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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

When I was laid off by Shopify last month, it was almost done perfectly.

The day started. Everyone got an email saying what was happening and whether or not they were impacted. I was. I was given access to slack to say farewells for a few hours. I had a quick meeting with my senior manager. Then all access was cut and my personal email got all the needed details on what's next.

It sucked, but it was pretty humane.

But...

There was a leak two days before that it was coming. The dread of knowing you might be laid off is worse than being laid off. And everyone had it for 48 hours. It was brutal and the company ground to a halt.

I'm not mad at the leaker. They probably felt it was better that people know. But I don't think they were right.

I don't think telling investors about the layoff before the people being laid off is right. But I also don't think dragging it out for many days or weeks is healthy for anyone.

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Also laid off by Shopify. Agree that leaking was not the right call but I would have to vigorously disagree about the “well done” lay-off bit.

Issues I observed included:

* A complete lack of resourcing for the operational teams conducting the layoffs (talent, legal, etc)

* People receiving demands to sign their severance agreements within a few days.

* Severance agreements that were outright illegal in the regions of the employees there were laying off

* Severance agreements with wildly incorrect numbers

* Severance agreements that Shopify refused to honor after signing (to the point that it’s triggered a class action in Ontario)

* Poorly coordinated equipment return. Many of us have not received return boxes for our laptops over a month after the layoff. Some have received 3 or more boxes despite having no additional equipment.

* Questionably times layoff of all personnel in Berlin shortly before a works council was established. This has also resulted in an investigation by the local authorities.

Now I’ve been through my share of layoffs—they always suck and it’s reasonable to expect large ones will have problems. But this mantra that Shopify has done a good job of the May 2023 layoff or the previous layoff last year is a fallacy being pushed by an executive board at Shopify that has become increasing unaccountable for poor decisions and exercised even worse leadership.

Unless there’s a security concern they should just let the employee keep the machine. The company I work for that did layoffs this year did that. It’s just easier for everyone involved and I imagine makes the layoff slightly less shitty for the employee.

I don’t disagree with you. I’ve been wondering what the economics of shipping thousands of laptops internationally shakes out to be. I suspect it may be a wash given the laptops are used and are likely depreciating assets.

Anybody ever manage equipment return programs? Are there compelling reasons to do this at scale that don’t boil down to data loss prevention.

The issue is that company information gets immediately sold on Craigslist or OfferUp or whatever.

In returning the equipment it actually protects the employee from compromise by creating a chain of custody for corporate data.

Sounds counterintuitive but it’s not. If the equipment needs to be destroyed — and it often is — it can be done properly.

People have no idea how easy it is to recover data from a single formatted drive.

I’d be curious if it was easy (or even possible) to recover data from a FileVault encrypted drive, which any IT dept worth its salt could remotely wipe

I’d wager to agree, I don’t play in this space much but I can’t imagine MDM being unable to handle this kind of basic use case, and also for most companies the confidential data being worth enough to be more careful than relying on MDM. Sure if you work for a compay that builds weapons for the USG you probably need to worry about hardware chain of custody. But those people are not sending their employees home with laptops anyway. In other words, if you trust your employees enough to take that device home, whatever you have on there is probably fine to be handled by MDM

I'm of a similar mind. I also think the argument of this protecting the employee, while true, feels a it weak in the face of an employer deciding to leave a laptop they didn't adequately scrub with said ex-employee.

I can't speak to FileVault, but Bitlocker and TPM can be quite easily defeated through sniffing the bitlocker key as it's transmitted from the TPM chip to the CPU to decrypt the drive on boot over the LPC, I2C, or SPI bus. Unless you enable TPM+pin for preboot auth you can't easily protect the data on a Windows PC, even with FDE.

If there's a remote wipe done (one click in MDM software) then there is no key left.

Pretty much every company does preboot auth nowadays for Windows laptops. And remote wipe is also possible, as the side comment says.

Letting the former employee keep the laptop is the default, IMO. Although, frankly, I am not sure I would want to keep mine... sitting on a pile of a dozen laptops accumulated over the years.

And everyone watches porn on their on own devices anyway.

> sitting on a pile of a dozen laptops accumulated over the years.

low power consumption and can probably run a couple of VMs, albeit not super well but well enough

When Kenna was bought by Cisco I never got a box to ship my laptop back (despite asking repeatedly). Instead the Cisco team bricked all of the laptops remotely.

I had only worked there for two months, so this brand new rather expensive laptop was turned into a paperweight for no reason other than to spite as far as I can tell. I still have it in my closet in case they decide we need to return it still (despite it being two years later). Anyways, if Cisco buys a company you're working for my advice is to immediately start looking for a new job.

Bricked like fried? or just can't log-in / OS scrambled / reinstall the OS?

One way to brick if it’s an Apple product is to do an MDM wipe and not disable the activation lock. It would be kind of shitty to just turn the laptops into e waste by not disabling the lock but this is Cisco that the OP mentioned so I could absolutely see that as a reality. After you wipe there’s literally no reason to not unlock the device except spite (if the device is stolen, you obviously don’t want people to be able to sell or use it again so it makes perfect sense not to unlock it). But if it was legitimately used as an employee device then the employer gains nothing but forcing the employee to deal with junk by not unbricking the device

The company I work for had layoffs recently and we were notified nearly 3 weeks in advance. I think they meant well but it was awful. Maybe there’s some science behind the transparency or something but it was pretty terrible to me. I would prefer that the day we’re told layoffs will happen that they do the layoffs.

I don't necessarily disagree. On the other hand, I have been in situations (both affected and not) where pretty much everyone with even the most minimal degree of self-awareness knew a hammer was coming in the relatively near future whether anyone had said anything or not.

The company where I had my first "proper" job got bought by some international corporation half a year after I joined. Not long after I noticed me and my coworkers had nothing to do, just sitting in the office twiddling thumbs all day rather than visiting clients doing work.

Since I had no point of reference, with this being my first job, I asked a coworker if this was normal. He said no, all his friends with similar jobs at other companies were working like crazy.

That's when I knew this wouldn't last long. A few months later the company got sold for scraps to our largest competitor.

I learned then that it's better with a bit too much to do, rather than too little.

How has the job market been? And out of curiosity, we’re you an engineer?

I have not loved my work’s strategy of announcing a layoff in the coming months.

Why? At least at a personal level, assuming it wasn't already obvious to you, it seems as if it could serve as a kick in the pants to start looking around. A statement that it's going to happen doesn't change the reality.

From a company perspective, it possibly makes less sense because you might prefer the oblivious folks to stay oblivious. But, personally, I'd prefer clear signals especially if it's not already blindingly obvious.

It's the opposite of a clear signal and it's not like "looking around" necessarily means more stability in sector-wide downturns. The cynic in me suspects the idea is to scare people into working harder.

It's worth considering that the desire to pre arrange those outcome emails may be why a leaker ended up in the circle of trust.

Messy layoffs may involve fewer people aware before the public announcement.

It read like a righteous indignation piece, without the benefit of being right, just to jump on the "aren't companies terrible?" bandwagon.

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