17 ms·

Terminating access and rotating passwords (if needed) while the person is in the meeting but has not yet found out they are being let go has been SOP for at lea

by yaur 4mo ago

Terminating access and rotating passwords (if needed) while the person is in the meeting but has not yet found out they are being let go has been SOP for at least the last 20 years

lazyasciiart 4mo ago
Amateurs. My employer does mass layoffs by terminating access to everything except their email account at 3am, and then sending an email to the victim saying “you were let go at 3am”. Managers get to figure out who’s left on their team by pinging everyone when they learn about it at work.
- brightball 4mo ago
  Oracle?
- Twirrim 4mo ago
  If you're talking about Oracle, the large round previous to that they did had individual meetings with employee, manager, and HR. With so many layoffs it took a week+ to do, effectively torturing an entire set of employees who had no idea if they'd have a job by the end of the hour, let alone week. I'm not sure there's any good way to lay off large amounts of staff (besides not getting yourself into the situation in the first place where you have to)
  - joe_mamba 4mo ago
    >I'm not sure there's any good way to lay off large amounts of staff Someone on HN once wrote that after the dot.com bust, Yahoo! HR had 1-1 meetings with every single employee that was part of the mass layoffs back then, and they did this for hundreds of workers. Boy what I wouldn't give to go back to such state of affairs, even though I wasn't yet part of the workforce back then. An older family friend of mine who started working in tech around 2003-2005, told me "back in my day, to get a job, you'd just send your CV to HR@corpo.com, and in 2-3 days you'd get a call asking you when you're free to come over for an interview". Now today you're lucky you get an automated reply back from 50 CVs sent, just for the opportunity to do an impersonal take home assessment as part of the seven stage interview process. It's like screaming into the void of AI bots and automated CV screening systems, while you spin the barrel of the revolver to play the next round of Russian roulette. And the crazy part is, that when people talk about "the good old days", we're talking about events from recent history, just 10-25 years ago, that a lot of current workers experienced in their lifetime, not stuff from when boomers were kids. The massive sudden shift in the commoditization of human workers and turning them into faceless labor resources that can be inhumanely disposed of with a keystroke, is real and noticeable to everyone, that I'm envious for you guys who are set to retire soon out of this shitshow. What comes after this? Have we reached rock bottom, or will it get even worse?
    - duzer65657 4mo ago
      Either your dates or experiences are off, because I've been working in software since 1999 and the easiest time to get a job was quite recent, in the back-half of COVID. The early 2000's were decent, but I didn't experience - or know anyone who did - any sort of "free jobs' period. Also pay was relatively decent but much less than what you saw even 5 years ago. It's only the in the past year or so that the world has appeared to be ending for developers, and I think that pronouncement is premature.
      - joe_mamba 4mo ago
        >Also pay was relatively decent but much less than what you saw even 5 years ago. IDK, I'm not from the US/Bay-Area, nor does my country have any big-tech/FANG jobs to distort the market for what constitutes a "high wage" in tech, it's all the same. >in the back-half of COVID. Sure, but Covid was only a short blip, a temporary exception, not a baseline norm for wage/job growth, like the years prior which was a longer period of getting a job was easy, like 2012-2020. For me where I live now, the career depression I saw came in 2023 already when jobs become less abundant and harder to get, and it only got worse later when mass layoff started. So we're already 3 years in the decline, longer than the Covid boom lasted and things aren't going better yet. I entered the workforce in around 2012-2014 and it was significantly easier to get a callback from sending a resume than it is now where it's mostly automated rejections. When I say "easy" I also mean you didn't need 7 stages of interviews to get a job back then, you'd have 2 stages and those were pretty chill and get a call back from every 2-3 resumes sent. Now you need to send dozens. I guess "easy" is relative. >Also pay was relatively decent but much less than what you saw even 5 years ago. Inflation also happened in that time.
        hackeridiot12 4mo ago
        [flagged]
        usrnm 4mo ago
        I know enough people who tried, to be able to tell you that it's not all roses over there. Some had to go back to being a corporate slave and some just continue grinding a barely viable business earning much less than they could at a large company
  - vidarh 4mo ago
    In much of Europe, if you're planning redundancies above a certain (low) number of employees, the employees / unions has a consultation right before layoffs start in order to be able to negotiate or consider other options...
  - lazyasciiart 4mo ago
    No, Salesforce.
- gcr 4mo ago
  Google powerwashes your corp Chromebook when they let you go. A friend was composing an email on the train when their screen went black and the device reset itself to factory settings. They even send the “you’re being fired” email to their personal email they have on file. Didn’t even schedule a meeting.
  - laughing_man 4mo ago
    Man, that's cold.
  - rixed 4mo ago
    A full email? We need a "you've been fired" emoji.
    - tosti 4mo ago
      U+1FAF5 U+1F525
  - gear54rus 4mo ago
    I think at least on windows you can powercycle it quickly a few times until it gives up this behavior. Not sure about Chromebooks.
  - ninalanyon 4mo ago
    Most of the employer behaviour described in such gleeful terms here would be outright illegal in most of Europe and open up the employer to risk of being sued for wrongful dismissal, etc.
    - mschuster91 4mo ago
      And then US tech has the arrogance of claiming "we don't need unions". yeah, shit like what we're reading here is precisely why y'all need unions.
      - kortilla 4mo ago
        We’re talking about a Google employee that makes 5x or more of what a European counterpart would. Lack of termination notice and other at will employment is easy to plan for when you make so much money. Until someone starts providing examples of software companies where the employees are unioned and clear $400k+ annum, the bar is still “no unions”.
falcor84 4mo ago
There's the classic article by Matt Ringel and Tom Limoncelli back from 1999: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa99/full_papers/ringel/ringel.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa99/full_papers/ringe...
belmarca 4mo ago
My first task at my last job was removing access to an employee being let go. I had just gone through onboarding so I knew every (documented) service we needed to handle. We live tested it on my own accounts, measured the time before I noticed, and then proceeded to successfully go through the checklist. Except not everything was properly documented, and it turned out the employee had given admin rights on some resources to a contractor which proceeded to wreak havoc on their behalf (the 'rm -rf' kind). Eh!
stirfish 4mo ago
I've turned off my own access at least three times when being let go from different jobs
zeafoamrun 4mo ago
Heh, a place where I worked some guy who left kept committing code for months (he went to work for a company we were a vendor for). Some of my teammates knew and just thought it was no big deal, he was fixing bugs and adding features. The color the director turned when he found out!! Oh man.
- thierrydamiba 4mo ago
  This story deserves a movie, or at least a long video essay! Haven’t laughed this hard in a long time.
  - tosti 4mo ago
    IIRC 50 Shades had a case of "remember me, the woman you fired? I talked to your boss' boss and I'm your boss now"
  - lukan 4mo ago
    You might enjoy this story then. 2 guys at apple continue to finish and ship their product after being laid off .. https://www.pacifict.com/story/ https://www.pacifict.com/story/
- pretzel5297 4mo ago
  so he was doing free labor for your company? What's he getting out of that?
  - michaelt 4mo ago
    he went to work for a company we were a vendor for Sounds like he's getting paid to work on the same thing by a slightly different stakeholder. I'd happily pay $$$$$$ to hire someone with commit access to Cloudflare, AWS or Google's codebase who could fix the goddamn bugs, let alone add new features.
    - ErroneousBosh 4mo ago
      > Sounds like he's getting paid to work on the same thing by a slightly different stakeholder. This honestly sounds like the sort of thing I'd sit down with the employee, their new employer, and various "Compliance Team" members, and firm up a bit. Sounds good for everyone. We get our bugs fixed, $vendor gets to say "Well we have this thing that was developed in-house for BoshNet, that might solve your problem too, it's going to cost you <some comical amount>", and everyone's happy.
tgv 4mo ago
I experienced that once. The parent and the parent's parent company were from the USA. The top CEO and CTO came over and fired everyone. My laptop was controlling a job that had to run pretty long on a 16 core server, but I did as asked: I shut down the laptop and left it on my desk. That was at least $50k down the drain. The reason they fired the whole dept. was that they were going to centralize development, as they had 200 other developers. After 5 years, they still hadn't developed a new product. Then they bought a competitor and rebranded it. The old product had to be kept running for years after. I guess they finally switched all their clients, because the web sites now open with . Who puts that in their HTML?
jamesrcole 4mo ago
Though you'd want to make sure there's no essential information that only this employee knows, because that action might terminate that employee's desire to cooperate with the company.
helsinkiandrew 4mo ago
But I'm guessing that doesn't work with someone who's been collecting other logins: > Muneeb had been assembling usernames and passwords—5,400 of them taken from his own company’s network data.
matsemann 4mo ago
Is this specific to US culture? And what about your work environment makes it such a risk? Where people are laid off here (Norway), they're still employed by law for 3 months. Most companies don't force you to work all that time, but it's pretty common to finish up your tasks, do offboarding etc for a few weeks. Never considered it an issue. Maybe it's a high trust society thing?
- joe_mamba 4mo ago
  >Is this specific to US culture? And what about your work environment makes it such a risk? It's called garden leave, it's popular everywhere, especially if it's a big international company with diverse workforce, sensitive to IP rights, since there's been plenty of cases of people taking company IP on USB drives to the new employer, like that Indian guy who took IP from Valeo to Nvidia and got his home raided by the police because the Valeo guys saw him share it on a Teams call lol. Same for companies in finance or that handle sensitive information. Norwegian trust doesn't fly anymore when it comes to multinational corpos. Companies run on liability and risk mitigation. If something bad happened once (IP theft or sabotage from someone they let go), then they have to prevent from ever happening again, not keep blindly trusting people while letting it happen.
  - vidarh 4mo ago
    It is not that common in Norway. It has at least been argued in the past that working your notice period is not just an obligation to employer if they want to enforce it, but a right for the employee on the basis that being walked out can affect your reputation by implying possible misconduct exactly because it has generally been uncommon in Norway. I haven't worked in Norway for a long time, so haven't kept up to date on the current legal position. The typical argument used to be that if there were concerns over IP theft or sabotage, there were other ways of protecting against that - and indeed, insider risk is something companies need to deal with whether or not someone has been fired.
    - joe_mamba 4mo ago
      > working your notice period is not just an obligation to employer if they want to enforce it And what if they don't want to enforce it? Which is what I was talking about.

by yaur 4mo ago

Terminating access and rotating passwords (if needed) while the person is in the meeting but has not yet found out they are being let go has been SOP for at least the last 20 years

lazyasciiart 4mo ago

Amateurs. My employer does mass layoffs by terminating access to everything except their email account at 3am, and then sending an email to the victim saying “you were let go at 3am”. Managers get to figure out who’s left on their team by pinging everyone when they learn about it at work.

brightball 4mo ago
Oracle?
Twirrim 4mo ago
If you're talking about Oracle, the large round previous to that they did had individual meetings with employee, manager, and HR. With so many layoffs it took a week+ to do, effectively torturing an entire set of employees who had no idea if they'd have a job by the end of the hour, let alone week. I'm not sure there's any good way to lay off large amounts of staff (besides not getting yourself into the situation in the first place where you have to)
- joe_mamba 4mo ago
  >I'm not sure there's any good way to lay off large amounts of staff Someone on HN once wrote that after the dot.com bust, Yahoo! HR had 1-1 meetings with every single employee that was part of the mass layoffs back then, and they did this for hundreds of workers. Boy what I wouldn't give to go back to such state of affairs, even though I wasn't yet part of the workforce back then. An older family friend of mine who started working in tech around 2003-2005, told me "back in my day, to get a job, you'd just send your CV to HR@corpo.com, and in 2-3 days you'd get a call asking you when you're free to come over for an interview". Now today you're lucky you get an automated reply back from 50 CVs sent, just for the opportunity to do an impersonal take home assessment as part of the seven stage interview process. It's like screaming into the void of AI bots and automated CV screening systems, while you spin the barrel of the revolver to play the next round of Russian roulette. And the crazy part is, that when people talk about "the good old days", we're talking about events from recent history, just 10-25 years ago, that a lot of current workers experienced in their lifetime, not stuff from when boomers were kids. The massive sudden shift in the commoditization of human workers and turning them into faceless labor resources that can be inhumanely disposed of with a keystroke, is real and noticeable to everyone, that I'm envious for you guys who are set to retire soon out of this shitshow. What comes after this? Have we reached rock bottom, or will it get even worse?
  - duzer65657 4mo ago
    Either your dates or experiences are off, because I've been working in software since 1999 and the easiest time to get a job was quite recent, in the back-half of COVID. The early 2000's were decent, but I didn't experience - or know anyone who did - any sort of "free jobs' period. Also pay was relatively decent but much less than what you saw even 5 years ago. It's only the in the past year or so that the world has appeared to be ending for developers, and I think that pronouncement is premature.
    - joe_mamba 4mo ago
      >Also pay was relatively decent but much less than what you saw even 5 years ago. IDK, I'm not from the US/Bay-Area, nor does my country have any big-tech/FANG jobs to distort the market for what constitutes a "high wage" in tech, it's all the same. >in the back-half of COVID. Sure, but Covid was only a short blip, a temporary exception, not a baseline norm for wage/job growth, like the years prior which was a longer period of getting a job was easy, like 2012-2020. For me where I live now, the career depression I saw came in 2023 already when jobs become less abundant and harder to get, and it only got worse later when mass layoff started. So we're already 3 years in the decline, longer than the Covid boom lasted and things aren't going better yet. I entered the workforce in around 2012-2014 and it was significantly easier to get a callback from sending a resume than it is now where it's mostly automated rejections. When I say "easy" I also mean you didn't need 7 stages of interviews to get a job back then, you'd have 2 stages and those were pretty chill and get a call back from every 2-3 resumes sent. Now you need to send dozens. I guess "easy" is relative. >Also pay was relatively decent but much less than what you saw even 5 years ago. Inflation also happened in that time.
      - hackeridiot12 4mo ago
        [flagged]
        usrnm 4mo ago
        I know enough people who tried, to be able to tell you that it's not all roses over there. Some had to go back to being a corporate slave and some just continue grinding a barely viable business earning much less than they could at a large company
- vidarh 4mo ago
  In much of Europe, if you're planning redundancies above a certain (low) number of employees, the employees / unions has a consultation right before layoffs start in order to be able to negotiate or consider other options...
- lazyasciiart 4mo ago
  No, Salesforce.
gcr 4mo ago
Google powerwashes your corp Chromebook when they let you go. A friend was composing an email on the train when their screen went black and the device reset itself to factory settings. They even send the “you’re being fired” email to their personal email they have on file. Didn’t even schedule a meeting.
- laughing_man 4mo ago
  Man, that's cold.
- rixed 4mo ago
  A full email? We need a "you've been fired" emoji.
  - tosti 4mo ago
    U+1FAF5 U+1F525
- gear54rus 4mo ago
  I think at least on windows you can powercycle it quickly a few times until it gives up this behavior. Not sure about Chromebooks.
- ninalanyon 4mo ago
  Most of the employer behaviour described in such gleeful terms here would be outright illegal in most of Europe and open up the employer to risk of being sued for wrongful dismissal, etc.
  - mschuster91 4mo ago
    And then US tech has the arrogance of claiming "we don't need unions". yeah, shit like what we're reading here is precisely why y'all need unions.
    - kortilla 4mo ago
      We’re talking about a Google employee that makes 5x or more of what a European counterpart would. Lack of termination notice and other at will employment is easy to plan for when you make so much money. Until someone starts providing examples of software companies where the employees are unioned and clear $400k+ annum, the bar is still “no unions”.

falcor84 4mo ago

There's the classic article by Matt Ringel and Tom Limoncelli back from 1999: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa99/full_papers/ringel/ringel.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa99/full_papers/ringe...

belmarca 4mo ago

My first task at my last job was removing access to an employee being let go. I had just gone through onboarding so I knew every (documented) service we needed to handle. We live tested it on my own accounts, measured the time before I noticed, and then proceeded to successfully go through the checklist. Except not everything was properly documented, and it turned out the employee had given admin rights on some resources to a contractor which proceeded to wreak havoc on their behalf (the 'rm -rf' kind). Eh!

stirfish 4mo ago

I've turned off my own access at least three times when being let go from different jobs

zeafoamrun 4mo ago

Heh, a place where I worked some guy who left kept committing code for months (he went to work for a company we were a vendor for). Some of my teammates knew and just thought it was no big deal, he was fixing bugs and adding features. The color the director turned when he found out!! Oh man.

thierrydamiba 4mo ago
This story deserves a movie, or at least a long video essay! Haven’t laughed this hard in a long time.
- tosti 4mo ago
  IIRC 50 Shades had a case of "remember me, the woman you fired? I talked to your boss' boss and I'm your boss now"
- lukan 4mo ago
  You might enjoy this story then. 2 guys at apple continue to finish and ship their product after being laid off .. https://www.pacifict.com/story/ https://www.pacifict.com/story/
pretzel5297 4mo ago
so he was doing free labor for your company? What's he getting out of that?
- michaelt 4mo ago
  he went to work for a company we were a vendor for Sounds like he's getting paid to work on the same thing by a slightly different stakeholder. I'd happily pay $$$$$$ to hire someone with commit access to Cloudflare, AWS or Google's codebase who could fix the goddamn bugs, let alone add new features.
  - ErroneousBosh 4mo ago
    > Sounds like he's getting paid to work on the same thing by a slightly different stakeholder. This honestly sounds like the sort of thing I'd sit down with the employee, their new employer, and various "Compliance Team" members, and firm up a bit. Sounds good for everyone. We get our bugs fixed, $vendor gets to say "Well we have this thing that was developed in-house for BoshNet, that might solve your problem too, it's going to cost you <some comical amount>", and everyone's happy.

tgv 4mo ago

I experienced that once. The parent and the parent's parent company were from the USA. The top CEO and CTO came over and fired everyone. My laptop was controlling a job that had to run pretty long on a 16 core server, but I did as asked: I shut down the laptop and left it on my desk. That was at least $50k down the drain. The reason they fired the whole dept. was that they were going to centralize development, as they had 200 other developers. After 5 years, they still hadn't developed a new product. Then they bought a competitor and rebranded it. The old product had to be kept running for years after. I guess they finally switched all their clients, because the web sites now open with . Who puts that in their HTML?

jamesrcole 4mo ago

Though you'd want to make sure there's no essential information that only this employee knows, because that action might terminate that employee's desire to cooperate with the company.

helsinkiandrew 4mo ago

But I'm guessing that doesn't work with someone who's been collecting other logins: > Muneeb had been assembling usernames and passwords—5,400 of them taken from his own company’s network data.

matsemann 4mo ago

Is this specific to US culture? And what about your work environment makes it such a risk? Where people are laid off here (Norway), they're still employed by law for 3 months. Most companies don't force you to work all that time, but it's pretty common to finish up your tasks, do offboarding etc for a few weeks. Never considered it an issue. Maybe it's a high trust society thing?

joe_mamba 4mo ago
>Is this specific to US culture? And what about your work environment makes it such a risk? It's called garden leave, it's popular everywhere, especially if it's a big international company with diverse workforce, sensitive to IP rights, since there's been plenty of cases of people taking company IP on USB drives to the new employer, like that Indian guy who took IP from Valeo to Nvidia and got his home raided by the police because the Valeo guys saw him share it on a Teams call lol. Same for companies in finance or that handle sensitive information. Norwegian trust doesn't fly anymore when it comes to multinational corpos. Companies run on liability and risk mitigation. If something bad happened once (IP theft or sabotage from someone they let go), then they have to prevent from ever happening again, not keep blindly trusting people while letting it happen.
- vidarh 4mo ago
  It is not that common in Norway. It has at least been argued in the past that working your notice period is not just an obligation to employer if they want to enforce it, but a right for the employee on the basis that being walked out can affect your reputation by implying possible misconduct exactly because it has generally been uncommon in Norway. I haven't worked in Norway for a long time, so haven't kept up to date on the current legal position. The typical argument used to be that if there were concerns over IP theft or sabotage, there were other ways of protecting against that - and indeed, insider risk is something companies need to deal with whether or not someone has been fired.
  - joe_mamba 4mo ago
    > working your notice period is not just an obligation to employer if they want to enforce it And what if they don't want to enforce it? Which is what I was talking about.