alt Hacker NewsTerminating access and rotating passwords (if needed) while the person is in the meeting but has not yet found out they are being let go has been SOP for at least the last 20 years
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I experienced that once. The parent and the parent's parent company were from the USA. The top CEO and CTO came over and fired everyone. My laptop was controlling a job that had to run pretty long on a 16 core server, but I did as asked: I shut down the laptop and left it on my desk. That was at least $50k down the drain.
The reason they fired the whole dept. was that they were going to centralize development, as they had 200 other developers. After 5 years, they still hadn't developed a new product. Then they bought a competitor and rebranded it. The old product had to be kept running for years after. I guess they finally switched all their clients, because the web sites now open with <!--eslint-disable @angular-eslint/template/prefer-self-closing-tags-->. Who puts that in their HTML?
My first task at my last job was removing access to an employee being let go. I had just gone through onboarding so I knew every (documented) service we needed to handle. We live tested it on my own accounts, measured the time before I noticed, and then proceeded to successfully go through the checklist.
Except not everything was properly documented, and it turned out the employee had given admin rights on some resources to a contractor which proceeded to wreak havoc on their behalf (the 'rm -rf' kind). Eh!
Amateurs. My employer does mass layoffs by terminating access to everything except their email account at 3am, and then sending an email to the victim saying “you were let go at 3am”. Managers get to figure out who’s left on their team by pinging everyone when they learn about it at work.
Though you'd want to make sure there's no essential information that only this employee knows, because that action might terminate that employee's desire to cooperate with the company.
There's the classic article by Matt Ringel and Tom Limoncelli back from 1999:
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa99/full_papers/ringe...
I've turned off my own access at least three times when being let go from different jobs
Heh, a place where I worked some guy who left kept committing code for months (he went to work for a company we were a vendor for). Some of my teammates knew and just thought it was no big deal, he was fixing bugs and adding features.
The color the director turned when he found out!! Oh man.