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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

#231

Post by mynameisbob22 »

silisili wrote: post #51
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 r…

Until the pandemic, we would regularly eat lunch together somewhere. For years, this was a standard routine in my life. It was a perfect way to get a feeling what others were doing, what the problems were, how the general mood in the team was, what was going on in their lives. I invited everyone to my wedding during lunch. I told them I was becoming a father during lunch. 2 people told us they were leaving during lunch.

In the beginning of the pandemic, we even switched to cooking at the office kitchen. Now there are only 2 people left on the floor, and eating lunch has stopped completely. Most of my colleagues I only see 1 or 2 times a year (Christmas party and work stuff that requires physical attention).

I noticed that it is much harder now for people to integrate when they are new. There is no real forum left for beginners to ask dumb questions they would rather not see in some chat log.

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

#232

Post by M2Ys4U »

athoscouto wrote: post #230
Symbiote wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you referring to GDPR? Does it apply to employees too, or only customers?

GDPR applies to everyone in the EU/EEA/UK.

They don't need to be a citizen, they don't need to have any sort of contractual arrangement with the data processor. If they're alive and identifiable, the GDPR applies.

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

#233

Post by suddenclarity »

unobatbayar wrote: post #159

Do you guys feel sad when your colleague leaves the company?

You'd have to define "sad" but naturally there's a sense of emptiness immediately after a friend disappears from your life. Someone you've learned to know and share jokes and interests with. Not every colleague is a friend though.

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

#234

Post by tirpen »

athoscouto wrote: post #230
Symbiote wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you referring to GDPR? Does it apply to employees too, or only customers?

GDPR definitely applies to employees as well. It applies to all handling of personal data.

One of the most important rules in GDPR is the requirement for companies to have an up to date list of all places where personal data is being stored, the reason it's stored there and what it's used for and the retention policy.

So an employee creating their own lists of previous employees could potentially get the company in trouble if it was discovered during some external audit if it wasn't listed.

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

#235

Post by M2Ys4U »

Symbiote wrote: post #59
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.

This is definitely processing personal data.

What Rachel is describing is absolutely illegal under the GDPR.

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

#236

Post by Havoc »

Banditoz wrote: post #136
Havoc wrote: post #129

Don’t think my employer would take too kindly to attempts to download bulk employee lists

Can they monitor for such a thing? Does say, Azure AD show whenever someone downloads data? Does Outlook make a similar call to figure out the name dropdowns?

Perhaps for small orgs. We’ve got thousands upon thousands of people so little chance of grabbing the entire AD or leveraging some outlook dropdown.

Is be surprised if any competently run large org allows that anyway. Just takes one rogue dude trying to make a quick buck by selling the info to spammers and you’re dealing with that for the next decade

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

#237

Post by dudul »

gpvos wrote: post #208

Is it common in the USA that employees just disappear without getting the chance to say goodbye to their colleagues? At most places I worked, people tended to send a goodbye email to everyone@company and got a chance to say personal goodbyes, even when there was a negative reason for them to leave.

Yes it is common when the employee is being terminated. It may depend on the industry, but it's always been like that at the 10+ companies I worked at.

Honestly, I much prefer it to the long notice (sometimes 3 months!) you get in say some European countries. Just rip the band aid and move on. Most likely you'll have a way to connect with former coworkers easily on LI and such.

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

#238

Post by xmodem »

At one role our GitHub access was mediated by a CI job that would export users and groups from Google Workspaces and apply them to GitHub. The script would helpfully print a list of actions taken, and we had a general policy of CI logs being world-readable - and this job was no exception.

It was a useful way to keep tabs on any skulduggery that was going on.

Unrelated, but Confluence has very powerful support for email alerts on changes. These include notifications of deletions, and the email includes the diff of the deleted content. One thing I do at any org that uses confluence heavily is set up notification rules on some interesting spaces and check in from time to time.

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

#239

Post by weregiraffe »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #66
kristopolous wrote: post #60

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…

But what would prevent someone from "downloading files" BEFORE they send the notice?

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

#240

Post by 7thaccount »

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…

I had an old boss with a Powershell script that auto-ran each morning and did a diff with the employee list in Outlook or something (can't remember what)to see who got terminated or left. I think it was the only sure fire way to know.
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