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Comment by technothrasher | Hacker News Reader

We had a disgruntled employee here at our small business purposefully release ransomware on our network. I don't think he was working with the ransomware people, he was just being disgruntled and trying to hurt us. Thankfully we're small enough and have a good enough data security plan that it just ended up wasting one day of my time to contain, analyze, walk the guy out the door, and restore from backups.

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And this is why corporate breakups are often as rude and traumatizing as the swipe card rejecting entry, you contact security and they tell you that you’ve been fired. I don’t know how we can be a better society, but I know we’re not there yet ;)

flipping the subject - my ex-colleague, a kind and talkative man, was deeply upset when a dot-com fired and locked out his co-worker over lunchtime, with no advance notice at all. Was it a "security problem" or was it slaver culture from the Third World in charge of personnel ? I mean, this is the Bay Area / Silicon Valley here, I am actually not kidding about slaver culture. The "money" wants complete control, and sees brusque, abrubt and no-alternative contract management as a big plus. Maybe this leads to a security problem mentioned as the topic? Talkative, kind people do wonder ...

You likely spent (pre-pandemic) more time with your coworkers than your spouse on an average day. Most everyone at your company has close bonds to a number of their coworkers and most people define the positive qualities of their workplace around their coworkers rather than the employer or the work. Losing a coworker is quite similar to a friend's parents moving them to a different school district - it's not uncommon to suffer a brief crisis as your brain copes with the change in expectations around what work will be like.

It is an extremely bad idea to bring coworkers into the scene at the time of firing and it's an even worse idea[1] to bring unnecessary people into the decision about firing - especially if they effectively have no voice in the decision.

You probably won't notice most of your coworkers leaving - but there are a few you'd likely feel deeply and people do occasionally need to move on. Go grab a coffee with them after the fact (or during their two weeks notice if that applies) and get your empathy in - but before someone is formally let go it will just hurt moral to spread that news too widely.

This is true, and the way things tend to work, but still short-sighted IMO. I don't think it's a good idea to design every process around the worst thing that could possibly happen. It further alienates the 99% of people who wouldn't do something like that, as well as everyone who witnesses it, to save the usually pretty mild pain from the 1% who actually do something bad.

In many places you can't be fired on a whim. There is an incompressible period of weeks. You can get credentials revoked obviously but it fosters a different dynamic.

You just let him walk and didn't call the cops?

I recently fired an employee who was working 3 full time 40/hr week engineering jobs concurrently, each paying $130k+, full benefits, etc (obviously breach of contract).

Especially in a small company, sometimes it’s best to cut your losses quickly and toss the rotten apple over the cliff rather than go out of your way to stomp on it and deal with rotten apple stuck on the bottom of your shoe.

wow! How did he manage it? 10X engineer with good social/communication skills?

Quite the opposite. Did the bare minimum to not be fired. Never took initiative. And stayed silent in all meetings unless forced to speak.

Definitely not a 10x, just a scam artist.

>Did the bare minimum to not be fired?

Did you only fire him because you found out he worked other jobs or because he didn't do enough work?

Maybe a "mere" beach of contact would have been excusable provided he was doing an amazing job.

It’s less about the breach of contract and more about the breach of trust.

(He was also not doing an amazing job - he required constant supervision without which he wouldn’t produce any meaningful output, presumably because he had 2 other managers he was trying to please at the same time)

He was fired because I can’t trust our production AWS keys to someone who lies about who he works for.

It’s not so much about whether he was a good coder. More that I can’t trust someone with production database access if I discover 6 months in that he has 2 other full time jobs.

sounds like they didn't really need to be paying a full time worker and could have got a casual/part-timer to handle the load instead

You’re right. What we got was a part time worker being paid a full time wage.

Yes, I did just let him walk. It didn't cause overly much damage and I was more interested in removing an employee that was not happy working for me and getting back to business than getting bogged down in a civil or criminal case.

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