[nickjj]

On paper I agree with all of that but in practice folks who are getting laid off already had access to all of those things every day.

Why do you trust them every day but not on the day of being laid off? Unless you're extremely close friends with them at a personal level you don't know what their state of mind is while employed without being laid off. They could do all sorts of destructive things at any point in time (both subtle and obvious).

I guess where I'm going with this one is you're always at risk for short term loss by hiring anyone. If you trust the people you hired then the short term loss outcome won't happen if you fire them. If you don't trust the people you hired then why did you hire them and give them access to do those things? All this does is optimize for bad actors and make the experience horrible for someone being fired who doesn't have intent to take the company down with them, they just want to say goodbye to their co-workers.

Plus, like you said, there could be legal actions taken against them. Who's going to risk getting sued by a corporation in the US by destroying as much as they could before they lose access? This action could potentially ruin the rest of their life from debt.

[apocalyptic0n3]

You don't. But you're also not purposefully doing something that is going induce undue stress and potentially upset or anger the employee. You don't know how anyone is going to react to being told they've been let go. That's not an easy thing to be told and I have seen people get violent afterward.

As an example, about a decade ago, we let go an underperforming employee. His reaction was to walk out of the room before the conversation had finished, take a trash can and dump it onto his desk and computer, then go outside and into his car, pull a gun out of his trunk and start walking around the building rambling like a mad man. We had to go on lockdown and wait for a police response. Prior to that moment, he had never shown a single indication he would react like that and was trustworthy, he just wasn't performing well. If he had been someone with elevated privileges anywhere, he could have instead reacted by going back home or even into his car, accessed systems, and done damage that way.

I get what you're saying, but you're discounting how big a deal it is to lose your job and the things it can do to you mentally. Some people come out the other side of that a completely different person for a while.

[jaywalk]

> Why do you trust them every day but not on the day of being laid off?

Because they had a job to care about before being laid off. It's entirely possible that being laid off triggers them to take malicious actions that they never would have when they were employed.