It amuses me to no end that of the last two (sigh) layoffs that took me out, I received one and six month notices.
In both cases, I’ve been called and asked if I remembered production root passwords, which I did, and which were still valid. Thanks for the trust guys, but I’d rather not have the exposure. In exit interviews, I always make the point that they need to change their root passwords now that I’m leaving. I also try to change them whenever anyone leaves the company, though when you’re hemorrhaging a techie every week or two, that’s really not feasible.
I’ve never seen massive theft myself, but all the stories I know of are either major closings, or simply companies turning a blind eye (one place I know of laid off a bunch of remote people, and simply never asked them for their laptops and printers).
Not theft, but I once rolled a server out of building on a handcart, without security ever asking for the paperwork. Same security team went through a rolling bin full of keyboards and mice to make sure it met the paperwork. Heh.
Not a layoff story, but I got fired once and was escorted out. The department admin was assigned to clean out my desk and fedex it to me. She felt that the firing was bullshit, and took it upon herself to send me a lot of stuff that I wasn’t entitled to.
When I was a manager and I had an employee give notice, I’d let them go ASAP, they are rarely worth anything after they give notice.
Ironically when I was the IT person for a hotel I was GIVEN two weeks notice. Every other job but one when I was laid off or quit, I was walked out the front door immediately or at the end of the day.
I had a ball when I was the IT person as I just played on the Internet for two weeks.
I have never gotten paid for a notice. I give notice and they say “BYE” and that was that.
When Atari did a big layoff years back on Christmas eve, the IT staff took all the backup tapes and reeled them off the second floor balcony. It was stunning to see the billows of magnetic tape and scattered reels in the parking lot.
The marketing guys loaded a bunch of big-ass coin-op games on rented trucks. I saw one U-Haul truck with probably 10 games in it.
Yeah, I’m with Dolores Reborn on this. How many cases are there of someone giving notice and then stealing things or causing trouble? I mean, I guess you have to take all the precautions you can, but WTF? They must be the stupidest thieves in the world.
gives notice, gets escorted out
Gah, if only I had thought to steal stuff BEFORE I gave notice, I would had gotten away with it. If not for those meddling kids, Scooby Doo! Or was it the Bloodhound Gang? Mathnet? Either way, grrr.
I’ve given notice twice in my life. The first was after working at an engineering consulting firm for six years; the second was after working at another consulting firm for only six weeks. In both cases, I had most of my personal stuff removed before giving notice, just in case the unexpected happened (i.e. being escorted off the premises). Nevertheless, this didn’t happen, and I ended up in both cases working my tail off for my last two weeks closing out projects and turning them over to other people. My boss at the first place had to prod me to finish things up on my last day so they could take me out for beers.
I left both firms on very good terms.
I even voluntarily returned my signing bonus at the second firm, because I had stayed there such a short time, and it didn’t seem right to keep it.
In the incident I spoke of earlier, I knew the firing was coming, and I will confess to liberating some office supplies. I’ve sometimes wondered whether my immediate supervisor (who also thought the firing was bullshit) expected me to do, as she all-but-warned me the Friday afternoon before the firing but did not ask for my key card or anything else.
In regards to the escorting out of persons who had given notice, this was typically done if they were going to work for a competitor; a lot of the information our sales staff had access to was proprietary. In one case, a friend of mine gave notice and then made it clear that she intended to do no more real work during her last two weeks; her manager would have been justified in firing her under other circumstances but decided it wasn’t worth the trouble of all the paperwork.
I liberated a certain amount of office supplies (though there wasn’t a great deal I actually wanted) in the three weeks or so between making my mind up to take the offer and leave and having to hand in my pass (actually my manager couldn’t get there on the last day and I handed it to another manager who visited the office frequently) . I guess I could have had the laser printer that had been sitting unused on a filing cabinet for a year or so - nobody else had been interested in stealing it and the IT crowd weren’t interested in recovering it after they had provided us with another one - God knows why, there was nothing wrong with it.
But I still don’t understand. If someone got a job with a competitor, and intended to steal proprietary information, wouldn’t they just steal it before they let their current company know they were leaving for a competitor? For firings it makes sense, but I’m having trouble seeing it for giving notice.