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

rachelbythebay.com

81–90 of 392 posts

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

#81
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.

If I read it correctly, they just dumped and diffed their uid, not all of that information.

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

#82
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…

During layoffs session last year, the company I work for immediately removed people from the corporate directory, and then went to the guy who had made the unofficial facebook and made him hide them in his tool too. They still technically worked there during the WARN period, so they didn't have epitaphs either. That went over about at well as you'd expect.

This time around, the laid off people show up as on vacation. If you see a team of people all on PTO until the end of May, you can presume that team is donezo.

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

#83
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've seen a company during WFH let a laid off employee (who asked) keep their access for an hour, to post a goodbye message.

It's not good practice for all situations -- you need some trust, despite the stressful situation, when people tend to show character and weaknesses -- but in this case, it worked out.

The departing employee posted a message of encouragement to the remaining people.

Kind words and contact info were exchanged, etc.

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

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a large web dev company and for years they had this attitude. Then one designer put in his two weeks and spent the majority of the time downloading all the site files for all of the sites the company had built over the two years he was there. We're talking hundreds of static sites where he took the all the design docs and static HTML/CSS/JS files one would need to recreate them somewhere else. Instead of…

Anyone could have done that at any time. The two weeks isn't magic. It could have been unannounced and they just stop showing up. You either trust your people or you don't. If you don't, get rid of them and lock them out. If you do and you still have to let them go then don't worry about it. People are far too inhuman in professional relationships and I strongly dislike that tendency. You likely spend as much time wi…

I think it’s a scale thing, honestly.

Yes, most reasonable adults remain reasonable even after fired

But once you hire a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand people… statistically there are gonna be some wackos you didn’t filter out!

It’s tough. I agree that treating each other like humans is the best policy.

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

#85
post #17
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.

We had biweekly team videocalls, so I just announced my last week in my last call.

I find it hard to imagine you have no such contact at all, or that you would say nothing in those meets. You are planning work every now and then, aren't you?

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

#86
post #83
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've seen a company during WFH let a laid off employee (who asked) keep their access for an hour, to post a goodbye message. It's not good practice for all situations -- you need some trust, despite the stressful situation, when people tend to show character and weaknesses -- but in this case, it worked out. The departing employee posted a message of encouragement to the remaining people. Kind words and contact info…

You can get nearly the same result with less trust: let the employee draft a goodbye message and have the boss (or so) forward that to the other employees.

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

#87
post #25

There's data and there's also the behavioral / psychological stuff which is the bigger tell in my experience. Things like delivering half assed work despite having a good track record, and not caring about problems that need to be solved in the mid term.

Hmm, how is this related to the article exactly? Bigger tell... of what?

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

#88
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…

You can’t get private Slack messages easily if you don’t have direct access to the account. There is an audit feature on the Enterprise version that allows it, and you can appeal to slack to open the messages due to a crime or similar - but AFAIK on the normal plans you are out of luck of you want to read private messages as workspace owner.

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

#90
post #72
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yup, same in Denmark. It’s called “fritstilling” - basically they pay you severance equally to the amount of months you should have gotten advanced notice (3-many months). But there has to be a very good reason. Such as theft, or actual security worries.

I believe this is called "garden leave" in the Commonwealth countries.
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