That experience (and the amount of loss and wasted time in reconstructing as best we could) heavily colored my view of the risk-reward ratio of letting terminated employees have continued access to premises and systems.
If I have any doubts about the future behavior of someone who just received very shocking, disorienting, and angering news, it is my job to protect the company and other employees much more than it is to allow the terminated employee continued access.
Also, this is an insanely childish way to act – again to the original commenter. It it seems like there is a difference in US an EU culture here.
It is, but safety protocols are put in for the extreme unexpected case. "Regulations are written in blood" and all that.
Not all Americans are childish any more than no EU citizens are.
Like most things in life, it depends. You'd have to get a prosecutor to agree to accepting the case to bring charges against the individual. They'd have to decide if there was enough evidence, they'd have to decide if they thought they could convince a judge/jury, then they'd have to decide if it was even worth their time. In 1996, that might have been a more difficult thing to do than today.
> Also, this is an insanely childish way to act
Yeah? And? So? Are you attempting to say that no non-American has ever acted irrationally or childish? I have a few history books that would disagree
That’s not how trust works, regardless of potential consequences.
That forces the employer to come up with actual explainations someone can digest, and gives the employee time to be rational and plan the pivot.
There will still be ugly stories, and preemptively removing accesses will be needed in some cases, but that's by far the exception and not the norm, and we usually know when that will be the case.
It sounds like they very much did, starting with physical security. Especially in that time period, physical access was probably the biggest component even.
The lesson is that employees should only have access to the resources that they need to do their job at all times, and that there should be a fine-grained permission system to check if someone can read or read-write to all these resources.
Even when I am working on my projects, by myself, I use different accounts to access my services, depending on the role. At first it might seem crazy, but if you learned how to do this and you automate this process, it is a life-saver if you suddenly find yourself need quick help from some contractor or if you want to give a backup key to a trusted friend as a way to say "here is what you need to do in case something happens to me".
[1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-edtn/pr/phd-chemist-sentenced-1...
That feels so inhumane to me. If you don't see your employees as humans, instead as mere resources and, as soon as they are laid off, threats, then we can say it makes sense.
*Deleted the configuration from the core network switch.
The first instance I can recall, a developer was terminated and his access was revoked. He goes home, waits until midnight, then tries logging into as many systems as he can. He apparently had saved a WordPress password on his Google Drive. He logs into WordPress and defaces a bunch of pages on the corporate website. FWIW he was one of my reports and he did not come off as a sociopath or unstable and his actions surprised me.
Second instance at a different startup, a marketing guy is terminated but was allowed to hang out at the office for a bit (for some reason management decided to fire him on a Thursday morning knowing he carpooled with several other employees). I felt bad so I took him out to lunch. At lunch he tells me he had a feeling he was about to be fired so he dumped the ~400K+ database of emails in our HubSpot account to sell to a competitor. I told him that was easily the dumbest idea he's ever had. I text the CEO from the bathroom to warn him. He's trespassed from the building upon our return. Oh, and he suspected I tipped them off and so he keyed my car.
Third instance at my own company, I terminated a contractor and removed their access to all services immediately. They attempt to run a series of reports on vendors, contractors, and other sensitive data from the admin UI without realizing their session was invalidated. I get the error notifications and add more granular permissions to the admin panel.
Is it inhumane? No. Is it rude? Yes. I think you have no choice _but_ to treat these people as humans. Humans do human things and act out for a variety of reasons and you have to expect that. Are they inherently bad people? No.
There's a whole plethora of issues around layoffs that are often ignored. I recall looking at Slack's people list constantly to see which accounts were suddenly marked as "deactivated". People I had great relationships with but never exchanged personal emails simply gone. That dread of "what the fuck is happening" and "am I next?" overcoming you. Some people scramble to create sheets with contact information from those who were laid off.
That's absolutely inhumane.
I survived 3 layoffs in the past few years and I can still distinctly remember the awful feeling each of those left me with. I can only imagine how much worse that is for those affected.
We can separate the security parts from the human parts. Companies choose not to do that, for whatever reason that I simply cannot understand. Especially companies with so called "human resources" should be extremely prepared for situations like this, to make sure everyone is actually treated well.
Recently we had that viral video of a person that recorded themselves getting fired with zero reasoning of why. That's the kind of shit that happens with these layoffs. Bad management at its worst.
In short, I agree with you with regards to security implications. But those can be solved with proper access controls and planning. What I don't agree with is everything else around it. Not once I have seen companies laying off people handle this in any manner that I would describe as humane.
We can do better, I don't know why we don't.
Never forget that "human" is an adjective in that phrase, not a noun. HR's duty and focus is on serving and protecting the company, not the employees.
There are stories of sales teams going in and grabbing their rolodex (instantly dating the stories) so they could use the contacts where ever they land next. They could also reach out to the contacts to attempt to poison them towards the company, libel be damned.
Because they don't trust institutions, if someone that is working for a company and does something bad, or is shown to be corrupt, it will affect the public perception of the company, not of the individual.
Also, because Americans don't trust institutions, a lot of the internal processes and cultural values are upheld by the individuals, and how strongly this is done depends on the individual's power and ability to influence. This applies to all levels of the organization. This allows for the organization as a whole to be more dynamic and effective, but the downside is that this works only when the individuals have a vested interest in the organization.
When there is a layoff, or even when a simple individual is fired, this mutual alignment is removed and all bets are off. Except for fear of legal retaliation, the individual is no longer bound to the organization. This can lead to things like:
- Executives preempting the communication of their firing and using it to swing internal opinion, or even taking key team members away with them, like Sam Altman vs OpenAI.
- Employees with access to (supposedly) restricted areas copying sensitive information: E.g, sales reps getting data from all their clients to contact them and move them along.
- Plain old espionage / sabotage. Don't forget, if a company is laying people off it means they are not doing well, and if they are not doing well means they certainly want to keep as much of what is "really happening" to themselves. Fired employees can use their internal communications to gather evidence from their boss wrongdoings, find internal memos and share with journalists willing to get a scoop, etc.
In this context, I think it's less about an individual's trust of institutions and more the institutions mistrust of the individual. Companies don't have to send fired employees home immediately, they only do this because they don't trust the individual to act appropriately. There's probably a bit of a death spiral there, where both sides continue to mistrust each other further, but the individual lacking trust of institutions alone wouldn't get them locked out as soon as they're notified that they've been fired.
Companies don't have agency or feelings. If company leaders expect people to do their jobs properly only because they are getting paid, it's already an institutional failure, because it's not taking into account that individuals are fallible.
If the company does not have an established process to protect itself from human error, whether accidental or intentional (like an disgruntled employee going rogue), when shit hits the fan all its leaders can do is to find blame in the individual. But instead of blaming people and hoping that we can force everyone to avoid mistakes, a better alternative would be to design a system that can withstand human nature and fix the institutional process so that that error doesn't happen again. The problem is that to do this takes time and most company CEOs can not see much beyond the next fiscal year.
I don't think its reasonable to assume that a company could ever have full safeguards in place to ensure that a bad actor employee could never cause meaningful damage, unless you are okay with a completely trustless system. Companies must trust their employees at some level, generally the level of trust grows in relation to the employee's responsibilities.
Its unreasonable to assume that any system can be 100% foolproof, if that's a requirement it just shouldn't exist. In the case of companies, they have to accept dome level of risk that employees can cause damage, whether intentional or not.
Hard disagree. People should be trusted with the things they need to perform their role, and no more than that. You would not give access of a production database to a CTO just because they have more responsibilities than a sysadmin, and any CTO that tries to bludgeon their way into getting access to it should be considered unfit for work.
Say I'm a software developer specifically working on the frontend library for an authentication service. The company needs to trust me with access to parts of the system and infrastructure pertinent to that feature. I very much agree that I should be locked out of other areas that I don't need for the job, for example I shouldn't have access to employee records, accounting, etc.
Once I am fired, though, the company has to continue to trust me to not misuse the parts of the system that I do already have access to. If I am fired but allowed to stay for a transition period and my permissions aren't revoked immediately, the company is trusting me. If I am fired and immediately blocked, its a sign that the company didn't trust me rather than an indication of my own mistrust for the company/institution.
My point was never that there aren't security protocols that could be used, only that its not relevant whether the employee trusts the company in that scenario.
With the proper protocols in place, a company doing layoffs signals "we trust you can still perform your role as a developer, you can still communicate/collaborate with your colleagues and you can even access the source code (because who really is going to check if you are deleting the code repo from your machine?), and the removal of write-access to the systems can be seen as a smoke test if the transition can be done orderly", while the standard current procedure just says "Through no fault of your own, you will be seen now as a potential threat so we will treat you as toxic material".
Or they could, like, take responsibility for their actions that led them to that point?
In Switzerland, we work with the government, and are generally OK with it, but proceed cautiously, as if it could explode any second. In Spain and France already, government is considered an inefficient nuisance. In many places in South America, the government is an adversary. In Russia, government is your arch-enemy, and you do everything possible to either hide from it, perhaps in another country, or actually damage it (unless you are evil and work for them).
So "trusting institutions" is a foreign, alien concept for most of the world.
If I needed help burying a body I would only ask my American friends. Friends from most other countries wouldn’t help and just encourage me to turn myself in. Not that I’ve needed this help but if I needed to do something where it was us against the world I would pick Americans to join me. I found it more difficult to make friends with Americans, they tend to maintain far fewer friendships, but the few they do maintain are held more strongly.
Can I ask if you are American or European? How did you come about this insight?
But I doubt that you see people saying that they love Equifax, Healthcare Insurance companies, Comcast...
In the US, you're probably out of healthcare in the blink of an eye, may have no severance, no coverage, no unemployment benefits, and in some cases it'd mean deportation.
So yeah, two different worlds.
Or get rid of tax shelters. Everyone I know who's broke is too broke to be buying stocks anyway. I can afford some tax.
If you don't have this insurance (mutuelle), the State does provide the social security (it's provided either way, the mutuelle is on top of this).
But this is basic social security. If you're in a car crash or something, you're mostly covered. If you need work done on your teeth, you're on your own.
When I needed to spend the night in a hospital after breaking my wrist, basic social security covered the ambulance and the actual procedure of putting my arm back together, but had I not had a mutuelle, I would've been on the hook for the hospital stay.
It may be a bit more (would need to dig the bill but it was of that order of magnitude) and I am writing this do that a non-EU person does not get the idea that it was 1000€ a day or something.
Only 50%, no?
Also, in Germany the cost of insurance is tied to income. So I went from the bizarre situation where I went from paying ~500€ while employed to less than 200€ now that my business is not generating substantial revenue.
We are (again essentially) talking about taxes, just calling it social insurance.
I completely understand the shittiness of this issue and I'm not from a developed country, but I mean, this is the reality of a temporary work visa, no?
I might be more pessimist/realist, but until I receive a permanent residency visa, I'd treat everything as temporary, ready to move back in a couple days notice.
The thing that makes the H-1B and visas like it insecure is their being tied to employer sponsorship. I don't think that's inherently unfair - the whole point of the visa is to bring in skilled workers in valuable industries.
What I do think is shitty about the H-1B in particular is just how short the grace period is to find a new sponsor. 60 days is a tight schedule even for a skilled worker in a good market, and layoffs don't tend to happen in good markets. It definitely opens up visa holders to exploitation by employers, and temporary downturns can end up kicking out a lot of valuable people.
There are other countries with skilled worker visas with more generous grace periods - e.g. Ireland's Critical Skills Employment Permit allows you 6 months to find a new job if you're laid off. I don't see the problem with that if the visa holder can support themselves financially over that timeframe.
As a result of policy, H-1B workers will take substandard pay, abuse, and burdens to maintain a job with a company willing to sponsor them until they can get their Green Card. This creates a from of indentured servitude.
The knock on affect is that it lowers wages for everyone because there's a vast pool of skilled workers willing to accept lower pay from a company willing to maintain sponsorship of them for 10+ years.
Imagine on year 9 you get laid off, now your indentured servitude got extended another 10 years if you can find a new sponsor.
The max unemployment benefits for any state is not going to cover much of anything, you better have savings to fall back on.
And for those on H1B, there is a 60 day grace period. Maybe in 2021-2022 it was extremely easy, but today? A lot of people will be lucky to get through a full interview loop in that time.
Most of the world (which isn’t the U.S. or Europe) is even worse.
I have no clue how unemployment works. I don't think I've ever paid into it?
There's a parallel and equally wasteful but popular practice of insisting on taking on CxO employees of a purchased outfit for some prolonged period, perhaps as insurance, except that you've got no useful or interesting work for them to do. Unlike Garden Leave they're not fired - one of my friends was even told they could expect a substantial pay raise, but the job is now awful so their goal will be to wait only until as many options/ bonuses/ etc. as possible have irreversibly turned into hard money and then quit ASAP.
It's like OK, I could do something actually interesting next week or, I could sit in tedious meetings with idiots for 24 months, then pay off my mortgage, and retire immediately with $$$$$. Ugh.
If you know you'll be dead in a year, obviously the former is the right choice. But you probably won't be.
I don't know why people think it's not possible to fire people in the EU, but it is and it's a normal thing. It just costs some money.
There is a process to firing. EVEN in the US there is a process of firing. The big lie is that most people are fed, is that in "right to work" states you have no legal recourse. You do, but not if you take the severance and sign your leave papers, because you panic right away. Something I didn't know either in the US.
The most important rule my (senior) friend once told me is to document everything, especially when your bosses make you do something that you feel uncomfortable with. Print emails if you have to and put them in a folder that you might never have to open if you're lucky.
You are technically still employed and paid but the company can refuse to let you step inside or connect to the network. You also can't work for another company without their agreement until the grace period is over.
It varies across Europe as well. Some countries, like Sweden, have more protections than others (no matter if union member or not), as an example. You cannot fire someone unless they demonstrably neglect their work duties and the firing overall needs to be objectively justified. Then the notice period depends on how long you've worked there, and more conditions I surely can't remember right now.
Compared to Spain that has "disciplinary dismissal" for example, where "insubordination" or "lack of discipline" could be enough to get you fired.
Your boss tells you to unpack a crate, you say no, boss tells you "f*ck off and never come back". Perfectly fine legally and you don't get any severance pay either.
There is some nuanced to this, as you have the right to refuse unreasonable requests and you are allowed to have a bad day if you have a longish good record etc etc.
For a knowledge worker it is more difficult to define what a reasonable order is and what constitutes insubordination, but the basic rules are the same.
Exceptions can be made if justified, not dug into the details of how that works.
However, another story is when mass layoff is going on. For example in Poland group of 9+ workers can be fired without any real reason. Downsizing! With 3-6 month notice period, of course.
Simplified a lot, and in general conditions, on Spain:
- You have to announce it at least 15 days before ( unless it's a disciplinary dismissal ) or pay for those 15 days of salary
- Pay for any unused vacation days and pending salaries
- An "objective reason" is needed for the firing [1]
- If there's no proper "objective reason", you have to reinstate the worker or pay 33 days of salary per year worked by the user [2]
- If the layoffs involve certain number or percentage of the workers, you have to go through certain legal process and get government authorization [3]
0: (EN) https://www.theolivepress.es/spain-news/2022/11/10/elon-musks-email-late-on-friday-to-sack-his-spanish-workforce-declared-null-and-void-by-unions/
1: (ES) https://www.laboralix.com/despido-objetivo/
2: (ES) https://www.laboralix.com/despido-improcedente/
3: (ES) https://www.laboralix.com/despido-colectivo/
4: (ES) https://www.elconfidencial.com/tecnologia/2023-01-24/twitter-confirma-el-despido-del-80-de-su-plantilla-en-espana_3563189/Virtually no one goes through this, and they opt for mutual termination, and generally a person can negotiate a severance package for their signature (I have seen examples of people negotiating almost a year’s salary as severance), and they are out immediately.
But this is also a scare tactic and people get caught by surprise and sign anything, sometimes without any severance. During this past year, as mass layoffs were happening in waves, people got more informed about this and were smarter in negotiating their exits.
Not trying to single you out, but these kinds of comments always baffle me.
Around the world, we have different religions, cultures, languages, customs, currencies, holidays, skin colors, legal structures, etc. And then someone is confused why people on the other side of the world don't do things the same way.
For me, as a product of all of the things above in the US, if a company tells me they no longer need my services, then I am not going to keep working for a while. That doesn't mean I am going to be spiteful, but just that I acknowledge their decision, and so I will move on to something else. To me, continuing to work alongside (former-ish) teammates in a dead man walking situation seems strange, but I can see why it might work in Europe.
One might have enough time to send their farewells, but that's about it - you are still getting payed until the end of the notice period of course. (let's not talk about severance packages, they are either non existent or a joke - you often also have to sign an NDA prohibiting you to talk about the package and the layoff in general).
So basically companies pull the same questionable stuff in Europe as well, it's far from the fairytale you sometimes read about. (there are always exceptions ofc)
you don't have to, that they arm wrest you, sure, but you don't have to do anything
It's rare it's immediate and if it is there needs be an agreed fee for termination.
In every European country, there's a legal requirement to give notice. And therefore there is an incentive for the company to maintain amicable relations during the notice period to try and prevent trouble.
How do they proceed operating after kicking people out without prior notice? Do those projects just get stomped and started over with new people?
That doesn't follow at all. The notice period exists so you can transfer your knowledge and projects to colleagues who will take over your work.
If the notice period is in the company interest when people leave on their own, it's also in the company's interest when they have to leave?
It is both in the interest of the company and employee, as neither can terminate the contract immediately.
So it's virtually unheard of to show up, hear about layoffs, and not have a job the next day. Unless it's a situation where the whole company is going bankrupt or so.
Required or allowed? So in the US you can't give notice?
I imagine most of the time people will have the courtesy of giving 1-2 weeks notice if possible.
That said, sometimes the company will decide that they'd rather you just go, and they'll tell you not to bother giving notice and you can leave immediately. Someone in another comment said that was because of bad blood, but it's also because of risk and it's unlikely that a person will be very productive during a short notice period.
When there's a tricky hand-off, though, the company might ask for and incentivize a longer notice period, too... So nothing's written in stone.
It is probably better phrased as “In the US, notice is not legally required”.
But I've seen it in the UK too... Specifically one corporate I worked for sent a mass email to everyone on a Thursday afternoon saying something along the lines of "please ensure you're in the office tomorrow morning". Then on the Friday morning people were called into a room one by one, told they had been made redundant and were immediately escorted off site by security. This was just a fairly regular retail business too. Nothing that you would think required such an extreme approach.
I suppose I understand it in some ways though... If you've just told someone you've lost your job you're probably not going to be very motivated to continue to work. And suppose there is some risk people might try to disrupt business activities in protest... I think it probably is better to give employees their redundancy pay and let them move on rather than waste their time for several weeks. That said, I'm not sure why the security escort was needed in this case. The layoffs came from McKinsey's infinite wisdom though, so it wouldn't surprise me if the security escort was their recommendation to reduce risk.
But! The Nordic approach is also bizarre! The norm is that employees keep working for 3 months after giving notice. There are, of course, plenty of exceptions. The "normal exception" is that if someone quits and the business thinks they are going to go to a competitor, they'll leave the premises within a few days, but continue as a paid employee for the remainder of the time -- known as "garden leave."
In either case, though, the employee doesn't start working at their new job for three months!! In my experience, it's super-stifling, especially for startups, since three months is an eternity for a new company. Of course, in the tech industry, nobody really does all that much work for at least the trailing two months, since who's going to get assigned to a new project just before they leave?
I guess this is perhaps sorta how things play out in areas of the US that allow noncompetes to be enforced, too.
Personal bias? Layoffs/Firing etc. in Austria in IT look very much the same. You're locked out, your devices are taken, you are escorted out of the office. That has nothing to do with being afraid, it's just a clear cut process. Why make it ambiguous?
If the company could keep reliably profiting off of the employee during its notice period, why wouldn't they? It's all about mitigating the risk.
Personally when I left, I've always spent weeks finishing off what I was doing, adding/updating documentation and generally passing on any knowledge that could potentially leave with me. They allow that because they're not afraid I'm gonna delete their source code, since I'm choosing to leave. If the company didn't see risk after layoffs, that's how they would react.
And let's be real here: this is mostly a threat when layoffs are not justified. So to keep it simple and streamline the process, they treat every layoff the same.
I have seen many times people be quickly "locked out" when being laid off. A term for this in the UK is "garden leave" because you're still paid but you're told not to work or come to the office anymore.
As the case may be this makes sense in order to avoid any issues (from bad blood in the office to actively malicious actions) and, realistically someone being laid off is not exactly going to do their best work, anyway...
Edit: Personally I think a quick cut is better as it avoids having to continue going to the office when you know it's pretty much pointless and it allows to focus on your next step. The thing is that it brings home the fact that this was all a business arrangement despite all the emotional attachment we may develop over time.
That was the only time I've seen someone completely locked out - in Germany. She couldn't even complete the normal offboarding, because her building access was revoked, and the company didn't have an alternative process, so I had to bring it in, where people would agree with me that it was a process failure, and that they were very sorry, but not sorry enough to tell it to my spouse's face.
That work relationship didn't last long after.
For companies like Okta, and a few other high security positions, it's not uncommon for companies in Europe to simply pay people do to nothing for their remaining time.
It's essentially a mechanism where they avoid having someone with a negative mentality that's not going to work hard anyway around the office.
Notice is compulsory -- you simply cannot let go of the employee immediately and must continue paying them for 3 months (or up to 4 months in some countries where every calendar month started is due).
Non-compete is opt-in by the employer, and allows them to prevent you from working for a competitor (for up to one year I believe). In exchange the employer must still pay your previous salary (some employers will ask employees without compensation, but that's not legally enforceable).
Non-disclosure means that you're not able to disclose company and trade secrets, similarly to an NDA. It is a standard term in most employment contracts and usually applies for one year, regardless of the non-compete being enforced or not.
It is fairly common to send people for garden leave during their notice, but actually extending it further by enforcing the non-compete is a costly thing and will only be done for strategic employees.
Money can smooth things over, though. The process is expensive, and has to be done properly, or the company can offer "voluntary redundancy" where they pay you to go away quietly. That happened to me. I don't know whether I was locked out or not, because I didn't try to log in again.
For the employee, being cut off means you don't actually have to do anymore work for a company that's letting you go. You're either getting severance or you aren't, and I'd much rather collect severance while not having to work. In the instance that they're letting you go without severance: yes that's horrible they just pulled the rug. But usually that's a result of poor performance and you probably should've seen it coming. And frankly that's also why we have unemployment.
I'd 100% rather get 3 weeks severance than get paid to a couple more months (or whatever).
---
Also, the whole "security escorting you out" schtick...I'm certain that happens, but I've never seen it personally.
So I'm a Brit who briefly worked over in Alabama for a few months and yes, that was a genuine concern with some of the folks that were let go by the company. It was well known that quite a few staff members had firearms in their vehicles.
You better believe he was locked out as soon as he could be removed from the building, and we had armed security there for some time after his termination.