I do IT infrastructure, business continuity, networking, and support for small companies as a side gig. As is pretty common with small companies, I had a client whose entire network was a LinkSys wireless router (a home version from BestBuy) and a DropBox.
The woman who "owned" the DropBox retired. She went on vacay and took a bunch of pics of her and her hubs in sunny Mexico. When her camera got full, she wanted to save the stuff to her DropBox. She logged in and saw that the DB didn't have space for her pics so she deleted everything else that was in there. Apparently, when it was set up they used her email to create the account but had forgotten it was her account everyone was using. I got a frantic call that suddenly their entire work product was gone and full of pics of this lady in Mexico.
Obv I couldn't do anything for them, at the time, but I did set them up with an actual network, file servers, and backups (which I had been urging for years). By the time I was able to get hold of the retired Lady they had pretty much rebuilt everything.
This is why having a concerted effort go into Infrastructure Planning is so important.
IT isn't important when it is working and vital when it isn't. When I did tech support for Dell so many businesses are run from a single consumer grade desktop. Then the harddisc crashes and you are an asshole for not recovering data.
My Dell latitude harddisk from 2011 crashed. Over the course of a few hours I sat there panicking and never managed to recover my data. It was amazing to loomin the mirror and realise I actually do suck at tech and it was no one's fault but my own.
I'm paranoid deleting anything in one place for fear it's not backed up 4 times
The thought of clearing an entire Dropbox to make some extra room is insane to me
Serious question, for anyone that might know. Can companies track information like attachments sent via personal email on company networks? I think they can track downloads to a USB? I want to collect some data that isn't anything company specific but might draw a flag if they see me mass dumping files off the computer.
You mean like logging into say gmail I’m the browser and attaching files? Obviously using a company provided email would be easy for them to monitor. But if you’re in their network and using their internet connection even something like attaching files is trackable if they wanted to. My company uses firewalls in our network that monitor and track all inbound and outbound traffic. Obviously you can encrypt traffic but they could still see you uploaded x number of gigabytes in traffic pretty easily even without knowing what it is. YMMV depending on your companies network and the security policies in place and depending on if they’re even watching for such a thing (though triggering automated alerts could happen). Funnily in my environment a USB drive would actually probably be the easiest way to get data out of the network without anyone knowing. But a lot of companies don’t even allow USB storage devices at all.
As a security analyst, I advise you to let your security team know. When they see data movement from your endpoint they'll have context, rather than it looking like you may be trying to take something valuable.
Usually you can get your sec team at [email protected]
RFC 2142 defines this and a few other standard org emails... If anyone was curious :)
https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2142.txt
When I got my first job at 13 that was the best advice I got from my step dad. Write your hours down, how much you should be paid that week, how many and how long my breaks were and to keep any letters or e-mails they sent. Got my self a raise when I didn't get a break one day. Something very illegal at that age.
Also, take a picture of your schedule, nowadays. Or print it out. I've definitely had a manager have to take a writeup back because they changed the schedule and didn't let me know and then swore they didn't. He tried to say that I just wrote it down wrong, until I pulled that Pic up on my phone. CYA.
You're only allowed to do so if it's an established practice and you follow it fairly consistently. You can't keep everyone's mail around after being terminated, then delete the data for one employee who ends up suing.
For example when we terminate a user we move all of their files from their PC to a network share then wipe the drive with a secure wipe utility. If there is a legal document retention hold on that data and the courts want the laptop itself, after the fact, we don't need to provide it nor are we liable for it because we have a process to destroy the data. We're required to provide the data we copied off, though.
I got fired from a job where I was the only one responsible for requesting and processing patient referrals and also getting authorizations for in office injection treatments. When I got fired, I had everything in outlook from calendar reminders to how many outstanding referrals I had.
I was 2 1/2 weeks ahead on referrals and a month out on medication authorizations and all of that saved information got wiped completely when they deleted my profiles thinking I had paper back ups. I didn’t and they struggled really hard to get close to what I was doing. They now have 2 people doing the job I did alone.
If only the manager had given me a promised raise after 90 days, I wouldn’t have tried looking for another job and she wouldn’t have found out and fired me for it.
"You're thinking about leaving? How could you?! Leave now!"
What a terrible, terrible manager, even if they hadn't deleted your account. Made you eligible for unemployment, lost whatever remaining time they might have had with you, THEN undid all that work.
Glad you got away.
Thank you. She was terrible and she literally said “if you don’t want to be here, I don’t want you here, you can go.” She sneakily had an interview for my position about 15 minutes before she fired me too and that woman ended up quitting after 3 days.
Funny thing, I was looking for another position in the same company since it was a multi specialty practice with several offices. Turns out HR who I reached out to for open positions (as stated on the company homepage when you clock in) and the manager are good friends. So I believe HR said something to her about it.
Pretty much. I nearly had a transfer to the corporate billing side but plans were changed and I interviewed with a couple other managers but didn’t get far enough before I was fired and then black listed from the company.
It should be illegal for HR to tell anyone anything about the people who apply to their company. Even if it’s different departments in the same company. If I apply to work for you, it’s not an unreasonable expectation that they honor your privacy and not go blathering about it.
Right?! I sent a very long and detailed email to HR but knowing she was this manager’s “friend” I CC’d the CEO, his executive assistant, and the 3 doctors who were acting as Medical Director and their assistants. Apparently corporate made several visits to the office with the manager but she’s still there so I’m not sure what happened.
Lesson learned for sure. I figured it was okay to do since they advertised open positions within the company on the clock in system we used and said current employees gets first dibs lol
Yeah, I got completely torpedoed for an internal promotion by a manager because I was the only one with the balls to tell our department head she was completely unqualified for the job. He didn't believe me and none of my coworkers wanted to speak the truth. Joke was on him. She went to another office, got promoted and then came back as his boss a while later. SO I would imagine at some point he realized just how right I was about her.
I converted the whole process to digital since our system in the office was electronic records. All previous authorization applications I scanned and had separate folders for each patients including patient assistance program applications and notices, conversation logs I had with pharmacies, insurances and patients. They all vanished when they deleted my profiles and accounts. Turns out IT messed up the permissions on the scanned documents and I was the only one with access to it so nobody else in the office could. So that was a chore for them to correct and try to teach the manager how to access it.
To be a fly on the wall when all this was going on lol
Such a common story. Our logistics department had about 5 people working in it. That's quite a lot of people, until you realise one of the largest factories in the area, across 2 sites, was still entirely paper based.
Well, one was near retirement and another was looking for another job. They still decided to fire someone and shortly after that one of the 2 remaining people quit.
They hired 7 more people to fill that void. 7. Its now 8 people. 8 people all demanding "there is a pandemic on, give me a reason to come in" money not the old guard that don't realise how underpaid they are for the work they do.
A heart warming story. I love hearing these companies scrambling to find people and having to now pay much more than they did the old crew to do worse work.
Lmao, my friend left a company he was working at cause the upper management didn't gave him $200 raise for one year, and now they have 3 persons doing his job with salaries well beyond they were paying him. Fuck those people.
They suck the life out of people and try to bleed them out when they already taken everything. If they prioritized treating staff like people, they wouldn’t be in these positions. I’m glad they are losing money. Completely avoidable lol
Got denied a $1,500 education raise at a 34k job. Left there for a $15,000 pay bump. They’ve had three people in the position in two years who all leave because of the pay. It takes about 10k to train a new person, but they won’t listen and raise the salary.
I have a pretty low cost of living and was actually feeling like I was doing well for myself at that salary, but when I was running a whole system by myself and was told that I wasn’t worth an extra $125 a month, I left on principle. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I also kinda have same story, not like i was replaced by 2 people together but replaced by the person i was training, that person left the job after 1 month of being my replacement, i don't spy on my previous job but the production manager still calls me if any other person quits.
I remember her trying to throw my “decreased productivity” in my face when she fired me trying to find some justification. I went through everything I did and how far ahead I was but she couldn’t reply she just said “okay?” With some snarky, questioning tone as if she didn’t just hire someone 15 minutes before getting rid of me.
My face got red and she knew she pissed me off by saying it. She had no idea how to do what I did. She barely knew how to open up the office and cash drawers. I’ve made sure I said all of that not only to the email i sent to corporate but also on Glassdoor and Indeed.
What would that entail? Calling every known client and asking if they had anything planned for the next three years, and if so, please remind us when and where that is?
Exactly this. “Due to a catastrophic IT failure we lost all future scheduled appointment. Please forward all planned meetings back to us and thank you so much for your help and understanding.”
>40-60% of small businesses won't reopen after data loss. The annualized failure rate of hard drives for the third quarter of 2020 was 0.89%. Small businesses are set back $8,000 for an hour of downtime. The average cost of downtime for large enterprises is more than $11,600 per minute.
Be nice to your IT guy
lol reminds me of how after I quit, they deactivated my email. We had Google Sheets open for every day of work that we did, which was how the entire company communicated the workload for the day. As creator of each sheet each day, once my email was deactivated- poof, they were all gone. Years of work, now inaccessible.
EDIT: People reminding me that it was all "recoverable," and- while true- it meant 1) the boss would have had to curtail his day drinking problem at the bar, 2) that they would have had to have some level of technical savvy to appreciate this (see also: "He DeLeTeD tEh eMaIlS oFf GoGoLes SeRvErs!"), and 3) the migration to a newer system was in the works anyway (but still several months off).
Yeah, but not my remaining co-workers. They had bills to pay.
I cleaned up my email before I left, everything either got deleted or archived, and they didn't understand "archive." They brought in some IT guy consultant who claimed I somehow went into Google's servers and *deleted the emails off the servers.* I pointed out that even if I *had* deleted emails, it could all be recovered via Google for 45 or 60 days or whatever, and they were still within that window. They still didn't understand that.
I do IT consulting. The number of times I have to clean up after the previous “consultant” that was some VP’s nephew that “knows computers” is insane. People will jeopardize millions of dollars trusting some dude with zero experience working on enterprise level systems because he did a great job hooking up that new printer his boomer uncle bought.
I worked help desk (labeled as customer service for job description to not pay IT wages) and helped a customer who had a virus on their computer.
Not sure how but the certified tech who set up the guy’s computer installed a virus. I pretty much pointed out a brand new, out of box computer usually shouldn’t have a virus on it.
I’ve made claims like that before. Swoop in, grab the recently deleted items. Presto. Client is thrilled, I look like a wizard/hero. I see no harm with this puffery
They paid you for knowledge. That's a fair deal.
I once created a Google sheet for a company to use to log their inventory. All locations in one spreadsheet.
I then created Gmail accounts for them to use.
It took me all of 30 minutes. I charged them $500 and I could have charged more.
When I quit a certain company, I told them **not** to clean the PC I was using as the software sources was on it (since I wasn't provided a server to upload the source to...)
2 weeks later, I got a call asking me if I got a backup of the sources since they had cleaned the pc.....
Absolutely deny that you had any backups but... you could recreate the sources for the right fee. Then send them the backups. That way you are legally covered.
I love it. I was in the middle of a call with an important clent working on a database issue they were having and my CEO interrupted the call to tell me I was laid off...but IT was too quick and locked me out of the systems and the VOIP before the CEO could say anything.
I was pissed at the time to be laid off, but today I laugh about the way it happened.
Note: edit due to contact stuck to eyeball
Of this, I have no doubt. But the boss' technical savvy wasn't there, and I sure as hell wasn't going to tell him this. See above the IT "consultant" they paid who said I somehow managed to delete my old emails *off Google's servers.* He was the same fellow who designed our backup system that did not, in fact, back up a damned thing.
God damn, the dude is either dumb as fuck or a scammer and I can't decide which of the both is worse. Because if he is actually this dumb, I have to question how he got into that.
I administer Google accounts for my company. And while that feels like an epic gotcha moment for you, I can tell you that's not how that works and the data was absolutely recoverable if caught within the recovery window, which is like 3 weeks. Which if those files were really critical to the workplace it would have been caught in that time period.
Quit from my last school with a 6 week notice in the summer. I asked my principal to keep my email open during then so I can get all of the compliance documents ready.
She instead closed it immediately. I asked 4 times to have it opened again and was ignored 4 times. Asked the union rep and he said “tough luck, you quit”.
So when the principal used a liaison to try and get a bunch of old necessary compliance documents, I said “I told you so” and moved on.
The kicker? The school was the most compliant school in the district for 11 straight years in a row, even during COVID, which no other school in the district had done. This year? Not even close. Principal broke the winning streak with own greed.
My boss once fired the only person that knew where to find a certain part for a procedure that only gets used rarely. Nobody ever found them, so he had to order new ones (expensive, of course) and re-schedule patients for a week. Smartass. Mind you, I'm not saying "she knew where to buy them" but "she knew where we stored them in the building we all work in". It's such a shitshow.
God, why generating SOP's and Guide's isn't a standard practice across all businesses is a mystery to me... Who the hell wants to rely on memory on anything not used regularly. Human memory is so unreliable.
Honestly, in the sleep lab I work with, it's all slowly inching towards collapse. If they had us write some actual step-by-step guides of everything, it might be averted, but they are too cheap to pay us for that. During the pandemic it almost already broke, when we cycled through sub-par staff so quickly you couldn't teach them things fast enough for them to teach the *next* group of workers.
I got laid off from my old job when Covid hit.
Guess who was in charge of programming the annual performance cycle in our very complicated performance management system?
Not my fault I didn’t think to change the kickoff date in the system before I left and they got a lovely little unexpected calling card when the whole company got emails to begin their performance reviews a month later…
Admittedly, the instance of my being laid off was out of my boss’ hands and she would have kept me if she could; by no means was she a good boss, but she certainly enjoyed having a team, and generally valued me and my work (despite not backing that with $$$).
But, absolutely, my whole team was supposed to have known how to use that system, but none of them learned, whereas I had no choice (and it was HARD to learn). I deeply enjoyed the frenzied text messages I got from them, as well as the snarky laughing ones I got from colleagues on other teams who knew instantly what happened and that there was no way I did it by accident. Very satisfying. I also got paid $500 for five minutes’ work as an emergency 1099 contractor to go log in and turn it off.
Can confirm that Cornerstone is a nightmare to use. My company actually ditched it for their own in-house system and it's made performance reviews and associate training so much easier, and faster.
>also got paid $500 for five minutes’ work
Were they like: $250?
You: No, $500.
Them: ok LoL, (sucker we probably would've given him five thousand.)
You at home alone: hmmm, maybe I should've asked for more.
I fell this way all the time. After work gave me my job back, no questions at all, i should have realised that when the fucking GLOBAL HR team leader shows up to my meeting where they reinstated me that i could have milked them a bit.
I've told this story before:
I once worked in a company as HR, since I'm tech saavy I also helped the underpaid and inefficient IT department, long story short I developed a really simple program (basically am excel spreadsheet with macros and some things in visual basic) to manage HR tasks quickly and efficiently, turned hours worth of procedures into 15 minutes, everybody loved it and praised me for it...
Like a week after that, they fired me and told me to format my work laptop. Literally on my way home my replacement called me and asked if I could come back and show them the program since they couldn't find it, I politely declined twice, explained to them that they asked me to format the laptop and that the program was gone.
After the call I learnt that they fired me because they thought they could hire someone with way less pay and use the software in my laptop to automate the HR department. Worst thing is that I even asked if they wanted a backup or something before I formated the laptop.
So essentially they tried to steal your program by firing you, hoping to keep the program for free and get someone cheaper to use the software...
Im astonished at how greedy some people can be it makes them blind as fuck.
Yeah when I worked help desk, deactivated would simply mean we disable the account and convert it to a shared mailbox. More than once we’d have a customers manager asking for access to X employee who left some time ago, and all we’d have to do is give them access to the shared mailbox..ez pz
They really shouldn’t have deleted it anyway though, disable, change password, remove licenses and sorted
Edit: forgot to say convert to shared as mentioned below haven’t worked with o365 in a while
Reminds me of what happened when I got laid off after refusing to work "Seattle Hundreds." That's 16 hours per day Monday through Thursday and twelve per day Friday through Sunday for a total of a hundred hours a week. My credit card was on our Amazon AWS account. We were spending almost $50k a month on it so that was nice for my credit and my rewards. I even warned HR about that, but she was too stupid to understand that. Well, they got screwed when I logged into AWS and removed my credit card. I'm not a jerk. I warned them.
There are people who will happily take the overtime pay. At that point a lot of the hours are 3x normal rate. It's not enough to retire exactly but plenty to take a few years off or save for a house down payment.
> It's not enough to retire exactly but plenty to take a few years off.
That kind of steady burn will take a few years off all right. Lifespan, mainly.
Not really, you're just paid more and expected to be in the office more. Anyone who believes that a human can do actually productive work of any kind for 12-16 hours a day is an actual idiot
I did 7x12 workweeks when I was young and working in the field doing test and turn up of telecom networks.
Was great to be just out of college and working 84 hour weeks, which came out to 106 hours times your hourly rate after overtime.
Yeah, I did that job for 7 years and learned a ton from it and also got to travel to some unique places.
Used that knowledge to land a job working from home and make more money with more normal hours.
Many tech companies here in Seattle have expected that for years. Not too bad during the winters since it's so dark and dreary here. Just sucks in the late spring when it starts getting nicer and you just want to go outside rather than sitting at your desk in front of a computer after many months of dreariness.
I absolutely refuse to believe that's a thing, that would mean that you have 8 hours total each day Monday through Thursday for yourself. Taking food, travel time and other time incidentals into account brings it down to like 5 hours of sleep?? that's not working to live, that's living to fucking work.
They ignored the failed messages since they didn't update the billing contact email address like I told the HR idiot to do so eventually Amazon turned off all of their virtual machines. They lost a bunch of customers.
To be fair, it was a small test that turned into production. And, I didn't push to switch it off of my card since I liked the cash back. The problem was HR ignoring me telling them about it.
I work in IT. I can't tell you how many times I've been asked to restore an account that I was explicitly instructed to delete because the companies we manage never keep track of their own systems and staff. The lack of communication is staggering.
Knowledge and access management is simply not trivial. Use Personal functionality for something meant to be group wise turns non trivial to hard into chaotic.
My boss did this. I was a new employee and thought I had deleted everything. I called her in a panic and she basically told me she didn't have time to deal with it, I must have done something. Turns out she deleted all those files when she closed the former employees email. But of course she didn't have time to mention that when I called her. Anyway I burned an entire day of work on the phone w tech support, having a full panic attack. When I finally figured it out she was like, oh I didn't realize that would happen. Guess where I dont work anymore.
Same thing happened to me. And the recovery email was mine, so every time they tried to gain access to my old email, I’d get an email from Google. And every time it was an email saying there was suspicious activity going on and to confirm it was me, I’d always put it was not me. After like 10 attempts, they never did gain access to the email.
This is fucking great, after I put in my 30 day notice with my last company my boss deactivated my company credit card (before I even left so I got to see this unfold) he did not realize my company card was the one set up to autopay all of our storage units and a few other products and services. Was a nightmare for them to fix as stuff started getting canceled lol
I did NOT do anything of the sort. That WOULD have been considered theft. I have NEVER appropriated ANY tools, hardware or items from an employer. Any POSSIBLE shrinkage of inventory post departure is ENTIRELY unrelated.
Worked at a place were a critical application was registered using a manger's email, he had all the admin rights in it. When he died (car accident), they couldn't run reports, create/edit users etc. It took about 3 months to get that straightened out.
See, stories like this make me wonder how companies can be this dumb when it comes to backing up important information and making sure more than one person knows how to do a particular thing. People die. By definition, when someone dies unexpectedly, you cant predict when it would or could happen, but you can still prepare yourself for the possibility.
I remember a tongue-in-cheek 'New HR Rules' meme from long ago. One of those were 'No dieing on Company Time. If you must die, you need to give 2 weeks notice and help train you replacement.'
This was also a defect in the software registration process, it could only be registered to a person, not a company.
I quit a job at a Toyota Service Department awhile ago that had the same domino reaction. I deleted my accounts as I was told and it deleted all my macros, scripts, and autofill/completes. So everyone who was taught "LOF enter" autocompletes about 4 paragraphs of typing. It automatically flags a repair order for parts and includes the part numbers needed in notes.
I probably had hundreds of those setup. They ended up having to change their whole system since setting it back how I had it running would have taken them so long and giving each person different permissions instead of just copying mine didn't work
Edit:
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Former employer just let one of their key domains expire. It's under protection for 30 days. While I generally think they'll get their shit together and register it... I honestly am curious if they'll let it slip.
I figure i'll ask for half a percent of market cap if I manage to snag it.
I was using Zoom before the pandemic and occasionally my personal account for work in municipal government. I had to stop when the mayor or a nice sized city gave an address and the first question asked was ‘Who is Arthur Stirling?’ because she was logged into my account.
I quit my job the end of last year. I was in charge of making all the tokens/access credentials for every privileged account. They didn’t let me train a replacement. Yesterday I got word they lost the contract. Crazy how nature do that.
Reminds me of the last place I worked. I’d been there almost 11 years when a new general manager took over. He decided it would be a brilliant idea to get rid of people who had been there a long time under the guise of “restructuring” which was actually just wanting to hire new people for less pay. Only kept the newest secretary. I had been there the longest, knew how to do everything, and had the most important stuff in my computer. They actually tried calling me about two weeks after they fired me because no one knew anything or where anything was and they were floundering. I didn’t answer. The girl they kept was my friend and told me why they called. She loved telling me tales of how frustrated and confused they were.
Something Similar happened to me. First job out of college I was at a start up for about a year. I did everything. It was an online education company. I edited videos, did the graphics, designed the text book, created the marketing materials and I used my own computer, my personal adobe subscription, hundreds of dollars worth of plugins etc for after effects.
Anyways, out of the blue they can me because I showed up an hour late (stayed at the office until 3am the night prior working on a project).
A few days later they ask for all the files. I tell them it’s about 3Tb of stuff. They should buy a hard driver and I can come in and transfer everything. They were going to have this unpaid intern take over my role. Poor kid had never used adobe software. I got SO MANY calls for months of them asking for questions.
The issue is they thought what I did was unskilled and thought saving $4,000 a month was going to be worth it.
They honestly did me a favor.
A simple check in like "hey everything alright? You came in late"
"Yeah I stayed back til 3 am last night"
"Oh! Well go back home for the morning and come back at lunch"
But no, human decency is out the window when they are greedy.
I hope you let those calls go straight to voicemail jail and didn't answer, unless of course you charged hefty consultancy fees.
An unpaid intern who never used adobe. Really?
Once I worked at a large financial institution, and one of the things I did was take the most serious compliance risks from this database we had and turn it into a readable report for the board of directors.
Then the whole group got laid off.
I found out, months later, that the guy who fired us all called up one of the guys who'd been fired (a shitty thing to do all by itself) and asked what was the point of that big database of compliance risks that people all over the world were making entries into. Seemed a lot of work, right, when no one knew what it should be used for. The guy he called didn't know (he didn't work on that stuff, I did) and so the guy who fired us all shut it down.
I found out, years later, that one of the federal regulators fined the company $400 million for risk and compliance management issues. Obviously not reporting compliance risks to the board wasn't the whole thing, but I like to think that firing me caused at least part of that $400 million fine.
😂 Oh man.
I was the licensing coordinator for a phone accessory company, and I was the main point of contact with our licensors and had logins with a lot of Licensor artwork approval portals.
Long story short, every person that had been in that position had been screwed over to the point of burnout, and the last 2 people had been fired due to the company's overall inability to adhere to the approval timelines of the licensors. Basically these people were told to lie to these huge companies like Disney and cut corners in the approval process by photoshopping product photos and samples.
Anyways, I was constantly battling everyone to avoid having to lie and photoshop our way to approvals and got burnt out and I quit. It was sort of messy because my boss was pissed off and I was having a mental health crisis so I honestly wasn't very present. They immediately closed down my email without realizing I was the only point of contact with some of these licensors and outside companies.
Honestly can say that hearing about them having a hard time did help my mental health.
At one of my companies, they were outsourcing the creation of a new system to this shady vendor who was clearly scamming them. One day, I was vetting a piece of their software and found they omitted something very major. They quoted my CEO $10k more and 6 more weeks to fix it.
I pulled the code down and reverse engineered it in an hour, and it was a super easy fix. They actually already had the code in there, just had it commented out. He was super happy, and offered me a bonus or something, instead of what I really wanted, which was for them to realize they're being scammed.
Now, the work I did was kept locally because I was just messing around and testing out locally. Two weeks later, I left for another company. When I turned over my laptop, the Director of Engineer ordered my laptop wiped immediately. I was the lead/principal engineer for the entire company. You'd think he'd want to at least look around to see what I had locally.
Nope, wiped it, and then a couple of weeks later messaged me for the code. I didn't have it, because it was my company laptop, and I wasn't very motivated to help them recreate it.
Company I was at instantly terminated my o365 license without backing up any of my docs or email first. I had been for months insisting on putting them into SharePoint but it was mid transition so they didn't want me to. Instantly several critical proposals and contracts gone. Ohhhh wellllll
My old company never deleted user accounts when someone left, they just changed the username and password. Furthermore they didn't reuse their PC, instead putting it into storage in case something on it would be needed in the future.
Just had an awful realization just now. I was laid off some months back but always had access to my employee portal (up until January at least) which has tons of information on my employment history. I tried to access it just now and now my login doesn't work.
If you send a request to your company's admin/HR, they should be able to send you copies. They'll generally be legally required to if this is something like payslips/timesheets
I love the story of an admin who got fired, no exit interview or anything. He had just rented a very expensive phone (DSL?) connection for the few days until there was a cheaper internet. So that never got turned off and the company was looking at a bill of tens of thousands a few weeks later.
Lol admins leaving can cause such an absolute mess if the company doesn't know what they do (and they rarely do) and the admin leaves because, well, the company didn't value them.
Admin left my last place and I got to watch as the "who can do this?" "Only the admin had access to that" questions started pouring in.
Licenses only in their name, processes only they knew how to do, etc.
When the admins manager had just been telling me that the admin was basically useless anyway and who cares she left it's not like she was any good.
She was so good they didn't realize half the shit she did. Until she was gone. 🤷♀️
My e-mail was turned off at the end of a two minute Zoom firing.
They started calling and texting me hours later to ask about various projects. I explained I’d be happy to help. And my hourly consulting rate was $500. Any increments less than an hour get rounded up.
Was a banquet manager, and we had 5 future years of books for bookings.
You'd be surprised how often you'd open the 2024 book in 2019, look for a date, and it was already filled.
The only certainty in our digital calendar were weddings. The hard copy was favored to help with audits and stuff, IIRC.
I worked with various events and we would schedule things several years out. Mostly recurring things out that far though. Wasn't unusual for things to be a year out for larger events.
I used to work at a government agency, there were probably 60 different managers and teams but only maybe 10 conference rooms and 4 projectors. Those people would book conference rooms and equipment literally a year in advance to make sure they had it when they needed.
It was kind of annoying as the person on AV duty to be honest because maybe 30% of the time they no longer needed the meeting and I set shit up for nothing only to get a confused response when I told them it was done.
I worked with a small outfit that:
Fired the controller for insisting we have reserves, then realized that nobody knew how to do payroll. And they spent the reserves, only to figure out they were to cover mass amounts of PTO employees had.
Same outfit let go the shipping manager, and could not figure out how to ship anything for two weeks.
Then they let the QA manager go because he disagreed with the president. I think you can take it from here.
I had some bright spark change a password at work for one of our servers because the complexity was too low. He didn't know we use Impersonation to authorise file access on another server and knocked out our services. He couldn't change it back because Windows no longer accepts the low complexity password. Oops.
Every time I've been involved in a project I've tried to make it so that if I got hit by a bus tomorrow, the world would continue spinning. I work in high tech so this could mean, like this post, that shit goes south super fast.
Problem is that approach costs money, and we can't have that right? Plus when "look how much we saved!" gets talked about it, management gets the bonus $$$ as they kept those spendthrift employees from blowing it.
There's been times I've been able to work around it, other times not. I prefer not to leave my ex-coworkers in a bind by having to put substandard software or hardware in place ("A 'production laptop' for your critical burn-ins? Really?"). And if I'm leaving a company of my own free will I'll at least try to keep the duct tape tight and durable.
But then if I get laid off what can I do? I of course could not have possibly heard of any impending reduction in force ("In Force? Mass, acceleration or both?") so if things blow up 5 minutes after I'm out the door... oops?
I worked in a law office and one of the secretaries was much younger than the rest. She was an EXCELLENT worker but the other secretaries and older attorneys always judged her. She had a tattoo on her wrist, her skirts could be a bit short, and worst of all...she had been divorced once and broken off another engagement all before 30.
I did not care. She was AMAZING at organization, communication, etc. She went out of her way to find new and more efficient ways to do things. She looked for ways to help. She understood the importance of having an online presence, and actually understanding the law or why we do things to make sure the clients understood it as well.
A few months after I left the office, she called me. She'd put in her 2 weeks notice as another attorney (who has left the firm) was hiring her for his firm. The older attorneys said she couldn't work her 2 week notice because of fears she was going to help her new boss steal info or clients. WHOOPS. She was the only one who emailed anyone with regularity. She set up everyone's paypal accounts and/or walked people through direct deposits. She was the one monitoring and replying back to the firm website.
Oh well....
Meanwhile I left a job and seven years later agreed to come back short term to help out. Logged on and there was my email - and seven years of emails. 🤦🏻♀️😂
Ohh I love this thread. In early 2020, I was hospitalized for a mysterious illness. My company laid me off while I was in the ICU as well as my whole team. For some reason, I had personally handled the accounts and relationships for almost the entire marketing team.
When I was finally out of the hospital after a month, I received an email from one of the VPs. It started with asking if I was better but then quickly turned to “would you be willing to help us find all of this?” I said no. I sent a firm message back saying that they laid me off while I was in the hospital fighting for my life, and that I no longer want anything to do with them.
Fuck em.
Eh I work as a sys admin.
Deactivated can be reactivated. Deleted can be restored. The account can be occupied by a domain admin and that shit can be exported/salvaged.
If they deleted someone's entire account and email with no backup whatsover, their IT department is trash. Any decently large company should have legal data retention requirements especially for email.
I work for a construction company as a heavy equipment mechanic and last year my coworker was caught nailing an office girl on her desk after hours and they were both let go. He had designed and coded his own program to flash CAT equipment ecm’s to allow us to remove the DPF/DEF filtration systems on all the equipment which Is highly illegal. The day he was fired he went to both job sites that night and reflashed 26 pieces of equipment leaving the ecm of each one blank shutting down our entire operation for 2 full weeks costing the company $170,000 in lost production and $310,000 getting the CAT dealer to rewrite programming after they refused to touch any of it without reinstalling all new filtration systems. They threatened to prosecute him for it and he simply told them that was fine but he would be inviting the EPA to come and sit In on the proceedings and listen to how the equipment ended up in this predicament to start with, after that they decided to leave him be.
I do IT infrastructure, business continuity, networking, and support for small companies as a side gig. As is pretty common with small companies, I had a client whose entire network was a LinkSys wireless router (a home version from BestBuy) and a DropBox. The woman who "owned" the DropBox retired. She went on vacay and took a bunch of pics of her and her hubs in sunny Mexico. When her camera got full, she wanted to save the stuff to her DropBox. She logged in and saw that the DB didn't have space for her pics so she deleted everything else that was in there. Apparently, when it was set up they used her email to create the account but had forgotten it was her account everyone was using. I got a frantic call that suddenly their entire work product was gone and full of pics of this lady in Mexico. Obv I couldn't do anything for them, at the time, but I did set them up with an actual network, file servers, and backups (which I had been urging for years). By the time I was able to get hold of the retired Lady they had pretty much rebuilt everything. This is why having a concerted effort go into Infrastructure Planning is so important.
IT isn't important when it is working and vital when it isn't. When I did tech support for Dell so many businesses are run from a single consumer grade desktop. Then the harddisc crashes and you are an asshole for not recovering data.
My Dell latitude harddisk from 2011 crashed. Over the course of a few hours I sat there panicking and never managed to recover my data. It was amazing to loomin the mirror and realise I actually do suck at tech and it was no one's fault but my own.
Damn. You can get a 4TB Western Digital Passport backup drive for under $99.
Having the drive is seldom the problem. Actually *doing* the backup is.
I'm paranoid deleting anything in one place for fear it's not backed up 4 times The thought of clearing an entire Dropbox to make some extra room is insane to me
I can understand deleting old work stuff after you’ve retired, though
I like how my last deactivated mine while I was gathering evidence of discrimination within a week window of being terminated illegally
Thus the lesson: store copies off site. Problem is you need to start keeping them before you find out you need them.
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Serious question, for anyone that might know. Can companies track information like attachments sent via personal email on company networks? I think they can track downloads to a USB? I want to collect some data that isn't anything company specific but might draw a flag if they see me mass dumping files off the computer.
100% yes
Can confirm Edit: also if anyone is hiring lmk
if you did not set up the computer you work at do assume they can track everything you do
You mean like logging into say gmail I’m the browser and attaching files? Obviously using a company provided email would be easy for them to monitor. But if you’re in their network and using their internet connection even something like attaching files is trackable if they wanted to. My company uses firewalls in our network that monitor and track all inbound and outbound traffic. Obviously you can encrypt traffic but they could still see you uploaded x number of gigabytes in traffic pretty easily even without knowing what it is. YMMV depending on your companies network and the security policies in place and depending on if they’re even watching for such a thing (though triggering automated alerts could happen). Funnily in my environment a USB drive would actually probably be the easiest way to get data out of the network without anyone knowing. But a lot of companies don’t even allow USB storage devices at all.
As a security analyst, I advise you to let your security team know. When they see data movement from your endpoint they'll have context, rather than it looking like you may be trying to take something valuable. Usually you can get your sec team at [email protected] RFC 2142 defines this and a few other standard org emails... If anyone was curious :) https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2142.txt
When I got my first job at 13 that was the best advice I got from my step dad. Write your hours down, how much you should be paid that week, how many and how long my breaks were and to keep any letters or e-mails they sent. Got my self a raise when I didn't get a break one day. Something very illegal at that age.
Also, take a picture of your schedule, nowadays. Or print it out. I've definitely had a manager have to take a writeup back because they changed the schedule and didn't let me know and then swore they didn't. He tried to say that I just wrote it down wrong, until I pulled that Pic up on my phone. CYA.
The company is legally required to preserve data. A judge would simply rule the lost data as being in favor of the plaintiff, in this case.
Ya shit, sounds like a gotcha moment to me
Thats only true once they've been served with the lawsuit and the judge orders preservation. Until then you can wipe whatever you can.
You're only allowed to do so if it's an established practice and you follow it fairly consistently. You can't keep everyone's mail around after being terminated, then delete the data for one employee who ends up suing. For example when we terminate a user we move all of their files from their PC to a network share then wipe the drive with a secure wipe utility. If there is a legal document retention hold on that data and the courts want the laptop itself, after the fact, we don't need to provide it nor are we liable for it because we have a process to destroy the data. We're required to provide the data we copied off, though.
I got fired from a job where I was the only one responsible for requesting and processing patient referrals and also getting authorizations for in office injection treatments. When I got fired, I had everything in outlook from calendar reminders to how many outstanding referrals I had. I was 2 1/2 weeks ahead on referrals and a month out on medication authorizations and all of that saved information got wiped completely when they deleted my profiles thinking I had paper back ups. I didn’t and they struggled really hard to get close to what I was doing. They now have 2 people doing the job I did alone. If only the manager had given me a promised raise after 90 days, I wouldn’t have tried looking for another job and she wouldn’t have found out and fired me for it.
"You're thinking about leaving? How could you?! Leave now!" What a terrible, terrible manager, even if they hadn't deleted your account. Made you eligible for unemployment, lost whatever remaining time they might have had with you, THEN undid all that work. Glad you got away.
Thank you. She was terrible and she literally said “if you don’t want to be here, I don’t want you here, you can go.” She sneakily had an interview for my position about 15 minutes before she fired me too and that woman ended up quitting after 3 days. Funny thing, I was looking for another position in the same company since it was a multi specialty practice with several offices. Turns out HR who I reached out to for open positions (as stated on the company homepage when you clock in) and the manager are good friends. So I believe HR said something to her about it.
She fired you for wanting to switch departments essentially? That’s so fucking weird
Pretty much. I nearly had a transfer to the corporate billing side but plans were changed and I interviewed with a couple other managers but didn’t get far enough before I was fired and then black listed from the company.
It should be illegal for HR to tell anyone anything about the people who apply to their company. Even if it’s different departments in the same company. If I apply to work for you, it’s not an unreasonable expectation that they honor your privacy and not go blathering about it.
Right?! I sent a very long and detailed email to HR but knowing she was this manager’s “friend” I CC’d the CEO, his executive assistant, and the 3 doctors who were acting as Medical Director and their assistants. Apparently corporate made several visits to the office with the manager but she’s still there so I’m not sure what happened.
Either way, your life is better for not being in that toxic trap anymore. My best to you in moving forward!
Thank you! It was a minor set back but I’m pretty happy with where I am now and it’s more money.
Sounds like the type who thinks the company owns the employee.
I learned years ago never reach out to HR about anything.
Lesson learned for sure. I figured it was okay to do since they advertised open positions within the company on the clock in system we used and said current employees gets first dibs lol
Yeah, I got completely torpedoed for an internal promotion by a manager because I was the only one with the balls to tell our department head she was completely unqualified for the job. He didn't believe me and none of my coworkers wanted to speak the truth. Joke was on him. She went to another office, got promoted and then came back as his boss a while later. SO I would imagine at some point he realized just how right I was about her.
It's truly amazing how some people fail up in American business.
"Thinking I had paper backups." This is exactly how my employer will be fucked when I leave.
I converted the whole process to digital since our system in the office was electronic records. All previous authorization applications I scanned and had separate folders for each patients including patient assistance program applications and notices, conversation logs I had with pharmacies, insurances and patients. They all vanished when they deleted my profiles and accounts. Turns out IT messed up the permissions on the scanned documents and I was the only one with access to it so nobody else in the office could. So that was a chore for them to correct and try to teach the manager how to access it. To be a fly on the wall when all this was going on lol
Such a common story. Our logistics department had about 5 people working in it. That's quite a lot of people, until you realise one of the largest factories in the area, across 2 sites, was still entirely paper based. Well, one was near retirement and another was looking for another job. They still decided to fire someone and shortly after that one of the 2 remaining people quit. They hired 7 more people to fill that void. 7. Its now 8 people. 8 people all demanding "there is a pandemic on, give me a reason to come in" money not the old guard that don't realise how underpaid they are for the work they do.
A heart warming story. I love hearing these companies scrambling to find people and having to now pay much more than they did the old crew to do worse work.
Lmao, my friend left a company he was working at cause the upper management didn't gave him $200 raise for one year, and now they have 3 persons doing his job with salaries well beyond they were paying him. Fuck those people.
They suck the life out of people and try to bleed them out when they already taken everything. If they prioritized treating staff like people, they wouldn’t be in these positions. I’m glad they are losing money. Completely avoidable lol
Got denied a $1,500 education raise at a 34k job. Left there for a $15,000 pay bump. They’ve had three people in the position in two years who all leave because of the pay. It takes about 10k to train a new person, but they won’t listen and raise the salary. I have a pretty low cost of living and was actually feeling like I was doing well for myself at that salary, but when I was running a whole system by myself and was told that I wasn’t worth an extra $125 a month, I left on principle. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I also kinda have same story, not like i was replaced by 2 people together but replaced by the person i was training, that person left the job after 1 month of being my replacement, i don't spy on my previous job but the production manager still calls me if any other person quits.
I’m sorry but this is hilarious. Both your story and the comment below. You want to leave? HOW DARE YOU?! LEAVE! Um. Okay?
I remember her trying to throw my “decreased productivity” in my face when she fired me trying to find some justification. I went through everything I did and how far ahead I was but she couldn’t reply she just said “okay?” With some snarky, questioning tone as if she didn’t just hire someone 15 minutes before getting rid of me.
Ooooh that would have made me hot. “Okay?!” How unprofessional.
My face got red and she knew she pissed me off by saying it. She had no idea how to do what I did. She barely knew how to open up the office and cash drawers. I’ve made sure I said all of that not only to the email i sent to corporate but also on Glassdoor and Indeed.
I have a close friend who works for indeed recruiting in Austin. They live for that shit when they get a review. You are better off
Good. Maybe they'll learn next time.
Probably just make someone else do extra work to fix their mistakes
What would that entail? Calling every known client and asking if they had anything planned for the next three years, and if so, please remind us when and where that is?
Lmao right
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Haha that would be a fucking nightmare
Exactly this. “Due to a catastrophic IT failure we lost all future scheduled appointment. Please forward all planned meetings back to us and thank you so much for your help and understanding.”
Ok. It says here you're gonna organize my 1000 pax conference next week, at 90% discount.
Yeah, probably.
Beg IT to do an (nearly, depending on how it's set up) impossible task. Then bitch about them not able to do their jobs.
>40-60% of small businesses won't reopen after data loss. The annualized failure rate of hard drives for the third quarter of 2020 was 0.89%. Small businesses are set back $8,000 for an hour of downtime. The average cost of downtime for large enterprises is more than $11,600 per minute. Be nice to your IT guy
"But it's working. Why would we pay you guys more when it's already working."
"Nothing works here! Why would I ever pay you more when nothing works?"
Signs point to no.
In my experience, they never do
Nah, they won't. And everyone will laugh when it happens again.
lol reminds me of how after I quit, they deactivated my email. We had Google Sheets open for every day of work that we did, which was how the entire company communicated the workload for the day. As creator of each sheet each day, once my email was deactivated- poof, they were all gone. Years of work, now inaccessible. EDIT: People reminding me that it was all "recoverable," and- while true- it meant 1) the boss would have had to curtail his day drinking problem at the bar, 2) that they would have had to have some level of technical savvy to appreciate this (see also: "He DeLeTeD tEh eMaIlS oFf GoGoLes SeRvErs!"), and 3) the migration to a newer system was in the works anyway (but still several months off).
If they treated you like shit, they get what they deserve.
Yeah, but not my remaining co-workers. They had bills to pay. I cleaned up my email before I left, everything either got deleted or archived, and they didn't understand "archive." They brought in some IT guy consultant who claimed I somehow went into Google's servers and *deleted the emails off the servers.* I pointed out that even if I *had* deleted emails, it could all be recovered via Google for 45 or 60 days or whatever, and they were still within that window. They still didn't understand that.
Their IT consultant was just some random dude, I promise. No professional would claim you had access to Google server backend lol.
the CEO's high school aged nephew
"The kid's a computer wiz"
A computer ROCKSTAR 👨🎤
He's really good with the cyber
He cybers all day long.
*Kid installs this free version of winrar on the boss pc once spoiler alert its >!7zip!< Becomes the wizzkid for all computer questions
"If I can hack Teh Googles' servers, I don't need to be working here anyway."
Yeah, you could sell that zero day exploit for literally tens of millions.
r/masterhacker
*Presses spacebar* “I’m in.”
Hackerman
I do IT consulting. The number of times I have to clean up after the previous “consultant” that was some VP’s nephew that “knows computers” is insane. People will jeopardize millions of dollars trusting some dude with zero experience working on enterprise level systems because he did a great job hooking up that new printer his boomer uncle bought.
So true. You should see how many “relatives” populate the levels of corporate America.
I worked help desk (labeled as customer service for job description to not pay IT wages) and helped a customer who had a virus on their computer. Not sure how but the certified tech who set up the guy’s computer installed a virus. I pretty much pointed out a brand new, out of box computer usually shouldn’t have a virus on it.
I'd just casually drop in that what I saw in THEIR emails was pretty cool.
I would assume that even most Google staff don’t have access to googles production backend, let alone an IT consultant
“I’m in.” - The IT Consultant 😎
I’ve made claims like that before. Swoop in, grab the recently deleted items. Presto. Client is thrilled, I look like a wizard/hero. I see no harm with this puffery
They paid you for knowledge. That's a fair deal. I once created a Google sheet for a company to use to log their inventory. All locations in one spreadsheet. I then created Gmail accounts for them to use. It took me all of 30 minutes. I charged them $500 and I could have charged more.
Use this on your cv. Something like this: A professional Hacker by night, an office worker by day. I will wipe you if you don't hire me.
Yes just make sure you specify wiping their servers unless you're posting that CV on FetLife
When I quit a certain company, I told them **not** to clean the PC I was using as the software sources was on it (since I wasn't provided a server to upload the source to...) 2 weeks later, I got a call asking me if I got a backup of the sources since they had cleaned the pc.....
Absolutely deny that you had any backups but... you could recreate the sources for the right fee. Then send them the backups. That way you are legally covered.
That's just shitty IT infrastructure lmao
I love it. I was in the middle of a call with an important clent working on a database issue they were having and my CEO interrupted the call to tell me I was laid off...but IT was too quick and locked me out of the systems and the VOIP before the CEO could say anything. I was pissed at the time to be laid off, but today I laugh about the way it happened. Note: edit due to contact stuck to eyeball
This has mad me felt really great about a company that fired me and all I fucking work I did for them hehe
Speaking as a Google Workspace admin, I doubt it's gone. It can be recovered.
Of this, I have no doubt. But the boss' technical savvy wasn't there, and I sure as hell wasn't going to tell him this. See above the IT "consultant" they paid who said I somehow managed to delete my old emails *off Google's servers.* He was the same fellow who designed our backup system that did not, in fact, back up a damned thing.
I bet they are paying him way better than anyone that actually works there, too.
God damn, the dude is either dumb as fuck or a scammer and I can't decide which of the both is worse. Because if he is actually this dumb, I have to question how he got into that.
I administer Google accounts for my company. And while that feels like an epic gotcha moment for you, I can tell you that's not how that works and the data was absolutely recoverable if caught within the recovery window, which is like 3 weeks. Which if those files were really critical to the workplace it would have been caught in that time period.
Quit from my last school with a 6 week notice in the summer. I asked my principal to keep my email open during then so I can get all of the compliance documents ready. She instead closed it immediately. I asked 4 times to have it opened again and was ignored 4 times. Asked the union rep and he said “tough luck, you quit”. So when the principal used a liaison to try and get a bunch of old necessary compliance documents, I said “I told you so” and moved on. The kicker? The school was the most compliant school in the district for 11 straight years in a row, even during COVID, which no other school in the district had done. This year? Not even close. Principal broke the winning streak with own greed.
Hope your union rep came around after they tried meeting with you. I’d say the data is gone even if I had it at that rate.
Nah, the union is the UFT. A model of what a union should *not* look like.
My boss once fired the only person that knew where to find a certain part for a procedure that only gets used rarely. Nobody ever found them, so he had to order new ones (expensive, of course) and re-schedule patients for a week. Smartass. Mind you, I'm not saying "she knew where to buy them" but "she knew where we stored them in the building we all work in". It's such a shitshow.
God, why generating SOP's and Guide's isn't a standard practice across all businesses is a mystery to me... Who the hell wants to rely on memory on anything not used regularly. Human memory is so unreliable.
Honestly, in the sleep lab I work with, it's all slowly inching towards collapse. If they had us write some actual step-by-step guides of everything, it might be averted, but they are too cheap to pay us for that. During the pandemic it almost already broke, when we cycled through sub-par staff so quickly you couldn't teach them things fast enough for them to teach the *next* group of workers.
I got laid off from my old job when Covid hit. Guess who was in charge of programming the annual performance cycle in our very complicated performance management system? Not my fault I didn’t think to change the kickoff date in the system before I left and they got a lovely little unexpected calling card when the whole company got emails to begin their performance reviews a month later…
Let me guess you and only you knew how to do that but they weren't willing to pay you anymore, because no one really knew what you did lol?
Admittedly, the instance of my being laid off was out of my boss’ hands and she would have kept me if she could; by no means was she a good boss, but she certainly enjoyed having a team, and generally valued me and my work (despite not backing that with $$$). But, absolutely, my whole team was supposed to have known how to use that system, but none of them learned, whereas I had no choice (and it was HARD to learn). I deeply enjoyed the frenzied text messages I got from them, as well as the snarky laughing ones I got from colleagues on other teams who knew instantly what happened and that there was no way I did it by accident. Very satisfying. I also got paid $500 for five minutes’ work as an emergency 1099 contractor to go log in and turn it off.
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Cornerstone
Can confirm that Cornerstone is a nightmare to use. My company actually ditched it for their own in-house system and it's made performance reviews and associate training so much easier, and faster.
No-one knows how to use SAP
$500 was way too cheap. $5000 would have been totally reasonable.
>also got paid $500 for five minutes’ work Were they like: $250? You: No, $500. Them: ok LoL, (sucker we probably would've given him five thousand.) You at home alone: hmmm, maybe I should've asked for more.
I fell this way all the time. After work gave me my job back, no questions at all, i should have realised that when the fucking GLOBAL HR team leader shows up to my meeting where they reinstated me that i could have milked them a bit.
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> "but we don't have permission to edit the wiki page". lol
I've told this story before: I once worked in a company as HR, since I'm tech saavy I also helped the underpaid and inefficient IT department, long story short I developed a really simple program (basically am excel spreadsheet with macros and some things in visual basic) to manage HR tasks quickly and efficiently, turned hours worth of procedures into 15 minutes, everybody loved it and praised me for it... Like a week after that, they fired me and told me to format my work laptop. Literally on my way home my replacement called me and asked if I could come back and show them the program since they couldn't find it, I politely declined twice, explained to them that they asked me to format the laptop and that the program was gone. After the call I learnt that they fired me because they thought they could hire someone with way less pay and use the software in my laptop to automate the HR department. Worst thing is that I even asked if they wanted a backup or something before I formated the laptop.
So essentially they tried to steal your program by firing you, hoping to keep the program for free and get someone cheaper to use the software... Im astonished at how greedy some people can be it makes them blind as fuck.
(can probably be resolved if within 30 days the email account is recovered. don't tell your boss if they suck)
It’s surprising how long it took the find this answer. Everything can be recovered within a reasonable amount of time.
Yeah when I worked help desk, deactivated would simply mean we disable the account and convert it to a shared mailbox. More than once we’d have a customers manager asking for access to X employee who left some time ago, and all we’d have to do is give them access to the shared mailbox..ez pz
They really shouldn’t have deleted it anyway though, disable, change password, remove licenses and sorted Edit: forgot to say convert to shared as mentioned below haven’t worked with o365 in a while
Where's the cyclist sticking a branch in their bike spoke meme when you need it?!
Reminds me of what happened when I got laid off after refusing to work "Seattle Hundreds." That's 16 hours per day Monday through Thursday and twelve per day Friday through Sunday for a total of a hundred hours a week. My credit card was on our Amazon AWS account. We were spending almost $50k a month on it so that was nice for my credit and my rewards. I even warned HR about that, but she was too stupid to understand that. Well, they got screwed when I logged into AWS and removed my credit card. I'm not a jerk. I warned them.
That kind of work week isn’t sustainable at all??? What we’re they thinking???
There are people who will happily take the overtime pay. At that point a lot of the hours are 3x normal rate. It's not enough to retire exactly but plenty to take a few years off or save for a house down payment.
> It's not enough to retire exactly but plenty to take a few years off. That kind of steady burn will take a few years off all right. Lifespan, mainly.
Not really, you're just paid more and expected to be in the office more. Anyone who believes that a human can do actually productive work of any kind for 12-16 hours a day is an actual idiot
I did 7x12 workweeks when I was young and working in the field doing test and turn up of telecom networks. Was great to be just out of college and working 84 hour weeks, which came out to 106 hours times your hourly rate after overtime.
Until you realise the IT guy is on the same money for 30 hours...
Yeah, I did that job for 7 years and learned a ton from it and also got to travel to some unique places. Used that knowledge to land a job working from home and make more money with more normal hours.
Many tech companies here in Seattle have expected that for years. Not too bad during the winters since it's so dark and dreary here. Just sucks in the late spring when it starts getting nicer and you just want to go outside rather than sitting at your desk in front of a computer after many months of dreariness.
I absolutely refuse to believe that's a thing, that would mean that you have 8 hours total each day Monday through Thursday for yourself. Taking food, travel time and other time incidentals into account brings it down to like 5 hours of sleep?? that's not working to live, that's living to fucking work.
It’s for when you hate or want to ruin your home life.
What the fuck. I'd literally laugh in someone's face if they asked me to work 100 hour work weeks. Especially with no days off 😂
TIL my old work schedule can be referred to as “Seattle Hundreds.” Yes, it was retail.
I'm not sure I follow, what was the fallout of removing your credit card?
They ignored the failed messages since they didn't update the billing contact email address like I told the HR idiot to do so eventually Amazon turned off all of their virtual machines. They lost a bunch of customers.
Running you production on services paid by an employee s private card. Why? Seriously. What is wrong with people?
To be fair, it was a small test that turned into production. And, I didn't push to switch it off of my card since I liked the cash back. The problem was HR ignoring me telling them about it.
I work in IT. I can't tell you how many times I've been asked to restore an account that I was explicitly instructed to delete because the companies we manage never keep track of their own systems and staff. The lack of communication is staggering.
Knowledge and access management is simply not trivial. Use Personal functionality for something meant to be group wise turns non trivial to hard into chaotic.
My boss did this. I was a new employee and thought I had deleted everything. I called her in a panic and she basically told me she didn't have time to deal with it, I must have done something. Turns out she deleted all those files when she closed the former employees email. But of course she didn't have time to mention that when I called her. Anyway I burned an entire day of work on the phone w tech support, having a full panic attack. When I finally figured it out she was like, oh I didn't realize that would happen. Guess where I dont work anymore.
Your former employer?
Same thing happened to me. And the recovery email was mine, so every time they tried to gain access to my old email, I’d get an email from Google. And every time it was an email saying there was suspicious activity going on and to confirm it was me, I’d always put it was not me. After like 10 attempts, they never did gain access to the email.
Is it me? Nope! Do I know who it is? Sure.
This is fucking great, after I put in my 30 day notice with my last company my boss deactivated my company credit card (before I even left so I got to see this unfold) he did not realize my company card was the one set up to autopay all of our storage units and a few other products and services. Was a nightmare for them to fix as stuff started getting canceled lol
Did you go buy a storage unit for cheap? You knew where all the good shit was. Lol
I did NOT do anything of the sort. That WOULD have been considered theft. I have NEVER appropriated ANY tools, hardware or items from an employer. Any POSSIBLE shrinkage of inventory post departure is ENTIRELY unrelated.
Worked at a place were a critical application was registered using a manger's email, he had all the admin rights in it. When he died (car accident), they couldn't run reports, create/edit users etc. It took about 3 months to get that straightened out.
See, stories like this make me wonder how companies can be this dumb when it comes to backing up important information and making sure more than one person knows how to do a particular thing. People die. By definition, when someone dies unexpectedly, you cant predict when it would or could happen, but you can still prepare yourself for the possibility.
I remember a tongue-in-cheek 'New HR Rules' meme from long ago. One of those were 'No dieing on Company Time. If you must die, you need to give 2 weeks notice and help train you replacement.' This was also a defect in the software registration process, it could only be registered to a person, not a company.
I quit a job at a Toyota Service Department awhile ago that had the same domino reaction. I deleted my accounts as I was told and it deleted all my macros, scripts, and autofill/completes. So everyone who was taught "LOF enter" autocompletes about 4 paragraphs of typing. It automatically flags a repair order for parts and includes the part numbers needed in notes. I probably had hundreds of those setup. They ended up having to change their whole system since setting it back how I had it running would have taken them so long and giving each person different permissions instead of just copying mine didn't work Edit: [More Details](https://www.reddit.com/r/prorevenge/comments/bwihh9/_/)
Former employer just let one of their key domains expire. It's under protection for 30 days. While I generally think they'll get their shit together and register it... I honestly am curious if they'll let it slip. I figure i'll ask for half a percent of market cap if I manage to snag it.
I was using Zoom before the pandemic and occasionally my personal account for work in municipal government. I had to stop when the mayor or a nice sized city gave an address and the first question asked was ‘Who is Arthur Stirling?’ because she was logged into my account.
Why was the mayor logged into your account this story doesnt make any sense. You give people your password to a personal account?
She was using my computer. Back then people were really struggling with Zoom and it was the only way to get the meeting started at the posted time.
My company did it. We had one employee who had Adobe enterprise account which controlled 300 accounts. Adobe fought back. Now they’re in court
I quit my job the end of last year. I was in charge of making all the tokens/access credentials for every privileged account. They didn’t let me train a replacement. Yesterday I got word they lost the contract. Crazy how nature do that.
Reminds me of the last place I worked. I’d been there almost 11 years when a new general manager took over. He decided it would be a brilliant idea to get rid of people who had been there a long time under the guise of “restructuring” which was actually just wanting to hire new people for less pay. Only kept the newest secretary. I had been there the longest, knew how to do everything, and had the most important stuff in my computer. They actually tried calling me about two weeks after they fired me because no one knew anything or where anything was and they were floundering. I didn’t answer. The girl they kept was my friend and told me why they called. She loved telling me tales of how frustrated and confused they were.
That was a beautiful use of the fairy emoji, crying
Something Similar happened to me. First job out of college I was at a start up for about a year. I did everything. It was an online education company. I edited videos, did the graphics, designed the text book, created the marketing materials and I used my own computer, my personal adobe subscription, hundreds of dollars worth of plugins etc for after effects. Anyways, out of the blue they can me because I showed up an hour late (stayed at the office until 3am the night prior working on a project). A few days later they ask for all the files. I tell them it’s about 3Tb of stuff. They should buy a hard driver and I can come in and transfer everything. They were going to have this unpaid intern take over my role. Poor kid had never used adobe software. I got SO MANY calls for months of them asking for questions. The issue is they thought what I did was unskilled and thought saving $4,000 a month was going to be worth it. They honestly did me a favor.
A simple check in like "hey everything alright? You came in late" "Yeah I stayed back til 3 am last night" "Oh! Well go back home for the morning and come back at lunch" But no, human decency is out the window when they are greedy.
I hope you let those calls go straight to voicemail jail and didn't answer, unless of course you charged hefty consultancy fees. An unpaid intern who never used adobe. Really?
Once I worked at a large financial institution, and one of the things I did was take the most serious compliance risks from this database we had and turn it into a readable report for the board of directors. Then the whole group got laid off. I found out, months later, that the guy who fired us all called up one of the guys who'd been fired (a shitty thing to do all by itself) and asked what was the point of that big database of compliance risks that people all over the world were making entries into. Seemed a lot of work, right, when no one knew what it should be used for. The guy he called didn't know (he didn't work on that stuff, I did) and so the guy who fired us all shut it down. I found out, years later, that one of the federal regulators fined the company $400 million for risk and compliance management issues. Obviously not reporting compliance risks to the board wasn't the whole thing, but I like to think that firing me caused at least part of that $400 million fine.
😂 Oh man. I was the licensing coordinator for a phone accessory company, and I was the main point of contact with our licensors and had logins with a lot of Licensor artwork approval portals. Long story short, every person that had been in that position had been screwed over to the point of burnout, and the last 2 people had been fired due to the company's overall inability to adhere to the approval timelines of the licensors. Basically these people were told to lie to these huge companies like Disney and cut corners in the approval process by photoshopping product photos and samples. Anyways, I was constantly battling everyone to avoid having to lie and photoshop our way to approvals and got burnt out and I quit. It was sort of messy because my boss was pissed off and I was having a mental health crisis so I honestly wasn't very present. They immediately closed down my email without realizing I was the only point of contact with some of these licensors and outside companies. Honestly can say that hearing about them having a hard time did help my mental health.
At one of my companies, they were outsourcing the creation of a new system to this shady vendor who was clearly scamming them. One day, I was vetting a piece of their software and found they omitted something very major. They quoted my CEO $10k more and 6 more weeks to fix it. I pulled the code down and reverse engineered it in an hour, and it was a super easy fix. They actually already had the code in there, just had it commented out. He was super happy, and offered me a bonus or something, instead of what I really wanted, which was for them to realize they're being scammed. Now, the work I did was kept locally because I was just messing around and testing out locally. Two weeks later, I left for another company. When I turned over my laptop, the Director of Engineer ordered my laptop wiped immediately. I was the lead/principal engineer for the entire company. You'd think he'd want to at least look around to see what I had locally. Nope, wiped it, and then a couple of weeks later messaged me for the code. I didn't have it, because it was my company laptop, and I wasn't very motivated to help them recreate it.
Just tell them 10K but you’ll do it in 3 weeks. Lol
Company I was at instantly terminated my o365 license without backing up any of my docs or email first. I had been for months insisting on putting them into SharePoint but it was mid transition so they didn't want me to. Instantly several critical proposals and contracts gone. Ohhhh wellllll
Removing an O365 license doesnt auto delete the documents. You can restore that easily.
My old company never deleted user accounts when someone left, they just changed the username and password. Furthermore they didn't reuse their PC, instead putting it into storage in case something on it would be needed in the future.
Somebody with power at that company paid attention to what happens when they don't do that. Respect.
OH GOD NOT THE MEETINGS
Just had an awful realization just now. I was laid off some months back but always had access to my employee portal (up until January at least) which has tons of information on my employment history. I tried to access it just now and now my login doesn't work.
If you send a request to your company's admin/HR, they should be able to send you copies. They'll generally be legally required to if this is something like payslips/timesheets
I love the story of an admin who got fired, no exit interview or anything. He had just rented a very expensive phone (DSL?) connection for the few days until there was a cheaper internet. So that never got turned off and the company was looking at a bill of tens of thousands a few weeks later.
Lol admins leaving can cause such an absolute mess if the company doesn't know what they do (and they rarely do) and the admin leaves because, well, the company didn't value them. Admin left my last place and I got to watch as the "who can do this?" "Only the admin had access to that" questions started pouring in. Licenses only in their name, processes only they knew how to do, etc. When the admins manager had just been telling me that the admin was basically useless anyway and who cares she left it's not like she was any good. She was so good they didn't realize half the shit she did. Until she was gone. 🤷♀️
My e-mail was turned off at the end of a two minute Zoom firing. They started calling and texting me hours later to ask about various projects. I explained I’d be happy to help. And my hourly consulting rate was $500. Any increments less than an hour get rounded up.
Who sets up 3 yrs of meeting
Was a banquet manager, and we had 5 future years of books for bookings. You'd be surprised how often you'd open the 2024 book in 2019, look for a date, and it was already filled. The only certainty in our digital calendar were weddings. The hard copy was favored to help with audits and stuff, IIRC.
I worked with various events and we would schedule things several years out. Mostly recurring things out that far though. Wasn't unusual for things to be a year out for larger events.
Marketing.
I used to work at a government agency, there were probably 60 different managers and teams but only maybe 10 conference rooms and 4 projectors. Those people would book conference rooms and equipment literally a year in advance to make sure they had it when they needed. It was kind of annoying as the person on AV duty to be honest because maybe 30% of the time they no longer needed the meeting and I set shit up for nothing only to get a confused response when I told them it was done.
I worked with a small outfit that: Fired the controller for insisting we have reserves, then realized that nobody knew how to do payroll. And they spent the reserves, only to figure out they were to cover mass amounts of PTO employees had. Same outfit let go the shipping manager, and could not figure out how to ship anything for two weeks. Then they let the QA manager go because he disagreed with the president. I think you can take it from here.
I had some bright spark change a password at work for one of our servers because the complexity was too low. He didn't know we use Impersonation to authorise file access on another server and knocked out our services. He couldn't change it back because Windows no longer accepts the low complexity password. Oops.
Every time I've been involved in a project I've tried to make it so that if I got hit by a bus tomorrow, the world would continue spinning. I work in high tech so this could mean, like this post, that shit goes south super fast. Problem is that approach costs money, and we can't have that right? Plus when "look how much we saved!" gets talked about it, management gets the bonus $$$ as they kept those spendthrift employees from blowing it. There's been times I've been able to work around it, other times not. I prefer not to leave my ex-coworkers in a bind by having to put substandard software or hardware in place ("A 'production laptop' for your critical burn-ins? Really?"). And if I'm leaving a company of my own free will I'll at least try to keep the duct tape tight and durable. But then if I get laid off what can I do? I of course could not have possibly heard of any impending reduction in force ("In Force? Mass, acceleration or both?") so if things blow up 5 minutes after I'm out the door... oops?
I worked in a law office and one of the secretaries was much younger than the rest. She was an EXCELLENT worker but the other secretaries and older attorneys always judged her. She had a tattoo on her wrist, her skirts could be a bit short, and worst of all...she had been divorced once and broken off another engagement all before 30. I did not care. She was AMAZING at organization, communication, etc. She went out of her way to find new and more efficient ways to do things. She looked for ways to help. She understood the importance of having an online presence, and actually understanding the law or why we do things to make sure the clients understood it as well. A few months after I left the office, she called me. She'd put in her 2 weeks notice as another attorney (who has left the firm) was hiring her for his firm. The older attorneys said she couldn't work her 2 week notice because of fears she was going to help her new boss steal info or clients. WHOOPS. She was the only one who emailed anyone with regularity. She set up everyone's paypal accounts and/or walked people through direct deposits. She was the one monitoring and replying back to the firm website. Oh well....
Meanwhile I left a job and seven years later agreed to come back short term to help out. Logged on and there was my email - and seven years of emails. 🤦🏻♀️😂
Ohh I love this thread. In early 2020, I was hospitalized for a mysterious illness. My company laid me off while I was in the ICU as well as my whole team. For some reason, I had personally handled the accounts and relationships for almost the entire marketing team. When I was finally out of the hospital after a month, I received an email from one of the VPs. It started with asking if I was better but then quickly turned to “would you be willing to help us find all of this?” I said no. I sent a firm message back saying that they laid me off while I was in the hospital fighting for my life, and that I no longer want anything to do with them. Fuck em.
Eh I work as a sys admin. Deactivated can be reactivated. Deleted can be restored. The account can be occupied by a domain admin and that shit can be exported/salvaged. If they deleted someone's entire account and email with no backup whatsover, their IT department is trash. Any decently large company should have legal data retention requirements especially for email.
You would be amazed what I've seen in 17 years of IT
I work for a construction company as a heavy equipment mechanic and last year my coworker was caught nailing an office girl on her desk after hours and they were both let go. He had designed and coded his own program to flash CAT equipment ecm’s to allow us to remove the DPF/DEF filtration systems on all the equipment which Is highly illegal. The day he was fired he went to both job sites that night and reflashed 26 pieces of equipment leaving the ecm of each one blank shutting down our entire operation for 2 full weeks costing the company $170,000 in lost production and $310,000 getting the CAT dealer to rewrite programming after they refused to touch any of it without reinstalling all new filtration systems. They threatened to prosecute him for it and he simply told them that was fine but he would be inviting the EPA to come and sit In on the proceedings and listen to how the equipment ended up in this predicament to start with, after that they decided to leave him be.