Has this happened to you?

Among other things, I was in charge of on and offboarding and buying IT gear. HR basically told me if the employee won’t return the laptop we just have to suck it up. I may be misremembering, but legally speaking, we gave them the gear, no matter what paperwork they signed. And in no case would it pay to so much as begin legal action.

And no, we don’t want the monitors. Just not worse the hassle and shipping.

Nope, just got an email in my personal inbox and immediately cut off from everything

Lol got caught with her hand in the cookie jar?

Just horrible. When I had to deal with people that I had to lay off or fire because they weren’t working out I would calmly sit down with them and say, “we need to work together on an exit plan for you”. I would then try to use my contacts to get them hooked up some place else and always give them a good recommendation.

Mine was just a zoom invite texted to me with just my boss, but I figured the jig was up when I couldn’t log into my work laptop.

Most competent companies lock down laptops so that even if they didn’t return them, it would be a useless brick

Yep. The invite was sent at nighttime the previous day so I didn’t even show up for it. Manager had to ping me on slack to get me into the meeting to get laid off while I was still in bed slowly waking up that morning.

And I was so completely done with that company that I just broke out in laughter as soon as the call ended. Couldn’t have worked out better for me.

It needs to be illegal to fire people who aren’t doing a bad job in the US like they do in civilized countries

That’s because you suffer the deadly condition of caring about the well being of others.

None of the companies I have worked with do that. What we do instead is we disable their login, and we also make sure that the PC is encrypted, so that if they do not return it, they will, of course, have to pay us for it, and then they can wipe it and reinstall and do whatever they want to do with the physical hardware.

Most people just return the hardware. Actually, now that I think about it, I think only once did we have an issue with getting the hardware back and we had still ended up with the hardware back after like a nine month delay.

Montana is cool at least, in this regard. Only state that does not have At Will employment.

That doesn’t sound very shareholder-minded of you. /s

“not a team player”

Ours wouldn’t brick the laptops, but we do have software on them that let’s us remote wipe them. They will do that if they dont get the device back in a timely manner.

Just in case it comes up later, since I assist in purchasing for the company I work for, what software is it?

My friend, who works as a license renewal and hiring manager at a large tech security firm, once shared something interesting with me. He said that when hiring under his company’s DEI standards, he sometimes had to bring on someone who wasn’t the strongest candidate for the role. The goal was to meet diversity requirements, but the tradeoff was that it occasionally meant hiring someone less qualified.

According to him, if a hire brought in under those standards didn’t perform well, it could be harder for the company to let that person go. The emphasis on maintaining diversity created extra pressure to hold on, even when performance wasn’t where it needed to be. That situation, understandably, can affect the rest of the team.

Personally, I don’t have anything against DEI. In fact, I think it helps reduce nepotism, which is a positive. But I also don’t think DEI always works out the way people imagine it will. Like many policies, it has both benefits and downsides.

The reason I bring this up is because I think it’s a slippery slope when governments start drawing hard lines about who can and cannot be fired. At the end of the day, what tends to matter most is whether someone makes the company money.

Take my friend as an example again: he’s only required to bring in $250,000 each quarter, but he actually brings in around $4 million. Because of that, he has survived multiple layoffs and has even been moved to different departments, simply because his performance makes him too valuable to lose.

There’s all kinds of options like Microsoft Intune to corporate antivirus + data protection solutions

Probation period is commonly 6 months during which time it’s basically at will employment. This is the time to figure out your hire and deal with it.

Do you mean she got caught stealing? No. Just stupid startup bosses having to fire half their staff because they had to fly Europe to New York like every two weeks and buy new macbooks when they left theirs at the airport, among other things.

My (small) company got acquired by a massive West coast tech giant and six months later all the employees (but not the executives and managers) of the original small company were laid off. This was not even remotely surprising to me, and would not have been even if any of us had been given any work to do during that six months. When my boss told me I was being laid off, I laughed and said “of course I am” which surprised him as apparently everybody else was massively shocked and upset. Which surprised me as I don’t see how anybody could have possibly not seen it coming.

All things considered, this company was actually slightly decent about it, as they gave us two months’ notice and severance equal to about what we would have been able to get from unemployment. The severance disqualified us from unemployment, but at least we got the amount up front and we didn’t have to spend six months pretending to look for work.