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

rachelbythebay.com

31–40 of 392 posts

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

#31

Scanning, dumping, and diffing of active directory also helps seeing when people got promoted. ("Software Engineer" -> "Software Engineer II" -> "Senior Software Engineer" etc). Useful for figuring out stats on "promotion velocity" in one org vs other. Wouldn't work at "a certain company" if such company now made all their levels secret by default of course.

Learned a new term today, promition velocity.

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

#32
post #11

If you're going to run something like this, I thoroughly recommend using Git for it. You can have your cron do something like this: curl https://internal.corp/employees.txt > employees.txt git add employees.txt git commit -m "Automated: $(date -u)" || exit 0 The || exit 0 should ensure no errors even if there is nothing to commit Now you have a commit history of every change made to that source of information - just…

I used your exact technique to start generating a diffable archive for the Finnish easy language news broadcast. It's been a huge help in gathering high quality comprehensible input for me, thanks!

https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/selkouutiset-scrape/

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

#33
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 of a hard problem to solve (but not that hard).

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

#34
post #11

If you're going to run something like this, I thoroughly recommend using Git for it. You can have your cron do something like this: curl https://internal.corp/employees.txt > employees.txt git add employees.txt git commit -m "Automated: $(date -u)" || exit 0 The || exit 0 should ensure no errors even if there is nothing to commit Now you have a commit history of every change made to that source of information - just…

A colleague of mine would do a sort of temporal-network analysis of this data to see which people either enjoyed working with (or for) each other or which did not, based on how people would switch groups over time.

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

#35
post #8

LDAP's full of secrets. It's a great way to keep tabs on what's going on in a company. And to think that you can get nearly all of it with anonymous access. Team or department mergers before they were announced? Yep, I've caught those. Secret mailing lists for internal projects? Check who's a member and you can ferret out what's going on. Bonus if the list mail address gives some of it away. `ldapsearch' is good if y…

I'm still flabbergasted when a company lets me index their entire AD tree as a random (or, holy crap, anonymous) user. Very nice of them, but still.

It's also often the only way to get information that doesn't exist in an Intranet page, like, literally what teams are there in IT, where are their offices, who's somebody's manager, and of course, what distribution lists am I not on that some other user is on that's causing one of us to have issues accessing some internal company portal.

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

#36
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…

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

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

#37
post #36
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…

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. :)

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

#38
post #11

If you're going to run something like this, I thoroughly recommend using Git for it. You can have your cron do something like this: curl https://internal.corp/employees.txt > employees.txt git add employees.txt git commit -m "Automated: $(date -u)" || exit 0 The || exit 0 should ensure no errors even if there is nothing to commit Now you have a commit history of every change made to that source of information - just…

I've been seriously considering using Git for all sorts of oft-changing-but-rarely-majorly data. Lists of books in my bookshelves. The other problem is that I sorta want transactional-database features on top of these things. Git does this well. I also want fast indexing on parts. Git does not do this well. I am considering writing a "standard" for the dumping of sqlite to git, so that I can just delegate this out; A…

Maybe this https://github.com/dolthub/dolt

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

#39
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 a large enough company, the experience will be exactly the same even if you do go to the office. It might take weeks or months before you have a reason to reach out and finally realize that you haven't seen someone around for quite a while. And "large enough" is surprisingly small.

For close colleagues leaving, WFH makes absolutely no difference though. Those you keep track of regardless.

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

#40
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…

This is just a natural consequence of WFH. Communications are work tasks are so isolated and transactional, there's no reason termination would be any different.
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