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> [Opexus] said that “the individuals responsible for hiring the twins are no longer employed by Opexus.” Getting close to the classic Monty Python line: "Thos

> [Opexus] said that “the individuals responsible for hiring the twins are no longer employed by Opexus.” Getting close to the classic Monty Python line: "Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked, have been sacked." Jokes aside, stuff like this sucks because I suspect many employers will take from it the most extreme, dehumanizing lessons, e.g.: (a) make firings [edit: including lay-offs] as abrupt as possible including terminating all access immediately, (b) never give second chances to anyone with any sort of criminal record (even say decades old marijuana posession or something). I'd prefer a more balanced version: limit unilateral access to sensitive systems in general (not just of recently-fired employees), when someone is fired immediately shut off particularly sensitive credentials if they do exist (but not their general-purpose login/email account), avoid hiring people convicted of wire fraud as sysadmins, hash your @!#$ing passwords, etc.

tempaccount5050 5mo ago
When you are talking about access like they had "make firings as abrupt as possible including terminating all access immediately" not doing this is incompetence. This is absolutely a standard and has to be for these kinds of positions. I've never worked anywhere where it wasn't for the majority of IT staff. You meet with HR, someone clears your desk, and security walks you out.
- scottlamb 5mo ago
  > When you are talking about access like they had "make firings as abrupt as possible including terminating all access immediately" not doing this is incompetence. You're proving my point—employers take the most extreme lesson and it's considered expected practice. They absolutely should have immediately terminated the credentials that granted unilateral access to sensitive databases. (Ideally those would never exist in the first place—there are two-person schemes. A pair of bad actors...well apparently happens according to this article...but is far more unusual.) But employers regularly (but shouldn't) terminate all access including credentials that allow last email to colleagues exchanging personal contact info or something.
  - tempaccount5050 5mo ago
    Yeah I don't see why that's necessary. I'm sure you can always reach out to HR and ask (I have facilitated this in the past, pulling contact lists and phone numbers) but that also gives them ways to exfiltrate data. It's company data. Just think of all the info you have in your inbox. Unless you've managed offboarding for high level IT positions it seems harsh, but the risk is just too high to allow the user to do that stuff themselves.
    - BrandoElFollito 5mo ago
      High level IT positions are not risky. This is the db admin who can do most of the damage.
    - scottlamb 5mo ago
      > Just think of all the info you have in your inbox. Meh? Sure, stuff that would help assemble a credible phishing attack, but not customer SPII or huge amounts of intellectual property or anything. If the assumption is that employees' inboxes are full of dangerous things, I would focus on fixing that.
      - fc417fc802 5mo ago
        No you don't get it, we have to take a harsh approach to firing people because we keep pallets of high explosive in the break room and management doesn't want to change that. /s
  - stronglikedan 5mo ago
    The first option is flipping one switch. The second option is flipping some switches now, and flipping the rest later. Of course the safest (first) option is the correct option from a liability standpoint, which is all a company should operate on since it's first responsibility is to protect the company for those that are still there. There's plenty of ways to communicate with ex-colleagues that don't involve company resources or opening the company up to liability.
- lesuorac 5mo ago
  Yeah but if you defense against somebody erasing a database is "we remove their access when they're fired" then your defense is garbage. Like there's so many other attack vectors besides an upset ex-employee.. Like all those articles about NK employees who presumably are trying very hard not to be fired. Or employees using company provided insecure email software leaving them vulnerable to ransomware et al.
  - tempaccount5050 5mo ago
    I'm talking about off-boarding not general day to day security.
    - scottlamb 5mo ago
      But I'm talking about general day-to-day security as well as off-boarding. What stops a single disgruntled employee from doing this before being fired? And if you have a good story there, why do you need the most extreme approach to "off-boarding"? It makes sense to terminate someone's high-risk credentials immediately when they're fired. But it's extremely worrying if every credential held by every employee is considered high-risk. It suggests a bigger failure. "Unilateral access to a database filled with plain-text passwords" shouldn't ever exist. "Email account filled with dangerous stuff" should at least be unusual.
- beAbU 5mo ago
  Having people with that level of access without some form of two-person-control is already a sign of incompetence.
  - saghm 5mo ago
    Maybe they did, but since they were twins...
    - dylan604 5mo ago
      This takes the whole "you must mean my evil twin" to an actual example. Maybe this is more "you must mean my other evil twin". Part of me really wishes their names were Daryl
  - dullcrisp 5mo ago
    Twins can defeat two-person control (okay I know one of them was locked out).
    - scottlamb 5mo ago
      You always have to be careful about overfitting to a specific scenario like "this but if they had also forgotten to lock out the other evil twin". I'd prefer a system that is robust to a malicious employee (more likely: compromise of an employee's credentials) but has a slight gap in the "evil twins" scenario over one that prevents all post-firing malicious access from twins but doesn't consider at all what happens if a current employee's credentials are compromised.
    - khazhoux 5mo ago
      TFA: Twins Fucking Authenticate!
- stego-tech 5mo ago
  There is a middleground, but it requires conscious effort to prop-up, support, and maintain over the long haul: off-boarding centers. I worked for a Big Tech company that actually did this, and it made the transition a lot easier. You could still access corporate resources necessary for the transition (HR, benefits, internal job postings, training offerings, expense reporting, etc), check-in with colleagues 1:1 (who would be warned this person was no longer part of the org, attachments could be blocked to prevent exfil, etc), and still send/receive email internally (though external was blocked by default and required justification). You can safeguard your corporate infrastructure without actually cutting everything off entirely and sending someone home to stew angrily about it. In fact, there might be (as yet undocumented) advantages to letting folks exist in that transition period on that segmented infrastructure, so as to identify potentially bad actors before they can do harm and see about mending bridges. Of course all of that requires conscious investment in projects with no clear quarterly/yearly KPIs to measure cost or success against, so most employers will never remotely consider it.
  - skinfaxi 5mo ago
    Your last sentence sums it up. I was blown away by the system you described that would allow for such a humane transition through such a difficult time. At least process wise it seems like a good place to work.
    - stego-tech 5mo ago
      It really was. I’d gladly go back, too, but they’re not hiring IT folks with my skills atm.
  - mistrial9 5mo ago
    you left out the people who enjoy the suffering and pain of the person it is being done to, while they supervise (and film it, in some cases)
- repelsteeltje 5mo ago
  I suppose that's a very powerful way of preventing "accidents" on termination. But isn't that just theatre? I mean - as though termination is the one and only case where an employee with the power to destroy the company gets angry and might do something really stupid?!
  - suburban_strike 5mo ago
    It's not theater, it's defense against aggrievement. Termination is a traumatic event that threatens your ability to exist or provide for dependents. People [rightfully] don't handle exile well. Someone with an interest in scuttling your company could just as easily maintain a low profile and do it at any time. Termination forces execution into a more-predictable timeframe. Once notified, the malevolent only have opportunity to exfiltrate or sabotage whatever they can reach in the time it takes to walk them out the door. European laws require us to give people something like two months' notice. Even then we don't trust them; we pay them their salary and tell them to stay home.
    - repelsteeltje 5mo ago
      > European laws require us to give people something like two months' notice. Even then we don't trust them; we pay them their salary and tell them to stay home. Escorting them to the door, and revoking access for the remainder of contract yet paying wages for that period seems very descent. Off course, you don't do that when the termination was triggered by employee's misbehaviour. But, yeah - the point I was trying to make is that there is only so much you can do as an employer to protect the company while there's an infinite number of reasons for anyone to be traumatized or otherwise act erratic. Admins are always entrusted with huge power and while wariness is probably warranted, distrustfulness is IMO counterproductive and often harmful.
    - imtringued 5mo ago
      Ok but with the European laws the incentive to do something at the last minute doesn't really exist. This seems like a self inflicted problem where the solution to the problem also made the problem worse when it happens. If you know that you have X months of pay if you behave, then why misbehave? You'll lose out on money and get a criminal record. Meanwhile if the employer wants you gone it's free money. Everyone is happy. You've been given enough time to find a new job. It's enough time to sit back and relax at work since you're getting paid either way. The primary reason why people want to get revenge is because of how inhumane the entire process is. The mass layoffs are random and impersonal, so you inherently think it is unfair and you will never agree with the reason of the layoff. The immediate access block and security escort is a reaction and extension of the inhuame treatment.
- ponector 5mo ago
  If you don't trust your people so much, why to hire them in a first place? Looking at it from Europe - it is such a weird inhumane practice. Someone decided your position is redundant. Okay, shit happens, economic downturn, etc. Then you have extra 3-6 months of work to pass your knowledge, train replacement and document everything.
  - ddosmax556 5mo ago
    Looking at it from Europe, this definitely also happens. It depends on the situation. I know of ppl who were kept bcs the parting was in good faith (which was less a firing and more an agreement that parting is in everyone's interest), but I also know of ppl who had their access revoked before firing bcs it wasn't. The latter had unilateral system access as well, which added to it. It's not about humane or inhumane, it's about risk. The 3-6 months being nice is also a fairytale that I have only ever heard in a positive light from employees who are not particularly ambitious or awake or in any way satisfied with their jobs or the prospect of a future job. On the other hand from the perspective of employers it's consistently hard to effectively restructure, it's expensice and awkward to have to pretend to want to keep someone around that you or they don't want around. It's just one of these rules that unfortunately in Europe allow people to view life purely as the time between jobs. I'd never tell that to someone's face but it's simply a fact that the world stops of people don't work and no matter what the ideal world looks like in your dreams, working is the only real way forward for anything. It's part of the reason why Europe is falling behind on everything.
    - joe_mamba 5mo ago
      > It's part of the reason why Europe is falling behind on everything. I read a news article that Orange Telecom in France was being sued by a woman they had on payroll for the last 20 years doing nothing, because due to a medical condition she suffered, she became unable to do her job, and since they couldn't fire her due to France unions and labor laws, nor did they have any available job that could fit her current condition, they just kept paying her for 20 years to do nothing at work, and now she's suing them for the depression she got to get paid for no work. It felt like reading a Monty Python skit. But Europe is failing due to a myriad of compounding issues and structural deficits, not just because firing workers can be a Kafkaesque nightmare in some countries. European workers' unions and labor protections were even stronger 20-25 years ago and in 2004 the Euro stock market was worth more than the US stock market, while now it's worth half the US one. But that's whole different discussion where pages have to be written to encompass the whole context and cover all aspects of European economic decline. Boiling it down to crazy labor protections would be reductionist and incorrect.
- hirvi74 5mo ago
  I work in government. If you think that is incompetence, then I have stories that could make your skin crawl.
- tardedmeme 5mo ago
  Last time I was laid off they let me keep my laptop for the rest of the day. I gave it to them immediately to avoid any accusations of sabotage. Eventually I tried to log into one of my old cloud accounts, to find it was only disabled since 9 days after my layoff. Pretty sloppy.
  - halper 5mo ago
    Last time I resigned, I got to keep the laptop and got to promise I had deleted everything work-related.
- rixed 5mo ago
  There is another thread elsewhere on the first page about low-trust USA. Sadly, behaviors and expectations converge toward one another.
paulpauper 5mo ago
Jokes aside, stuff like this sucks because I suspect many employers will take from it the most extreme, dehumanizing lessons, e.g.: (a) make firings [edit: including lay-offs] as abrupt as possible including terminating all access immediately The employee is always the last to know. This is standard fare.
reactordev 5mo ago
They do all of that now though... In the US, they'll terminate your access while you're on the Teams Meeting behind the scenes and if you have any gaps, issues, blips, or smudges in your resume it gets thrown into the recycle bin by some AI agent.
aksss 5mo ago
> a more balanced version: <bunch of weedy ACLs, judgement calls, liability/> Too complicated and subjective, stinks of more risk. Also, I don't think it's dehumanizing it all (having been on the receiving end of it way back when during a layoff, and involved in the process more times than I care to count). It's standard practice for involuntary terms at all companies we work with, whether employee is IT or not. If a company is not doing this already, I'd encourage them to.
- scottlamb 5mo ago
  > Too complicated and subjective, stinks of more risk. I actually think there's less risk, because it's not as narrowly focused on what a just-fired employee can do. That's not the only scenario of concern. > Also, I don't think it's dehumanizing it all (having been on the receiving end of it way back when during a layoff, and involved in the process more times than I care to count). Interesting. Thanks for the perspective. I've been fortunate enough to not be on the receiving end of a lay-off, knock on wood. It's happened to my teammates/reports though. Wasn't my decision. :-(
yaur 5mo ago
Terminating access and rotating passwords (if needed) while the person is in the meeting but has not yet found out they are being let go has been SOP for at least the last 20 years
- lazyasciiart 5mo ago
  Amateurs. My employer does mass layoffs by terminating access to everything except their email account at 3am, and then sending an email to the victim saying “you were let go at 3am”. Managers get to figure out who’s left on their team by pinging everyone when they learn about it at work.
  - brightball 5mo ago
    Oracle?
  - Twirrim 5mo ago
    If you're talking about Oracle, the large round previous to that they did had individual meetings with employee, manager, and HR. With so many layoffs it took a week+ to do, effectively torturing an entire set of employees who had no idea if they'd have a job by the end of the hour, let alone week. 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)
    - joe_mamba 5mo ago
      >I'm not sure there's any good way to lay off large amounts of staff 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?
condiment 5mo ago
In an age of malicious agentic AI, this level of access is negligent. A lack of engineering controls preventing this from happening at all means that a simple phishing or supply chain attack could easily have resulted in the same outcome or worse.
EGreg 5mo ago
Then Opexus fired the one who said it. Leaving no one to say anything anymore on their behalf.
cgio 5mo ago
Privileged access should only be temporary in context of break glass with approval. People can go ballistic with core systems for reasons other than firing.
- PunchyHamster 5mo ago
  nah give the access to LLM, what can go wrong
czhu12 5mo ago
the problem is that its so challenging to figure out what the person actually has access to. Have they ever done a export with sensitive information, that is now sitting on their local machine? Any important clients they still are in contact with over email that they may try to sabotage? Any other creative endeavors you haven't thought through? The most fool proof way is just to nuke the computer in its entirety.
- UltraSane 5mo ago
  I once worked at a company where one Active Directory server was storing all passwords in plain text. Just think of the havoc someone could do with a dump of that.
pjc50 5mo ago
I think mature sysadmins accept there's a certain .. bushido to their security-critical role. It is after all their job to respond to security threats, including by revoking credentials, and to recognize that they might fall on the wrong side of that some day. But things are different both in small companies, and non-US environments where minimum notice periods or redundancy consultations are a thing. You may put people on "gardening leave" where they're still paid but not actually working. Or it may be the case that the sysadmin is the one person who knows and controls a lot of stuff, and the employer has ended up relying on them for a smooth handover. Password and role management for the "root" of things is a real problem.
spwa4 5mo ago
I don't think you understand how this works. The second person was hired because the first one wined at his manager until he was hired. Presumably this was part of a whole chain and that would make me understand why “the individuals responsible for hiring the twins are no longer employed by Opexus.” was a good idea.

tempaccount5050 5mo ago

When you are talking about access like they had "make firings as abrupt as possible including terminating all access immediately" not doing this is incompetence. This is absolutely a standard and has to be for these kinds of positions. I've never worked anywhere where it wasn't for the majority of IT staff. You meet with HR, someone clears your desk, and security walks you out.

scottlamb 5mo ago
> When you are talking about access like they had "make firings as abrupt as possible including terminating all access immediately" not doing this is incompetence. You're proving my point—employers take the most extreme lesson and it's considered expected practice. They absolutely should have immediately terminated the credentials that granted unilateral access to sensitive databases. (Ideally those would never exist in the first place—there are two-person schemes. A pair of bad actors...well apparently happens according to this article...but is far more unusual.) But employers regularly (but shouldn't) terminate all access including credentials that allow last email to colleagues exchanging personal contact info or something.
- tempaccount5050 5mo ago
  Yeah I don't see why that's necessary. I'm sure you can always reach out to HR and ask (I have facilitated this in the past, pulling contact lists and phone numbers) but that also gives them ways to exfiltrate data. It's company data. Just think of all the info you have in your inbox. Unless you've managed offboarding for high level IT positions it seems harsh, but the risk is just too high to allow the user to do that stuff themselves.
  - BrandoElFollito 5mo ago
    High level IT positions are not risky. This is the db admin who can do most of the damage.
  - scottlamb 5mo ago
    > Just think of all the info you have in your inbox. Meh? Sure, stuff that would help assemble a credible phishing attack, but not customer SPII or huge amounts of intellectual property or anything. If the assumption is that employees' inboxes are full of dangerous things, I would focus on fixing that.
    - fc417fc802 5mo ago
      No you don't get it, we have to take a harsh approach to firing people because we keep pallets of high explosive in the break room and management doesn't want to change that. /s
- stronglikedan 5mo ago
  The first option is flipping one switch. The second option is flipping some switches now, and flipping the rest later. Of course the safest (first) option is the correct option from a liability standpoint, which is all a company should operate on since it's first responsibility is to protect the company for those that are still there. There's plenty of ways to communicate with ex-colleagues that don't involve company resources or opening the company up to liability.
lesuorac 5mo ago
Yeah but if you defense against somebody erasing a database is "we remove their access when they're fired" then your defense is garbage. Like there's so many other attack vectors besides an upset ex-employee.. Like all those articles about NK employees who presumably are trying very hard not to be fired. Or employees using company provided insecure email software leaving them vulnerable to ransomware et al.
- tempaccount5050 5mo ago
  I'm talking about off-boarding not general day to day security.
  - scottlamb 5mo ago
    But I'm talking about general day-to-day security as well as off-boarding. What stops a single disgruntled employee from doing this before being fired? And if you have a good story there, why do you need the most extreme approach to "off-boarding"? It makes sense to terminate someone's high-risk credentials immediately when they're fired. But it's extremely worrying if every credential held by every employee is considered high-risk. It suggests a bigger failure. "Unilateral access to a database filled with plain-text passwords" shouldn't ever exist. "Email account filled with dangerous stuff" should at least be unusual.
beAbU 5mo ago
Having people with that level of access without some form of two-person-control is already a sign of incompetence.
- saghm 5mo ago
  Maybe they did, but since they were twins...
  - dylan604 5mo ago
    This takes the whole "you must mean my evil twin" to an actual example. Maybe this is more "you must mean my other evil twin". Part of me really wishes their names were Daryl
- dullcrisp 5mo ago
  Twins can defeat two-person control (okay I know one of them was locked out).
  - scottlamb 5mo ago
    You always have to be careful about overfitting to a specific scenario like "this but if they had also forgotten to lock out the other evil twin". I'd prefer a system that is robust to a malicious employee (more likely: compromise of an employee's credentials) but has a slight gap in the "evil twins" scenario over one that prevents all post-firing malicious access from twins but doesn't consider at all what happens if a current employee's credentials are compromised.
  - khazhoux 5mo ago
    TFA: Twins Fucking Authenticate!
stego-tech 5mo ago
There is a middleground, but it requires conscious effort to prop-up, support, and maintain over the long haul: off-boarding centers. I worked for a Big Tech company that actually did this, and it made the transition a lot easier. You could still access corporate resources necessary for the transition (HR, benefits, internal job postings, training offerings, expense reporting, etc), check-in with colleagues 1:1 (who would be warned this person was no longer part of the org, attachments could be blocked to prevent exfil, etc), and still send/receive email internally (though external was blocked by default and required justification). You can safeguard your corporate infrastructure without actually cutting everything off entirely and sending someone home to stew angrily about it. In fact, there might be (as yet undocumented) advantages to letting folks exist in that transition period on that segmented infrastructure, so as to identify potentially bad actors before they can do harm and see about mending bridges. Of course all of that requires conscious investment in projects with no clear quarterly/yearly KPIs to measure cost or success against, so most employers will never remotely consider it.
- skinfaxi 5mo ago
  Your last sentence sums it up. I was blown away by the system you described that would allow for such a humane transition through such a difficult time. At least process wise it seems like a good place to work.
  - stego-tech 5mo ago
    It really was. I’d gladly go back, too, but they’re not hiring IT folks with my skills atm.
- mistrial9 5mo ago
  you left out the people who enjoy the suffering and pain of the person it is being done to, while they supervise (and film it, in some cases)
repelsteeltje 5mo ago
I suppose that's a very powerful way of preventing "accidents" on termination. But isn't that just theatre? I mean - as though termination is the one and only case where an employee with the power to destroy the company gets angry and might do something really stupid?!
- suburban_strike 5mo ago
  It's not theater, it's defense against aggrievement. Termination is a traumatic event that threatens your ability to exist or provide for dependents. People [rightfully] don't handle exile well. Someone with an interest in scuttling your company could just as easily maintain a low profile and do it at any time. Termination forces execution into a more-predictable timeframe. Once notified, the malevolent only have opportunity to exfiltrate or sabotage whatever they can reach in the time it takes to walk them out the door. European laws require us to give people something like two months' notice. Even then we don't trust them; we pay them their salary and tell them to stay home.
  - repelsteeltje 5mo ago
    > European laws require us to give people something like two months' notice. Even then we don't trust them; we pay them their salary and tell them to stay home. Escorting them to the door, and revoking access for the remainder of contract yet paying wages for that period seems very descent. Off course, you don't do that when the termination was triggered by employee's misbehaviour. But, yeah - the point I was trying to make is that there is only so much you can do as an employer to protect the company while there's an infinite number of reasons for anyone to be traumatized or otherwise act erratic. Admins are always entrusted with huge power and while wariness is probably warranted, distrustfulness is IMO counterproductive and often harmful.
  - imtringued 5mo ago
    Ok but with the European laws the incentive to do something at the last minute doesn't really exist. This seems like a self inflicted problem where the solution to the problem also made the problem worse when it happens. If you know that you have X months of pay if you behave, then why misbehave? You'll lose out on money and get a criminal record. Meanwhile if the employer wants you gone it's free money. Everyone is happy. You've been given enough time to find a new job. It's enough time to sit back and relax at work since you're getting paid either way. The primary reason why people want to get revenge is because of how inhumane the entire process is. The mass layoffs are random and impersonal, so you inherently think it is unfair and you will never agree with the reason of the layoff. The immediate access block and security escort is a reaction and extension of the inhuame treatment.
ponector 5mo ago
If you don't trust your people so much, why to hire them in a first place? Looking at it from Europe - it is such a weird inhumane practice. Someone decided your position is redundant. Okay, shit happens, economic downturn, etc. Then you have extra 3-6 months of work to pass your knowledge, train replacement and document everything.
- ddosmax556 5mo ago
  Looking at it from Europe, this definitely also happens. It depends on the situation. I know of ppl who were kept bcs the parting was in good faith (which was less a firing and more an agreement that parting is in everyone's interest), but I also know of ppl who had their access revoked before firing bcs it wasn't. The latter had unilateral system access as well, which added to it. It's not about humane or inhumane, it's about risk. The 3-6 months being nice is also a fairytale that I have only ever heard in a positive light from employees who are not particularly ambitious or awake or in any way satisfied with their jobs or the prospect of a future job. On the other hand from the perspective of employers it's consistently hard to effectively restructure, it's expensice and awkward to have to pretend to want to keep someone around that you or they don't want around. It's just one of these rules that unfortunately in Europe allow people to view life purely as the time between jobs. I'd never tell that to someone's face but it's simply a fact that the world stops of people don't work and no matter what the ideal world looks like in your dreams, working is the only real way forward for anything. It's part of the reason why Europe is falling behind on everything.
  - joe_mamba 5mo ago
    > It's part of the reason why Europe is falling behind on everything. I read a news article that Orange Telecom in France was being sued by a woman they had on payroll for the last 20 years doing nothing, because due to a medical condition she suffered, she became unable to do her job, and since they couldn't fire her due to France unions and labor laws, nor did they have any available job that could fit her current condition, they just kept paying her for 20 years to do nothing at work, and now she's suing them for the depression she got to get paid for no work. It felt like reading a Monty Python skit. But Europe is failing due to a myriad of compounding issues and structural deficits, not just because firing workers can be a Kafkaesque nightmare in some countries. European workers' unions and labor protections were even stronger 20-25 years ago and in 2004 the Euro stock market was worth more than the US stock market, while now it's worth half the US one. But that's whole different discussion where pages have to be written to encompass the whole context and cover all aspects of European economic decline. Boiling it down to crazy labor protections would be reductionist and incorrect.
hirvi74 5mo ago
I work in government. If you think that is incompetence, then I have stories that could make your skin crawl.
tardedmeme 5mo ago
Last time I was laid off they let me keep my laptop for the rest of the day. I gave it to them immediately to avoid any accusations of sabotage. Eventually I tried to log into one of my old cloud accounts, to find it was only disabled since 9 days after my layoff. Pretty sloppy.
- halper 5mo ago
  Last time I resigned, I got to keep the laptop and got to promise I had deleted everything work-related.
rixed 5mo ago
There is another thread elsewhere on the first page about low-trust USA. Sadly, behaviors and expectations converge toward one another.

paulpauper 5mo ago

Jokes aside, stuff like this sucks because I suspect many employers will take from it the most extreme, dehumanizing lessons, e.g.: (a) make firings [edit: including lay-offs] as abrupt as possible including terminating all access immediately The employee is always the last to know. This is standard fare.

reactordev 5mo ago

They do all of that now though... In the US, they'll terminate your access while you're on the Teams Meeting behind the scenes and if you have any gaps, issues, blips, or smudges in your resume it gets thrown into the recycle bin by some AI agent.

aksss 5mo ago

> a more balanced version: <bunch of weedy ACLs, judgement calls, liability/> Too complicated and subjective, stinks of more risk. Also, I don't think it's dehumanizing it all (having been on the receiving end of it way back when during a layoff, and involved in the process more times than I care to count). It's standard practice for involuntary terms at all companies we work with, whether employee is IT or not. If a company is not doing this already, I'd encourage them to.

scottlamb 5mo ago
> Too complicated and subjective, stinks of more risk. I actually think there's less risk, because it's not as narrowly focused on what a just-fired employee can do. That's not the only scenario of concern. > Also, I don't think it's dehumanizing it all (having been on the receiving end of it way back when during a layoff, and involved in the process more times than I care to count). Interesting. Thanks for the perspective. I've been fortunate enough to not be on the receiving end of a lay-off, knock on wood. It's happened to my teammates/reports though. Wasn't my decision. :-(

yaur 5mo ago

Terminating access and rotating passwords (if needed) while the person is in the meeting but has not yet found out they are being let go has been SOP for at least the last 20 years

lazyasciiart 5mo ago
Amateurs. My employer does mass layoffs by terminating access to everything except their email account at 3am, and then sending an email to the victim saying “you were let go at 3am”. Managers get to figure out who’s left on their team by pinging everyone when they learn about it at work.
- brightball 5mo ago
  Oracle?
- Twirrim 5mo ago
  If you're talking about Oracle, the large round previous to that they did had individual meetings with employee, manager, and HR. With so many layoffs it took a week+ to do, effectively torturing an entire set of employees who had no idea if they'd have a job by the end of the hour, let alone week. 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)
  - joe_mamba 5mo ago
    >I'm not sure there's any good way to lay off large amounts of staff 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?

condiment 5mo ago

In an age of malicious agentic AI, this level of access is negligent. A lack of engineering controls preventing this from happening at all means that a simple phishing or supply chain attack could easily have resulted in the same outcome or worse.

EGreg 5mo ago

Then Opexus fired the one who said it. Leaving no one to say anything anymore on their behalf.

cgio 5mo ago

Privileged access should only be temporary in context of break glass with approval. People can go ballistic with core systems for reasons other than firing.

PunchyHamster 5mo ago
nah give the access to LLM, what can go wrong

czhu12 5mo ago

the problem is that its so challenging to figure out what the person actually has access to. Have they ever done a export with sensitive information, that is now sitting on their local machine? Any important clients they still are in contact with over email that they may try to sabotage? Any other creative endeavors you haven't thought through? The most fool proof way is just to nuke the computer in its entirety.

UltraSane 5mo ago
I once worked at a company where one Active Directory server was storing all passwords in plain text. Just think of the havoc someone could do with a dump of that.

pjc50 5mo ago

I think mature sysadmins accept there's a certain .. bushido to their security-critical role. It is after all their job to respond to security threats, including by revoking credentials, and to recognize that they might fall on the wrong side of that some day. But things are different both in small companies, and non-US environments where minimum notice periods or redundancy consultations are a thing. You may put people on "gardening leave" where they're still paid but not actually working. Or it may be the case that the sysadmin is the one person who knows and controls a lot of stuff, and the employer has ended up relying on them for a smooth handover. Password and role management for the "root" of things is a real problem.

spwa4 5mo ago

I don't think you understand how this works. The second person was hired because the first one wined at his manager until he was hired. Presumably this was part of a whole chain and that would make me understand why “the individuals responsible for hiring the twins are no longer employed by Opexus.” was a good idea.