[Dayshine]

The American way of firing people with no notice and cutting off their logins instantly is so strange.

Is saving a tiny bit of money that much more important than a smooth handover? Or are employees just not willing to work their notice periods?

It sounds like in this case it's actively going to hurt the business.

[rqtwteye]

There is also paranoia. A lot of people believe that a laid off employee will immediately go against the company and do some kind of sabotage or leak secrets.

[Ekaros]

Does that mean they think they would themselves do that? And on other hand do they not trust their own systems to protect from these actions? Or being legally capable of suing employees?

[RHSeeger]

Remember that you're balancing the odds of it happening against the possible harm it can cause. If it's super unlikely to happen but the effects can be catastrophic, then it may be worth the cost to prevent it from happening.

[rqtwteye]

This seems to be the same paranoia as the fear that some stranger will snatch a child as soon as parents don’t watch it for second. It may have happened but real risks are probably somewhere else.

[Dalewyn]

It's not exactly paranoia given there have been many examples of the fear becoming true.

[mcherm]

Sometimes it is purely paranoia.

I have worked at a company that had the policy that any time an employee gave notice that they were leaving, the employee immediately had their access credentials revoked and was walked out of the building by security. The justification for this policy was that the employee might decide to sabotage systems if they were leaving.

While I think it is unnecessary in nearly all cases, I can at least understand the reasoning for a policy of immediately cutting access and walking an employee out after that employee has been informed that they are being fired or laid off. But there is NO sense in having the policy for employees who are choosing to leave. The policy of walking employees out immediately was well known. If such an employee HAD wanted to sabotage systems or plant a back-door, they would have done so after deciding to leave but before informing their managers. The policy served no rational purpose.

[lesuorac]

I mean employees also leak/sabotage stuff while they're employed perhaps you should have a better system where 1 "rogue" employee can't trash it.

Imagine being a Google cloud customer and hearing that they need to give employees no notice of a firing in order to protect your data. Like that implies employees have unrestricted access!

[erik_seaberg]

How would a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_duties system work where no one guy has sudo? Approve commands to run by digitally signing them? Missile silo keys?

[lesuorac]

Well, first take a step back and ask yourself what process do you have that prevents an employed rogue employee from doing something malicious? And then ask the obvious followup, what powers does a soon to be fired employee gain that lets them bypass those processes?

If the answer to both of them is nothing then you've got a problem.

---

Well, first your question has a frame-challenge problem. Most SWEs are like a factory creating tools that an end user can then use/consume. You don't want to be in a situation where if there's a power outage in the factory then all of your smart lights stop working. The amount of people that would need sudo to customer-related machines is extremely low and so trivially they wouldn't need to be fired with no notice.

Sticking with the frame-challenge problem. There are many non-sudo activities that an employee can do. Literally their sudo access could be revoked no-notice and then they're given time to do knowledge transfers / pass off their on-call rotations / etc. For most of these layoffs the individuals are still employees for the next 60 days (WARN Act has a 60d notice period, this is why all the severances are worded so weirdly in that the employees get 60d of pay and then a lump sum of X. The lump sum is severance, the 60d is salary by-law -- they can't be fired yet).

The `sudo` command itself posses a problem for separation of duties but an invocation of it could be blocked without a review from multiple other people (perhaps that list is filtered by not-to-be-fired employees). It could also be that the command is set by one person (i.e. copy data) and the parameters are set by another person (i.e. machine1, machine2) and this can be done ahead of time (i.e. a template workflow).

[rom-antics]

In this case it was one of the founders of the company. If you can't trust the founders, who can you trust?

[drewcoo]

Sometimes bad things happen to people when they travel outside.

So my not wanting to leave my home is not exactly agoraphobia.

[willcipriano]

Has it not happened in Europe for some reason?

[chillfox]

People in Europe usually don’t have their healthcare and safety net tied to their work.

[thedougd]

Usually if it’s a layoff (without cause) and the employee does not have special powers (officer of company) a long notice is given to support a transition. A compensation package which requires signing a contract is the incentive for the employee to cooperate.

[dimgl]

This seems incorrect. I was recently laid off and there was 0 notice.

[thedougd]

I’m sorry. Times may be changing.

[gregors]

In this particular case it looks like he was the co-founder of a business acquired by another company. Usually co-founders hang out for a time, but also usually not forever. How would you feel if you bought a house and the previous owners kept showing up to see the new decor? It's generally a short-lived relationship.

It's a bummer but a labor of love that's acquired by someone else....is no longer your baby. If it's not generating revenue by the new company they're going to kill it. Heck, even if it is generating revenue they still might mess it up. That's really the sad part of acquisitions. Hopefully he took away some cash at some point.

[Gigachad]

This happens outside of America. I believe it’s to avoid the risk of the employee maliciously causing damage after being given the news.

[ceejayoz]

Yes, but in the US, pay usually stops immediately when the login stops working. In much of the developed world there's a guaranteed notice period and severance, and often limitations on what situations you can fire for.

[bluGill]

Laid off in the US generally implies there is some severance pay. We do not get any details, but I would assume he gets some severance pay that he isn't talking about (he probably cannot, and it is possible given the details that he doesn't even know yet)

There is fired for cause cases where the login stops working at the same time as your pay stop, but for cause means you screwed up, and your pay probably should have stopped several months ago but it took time to investigate to ensure you really were that bad.

Granted small companies will often say "sorry we are out of money, don't come back Monday".

[nemo44x]

Generally pay is tremendously higher in the USA. Tech companies, although not compelled to, grant severances if you aren’t “fired for cause”. Also in most other places you have to give like a 3 month notice if you want to quit.

It’s frustrating hiring Europeans for this reason but at least they are significantly cheaper to pay than in the USA.

[dosethree]

Companies just want a clean break. In cases where they really need you to do a hand off, you will get a transition period. I've had that happen to me, and it's a weird feeling. I don't think its great for productivity or morale, and is more common when you are shutting an entire division down.