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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
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.
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
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?
"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.
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 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
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
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.
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?