It doesn't have to be hot wallet / cold storage. Source code, business plans, revenue & profit statements, SSH to servers, physical access to datacentre, client contact lists, etc etc... there's a myriad things that are either valuable to the company or can cause harm to the company.

I've been escorted out of the building during a layoff once early in my career. Friendly, smiley, fake. It felt AWFUL. I'm as goody-two-shoes pacifist laid back easy going do-no-harm as it gets... and I definitely had various strong emotions going through my head heart and body at the time. So on both cold & rational, as well as personal & empathetic side, I understand both how the individuals feel as well as why companies need to do it.

My father had to lay off a bunch of people in 2008. I am now a manager. He told me that if I am ever forced to do this to not ever do this crap to my team. Tell them that this is bullshit. Tell them that you are upset. Tell them that you haven't slept. Tell them that the are right to be mad, disappointed, and even to hate you for choosing their head to roll. Anything better than fake smiles and "I'm sure you'll land on your feet."

For me, I think I'd just quit if I was told to lay off people on my team. Maybe that's hard to do in the moment, since I'd also not want to lose my job in a major crisis, but it sounds awful.

I've reached out to some afterwards and offered help (serving as a reference, reviewing resumes, connecting to people, etc.) but in _that_ moment you should say as little as possible give them space to process emotions however they will.

I've had to fire people a few times. It's never fun, it's always been a hard decision that I took for the benefit of my team. It's never "bullshit". If it is bullshit then it would be MY job as manager to fix it and stop it being bullshit.

I've never had a negative reaction to the firing from the team members who remain. If anything, the reaction has always been "why did you wait so long?".

But luckily I've never had to do a team downsizing because of budget cuts. I imagine that would be a more difficult process and managing the emotions involved in that would be difficult. I see entirely why Coinbase chose not to take any of those risks and just cut everyone off first and then answer questions later.

It's hard to know what emotional tenor to put on it. On the one hand, of course you're right that upbeat positive optimistic is fake and maybe feels like it's more for you than them. On the other hand, being like, "this sucks and it's bad for you and I hated doing it" feels like kicking people when they're down, making them feel like it's even worse than it already is.

I have generally give with a pretty emotionless affect, but tried to convey respect for them as a person, even if they didn't work as an employee, but that's hard to convey. It's a generally fraught situation.

It is, but it should not be. In the best world, it's impersonal. Sometimes it's not a good fit, period. The reason it's fraught is at least partly systemic. Having healthcare tied to the employer is particularly wrong. It makes severance (for any reason) akin to having life support turned off.

But also, ours is a culture that discourages employees from participating in the job market while employed - this is deeply hypocritical, especially as most employment is "at will", which means they can dump you whenever you want, and of course the employer is always active in the job market, happy to replace you with someone cheaper/better if they could. If you're already in the market, and have warm leads, this softens the blow considerably. The final thing worth mentioning is that a firing is a severance, and need not reflect poorly on you (except, perhaps, insofar as you didn't adequately anticipate it and quit in advance). On first principles I hate it when those in power tacitly accept the implication that if other, unrelated powerful people have punished you, you're bad. I'm not sure if this is actually believed, or just used as leverage to get a better deal, or both, but either way it's unfair. Hence the importance of privacy in such situations.

Hence, usually going for a somewhat impersonal affect.

In many jurisdictions (not in the US I suppose), before firing someone for poor performance they must be told that their performance is inadequate and be given a chance to improve.

Bottom line, in general being fired is fully on the person being fired so no need to sugar-coat or to feel bad.

Performance Improvement Plans are a thing at larger companies. That said, once someone is on a PIP, the handwriting is almost certainly on the wall.

I've also worked with people who were incredibly oblivious about the quality of their work, however much feedback they received and however much rework others had to put in. I can think of at least one case where this went on far too long and they were incredibly shocked when they were let go.

For legal reasons most employers will only verify dates of employment. 2 months of so of PIP is more than enough to find a new role.

This is another reason to not get too attached to any job. I come to work for money, not to feel apart of something.

You WILL get fired if your in this industry. Hell, I've quit several jobs since the manager sucked.

Demanding salary employees work nights regularly is good way to get em to quit.

Imagine if America had a NHS style system, vs the horrific employer provided system. Then more people would be free to quit bad jobs.

Let's say you have an abusive manager, but your husband has an expensive to treat illness. You just need to suffer since if you leave your husband won't have access to treatment

I think a lot of people here underestimate the difficulty of landing a new job depending on your background, overall skill level, experience, and location.

At best you find a new job, at worse you have time to cut back on your spending

As others have said, in a good company and team, PIP is one amongst many coaching tools, rarely the first one, and can be useful in various situations - somebody not taking a hint or being oblivious, indicator of seriousness, but also to those with potential who need structure and benefit from explicit list. And yes of course, a paper trail and a documented process if things don't work out for various reasons.

My current manager is particularly transparent about this (with other managers, at least). When he puts someone on a PIP, it is a formality. He deliberately chooses a redemption project that is impossible to achieve.

Edit: Jeez, guys, don't downvote -me- ;-). It's not my policy.

Depending on the company, that could easily be appealed/disputed.

Personally, I do sort of understand his view. He does not like to put anyone on a PIP, and by the time he gets there, he has already concluded that the relationship is not saveable. In his mind, everyone involved should know that the PIP is a formality, and ideally they'd use the time to find another job and have a smooth transition. HR probably would not agree to firing someone with a few months of severance.

That doesn't mean the firing shouldn't happen, but it does mean that everyone feels bad.

"ON OUR WAY!"

This is a disgusting scenario. I hope they weren't misusing on-duty police resources for this.

All they wanted to do was go get their personal items and say goodbye to their peers. Some of them were forced to leave phones and purses behind and wait a week for them to be mailed to them.

It's one of those times in life where you see the mask slip off and realize who the people you've been dealing with actually are.

How is that even legal? I wouldn’t leave without my personal belongings or I would file charges for theft with those cops.

One of my former colleagues, who showed up to work early, inadvertently freaked out one of the executives when they saw them in the hall. Naturally they (not the executive) were soon escorted out of the building and told they had been laid off.

I did that in the dotcom bust. As a manager I was highest paid and had least billable hours, so when asked to reduce costs in my team I was the logical choice to go. The company went through a series of layoffs but at least for that cut I managed to leave my team in place for a bit longer. I went travelling for a year, so also benefitted from not having to deal with any more rounds of layoffs.

One thought though, for whatever little it may be worth:

>>For me, I think I'd just quit if I was told to lay off people on my team.

That has been my personal emotional reaction many a time. As I spend more time as a manager though, I try to force myself to look harder and harder at what will this course of action actually accomplish? And the self-righteous emotional me hates that the rational conclusion is: it'll only accomplish negative things, i.e now the team that remains has lost your support. Bluntly, it will not "send a message", it will not "change things", it will not "make them realize what they're doing / what they're losing". Literally the only thing it'll do majority of time is make things even crappier for those who remain :-/.

So I would put it in inverse: the hard thing in the moment is to NOT go with your emotional reaction, and consider truly how can you be of best benefit / support / help to the team. Basically, I would say most of the time one quits for personal reasons (whether positive "I can get more money there" or negative "I hate this place and everybody in it"), not for the benefit of others.

This is OK.

> Tell them that you are upset. Tell them that you haven't slept.

No, no, no. Never talk about your own difficulties when you lay someone off, this is one particular time when it's not about you but 100% about the person that you are laying off.

Respect and support and empathy and sincerity are the key, always. Deflecting blame and ranting are not long term helpful.

If a mid-level manager actually cares, and was any good at their job, the best thing they can do is to keep doing it for that person.

Maybe it is also bad. I don't know. But the fake smile seems much worse.

I was at a startup that had massive layoffs during the pandemic. I was able to protect my team (though I had to rescind a few offers).

The problem was that after the layoffs, while everyone was still grieving, management decided to come down really hard on my team and others. I realized at one point I could either keep my job, or protect my teams sanity for the next few months.

I chose the latter. Upper management didn't like it, but my team got time to heal and after I was let go and my team survived for another two years.

I had never been fired before, but when I was I honestly felt a bit a pride that this "leadership" team felt I wasn't a good match.

I don't know if there's a point to this story other than that, when the shit hits the fan, you can standup for what you believe in and fight to make the tiny bit of this world you have some say in a bit better. I've known plenty of people who just shrug their shoulders in such times and say "what can you do?", but you can do something and in my experience it is worth it to take a stand at these crucial points.

I offered to try and give up some salary to keep one of them because he was on a visa and would have to find a new job within 90 days or something like that. Everything worked out in the end with both engineers that were let go but the "bias for action" by executives and middle management in these kinds of scenarios pisses me off quite a bit since they usually don't ask for any input from the people actually working with the employees that are getting laid off.

For myriad reasons, it's not always practical to discuss potential layoffs. It's certainly not ethical to discuss "who should stay?" with more junior folks on the same team who are themselves staying. It's extraordinarily likely that your managers had much better insight into what the other folks were contributing that you did.

Cutting salaries to maintain team size has been tried time and time again, and every time the same thing happens: everyone takes a pay cut, the highest performers leave for more money, and both velocity and morale tank.

If you really hated doing it, you wouldn't be doing it. Quitting yourself is always an option.

Dunno. I find it pretty bad when managers talk about their difficulties when e.g. firing people. It's about them, not about you. I agree about the part about fake smiles.

Typically layoffs happen for a reason - if its the company failing and trying to survive, it's not a bad idea to jump ship. If its economic (like all of the layoffs right now) - it's a bad idea to jump to a new job if you can avoid it -- you may very well get hired, and laid off as a new hire.

Those you're directly telling this message to don't have that comfort. Now is not the time to talk about how bad you think you have it. You might have a couple sleepless nights, they're going to have sleepless weeks.

Talking about how the layoffs affect you, the still-employed manager, makes any thing else you say sound hollow.

This is the odd one out here. Showing your grief about an undesirable decision is one thing. But implying that you're making significant decisions about your employees' welfare in a deteriorated mental state is wildly unprofessional (even if truthful).

No one seems to care about the huge effects this has on private citizens.

All the concern is with the ephemeral belief these businesses are the future.

Anyone remember Nortel? 80% of last generations Fortune 500 is gone.

The future has no obligation to drag along, and will probably mock how primitive it is, our bleeding.

These guys are traditional confidence men promising prosperity for the ages while routinely pumping and dumping all over the public, that despite what memes media and politics try to peddle, does not owe deference to history and self aggrandizing story.

I'd far rather just come back after hours and remove my things supervised than have somebody else hastily throwing my stuff into a box.

Luckily it's never happened to me, but I've seen it happen a couple times.

I don't need to cry in front of my boss.

We hired a guy that while nice enough was not a good fit; he couldn't do the work. HQ decided that we would terminate him on Friday. I have no idea why, but the on site supervisor had gotten the perception that we had the go ahead to inform this guy he was terminated, and right before he was going to get escorted out he realized this was premature.

We basically had to tell this guy, "You're fired, oh wait you're fired on Friday, carry on until then unless you want to quit before that.." it was a Monday or a Tuesday. We practically begged the company to move it up, our supervisor even asking to give the guy his own leave for the rest of the week to get him out of here. They didn't budge. Because of all the bureaucracy we couldn't revoke his building access or even his computer access; we risked getting in trouble just by disabling all of his administrator related privileges just because we didn't know what he was going to do if left to his own devices.

The guy was a mess, he had left a decent job to have a shorter commute and it blew up in his face horribly. I felt awful because he wasn't a bad guy or lazy or anything.. he just wasn't a good fit and couldn't contribute. I remember talking to him later and him saying how humiliating it was to be sitting there knowing full well he was 'a failure' and just 'waiting to be fired', browsing the internet looking for jobs while at 'work'.. but wasn't willing to quit before hand because he needed as big a pay check as possible to support his family. I don't believe it was just because of this but do I do firmly believe this awful experience may have been a contributing factor to him taking his life later that year.

It was such a garbage company. We had the reverse happen with another employee; local management was planning to let him go on Friday; somebody from payroll sent an email telling him to fill out his time card so they could process his termination.

Cold? Maybe, but frankly to me it's a million times better than my experience with the inverse. I do NOT want people who know they're about to get canned hanging around. In the best case they are miserable and just wanting to leave.

That’s extremly sad to hear. Not saying that the company or anyone owed him anything but we do live in a really mean world. In an alternate universe or maybe eveb a different country nobody would be pushed into taking such decisions as taking their own life.

He had apparently took up delivering pizza instead of IT, it was pretty awkward when he delivered Pizza to one of us. Another one of us felt so bad about how it all went down that he kept in regular contact with him right up to when he passed away.

Another coworker however chose to his interactions with this guy as the basis of a post on /r/talesfromtechsupport to win internet points.

I have chosen to keep my strongest memory of this man based around the one potlock we had while he was with us; he brought in an amazing habanero salsa and was a pleasure to chat with.

I miss some of the people but I don't miss working there.

In my younger days I literally got unemployment 100% of the time I applied. In California unless you get arrested at work, your getting UI.

You can definitely be paid laid off employee for a period of time, while having your access revoked. They're completely orthogonal. Depends on role, company, situation. It's an assessment and tradeoff - is it worth / do I need the next two weeks of work and KT from this person, vs the risk of having access.

The notion of revoking security access to limit risk is definitely not a US thing.

See here: https://www.gov.uk/redundancy-your-rights/consultation

Revoking access and not allowing users to complete their jobs would often be seen as a failure to consult (see, for instance, the recent P&O ferries dismissals where they immediately removed ship access from the crew, replaced them with oversees workers, and then began consultation. This was a failure to consult and was found to be illegal).

People tend not to do rash things anyway during this period, as gross misconduct during that time would mean the employee is instantly fired regardless with zero redundancy pay. Treat people fairly and as adults and they tend to behave fairly and respond as adults. Treat people as untrustworthy and rash, and they tend to respond with the same.

There are some protections, but yes, they are much more limited (in particular, anything that would generally be classified as automatic unfair dismissal is still protected, for instance for whistleblowing, joining a trade union, firing someone for raising a health and safety concern or for going on maternity leave).

You will likely still want to capture and document the genuine reason under either performance, absence or conduct grounds in order to protect against any invalid claim that the dismissal was because of a protected reason if it was brought to tribunal (when in reality it wasn't).

Although it may still be better to go through formal redundancy so you can make the redundancy on the basis of performance rather than just length of service.

You mentioned that "they are entitled to learn why and what has been done to try to keep them", but actually it's much further than that - they are entitled to be part of the conversation and to propose alternatives to the dismissal which the company is legally obligated to consider.

As an example, if the redundancy proposes to make a team redundant and split that teams responsibilities across other teams, the consultation might raise that the team being made redundant could take on additional responsibilities and down-size as an alternative which could result in fewer redundancies. Similarly, employees could suggest an initial round of voluntary redundancies first to reduce the people impact (particularly if there are employees nearing retirement age). The employer is legally obligated to genuinely consider these alternatives, however if the action was taken immediately to disband the team and place employees on gardening leave it is much more difficult for them to argue that the consultation was 'genuine'.

If a genuine consultation is not held, where alternatives are listened to and genuinely considered, this could then be brought to an employment tribunal and could open them to unfair dismissal claims.

Garden leave is not a necessity (particularly if you have structured your company so a single employee cannot go too rogue regardless - if a single bad-apple employee can take down coinbase then they have bigger systemic risks!).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_leave

In France, this is a breach of contract as you are not providing your employees with the means to work, and you can be sued for it if it is not done as a disciplinary measure (which you can also be sued for if not done in good faith)

EDIT: my dudes stop trying to link legifrance articles to me, I have literally been in this situation twice, gone to prud'hommes twice and helped multiple friends with such a situation. I'm starting to know our work code a little bit.

EDIT 2: alright, more context for all the nonbelievers and people who never had to face an actual work code:

In the very best case for the employer (in such a way that doesn't expose them to being sued), firing a single employee takes two weeks.

* Initial notification of the firing, with at least 5 days between this notification and the meeting before firing to explain the reasons

* Meeting before firing, a mandatory 48 hours waiting period before taking any decision.

* Notification has to be mailed in as a recommandé, which can only be sent after those 48 hours, and takes a day or two to arrive.

It gets infinitely more complicated for Coinbase sized companies trying to lay off more than 10 people for economical reasons, the company is obligated to have meetings with the employee representatives, at the very least twice spaced by 15 days. For a company the size of Coinbase, the CSE has 2-4 months to answer and can ask for proof that the company is, indeed in financial troubles, having them open their books. https://entreprendre.service-public.fr/vosdroits/F24648

https://knowledge.leglobal.org/restrictive-covenants-in-fran...

However, any firing must be notified of an entretien préalable de licenciement by letter (can be given directly). This is usually a week after, to grant the employee time to prepare (and to eventually be helped by employee representatives). Then, after this, the employer has to give at least 48 hours before doing anything. This gets even worse in the case of a massive layoff like Coinbase's for economical reasons, the company is obligated to have meetings with the employee representatives, at the very least twice spaced by 15 days. For a company the size of Coinbase, the CSE has 2-4 months to answer and can ask for proof that the company is, indeed in financial troubles, having them open their books. https://entreprendre.service-public.fr/vosdroits/F24648

So, in practice, while quick firings are possible for individual cases, massive layoffs like that do not happen over a single day.

Article L1234-5 [1] of French Labor Code looks like it is possible.

* [1] https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/id/LEGISCTA000006195622...

L1234-5 (which is a very nice number) merely says that you have to pay the employee a compensation if the préavis is not respected, equal to the amount of days the employee would have worked, in addition to everything else (severance package, etc). It gets more complicated in the case of massive layoffs, because the CSE/lawyers get involved, and for a 50+ employee company firing over 10 employees, a plan de sauvegarde de l'emploi is put into place, which lasts multiple months.

On leave, you are trusted as an employee to not do any work. Anything you do will be your own responsibility, or eventually the employer's responsibility to refuse any work you hand over. You are also not covered by the company's insurance on your leave. Your company cutting off access is a clear breach of contract.

This does sound non-sensical to me. If someone is not working, there should not be any entitlement to access.

To give you an example: let’s say a factory is temporarily closed due to lack of supply materials or modernization and workers are put on paid leave. Are those workers allowed to visit their workplace to access their tools? If not, why digital workers should have this privilege when they are on paid leave?

Logic would dictate that providing the exact same pay/benefits as one would get for the work ought to be sufficient. But, <insert joke about logic and French labour laws here>...

Also consider that software developer is an incredibly privileged position and that, while you may not give a shit because you get 100k and can find another job in two weeks, many people have a salary that barely covers their living expenses and take much longer to find a new job. In effect, that would be subsidizing employers through unemployment benefits and therefore, cost society as a whole.

<insert joke about american laws having no foresight or absolutely fuck all experience in fighting for workers>

* as an employee, you sign a contract that exchanges your time for both a salary and a job. Refusing to provide either of those is a breach of contract. It's one thing to say "things are a bit slow right now, so do whatever". It is an entirely other one to not give your employee tools, access to things they'd need to do their job, or even leave them wondering if they even have a job still. Doubly worse if you require them to come to the office to not know what to do. Hence, the common solution to that is to change their job to something that just puts them in the corner on mostly useless tasks. They're technically working, but you can't fire them unless you have a good reason to. It's then hoped that the boredom makes you leave. However, that goes in to point two:

* Putting people in such a position is alienating and potentially damaging mentally. You are seen as the guy who does fuck all by your colleagues, you are not allowed to take another job in the mean time, itb is mentally unfulfilling and morally discouraging. Do so at your own risks, because there have been plenty of instances where the employer has had to pay damages.

Basically, if you want to fire someone, either do it and pay the (quite expensive if the employee has been here for a while) indemnities, or don't. The halfway solution of boring them until they quit is illegal.

It is when somebody is explicitly fired and laid off (as is the case in Coinbase, and all the examples I believe we've been discussing in this thread).

They DO know what their status is, it's not ambiguous. Essentially it is: "Hi; You've been laid off; your services are no longer required; we will continue paying you for the remainder of your contractual notice period / two weeks; you'll get whatever package is due to you; please go home and ensure you take all of your materials with you."

This is completely unrelated to any notion of effectively dis-empowering an active employee or keeping them in the dark.

That sounds awful.

you may however send the employee home with his full salary and no obligation to work. I know, worker protection is a crazy concept.

>> You can definitely be paid laid off employee for a period of time, while having your access revoked.

and replying

> In France, this is a breach of contract

And now you write

> you may however send the employee home with his full salary and no obligation to work

Which was exactly the original claim!

I'm not sure if you misread or misunderstood, but you have been arguing incorrectly in most of your subsequent replies, and the sarcastic jibes at other countries don't help.

France is a more trusting society than the USA, so I won't be surprised if gardening leave is less common, but you can be sure it's sometimes used when employees of investment banks, defence contractors, the government, military etc are made redundant or resign.

Send people home with their severence after the necessary period to inform the employee that they're getting fired, sure. But telling them out of the blue "Fuck off, don't come to work today, your access is revoked" is a breach of contract and is illegal.

So, no, you cannot be a paid laid off employee with no access. You're either employee, paid a salary and with access, or not an employee with your severance package and no access. There is no inbetween, and your lack of reading comprehension doesn't mean i misunderstood.

>>You're either employee, paid a salary and with access, or not an employee with your severance package and no access.

The latter. It's the latter. We've all been discussing the latter (or at least that's my impression, as that's what the original article is about, and certainly what my post was about :).

I'm Canadian, it's our national pastime to diss our neighbours to the South, but the notion that a laid off employee can be a high risk to the company knows no borders. Are we making a claim that those working on Rafale or Gripen get to keep messing with classified files after being fired, because "we don't DO that in Europe"? :)

I have heard of one more person fired that way - it was by American company and pretty much everyone else treated it as great injustice. Team members met with him in nearby pub pretty much right after.

https://edd.ca.gov/en/Jobs_and_Training/Layoff_Services_WARN

If you want to do that you need to prove they have (already) committed a fault of such gravity that allowing them to stay would harm the company irremediably -- it's a high bar to cross.

If I get fired from my company I get like a year's wage to go (and government assistance after that) so I wouldn't be that upset. Hence no need for a disorderly exit.

I think it's more in the US when people are let go with nothing, I think it's pretty obvious that they'd be pissed about it.

My last position was three months.

This is rare but depends on your manager, if they don't want you around. You will still be paid for the remaining of your "employment" but will not be working.

The one I remember most is how our coworkers coffee was still there for like a week. She had made it literally right before getting called in for the layoff!

Apparently main thing is they don’t want them to start a scene, talk shit about things, and cause issues with their computer access

And in most of the Europe and I'd guess also world during probation period (typically in Europe 1-3 months).

But yeah, you can't do that once probation period pass, then it's usually at least 1-3 months PAID resignation period. You can tell people not to come to work and still get salary though, but if they would still wanna come it could get very messy legally.

I had actually only fixed contracts during my EU jobs and either company told me they won't extend the contract or I told them I won't extend it, but they were happy to keep me working until very end.

Only in China during Microsoft layoff I was told I don't need to come to work, while getting compensation, but that was understandable considering me and other Israeli girl were only two people fighting against company trying to cheat us for our legal compensation and it came to me telling them whether they wanna leak certain data and me contact labor bureau about their illegal procedures.

In Austria it's super easy to fire jobs like white collar tech workers and sales people without any reason as the employee protection laws are very weak (you just have to give them their notice period). At every company I've worked here I've seen people get fired after not meeting their performance goals(PIPs), or even having too slow velocity in Jira's charts, or just some manager having an axe to grind.

There's no magic protection aura from the government to save you from getting fired here.

I suspect the fact that some people in this thread read it the way I do, and others (I guess including you?) read 'firing' to include redundancy, is causing a fair amount of confusion / people talking past each other.

(I'm not claiming I'm right and you're wrong, btw, just observing a linguistic disconnect)

Note, whether you get walked out the door right away or later, in these types of job you get a severance package.

In my case where it was two weeks it was work 2 weeks, go home keep getting paid for another 30 days, then start your paid 60 day WARN period, then actually separate and receive severance of ~9 months pay plus heath insurance for 1 year.

Flexible labor laws are also a major reason Americans are paid considerably more than euros.

Helped me a lot a few years back and got me from "you are fired without severance" to "you are paid for six more months, you don't have to come in and here is half a year's pay in severance". Companies want to shock you into submission, hand it to an external party, lean back end enjoy.

I don’t think you can name many things here that the American tech workers have to spend on, that are included in typical European social benefits package. For example, if you were thinking about healthcare, you would be very wrong, as American tech workers spend very small fraction of their pay on healthcare, smaller than a typical European tech worker.

Health care in the US is only expensive if you are poor and unemployed, sad to say.

Are you thinking of anything beyond healthcare? Youre correct that salaries and GDP are difficult to compare, but US disposable income pc is dramatically higher than almost anywhere in Europe, with the couple exceptions being tiny enclaves like Luxembourg or petrostates like Norway. Subtracting healthcare spending doesn't come close to closing the gap btwn the US and eg France.

And this isn't explicable by retirement either, as Actual Individual Consumption is also dramatically higher in the US.

Hell, I'm not even sure your hypothesis makes sense at first glance. If the salary difference was simply a matter of shifting govt spending into the personal ledger, wouldn't pretax incomes be as high in Europe? After all, much of the layoffs we're talking about are high-income enough that the employees would surely be net-payers in any mildly progressive tax system.

I've known quite a few senior developers with a 3 months' notice period baked into their contract.

The fired person is just sent on paid time off.

Canada two weeks: https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/servi...

China, 30 days: https://china.acclime.com/guides/china-labour-law-hiring-fir...

Russia, two weeks: https://uk.practicallaw.thomsonreuters.com/5-503-4083?transi...

(Did you really think ex-communist countries would be good examples?)

If you were leaving for a competitor you were walked out within an hour of submitting your resignation and promised your 2 weeks pay. It was so well known that engineers would schedule vacations starting the day after they planned to resign and say their goodbyes to coworkers before telling their bosses.

I've seen WAY too many cases of employees email forwarding documents to their personal email the moment they are told they're being let go.

Before we started terminating access immediately, I'd estimate that roughly 25% of employees would email themselves at least something.

It's just so incredibly common that I don't understand why any employer doesn't terminate access the instant someone is let go. When people they're in a state of stress just grab whatever they can think of.

What's the general way for an employee to retain access to those?

Trying to forcibly steal those documents/emails is a wonderful way to being charged with a computer crime if it's serious enough. ...but lesser consequences include public lawsuits that impact your career prospects (we did this to one high ranking employee who tried to email herself powerpoint strategy presentations she made and copied to a USB). ...but at the very least, having an attempted theft of documents on record will get any future allegations they might make against the company much easier to throw out.

So not only I hanged around, I also made sure that my replacements had all the information they need and I saw that they can fulfill my duties :)

Granted, it was me who gave in his resignation, but it was nice to see that the trust didn't erode during this leaving process.

While in colleague I interned for a major investment bank. They extended my internship since I was doing a good job and have a few weeks to spare.

However IT did not get the memo and the very next day after my original termination date I came to my desk to find my machine wiped and account deactivated.

Apparently they used to do this at Microsoft. Microsoft stopped doing it though because people would freak out if the network ever went down - employees would think "oh my god, I'm about to get fired".

Edit with example: https://www.arbeidstilsynet.no/en/working-conditions/dismiss...

> An employee may usually remain in the post as long as negotiations or legal proceedings are in progress, provided the courts have not decided otherwise.

> [...]

> The employer may summarily dismiss an employee if he or she is guilty of a gross breach of duty or other serious breach of the contract of employment. The employee has no right to remain in his post while the matter is being considered, unless the court has decided otherwise.

Having said that, in finance (I used to work at a proprietary trading firm in an at-will state), it’s extremely common for firings to be immediate, e.g., arrive at work, boss calls you to office, get fired, badge taken and you’re walked out and your desk belongings are mailed to you later. More often, you’re walked to your desk to pick up your things instead of having them mailed out, but both happen. But even more often, people are “incentivized” through bad reviews and bad bonuses to quit in advance of a firing.

When I quit, they didn’t want me to leave, and I negotiated a couple weeks of notice to hand over my responsibilities and knowledge, and to maintain some relationships.

I had a non-compete in my original contract, so I would have to negotiate with the original firm as to whether they would enforce it. If so, I would receive gardening leave pay in order to delay my employment at a competing firm. That could be for as much as 2 years, and they would pay my base salary at the original firm in order for me to not start at the competition. This gardening leave is totally different than a severance package though.

In Britain it's called gardening leave, and it's common in finance and other jobs with tight security. You are paid, but you stay and home and do some gardening. (Or, more likely, look for a new job.)

I understand it happens, but it seems _way_ too common (reading the comments here) compared to what is actually necessary.

Typically access to sensitive systems is cut, but cutting everything and notifying to personal email seems unusual. Sensitive information should always be segregated and subject to tight controls, which is easy to sever, and then leave regular email and video conferencing in place - ie. the bare minimum necessary to communicate over a work device.

This, very few people should have access to production data. This is a shocking revelation. I’m reevaluating being a customer of theirs.

I was similarly shocked that the only control plane they had to limit access to sensitive information was literally terminating everything. They don't have any kind of access control that would allow them to keep an employee in their system but limit their access. How exactly are they running a "finance company" if they don't have these basic protections.

I could see if they were an early stage startup and just haven't gotten around to it, but they are multiple thousands of employees at this point. In every start up I've worked in, implementing access controls ends up being a priority around 100 employees.

I've never used Coinbase but this revelation makes me not want to ever use them in the future.

It is only fairly recently that locking people out of the office didn't implicitly remove their access to email, memos, letters and so on.

Customers email something like “[email protected]” and that routes to a ticketing system (eg Zendesk), not to people.

And, the vast majority of employees don’t directly interact with customers either.

Well designed controls deliberately keep PII data out of general purpose systems like email, drive sharing, dev ticketing, etc

I agree that the remote move introduces new risks, but those should be minimized by the existing controls in place.

To be fair, getting fired from those companies meant you actually did something wrong. There wasn’t these mass culls that crypto/startup type companies are famous for.

> "Given the number of employees who have access to sensitive customer information"

Surly they should have very very few employs that have access to that type of information?

If you need to completely revoke someone's account overnight to prevent adverse impact, you designed your "access matrix" incorrectly.

This doesn't make any sense to me, and is in fact exactly how it should work.

So you're telling me that every time, say, a CS rep needs to access some sensitive customer information (which is almost every single call), you think they should need to go through some password approval process? Security procedures that are so cumbersome to getting work done get bypassed.

The whole point of SSO systems is that you can immediately revoke access to any and all systems at once by just changing one setting.

But indeed, permanent access to sensitive info without ever needing approval from a second person (beyond being hired and gaining the access) seems like a bad idea.

One kid definitely got fired for querying data on persons they weren't supposed to query for.

With work-from-home, I can imagine there's employees with all sorts of access. And with them being a startup, who knows how much controls they've got in place yet.

Having said that, we're still talking about hundreds of people being laid off, so even with excellent access controls this step might be prudent -- e.g. even customer support staff would have access to some stuff that would be useful for social engineering, at the very least.

It depends on the nature of the information. If we're talking anything that directly affects liquidity, I'd be surprised if that number was large. But if we're talking regulated or contractually protected consumer information (e.g PCI), that number's probably a bit bigger.

That may very well happen, but Coinbase is directly blaming their layoffs on over-hiring for web3 usecases and ideas that they feel are no longer financially viable.

I worked at hotel once where I had keys to everything and I would take them home nightly at the end of my shift. When the hotel changed ownership one of the changes implemented was anyone with hotel keys had to lock them up in one of the front desk safety deposit boxes when their shift ended. At the time I thought this was pointless security theater that wasted 10 minutes of my day. In retrospect, it was probably so we could safely be fired if necessary with our keys still accounted for.

Edit: not sure what's up with the current iteration of the HN crowd, but downvote is not equal to "I disagree".

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/21/jobs/laid-off-and-locked-...

Some companies even do it after an employee submits notice on their end (paying through the end of the term but disabling access earlier than expected, or even immediately), though this is far less common.

We agree on whether it's acceptable, but let's be honest, any roles I've held in the past (and all security jobs around the world, really) exist only because people have a surprising potential to be absolutely crappy.

People just "disappear" overnight. Access cut. You've had nothing on your personal computer anyways (all work & data is on company machines, accessed through Remote Desktop).

My current working model is that there are multiple simultaneous effects, mostly separable but interrelated. In order of decreasing acuteness:

a) asset bubble popping due to imminent rate increases. Crypto the obvious candidate for a correction that IMO was predictable? Future of the industry unpredictable (by me)

b) Tech stock correction and hiring freeze, due to skyrocketing value growth and some overextension during the pandemic. This is a good thing, and a healthy pullback on very recent overestimate of value gains. Fundamentals largely unaffected

c) More secular pullback of tech value into a lower equilibrium. High-growth stocks do well in historically low-rate environment, that we're potentially exiting

d) General recession expected. Marginal tech startups wiped out, bigtech generally still a great place to get paid a ton and buy the market while it's low

I'd love to hear if anyone has anyone else has any disagreements with my working model! I'm far from an expert, but using it for my own decision-making. Eg, I just quit my job, but I was planning to go back to bigtech so I'm not especially worried (plus I have tons of savings and frankly don't care about $ that much). OTOH, I'm not taking much time off, because I expect hiring and possibly salaries to start tightening even in bigtech.

1. Create a budget

Know how much you spend per month, and what are essentials (Rent, Food, Transport etc.) and what can go if you really need to (Netflix, eating out, etc.)

2. Have 3-6 months expenses in an emergency fund

Usually cash or things not likely to tank during a downturn like stock/crypto.

You can find more helpful info here: https://old.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/commontopics

Ok. I am very comfortable entrusting my data to this company.

Then don't fucking give it. Or don't write this sentence.

I hope it's not mainly advertising.

$745m selling & marketing expense over the past year (SG&A was $1.95b overall).

$1.67b expense for R&D.

$733m for other.