Before You Fire the Company Geek

An anonymous reader writes "A new 'insider threat' survey by the US Secret Service and Carnegie Mellon University finds that 82 percent of people who hack their company 'exhibited unusual behavior in the workplace prior to carrying out their activities.' A somewhat amusing writeup at washingtonpost.com points to a bunch of more interesting gems hidden deep in the study, including: 'Almost all - 96 pecent - of the insiders were men, and 30 percent of them had previously been arrested, including arrests for violent offenses (18 percent), alcohol or drug-related offenses (11 percent), and non-financial-fraud related theft offenses (11 percent).' The blog post also notes that 86 percent held technical positions at the companies: '...if you're going to fire someone (particularly company geeks who have the motive, means and access to inflict pain on your computer systems) make double sure you cut off their e-mail and network access at the same time you hand them their walking papers.'

Comments

you don't even have to be suspicious

[yagu]

I guess I get it as far as policy goes, but I experienced this a year ago from a large corporation when I got laid off... My manager came to my desk and did the perp walk with me to the office. Told me that in the interest of cutting cough costs the company was willing to offer me a one year severance package and let me go.

I said, "You're offering me a one year severance package???" He looked confused, but said, "yes".

I said, "Well then I respectfully decline your offer.... I would like to continue working for this company."

He said, "It's not optional."

I said, "Then you're not offering anything to me, you are doing something to me."

A couple of notes about the treatment therein:

• By the time I got back to my desk, all access was gone to all systems, man they're fast!
• The one year package turned out to be 60 days pay (required by the federal WARN law), then one month's pay for every year I'd put in.... with a 10 month maximum. I had 21 years, so I got ten months pay plus the sixty days... I consider that a ten month package.
• I found it interesting that any others with ten years, eleven years, twelve years, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, and twenty years all also got the same package as mine.... so much for any extra benefits for being a long time and loyal employee.
• No information as to who else was gone was given, and those who would still talk to me (funny how one laid off somehow develops a quick case of leprosy) had no information internally who was laid off -- they could only tell by seeing around them -- no lists were dispersed.
• Those who may have had info would not give it (a bit of a pain since I no longer had access to directories, phone numbers, etc.) making the process of setting up contacts for references nigh impossible (turned out, my entire management hierarchy was gone... and I never did find out where they all went).
• I had a few years left for qualifying for full retirement.

In my career at this company I had received the highest award given by the company and was flown to a special ceremony to present my project and receive that award.

Bottom line here: you don't have to be a criminal, act like a criminal, or even be suspected of being a criminal to be treated like one....

Re:you don't even have to be suspicious

[yagu]

it makes sense to get rid of the highest paid people. If you've been there for 10 years, not only are you normally get paid more then other people, you also get more time off, and require more severance pay. Since getting rid of one high paid employee can in a lot of cases fund two lower paid ones, it also doesn't look as bad to the public.

What you are describing is evil.... what's more, it is illegal. Companies today pay millions to their legal staff to ensure when they do lay off that their numbers will pass legal muster, but that's about all they do. It's well documented (I can cite the research, ahem, and have done some on my own) how difficult it is to prove age discrimination, but plain and simple, this is what it is. And, it is still illegal.

Re:Apologies to Tyler Durden...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're stupid enough to get caught, you're not earning your reputation anyway.

Coincidence

[Praetorian42]

That's quite coincidental. The company I work for fired a sys admin last week for drug abuse, and we are at this very second combatting a DoS attack from him. He's also using our servers to route spam to all over the place hoping to get our servers listed on spam blacklists so that we can't use corporate mail.

Re:Don't ask, don't tell

[MindStalker]

There is a difference between Reference and Previous Employment. Essentially when they call your previous Employer all they can ask is "Did they work here?"
When they call your references they can get good or bad information.

Re:Further down in the report...

[ichin4]

It's often called the prosecutor's fallacy. Just google for it.

It involves confusing the odds of A, given B, with the odds of B, given A.

Employment "at will" in the US

[dereference]

Companies are required BY LAW to give severance pay and/or notice when laying off employees.

In the US this is not true, at least as a general statement. Under the doctrine of At-will employment you can be fired at any time for (almost) any reason.

Re:Further down in the report...

[SatanicPuppy]

It's the "Fallacy of Affirming the Consequent"

Basically, it's whenever you have a one way relation (A->B) and you turn it around to say (B->A), implying that A and B are logically equivalent when it isn't the case.

Good argument, btw.

Re:Further down in the report...

[redrhino]

um ... we statisticians call this fallacy "confusion of the inverse".

Re:These number mean nothing

[wfberg]

For those clamoring for stats:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0818/p02s01-usju.htm l

If current trends continue, it means that a black male in the United States would have about a 1 in 3 chance of going to prison during his lifetime. For a Hispanic male, it's 1 in 6; for a white male, 1 in 17. ..
An estimated 4,299,000 former prisoners are still alive..By 2010, the number of American residents in prison or with prison experience is expected to jump to 7.7 million, or 3.4 percent of all adults, according to the new report.

And that's probably just people who went to prison; that doesn't include people who were only fined for a felony and/or received a suspended sentence and/or did community service, and perhaps even excludes people who went to jail rather than prison.

Not 1-in-5, but even for white males, uncomfortably close.

Re: planes, automobiles.

[123abc987]

Here's a really old chart with real statistics. It says that going to work is way more dangerous than flying in airplanes OR crashing your car.