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She Was Fired, But Never Told
A fun one: "An employee at Network Commerce Inc. (formerly shopnow.com) found out that she was fired when her company cellphone was cancelled, network account was disabled and building keycard wouldn't work. This article from The Stranger talks about the somewhat callous attitude that this particular dotcom has taken towards its soon to be ex-employees." Now, with readership as diverse as ours, I'm sure there are a few good stories out there about getting fired from a dot-com.
Lots of .com's don't tell their employees about new hires either, until they see their name in /etc/passwd one day...
Its standard policy if someone tells us their leaving to lock their account and start up the taper that minute (though if they tell us they're leaving they've probably already done whatever they were going to do).
Though this still isn't an endorsement of those jerks mentioned in the story :)
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
(1)Remove a ceiling tile
(2)Toss a piece of meat up there
(3)Replace ceiling tile
Being treated like that really hurts really hurts to the viewpoint of the exmployee getting fired.
.com workers who are reading this comment gets fired, I want you to remember this article here on slashdot and how everyone thought it was so funny.
Have any of you been fired before?
I was the angriest I have ever been in my life when I was fired. Being a tech worker I was treated like nuclear waste and was really embarrased and humiliated by having security escort me out in front of everyone. What hurt was being treated like I was a percieved threat after the blood, sweat and hard work I provided for that company.
The non tech workers are not fired fired that way because its cold and too humiliating. I felt like the people staring thought I was stealing or into extortion or somthing really bad when a security guard comes in. That just put fire into me. At least my other co-wrokers didn't know ahead of time. That would of made even more angry and betrayed.
WHen one of
Its not funny at all.
i was the first eng. at a web-dev shop in san francisco, papermedia. after 6 months of working there and growing about 3x the original size yet still not doing anything interesting - I started looking. I found a company that looked awesome, Collab.net, so i dropped my resume to them and only them. I even felt like a bit of a traitor for doing it. I had a phone interview with them soon after and was very impressed with them and scheduled an in-person interview.
I was nearly burnt out at the job i was still at, doing all the sysadmin work - some tech support - and doing a lot of the programming, and told the company I was taking my first 2 days off. On the evening of my first day off (a thursday) one of the two owners said there was an all-hands meeting the next morning and i had to come in for about 30 mins at 9 am i think. Well at 10am was my in person interview with collabnet. So I got there at 9am with no worries since both places were close from where i live in downtown.
well they laid off about 15 people myself included. after their lil spiel about how sad they were and how this wasnt personal in any way but a financial neccesity they asked if anyone had any questions. I asked what time it was, and when they told me and asked why, I replied, "I'm in a hurry because in 30 minutes a have my second interview with a much better company."
I filled out a few small papers, got a shitload of severence and left.
I'm now *extremely* happilly employed @collabnet.
Who's stabbin who?!!
Although I was short employed with Telocity, Inc. (that is the NASDAQ symbol "TLCT" [amuzing]) I found my termination to be rather amuzing.
My position was as a Security Analyst, the direct interperetation being "Someone who analyses security", saving the company from a IPO Web Deface Hack and implementing security policies that previously did not exist.
While doing a "screen lock" check, jotting down the workstations that were not locked, I came across an office in HR, on the screen - open - in Word, was my termination letter. I printed out a copy, and took it to my Exit Interview that I found out about two hours later, along with my badge and cellphone. Needless to say, HR was rather - stunned. My boss was impressed, smirked, and stated "Hey, I hired him because he was good.", while the HR bitch just stared at me.
Funny thing, they didn't pay any of my relocation which cost me out of pocket over $7.5k and gave me none of my hiring bonus.
My boss (only other person there who did security) was terminated a couple weeks later. Leading to the "passive/reactive" approach to security.
I cannot confirm nor deny the allegation or allegations you may or may not have just made
I was fired from there a year or so ago, the way I found out was an outside recruiter called me and said to pack my bags. An hour later someone from HR came down to escort me out the building. Email was cut off, couldn't even send mail telling my friends I was canned. Everyone in that company ran around like a chicken with their head cut off and yelling. Dwayne (CEO) yelled at his direct reports. They yelled at their serfs, etc etc. Thank god I was a contractor and was paid hourly. Everyone in IT was working 80 hour weeks if they were salary. People would sleep at their desks. And for what? NWCK is at $1, and their options are at $7. Eventually all the good people got out of there and the only people left are yes men/women and those that sleep with their bosses.
There are some risks you run when you sign on with a dotcom.
This is one of them:
Saturday September 16th, 2000
5:30 am:
I wake up on my kitchen floor with a severe hangover and no memory of how I got there. Further investigation reveals that I have no memory of the previous 12 hours. Fuck.
6:00 am:
After downing 3 cans of Diet Mountain Dew and 8 Excedrin I stagger into the shower.
6:05 am:
36 fluid ounces of Dew and 8 partially dissolved Excedrin tablets wind up in my toilet bowl. This brings back a memory of the previous night - a memory of vomiting in a computer case at work to be precise. Fuck Fuck.
6:10 am:
I realize that since the cleaning crew only works Sun. - Thurs., my gift to the company is going to sit there for a couple of days unless I go clean it up. Fuck Fuck Fuck.
8:30 am:
I arrive at atomfilms on a vomit scrubbing mission.
9:15 am:
After dragging the case up to the roof, I hose it down and leave it to dry.
9:30 am:
Since I'm at work anyway I ought to check email.
9:45 am:
I unlock my workstation and find myself staring at the "Comment Submitted" page at http://slashdot.org/. "That's funny, I don't remember posting anything on slashdot last night," I think to myself. Then it occurs to me that I don't remember doing anything last night and that it isn't very funny.
10:00 am:
I work up the courage to read what I posted. It turns out to be an expression of carnal desire for our young, female (god be praised) sysadmin. Fortunately I posted it on a small, out of the way website that only server up 1.5 million pages/day and is only read by young sysadmins and their friends. I begin praying for the sweet release of death.
10:05 am:
It dawns on me that I'm an atheist - so I switch to merely hoping for the sweet release of death.
10:06 am:
I recall that our young, female sysadmin's hobby is competitive target shooting and that she has more firearms than the armed forces of Malawi - 12 to be precise. I begin hoping to avoid the sweet release of death.
10:10 am:
A sudden rush of paranoia drives me to check my "sent items" folder - there I see a message to our young, female sysadmin. The message has 34 lines. Lines 1-3 contain a delicately phrased and badly spelt expression of tender affection. Line 4 explains that the aforementioned affection should lead to the two of us knotting an coupling like frogs in a cistern. Lines 5-30 outlined the techniques and approaches that should be utilized in our impending bout(s) of carnal riot. Line 31 presented my conviction that these activities should be carried out until the bed collapsed in a pile of splinters. Lines 32 and 33 advised that our offspring would have to be named after confederate generals - even the girls. Line 34 was my signature. Betting odds began to favor my meeting the sweet release of death.
10:30 am:
I send an apology. Since the thing I'm most sorry about is my failure to use spellcheck, It's not the most touching thing ever written.
10:00 pm:
I send a dozen yellow roses with a carefully worded note expressing my heartfelt sorrow at having failed to use spellcheck.
By monday I was unemployed.
This is all 100% true.
--Shoeboy
It happened when I was in tech support. We always "punched in" by typing a code into a computer time clock. One day, the computer gave me a wierd error I had never seen. I told my manager about the error, and she said, jokingly, "maybe you got fired". I was in good standing, so we could both laugh about this. I guess she knew that the error was associated with termination, but she figured it was just a glitch and that it would resolve itself. The problem persisted, and I reported it to her again. Well, then she realized it wasn't going away and did something about it. Sure enough, I was "fired" by accident. They even paid me for my vacation hours and zeroed out my leave balance. Getting a severance check was nice, but I lost my leave which was OK because I didn't have much saved up anyway.
Anyhow, stuff happens. I took this accidential "firing" in good stride. Starting termination mechanisms before the employee is actually informed is just COLD though.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
IANAL (yet), but according to the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification act, companies with more than 100 employees that do mass layoffs are required to give sixty days of notice before people are laid off -- presumably so things like this don't happen. How large was this company? Is there anything to prevent employees of smaller companies (or companies experiencing smaller layoffs) from getting screwed?
http://freshmeat.net/projects/charities.cron/
I worked at a company that was so fucked up it could quite easily have been a dot com. They hired people just so they would look like they were growing so a major investor would keep giving them money (which they then blew). My job was very secure at this company and basically consisted of reading slashdot and playing The Sims. Many times I got in trouble for showing up late and my most common response of "so am I fired?" went unheard. It was a great time in my life and I was going insane following the office politics and I only hoped that things would return to normality eventually. Unfortunately, I had managed to get a friend of mine hired when I joined the company. He was not nearly as valued as I was (he spent the majority of his time warezing and was constantly getting bitched at for using too much bandwidth) and not nearly as good as avoiding the bosses. So finally one day his "three month trial period" was up and he marched into the boss' office and demanded his pay rise (off the trial period wage). They didn't want to give it to him, probably because all he did was warez all day, but they didn't want to fire him either. He came back and told me he was going to call a meeting and do everything in his power to get fired so he could get a payout and go get a real job somewhere. Well I knew this was going to be more amuzing than Sims/Slashdot so we arranged a little plan. Just before the boss' showed up in the conference room he dialed my extension and put the conference room phone on speaker phone. I then pressed the "mute" button on my end, creating a one way connection that was better than a hidden microphone. A bunch of the guys then crowded around my desk and listened to him abuse the bosses, telling them nothing but the trueth: that their company sucked and they had no idea how to make money. I quit a few months later. The strain of playing The Sims and reading Slashdot all day was just too much and I felt myself wanting to do some real work -- always a good time to quit.
How we know is more important than what we know.
heh.. I was fired from a job as a security auditor at an ISP once. They disabled my account and then a week later noticed that I was still doing work. They asked me why I was still working and I told them I had received no notice that I was fired (they emailed it). They asked me how my account was still active and I said I had a cron job that readded me to the password file (which I did) for security reasons.
How we know is more important than what we know.
This reminds me of a George Carlin bit.
"Did you ever get a pink slip? I didn't. Usually a guy would come up to my desk and say, 'GET THE FUCK OUT! GET YOUR SHIT AND GET THE FUCK OUT!'"
Apparently, we don't even get that anymore.
... my department figured out we were being canned only after we got the next year's budget out of the company vice president's computer and discovered that our department wasn't listed on it.
I've been on the other side of this, and firing people really sucks. Over the last 12 years I've done it to three people for cause, and to three other people (at one shot) because of events beyond my control (reorganization).
There's no easy way to do it. On the reorg, it was done professionally and was completely out of my control. Laid-off people were met at the door when they arrived and escorted to their work areas where boxes had been set up for them to pack their things. Then they were escorted to a holding area where HR lectured them on their options. The rest of the employees were sent to a central meeting area where the layoff actions and reasons were explained.
On the cause side, I'm not proud of my first effort. The guy turned out to be incredibly strange. He interviewed well, but when he started work he didn't seem to understand instructions, and he couldn't communicate with the other employees. After a few weeks he became upset and sullen. Nobody could understand what he was upset about. He didn't seem to understand or to be able to follow verbal instructions. Finally I gave him written instructions on what to do one week, and reviewed his progress at the end of the week. There had been none. So I gently told him I would have to let him go. He did not seem to understand. I repeated this about 6 different ways, but he still didn't seem to understand. Finally after about 10 minutes of this I completely lost it and just yelled at him, "HERE IS A BOX. GO TO YOUR DESK. PACK UP YOUR THINGS. GET OUT. CALL HUMAN RESOURCES TOMORROW. GET OUT NOW. GO." This is literally true. It was as ugly as you could imagine. Everyone was horrified (although sympathetic).
The second two firings (done together) I handled better. I had taken over an Engineering organization for a turn-around effort. I gave everyone tasks, and most people responded really well with great original ideas and enthusiasm. Two guys didn't seem to "get it", though. A more experienced manager urged me to fire them immediately. He said that on a turn-around effort, the people that aren't willing to turn things around stand in the back with their hands up (figuratively), saying "Please fire me." But I didn't listen, and kept giving them more chances. Finally after two months it became clear that they simply couldn't (or wouldn't) do their jobs, and I had to fire them. I met with them individually, and explained that I couldn't keep them on because they had not been able to accomplish their objectives. It was unpleasant, but I felt that I had given them every chance possible, so I could look them in the eye without flinching. So I felt that I handled it OK from a human perspective. From a business perspective, though, I really hosed up my schedule by keeping them on the payroll, because all their work had to be tossed and re-done by others. I should have taken the advice of the more senior manager.
No matter which way you cut it, firing people is hard and ugly and messy. Also many managers are avoidant -- they don't *want* any contact with the people they are firing. I think the right thing to do is to go face to face, regardless of what happens. Even if the employees are angry, and they probably will be, at least they will respect you later for having the guts to talk to them mano a mano and explain in detail why they're being let go. And you can keep your self-respect too, for being honest.
Like anything else, one learns by doing. A lot of people become "managers" way before they're ready. It's not surprising that they fuck up the hiring/firing process -- where were they supposed to learn how to do it? Business school? Don't make me laugh.
So whats the Worst thing you did to get back at your former boss?
1. Run up the toll free 800 phone bill?
2. Remotely reboot the servers?
3. Post the radius passwords on usenet?
4. Cut the t1 on the side of the building?
5. Use a pin and poke the t1 cable (let them find the problem)
6. Take his/hers customers?
7. Become their boss?
8. Sleep with their spouse?
9. Spam the hell out of their private email accounts?
10. Subscribe them to every mailing list you can find? (root@ webmaster@ sales@ info@)
11. Sugar in the gas tank?
12. IRS?
13. 1-888-NOPIRACY
14. Post those drunken party pictures on yahoo personals?
"Lots of folks confuse bad management with destiny." -Kim Hubbard
One of the funniest ones I remember was when some dotcom wanted to announce their layoffs and invited their staff to a meeting at the balcony(!). Why choose such a venue is anybody's guess but this was a feeding ground for many crude and utterly funny jokes on FC.
Speaking from experience, employees sometimes have their security clearance (keycards, network login, etc) revoked before being informed of their termination to reduce the risk of retribution to the company.
Happened to me once, too. The company profit-sharing plan was keyed to the departmental expenses and I was highly paid and had just finished my latest project at the start of the last quarter approached. So the boss who had inherited me (third since I'd been hired) dumped me. I got my first hint when my PPP link didn't work when I tried to check mail before coming in. (It wasn't a security thing - they let me clean out my account and my desk unsupervised. It was just "the way things are done".)
After the end of the year said boss quit, along with the most of the remainder of his department, and started a new company (much to the annoyance and bottom-line damage to the OLD company). A couple months later he called me up and wanted me to consult for his new enterprise. After he'd surprise-fired me at the old shop and then hadn't invited me to be among the founders of the new? Fat chance!
At an auto company's engineering department a couple decades ago I saw what happened when two consultants come to blows. Security had them off the premesis inside of ten minutes. (Took that long because it was a BIG site.) They were permanently banned from the company and their desk contents were packed and shipped to 'em. You DON'T lay hands on co-workers in that industry.
Funniest one was the time Amdahl pulled the plug on Key Labs. Came in that morning to find a sign on the door: "Will build mainframes for food." (Amdahl let the people at Key keep their offices and email for a month or so while they job-hunted.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
In most states they owe you two weeks pay. I think they owe you a bit of warning (say half an hour), but there is no law that I know of that says that.
Nah, people just starting out may not make enough (I know I didn't). People with a family may not.
Being fired? Yeah, you should be able to see that well in advance. Getting layed off? Well if hte compony isn't public, there may be scant little chance that you know in advance.
If you can afford to save, it's a good idea. You may need it, could be lay offs, could be a family emergency, could be anything. But not everyine can afford to do it.
The worst part, though, is that one of the employees laid off was BLIND. Yes, BLIND. They fired a blind lady. She had worked for the company 13 years. Fired her dog, too.
She had text-to-speech software on her machine that was owned by her personally and had taken me quite a while to install. It had a floppy disk copy-protection scheme that required you to move the key back on to the disk when uninstalling it, so I had to go up to her desk and remove the key for her. They had called her a cab, but NO ONE was around to carry her things, which included a braille scanner (heavy as hell) and several boxes of books and papers. So it fell to me to go get a cart, load it with her stuff, and escort the blind woman and her dog outside and wait for her cab.
I'd like to say I went right back inside and quit on principle, but I waited two weeks so I could take all my vacation time and get my bonus.
--
PaxTech
All movements for social change begin as missions, evolve into businesses, and end up as rackets.
I thought I had heard of these guys - "Network Commerce, Inc" - recently.
They just acquired the domain registrar Registrars.com last week, per this press release.
According to Network Commerce chairman and CEO Dwayne Walker:
"We believe this is an important addition to our technology infrastructure business. We also believe this will be another avenue for expanding our database of registered customers."
Wonder what it'll do for their database of employees...
hire yourself without telling. There was a hysterical article in the New Yorker a while ago, about this guy who waltzed into a .com company, got past the security guard, and picked out a cubicle for himself. Over the next few days, he got himself setup with a phone extension and a computer, despite never being hired or knowing anyone. Acording to him, nobody there knew what was going on, and people showing up, and vanishing with no explaination was completely normal. He wasn't getting paid for his time there, but he got a productive setting to do his own work, and he got free food. The article sounded so bizzare that I wondered if it was true, but a week later I saw a small note in the paper, that the author of that article had been called to task, because he made up one encounter in the story, and he didn't disclose that his mother had previously been an employee of that company, so I assume the rest of it was true.
------ Work is so much easier when you don't
IIRC, Amazon still hasn't turned a profit and is still riding on the fact that it provides a really good service. But stockholders won't wait forever.
Yahoo is valued greater than GM, that bubble's gonna burst.
Ebay's starting to realize that people can circumvent them and deal directly with each other.
AOL is just so big, it ain't going nowhere.
CDNow, which I frequent as a customer is in big trouble from what I've heard.
So three out of these 4 companies are on potentially shaky ground, and even if they and other well-established businesses continue to succeed, for each success story there are a thousand failures.
A lot of those businesses that are pouring massive resources into a Web presence are going to learn the hard way that once the novelty wears off (and it hasn't yet), they might be saddled with an expensive operation that isn't paying off.
Companies are starting to run out the leeway they had from the buoyant market and are now facing the reality that ad revenue, upon which many, many content providers rely just isn't there.
I think the Internet bubble burst is just starting. Many will die, a few will survive. The stock market may tank more (at least the stocks... and there's the supposed Economic Slowdown (TM) looming).
The Internet won't go away, but how it works economically might change drastically in the next few years. I think it will be very interesting to see what happens. To paraphrase Terry Pratchett by way of the Chinese: We are living in interesting times.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.