Figure out who's leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat
rachelbythebay.com
Figure out who's leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat
1–10 of 392 posts
Re: Figure out who's leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat
#2Now to figure out how the frig to implement this at $work.
Re: Figure out who's leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat
#3Now to figure out how the frig to implement this at $work.
Since we're a puppet shop, the user account definitions are largely (albeit not exclusively) kept in hiera (i.e. yaml), tracked in Git.
We haven't used this for the purpose of writing epitaphs, but we could. In fact, since such changes need to go through code review, someone could theoretically author their own removal and add an epitaph of their choice in the commit message; after they leave, the change can be approved and merged in their absence.
Re: Figure out who's leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat
#4Now to figure out how the frig to implement this at $work.
Since we're a puppet shop, the user account definitions are largely (albeit not exclusively) kept in hiera (i.e. yaml), tracked in Git. We haven't used this for the purpose of writing epitaphs, but we could . In fact, since such changes need to go through code review, someone could theoretically author their own removal and add an epitaph of their choice in the commit message; after they leave, the change can be appr…
Heh. Now I want to sneak in a CI automation or a pre commit hook or something - to post _my_ version of my obituary when I've left.
Re: Figure out who's leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat
#5I do this for various reasons at my work.
To function in day to day tasks you need to be able to read stuff in AD. I have solved interesting problems this way like: How do I get access to X thing when the security groups are not documented? Find someone with access and recurse their MemberOf and diff your own.
I also have used it to find people leaving.
Re: Figure out who's leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat
#6We used to use Sametime and I’d periodically search for “Deleted - “, which would show me everyone who was deleted over the past few months, before they fell out of the system.
Re: Figure out who's leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat
#7The “epitaph” app that was mentioned is an internal Google web site. I always found it to be fascinating.
Re: Figure out who's leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat
#8LDAP's full of secrets. It's a great way to keep tabs on what's going on in a company. And to think that you can get nearly all of it with anonymous access.
Team or department mergers before they were announced? Yep, I've caught those. Secret mailing lists for internal projects? Check who's a member and you can ferret out what's going on. Bonus if the list mail address gives some of it away.
`ldapsearch' is good if you know your way around LDAP. Apache LDAP Studio is a great UI tool if you just want to explore.
Everyone should know enough about LDAP to build a login service that binds against it for internal apps. You can exploit the groups the sys admins maintain to control permissions in your app. It's very powerful and an easy way to get up an running in no time.
Re: Figure out who's leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat
#9Layoffs in the WFH era are weird. Back in the day you had a pretty good idea of who got laid off because you saw them walking out the door with a box of their stuff. You could go up to them and say, "hey let's meet at $local_watering_hole and hang out". You could swap contact info if you didn't already have it.
You could get closure.
Now, one day a bunch of people just stop replying to email. You have a to wait a while to figure out if they are actually gone or just busy. And if you're waiting on them for some output to work on your project, they may just never deliver and you won't know why for a while.
The company directory, if there is one, often still shows them for 60+ days because of the WARN act. And it seems most companies won't make a "layoff list".
It's really hard to get closure if they won't even tell you who got let go, and if they don't give the people a chance to say goodbye by cutting off their access before telling them they are laid off.
Re: Figure out who's leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat
#10Love this bit:
"Incidentally, if someone gets mad about you running this sort of thing, you probably don't want to work there anyway. On the other hand, if you're able to build such tools without IT or similar getting "threatened" by it, then you might be somewhere that actually enjoys creating interesting and useful stuff. Treasure such places. They don't tend to last."