Figure out who's leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat • Hacker News Board

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

#271

Post by ElevenLathe » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 2:25 PM UTC

seer wrote: post #122

Aurornis wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

One company I worked for used to have an unofficial “ex-company” slack setup, where people would get invited to by others that have already left and were in there, it was kinda nice since you form bonds with people and suddenly they’re just gone. You might have not managed to connect with them in any other form. But you login to “ex-company” slack workspace and here they are - everyone that went through the company.…

I am in a Discord of full people that all got laid off from the same place in 2019 (I actually left on a Wednesday for a new job, and everyone else got their pink slips Friday that same week). At first it was pretty lively, as you can imagine, but its settled into a wonderfully cozy online space and I'm so glad I'm a part of it. It's good to have connections to people with whom you have shared experiences but no real ongoing professional relationship (these are called "friends"). It's also good for networking, since we're all in the same industry. In some ways it just feels like a continuation of the Jabber rooms we all shared when we worked together, but it's also something more.

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

#272

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 2:27 PM UTC

donalhunt wrote: post #161

sillysaurusx wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had some DM’s which were of personal nature that were rifled through after a contract ended. How do you "clearly mark a DM as personal"? It was creepy, and further illustrated that anything you say in Slack can and will be viewed by the whole company. If not literally, then that’s how you should treat it. You might be right that it’s not illegal, but it would be nice to have those kinds of protections. Trying to ta…

The way this was communicated to me in the past was "don't say/write anything using company resources that you don't want to see on the front of ". All communications on employer-operated platforms are subject to discovery. Senior leaders tend to skirt this by using the telephone or video calls predominantly. However the infiltration of machine learning and AI means transcripts of calls, etc are now possible too. In…

[deleted]

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

#273

Post by insane_dreamer » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 2:29 PM UTC

mynameisbob22 wrote: post #231

silisili wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lun…

> There is no real forum left for beginners to ask dumb questions they would rather not see in some chat log.

this is a key point; employees who have been together a long time can easily switch over to maintaining that same level of connection while WFH (I've experienced that). But it's very hard for a "new guy" to integrate if s/he has never interacted, or only occasionally, with their coworkers in person.

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

#274

Post by orangevelcro » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 2:32 PM UTC

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…

Also the language everyone uses to tip toe around saying people got laid off. Some employees 'were affected' or were 'part of the RIF' or whatever other acronym is currently popular.

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

#275

Post by ghaff » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 2:35 PM UTC

donalhunt wrote: post #161

sillysaurusx wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had some DM’s which were of personal nature that were rifled through after a contract ended. How do you "clearly mark a DM as personal"? It was creepy, and further illustrated that anything you say in Slack can and will be viewed by the whole company. If not literally, then that’s how you should treat it. You might be right that it’s not illegal, but it would be nice to have those kinds of protections. Trying to ta…

The way this was communicated to me in the past was "don't say/write anything using company resources that you don't want to see on the front of ". All communications on employer-operated platforms are subject to discovery. Senior leaders tend to skirt this by using the telephone or video calls predominantly. However the infiltration of machine learning and AI means transcripts of calls, etc are now possible too. In…

A video call on a company account isn't ironclad but, unless you're discussing something actually illegal, it's probably good enough for most purposes. Maybe not as good as personal cell phones or in-person, but a lot better than anything written--especially on company systems.

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

#276

Post by hef19898 » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 2:37 PM UTC

lotsofpulp wrote: post #261

donkeyd wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The rules on this vary across Europe Not really, ECHR has already ruled on this. It's pretty much only allowed if there's an important reason for it. For example, to recover something invaluable (contract, code, report) that isn't available somewhere else and cannot be replaced. In that case that's also the only thing that them employer can look for. They can't open obviously unrelated e-mails. So before talking to…

What mechanism is there to prove who looked at what emails? And who would be there to enforce it, especially at a small business?

Difficult, very difficult on deed. As with most corporate and whize collar crime, the investigation rate is extremely low. That being said, worker councils and unions. The former has to involved in these things, if the exist. The latter pushes for the former.

That is valid for Germany.

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

#277

Post by ghaff » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 2:41 PM UTC

bombcar wrote: post #254

sillysaurusx wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the cognitive dissonance is that I used to be able to say things to a coworker in-person which wasn’t recorded and tracked, using my voice. This was always a normal part of work, and I didn’t give it a second thought until it was gone. Nowadays it feels like someone is constantly standing over your shoulder whenever you’re at work, and there’s never a private moment. This is especially strange during holidays…

Call! Yes, most communication can be done with chats in slack or teams, but take the excuse to call and chit chat a bit before getting down to business. Unless all calls are transcribed and recorded, it’s pretty “watercoolerish”.

At that point, the bigger risk is that someone repeats something to someone that you wish they hadn't. But I've had that happen with an in-person conversation.

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

#278

Post by dsr_ » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 2:42 PM UTC

emj wrote: post #212

wil421 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get a DLP system in place for god sakes. I’ve even seen off shore people work from VMs only where they can’t download or store any file locally, much less dump everything to a USB stick.

Top search result is from Gartner: alarm bells ringing. Data loss prevention seems to be enterprise speak for doing as much intrusive monitoring you can do, in as neutral speak as possible. 1984 is so appealing for so many people, it seems like it is just a book about the tendencies that power can take when it is not guided by sane principles. I have always been employed in a high trust capacity since I was a young a…

Every so often a client asks if we are using a DLP, and if not, why not.

All the DLPs rely on, effectively, regular expression searches of traffic.

This is fine if what you need to protect are SSNs, phone numbers, credit card numbers... but if your data is not easily recognized that way, they don't work.

If you ask the DLP vendors about their threat model -- and the salespeople generally don't know what a threat model is -- it's always a set of stories about a salesperson who clicks the download-as-CSV button on a CRM system, a DB reporting specialist who generates a report full of raw passwords and credit card numbers, and an off-shore programmer who sends AWS credentials via email.

Hopefully you can spot the non-DLP prevention mechanisms for all of these...

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

#279

Post by thfuran » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 2:45 PM UTC

walthamstow wrote: post #247

M2Ys4U wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So interesting that you say alive. There's always a some obscure bit of GDPR I've never heard of. Does a dead person not have PII?

They can't be harmed by mishandling of PII.

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

#280

Post by chiefalchemist » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 2:46 PM UTC

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…

When someone new comes on board, I make it a point to send a LinkedIn connection. While I'm no fan of LinkedIn per se, it's neutral enough that nearly all of those connections are accepted. If necessary, it then becomes a non-company channel for having safe (ish) discussions about the company.