Posted on 03/23/2023 9:07:26 AM PDT by where's_the_Outrage?
With regard to the ethics of such retribution, it's not news that all your work as an employee or contractor is the intellectual property of the employer. If you execute a career-breaking temper tantrum for your misfortune, expect to be un-hirable in your future choice of jobs.
The story itself is a pom-pom shaking, rah-rah exercise in woke victimhood. Those mean, mean employers. How dare they.
Told them to check in the overhead storage where they would find a ring binder that would give them step by step instructions. Yes, the binder was labeled.
One thing to consider is that the employee might not have been a programmer in IT. The description of what he developed sounds like a custom process developed in MS Access or some other software used in the business side of the office.
It also sounds like a custom application developed in house of something that might be available in shrinkwrap or download form, but it's "missing a main component that is important to us because our place is unique with special needs that are not on the market."
Which is usually not true, but management often forgets the payroll cost and opportunity cost of having a worker develop something custom instead of paying for a developed commercial software product. Then the developer leaves and in a few years something breaks and nobody knows how to fix it.
Companies don’t inform you you’re going to be fired in two weeks so finish up any pending projects, etc. you’re working on before we terminate you in two weeks. That’s not how it works.
If you’ve seen the movie “Margin Call” there’s a great scene that walks through when Stanley Tucci’s character gets let go. Especially the condescension of the two women doing his exit interview.
“Sounds like he just Empedocles himself for a lawsuit. They paid him for his work. The company owned the product. He destroyed the product. He owes them for said destroyed product.”
Yup. All work done for a company belongs to the company, unless otherwise specified.
This is why a lot of companies just escort you out the door and don’t give you two weeks.
Layoffs generally, in my experience are you go into the office, told you are gone and escorted out.
A few years ago my wife was working for a Japanese company in town. One of the guys came to her and said that they were letting him go and he was very concerned because he said they can’t do without me. He said they literally cannot do without me.
My wife smiled and said don’t worry about it. Give them a little time and they’ll be calling you up to come to do that same work as a contractor. Sure enough two weeks later the company called him and he charged them something like $100 an hour. I think it went on for several months, he said he made about $90,000 laughed all the way to the bank
A major company I used to work for gave us 90 days.
Then that is the extent of the business deal - I agree to perform work for an agreed-on price, I do that work, and they pay me the fee. THAT'S the end of it.
What am I missing here?
(I worked for one company for 17 years, got laid off - and present company for 25 years - I did what they asked me to do, and they paid me the money we had agreed on.)
“In that time, I removed every program I’d created for them and put them back on their outdated, original program,” he wrote.
So, backup is not a thing?
If the company can't recover from that, they've got bigger problems.
I had a funny. I was leaving this company, and was working on an application that my manager had originally written. A bug was found, and I explained what the bug was, and how I was going to fix it to my manager. He told me I was wrong, and to fix it a different way. I did as he said, but I also put the CORRECT fix in place, but commented it out, and left a message. “Larry says the fix for this issue is in the block at line 42. It’s not. It’s actually here. Remove that block above, and uncomment this block to fix it.”. Saved the changes, checked it in. A couple of months later I ran into my former manager, he said “I found your message.” Yeah? “Yeah, you were right. Sorry about that.” :-D
This would be a crime, and the idiot went public.
Anyone that sabotages their employer, regardless of the reasons, should be prosecuted and jailed. There should be zero tolerance. Definitely needs to be identified when applying to new work.
Rare anymore... because of things like what this guy has done.
And there goes the 2 week notice courtesy if this is the answer.
LOL.
That's how it happened to me during my two layoffs from engineering companies. And one of my previous managers still called me for help for quite a while afterwards (which I did provide).
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