One of our well respected product owners was always so very busy, with back to back meetings when working in office. Then we started WFH and all figured out she was a Costanza - all those meetings were her way of looking important, while everyone routed work around her.

On the other hand, some of our more neurodivergent engineers benefited from the rigidity of sitting at a desk where they are too afraid to pick up their Switch and just game.

Swings and roundabouts.

So to my point, this isn’t a story about a bad programmer, it’s a story about a person who is truly so disabled that they can’t program.

Otherwise? Totally agree. The worst developers are the ones that make everything they touch that much worse merely by virtue of touching it. I’ll take dead weight, “go write a bunch of printf’s and accomplish nothing” over them any day.

I think the basic decision was "a 2021 MacBook is now worth less due to deprecation than the time it'd take HR/legal to figure this all out, so screw it and let's mark it disposed for $0"

Towards the end of their severance time, Infosec will run a remote wipe so if their endpoint ever connects to Wifi it'll get nuked. They tend to wait a bit to ensure there's not something on the laptop that needs to be recovered for the company – or the employee says they had some critical personal things on it. Either way the only way they get it back is by sending it back and letting the Helpdesk pull the data.

Worst case, an employee doesn't send stuff back and we write it off. It's really not a big deal. Mandatory FDE + device wipes when a laptop comes online means any data is protected, which is 100% of what we're concerned about. No one cares if an employee gets a "free" MacBook that's a few years old.

For those who were fired, infosec ran a script during the CEO call to pull their access packages for production systems, crank the data-loss protection systems on their laptops up to high, boot them from Slack, and prevent them from sending & receiving emails to non-HR folks. After their "fired" email they received an invite to talk with HR to provide updated contact information. Then infosec pushed a new password to their account & force shutdown their workstation.

If it sounds brutal, it was. But the layoffs I was involved at a previous company were handled much differently, more traditionally: CEO announcement at 9am, and then you spent the rest of the day agonizing and waiting if you're going to get a :15 private calendar invite from your manager titled "Employment", or if you'd make it to the end of the day with no news (good news!). I'd almost argue that moving fast was more merciful than this, but that's easy for me because I wasn't fired either time.

First, if you are truly the linchpin, you’re likely working over/above your position. So make the case that you are a rank N employee doing N+1 work.

Alternatively, try the market adjustment route: you are doing more than your role, and you’re already being underpaid for that role.

As a manager IDGAF about these typical asks for raises. It’s part of the job. What I do care about is the “pay me +X or I leave” games - those suck to deal with and are often a card you can play once.

But while we are all worried about job security, things are extra tight for employers right now: if I lose one of my employees, it’s very likely that I’d face an uphill fight to hire someone to replace them because my boss / her boss would claim that as a win for their budget. So you do have some room to maneuver here.

Don’t sleep on this.

In 2008 I had a few friends go back for higher education rather than stay at/take low quality jobs. They graduated with additional debt, but also with credentials that accelerated their job search and earnings during the recovery.

If your personal situation allows it, it’s a good idea to consider.

You probably don’t need to be concerned: they’re unlikely to show, so you’ll just get summary judgement.

http://wikiwho.ailef.tech/page/11014515

They appear as “PEO STAMIS” here, which appears to be an IT group?

HSMs are hardened against individual bad actors. Their threat model envisages the presence of nation state actors.

Is it possible that an HSM attack happened here? I wouldn’t bet on it.

I will say that it reflects very positively for Shopify: I can imagine plenty of companies downplaying the issue or trying to duck the payout by saying “not our code!” In that sense, this is one of the few bug bounty posts that leaves a company looking good.

And their parents generation had over serialized plays on the radio.

And several generations removed, the panic over the printing press.