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

rachelbythebay.com

21–30 of 392 posts

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

#21
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…

Yeah I actually asked for a few weeks ago when we experienced 10% cuts and I was told they won't share one because of privacy reasons...

But we were seeing the list of deactivated slack accounts crop up slowly anyway.

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

#22
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.

Yeah, whenever I want to find out if someone still works at the company, I just search them on Slack. If it has "(deactivated)" after their name, they're no longer employed here.

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

#23
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…

I do something similar but instead of `|| exit 0` I use `--allow-empty` on the `git commit`. I don't mind the empty commits this creates, as they let me know that there was a successful automated run that happened to be empty, rather than having failed to run for whatever reason.

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

#24
I once worked at a large bureaucratic org that tried to keep it secret when people left (if quit or were fired) because they thought departures were bad for morale. So it was just a big secret. Are they here any more, are they on PTO, are they out sick, who knows! Can't talk about it. It caused way more gossip and bad morale than it would have just to be straightforward letting us know that so and so was gone.

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

#26
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…

I've been seriously considering using Git for all sorts of oft-changing-but-rarely-majorly data. Lists of books in my bookshelves.

The other problem is that I sorta want transactional-database features on top of these things. Git does this well. I also want fast indexing on parts. Git does not do this well. I am considering writing a "standard" for the dumping of sqlite to git, so that I can just delegate this out; Any transaction can be expressed as a git commit, and I can run both at once for both the durability and the reasonable indexing; The sqlite database can be re-created and reindexed whenever, and it also sorta works for backups...

Definitely just spinning my wheels, though. We'll see where databases take us next.

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

#27
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…

I regret to have had a recent opportunity to notice that MS Teams shows an empty status icon for deleted/disabled accounts. Their documentation describes it as "status unknown": https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/presence-ad...

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

#28
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.

At Amazon, when someone was laid off their Slack still worked for the 60 day WARN period. It was actually a problem because you would Slack them and get mad that they didn't reply. The only way to know for sure was to ask their manager, but you didn't want to do that because if they weren't laid off you didn't want to throw them under the bus!

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

#29
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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' :)

Ahhh thanks!

Of _course_ the right place to do this is hidden in the compiler.

;-)

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

#30
Scanning, dumping, and diffing of active directory also helps seeing when people got promoted. ("Software Engineer" -> "Software Engineer II" -> "Senior Software Engineer" etc). Useful for figuring out stats on "promotion velocity" in one org vs other.

Wouldn't work at "a certain company" if such company now made all their levels secret by default of course.

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