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

rachelbythebay.com

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

#51

Post by silisili »

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…

It's one thing I miss from the work from office lifestyle - the more human connections. People stopping by your desk to chat about life, the joking - I'd never laughed so hard in my life. Closer connections in general, and being sad when people left, but happy when they were for greener pastures.

WFH feels so sterile and impersonal in comparison.

I've been WFH since 2015 or so, so this isn't a RTO endorsement, just reminiscing.

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

#52

Post by elgenie »

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 attributes that would let one reliably eyeball a person who got fired doing their walk of shame also made for a soul-sucking workplace.

That "back in the day" algorithm required an office that emphasized butt-in-seat, lacked flexible working hours, and lacked both personal offices and multiple exit points.

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

#53

Post by earthnail »

Aurornis wrote: post #48
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…

Watching people’s accounts go into deactivated status in Slack with no goodbye is sad. The most toxic boss I ever worked for would request access to former employee’s Slack accounts under the guise of looking for data to transition their job. Their accounts would periodically go green when he logged in as them. Spooky to see ex-coworker accounts go green and know the boss is scouring their private messages. I know co…

Wow, that is creepy.

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

#54

Post by doix »

It's amazing how many people came to the same idea independently. At my old gig I created "the sackinator" (getting sacked = getting fired). It was a cronjob that dumped the entire AD directory nightly and then a script to diff the output of any two days.

Since the data was dumped, you could always go back and do more analysis. First I just cared about which accounts got deactivated. Then I started tracking title changes, last name changes (people getting married), department sizes, company head count over time etc.

> 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.

Couldn't agree more.

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

#55

Post by eddiezane »

Back when I was at DigitalOcean they were laying off/firing people from the company but not announcing any departures. You'd just go to message someone and their Slack account was deactivated. This was over the course of several weeks. I built a Slack bot to post when accounts got deactivated and learned of some new departures well before those impacted actually did.

https://github.com/eddiezane/no-ghosties

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

#57

Post by lmz »

Unfrozen0688 wrote: post #50

Not a WFH thing. This is a USA thing!! Edit: OP said "Layoffs in the WFH era are weird" Yes they are, but people here don't suddenly go offline quite as weird is what I was trying to get at. Here in Sweden if you are FTE there is usually a 1-3 month layoff period (upppsägningstid) where you work and get paid still. At the end of the period you leave. People usually email the team and even the entire company with "hey…

But if the company is worried about access can't it just pay the employee the 1-3 months without allowing them to work, even in Sweden?

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

#59

Post by Symbiote »

simonw wrote: post #10

Love 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."

I wonder if this counts as personal data. It's a copy of everyone's name, job title and employment dates.

I can certainly see many European businesses would be wary of an employee keeping this list.

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

#60

Post by kristopolous »

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 lockout always struck me as dumb and I didn't do it as a manager.

If I trusted them for the 3 years they worked for me, I can trust them for another week or two.

Tie up loose ends, take your time. We're all adults here.

I understand that under the worst circumstances bad things can happen but that's always the case.

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