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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

#111
post #101
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good idea. Though I think the fact that they trusted the departing person, and the departing person delivered -- if it plays out that way -- is much more positive message than effectively implying that the company didn't trust the person. The company letting a manager relay a message, with any censoring, is certainly better than the person having no way to get their contact info to people, and they might also say som…

You are right that the other way sends a stronger signal.

My suggestion was meant as something that's feasible even for a company that already got burned by vengeful leavers; and also something that an individual manager has an easier chance of pulling off, without having to change all of corporate policy.

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

#112
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.…

I worked at AWS in the Professional Services department and people got cutoff in the middle of customer conference calls during the first round of layoffs and then found out about their layoffs.

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

#113
post #102
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> A man moves from East Germany to Siberia, where he knows his letters will be censored. He establishes a code with his friends: anything written in blue ink is honest and true; anything written in red ink is false and only there to get the truth past the censors. A month goes by and the man’s friends receive a letter written in blue ink: “Everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theaters sho…

That's a very old joke, thought I think I usually heard it as a Yiddish joke.

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

#114
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> their Slack still worked for the 60 day WARN period So weird companies can’t just pay that out as severance

That's effectively how it ends up, except with a slight advantage to the company. They cut you off and tell you that you don't have to work anymore, but in the off chance you get a job within 60 days, they don't have to keep paying you. They can also preserve their cashflow by not paying you up front. But since you technically have to be "on the books", if something like Slack is tied to your status in the company di…

Just an FYI - you can still get paid the WARN severance even if you take another job, just don't "quit" during warn. Your employment contract may or may not say you can't do side work, but (1) what, will they fire you? (2) it probably just says that you can't do work that interferes with your current employment, which is not a problem.

The WARN period exists to give you the money, but also keep you on for insurance and 401k vesting purposes (and similar). Getting cut off immediately, and suddenly losing insurance would be much much more disruptive, even with COBRA.

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

#115

There's a very common problem with systems that use SSO, where the 3rd parties that accept SSO logins cache the login information, sometimes indefinitely. A user can leave the company but their login placeholder account stays in the 3rd party, and active login sessions are maintained basically indefinitely. So you can leave the company and lose your AD account, but still access the 3rd party. As Rachel says it's kind…

In most cases wouldn't that session info be tied to physical hardware to which the employee no longer has access? Sure, tick all of your boxes, but I would think that losing the company laptop/phone/VPN would be a pretty significant barrier to maintaining access to other systems.

Not with BYOD

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

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

> You put in your two weeks? Nah, you're out the moment you hit send on that email. Manager alerts security, who then come over to your desk. You get your jacket and whatever you walked in with and get walked out.

The only thing that that accomplishes is that people don't put any notice.

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

#118
post #37
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be the only time I ever say this, but thank god for LinkedIn. At least you know you can always catch up with someone who has left

Assuming they have LinkedIn and you bothered to connect while they still worked with you. :)

First part is a personally solvable, and as for the second part: you can still add them if you know their name.

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

#120
post #64

So negative! Where I work this tool is called “new-hires”. It uses a restricted read-only API key to our third-party people tool. It was given to me by our People Director . Sometimes there are lines beginning with - but the tool is named for the lines beginning with +. new-hires is built on top of the “people” python module / cli in our monorepo. That tool is so much more useful than just a way of diffing the org ch…

Where is this? Sounds like a great place!
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