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Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

> You often end up with files and folders "owned" by a user who no longer exists and then we have to get the central IT to go fix it.

That sounds reasonable to be honest. If someone leaves and has not left the files editable by others in a group... what's the other safe option? Someone has to be the arbiter of the permissions and the IT seems like a good choice.

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Or your IT team can implement an offboarding process that does something reasonable here, like transfer ownership of any remaining files to the departing employee's manager. Or sequester them somewhere with specified access rules. Some version of this problem is present in any corporation but the right solution varies a lot.

Be careful - stuff in employees personal folders CAN count as personal information. Check the relevant local privacy legislation.

And, with proper file discipline (everything being stored in shared drives (previously 'team drives')), this should never happen.

Please show me teaching proper permissions discipline to a company that goes from 5 to 500 employees and ret-con it to all of the older files like that random spreadsheet the former head of HR shared with legal with various employee PII on it such as SSN, Salary, Sexual Orientation, Name your most sensitive employee data etc on it that IT now sees / owns.

That’s a problem with Office too.

I can assure you that some asshat HR dude has dropped the “Gay Employee PII DRAFT2 Pre Final.xlsx” on his home drive or saved it to a public folder while trying to email it to his Yahoo account to work on it at home.

There's always going to be a huge amount of documents and drafts that people don't want to publish to their team but still want to save. Occasionally there's value in mining through these after somebody leaves but it also creates a privacy law nightmare since personal folders even at work can situationally count as personal information.

IT seems like a horrible choice; if they were paper documents left at a desk would IT take them over or the unit supervisor/manager? Almost certainly the latter. IT taking over business area responsibilities wherever a computer is involved rather than facilitating business units performing their work is almost always the wrong answer.

The comparison doesn't hold. Paper documents can be found by anyone, they get "open access" automatically, you leave them in your team's area, and the accidental losing scales differently (if you "lose" 1GB of paper documents, you notice).

> rather than facilitating business units performing their work

Sure, and the team which enables business units to deal with this internally is... IT. I'm not saying they have to deal with every single document, but if they enable this, they deal with things that fall through cracks.

fast forward 10 years, you have 300,000 documents that various folks have access to. Now IT is the arbiter of reading a 40 page document and deciding on the data sensitivity of it and granting or not access. Now a founder retires who owned the folder that contained HR + marketing docs and it reverts to IT and revokes access to all of it. Injoy.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here - what's the other option? You don't have to deal with every single orphaned document - just the ones where people request access.

When the founder retires and the files did not get shared before, how exactly do you want to deal with that? (context: we're in a situation where we already know the standard handover / permission granting procedures either didn't kick in, or failed)

These online doc systems seem to lend themselves to massive proliferation of orphaned docs that are still accessible, versus ones that go away as they're on machines. Similar to issues with the internet never forgetting. And because it's good at not forgetting you have a fight to delete docs vs fight to retain them.

I don't get it - you're saying that losing information when somebody leaves because they kept it their local drive is somehow better then temporarily losing access in a manner that is easily recoverable?

In many cases yes actually. Not sure if you've had the sad experience of your parents passing yet, but it's real work to clean up. Drawers full of documents, including a receipt for Gum next to one for the upgrades on the house (one is tax deductable when you sell their house one is garbage). Let alone the really embarrassing stuff you find in say your parents night stand or that photo album.

Now multiply that by hundreds of employees over years, add in 50 revisions and forks of documents, legal liability, etc. Yes it's a giant pile that just gets worse.

It's all tradeoffs and a problem you hit when you get older and bigger.

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