Figure out who's leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat • Hacker News Board

Re: Figure out who's leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat

#11

Post by simonw » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 5:43 AM UTC

If you're going to run something like this, I thoroughly recommend using Git for it.

You can have your cron do something like this:

    curl https://internal.corp/employees.txt > employees.txt
    git add employees.txt
    git commit -m "Automated: $(date -u)" || exit 0

The || exit 0 should ensure no errors even if there is nothing to commit

Now you have a commit history of every change made to that source of information - just run "git log" to view it.

I run this kind of thing on scheduled GitHub Actions all the time, see https://simonwillison.net/2020/Oct/9/git-scraping/

Re: Figure out who's leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat

#12

Post by jacquesm » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 5:47 AM UTC

simonw wrote: post #11

If you're going to run something like this, I thoroughly recommend using Git for it. You can have your cron do something like this: curl https://internal.corp/employees.txt > employees.txt git add employees.txt git commit -m "Automated: $(date -u)" || exit 0 The || exit 0 should ensure no errors even if there is nothing to commit Now you have a commit history of every change made to that source of information - just…

That's clever, thank you! I will definitely use this.

Re: Figure out who's leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat

#13

Post by timeagain » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 5:49 AM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #9

Layoffs 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 whi…

IMO their slack avatar/posts go gray within minutes of them being sacked.

Re: Figure out who's leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat

#14

Post by jacquesm » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 5:49 AM UTC

bigiain wrote: post #4

enasterosophes wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

'Reflections on trusting trust' :)

Re: Figure out who's leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat

#15

Post by loneranger_11x » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 5:53 AM UTC

"Treasure such places. They don't tend to last."

True true true. Especially if people are building quirky cool stuff in smaller orgs, its simultaneously a great place to work and has a higher extinction probability.

Re: Figure out who's leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat

#16

Post by mmsc » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 5:56 AM UTC

I made a tool to track ldap like that [0]. LDAP is a treasure chest of info and great for stalking. for some reason i find it fascinating to see people leaving, and if possible, see how long they worked there for. seeing friends get fired via LDAP before they even knew about it was certainly interesting, too.

I noted in the readme..

    Know what's going on in your LDAP directory on-demand with Slack webhook integration.
    See new hires, leavers, and promotions as they appear in LDAP.
    Monitor when and what HR is doing.
    Detect unauthorized changes in LDAP.
    Monitor for accidentally leaked data.
    Detect when users are logging in and out of LDAP.

There's also LDAPmonitor[1] which is designed for Microsoft and Active Directory which does effectively the same thing.

[0]https://github.com/MegaManSec/LDAP-Monitoring-Watchdog

[1]https://github.com/p0dalirius/LDAPmonitor

Re: Figure out who's leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat

#17

Post by jiehong » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 5:56 AM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #9

Layoffs 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 whi…

In the company I knew, it’s usual for people to send an email telling others “hey, it’s my last day, thanks for all the memories. Here is my contact info if you want to.”

Others colleagues would also usually organise a virtual envelope with money inside to wish you farewell.

Re: Figure out who's leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat

#18

Post by MarkSweep » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 5:57 AM UTC

simonw wrote: post #11

If you're going to run something like this, I thoroughly recommend using Git for it. You can have your cron do something like this: curl https://internal.corp/employees.txt > employees.txt git add employees.txt git commit -m "Automated: $(date -u)" || exit 0 The || exit 0 should ensure no errors even if there is nothing to commit Now you have a commit history of every change made to that source of information - just…

Maybe add a ‘| sort’ in there for determinism. But yeah, git is an underrated database for this type of small scale data.

Re: Figure out who's leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat

#19

Post by _the_inflator » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 5:57 AM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #9

Layoffs 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 whi…

The email sentiment is both true and somewhat strange.

Simply shut down, just like a service or API that got deprecated. It is a weird experience, if you happen to know these leaving people only by email.

Re: Figure out who's leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat

#20

Post by mcqueenjordan » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 5:58 AM UTC

[flagged]