I live in a constant state of fear and misery
And employers love keeping you in that state
“Why are my employees not respecting me? Why are they unproductive?”
“Maybe treat them with a modicum of respect?”
“Must be something in the water.”
“No, no it’s everyone else who’s the problem, not me!”
Don’t wait for a layoff, start organizing a union for that juicy ‘represented’ employment status (as opposed to at-will). Unions can’t stop layoffs, but they can minimize the impact, negotiate a higher severance, and provide advanced notice. I highly recommend the good folks at CODE-CWA, they specialize in organizing tech workers
My dad has been a server engineer for a single company for my entire life and he lived like this up until quite recently. His fear oscillates in magnitude with the success of the industry the company is a part of course so it isn’t always severe but I remember every few years as a kid I’d hear him and my mother murmering about lay offs. These days he just jokes about it being an early retirement
thank you for your input, sharkfucker420
Sharkfucker420 just knows what’s up.
rimjobsteve?
Yeah this post hit me different than was probably the intent. I’ve been expecting to get laid off for the past 6 months ago, initially it was fear, eventually it was desire. Didn’t happen though and I’ve since found a new job, but I would have welcomed it if it did.
My company has a 6 month probation period. It also has a 6 month password expiry. Because of all the SSO nonsense, it’s quite possible for it to lapse without warning.
It’s now a running joke that get locked out on the last day of probation, and you’re expecting a call from HR any minute.
You might want to let your IT department that 6 months is a really long time
Current IT best practice is that passwords should never expire on a set schedule, but they should expire if there is evidence they’ve been breached.
Legit, my old job required a 90-day change, and I once logged into a system I could do monetary damage on with ease, because I took a guess at my manager’s password based on how long it had been since he told it to me during an emergency.
He did what every single person I spoke to did. “password 01” changed to “password 02” and I just tried twice, and sure enough he had changed it three times since he had told me.
While I wouldn’t be ruining the company as a whole, I could have easily fucked over the individual location because scheduled password changes just ensure people use predictable passwords.
You might wanna read up on the most current NIST guidelines
I didn’t realize updating IA-5 was part of rev5. We haven’t gotten to the IA family yet in our rev5 hardening yet.
The current thinking as I understand it is expiry policies make most types of accounts less secure because users just cycle through the same predictable pattern of adding increasing numbers of exclamation points or incrementing the last digit at each required password change, and if you require new passwords to be too substantially dissimilar from x number of previous ones then users can’t remember them at all. Policies that make people use minimally complex passwords because they have too many to remember and don’t understand how password managers work inevitably increase password reuse between services and devices which does the opposite of improving security. Especially with MFA enforced, which I’ve been known to do as aggressively as I can get away with, there’s just no sense in requiring regular password resets – as long as the password remains complex, unique, and uncompromised. I’m not a network security expert but I am responsible for managing these sorts of things in my role and that’s the rationale I use for the group policies in a typical customer’s environment.
You’re supposed to have controls in place to prevent all of those concerns. I’m not saying passwords should be changed every 30 days, but 6 months is a long time.
But, companies with password expirations should be providing a password manager.
When is someone going to find a password but somehow be stopped because it expires in as many as six months? What is it mitigating?
I got canned from my last job and thr way I found out was my work Gmail was locked out, fuckin class acts them.
Getting fired from my current gig would be a relief tbh.
Im at a perfect equilibrium of indifference for being laid off. Some jobs suck.
same here
I haven’t been laid off since April. I haven’t had a job since then though, so that’s not exactly ideal.
I got my best IT Job off of Craigs list so don’t count out that option.
Upside: not fired.
Downside: have to do work.
Upside: make money
Downside: not enough money
The frogurt is also cursed
I live in a constant state of fear and misery
Do ya miss me anymore?
Glad someone noticed
AND I DON’T EVEN NOTICE WHEN IT HURTS ANYMORE
Just hit 5 months with no work. It’s been tough
Just hit 5 months with 3 works. It’s been tough.
Edit: not trying to mock your suffering comrade. The point was that no matter what happens while we live a capitalist way of life, the working class will suffer.
I went one year and six months. It was bad. I’m wishing you the best.
Out of interest, what do you do and where are you based? It’s a shitty place to work, but if you’re near an Amazon office and you do Amazony things I’m happy to send a reference your way.
I work in IT. We get notified when people leave.
The cruelest thing in my company is when we get to know before the person in question…
While WFH is amazing, your colleagues just going poof and never knowing what happened to them is a big downside.
The randomly fired 2 people on my team one morning. I think we’re doing the evil shit Amazon does with stack ranking. It’s so toxic. Fuck this place, you only get the bare minimum now. Anyone know of any software engineering unions?
I think someone mentioned CWA (Communication Workers of America) in another thread? Assuming you’re American which on Lemmy is statistically likely.
Anyone else see the back of the chair as the person’s hair in the first two panels?
Yes, it wasn’t until the third panel did I notice the arms of the chair and suddenly the person was bald
Could still be hair!
In third panel those are the person’s arms ;)
You just captured the daily life of a UK academic after the catastrophically low recruitment numbers this year.
Yeah same here in NL
I know the feeling. A few months ago I randomly got a video call from my boss. Both he and the owner of the company were in the line. They let me know that they unfortunately had to let go of almost everyone on the dev team. Some funding had fell through (gotta love startups). Fortunately, I got to keep my job that day, but I can’t shake the feeling that another layoff is right around the corner.
Don’t let that fear cow you into accepting marginal raises or career stagnation (assuming you’re not happy at your current level). Severance (outside the US) is usually generous enough to skate into your next opportunity and, tbh, working in constant fear is fucking awful for your mental health.
Would probably say in your contract if you have any sort of severance regardless of where you live? Or is there some sort of mandatory severance in some places?
In most of the developed world there is a mandatory level of severance (and companies can obviously exceed that if they want but the base amount is guaranteed). In BC it’s one week after three months (the probationary period) a second week after one year and then one additional week per year up to a maximum of eight weeks.
In most of the developed world
Ah, so not the USA then
Happy Cakeday! 🍰🎂
Merci beaucoup!
Most places in the US will have nothing about severance written down anywhere, but it’s very common to actually pay severance in a mass layoff situation (unless the whole business is going under).
The US has the WARN Act, which requires 60 days’ notice or 60 days’ pay if at least 500 employees or 33% of the workplace are getting laid off (whichever is smaller). It’s a threadbare legal minimum on severance, but there is a minimum.
Ah but I love in the US, so I’ll just continue in constant fear. On the bright side, those marginal raises go towards the hilariously high cost of therapy.
