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.

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.

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.

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.

https://xoogler.co/ has a xoogler slack

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."

"Handbook for the Recently Terminated"

As long as it doesn't read like stereo instructions ....

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”.

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

if Plato's cave were rewritten today, it would probably be from the perspective of the cave

Tempt me with a good time lmao. "Imagine someone spends their entire life in a dark room with only an ebook reader..."

This seems common now, I’m part of two such groups and it’s a nicer experience than trying to keep up via LinkedIn.

Only a recruiter would think keeping up on LinkedIn would be the route to take

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.

> One company I worked for used to have an unofficial “ex-company” slack setup,

More than one for me.

Fortunately in Europe what the said boss did is illegal and this can end with a criminal prosecution.

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...

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.

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.

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.

That seems like it would be a much larger constraint than you're making it out to be.

> 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?

In private DMs?

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.

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.

Call! Yes, most communication can be done with chats in slack or teams, but take the excuse to call and chit chat a bit before getting down to business.

Unless all calls are transcribed and recorded, it’s pretty “watercoolerish”.

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

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.

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.

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

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....

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?

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.

> Europe isn't a single country

Correct, but it does have a single ECHR. Even though some countries still ignore them.

What ECHR principle are you referring to here?

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.

> 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.

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

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

That is valid for Germany.

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.

It's completely legal in the US and often mandated by regulation. In some US industries, even your phone calls are recorded by law.

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.

Request access to former employee’s corporate email and reset the password.

Yep. That’s how it happened for me.

Ouch. My takeaway is that I should probably delete my slack account before leaving the company.

The takeaway is that no message on Slack should be considered private.

Why would anyone consider a company provided messaging service as private? Or even a company provided laptop, cellphone, etc.

People have terrible opsec.

Because private messages carry an expectation of privacy.

They're different parts of speech from the same root word, after all.

There’s no legal obligation of privacy on a work system though. Not in the US at least.

The only expectation of this is in your head. It is a fantasy that doesn't exist.

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".

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)

Deleting company data before leaving probably won't end well.

Slack keeps those messages even if you delete the account when you leave. It's a data retention setting.

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.

And all but extremely early startups or cheapskate companies have the Enterprise version.

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.

I haven't checked in a while, but I think there's also an API for it too.

I think admins don't need to log into an account to see private messages. Was like that at two of my previous jobs.

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.

Wow, that is creepy.

> 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.

The lockout always struck me as dumb and I didn't do it as a manager.

If I trusted them for the 3 years they worked for me, I can trust them for another week or two.

Tie up loose ends, take your time. We're all adults here.

I understand that under the worst circumstances bad things can happen but that's always the case.

I worked at a large web dev company and for years they had this attitude.

Then one designer put in his two weeks and spent the majority of the time downloading all the site files for all of the sites the company had built over the two years he was there. We're talking hundreds of static sites where he took the all the design docs and static HTML/CSS/JS files one would need to recreate them somewhere else.

Instead of 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

> 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.

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.

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.

People asking for company directories amuses me so much, especially when most company email patterns are completely guessable.

it's more the name and the org chart?

maybe the phone number too

> 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.

Designers also need to show portfolios. Hard when your work is all behind some corporate firewall.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

...so now people who want to do that just copy everything before sending the email?

So what stops people making their “backup of files” before hitting send on the email?

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

Top search result is from Gartner: alarm bells ringing. Data loss prevention seems to be enterprise speak for doing as much intrusive monitoring you can do, in as neutral speak as possible.

1984 is so appealing for so many people, it seems like it is just a book about the tendencies that power can take when it is not guided by sane principles. I have always been employed in a high trust capacity since I was a young 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.

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...

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

What is it?

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...

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

I mean, I love working without headphones in a room with 4 people in. I detest it in a room with 100.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> Nobody really wants to sit at a beach sipping drinks the rest of their life, accomplishing nothing.

Speak for yourself.

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

This may be the only time I ever say this, but thank god for LinkedIn. At least you know you can always catch up with someone who has left

Assuming they have LinkedIn and you bothered to connect while they still worked with you. :)

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.

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.

> 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 :)

Like the rule of modern tank battles goes: first one to take the shot wins.

idk I added a lot of people after I quit my last place

First part is a personally solvable, and as for the second part: you can still add them if you know their name.

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...

My family's chat server still shows "Offline" for the account of a deceased relative. Like yeah... they're pretty well offline.

The user was disappeared

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.

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.

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.

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?

>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.

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.

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.

> 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/

That's a very old joke, thought I think I usually heard it as a Yiddish joke.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

IMO their slack avatar/posts go gray within minutes of them being sacked.

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!

> their Slack still worked for the 60 day WARN period

So weird companies can’t just pay that out as severance

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.

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.

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…

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.

There must be a Slack API that could be used for this, and written to git periodically as the other post said.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 (upppsägningstid) 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.

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.

Not really in the nordics (europe?)

Sweden doesn't need employees to do damage, they outsourced that to eastern Europe.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/01/sweden-sc...

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?

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.

I believe this is called "garden leave" in the Commonwealth countries.

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.

“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!

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.

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.

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.

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".

Pictures of beer aren't usually moved into your next employment place though, as GP implies, but rather to your own devices.

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.

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...

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.

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.)

On the other hand, when we talk about low it salaries it is never a USA thing, but an Europe thing.

Not Switzerland, still Europe, still can't fire on the spot during layoffs like in the US. I know it's an exception though.

> Here in Sweden if you are FTE there is usually a 1-3 month layoff period (upppsägningstid) 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.

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...

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.

Yeah, "they don't pay me any money in Sweden, but at least I get to continue doing what I'm doing for 3 more months if I get laid off" is not too enticing, sorry.

Meta comment: why are bunch of people from Europe repeatedly get triggered on US-based site by stories about US business practices that have nothing to do with them?

Small correction. When you’re getting laid off they pay you for whatever termination time is in contract. Usually it’s something pretty long, like 3 months, with some contracts structured in such a way that this period grows with your tenure at the company. My “notice” period grew from 1 month during first half a year to 3 months afterwards.

Once a layoff is declared you get paid for the remainder time plus often a severance package (about 6-12 months of salary in total is customary). You are expected to work these 3 months, though, just like you would work for 3 months (and get paid) if you decide to charge jobs.

In practice it means working with people who will leave a company soon is pretty common, having these people as your bosses, as your subordinates, see them at company social gatherings etc etc is all part of working culture. They aren’t perceived as a threat to business or to company morale. Handover of responsibilities, knowledge transfer, hiring or training a replacement: all these processes tend to spread out gradually over months, and the resulting transition is often pretty painless.

It’s a stark contrast to US business practice and people working across the ocean or relocating from one continent to the other need time to adapt.

Europeans pointing such differences on a website does not necessarily constitute “triggering”. If you knew all of this already, great. But someone reading this thread may learn about it for the first time, and there’s no downsides to sharing the knowledge.

On this very website I see people having heated debates about whether curly braces or indentation are insane or brain damaged, and that's just a "nerd" rant and that's ok.

But suddenly, when the debate is whether it's being so paranoid about disgruntled employees nuking prod or stealing IP during layoffs instead of handling a transition gracefully, that's suddenly enters the domain of nationalism and it's no longer the "right" kind of rant to have?

Yeah sometimes people will use unnecessary direct language, which btw is also a cultural thing (see "Culture Map - Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business" by Erin Meyer), but I don't think you should perceive this as an attack on you personally.

This is not just a US site, and even if it was, it's still useful to learn about how stuff works elsewhere in the world. Curious people want to learn and that's why many come here.

OP is wrong and reads too much reddit - US bad, EU good. It is definitely possible to get fired "effective immediately" in EU/Sweden and 100% legal. I've seen it myself. (The company would just pay the 3 months salary)

Yea, but getting 3 months pay without having to work sounds even better for the employee. Now, there will still be the issue of dropping off Slack and hand off etc.

I do read too much Reddit, but I also live in Sweden lol

Absolutely better, if I get fired I wish I will be fired immediately as well - 3 months of vacation sounds awesome :D

For me, it's the stories of "how IT jobs suck" but it's not that IT jobs suck it is due to where you live.

Also the misunderstandings of how things work here.

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.

Because people like you intentionally misinterpret and misrepresent what actually happens in Europe.

> Here in Sweden if you are FTE there is usually a 1-3 month layoff period (upppsägningstid) 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.

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'.

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39311754)

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

Healthcare would be one place where a very large number of workers died.

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.

Was it ever really real anyway if you're just little faces or icons on a video call while you worked together.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

At least it’s made LinkedIn useful for something

> 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?

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)

...yes? That's why it's in movies

linkedin ?

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.

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.

There are no more people in that process, just “resources” that you “let go”. Welcome to 2024.