The color the director turned when he found out!! Oh man.
Haven’t laughed this hard in a long time.
Sounds like he's getting paid to work on the same thing by a slightly different stakeholder.
I'd happily pay $$$$$$ to hire someone with commit access to Cloudflare, AWS or Google's codebase who could fix the goddamn bugs, let alone add new features.
This honestly sounds like the sort of thing I'd sit down with the employee, their new employer, and various "Compliance Team" members, and firm up a bit.
Sounds good for everyone.
We get our bugs fixed, $vendor gets to say "Well we have this thing that was developed in-house for BoshNet, that might solve your problem too, it's going to cost you <some comical amount>", and everyone's happy.
Who even owns the code the person is working on? Who is responsible when it goes wrong?
They even send the “you’re being fired” email to their personal email they have on file. Didn’t even schedule a meeting.
I went through a similar thing at Amazon. Locked out of my laptop at 3 a.m. and emailed I was laid off. The key thing though is that my official end date was 90 days in the future. Legally, the 3 a.m. lock out was actually just a warning of impending layoffs. I got paid to “work from home” for 3 months after I returned my badge and laptop.
My understanding is that Europe may have longer wait periods, but most tech companies still essentially do the same thing there. Amazon’s laid off Berlin employees still get locked out at 3am and told to do nothing for months while legal does whatever it needs to do to get rid of them.
But you can be placed in a room/office with no windows (not the OS), a computer without internet access and nothing to do. How long can you go on like that?
The law, sadly, can't forbid asshole employers.
Was a battle of wills and eventually after 5 weeks of coming into a random branch office and sitting in an empty room, we came in one Friday to be told that the manager in charge of the building closure had been removed from the project and they would be paying full redundancy pay and we didn’t have to come back in but they’d pay for the next 3 months as well.
Fun as a 21 year old.
yeah, shit like what we're reading here is precisely why y'all need unions.
Until someone starts providing examples of software companies where the employees are unioned and clear $400k+ annum, the bar is still “no unions”.
I'm not sure there's any good way to lay off large amounts of staff (besides not getting yourself into the situation in the first place where you have to)
Someone on HN once wrote that after the dot.com bust, Yahoo! HR had 1-1 meetings with every single employee that was part of the mass layoffs back then, and they did this for hundreds of workers. Boy what I wouldn't give to go back to such state of affairs, even though I wasn't yet part of the workforce back then.
An older family friend of mine who started working in tech around 2003-2005, told me "back in my day, to get a job, you'd just send your CV to HR@corpo.com, and in 2-3 days you'd get a call asking you when you're free to come over for an interview". Now today you're lucky you get an automated reply back from 50 CVs sent, just for the opportunity to do an impersonal take home assessment as part of the seven stage interview process. It's like screaming into the void of AI bots and automated CV screening systems, while you spin the barrel of the revolver to play the next round of Russian roulette.
And the crazy part is, that when people talk about "the good old days", we're talking about events from recent history, just 10-25 years ago, that a lot of current workers experienced in their lifetime, not stuff from when boomers were kids.
The massive sudden shift in the commoditization of human workers and turning them into faceless labor resources that can be inhumanely disposed of with a keystroke, is real and noticeable to everyone, that I'm envious for you guys who are set to retire soon out of this shitshow.
What comes after this? Have we reached rock bottom, or will it get even worse?
IDK, I'm not from the US/Bay-Area, nor does my country have any big-tech/FANG jobs to distort the market for what constitutes a "high wage" in tech, it's all the same.
>in the back-half of COVID.
Sure, but Covid was only a short blip, a temporary exception, not a baseline norm for wage/job growth, like the years prior which was a longer period of getting a job was easy, like 2012-2020.
For me where I live now, the career depression I saw came in 2023 already when jobs become less abundant and harder to get, and it only got worse later when mass layoff started. So we're already 3 years in the decline, longer than the Covid boom lasted and things aren't going better yet.
I entered the workforce in around 2012-2014 and it was significantly easier to get a callback from sending a resume than it is now where it's mostly automated rejections. When I say "easy" I also mean you didn't need 7 stages of interviews to get a job back then, you'd have 2 stages and those were pretty chill and get a call back from every 2-3 resumes sent. Now you need to send dozens. I guess "easy" is relative.
>Also pay was relatively decent but much less than what you saw even 5 years ago.
Inflation also happened in that time.
Says who? What does God have to do with this topic? And why are you censoring the word God?
>but you sold out and took the easy pay check.
I didn't sell anything, nor was the paycheck easy, it was all hard honest work from school to university to put food on the table for my family. Why do I need to justify myself to you?
>Now You’re fucked
I'm doing fine, thanks. Your username is accurate though.
Things can be easy or difficult at different parts of the hiring funnel.
Towards the end of covid, it was easy to convert a resume into interviews, and successful interviews into a job.
But in the 1990s the tech industry hadn't yet invented the five-interview, live-coding, culture-fit, hiring-committee gauntlet. If a hiring manager liked your resume there'd be one interview, and it wouldn't involve any coding.
What I hear about today seems crazy hard.
2021-2022 was pretty good as well.
Nobody ever seems happy about how the announcement part is done though. "Wait for everyone to have 1:1" and the problem is the mass panic that starts to roll through the workday as employees wonder if they are next. "Mass announce and then engage after" makes another group upset they were told by a generic mass email. I've been at places which have gone each way and I'd honestly rather hear from the mass email myself.
There was no leetcode and the resources weren't great. The introduction of leetcode made everything super painful.
> The massive sudden shift in the commoditization of human workers and turning them into faceless labor resources that can be inhumanely disposed of with a keystroke
Look up the treatment of labor during the industrial revolution. Similarly then large competitive advantages in automation lead to concentration of power in the hands of those that (not to spill the beans on where I'm going with this) controlled the machinery and means of production by way of access to capital. Collective bargaining of some form by labor was (and I would maintain, still is) a reasonable response, as is state regulation. Not to literally use the M-word* here but ... these problems aren't new, and solutions have been explored in the past (not that they were or are perfect!). As is typical in tech, we could stand to learn a bit from history when considering paths forward from the present. History may not repeat verbatim but it sure as hell rhymes.
idk, just my two cents as someone in the technical trenches who happened to fall in love with an historian. :)
* Marxist/ism. The communists certainly had/have their problems, as did Marx's analysis itself, but he wasn't wrong about there being some society-scale Problems with unfettered capitalism.
Except not everything was properly documented, and it turned out the employee had given admin rights on some resources to a contractor which proceeded to wreak havoc on their behalf (the 'rm -rf' kind). Eh!
Where people are laid off here (Norway), they're still employed by law for 3 months. Most companies don't force you to work all that time, but it's pretty common to finish up your tasks, do offboarding etc for a few weeks. Never considered it an issue. Maybe it's a high trust society thing?
It's called garden leave, it's popular everywhere, especially if it's a big international company with diverse workforce, sensitive to IP rights, since there's been plenty of cases of people taking company IP on USB drives to the new employer, like that Indian guy who took IP from Valeo to Nvidia and got his home raided by the police because the Valeo guys saw him share it on a Teams call lol. Same for companies in finance or that handle sensitive information. Norwegian trust doesn't fly anymore when it comes to multinational corpos.
Companies run on liability and risk mitigation. If something bad happened once (IP theft or sabotage from someone they let go), then they have to prevent from ever happening again, not keep blindly trusting people while letting it happen.
I haven't worked in Norway for a long time, so haven't kept up to date on the current legal position. The typical argument used to be that if there were concerns over IP theft or sabotage, there were other ways of protecting against that - and indeed, insider risk is something companies need to deal with whether or not someone has been fired.
And what if they don't want to enforce it? Which is what I was talking about.
That guy was a six figure paid SW engineer, who stole IP for the opportunity to jump ship to an even better paid gig at Nvidia, not a minimum wage fast food worker who couldn't take it anymore.
Scammers will always be scammers and will use any excuse and opportunity to get ahead, no matter how much you trust, value and pay them, they'll always want more from you even when you have no more to give. They'll bankrupt you gladly if they can get away with it, out of greed, envy, spite and malice, I saw this when my parents ran a small business.
In globalized multinational companies, you can't defend from this using mutual trust and respect, only by strict IP protection, law enforcement, fines and jail time as a deterrent.
Please don't straw man me. Discuss in good faith, and don't invent things I didn't say. I never said anything remotely close to that being allowed. I said that it could happen even if you don't terminate all their accesses the moment they're let go. And the fact that some people have to worry about it reflects on how the employer behaves or the trust in the society.
I'm not. That's just the only logical takeaway from your comment saying: "I think if you treat your employees with respect, they don't feel the need to this kind of retaliation."
How else would you interpret it, rather than a veiled threat that if employees don't get their way then they'll steal or sabotage you? Please explain in detail. If you feel you're not treated the way you want to, then quit and find another job, don't steal or sabotage your employer.
> I said that it could happen even if you don't terminate all their accesses the moment they're let go.
Yeah, but it's WAAY more likely to happen AFTER you give them notice of termination since breaking relationships be them romantic or employment, can cause people to do illegal things like steal from their employer or murder their spouse in an impulse of revenge, when they hear their relationship is being terminated. All this is documented from decades of police and legal records, and companies know this, so they take preventive measures.
>And the fact that some people have to worry about it reflects on how the employer behaves or the trust in the society.
Companies worry about it because some people are gonna be evil thieves no matter how well they're treated.
If you want to get better treatment then negotiate better, talk to lawyers, organize in unions, vote, go protest, pester your representatives, but don't break the law or steal from your employer in revenge, as that reflects badly on all workers, and the economic, legal and societal costs of a few thieves will be distributed on the honest ones in forms of more workplace surveillance, higher cost of doing business, higher insurance premiums, etc all of which have a negative upstream effect on wages and employment opportunities.
Which is what makes it hard for you to fathom it doesn't have to be that way you experience. When my company laid of half it workforce two years ago, everyone stayed for a few weeks to help in the transition, with the same accesses as before. Because we were treated nice all the years working there, and with respect during the process, it was absolutely no ill feelings or any risks of people doing what you describe.
So again, please read and answer comments in good faith. It's your mind that's not open enough for alternatives here, please bear that in mind - don't use your own closed mindedness to misread my comments.
Edit: your other comments in this thread shows you absolutely loathe your employers. I feel sorry for you having had those experiences, but don't assume they're global.
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa99/full_papers/ringe...
The reason they fired the whole dept. was that they were going to centralize development, as they had 200 other developers. After 5 years, they still hadn't developed a new product. Then they bought a competitor and rebranded it. The old product had to be kept running for years after. I guess they finally switched all their clients, because the web sites now open with <!--eslint-disable @angular-eslint/template/prefer-self-closing-tags-->. Who puts that in their HTML?
> Muneeb had been assembling usernames and passwords—5,400 of them taken from his own company’s network data.