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Ask Slashdot: Dealing With User Resignation From an IT Perspective?
New submitter recaptcha writes Today one of my fellow workers has announced he has found another job and will be leaving our company in two weeks' time. This is all above board and there is no disgruntled employee scenario here; he is simply working through his notice period and finishing up some jobs. I have already set some fileserver folders to Read-Only for him and taken a backup of his mailbox in case he empties it on the last day. Which best practices do you follow that will prevent a resigning user from causing any damage (deliberately or not) in these last days of employment before his account is disabled?
But first make a backup of his computer/files. Because a lot of what people call "personal" isn't. And a lot of what isn't personal they think is unimportant.
I've never had a particularly bad experience quitting jobs, and the more graceful employers have always left themselves in situations where they can call me up and ask if they need a particular file or piece of knowledge or hire me back on a short term basis to fix a problem.
One employer early in my career even pointed out that my workstation was slated for recycling when I was done with it and let me take it home. Somehow security didn't bat an eyelid when I signed that out and simultaneously handed over my termination documents and badge.
We had a person like that, everyone thought she just walked around the office batting her eyelashes to get out of doing work. Then she got let go and all hell broke loose because nobody had any idea she was monitoring logs and jobs for all kind of things through out the enterprise everyday fixing stalled jobs etc... not on her workstation but still. She liked to ask me questions and had me check some of them when she would go on leave so I had an idea we were screwed.
If he wanted to screw with stuff, the seeds are already planted and will go off after he's gone. And if he hasn't wanted to screw up stuff, don't give him a reason to regret that decision by treating him in a dick way.
This. I was given the option on a Tuesday at my last job - either I'm gone Friday, or if I agree I can spend the next 5 weeks paid documenting things and "training people" (who, 2 weeks later, turned into "my replacements" - me and a coworker both got laid off, we both took the 5 extra weeks - basically they laid off the two highest paid and hired in two people for less money).
I "sabotaged" nothing, documented what I could and held training sessions for the people the boss gave me as people to train. It's what's called "being professional", even in the face of being laid off. Even one of the people they brought to replace us said "I don't get it, you know all this stuff (heck we *built* most of it), why are they hiring us to replace you?"... (obviously the answer was "money"). They're apparently still dealing with problems with things that have popped up that nobody knows enough about, or 'migrations' to new servers that are having issues... that more than likely with almost a decade of working with them I'd have figured out by now, but c'est la vie. Experience costs, and a lot of what I learned about things was 'trial by fire', I always used to say that troubleshooting is a skill that's not necessarily "documentable" because every time it's different, and the more you know about how something works 'under the hood' the easier it gets.