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Employees Would Steal Data When Leaving a Job
An anonymous reader writes "Employees openly admit they would take company data, including customer data and product plans, when leaving a job. In response to a recent survey, 49% of US workers and 52% of British workers admitted they would take some form of company property with them when leaving a position: 29% (US) and 23% (UK) would take customer data, including contact information; 23% (US) and 22% (UK) would take electronic files; 15% (US) and 17% (UK) would take product information, including designs and plans; and 13% (US) and 22% (UK) would take small office supplies."
Escorting people out of the building and revoking their access privileges the second they get fired is actually warranted?
Emotions! In your brain!
That's actually pretty saddening. I would have hoped that people were more honest and trustworthy than that:(
"You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm." - S. G. Colette
To be honest I'm a little surprised that so few would take office supplies. I would expect that to account for at least 80% of those who would take anything. It's how I got my red Swingline stapler. I like it because it binds less.
ad astra per alia porci
... we are just getting even.
I've got a number of code libraries that migrate with me, but that's about it. Most of it I've opensourced at various times anyway. Far as I'm concerned, that sort of thing belongs to me in the first place.
Usually works out to their advantage: I had a guy contact me about some python code (my name is always in the header, along with my permanent email), and it turned out I was still using it, and had updated it enough to fix the problems that he was having with it. I was trying to figure out how he'd gotten his hands on such an old version when the email address registered.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I think it would greatly depend upon the circumstances in which one is leaving.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
51% of the US workers are liars and 48% of the British worker lie. Therefore, British workers are 3% more trustworthy.
Leaving on my own? I'd take nothing except my paycheck.
Fired and I deserved it? A few pens. Pack of paper.
Fired and I didn't deserve it? I'd GIVE them a lawsuit.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Arrest 49% of the employees that leave the company?
I don't take data, but I did take the source code when I left my last role for my personal use. I've been told that taking samples of your work isn't a crime but I honestly don't believe that.
I also had to update some of our systems to prevent employees that were about to made redundant from having further access. Kind of sucked when you got to find out who was leaving before they did, especially if they sat directly opposite you like happened in one case.
I just want my stapler back... The new ones aren't as good as the swinglines.
The obvious, interesting follow-up question is, how many of them would sell, share, or otherwise exploit that data? Would they take measures to protect it, or simply misplace it? I figure at least some of that's got to be people who don't see the point in deleting that sly backup they made so they could work on their reports at home, or whatever, and those are people who don't represent a threat to company security. "Stealing" data itself causes the company no harm. Using the customer list to set up one's own business, losing that data on the bus, or selling on some trade secrets, is where the concern lies.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Just what we need, more ammo to put multi-year non-competition agreements on employees.
I live where that one really big business used to be, what was it called... Apple hated them... IBM or something I think. =P I've seen thousands of jobs slashed here in my time, and a lot of those people walked out the door with a clause behind them stating they couldn't even begin to work in the industry again for at least a year.
A year is a long, long, long time for your typical family to drop from working wages to unemployment.
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
I would not take any data; but I would like this chair though. Plus It would be nice to get a seat on the underground on the way home.
Saying you will consider committing data or property theft in a survey is one thing, but actually doing it when push comes to shove, is different.
How do you steal data if you copied it? Goes back to the whole MPAA thing with music.
I think it's all about what you can use in the future. If I do a number of excel sheets which are used for layout optimization, and take copies for reference later, is that wrong? How about my outlook contacts which might come in handy later? I think if it's purely business between you and the company, then keep it clean (with the exceptions I used above). If it's ugly, still keep it clean as possible, but don't do them any favors.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
Some employers will recruit staff who can bring a long list of contacts from their last company. It's not what you know but who you know and all that.
That proportion seems a little high for say, IT workers, who'd probably have little use for customer data outside the job they're in, but I could imagine sales staff however being more likely to do such a thing because having a good network of contacts can be a major benefit when moving into other jobs as a salesman- especially if you're on performance related pay and need to hit sales targets, there is quite high financial motive there for it.
Also from another point of view, it's possibly a good indicator of job satifcation, if staff are pissed off at work then they're going to have less loyalty to the company which will in turn leave them less worried about feeling guilty for doing that sort of thing. In many cases, companies probably bear some responsibility in creating this mindset by treating, or allowing their staff to be treated like shit and making them want to get the fuck out of the company and with a vengeance too.
This is what happens when companies are disloyal to their employees. The employees become disloyal to the company. If the executives would stop being greedy, arrogant shithead; stop fattening their pockets at the expense of the company, the shareholders, and the employees; and treating employees like expendable resources instead of people, this would not be a problem. But, they are psychopathic assholes, so it is going to continue.
"according to Harris Interactive."
If this is the same "Harris Interactive" that spams me 100x per week with polls to gather personally identifiable information from me for marketing purposes, then I'd say the "study" is probably bunk.
At my severance interview, the boss told me that the really good pens were on the top shelf.
Have gnu, will travel.
I only wish I had taken more when my previous employer closed its doors. I wrote some really amazingly cool little shell scripts for various systems administration and code deployment tasks that I neglected to grab copies of. I had to re-invent a few wheels over the past four years due to that short-sightedness.
Samples of my own code - heck yeah, company secrets or customer data? no way!
Office stuff? Only the crap I brought in with me: my 24" monitor, a couple mice and keyboards and my hella sweet phone headset. (stuff I brought in myself cuz I couldn't justify them well enough to my boss, but I really felt my work life was better having.)
The Digital Sorceress
I can't imagine that anyone planning to leave their company wouldn't start siphoning off data weeks or months in advance. To combat that, my DBA tracks queries over a certain number of records that match particular criteria - namely client/customer info. She then keeps a log of those queries for a couple months to see if there's a pattern. That way we'll know if when a person leaves if they've been taking data.
I knew a man who played the system quite well when leaving a job. He gave three months notice on his resignation letter, and they immediately revoked his access and escorted him from the building, but had to keep paying him for the three months.
This signature is a waste of 42 characters
Bosses admit that they expect employees to do more work for the same amount of pay.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
These numbers are really only relevant if we also know how many people steal when: * Leaving the company voluntarily. * Leaving the company voluntarily as asked (by new employer) to take information. * Not leaving at all. * Not leaving at all and offered compensation by a 3rd party to take the data.
we issue expensive highly industry specific reports behind a login on our website
i did an audit after some unusual login activity, and noticed a completely unrelated transgression: we boneheadedly forgot to remove an ex-employee's login, and he was systematically downloading all of these reports. tying the geolocated ip address of his login with the access times in the web log, we could see he used his new employer's computer and his home computer to go through folder after folder, and download thousands of documents, one after the other. i could tell he was actually doing this manually rather than some screen scraper, because the download times were too variable, and included obvious 15 minute coffee breaks. took him days
we did some snooping of our own, and it turns out he got a job in journalism, and was passing these reports off as his own research. so we contacted his new employer, and disclosed the plagiarism. i think he's an ex-journalist now
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"Employees openly admit they would take company data, including customer data and product plans, when leaving a job. In response to a recent survey, 49% of US workers and 52% of British workers admitted they would take some form of company property with them when leaving a position: 29% (US) and 23% (UK) would take customer data, including contact information; 23% (US) and 22% (UK) would take electronic files; 15% (US) and 17% (UK) would take product information, including designs and plans; and 13% (US) and 22% (UK) would take small office supplies."
I wonder if this is the children of the digital generation that sees nothing wrong with illegal copyright infringement? Glad to see they grew up and became trustworthy adults.
Yeah, I can see the getting even with office supplies. "They may have demanded 100 hour weeks, treated me like dirt, and spat me out on the street the second I started showing the slightest signs of burnout, but I got a pen with their logo and 100 sheets of A4 paper! Take that, corporate oppressors! They're probably already regretting the day they decided to fire me!"
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This should come as no surprise. Gone are the days of loyalty and working for one company till you die. What's it been replaced with? Companies that cut you at the drop of a hat while executives collect huge bonuses for "restructuring prowess". I can't say I blame employees for acting cut-throat or unethically.
When I get sacked, I plan to grab all the doughnuts I can and run out of the building screaming incoherently.
/* MAGIC THEATRE
ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYBODY
MADMEN ONLY */
If I were a tech company owner I'd worry more about off-shored employees taking code/secrets with them. I know a contractor company that is now developing a competing product to something our vendor hired them to write in the first place. So our vendor basically paid them to develop the skills and domain knowledge they would need to build this thing, got a so-so quality product from them, and soon they will have a new competitor. Note: I don't know any of the legal issues involved. Seems like there should have been a non-compete clause in there somewhere, but either it's being ignored or it was never there in the first place.
Does this imply that people are rotten, or that the relationship between employer and employee is adversarial?
Maybe things have changed, or maybe I am coming to realize the reality that has always been. My perception is that there used to be a non-adversarial relationship between employer and employee. I think that has changed. I think you see it in every annual review, which resembles little so much as pulling teeth. The middle manager is pitted against the employee by the upper management basing the middle manager's compensation on how little he can get the employees to stick around for.
Smaller businesses have been getting driven out by the efficiencies-of-scale corps, so there are fewer and fewer jobs where the top guy is the one who talks directly to employees. I would wager it is easier to tell a middle manager to be adversarial than it is to be adversarial yourself. (hmm, tangent; which also hints at one of the natural forces of wealth concentration)
Anyway -- are people rotten, or are they responding to what I see as a shift in corporate culture? Corporate culture is bringing adversarial behavior within its walls. Perhaps it is only natural for that training to affect people's behavioral patterns. Or at least their sense of loyalty.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
It's because companies frequently let their normal employees treat IT staff in ways that are fireable offenses if done to the rest of the company. Call them up, foaming at the mouth screaming because the email server is down, for example. Or God forbid that an in-house developer has a few bugs in their app.
My wife is an in-house developer at a large company. I can't even begin to count the number of times she and her group have been savagely attacked by users who are so fucking stupid that they literally freeze up if a single new button appears in the UI.
The dirty little trend I've noticed is that 9 times out of 10, the people who attack her are non-technical female employees. Most men don't dare attack a female developer at that level, especially not one who is competent (the second worst fury, aside from a scorned woman, is HR coming to the aid of a woman like that against a bombastic man). Male developers also often don't hesitate to humiliate users who treat them like that.
Part of my weekly routine is to make an offsite backup of all important data, mine or otherwise.
If I am walked out the door I still have everything.
all these confessions are being back traced by the CYBER POLICE !!1!
If a business treats its employees as human beings with respect, it will (generally) get respect in return.
If a business shows its employees that they are worthless, replaceable drones who may be dumped at any convenient time, then no, the business won't get any courtesy or respect in return.
It's not the sort of thing that shows up on a goddamn balance sheet, and I'm sick of so many larger firms moving ever more toward 'management by accountant' than actually making human decisions based on the long range view of the value of people.
Probably it's been a complaint forever, but it seems that decisions are based more and more on the bottom line THIS year, THIS quarter, THIS month. Those are decisions that are invariably hurtful to employees, generally at lower staff levels.
Much of it is market driven - I've worked for my company for 18 years, and I saw it coming when we went public 7 or 8 years ago. What do we get out of this, aside from capital (which we didn't need) and a giant quiet bump to our top execs' compensation (since then they would have stock options, etc.)? In exchange, we whore our business for the share price, making decisions that can only be understood as logical if one genuinely believes there will BE NO TOMORROW. Incomprehensible.
Want your employees to treat your data with confidentiality and respect? Then treat the PEOPLE with respect, pay them reasonably well, and above all treat them like humans. Then, if they ultimately depart, they may make the moral decision that you've treated them fairly and that while they could screw you, they are at least slightly more likely not to.
-Styopa
How could you leave a company and not take a lot of the data with you? ???
He's too boring. I might steal Lore, though.
Or maybe Tasha Yar. MmMmmMmMMmmmmmm Tasha Yar.... auuruhghglglglgllll
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
If you are laid off from your employer, how are non-compete agreements enforceable at all? I am suspicious of your claim that people who had their "jobs slashed" would still be under a non-compete of anykind.
It's like unemployment. You don't just automatically get unemployment if you are out of work. If you are terminated for cause, then you get no unemployment. If you quit on your own, you get no unemployment. However, if you are laid off, then you will qualify for unemployment.
Non-compete agreements have the same basic legal structure. You can't be held to a non-compete if your employer lays you off as a normal part of downsizing. You may very well be held to a non-compete if you are fired for cause and/or quit on your own.
The distinction is subtle, but important in the eyes of the law.
At a guess, I'd say the reason employees might take customer data is to maintain relations with their old customers if they go freelance. I doubt most people would take personal customer info to do evil. Sure, there's no doubt some would sell it to spam.com, but I don't think they are the majority.
Over 10 different jobs and 20 years ...
I've taken everything that I worked on only once; that was all the software, source code, code libraries, tools, everything needed to build the software client, server and data server for all 6 platforms that we built and supported. I took it for nostalgic reasons, but planned to use some of the tools on "home" projects. Never did, but I have looked at the code 3 times in the last 12 years since leaving that job. It wasn't too useful.
I also took libraries and code from another job - Visix Galaxy rocked - for about 7 platforms (Win32, Solaris, Alpha, Mac, HP-UX, SGI, and Solaris-x86), but my home x86 machine wasn't powerful enough to run it. Now, I'd just use Qt to accomplish the same things. Never used it and Visix died once Java was released and became stable around 1996.
Other jobs were so specialized that taking anything would have been pointless. I do wish I could get a copy of some nose wheel steering code that I wrote in 1990, however. It would be fun to look at, but completely useless to have since there's no chance I'd have the hardware or even a simulator to run it.
I did have a job that was 2 years of completely wasted time. While the company thought I did a great job, I had nothing - ZERO - to prove that. I had ZERO deliverables and just attended meetings and sent emails to people all over the company on architecture and security decisions. I did get 1 thing implemented, but it was removed less than a month after I left - deemed to difficult for end users. That company was violating so many server software licenses it wasn't funny. They were fully compliant on desktops and audited those all the time. It was a publishing company. You'd think that THEY would understand copyright infringement, right? Anyway, I took nothing from that job and consider it a waste of 2 years of my life - at least the pay was good (2x my prior salary).
At the last job, the company was extremely good at IT Governance and I wish that I'd taken all their IT Policy and Security Policy documents, but I did not. The Security team really did a fantastic job of covering almost anything related to network, computer, device, mobile, wifi, cellular, physical access and auditing requirements. Don't know that I'd use it, but since getting to a new job and being responsible for "workable IT policies", those docs would be nice to have as a reference. My new IT policy document is only 10 pages and only talks about what end users must do. We make all end users, including the CEO, sign a contract that they will follow it and that ignorance is no excuse.
I don't expect to ever work at another company again in my life, so I think I'm done. At this point, stealing from the company is stealing from myself.
It was a good stapler... it was a red Swingline
Fired and I didn't deserve it? I'd GIVE them a lawsuit.
Employers can always find a reason for just cause for termination - always.
Ever wonder why performance reviews are fucking ridiculous and you can never meet all of your "benchmarks"?
And I can tell you this, even if you win the lawsuit after years of litigation and subsequently being unemployed because of it, you will at most get a couple of years of salary (most going for attorney's fees) and you will be forever unemployable because there's a database that tracks that kind of stuff. I asked my biz law instructor (employment lawyer in Atlanta).
It's the same for hiring - they can always find a reason not to hire you.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Are always going to boast. Anything to put fear to the man.
"It's a doughnut stuffed with M&M's. That way when you finish the doughnut, you don't have to eat any M&M's."
I know a guy who did the same thing and was fired on the spot. He was escorted out and paid only through the end of the day. I was the one who fired him.
I don't know why that company would have to keep paying your friend. Once you offer up the fact that you plan to resign, the company is under no obligation to do anything else for you. In fact, they could have just as easily said "no" and fired him right there and then (like most employers will do).
Please, please, please do not follow the parent's advice on this. In almost all cases, it will not turn out well for you. I speak with authority because I am an employer and have dealt with this very issue recently. Attorneys were involved, counsel was sought, etc, etc. I am not talking out of my ass on this one.
Anytime anyone has ever done a study looking at how morally upright people really are, then answer has *always* been "not very."
We delude ourselves into thinking our neighbors are nobler than they are....because....wouldn't it be nice if they were?
But they are not. Nobody is. Morality is difficult, and if we don't keep each other in check, evil will run rampant.
As a related aside, I think that the RIAA (et al) is justified in their presumption that their clients are criminals. Most of them are. Of course, so are the RIAA. The more useful question question is not "how do we stop the crimes on both sides?" but rather "which form of crime is more evil?"
Personally, I think taking freedom away from everyone in the world by forcing them all to pretend that an abundant good is non-abundant is a more harmful crime than copying non-personally-identifying data.
Yep, exactly .... What these surveys DON'T collect is information on WHY individuals felt entitled to, or at least ok with walking out with company information or property.
You don't see 49% of American workers openly stealing property from their neighbors or other people they do business with, right? (If you did, you'd have practically every other person in line at the store getting arrested for shoplifting!)
In my current job position, I'm privy to quite a bit of company "proprietary information" and I have no interest in taking/keeping a bit of it. (Among other things, I wouldn't even really know what to do with it if I had it. I don't work for an I.T. related firm, though I'm in I.T. Their information and customer data is worthless to me, personally.) But I do remember working for a PC service place once before where I *did* hang onto a bunch of customer records. Why? Because after making every effort to work with the owner and his struggling business, he turned on me, falsely deciding I was "out to get him/sabotage his business", and quit sending me service calls with no warning or explanation. (To this day, I never really got a satisfactory answer to what was going on ... I was able to put together some of the pieces, though. I *think* what happened is his receptionist/office assistant decided she needed references or leads for a new job, so she started going through his customer lists to find contact info for people she knew would say positive things about her. The owner came in that night and saw his stuff had been gone through, so he assumed it was me, planning on stealing all of his customers.)
At that point? I realized I still had the opportunity to hang onto a lot of his customer data because he had left it up on a web site calendar/scheduler application and not locked me out or deleted it yet - so I downloaded it and started soliciting the people directly. He threatened a lawsuit with a boilerplate letter from his attorney, but they didn't have a leg to stand on, because I never even signed a non-disclosure or non-compete agreement with them when I worked there! In the end, he decided to ditch his business and get a full-time job elsewhere, and many of his former customers were very pleased to know I was still around, because I was the one doing 90% of the service calls to them in the first place.
I would be cautious about this survey. The headline says "steal" but the article says "take," and those are different things. I get the feeling that this survey might be intended to find a particular result.
Here is a real world example from my experience.
I leave a company position at company X after some years, in a friendly fashion. I have a good friend who is an executive at one of company X's channel partners. Is his work contact information company X property ? What about his home contact info ? I have used company X pens in my pocket and used note pads in my briefcase and some training materials at my house. If they don't ask for this stuff at the exit interview, it is taking to keep it, but is it stealing to keep it ? If they have sent me emails and files at home (to my home email account), and nobody asks about this at the exit interview, is it stealing to keep it ?
If you work a long time at any place, there will be many corner cases / judgement calls. I have returned stuff that was not asked for, and honestly not been able to find stuff that was asked for. There always seems to be a bunch of stuff that the company doesn't care at all about. I get to know most of the people I deal with personally and could contact them even if my address book was shredded. So, if I was asked, "did I take this or that" I might answer yes, without in the least feeling that anything was stolen.
Don't talk out of your ass bro. Like all employment law it varies heavily from state to state and country to country.
I've gigabytes of code, specifications and test data on my personal machine at home. Why? Because I often do work at night in my home office. When I leave, I'm not going to go out of my way to delete all that... There are confidentiality agreements and intellectual property agreements in place, which I signed. I wouldn't be an asshat and publish all their stuff, and risk the lawsuit that would likely follow, even if they fired me. But, as I said, I'm not going to go out of my way to delete the code.
I always end up with some pens of highlighters from any company I had left or been laid off from, but one place I was a contract employee at the owner would CONSTANTLY steel my pens. They were pens I brought in myself and after about 15 to 20 went MIA I had enough. I told him to stop taking them, as I had purchased them with my money and they were the nice gel pens which are not the cheapest ones. So he went out and got some pens for the office as a "sorry I took all your pens, I can't find them but here are these". What did he get? The cheapest BIC pens. The white with the black cap that you can get 20 for $3.
So I thought all would be well and brought in more of my personal gel pens. The guy continued to steel my pens and when I confronted him about it while he was writing with one of my pens, he denied it and said the pen he had he bought. Funny thing is I sometimes scratch my fingernail on the side of the pens I use and it had the scratch on it. I told him such and he still denied it. Needless to say I worked for him till the contract was up and told him I was don't working for a person as unprofessional as him (the pens were only the tip of the iceberg and a sign of how much of a cheap ass the guy really was)
The funny thing was the guy was using pirated software and had EPA violations, both of which I reported. He chose his battles poorly and ended up with EPA violation fines and had to purchase legal version of the software.
Yeah, when my short tenure at an interesting company ended, I took a bunch of stuff. Full backups of the primary and development systems, tons of code,
All of it on the express advice of the exiting CFO. He seemed to think I might be able to use it to get my last 4 paychecks cashed. Never did, but when the owner showed up somewhere else trying to make the system work, I got a call from his tech guy asking if I had any of the old code, and would I be willing to send it over. Hell, yeah, I was happy to send it. I even offered the tapes. All I needed in advance was the pay I was stiffed on. After his tech guy got all huffy, proclaiming that his boss 'wasn't that sort of a person', I told him to have the boss call me. What an earful.
Turns out, he had a mega-deal going with a really recognizable firm, all he had to do was deliver on short notice this system so they could go out and start signing subscribers. And I had the code base to fix it, since he only got an out-of-date copy of the system before he left, literally in the middle of the night. I told him I wanted my missing pay. He would send a check right out, all I had to do was email him the code. I said no, pay in full, and reminded him I stuck around to make it possible for him to have anything at all.
Never heard from him again. His mega-deal sputtered. The mega-company sputtered, and is not in the U.S. any more. You can occasionally buy their hardware on eBay, but the card to make it work is pretty much impossible to find. I have no doubt my old boss landed on is feet, last I heard he was making progress rebuilding a company and well on his way to another meltdown. But he kept the houses, cars, boats, and lost his wife. Ack.
I've still got the tapes and all, but they are useless to me. And I won't go out and scrounge a DLT drive just to relive a painful memory.
My boss before and after that? I left with nothing. But I got paid.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Usually businesses will offer permanence and hope of higher position and wages in the future in order to get unusual amounts of effort from employees. Imagine hiring someone and telling them the truth. That truth usually being that the employee will be dismissed and that the job has no potential and no future at all. So turn about is fair play. If the employee only steals from the company they are actually lucky. Many employees are thinking rope and a tree for the management on the way out. Pay them in promises. Pay them in recognition. But never,ever pay them with money!!!
Employers get all the loyalty they give. I don't understand why, when employees have spent decades telling employees "you don't have a job for life" that employees have realised that this means that they owe no loyalty to their employers.
And when many employers treat their (ex) employees training as personal property and demand non-compete terms or include any sodding thing as "their" information, that the employee doesn't care what the employer thinks is their stuff when they leave?
If you did, you'd have practically every other person in line at the store getting arrested for shoplifting!)
That's a singularly odd shoplifting technique -- the Queue!
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
Why would you want to discourage your employees from giving notice? Unless the guy right out states that he intends to slack off, as an employer it's only to your advantage to get an early heads-up that you will need to hire a replacement.
Despite your attempt to rationalize it I stll think what you did was wrong. That business owner shelled out a lot of money to start a business and find customers, then he was nice enough to hire you to service those customers. To stab him in the back and steal his customers after you were fired is wrong, even if you didn't deserve to be fired.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
I take KNOWLEDGE with me har har har.
I would take with me what I have in my head. The rest is mostly stuff I could rebuild faster bigger better at the next employer if they need it and I get the chance.
I know a guy who did the same thing and was fired on the spot. He was escorted out and paid only through the end of the day. I was the one who fired him.
You apparently didn't see any value in having him around to tie up loose ends, pass information on to his successor, etc.
Was that because the nature of the job was such that there wasn't information in his head that the company needed, or because you screwed up?
Attorneys were involved, counsel was sought, etc, etc. I am not talking out of my ass on this one.
Sounds like it backfired on you. If you had to pay an attorney, it would have been cheaper to keep the guy on for a while longer, and just watch him to make sure he was actually doing his job.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
now HR is cutting IT over the boss?
wow that seems dumber then having a non tech IT boss.
Your post is a glowing example as to why you never give two weeks notice. Simply wait until Friday at 4:30pm and let your employer know this will be your last day, and start your next gig on Monday.
Depends on the contract. Some contracts require that the employee be given, and give, X months notice before the end of employment. the only permissible exceptions are certain kinds of gross misconduct, which would have to be proven in a tribunal if you disputed it. (FWIW, this is in the UK, where such contract terms are mandatory.)
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
It's almost impossible to enforce contracts against companies that you'd offshore to (unless they have a US presence, and even then it's hardly feasible). The lesson? Don't offshore if you want the legal framework of your country to protect you.
That is a very good point - in many cases, "customer information" is personal contact information that the worker has built up through his own time and investment. in many cases, the first thing the person is likely to do at their new job is call up their old customers and say "hey, I'm working for X-Corp now, would you be interested in switching firms to continue to work with me." Since many customers are choosing their business based more on the individual agent than on the corporate structure, they'll switch.
Technically, that information belongs to the company, but many people don't consider it unethical to keep it.
As for pens, I think that has more to do with the weird way we look at value. Few people think twice about stealing a couple pens out of the supply room, but would never steal a dollar from the office every time they came in.
What are the consequences of taking things home beyond the actual legal consequences, if any?
If I were considering hiring you and I found out you took proprietary information home, I would be much more concerned with your motivation and your actual loyalty to your previous employer than I would be whether it broke your previous employer's company policy. If your motivation wasn't to hurt your past employer and you had reasonable loyalty to him at the time and you continue to have the reasonable loyalty that I would expect from an ex-employee then I would likely not count your take-home against you. If you were or are disloyal then I would worry you might be disloyal to me and I would likely not hire you.
Of course, if you worked in an industry like national defense, I would expect you to never take company data home without explicit permission.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
How unethical is it if all of the data was created by you? I don't think this company would still exist if it weren't for my contributions.
You ask a legit question. It all depends on whether you want that employee around. For employees "in good standing", it's not a problem to keep them around and I appreciate the heads up. In response, I will often give an extra week of pay as a tradeoff for the help they provide during transition.
It is all dependent on risk/reward. Sometimes it's better to keep people around for transition reasons....and sometimes it's better to get them out as quickly as possible so they don't poison everything else.
In our particular situation, firing on the spot was appropriate.
Seems dumb to take the data and risk someone finding it missing, than simply make a copy of it so that the company wouldn't find anything missing. But that's just me.
You apparently didn't see any value in having him around to tie up loose ends, pass information on to his successor, etc.
Correct.
Was that because the nature of the job was such that there wasn't information in his head that the company needed, or because you screwed up?
It was a sales position so I suppose it's the first one you mention. Sales is a very easy game to score, with respect to employee performance. Yes, we will take a minor hit getting the new guy up and running but that's a small price to pay in the overall scheme of things.
Sounds like it backfired on you.
Not sure why you would say that. We always consult attorneys in situations like this because I want to know what the law actually states and how it is interpreted. While I understand where your comment comes from, attorneys are not all that expensive when compared to the severance. Maybe $1000 for the attorney and around $10K for the employee. That's money well spent in my mind.
...all the money in the bank account and assets and has constructed an alibi that "the Maquiladora" took it, then that is what?
This is just an extension of stealing from the company. People can bitch about the office supplies and customer info, but there is a lot of stealing that goes on with the executives and shareholder/partners.
Ben there for 40 years and seen it all. No answer to it other than vigilance and pre-worked out plans and the deliberate attempt to treat people nicely and fairly.
If you DO NOT treat people fairly, don't expect your back to not have the scars and stitch marks.
More importantly, you could draw unemployment which affects your employer if they decide to fire you
You are not eligible for unemployment if you were fired for cause. If you were laid off, you would be correct. However, if you are fired....you can not "stick it" to your employer by filing for unemployment. It doesn't work that way.
Talk about not ending well. But then I said "That was well-done sir!" and he was so amused that he put his pinky up to his lips and gave me an evil laugh.
Believe me! I was there! That guy has like a Doctorate in Evil! Don't mess with any employers ever!
-- How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics.
so your anecdote translates to most employers? shut up idiot
You don't think there's more scrutiny on the person walking out without buying anything versus the person leaving with a shopping cart full of bagged and paid for stuff?
I know when I walk out empty handed at a lot of places, their little old lady at the door will ask me if I needed help finding anything.
Sometimes I want a reference. Generally you don't do that if you want one (and have had an amicable relationship with your coworkers/supervisors).
I speak with authority because I am an employer and have dealt with this very issue recently. Attorneys were involved, counsel was sought, etc, etc. I am not talking out of my ass on this one.
In which jurisdiction?
(as most everything else, laws dealing with such things vary from country to country and from state to state)
Insurance. Those three months salary may be chump change compared to what might happen if the new guy can't perform the same job as the old guy you just fired. Critical system goes down, some job can't be completed, or there is some obscure but important bit of knowledge that wasn't transfered are all cases where it might pay to keep the guy on salary so you can call him in, as he is still on salary, and get him to tell the new guy how it's done. I used to do technical support for Adobe (Pagemaker and Photoshop), and I would get about one call a week from some manager at a print shop who had a guy who had been fired or laid off. Not only did they not know how to operate the programs needed to finish "this project that MUST be printed TODAY", but they often didn't even know which file it was on the computer they needed to print. My official technical advise to them was the beg the guy they had just fired to come back because he is the only one who could probably help them. The notice is often a courtesy to the company to give them time to hire a new person to fill the position and transfer knowledge. Things often aren't documented and if they are it's usually in a manner only the writer really understands well. Some hiring processes can take months to find the right candidate and bring them up to speed.
You are part of the problem, jackass.
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
I have taken from all companies I worked for, a copy of certain software's that I worked on, specifically due to the nature of the coding. If ever there was an implication later on, I could prove that the records I have with the dates show exactly what was what when I left, and nothing can be said to be me, but having been added after I have left. This is usually the case when dealing with accounting software where legal issues can come up much later in life and come back to haunt you. I have signed a disclosure form for each company so I know that I am not stealing and that I am under obligation not to share the code, so all in all, it is ok for these exact purposes, but it depends individually on each person's contract with their company, what is allowed and what is not.
Why would you fire immediately? I put in a letter of resignation with about 2 monthes before I planned to leave. I did it as a courtesy. They told a co-worker and I we were too important to be allowed to take vacation (not why I left, its was more my boss breaking things (i.e. unplugging the network cable from the DHCP server) at 2,3,4,5am and then calling me, a single father at the time, in to fix them). I figured if I was too important to take vacation, I would give them a bit of time to try and figure out a plan for working without me.
About a year before I left, I told them I was planning on looking for a new job. THey were playing some BS games about paying me which a lawyer said was completely illegal, I asked for some help from my boss in dealing with them, and when he refused I said it would make me reconsider my position.
You're not talking out of your ass, and yet someone modded you troll instead of informative. Welcome to Slashdot.
1st mistake is calling it stealing. It is a copy, if it was stolen then the employer would be missing something and would be asking for it back.
It may or may not cause harm but what can you expect when you purposely try to blur work and home to get extra free labor from employees and blur the distinction between friend/family and work to also take advantage of employees? Employees are not going to respond to all that quite the same if work would just stay in its role in their lives.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Sorry, but it's a two-way street. The employer stabbed him in the back, so he stabbed right back. Self-defense is always moral.
As for being "nice enough to hire you", that's bullshit. Employment is a two-way street. The employer needs the employee just as much as the reverse. If not, then don't hire anyone and do it all yourself.
I don't think there's a path that's always right in every situation. I left my previous job because I was entirely underwhelmed with the management and the quality of work that resulted from the chaos there, and I certainly didn't feel like I owed my boss anything. But I gave plenty of notice and spent that time transitioning my responsibilities to other people in a somewhat controlled manner. I was willing to do this not for the benefit of my boss, or the company, or our clients, but mostly for the benefit of my coworkers, many of whom I became friends with during my years at the company, and who were already stressed enough without having my work dumped on them suddenly one day.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
I once worked for a company in the New Product Development Group for a company that provided materials for the semiconductor industry. A new top management team came in and decided to get rid of that unit. You can guess what happened - the stock price went from ~$15 to $0.60 within a year as the company lost business to its competitors. I didn't take anything with me but that gained through my experience there. Once and a while I get a call from an engineer or product manager about my input on some problem. I just tell them that my consulting fee is $250/hour in 6 minute units. They now can't afford me!
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
Most people I know don't start "stealing" from their companies unless they feel they are being wronged in someway. Generally this is due to excessive forced overtime (the company "stealing" the employee's time), making up for expenses they didn't feel they should have to pay out of pocket (IE for office supplies not on the approved list, having to go to a meeting or a convention far from the office without being reimbursed for the extra travel cost), etc.
And by stealing, there are many ways to steal- expensing cabs when you are heading home instead of to a client, ordering dinner before the 9:00 time or whatever company policy says you can, walking out with a pen in your pocket or jotting down a personal note is in the strictest sense, "stealing."
I don't know anyone who has admitted to taking something tangible of significant value for their own personal use- IE a computer/laptop, phone, office furniture or equipment, though I am sure it happens. Intellectual property theft I feel is quite overblown. I don't really know of any firms where you can take any non-trivial amount of code from company A and install it and run it at company B without taking so much time to adapt it to their systems that they probably could have written it from the ground up to begin with.
Man are you an asshole.
It was worse than that; you're leaving out an important part. Mr. Mustafa didn't die right away, and kept moaning loudly and disrupting the meeting, so the boss had to call one of his minions to go finish the guy off.
Not sure why you would say that. We always consult attorneys in situations like this because I want to know what the law actually states and how it is interpreted. While I understand where your comment comes from, attorneys are not all that expensive when compared to the severance. Maybe $1000 for the attorney and around $10K for the employee. That's money well spent in my mind.
Your company doesn't have attorneys on staff?
To stab him in the back and steal his customers after you were fired is wrong, even if you didn't deserve to be fired.
That's not wrong, that's capitalism, baby.
After companies doing everything they can possibly do to fuck their employees they have the gall to complain about getting fucked back? Screw them.
if you fire him, he will earn more money than just by resign. At least in my country (Argentina).
Once you offer up the fact that you plan to resign, the company is under no obligation to do anything else for you. In fact, they could have just as easily said "no" and fired him right there and then (like most employers will do).
Please, please, please do not follow the parent's advice on this. In almost all cases, it will not turn out well for you. I speak with authority because I am an employer and have dealt with this very issue recently. Attorneys were involved, counsel was sought, etc, etc. I am not talking out of my ass on this one.
First, if you are not talking out of your ass, you ought to advise the job holders to get the advice of an employment attorney in their jurisdiction. Right? Also, what happens if you say you plan to retire in 3 years when you turn 65? In 10 years? In 20 years? At what point does an intention to stop working in the future justify immediate dismissal? This is not simply an "at will" issue as unemployment insurance and other compensation mechanisms the employee often pays for are in play.
As others have pointed out, you treat this 3-months-notice type will dictate how all employees will act in the futre. Game theory is a bitch, man.
My personal opinion is that repeated stories of corporate management supersalaries and superbonuses, even when there is no logical reason has worn away the ethics of many corporate employees. Rather than an attitude that we are all working together towards common goals, many now feel that it is OK to go for as much as you can get for yourself, and the company, the public and ethics be damned.
At the last job I had in England, UK. My contact said three months notice period (applies to both side!!!). So, if I give my notice period, and they no longer want me on the premises, they will have to keep paying for the notice period - that's the contract. Off course, I am also, legally, not allowed to start another job.
**Z
Well, this is a very 'company-centric' view, by the looks of it. Think about what 'company data' is.
Say you're a salesperson for an electronics retailer. Someone comes in and wants to buy, oh, a TV. You give that person fantastic service they're happy with, they buy a TV, they love it. They come back the next week a buy a camera. Then some other stuff. Every time they come and search you out because you gave them such great service, and they feel happy dealing with you. Finally, you leave the job. On leaving, you take their phone number out of the company system and give them a call and say 'hey, just wanted to let you know I'm not working at Big Electronics Store any more, but if you need any help with all that stuff you bought from me, just give me a call on this number!'
I suspect, according to the terms of this survey, that would be 'taking company data'. But is it wrong? The customer was dealing with _you_ as much as, or more than, they were dealing with Big Electronics Store. I'd see this more as a sad indictment of the victory of the very American philosophy of the supremacy of the corporate entity over the personal relationship, myself.
(no, this is not a thinly-veiled version of my life. I've never worked as a salesperson, actually. Just a hypothetical.)
"on staff" doesn't mean they work for free. If you know attorneys who work for free, please send their number.
All I took were some pens, which having chewed on them, I didn't think anyone else would want. Yes, I know it is nasty habit.
Yes, it does mean that. "On staff" means they're paid a salary to be there every day, whether they're actually doing work or twiddling their thumbs.
Unless you've seriously overloaded your on-staff lawyers (meaning you need to hire more), then it shouldn't be that big a deal to get them to spend a little time researching an issue.
Of course, most companies these days seem to prefer to understaff themselves to save money and then whine about how they're "understaffed", so that would probably explain why your company is so badly managed that an on-staff lawyer can't spend a couple hours researching an important issue and you need to pay extra to outsource the work.
I agree with everything you said except, "Nice enough to hire you."
Hiring me isn't a favor. I'm not your loser cousin who can't hold down a job because of his drinking problem. I'm a skilled and experienced professional, and I goddamn well will be treated like one.
The last time someone told me I should suck up a bad situation because I was, "Lucky to have a job" I quit. On the spot.
Within 3 months he was offering me a 10% raise, and 3 months after that his replacement was offering me 20%.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I do keep a copy of my email. However, it's in Outlook's exported email format. I run Linux at home. So I have all this email but I can't access it!
"Escorting people out of the building and revoking their access privileges the second they get fired is actually warranted?"
The answer to that question cannot be determined by this survey. The poll was unscientific (conducted online) and as a result its results are meaningless. Even if it was conducted in a proper manner, the questions are not reported nor do we have any idea of the actual group of people it covers. In other words, it is an epic fail. Unless of course you want to promote an agenda or get page hits, then it is an epic win.
he turned on me, falsely deciding I was "out to get him/sabotage his business"
*snip*
so I downloaded it and started soliciting the people directly
*snicker*
Guess he was right but for the wrong reasons
But notices have no legal meaning in the workplace. You can send all the notices you want and they have no legal muscle until you actually leave or the employer "accepts" your offer of resignation under whatever terms you all agreed to.
Just saying "I will leave in 2 weeks" has no legal meaning unless the company responds with "ok, we accept and agree to pay you for the two weeks you plan to work". Until the employer accepts all you have done is advertise that you no longer want to work there. If the employer does not accept, you still retain the right to walk out the door and quit right then and there.
Employment law does not prevent them from firing you on the spot and it does not prevent them from rejecting the terms of your resignation (ie: I work for 2 more weeks, you pay me 2 weeks pay). There is no legal requirement for an employer to "accept" your resignation and the terms you dictate.
If there was a legal requirement for employers, I'd just say I am resigning effective Feb 2022 and you Mr employer have to pay me until then.
Curious...
Would you please disclose what company you work for, so I know not to apply there ever? Or at least not to give them the professional courtesy of two weeks or more notice? Clearly they don't deserve it...
No, we don't. Is that a serious question? Most companies don't have attorneys on staff. The only people in business who would want attorneys around all the time are other attorneys...
They don't? My 1800-person company has lawyers on staff (1 or 2). Any moderate-sized company or larger will have lawyers on staff, sometimes a whole department. It's a lot cheaper than constantly contracting out for legal services.
Customer information only 'technically' belongs to the company if it's written in the contract.
If an employer hires a representative, who cultivates a list of clients and uses them to the companys benefit, Then you need to figure out if the company is a) employing someone who can bring them in money through whatever method (gettign contacts to provide custom, in this instance) or if they are hiring a person, and getting contacts themselves, and having the employeee manage the company's contacts.
I think you'll find there are a lot of potential employees who are valued because of their contacts and their possible custom from these contacts,
This is why people who have/can get a lot of contacts are usually the ones who are kept in employment. The ones who don't aren't hired or who can't get them aren't kept on.
Of course, an employee taking a list of the companys contacts, especially when that employee had nothing to do with aquiring said contacts is potentially stealing, but this is not always the case.
"lt;dr" is the correct response to most of my posts.
Ok, now I get where you are coming from....
We are nowhere near 1800 ppl. Try 25. That's why we keep a firm on retainer for advice. That's a much cheaper option than keeping a 6-figure attorney on staff. My god, just the thought of having an attorney on staff makes me shudder!
In my line of work, attorneys are the sales stoppage department.
at every company I've ever worked at. Not that I care, but we're allowed to remember stuff, what's the difference if I keep my notes?
I still remember one particularly scummy bunch (the company was originally okay: it got infiltrated by a dirtbag executive who hired all his friends and ran the place into the ground) who decided to be a software company without the expense of a development staff. They called a year or so later telling us that our product needed a Win7 update (they were still selling it online, with no tech support) but they'd lost the source code and did we have a copy we could polish up for a commission?
Even if I had trusted them to pay anything, I would have been afraid to admit I had a copy: given their management, they might have been trolling for someone to sue.
Sorry, I didn't realize your company was that small. For that size, just having one on retainer certainly makes the most sense. I'm used to working at much larger companies.
the company I was working for suddenly got paranoid and started cracking down on carrying floppies onto company property because of a network viral infection incident widely believed to be the fault of somebody at C-level.
I brought in a QIC-40 tape cartridge identical to what the company was using for server backup. By mistake, I used the same format for my own desktop backup, I'd bought a cart the night before and forgot to take it out of my backpack when I got home the night before.
The temptation to do an unauthorized backup quickly passed when I realized my employer had nothing worth stealing... their technology was useless even for its intended purpose (including making money, the company folded a few months later), and anyone buying the product was probably an idiot.
I was there because I REALLY needed the money.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Well, if you work for assholes like tacokill, you simply stop showing up. Don't even bother with the notice.
Depends on what country you're from/what kind of employment agreement you have.
In Australia, it is unlawful to not pay an employee if they have given appropriate notice of their intent to leave. (I think gross misconduct may overrule that last part, but am unsure).
I have always been confused about US employment agreements, or lack thereof. It seems to be mostly about lawsuits after you're fired. Here, you can appeal to Fair Work authorities in a documented and controlled fashion that costs the employee little or nothing.
How does one steal or take data ? After all, it's probably going to be a copy and the company will still retain their copy so that haven't really lost anything, have they ? You simply pirated it away. We know all data wants to be free, so how could there be any harm, right ? So long as it's for personal use and you share it without any monetary gain for yourself, you haven't really done anything wrong, right ?
In Russia, the copyright issue is a tad complicated. The "Author's Rights" are divided into two classes: "Substantial rights" and "Non-substantial rights". The first category comprises the rights that have something to do with producing physical objects or using them, e.g. the right to make copies, restrict making thereof, extract profit, etc. The second group comprises the rights that cannot be taken away, sold or transfered, as the right to be and to openly name yourself as the author of your work.
Now, the copyright for work-for-hire code belongs to the company, but the "right to be an author" belongs to the programmer, which makes him or her entitled to having a copy of the work in question for one's own private purposes.
Thus if after being fired you take a copy of your code with you for private reference, or for taking pleasure in reviewing your work, or whatever else of such kind, it's legit in Russia.
Why not just sit it out and take the two weeks pay? Isn't that a lot of loot? If they restrict you from doing regular work for that time, big deal! Goof off, post on slashdot, play some games, read a book, do some of your own coding stuff..whatever.
Money is money. And also, you have stuck to YOUR word in that case, you offered two weeks, and stayed there, it is their fault and loss if they don't want you to do legit work during that time. Now actual *abuse* is a different story, but even then, document the abuse (short of physical I mean, and if that occurs you can go right to the cops) for the full two weeks, then let a lawyer take a glance at what you have. It might turn out to be quite lucrative.
Keep the moral and ethical high ground, and get paid to do it.
I know a guy who did the same thing and was fired on the spot. He was escorted out and paid only through the end of the day. I was the one who fired him.
let me guess, he wasn't able to get unemployment because he was quitting? if that was the case, going postal would be perfectly justified imo.
While there are employees who do violate the trust of their employer, it is far more likely the employer violates the trust of the employees by:
I'm aware of no case in which an employee theft erased the value of the product made for the company, or even the profit on the product. Most US companies make around a *half million dollars* per year, per employee.
Think about that. A company paying 10 or 20 cents on the dollar for labor will try to squeeze out an additional 15 to 30 hours of work beyond the standard 40 hours per week. They'll discontinue benefits because they consume a mere half percent or less of the revenue made by an employee. They'll freeze cost of living increases (less than 1.1% of the gross) because, "Times are tough".
I'm sorry, but almost never does an employee steal more than a few thousand dollars from their employer. It is always the other way around - companies treat employees like cattle, sequestering billions of dollars in their corporate coffers as while denying basic things like health care and living wages to their employees.
Employers are almost *never* the victims.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
"As for being "nice enough to hire you", that's bullshit."
Maybe in bizarro world, but here in reality there's dozens of applicants for a single job, not the other way around, unless you're some famous superstar and everyone wants you. So yes he was "nice enough to hire you", because he had dozens of other people he could have hired instead of you.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Duh, it depends upon:
- your contract
- the laws in your jurisdiction
-josh
What people say they would do and what they end up doing can be very different things.
I disagree. I think self-defense is always justifiable, but that doesn't mean it's moral. Besides that, stabbing someone in the back in return for a previous stabbing is not self-defense, but revenge.
Being paid a salary is actually quite different from working for free.
Right, and how many of those would have actually worked out, instead of being flakes, being incomptent (because they lied on their resumes), etc.? Employers typically go to significant lengths to find people that can actually perform, because lots of those dozens of applicants you mention can't.
Yes, but it also means you have someone on-hand to handle short, high-priority tasks, and you don't have to pay any more for it than you've already budgeted. If you've built enough slack into your scheduling, it shouldn't affect your timetables much either.
I see a lot of posts here talking about 2 weeks notice or immediate exit, but in my last 2 roles, I've been on a 3 month notice period. In the last one, I was required to work that 3 months, and fortunately my new employer was still happy to hire me, knowing about this.
That isn't an uncommon notice period here in the UK these days, and I can't see how you'd have someone come in every day for 3 months with no access.
You have to hire people that you trust, otherwise they could be ripping you off at any time, not just on the way out the door.
Ahhh, America, land of shit employment laws.
Thankfully I think most of the world likes to prevent employers from screwing over their employees like that, and vice versa mind you. At least here in NZ, firing on the spot will get you into court very quickly where you will be severely punished for your disregard of the rights of the employee.
NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
I probably wouldn't take any data with me... but they better have a full backup somewhere because destroying a shitload of work is basically only ONE click on ONE button mehehehe
only on /. would the same post be Insightful one day and Flamebait the next ;)
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
I think Employee will always complain that Employer exploited him unless he is made shareholder of the company.
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
"and how many of those would have actually worked out,"
And who said this guy did? He was fired for a reason, and in this case it's because his boss thought he was stealing clients. He had to do something to make his boss believe he would steal clients... and *shock* he did hang on to a bunch of clients and started soliciting them after he was fired.
Guess his boss was right for firing him after all.
I am a "boss" and we do surveys of our customers to see if anyone's soliciting. If someone is I immediately dismiss them but never tell them why, because I don't know if he's soliciting 1 or 20 and I don't want him retaliating against the customer (some people go crazy after getting fired).
Maybe that's what happened in this case, boss got feedback that this guy was soliciting so he was fired and now he feels justified stealing customers because he was fired. He was still wrong for stealing customers.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Actually, it sounds like I should step back in here and clarify this a bit.
First off, the employer in question was already winding down his business before the whole "someone took my clients!" thing came up. He announced to us he was no longer paying for the office space he had been leasing, and he was going back to "running the business out of the basement of his house, like it was when he first started it". Right then, I knew that meant his office assistant was losing her job, so I asked what this meant for me? That's when I was assured that he'd "continue to send me jobs, like before - except he'd just call me on the phone to tell me where to go for each one" and I didn't need to come into an office first, anymore.
Within only a few DAYS of him ceasing to live up to his promise (and again, remember, I was never officially "fired" .... just left hanging, waiting for my phone to ring until I realized he wasn't really going to call me anymore), I had a couple of his customers calling ME on my cellphone, because they couldn't reach the owner and needed computer service. They dug around until they got my cell number.
I just don't see any way to construe my actions as "wrong" under these circumstances. On the contrary, if I had just ignored the whole situation and started looking for a different job - how many people who relied on us for computer support would I have inconvenienced? Sure, they could hire some competitor -- but then they'd get people unfamiliar with their systems and software, who they'd be paying for their time to get up to speed on it again. And how would any of it been fair to me, personally, either? I gave 110% for this company for several years, because I really wanted it to succeed. I really ENJOYED doing on-site work and cared about the customer-base. I had no interest in trying to do it all alone, especially since he already had a great corporate logo, invested in Yellow Pages advertising, and had some parts inventory in stock that I would have had to buy out-of-pocket if I did it by myself. But after being back-stabbed for something I didn't do and putting me in that position? I think it was fully justifiable.
Unless you mostly agree with him, you're basically saying that the 8% of unemployed Americans are incompetants, flakes and liars.
I've hired for plenty of positions, and a fairly typical response level would be 40-50 applicants, half of which can be discarded at the resume level immediately. The rest of the resumes get deeper scrutiny, so maybe a dozen or so applicants get the phone call to discuss whether it's in both our interests for them to come in for an interview. Half a dozen interviewees get the technical interview, and if more than one stands out, there'll be a second interview with more of an emphasis on team integration.
Employers do indeed go to great lengths to find the right employee, but in so many ways there are plenty of other people who could have been offered the job without the world ceasing to turn.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
"First off, the employer in question was already winding down his business before the whole "someone took my clients!" thing came up."
Then you didn't steal anything since the business was out-of-business.
that was an important part of your story that probably should have been included.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Jobseeker Trick #143: You're usually smart enough to steer prospective employers only to references who are going to provide an excellent reference. I'd never provide a reference contact for myself who wasn't going to say I was a great employee.
Unless you mostly agree with him, you're basically saying that the 8% of unemployed Americans are incompetants, flakes and liars.
Incompetency isn't a binary trait (is or is not). It's relative to the job.
Personally, I'm incompetent at being an astronaut, mainly because I've never trained for it. I'm also incompetent at being a hairdresser (and have no interest in gaining competency at it). However, I'm quite competent as an embedded software engineer (at least I like to think so; my employer hasn't fired me yet so I guess they think so too).
Lots of people apply for jobs they're not competent for. That doesn't mean they can't do any job, it just means they're trying to move up, or into a job they think they want. It could just be there aren't any openings for their expertise and they're getting desperate and applying for whatever they can get without resorting to becoming a greeter at Wal-Mart. Sometimes it even works out, if the employer is desperate, they may give the guy a chance and he might be able to figure it out as he goes.
Pardon my English, but I think that is the best way yo put it.
I work only 9 to 5 and everybody knows it.
Out of hours work? Fine. How much are you going to pay me to do it or how are you going to compensate me for it?
Bonus? You must be joking, I may not be here by the bonus time.
Somebdoy shouts at me? I say in no uncertain terms I will not talk to that person until he/she comes down, and I will report it to the respective company arbiter if such behaviour happens again.
Geeks: grow a pair.