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Comment by chihuahua | Hacker News Reader

At Microsoft, the standard practice is that if you say you're leaving to take a job a company they consider a competitor, they cut off all your access at the end of the day, even if your manager wants you to stick around for knowledge transfer. If it's not a competitor, it's up to you how much notice you want to give. If you say you're leaving but don't say who your next employer is, they assume it's a competitor.

Facebook was classified as a competitor, Amazon was not.

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I can confirm based on my experience that at Microsoft, depending on a lot of factors like your level, role, information you have access to, and where you’re going, that they may terminate immediately as soon as you give them notice.

Amazon has rapid termination processes as well but I’m not as clear on their criteria.

If you work for a big technology company and are jumping to a perceived competitor, and/or if you have access to sensitive information, then you should expect that the day you give notice will be your last day.

> that they may terminate immediately as soon as you give them notice.

Which is nonsense, because it’s the employee that chooses when to tell the employer. If I want to exfiltrate confidential data, I’ll do it first, then I resign.

It’s different on layoffs, where disgruntled employees could break havoc.

That's not how Corporate Accountability works. If you tender your resignation and I continue to provide you access to the systems then I'm accountable for having continued your access to those systems.

If you exfiltrated confidential data prior to tendering your resignation then no one remaining in the organization is responsible for your actions. It may trigger a policy review to minimize the exfiltration of confidential data, but no one remaining is accountable. Moreover, the exfiltration of confidential data will put you in felony land and your employer will prosecute. You're guaranteed to lose your new job too, and likely never work again.

No, what most employees do instead - for those who do these kinds of things, which is exceedingly rare - is destroy data. That is extremely damaging to an enterprise.

There are plenty of motivations to get your rear end away from the keyboard! Some are legally mandated, depending upon which industry you're working in.

Which is still bonkers. Plenty of people with high level access have notice periods of 6 months in some European countries and work their remaining time after giving notice or at least part of it, because they negotiated the 6 down to 2 or 3.

If an employee has been malicious during their tenure then other systems should have detected and caught that. That scenario can be decoupled from the termination scenario.

Think about making a 2x2 matrix (nod to Pascal’s wager):

Across the top: fire immediately, don’t fire immediately.

Down the side: employee is benign, employee is malicious.

There’s only one square where the company is at risk- bottom right.

The algebra is easy: terminate immediately and the company is not at risk.

And for some reason there's a particular country in this world where this is interpreted in one way and one way only (well not 100% true either but the odds of being treated one way are waaaaay skewed towards what you're saying) while in other countries it's interpreted in other ways and they're all just fine. I've personally witnessed and been part of the other squares over my entire career.

If entire countries can run on the other squares, why can't the US?

Some countries selectively put some people in the "you have a very long notice period" and "you will not be working for us, but still be paid, during your notice period" (so-called gardening leave).

Not unusual in the finance industry, somewhat unusual (but I have heard of it) in "more pure tech". Probably also more common the further up you get in the corporate hierarchy.

> No, what most employees do instead - for those who do these kinds of things, which is exceedingly rare - is destroy data.

So the employee could destroy data first, then resign.

> If you tender your resignation and I continue to provide you access to the systems then I'm accountable for having continued your access to those systems.

Well, if the employee is still an employee, and they need access to the systems to do their work… what would the alternative be? How could you honour the pre-resignation time otherwise?

I’m perplexed by the sudden drop in trust at resignation time. If an employee is trustworthy, why should their attitude change just because they resigned? And if they aren’t trustworthy, you have a problem even before their resigning.

> I can confirm based on my experience that at Microsoft, depending on a lot of factors like your level, role, information you have access to, and where you’re going, that they may terminate immediately as soon as you give them notice.

I saw Apple do this. Not to me.

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