[HN Gopher] Figure out who's leaving the company: dump, diff, re...
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Figure out who's leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat
Author : l0b0
Score : 585 points
Date : 2024-02-09 04:46 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rachelbythebay.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rachelbythebay.com)
| l0b0 wrote:
| Now to figure out how the frig to implement this at $work.
| enasterosophes wrote:
| Since we're a puppet shop, the user account definitions are
| largely (albeit not exclusively) kept in hiera (i.e. yaml),
| tracked in Git.
|
| We haven't used this for the purpose of writing epitaphs, but
| we _could_. In fact, since such changes need to go through code
| review, someone could theoretically author their own removal
| and add an epitaph of their choice in the commit message; after
| they leave, the change can be approved and merged in their
| absence.
| bigiain wrote:
| Heh. Now I want to sneak in a CI automation or a pre commit
| hook or something - to post _my_ version of my obituary when
| I've left.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 'Reflections on trusting trust' :)
| bigiain wrote:
| Ahhh thanks!
|
| Of _course_ the right place to do this is hidden in the
| compiler.
|
| ;-)
| jacquesm wrote:
| I wonder how long it would take them to figure it out.
| Bonus point if it is a two stage, where the compiler
| contains the real logic but some innocent tool looks like
| it is the culprit. And of course per the original you
| modify the compiler in such a way that an attempt to
| recompile it will reinstall the gimmick. And maybe
| redirect the distribution downloader to the point that it
| uses a locally cached devtools copy that ... you get the
| idea...
| RajT88 wrote:
| I do this for various reasons at my work.
|
| To function in day to day tasks you need to be able to read stuff
| in AD. I have solved interesting problems this way like: How do I
| get access to X thing when the security groups are not
| documented? Find someone with access and recurse their MemberOf
| and diff your own.
|
| I also have used it to find people leaving.
| al_borland wrote:
| We used to use Sametime and I'd periodically search for "Deleted
| - ", which would show me everyone who was deleted over the past
| few months, before they fell out of the system.
| alpb wrote:
| The "epitaph" app that was mentioned is an internal Google web
| site. I always found it to be fascinating.
| mickeyp wrote:
| 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 you know your way around LDAP. Apache
| LDAP Studio is a great UI tool if you just want to explore.
|
| Everyone should know enough about LDAP to build a login service
| that binds against it for internal apps. You can exploit the
| groups the sys admins maintain to control permissions in your
| app. It's very powerful and an easy way to get up an running in
| no time.
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| 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.
| mickeyp wrote:
| It has to be public (or at least not too locked down) or
| things like Address Book in outlook would stop working. Lots
| of weird things depend on the LDAP tree being broadly
| accessible. It's just that it leaks more information than
| most people think.
| xorcist wrote:
| Still, it's a tool made for another era. It would be
| sufficient to let it return one search result at a time, or
| complete specified group aliases, in order to work for
| groupware clients. Applications mostly needs to
| authenticate a specific user.
|
| The ability to walk the tree is something else. Just like
| we don't allow zone transfers for dns anymore, there should
| have been similar best practice changes to ldap if people
| just gave it some love.
| SheinhardtWigCo wrote:
| > Everyone should know enough about LDAP to build a login
| service that binds against it for internal apps. You can
| exploit the groups the sys admins maintain to control
| permissions in your app. It's very powerful and an easy way to
| get up an running in no time.
|
| Sure, if you want to be the next SolarWinds.
| jedberg wrote:
| 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 while to figure out if they are actually gone or
| just busy. And if you're waiting on them for some output to work
| on _your_ project, they may just never deliver and you won 't
| know why for a while.
|
| The company directory, if there is one, often still shows them
| for 60+ days because of the WARN act. And it seems most companies
| won't make a "layoff list".
|
| It's really hard to get closure if they won't even tell you who
| got let go, and if they don't give the people a chance to say
| goodbye by cutting off their access before telling them they are
| laid off.
| timeagain wrote:
| IMO their slack avatar/posts go gray within minutes of them
| being sacked.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Yeah, whenever I want to find out if someone still works at
| the company, I just search them on Slack. If it has
| "(deactivated)" after their name, they're no longer employed
| here.
| supportengineer wrote:
| There must be a Slack API that could be used for this, and
| written to git periodically as the other post said.
| jedberg wrote:
| At Amazon, when someone was laid off their Slack still worked
| for the 60 day WARN period. It was actually a problem because
| you would Slack them and get mad that they didn't reply. The
| only way to know for sure was to ask their manager, but you
| didn't want to do that because if they weren't laid off you
| didn't want to throw them under the bus!
| petesergeant wrote:
| > their Slack still worked for the 60 day WARN period
|
| So weird companies can't just pay that out as severance
| jedberg wrote:
| 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 directory, it's easier to just leave it.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| 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.
| sharkweek wrote:
| My org had a big cut last year but nobody would tell us how
| many people were laid off for some reason.
|
| I happened to remember the total number of people who were in
| our org's giant slack channel before the layoffs and thus was
| able to do some hardcore detective work subtracting the new
| number of people in the channel from the previous amount to
| get the answer...
| jiehong wrote:
| 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.
| brnt wrote:
| 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?
| away271828 wrote:
| >You are planning work every now and then, aren't you?
|
| In the past, I've tried to give key people on longer-term
| projects I'm working on a heads-up. But I trusted them and
| it was longer-term. At the end of the day, I'm not going to
| let the word out before I'm ready if I'm worried it has the
| potential to bite me financially, e.g. because of vesting.
| _the_inflator wrote:
| The email sentiment is both true and somewhat strange.
|
| Simply shut down, just like a service or API that got
| deprecated. It is a weird experience, if you happen to know
| these leaving people only by email.
| purrcat259 wrote:
| Yeah I actually asked for a few weeks ago when we experienced
| 10% cuts and I was told they won't share one because of privacy
| reasons...
|
| But we were seeing the list of deactivated slack accounts crop
| up slowly anyway.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| I regret to have had a recent opportunity to notice that MS
| Teams shows an empty status icon for deleted/disabled accounts.
| Their documentation describes it as "status unknown":
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/presence-ad...
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| My family's chat server still shows "Offline" for the account
| of a deceased relative. Like yeah... they're pretty well
| offline.
| picadores wrote:
| The user was disappeared
| namdnay wrote:
| 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
| jedberg wrote:
| Assuming they have LinkedIn and you bothered to connect while
| they still worked with you. :)
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| idk I added a lot of people after I quit my last place
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| First part is a personally solvable, and as for the second
| part: you can still add them if you know their name.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Between jobs is the _only_ time you touch LinkedIn, lest HR
| sees some activity on your profile and buckets you into a
| "actively job-searching" risk group.
| fullspectrumdev wrote:
| Conversely: being in that "risk group" can, in many
| situations, be extremely useful when it comes to
| negotiating raises.
|
| May depend on your job market, but it's a pretty normal
| tactic for a lot of people I know.
| namdnay wrote:
| > lest HR sees some activity on your profile and buckets
| you into a "actively job-searching" risk group
|
| well.... yes? HR considering you "at risk" is a pretty
| good thing :)
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Like the rule of modern tank battles goes: first one to
| take the shot wins.
| ZaoLahma wrote:
| 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.
| hiremelocally wrote:
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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 companies can get slack messages anyway, but seeing your
| boss do it in real time is extra creepy.
| earthnail wrote:
| Wow, that is creepy.
| economicalidea wrote:
| 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.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Request access to former employee's corporate email and
| reset the password.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Yep. That's how it happened for me.
| planede wrote:
| Ouch. My takeaway is that I should probably delete my
| slack account before leaving the company.
| exitb wrote:
| The takeaway is that no message on Slack should be
| considered private.
| wil421 wrote:
| Why would anyone consider a company provided messaging
| service as private? Or even a company provided laptop,
| cellphone, etc.
| adastra22 wrote:
| People have terrible opsec.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| Because private messages carry an expectation of privacy.
|
| They're different parts of speech from the same root
| word, after all.
| adastra22 wrote:
| There's no legal obligation of privacy on a work system
| though. Not in the US at least.
| voidfunc wrote:
| The only expectation of this is in your head. It is a
| fantasy that doesn't exist.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| I know that legally, employee data has no expectation of
| privacy. But I'd like to gently push back here.
|
| The word "private" means "having privacy" in the normal,
| everyday sense. Using that word to describe something
| that _isn 't_ private is lying. You and I both know there
| do exist many people who suffered consequences for not
| understanding the definition of that word.
|
| In my opinion, the ethical thing to do is to use a
| different word when no expectation of privacy applies.
| And the upside is powerful: transparency gains trust.
|
| Slack did this well: they call them "direct messages".
| bluescrn wrote:
| I'd extend that way beyond that, to anything done on a
| company system/network/device.
|
| If you need privacy, use your personal phone (and don't
| connect it to the company wifi)
| hiatus wrote:
| Deleting company data before leaving probably won't end
| well.
| delfinom wrote:
| Slack keeps those messages even if you delete the account
| when you leave. It's a data retention setting.
| morkalork wrote:
| Hah, that would be the trick wouldn't it. My old manager
| used to get all of his former employees work emails
| forwarded to an account he had access to. Ostensibly it
| was a precaution against accidentally missing anything
| critical from a vendor or partner.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| And all but extremely early startups or cheapskate
| companies have the Enterprise version.
| amenghra wrote:
| The correct mental security model here is "if you used an
| account on a company issued laptop/phone/any hardware" ==
| "the company technically already has or can get access to
| the data". There are so many ways for a company to do that.
|
| Granted, some of these ways might be legal or not depending
| on jurisdiction, but then lots of company will thread or
| cross the legal fine line if they are happy with the
| risk/benefit trade off.
| camgunz wrote:
| I haven't checked in a while, but I think there's also an
| API for it too.
| kunley wrote:
| Fortunately in Europe what the said boss did is illegal and
| this can end with a criminal prosecution.
| yau8edq12i wrote:
| What? First, Europe isn't a single country and there are
| large difference between legal systems.
|
| Second, what you said is just plain wrong in at least one.
| In France (which is known for strict worker protections)
| the employer can go through any employee's mailbox or files
| on their work computer/account provided 1. that the
| messages/files in question aren't clearly marked as
| personal 2. that the conditions for the access are laid
| down in advance with proper notice. When an employee is let
| go, they need to be given time to empty their mailboxes etc
| of private correspondence or files.
| https://www.cnil.fr/fr/lacces-la-messagerie-dun-salarie-
| en-s...
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| 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 talk
| to anyone at work in the WFH era is a field of landmines,
| because you never know at any given time whether what you
| say will make it back to the person you're discussing.
| Discussions like that are a normal and healthy part of
| socializing with coworkers, and it happens at every
| company. Except in the WFH era everything you've typed is
| a permanent record, whereas previously you'd be able to
| say something to a coworker without worrying that someone
| else will someday hear it.
|
| But, it's a new era. It's easy to adjust. Just don't get
| personal at work. It sucks, but work is designed to suck,
| or else it wouldn't be work.
| Gabrys1 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Anyone thought otherwise?
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| In private DMs?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| In company Slack?
|
| Private != personal. At least I never ever imagined one
| could even _assume_ DMs on work IM are _personal private
| conversations_. They 're organizationally grouped as chat
| between to accounts, as opposed to group chat, but
| they're at work, for work, using work-provided tools...
|
| Or put another way: why would anyone consider work Slack
| to be different in this regard than company e-mail? Much
| like with e-mails, the difference between DMs and group
| chats is whether the number of participants is > 2.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| 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, since personal
| conversations tend to spontaneously happen around those
| times.
|
| You're right of course. I just wish we had something to
| fill the void that was left by in-person interactions
| vanishing. I think I'll be doing WFH pretty much the rest
| of my life, and I absolutely hate going into an office in
| general, but there are definitely some aspects I miss.
| Being able to chat off the record with a coworker is one
| of them.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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".
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| That's funny, because as someone who has worked mostly
| remotely, I consider the recording of every chat a
| feature. For example, I have been able to use this to
| figure out why code I wrote a decade ago is the way it
| is.
| michaelt wrote:
| Most large companies will tell you two contradictory
| things:
|
| First of all, they'll tell you that even the most junior
| helpdesk workers can remote onto your machine, reset your
| password, disable your 2FA, and monitor all your web
| browsing and chat history.
|
| Second of all, that this unannounced product, this not-
| yet-filed patent, this big planned layoff, this
| prospective hire background check result, these upcoming
| financial results, this employee's reason for needing
| medical leave, this pentest result document, and this
| forthcoming change to pricing are Strictly Confidential.
| You shouldn't discuss them even with your own boss,
| unless you've first confirmed they're on the need-to-know
| list, and that certainly doesn't include level 1 helpdesk
| workers.
|
| Most large companies, to address this contradiction, will
| say access is _possible_ but _rarely used, tightly
| controlled and carefully audited_.
| prepend wrote:
| It is still strange to me that:
|
| 1) people think that anything sent on an employer system
| isn't visible to the employer
|
| 2) people send private DMs from work accounts
| donalhunt wrote:
| 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 <insert major news
| publisher>". 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 addition, the growing use of "disappearing" messages
| despite litigation holds has come up in more legal cases
| recently.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| That seems like it would be a much larger constraint than
| you're making it out to be.
| theologe wrote:
| I agree with you, Europe has different countries and some
| of them are not in E.U. so different rules may apply.
| However, since France is in E.U. what you describe should
| be illegal. The article you refer to is 15yrs old btw....
| yau8edq12i wrote:
| The "article" is published by the French data protection
| authority. They update them when regulations change. They
| didn't update this one. Make a deduction, now.
|
| > However, since France is in E.U. what you describe
| should be illegal.
|
| What's the regulation or directive you're talking about?
| laserlight wrote:
| What the said boss did sounds to me like impersonation,
| which is not only illegal, but a crime. Accessing records
| kept on company assets is one thing, logging in to
| someone's account in a communication software is another.
| donkeyd wrote:
| > Europe isn't a single country
|
| Correct, but it does have a single ECHR. Even though some
| countries still ignore them.
| yau8edq12i wrote:
| What ECHR principle are you referring to here?
| fullspectrumdev wrote:
| The rules on this vary across Europe, though broadly
| speaking accessing an employees mailbox is "something you
| only do after speaking to legal".
|
| The patchwork of national laws and national interpretations
| of EU regulations is quite interesting, and rather
| confusing especially if you do offensive security work or
| DFIR.
|
| As an example, when doing consultancy we would do the usual
| phishing as part of an assessment. Usually this is followed
| by dumping the users mailboxes to look for further
| credentials/access to corporate resources (eg: are they
| emailing passwords around?) - but in some countries such as
| Germany that's often explicitly ruled out due to fear of
| breaching privacy regulations.
| donkeyd wrote:
| > 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 legal, make sure you have a valid
| reason.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| What mechanism is there to prove who looked at what
| emails? And who would be there to enforce it, especially
| at a small business?
| hef19898 wrote:
| 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.
| donkeyd wrote:
| There really is none. A smart company would work with the
| 4 eyes principle though (still no guarantee).
|
| However, if a company does find an unrelated e-mail they
| want to use against you (which is what most people fear),
| that makes them liable.
| delfinom wrote:
| It's completely legal in the US and often mandated by
| regulation. In some US industries, even your phone calls
| are recorded by law.
| seer wrote:
| 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
| mean lots of people would stop responding after a while, but
| there was enough time "buffer" to allow people to connect
| with other means.
| itsrajju wrote:
| I am a part of one such group! It started as a WhatsApp
| group for all ex-employees, but has now morphed into a
| discord server. It's a great way to remain connected to
| friends you make at work, and recently, it has also become
| a way to share job openings to your network to help laid-
| off people.
| nick7376182 wrote:
| Anybody have connection to the ex-google one if there is?
| I just left and didn't see it referenced in any of the
| leaving guides.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Leaving guides? I imagine a pamphlet.
|
| "We wish you well on your departure; as you embark on new
| adventures your about to open your eyes for the first
| time.
|
| This may be a shock to some of you as you may discover
| that the world is more dystopian than you've may of seen
| from your altered reality mind-implants.
|
| We would like to thank you for your service as a tool at
| the corporation."
| jasonjayr wrote:
| "Handbook for the Recently Terminated"
|
| As long as it doesn't read like stereo instructions ....
| bombcar wrote:
| You could rewrite Plato's Cave for some companies,
| especially the insular ones where there's some culture
| shock when you get into "the real world".
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Plato's cave needs to be rewritten anyway
|
| time to just acknowledge that its an overly long arduous
| convoluted setup that can be vastly simplified for the
| message it creates
| kevindamm wrote:
| if Plato's cave were rewritten today, it would probably
| be from the perspective of the cave
| taylorfinley wrote:
| Tempt me with a good time lmao. "Imagine someone spends
| their entire life in a dark room with only an ebook
| reader..."
| laz wrote:
| https://xoogler.co/ has a xoogler slack
| data-ottawa wrote:
| This seems common now, I'm part of two such groups and it's
| a nicer experience than trying to keep up via LinkedIn.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Only a recruiter would think keeping up on LinkedIn would
| be the route to take
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| 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.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > One company I worked for used to have an unofficial "ex-
| company" slack setup,
|
| More than one for me.
| trumbitta2 wrote:
| I think admins don't need to log into an account to see
| private messages. Was like that at two of my previous jobs.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's usually an additional step as admin to access
| messages, but "login as" can be easier/simpler.
|
| Learned that Office 365 now has a "login as" for email
| which is convenient for setting out of office, deleting
| calendar invites, or email snooping.
| teeray wrote:
| > Their accounts would periodically go green when he logged
| in as them.
|
| The new dystopia will be when an LLM steps in to reply like
| them.
| silisili wrote:
| 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 reminiscing.
| jedberg wrote:
| I miss that too. Some of my best friends are former co-
| workers. Especially from when I was younger and we spent
| nearly every waking hour together either at work or at a bar
| after work.
|
| I don't miss it enough to want to go back to an office
| though!
| ryandrake wrote:
| The way I see it I go to work to exchange my skills for
| money. Often that involves working with others, but I'm not
| there to socialize and make friends. I have friends.
|
| So given that outlook, WFH seems just kind of more "pure."
| It's distilled work, unencumbered by phony pseudo-
| friendships and awkward water cooler chit chat about
| sportsball. When we start a zoom meeting I can just launch
| right into the agenda without having to do that offtopic
| pre-meeting banter ritual. To me it's work without waste. I
| feel like with WFH I get more done per hour and that means
| more time for me to do what I enjoy: things that aren't
| work.
| wolletd wrote:
| I also have friends, but I rarely see them on workdays.
| Having other people around me on those days feels good, I
| don't like being alone for several days. I totally can do
| and have done that, but I prefer to not be alone.
|
| Additionally, my colleagues and I share big parts of our
| life: every damn workday. None of my friends are capable
| of talking as long and nuanced about things happening at
| my workplace. They don't really want to hear emotional
| rants about bullshit projects because they have no way to
| relate to those feelings.
|
| But I want to rant about bullshit projects and
| thankfully, I have colleagues that like hearing such
| rants from time to time, as they totally can relate. When
| I am mad about some shit, start talking about it and they
| ask "oh, was that XY who said that?" and it totally was
| XY, that is comforting.
|
| I have friends, yes, and I don't need to meet my
| colleagues after work. But I still have healthy social
| relationships to them.
| iteria wrote:
| Man, i have different friends than you. I have listened
| to a friend rant for 3 hours about a BS project at a
| company I haven't worked at. Another friend rant over
| weeks and I wasn't even in the same industry.
|
| I talk to my friends during the day. I'm lucky that we're
| all remote, but honestly even my in office family members
| can chat sometimes at work.
|
| When I was in the office, I rarely connected with
| coworkers. I was often the youngest and/or just not in
| the same life stage. I could exchange pleasantries and
| that was about it. I have a grand total of 2 friends from
| work after over a decade of work across several
| companies. My social life is still vibrant outside of
| that.
|
| I don't even understand where people think you can't
| connect to peolle WTH. I just had an hour long chat with
| a coworker about nothing at all. Sometimes people just
| need to chat about nonsense and VC people. Peoppe seem to
| be afraid of that, but I don't see why. We can work and
| talk. We did it in the office.
| xorcist wrote:
| So when you've earned your f-u money you stop showing up
| for work?
|
| That's not what we see in practice. Most people with a
| sudden windfall (stocks, lottery winnings etc.) keeps
| showing up for work. Because how else would you stay
| socially meaningful in our society? Nobody _really_ wants
| to sit at a beach sipping drinks the rest of their life,
| accomplishing nothing.
|
| There is clearly a social aspect of work, at least for
| the majority that we can call socially functional. And
| it's at least as important as getting paid. Work is also
| a social role, and it hurts many people if they are left
| out of it. It's not easy.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > So when you've earned your f-u money you stop showing
| up for work?
|
| Yes. Absolutely 100% I am looking forward to it and
| counting down the days.
| harryquach wrote:
| Absolutely, there are plenty of ways to be social, on my
| terms, with the people I choose. If I didn't have to
| trade my time for money there are plenty of ways I can
| fill my days without corporate bullshit.
| mlrtime wrote:
| This is one reason why playing the lottery [even if once]
| has some positive value.
|
| It forces people into a thought experiment on what they
| would do if they didn't have to work.
| 2024throwaway wrote:
| > Nobody really wants to sit at a beach sipping drinks
| the rest of their life, accomplishing nothing.
|
| Speak for yourself.
| ZaoLahma wrote:
| This really highly depends on the people that you work with.
|
| At a previous employment (a 100% WFH position) I had most of
| my colleagues in India, roughly 4 time zones away from my own
| so we almost never met in person, and we'd have personal chit
| chat sessions while working.
|
| Then I've worked with people who weren't present even when
| you were sitting right next to them. They'd come into the
| office, say "morning", put on their noise cancelling head
| phones and be gone for the rest of the day (modern open space
| office life in a nut shell).
| The_Colonel wrote:
| That's of course true, but then there's a large group of (I
| assume) introverts with whom it's kinda difficult to get
| close with, but once you do, you can have a great
| relationship with them. It's an order of magnitude harder
| problem to break ice remotely with such people.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| Speaking as one of those introverts, it's actually much
| easier for me to get to know people over video calls than
| it is in person, at least if there's an actual task at
| hand.
|
| In-person I tend to be a little more no-nonsense, whereas
| over video calls I'm sitting comfortably at home with a
| cat in my lap, already relaxed and much less uptight as
| an emotional starting point.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I mean, I love working without headphones in a room with 4
| people in. I detest it in a room with 100.
| romanovcode wrote:
| As someone who has enough social interactions and friendships
| outside of work I am very happy with this attitude. My co-
| workers are not my friends and I'd like to keep it that way.
|
| Indeed nowadays I have seen many articles publishing that it
| is even more prominent idea with Zoomers entering workforce
| and have a clear boundary between co-workers and personal
| outside-work friends. The companies actually do not like this
| because this means that those people have literally 0 loyalty
| to the company and only care for the money. Which is
| _shocking_ , I know. \s
| mynameisbob22 wrote:
| 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.
| drewcoo wrote:
| Most of what I read about people missing offices makes me
| think "gee, I'm glad I don't share an office with that
| person."
|
| But I do miss lunches. Even the loud, obnoxious people are
| much more tolerable in that context.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > 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.
| harryquach wrote:
| There is nuance to this as well. The company size and
| culture make a dramatic impact. I recently joined a small
| company which is fully remote. Everyone has been helpful
| and supportive as I have been onboarding.
| elgenie wrote:
| The attributes that would let one reliably eyeball a person who
| got fired doing their walk of shame also made for a soul-
| sucking workplace.
|
| That "back in the day" algorithm required an office that
| emphasized butt-in-seat, lacked flexible working hours, and
| lacked both personal offices and multiple exit points.
| kristopolous wrote:
| 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.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| 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 going after the guy legally, they passed and then
| instituted the same policy. 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 one designer totally ruined the company from ever
| letting someone stay for their two weeks.
| kristopolous wrote:
| 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 with your colleagues as your spouse, make it a
| real connection.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| But once they receive the bad news, their motivation for
| revenge increases, which is why similar policies exist in
| many workplaces. Trust isn't a univariate, piecewise
| defined function like you suggest.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Right, if you're being a dick then sure. I'm advocating
| for not being one in the first place. That's the
| challenge.
|
| If you can't meet that use keycards instead of keys, voip
| instead of real phones, lock file cabinets, I mean go all
| the way.
|
| Corporate America loves pretending. Pretending you're
| part of the family and then treating you like you're
| trying to rob the place at the drop of a hat.
|
| That's the messed up thing. Be consistent and don't be
| fake. People can deal with you for being overly formal
| and paranoid but probably not for being a phony
| backstabber, that's how you grow haters.
|
| The hardest thing for a brand to shake off is a bad
| reputation, whether they justly deserved it or not. You
| don't want haters in the Internet age.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I think people in general are a lot better about being
| fired if it doesn't happen at the drop of a hat.
| Unfortunately in the US it seems like you can go from
| gainfully employed to jobless in the space of an
| unfortunate 10 minutes. That'd piss me off too.
| ketzo wrote:
| 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.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Of course it increases. That's why you have permissions
| and guard rails on the employees in the first place.
| Those should be sufficient.
|
| Also if you want to work with the people you like again
| but need to actually downsize because of external
| pressure, good luck trying to get them to come work for
| you at your next venture after some fucked up bridge
| burning ceremony.
| bombcar wrote:
| You also have the situation where the boss usually KNOWS
| who might do things that he shouldn't - but you can't
| have policies that only apply to some, so they get
| applied to all (there are still unofficial ways around
| this, of course, like letting someone know unofficially
| before they're officially laid off).
| rightbyte wrote:
| > 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.
| rob74 wrote:
| ...so now people who want to do that just copy everything
| _before_ sending the email?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _The one designer totally ruined the company from ever
| letting someone stay for their two weeks._
|
| No, it's the over-reaction by whoever instituted that
| policy that ruined the company. They should've cut their
| losses and ignore the outlier, perhaps make it tad more
| difficult to copy off data en masse without being noticed,
| and/or do many other things addressing this risk without
| ruining the workplace for everyone else.
|
| This is the organizational equivalent of autoimmune
| disease. Works at every scale. On national/international
| scale, this is what terrorist organizations are exploiting
| - do an X amount of damage that may even be
| counterproductive to their goal, and watch the victim do
| 1000X damage to itself by overreaction.
| darkwater wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This will work for the first 5-10-20 people, then word of
| mouth goes out about this policy and your evil designer is
| downloading everything the day before sending their
| resignation mail.
| fullspectrumdev wrote:
| Or "your sales guy is making a little backup of the leads
| from the CRM before handing in notice".
|
| Though with sales orgs I think this is almost an expected
| practice - sales people are often hired on the tactit,
| never officially acknowledged basis that they will bring
| their leads list.
| notbeuller wrote:
| Years ago I got a job through a recruiter, left company A
| for B. She called me after a few months and asked me for
| the Compsny A internal directory - which I declined to
| provide and she got kind of nasty about it. Maybe ten
| years later I was at company C and my manager mentioned
| hiring a recruiter - same person. I mentioned our
| previous interaction (not out of spite, just a naive
| narrative) and they stopped working with her immediately.
| My point being - your behavior has a long tail, so don't
| be trying to take advantage.
| bombcar wrote:
| People asking for company directories amuses me so much,
| especially when most company email patterns are
| completely guessable.
| htrp wrote:
| it's more the name and the org chart?
|
| maybe the phone number too
| serial_dev wrote:
| > 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.
|
| You make it sound like he poached your clients or extorted
| your company. As they didn't go after him legally, I assume
| that didn't happen.
|
| I assume all the files are on a thumb drive in his drawer,
| unopened, just in case he wants to remember how "that cool
| animation" was implemented. And when that moment comes, he
| will not find the thumb drive, anyway.
|
| And all that security charade will accomplish is that
| people who care enough about their work, will make a copy
| the day before they quit. Congratulations, your policy
| achieved nothing, except get rid of their two weeks notice
| and everyone feel a bit worse working for you.
| drewcoo wrote:
| Designers also need to show portfolios. Hard when your
| work is all behind some corporate firewall.
| away271828 wrote:
| I don't know the details but so long as its not some top
| secret IP, taking copies of various work you've
| personally done seems pretty reasonable. Good idea to do
| it periodically as you go along though.
| Macha wrote:
| One thing I noticed is we got in the last few years a lot
| stories of the form "Adobe donates Photoshop 1.0 source
| code to Computer History Museum, saved because early
| programmer kept it on a floppy disc in his house". Or
| games especially we get a lot of this.
|
| It feels like if an employee did this with modern
| projects, they would at the very least be summarily
| fired, if not have legal action taken against them.
| nilamo wrote:
| These days, we use centralized source control, instead of
| emailing zip files and patches back and forth. Having all
| the source on a random piece of media was a lot more
| normal back then.
| fullspectrumdev wrote:
| So what stops people making their "backup of files" before
| hitting send on the email?
| wil421 wrote:
| 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.
| emj wrote:
| 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 adult, there is not a technically feasible system
| in the world that could prevent me from wrecking havoc in
| a company. Social ones though, they are extremely
| effective.
| dsr_ wrote:
| 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...
| oblio wrote:
| > Hopefully you can spot the non-DLP prevention
| mechanisms for all of these...
|
| What is it?
| wil421 wrote:
| What does any of this have to do with theft? In most
| lawful places, if you dump source code and documents to
| take with you it's not going to end well.
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/08/04/anthony-levandowski-
| gets...
| outworlder wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Sure, they can't do any of that, and development becomes
| miserable. You don't have to go full VM and remote
| desktop to prevent those things.
| mysteria wrote:
| If you really want protection you don't want a DLP, you
| want a (limited) air-gap.
|
| Basically the machine is not allowed to access the
| internet and USB drives do not work. Only specific locked
| down applications like the email app, web browser, and so
| forth have internet access. Downloads are allowed but
| uploads are not.
|
| A permissions interface is available for say legitimate
| transfers of data to a flash drive or a web upload, in
| that case the user will have to add a valid reason and
| the specific files into the form. Once that's checked and
| approved by a higher-up the files are temporarily placed
| in a special folder that permits transfer out. The same
| thing goes for external emails that aren't on a
| whitelist, they'll need approval before they get sent.
| dheera wrote:
| If you're running a VM you're storing the whole state of
| the VM on the host machine, there's nothing technically
| stopping you from copying all the data, and worse,
| there's no way to even know that it happened.
|
| What VMs are helpful for is cross-contamination and
| spyware attacks from _other_ clients a contractor is
| working for.
| weregiraffe wrote:
| But what would prevent someone from "downloading files"
| BEFORE they send the notice?
| ajb wrote:
| In the UK, and most European countries, locking someone out
| during their notice period is really rare. Big companies
| exist and are not destroyed by disgruntled employees.
|
| If someone is _fired for cause_ then they go immediately,
| but if they are given notice then they are usually trusted
| with access, and it rarely goes wrong.
|
| Stealing IP is rare because it's hard to benefit from it.
| If stolen IP is offered to another company, usually they
| report it to the owner to cover their backs legally.
| Funders are not going to want to invest in a company that
| is based on stolen IP, where their investment can become
| worthless overnight.
|
| So I think these stories about how 'we have to treat
| employees like they are potential criminals' (not accusing
| parent of that, but you hear them) are bugos. Treating
| people like human beings is both right and economically
| efficient.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| I work at a large corporation. Most of the people have
| transitioned to WFH now.
|
| At least five times I can say I had no idea someone had been
| laid off or sacked until weeks later. I just assumed they were
| on PTO or something, and then in the middle of a meeting, I'd
| say something like, "Yeah, where's James been, I haven't seen
| him online for a few weeks now." Then the manager would chime
| in and say they got laid off or let go several weeks ago and
| they were waiting to announce it to everybody.
|
| Twice my director had a meeting with the team and forgot to
| include myself and two other devs to announce someone had been
| let go - which is scary AF when we're all on Teams wondering
| why they just randomly left us off the meeting, which then made
| us all paranoid AF for a few weeks.
|
| The whole process with laying people off or people getting
| sacked has just been handled in such a ham handed way, it
| doesn't inspire confidence at all, and people are constantly
| looking over their shoulder when a team loses people and have
| to pick up the slack immediately.
| bsimpson wrote:
| 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.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| 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.
| saagarjha wrote:
| The infuriating part is when they spin this as some sort of
| employee privacy move, as if the employee (now ex-employee?
| But not really, because of WARN) has no input in that
| decision.
| neilv wrote:
| 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.
| eru wrote:
| 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.
| neilv wrote:
| 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 something nice for morale.
| eru wrote:
| 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.
| dpig_ wrote:
| > 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 show good films from the West.
| Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you
| cannot buy is red ink." [1]
|
| [1] https://www.guernicamag.com/tomas-hachard-the-red-ink/
| eru wrote:
| That's a very old joke, thought I think I usually heard
| it as a Yiddish joke.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Surprisingly enough, as toxic as Amazon is, after I got
| Amazoned and made my choice to "leave Amazon and get a nice
| severance" instead of "try to work through the PIP and still
| get fired and only get a third of the severance amount", they
| let me stay for a week to finish up a customer project. I
| worked in Professional Services.
|
| I told them that I really wanted to finish the work for a
| customer (large state organization) because I liked the
| customer. They let me stay for a week.
|
| Of course that was bullshit, I took the time to have back
| channel communications with the customer to see if they would
| hire me as an independent consultant after I left and to
| start interviewing.
|
| I'm sure they would have. But I gor a full time offer less
| than two weeks later.
| neilv wrote:
| Sorry about getting Amazoned. They don't have a reputation
| as a place inspiring loyalty. But, at least in non-Amazon
| contexts, I absolutely know people who would say they
| wanted to finish up some work, and they'd mean exactly
| that.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Nah it was fine. I had a job offer two weeks after I left
| doing the same thing.
|
| I knew after the first year that I didn't plan on stay at
| Amazon for more than four years and I planned
| accordingly.
|
| I was nine months and two vesting periods short. But the
| severance more than made up for one.
|
| The longer version of the story.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38474212
| javcasas wrote:
| I got fired from the office on a Friday evening when more than
| half the company already logged off.
|
| What is the wonderful closure you get?
|
| Anyway, welcome to the corporate world. It pretends to be
| personal, but it's business.
| jedberg wrote:
| I'm sorry you had a bad experience, but most people get laid
| off Friday morning (it's the most common time).
|
| > Anyway, welcome to the corporate world.
|
| I've been in the corporate world for 27 years, and been
| through many layoffs (usually as a survivor, sometimes as a
| victim). The ones during WFH have all been worse.
| saagarjha wrote:
| After going through my first layoff (not affected personally, I
| just saw people who were), I just started posting my personal
| contact information preemptively. I've seen others start to do
| the same. It's kind of depressing but I think it really helps
| to be able to reach out after the termination is done.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| We tried at first, but we were so overwhelmed by the rate of
| deaths from the earliest moments of the pandemic that the org
| couldn't keep reporting them. It was a demoralizing effort for
| HR to try to put something, even a few words together for
| everyone, and it's left a lasting pallor where vibrant personal
| touches once were. People continue to vanish, and there's still
| no notice that, or how, they've moved on.
|
| Our General Counsel and I met for the last time during the
| early months of the pandemic. Like most people during the
| shutdown, he hadn't seen anyone outside his immediate family or
| had a chance to tell a good story in a few months, which would
| have eventually killed him, anyway, and I got an earful as he
| unloaded all the work he was wrapping up. After, as lawyers
| excel at, he wrote a great letter to our CIO about it that led
| to probably my favorite exchange between us.
|
| Six months later, someone called me to say they were headed to
| Legal because someone had died, and I was struck by an
| immediate sense of dread. I searched our website for any word,
| then our directory, and then for local obits and found nothing.
| Even the grapevine was silent, so I called his admin who pretty
| casually told me our GC had died six weeks prior.
|
| Almost a year to the day later, the mechanisms caught up, and
| the org put out a "Remembering $generalCounselor". By then,
| we'd missed his funeral, his family had relocated, and many
| felt awkward trying to send condolences so late. Watching
| other's surprise, shame, and sadness wasn't reassuring, even if
| it told me I wasn't the only one.
|
| We're not small, but we're personal, and each death has left a
| little void that we collectively haven't acknowledged or
| addressed. We still don't have a way to handle the losses and
| haven't talked about it. Having old saved contacts pop up after
| their extensions are reassigned is inevitably like a call from
| the grave. I try to keep in touch to keep track, but little by
| little, the connections are fading, and the memory and history
| of us with them.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| > rate of deaths from the earliest moments of the pandemic
| that the org couldn't keep reporting them
|
| Truly sorry for your collective loss, but where/what industry
| did you work in where this was a significant number?
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Healthcare would be one place where a very large number of
| workers died.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| Public sector in one of the earliest hotbeds, with a large
| vulnerable population across several demographics.
|
| Think, a city, and it swept through us like it did the
| hospitals and nursing homes.
| wil421 wrote:
| Office layoffs are weird too. A friend worked for Oculus. One
| day they went to lunch and the manager muttered something
| quietly about the whole team being laid off then ran off. A
| team of like 10-15 people had to stand outside and wait for
| security to bring out their stuff. Sounds pretty awkward.
|
| Another large company I worked for sent out random meeting with
| the CIO, if you got the meeting you were laid off. At least the
| CIO did it himself.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Was it ever really real anyway if you're just little faces or
| icons on a video call while you worked together.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| 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.
| burnerburnson wrote:
| I don't understand the secrecy about firing somehow. If I were
| an employer, I'd want my remaining employees to know that what
| the fired person did was unacceptable.
| bombcar wrote:
| Companies very rarely do not want to open themselves to
| liability so they usually go for the blandest possible
| description, even laying off and paying unemployment for
| someone who should be fired for cause.
| orangevelcro wrote:
| 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.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| 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.
| Angostura wrote:
| At least it's made LinkedIn useful for something
| tonnydourado wrote:
| > you saw them walking out the door with a box of their stuff
|
| That's cool, I've never seen anyone that worked in a 90's movie
| before!
|
| Seriously, though, is that a thing? Was it ever?
| drchickensalad wrote:
| ...yes? That's why it's in movies
| Aeolun wrote:
| I mean, I have a bunch of personal stuff in the office. On my
| last day in the office I'll bring it all home because I need
| it until that time.
|
| I can imagine myself bringing it all in a handy box if I were
| suddenly fired (which is impossible in my country of
| residence, but it's about the idea)
| htrp wrote:
| linkedin ?
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| On the first project where I was team lead one of my team
| members was laid off and nobody told me. I worked with her on
| Thursday, took a PTO on Friday, and on Monday around noon
| noticed she hadn't been in at all. I asked the guy who sat in
| the space next to her, and he told me she had been laid off on
| Friday. I had no idea there had been any layoffs as there
| wasn't an email sent out like in earlier rounds. Turned out she
| was the only person laid off. Really weird way of handling
| things.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| There's also Blind, but only if you're on it before the layoff:
| you need access to your company email account to create an
| account.
| smugglerFlynn wrote:
| There are no more people in that process, just "resources" that
| you "let go". Welcome to 2024.
| simonw wrote:
| 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."
| Symbiote wrote:
| 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.
| brailsafe wrote:
| If I read it correctly, they just dumped and diffed their
| uid, not all of that information.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| In central Europe, we have the complete company organigram in
| namely, so it can't be that bad.
| athoscouto wrote:
| Are you referring to GDPR? Does it apply to employees too, or
| only customers?
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| 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.
| walthamstow wrote:
| 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?
| thfuran wrote:
| They can't be harmed by mishandling of PII.
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| Recital 27 of the GDPR states:
|
| >This Regulation does not apply to the personal data of
| deceased persons. Member States may provide for rules
| regarding the processing of personal data of deceased
| persons.
|
| It's not part of the _operative_ text of the regulation,
| but it provides for a clarification on what a "natural
| person" is, and the principal prohibition in the
| regulation is the processing of data about an identified
| or identifiable natural person.
|
| I would also assume, but I'm not 100% sure, that there's
| some case law from the CJEU around whether or not the
| definition of "natural person" includes dead people,
| which is why it's not in the main body of the text.
| tirpen wrote:
| 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.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Depending on the business, employee data can be more of a
| concern than customers.
|
| A business probably handles sensitive private data on
| employees (e.g. medical conditions, family records).
| Employees know this, and could report an ex-employer out of
| spite, especially if they're aware of poor data security.
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| This is _definitely_ processing personal data.
|
| What Rachel is describing is absolutely illegal under the
| GDPR.
| htrp wrote:
| uids are definitely not pii
| jijijijij wrote:
| > Incidentally, if someone gets mad about you running this sort
| of thing, you probably don't want to work there anyway.
|
| If you do want to work there, though, maybe check the legal
| situation first...
|
| I am almost certain, this counts as unauthorized processing of
| personal information. Just because you have access doesn't mean
| it's fair game to do whatever you like with it. Especially
| archiving, keeping a history or linking (external) data is not
| the intended use for such an interface. If you take the
| information home with you, e.g. on your work laptop, that may
| be a whole nother can of worms. May even count as business
| secrets you're exfiltrating.
|
| At least in Europe, abusing such an interface likely would be
| illegal, certainly if you keep a copy/diff. Your employer may
| _have_ to act against you, or become liable. Or they may use
| this misconduct later to conveniently terminate your contract
| (lol, especially, if you use your insights as leverage).
|
| I presume the larger the network, the more likely this will get
| you in trouble. Conversely, collecting the data has little use
| otherwise.
|
| How about you organize with your colleagues to voluntarily
| share employment information to gain collective leverage?
| notyourwork wrote:
| A diff of the directory is abuse? That seems overly
| aggressive and I don't see what that prevents.
| jijijijij wrote:
| Are you trying to be pedantic? A diff by itself does not
| necessarily contain any information at all. However, it
| should be fairly obvious a complete diff in relation to a
| reference contains all the information of a prior state. So
| it's functionally similar to a copy.
|
| [LIVE_N]->[DIFF_N]->[DIFF_N-1]->...->[DIFF_1]=[LIVE_1]
|
| You know, that's kinda how Git works.
| maximinus_thrax wrote:
| > A diff of the directory is abuse?
|
| Yes, if it contains employment information. A bunch of
| diffs can cross the threshold into event sourcing and if
| you have enough of them you might end up with a copy of the
| directory.
| malfist wrote:
| Amazon fired a guy that shared an LDAP query to find folks
| affected by a round of layoffs....after the layoff happened. So
| it's not like he was leaking information.
| refulgentis wrote:
| I don't love it at all.
|
| It's over-the-top posturing for posturing's sake.
|
| A way to confirm this is to look for HN comments who posture
| the same. After the Overton window widening, they forget to
| hold back, and will openly say what we know: it's an abuse of
| the system that turns an outmoded address book into a gossip
| rag, to the surprise of the actual people involved.
|
| Citations:
|
| "First I just cared about which accounts got deactivated. Then
| I started tracking title changes, last name changes (people
| getting married), department sizes, company head count over
| time etc."
|
| "LDAP's full of secrets. 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."
|
| "Lots of weird things depend on the LDAP tree being broadly
| accessible. It's just that it leaks more information than most
| people think."
|
| "Monitor when and what HR is doing. Detect when users are
| logging in and out of LDAP."
| simonw wrote:
| 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 run "git log" to view it.
|
| I run this kind of thing on scheduled GitHub Actions all the
| time, see https://simonwillison.net/2020/Oct/9/git-scraping/
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's clever, thank you! I will definitely use this.
| MarkSweep wrote:
| Maybe add a '| sort' in there for determinism. But yeah, git is
| an underrated database for this type of small scale data.
| svat wrote:
| I do something similar but instead of `|| exit 0` I use
| `--allow-empty` on the `git commit`. I don't mind the empty
| commits this creates, as they let me know that there was a
| successful automated run that happened to be empty, rather than
| having failed to run for whatever reason.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| Thanks for this, much more "intent revealing" than my (up to
| today) standard practice of `... || true` to keep my `set -e`
| from killing my script for this "error-but-not-really"
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| 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; Any transaction can
| be expressed as a git commit, and I can run both at once for
| both the durability and the reasonable indexing; The sqlite
| database can be re-created and reindexed whenever, and it also
| sorta works for backups...
|
| Definitely just spinning my wheels, though. We'll see where
| databases take us next.
| rofrol wrote:
| Maybe this https://github.com/dolthub/dolt
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| Dolt is really close and yet just doesn't feel right; I
| don't want to "commit" between transactions, I want every
| transaction to be a commit.
| timsehn wrote:
| You can do this with a setting:
|
| https://docs.dolthub.com/sql-reference/version-
| control/dolt-...
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| That's awesome. I will have to try that out.
| ElectricalUnion wrote:
| Would fossil fit this bill?
|
| Somewhat git-compatible, based on sqlite3.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| Specifically the fossil repo is a sqlite database.
|
| I have a cron script stashing whatever is currently in an
| obsidian vault into a fossil repo. There's a fossil
| addremove command that makes that very easy. Thus
| distributed backups of said vault.
| Zambyte wrote:
| What does "somewhat git-compatible" mean? Can it sometimes
| use existing git repos, or is the mental model close enough
| to pick up without learning much?
| ElectricalUnion wrote:
| > is the mental model close enough to pick up without
| learning much?
|
| I would say git core concepts are pretty similar to
| fossil concepts, but actual plumbing implementation
| details are pretty distinct.
|
| The major difference that I remember from a day-to-day
| "git porcelain" perspective is that rebases and other
| types of history rewriting are very discouraged.
|
| For a Rosetta stone of somewhat comparable commands:
| https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/gitusers.md
|
| > Can it sometimes use existing git repos
|
| You can, but it's kinda a lot of really slow busywork.
| And you lose some of the not-file-dvcs features of
| Fossil, but it is possible.
|
| This page explains how: https://www.fossil-
| scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/mirrortogithub...
| jarofgreen wrote:
| In your git & sqlite setup, I'm not sure which way round you
| are thinking - which is the SSOT (Single Source Of Truth) and
| which is the handy cache.
|
| I've been working on a tool that treats the git repo as the
| SSOT then lets you dump out all kinds of formats for data
| work including a sqlite DB. I haven't had as much time as I
| would like on it but it's at
| https://pypi.org/project/DataTig/
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| > oft-changing-but-rarely-majorly data
|
| I think you're referring to SCDs, and there are plenty of
| well-defined ways to track these within relational databases:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slowly_changing_dimension
|
| Why git?
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| 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/
| itronitron wrote:
| 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.
| loneranger_11x wrote:
| "Treasure such places. They don't tend to last."
|
| True true true. Especially if people are building quirky cool
| stuff in smaller orgs, its simultaneously a great place to work
| and has a higher extinction probability.
| mmsc wrote:
| I made a tool to track ldap like that [0]. LDAP is a treasure
| chest of info and great for stalking. for some reason i find it
| fascinating to see people leaving, and if possible, see how long
| they worked there for. seeing friends get fired via LDAP before
| they even knew about it was certainly interesting, too.
|
| I noted in the readme.. Know what's going on in
| your LDAP directory on-demand with Slack webhook integration.
| See new hires, leavers, and promotions as they appear in LDAP.
| Monitor when and what HR is doing. Detect unauthorized
| changes in LDAP. Monitor for accidentally leaked data.
| Detect when users are logging in and out of LDAP.
|
| There's also LDAPmonitor[1] which is designed for Microsoft and
| Active Directory which does effectively the same thing.
|
| [0]https://github.com/MegaManSec/LDAP-Monitoring-Watchdog
|
| [1]https://github.com/p0dalirius/LDAPmonitor
| randycupertino wrote:
| I once worked at a large bureaucratic org that tried to keep it
| secret when people left (if quit or were fired) because they
| thought departures were bad for morale. So it was just a big
| secret. Are they here any more, are they on PTO, are they out
| sick, who knows! Can't talk about it. It caused way more gossip
| and bad morale than it would have just to be straightforward
| letting us know that so and so was gone.
| mkl95 wrote:
| 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.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Hmm, how is this related to the article exactly? Bigger tell...
| of what?
| 72f988bf wrote:
| 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.
| 3abiton wrote:
| Learned a new term today, promition velocity.
| saagarjha wrote:
| There is no need to show levels if the company has solved
| equity already, right?
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| 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).
| grinich wrote:
| The answer to this is SCIM, which allows an app to sync the
| user state with the identity/directory system.
|
| IT admins call this "User Lifecycle Management" and it's
| typically a required feature for enterprise-scale customers.
|
| (I work at WorkOS and we help developers with this:
| https://workos.com/directory-sync)
| fbdab103 wrote:
| 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.
| n_plus_1_acc wrote:
| Not with BYOD
| fbdab103 wrote:
| I refuse to BYOD, so I am not familiar with the nuances,
| but wouldn't the corporate controlling entity
| wipe/reset/deauthenticate the corporate partition of the
| device?
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| Not worth 3rd party vendors with basic SSO. They have no idea
| when the user leaves the company because there's nothing
| updating the vendor's sessions.
| mfkp wrote:
| Ha, I did this about 10-15 years ago at a prior company. The
| turnover was so high (especially in the sales staff) that there
| would be at least a handful of people mysteriously disappearing
| each week.
|
| I automated a small newsletter called "The Weekly Diff" for a few
| close trusted coworkers and sent it out each Friday with a list
| of who's new and who was missing from the company directory. And
| I kept a scraped database including phone numbers in case anyone
| wanted to reach out to anyone after they'd been removed.
|
| Sometimes you make the best out of a failing company culture.
| Kept a lot of friends that way just by reaching out with some
| words of support :)
| lulznews wrote:
| Hacking is fun but how is this useful?
| brailsafe wrote:
| A modicum of increased transparency/visibility.
| ElectricalUnion wrote:
| Being able to bind and query useful/interesting information on
| LDAP is always useful.
| Unfrozen0688 wrote:
| Not a WFH thing. This is a USA thing!!
|
| Edit: OP said "Layoffs in the WFH era are weird" Yes they are,
| but people here don't suddenly go offline quite as weird is what
| I was trying to get at.
|
| Here in Sweden if you are FTE there is usually a 1-3 month layoff
| period (upppsagningstid) where you work and get paid still. At
| the end of the period you leave.
|
| People usually email the team and even the entire company with
| "hey im leaving here is my info"
|
| Now people CAN get fired day of, but that has to be VERY
| grounded.
|
| Again, Not a WFH thing. This is a USA thing!! I notice this time
| and time again where people complain about IT or WFH, but it's
| just that you're in the USA, land of the exploited.
| lmz wrote:
| 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?
| Unfrozen0688 wrote:
| I am unsure actually as I am not an employer. I am sure it is
| possible but probably for sensitive jobs like military or
| something.
|
| Some links if you want to google translate
| https://www.unionen.se/rad-och-stod/uppsagningstider-om-
| din-...
|
| There is "duty of loyalty" where you can get sued for leaks
| etc https://www.unionen.se/rad-och-stod/om-lojalitetsplikt-
| och-l...
| emj wrote:
| Of course we fire people in Sweden pay them and revoke
| their access, this is very uncommon I have only seen it
| once myself. Would like to note that, simply speaking, the
| rules change the more responsibility you have.
| 4hg4ufxhy wrote:
| Yes, at least in Finland the penalty for not adhering to the
| notice periods is full pay during that time. But I never
| heard of it happening.
| permalac wrote:
| I work with identities. I've worked in Spain, France and uk.
|
| 99% of lay off are agreed and there is no need for account
| termination, my current company let's you have your account
| open 30 days after your last day, so you can move data out to
| your next company.
| worthless-trash wrote:
| Sorry, move data out ?
|
| Can you expand on exactly what this means, as I imagine
| most companies would not want their data moved out to
| another company.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Presumably things like "your credentials to the account
| that we deposit RSUs into" or "your picture of the beer
| they served in the cafeteria one time that you liked".
| notpushkin wrote:
| Pictures of beer aren't usually moved into your next
| employment place though, as GP implies, but rather to
| your own devices.
| MadsRC wrote:
| 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.
| bsimpson wrote:
| I believe this is called "garden leave" in the Commonwealth
| countries.
| Maxion wrote:
| Gardening leave is usually a term for a paid non-compete.
| I.e. you're not allowed to work in the same industry for
| 6 months, and you're paid salary for those months.
| com wrote:
| "Gardening leave" is the polite fiction - much to do in
| your personal garden, so you are being given exceptional
| paid time off to deal with it.
|
| I have genuinely spent a lot of time once sorting out the
| vegetable beds during a period of gardening leave. It was
| VERY therapeutic!
| tomwojcik wrote:
| Yes, it's normal in IT in Europe to fire someone, revoke
| their access and still pay them for 1-3 months. On the other
| hand many IT professionals work b2b so some of the normal
| employment policies do not apply. On b2b contract the other
| side usually is obliged to pay for 1 month.
| eru wrote:
| When I quit my work at Goldman Sachs (a very American company),
| they made me work the whole three months of my notice period.
|
| (Just as one example. The American economy is a big and diverse
| place. Though in the interest of full disclosure, I was working
| for Goldman in Singapore, but they were just following global
| corporate policy; and our labour laws in Singapore defer more
| to contracts than the US one. Eg no WARN act here.)
| cornel_io wrote:
| When Europeans quit their jobs, they're often required to stay
| on for 1-3 months, as well, and many if not most employers
| actually hold employees to that when they get new jobs. In the
| US you can leave same day, and it's considered rude but meh; 2
| weeks is almost always fine unless you're super senior.
|
| We also make 2-3x what you do for exactly the same work,
| sometimes up to 5-10x in tech.
|
| There are tradeoffs, but in my experience European workers are
| more likely to wish that they could come to the US to work than
| vice versa. When contracting in Europe I've had clauses written
| into my contracts on multiple occasions that forbid me from
| disclosing my rate even to the people managing my work, because
| I was making more in one month than they (as senior project
| leads) did in a year...
| Symbiote wrote:
| The employee in Europe usually has a shorter notice period
| (if they wish to leave) than the employer.
|
| Americans make more in highly skilled jobs, and less in low
| or unskilled jobs.
|
| Beyond that I can't generalise, Europe is 44 countries. The
| Americans I meet were obviously keen to move here.
| globalise83 wrote:
| Yes, but in cases where a disgruntled employee can do real
| damage, companies can and do simply ask employees to go on
| gardening leave with immediate effect, while paying them the
| rest of their notice period.
| Maxion wrote:
| Not really in the nordics (europe?)
| pnw wrote:
| Sweden doesn't need employees to do damage, they outsourced
| that to eastern Europe.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/01/sweden-
| sc...
| ponector wrote:
| On the other hand, when we talk about low it salaries it is
| never a USA thing, but an Europe thing.
| karolist wrote:
| Not Switzerland, still Europe, still can't fire on the spot
| during layoffs like in the US. I know it's an exception
| though.
| romanovcode wrote:
| > Here in Sweden if you are FTE there is usually a 1-3 month
| layoff period (upppsagningstid) where you work and get paid
| still. At the end of the period you leave.
|
| This is only part of the story. They can just pay you the 1-3
| months and mark your firing as "effective immediately".
| Absolutely legal in Sweden, EU and US, and indeed even better
| for the person fired - 3 months of pay for no work.
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| > Here in Sweden if you are FTE there is usually a 1-3 month
| layoff period (upppsagningstid) where you work and get paid
| still. At the end of the period you leave.
|
| That might be very local. There is a long layoff period in
| Austria too but I don't think any company will let you back
| into the office. You just get paid without access at home.
| rconti wrote:
| This is not a particularly helpful comment. I work at a
| California-based company, though we have employees all over the
| world. In our layoffs, typically employees stick around for
| weeks, months, even 6 months sometimes.
|
| How are we supposed to know? Sometimes people put cryptic slack
| status icons or messages. Sometimes they slack the team or
| close contacts or something. But in a company with thousands of
| people, unless an employee sends a email to the entire company,
| how are you supposed to know? The layoffs happened months ago,
| why would it occur to me that the person I am working with
| _today_ will be gone tomorrow, unless they start every
| conversation with "hey, so I got laid off..."
|
| Nobody really wants to relive that trauma over and over again.
| It's frankly MORE confusing the longer coworkers stick around
| after the 'event'.
| dang wrote:
| (We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39311754)
| doix wrote:
| It's amazing how many people came to the same idea independently.
| At my old gig I created "the sackinator" (getting sacked =
| getting fired). It was a cronjob that dumped the entire AD
| directory nightly and then a script to diff the output of any two
| days.
|
| Since the data was dumped, you could always go back and do more
| analysis. First I just cared about which accounts got
| deactivated. Then I started tracking title changes, last name
| changes (people getting married), department sizes, company head
| count over time etc.
|
| > 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.
|
| Couldn't agree more.
| eddiezane wrote:
| Back when I was at DigitalOcean they were laying off/firing
| people from the company but not announcing any departures. You'd
| just go to message someone and their Slack account was
| deactivated. This was over the course of several weeks. I built a
| Slack bot to post when accounts got deactivated and learned of
| some new departures well before those impacted actually did.
|
| https://github.com/eddiezane/no-ghosties
| popcalc wrote:
| It seems DO uses the same methodology for their customer
| support.
| biosboiii wrote:
| Did this for a supermarket delivery company, they had an API that
| exposed their exact stock level for products, scraped the data
| every 30ish seconds, diffed and repeated :D There were some
| interesting orders for sure (cigarettes + soap + 1 beer)
| evmar wrote:
| I made epitaphs! AMA
| kajecounterhack wrote:
| Thanks for making epitaphs <3
| JoachimSchipper wrote:
| Why did you make epithaps? Any interesting organizational or
| technical challenges you encountered on the way?
| evmar wrote:
| Initially it was a combination of just for the fun of it
| (it's a small script, as OP described). Secondarily there was
| the feeling of "everyone is going to go work at [major
| competitor]" and I was curious whether I could collect the
| data to show it. (I never ended up looking into this, but
| maybe HR did.)
|
| As a dumb script it was not designed to be especially
| flexible. One thing I remember needing to fix was that by its
| nature it was archiving old data and preserving it, which
| meant that it was accidentally deadnaming trans people. My
| recollection is this was a small code fix, but an interesting
| lesson in social consequences of oblivious software.
| bsimpson wrote:
| I don't know what to ask you in a public forum, but it's nice
| to see your name pop up!
| umbauk wrote:
| Is it still going?
|
| Were you ever made change it by HR?
|
| I left 5 years ago. Loved that thing!
| saagarjha wrote:
| It was there when I left several months ago, so I assume so.
| Or maybe I shouldn't, they started shuttering a lot of these
| kinds of things after layoffs.
| larsrc wrote:
| It's still there, just used it to see if I had guessed
| right on Rachel's workings (I hadn't). Thanks for making a
| very useful tool!
| saagarjha wrote:
| Just in case you meant otherwise Epitaphs is not my tool,
| but I agree it is very useful :)
| evmar wrote:
| It was still going at the time I left (~2y). Most of the work
| of keeping it alive had been done by others for the last
| decade, so I hope someone else is still carrying the torch.
|
| We had the occasional HR interaction but to my recollection
| never anything nasty.
| boulos wrote:
| I'm still (poorly) maintaining it!
| znpy wrote:
| In what company, if I may ask?
| vicek22 wrote:
| It seems like Google from all the people who responded in
| this thread :)
| laurentlb wrote:
| The blog post mentions "Someone else who knew you had to add
| it", but this is not exact (or no longer exact). An employee
| can send an email to a special address with the content, and it
| will show up when they leave the company.
|
| That's what I did. That said, I can't double-check to see if it
| worked. :)
|
| Thanks for the tool, Evan!
| evmar wrote:
| You are both right. Originally you could not email, and like
| the OP I kind of liked the ceremony of entrusting someone
| with a message to send from beyond the grave. But someone
| contributed the code to make the email work, likely after the
| OP's time.
| kajecounterhack wrote:
| Laurent FYI it didn't work (FYI we interacted over the cider
| font size thing). I couldn't find you anywhere even though I
| know your ldap.
| brunooliv wrote:
| I find this super weird and almost borderline invasion of
| privacy? I mean, a job is your professional life and you're there
| to work, not go directly make friends or stalk people... I mean
| sure I've made a few people whom I'd call friends in previous
| jobs and current one too and I'd like to believe that we'd have
| enough confidence in the friendship to tell each other about
| quitting. But seeing that potential info about anyone feels very
| weird...
| heads wrote:
| 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 chart. Who is in what team, where are they, are
| they working today, is it time to celebrate their anniversary,
| etc. It also follows what I coin the "ZFS litmus test" for good
| CLI tools by providing -pH for parseable, headerless output.
|
| Treasure such places indeed.
| elromulous wrote:
| Where is this? Sounds like a great place!
| heads wrote:
| Speechmatics.com in London and Cambridge, UK. We build audio
| and language models that perform the most accurate speech
| recognition available.
|
| https://www.speechmatics.com/company/careers/roles
| sevagh wrote:
| Your site looks great. Clean description of the draw of
| your product!
| shermantanktop wrote:
| I've done this multiple times, and have two instances running
| right now which have been active for years. One is simple and
| watches a smaller org:
|
| ldapsearch ... > new; diff old new > updates; mail ... < updates
|
| (On phone, pseudo code, definitely wrong)
|
| The other is perhaps more interesting. I built a tool for a tool
| for a population of specialists in a large company. The tool
| requires ldap data synced in, and I capture the diffs. That
| sampling approach provides surprising insights into what's
| active/hot/declining, even when the total size of the company
| would making tracking every employee change quite difficult.
| rpigab wrote:
| This is a very fun thing to do, unfortunately where I work
| (France), the HR team send out weekly/monthly emails with somes
| HR updates, and at the end the list of everyone who is hired
| (this includes conctractors), and everyone who leaves (resigned
| or fired), so it would not add any information to run LDAP
| searches and dumps/diffs.
|
| It's always kinda stressful to open this email and find out if
| one colleague you liked has decided to leave, but most times,
| this colleague informed you before the email arrives.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| > uid (unix account name)
|
| Is this a joke or for real?
| enasterosophes wrote:
| Why wouldn't it be for real?
|
| Given the context of the post, the uid info is likely populated
| from a central source. I log into one box anywhere in their
| infrastructure and see who has what uids, it is evidence about
| who is permitted to that part of the infrastructure at that
| time.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| Sorry, for some reason, I thought the author meant UID stands
| for "unix account name".
|
| It's totally my fault for misunderstanding.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Rachel doesn't joke much in her posts.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| Most likely real. In LDAP, the "uid" attribute is commonly used
| to store the Unix account name. The numeric Unix uid/gid are
| stored in the "uidNumber"/"gidNumber" attributes.
| Havoc wrote:
| Don't think my employer would take too kindly to attempts to
| download bulk employee lists
| Banditoz wrote:
| 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?
| Havoc wrote:
| 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
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| In Germany it's also a very good idea to monitor the
| "Handelsregister" (register of all companies) and see who
| currently is really the CEO, who can sign things etc. This shows
| early ripples in the force (e.g. founders on their way out,
| willfully or forced).
| Foobar8568 wrote:
| With Excel and Power Query, you have your own analysis
| tool...There is a direct connector to dump the full LDAP.
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| I wrote a script that is looking at the git log of a git
| repository, it tries to sum up how many commits per author/number
| of lines changed etc, when the author was active. This also gives
| some indication on the 'turnover rate' or whatever. (I know lines
| changed and number of commits is a very bad indication, but it is
| some indication)
|
| https://github.com/MoserMichael/gittools/blob/main/git-whois...
| ben_w wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Advice I wish I'd been given before graduating, second only to
| "get everything in writing".
| unobatbayar wrote:
| Do you guys feel sad when your colleague leaves the company?
| romanovcode wrote:
| I feel sad if this means I have more work and responsibilities
| for same amount of pay. Otherwise - no.
| suddenclarity wrote:
| 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.
| mlrtime wrote:
| Depends, but not really.
|
| It's like saying sorry for someone getting divorced.... in all
| likely hood you should be happy for them and congratulating
| them on ending a toxic relationship.
| codeulike wrote:
| Note that in Europe or UK downloading bulk employee lists would
| likely mean you are now handling 'personal data' and so various
| GDPR rules kick in
| hardware2win wrote:
| Irc, cron, ldap, spying on other employees stuff
|
| Yea, admins.
| fredley wrote:
| I'm a WFH worker. My company is fully remote. They are really
| great at managing departures and make sure everyone's aware and
| has a chance to say goodbye.
|
| However I can't shake this feeling that the mindset that got us
| from treating servers like pets to treating them like cattle is
| creeping into workforce planning, and the WFH movement is making
| it that much easier.
|
| Why plan capacity when you can scale resources up and down on-
| demand on a whim? With the emotional and morale implications of
| letting people go hugely reduced it becomes easier to think like
| that.
| wwilim wrote:
| Unix hacker approach to corporate drama, I like it.
| cyclops1982 wrote:
| For those wondering, by default, any user with an AAD account can
| query /all/ users via the MS graph API.
|
| The trick showed in the article can easily be done on AAD as
| well.
| gpvos wrote:
| 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.
| glimshe wrote:
| It isn't the usual way for an employee to depart a company. It
| is common in layoff situations, though.
|
| Note: don't ever depart with public criticism, you have little
| to gain and potentially a lot to lose with the burned bridges.
| dudul wrote:
| 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.
| gpvos wrote:
| A week or so seems fine to me. Gives you a chance to wrap
| things up and transfer stuff.
| dudul wrote:
| Or roam the hallway, do nothing but bitch and all.
|
| If I'm terminated I'm not gonna care about wrapping things
| up, I'm out of there.
| dghughes wrote:
| Adam Savage's recent video said large companies don't like to lay
| off big blocks of employees so they just do it in small batches
| over the year. They fire the last person who made any mistake.
|
| https://youtu.be/CzjftlUQs4g?t=403
| brlewis wrote:
| That doesn't fit my experience. Google's stock price increased
| after a large block of layoffs. And they were making every
| effort to put as many as possible in a single block. For
| example, my department was "impacted by the layoffs" but given
| 9 months to keep working and possibly transfer out. If they
| didn't want to announce a large number at once they easily
| could have waited.
| lapcat wrote:
| Fun fact: back when I was a contractor for Apple many years ago
| (while Steve Jobs was CEO), I learned through their directory
| service that Steve Wozniack was still an employee and reported to
| then-CFO Peter Oppenheimer.
| xmodem wrote:
| 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.
| ezekiel68 wrote:
| The last two sentences of the article were worth the whole read.
| pharmakom wrote:
| I once discovered that a very large org had AD configured in such
| a way that you could see "last seen at" timestamp for everyone
| profile in the company.
|
| It would have been trivial to track everyone's hours using this,
| which would likely have been unpopular.
| jjkaczor wrote:
| Hahahahaha... So, I um have a very similar script that I manage
| for 'KTMJ' - it's not to find deactivated users, but to
| synchronize certain ldap attributes to another system. This
| organization is large enough (300k+ users) that typically,
| between the time that the script queries ldap, prepares the
| synchronization file, then actually performs the synchronization
| import which validates if each user still exists, there are
| already several hundred accounts that have been deactivated
| during that window and reported in an 'error' log file. (The
| actual synchronization and 'error' log file are outside of my
| direct control)
|
| Why did I laugh maniacally?
|
| Due to 'budget constraints' my contract is being terminated (they
| have just been through several rounds of layoffs, I was expecting
| this), my account will be one of the ones deactivated on the next
| monthly cycle - prior to that, I will have to handover the
| processing and expected 'deactivated' users 'error' logging
| behaviour to my replacements...
| tonnydourado wrote:
| I'm not sure I get this.
|
| If it's in my team/department, I'll know about it one way or
| another. If not ... Why would I care? People come and go, and if
| we're friends outside of work, we'll have other channels.
|
| Besides that, most companies I worked at don't even maintain the
| LDAP/whatever properly. I've seen contacts from people that
| left/were fired stay around for years.
| OJFord wrote:
| On an individual level: maybe you don't work closely but know
| the name, might be interested to know ahead of suddenly
| realising you haven't seen/heard from them for weeks/months; or
| maybe you used to but they moved to a different group, you're
| not in touch but vaguely interested if they've left.
|
| On a more macro level: you might be interested in an apparent
| layoff/significant restructuring.
|
| Someone used to (/maybe does) run this as an email service
| ('orgdiff') at Arm. I wouldn't have gone out of my way to do it
| myself, but it was something to skim with a Monday morning
| coffee.
| baud147258 wrote:
| > If not ... Why would I care?
|
| What if they're someone you're working with on and off. Or if
| you're waiting on some tasks from them?
| irrational wrote:
| My company has 80,000+ employees. I have a feeling I'd be
| inundated with the churn.
| khalilravanna wrote:
| There was an automated tool like this someone built at Twitter.
| At first it was cool just to see who the most tenured people
| were. Then the layoffs happened and it became essential due to
| the absolute 0 communication happening thanks to the Cool New
| Management. I remember we used the count of people in one of the
| default Slack channels to keep track of how many people got the
| axe. Woof.
| omgbear wrote:
| A former company I was at was really weirdly tight-lipped about
| people leaving.
|
| I'm sure totally unrelatedly, we got dinged a bunch on our SOC2
| reports improper "off-boarding" and not removing access from
| terminated folks since no one knew to remove them.
|
| Once we added quarterly SOC2 controls to make sure only employees
| had accounts it was always a shock to see who had to be removed.
|
| I know the intent was to improve morale, but it had the opposite
| effect.
| azemetre wrote:
| That definitely sounds bad. I wonder what sort of justification
| they had to not tell people who left?
|
| Not having closure is one of the most common grievances people
| have about relationships, friends, lovers, siblings, or
| colleagues that disappear.
|
| It seems purposely malicious.
| omgbear wrote:
| Agreed the lack of closure was frustrating.
|
| Stemming the tide maybe? Don't want people to leave when they
| see a respected or well tenured person leave / get laid off?
|
| All happened after an acquisition, so I'm not sure if this
| was business as usual for the other company or in response to
| increased attrition.
|
| We ended up with an alumni slack like others here have
| mentioned.
| starkparker wrote:
| I've had companies use privacy concerns as an excuse, which was
| hilarious. They couldn't tell us who left because they wanted
| to respect the laid-off people's privacy so the entire company
| spent the day compiling a list of all the deactivated Slack
| accounts. Great job!
| GIVEDADDYABYTE wrote:
| I tried to make one of these systems at my first job, but my
| manager expressly forbade me after hearing about it.
|
| Later that company would go on to lay off 15% of software
| engineers in a day. The support team created tickets in the
| public issue tracker to decommission employee accounts, so a lot
| of people found out that way before anyone reached out for a
| meeting.
| marviel wrote:
| > 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.
|
| too true
| Lance_ET_Compte wrote:
| I did this before. I ran a cron job once a day that counted the
| number of active entries in a particular file. It was neat to see
| the number bump up after an acquisition or drop after a layoff.
| It was neat to see the overall growth of the company I worked
| for.
|
| I eventually decided that someone _might_ decide that, although
| freely available, in aggregate, this material could be
| _sensitive_. I stopped doing it. I deleted years of interesting
| data...
| drtz wrote:
| I've been using POSIX systems regularly for 25 years. Why have I
| never seen the comm command used before?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > Incidentally, if someone gets mad about you running this sort
| of thing, you probably don't want to work there anyway.
|
| Well that depends I guess. A lot of companies/orgs have privacy
| policies that prohibit accessing services out of "curiosity."
| I.e. if you're working at a university it's OK to access student
| information if you're doing it for a specific work-authorized
| purpose but you can't go casually looking at people's information
| just to satisfy some personal interest.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| I built this by accident once!
|
| We had this internal web application. It had its own separate
| username/password table. I was asked to make it so you could
| login with your regular password instead.
|
| It wasn't hard to solve the password part. I could make the web
| app consult the main system to verify your password at login.
| But... I couldn't eliminate the web app's user table entirely. It
| was too fundamental.
|
| So I built a thing that ran periodically, got a list of users
| from both places, diffed the lists, and then did the required
| create/update/delete operations on the web app's user table. Thus
| the web app's user table mirrored the main login system.
|
| I rolled this thing out and babysat it, keeping an eye on its log
| file. Naturally my code logged operations done on the user table.
| And I was like, "Hey, this is telling me who is joining and
| leaving the company!"
|
| It even gave me a little additional info. The web app had certain
| roles and permissions, and these needed to correspond to
| organizational structure, which I got from the main login system.
| So if a user's web app roles changed, it was a clue they may have
| switched teams or got promoted.
|
| I felt like I needed to be a bit careful with this info. Not that
| I wasn't allowed to have it, but I don't think IT expected anyone
| to have a tool that would make it that easy to notice changes as
| they happen. Potentially, I could have known someone was fired
| before their manager told them or something like that.
|
| TLDR: Tried to streamline operations, accidentally developed a
| signals intelligence capability.
| sciencesama wrote:
| Is there a script to check the users from the windows graph !!??
| tandle wrote:
| Speaking from the other side (the side that does the
| termination), as long as your IT team is actually good a simple
| ldap diff isn't going to be enough.
|
| Why? Because a good termination process is sensitive to there
| needing to be a communication about a termination that can happen
| well after the actual process of eliminating their access and
| telling them it's their last day.
|
| So a better termination process is something like:
|
| 1. Employee goes to a physical space (preferred) where they don't
| have their work equipment or talk to their manager and/or HR
| using something that isn't work controlled (phone call, etc.).
|
| 2. A manual or scripted process executes that forces sign outs of
| all work things (computer, slack, google, whatever). Credentials
| get reset and not disabled. Perhaps someone can try to look for
| password reset metadata or other things that might indicate a
| departure, but it's a lot harder than looking for disabled uids.
|
| 3. After the person leaves or has finished their conversation
| remotely, the team that works with this person gets a broader
| communication from someone to tell them about the departure. If
| the company is small enough, maybe there's a broader
| communication to more people.
|
| 4. The rest of the termination process gets fired off that does
| disable accounts, etc.
|
| Why don't all IT departments do this? Well for a lot of reasons:
|
| 1. They don't care, don't have incentives, or haven't been told
| by HR, etc. to care about handling the termination process in a
| more sensitive way.
|
| 2. For any sufficiently complex company, the number of edges
| cases of systems where you can't force a logout or handle a
| password reset increase over time. It takes a lot of testing to
| make sure a process works because vendors have bugs all the time
| or unintended behavior.
|
| 3. The risk of poorly communicated terminations increase as the
| number of people that either perform or can troubleshoot the
| automated process to terminate increase. As others commented, you
| don't want some ticketing system that is readable by a wide
| amount of people to see termination requests, so now how do you
| communicate a termination without too many people knowing about
| it?
|
| Strangely enough, I think trying to achieve the most sensitive
| but automated process is good because it forces the company to
| communicate and acknowledge a departure before the full
| termination process fires off, but maybe I'm in the minority.
| kylestlb wrote:
| doesn't every HRIS have this? workday, et al... all have some
| sort of "Leave Reason" field which can be reported on &
| aggregated
| 0x500x79 wrote:
| I worked at a company that had an internal website that showed
| all people, departments, teams, and had a filter you could use
| for new employees or employees that left. It was sort of a double
| edged sword: you had enough information to start asking questions
| about what it meant if a team member or coworker was on the list.
| What was more interesting is that it almost became ritual for
| some people to logon first thing in the morning and check the
| list, every morning.
| joshstrange wrote:
| At my last company they had no system for letting us know if
| someone had been let go. At one point they laid off the VP of
| sales and it came up almost by accident in an all-company meeting
| (not a massive company, <100 but >50) and people were surprised
| he had been let go.
|
| I was young, with nothing to lose (or rather just no self-
| preservation), and so I spoke up that the policy of saying
| nothing was silly and potentially very dangerous. If that VP, who
| I saw around regularly, had emailed me for a list of our clients
| I would have sent it to him, if he had been waiting at a door
| telling me he had forgot his keycard I would have let him in,
| etc. You could argue "You should have always asked up the chain
| before doing that or refused to let him in on your keycard", but
| then I'd just shake my head at you. When a VP tells you to do
| something it's not a great career move to throw up roadblocks,
| even if it's company policy, in my experience.
|
| Going forward the company agreed to send out bland, generic "X is
| no longer with the company" for "legal" reasons (as in they
| couldn't say "was fired", "left of their own accord", etc). Which
| was better for sure. I never thought to scrape our company
| directory, that's a clever way to do that for sure.
| nickm12 wrote:
| This is funny... I thought I was the only one who did this. I
| work in an org of over 1000 people and have found doing a
| programmatic dump of the org chart gives me insights I would
| never get from reading our status update. Often it is the only
| way I learn about colleagues who have left (and returned!)
| because not everyone sends goodbye messages or even has the
| opportunity to.
| tonymet wrote:
| Just be aware that your company will be logging this behavior and
| it will seem suspicious. They can make a good case for
| termination with this evidence.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| I postulate that if your company uses LDAP, and you are here on
| HN, you're going to be laid off within the next 12 months. The
| existence of LDAP at a company implies that the company is likely
| highly um "mature" and isn't amenable to the kinds of hackers who
| have actual interest in the programming field.
| chrsw wrote:
| The power of turning information into data that can be processed
| by relatively simple Unix commands and pipelines is still mind
| blowing to me.
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