Twitter begs some staff to come back, says they were laid off accidentally In a sign that laying off half the company may not have been the best idea, "dozens" of Twitter employees given notice on Friday were reportedly asked to return over the weekend. While the move will only bring back a tiny portion of the nearly 3,700 people believed to have been axed following Elon Musk's acquisition of the app …
1. You've given me notice of termination.
2. You retract your notice of termination.
3. It's up to me whether or not I accept you retracting your notice.
4. If I don't accept, you pay me all the compensation I'm due.
5. Then we'll talk about you rehiring me, but only if I want to be rehired.
This is UK law, but YMMV in the land of the free and the home of indentured servitude.
When put on gardening leave the usual thing is you're on leave for the rest of your notice period, i.e. it's linked to your notice (especially the way Twitter did it, i.e you're fired, your account is deleted, and your badge doesn't work), and the employee could argue that revoking gardening leave requires the company to revoke notice of termination as well.
There is also the possibility, at least in the UK, of suing the employer if they put you on gardening leave for not having a gardening leave clause in the contract. So that's another card the employee could threaten to play.
Finally there is working to rule, aka "quiet quitting", and if the company decides not to pay compensation for working the stupid hours their colleagues do, the employer would need to show exactly what clause in the contract they've broken.
Well, technically they appear to be employed thru Jan 2, but the phrases "last working day" and "you are not expected to work" seem to indicate no expectation of re-employment.
So, any request to return to work would be a change in the terms of your departure. I'm doubtful you'd have any leverage to change any of the remaining terms to your benefit, though "declining" to return (i.e.: sticking to the original terms of your departure) might be an [intelligent] option.
Personally, my reply would be, "I don't think so", if asked to return to work under those circumstances.
I spy somebody who wasn't made redundant in the 2007 recession!
Given that I know from personal knowledge that our employment laws have so many loopholes in them that they are worthless insofar as protecting employees are concerned I rather doubted that revoking these was a serious goal because any replacement would probably do a better job, and by that logic if you wanted your employees to have no usable rights in practice then you'd want to retain the existing system.
Therefore, a quick look into that situation seemed called for. This says:-
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/cbill/58-03/0156/en/220156en.pdf
25 The principle of the supremacy of EU law is a concept developed by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). The principle provides that, where the domestic law of a Member State conflicts with EU law, the latter takes priority.
31. This Bill is removing the interpretive effects of EU law on the UK statute book through the sunset of section 4 EUWA rights, the abolition of supremacy and the abolition of general principles of EU law.
32. This Bill will rename REUL [Retained EU Law] as “assimilated law” to reflect that these interpretive effects of EU law will no longer apply to this body of law once these changes have taken place.
I (and I suspect many other people) aren't going to get particularly worked up about the principle of EU courts being able to override UK courts being removed in UK Law, and retained EU laws being renamed to "assimilated law". No legislation is actually being removed from the law books as far as I can see.
Now were you misinformed by your news source of choice lying through omission, or did you know that already?
Have you forgot about the great book burning planned for the 31st of December 2023? This will affect employment law.
If you just got a few lines of text then open in a new private tab to see the whole article.
From your own link about "the great book burning".
Paragraph 5, in case you didn't read that far.
The supremacy of EU law will also end on 31 December 2023 (so UK law will take priority) and general principles of EU will no longer be part of domestic law, unless the Government exercises its power to restate legislation to produce an equivalent effect.After the end of 2023, any EU retained law will be known as “assimilated law”.
So I ask again, where are you getting this bollocks about "the great book burning" from? Because it's not that link.
What does the Bill do?
Under the Bill’s sunset provisions, retained EU law set out in secondary legislation will expire at the end of 2023, unless the Government decides that it should be preserved and remain part of UK law. The Government may also decide to postpone the expiry of any EU-derived secondary legislation to a later date, but not later than 23 June 2026. It can also decide to restate legislation, replace it or revoke it (without replacing it). Any replacement legislation must not increase the regulatory burden.
Then there's this heading a bit further down.
Impact on employment law?
And three paragraphs under this heading, which you may read in their entirety.
There you go.
There's a fair amount of confusion about this. The 2400* number comes from Rees Mogg, who published a list of 2400 pieces of retained EU legislation and suggested that the public might want to vote on what we keep. It's here
https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/governmentreporting/viz/UKGovernment-RetainedEULawDashboard/Guidance]
From the site: "Retained EU Law (REUL), is a category of domestic law created at the end of the transition period. It is made up of certain pieces of EU legislation that were ‘cut and pasted’ onto the UK statute book as the UK’s own version of these laws. REUL is also made up of certain domestic laws that implemented EU law and were preserved as REUL on the UK statute book."
So those are the laws the bill is about when it references REUL.
The bill says
16 This Bill facilitates planned reforms to over 2,400 pieces of REUL. To ensure REUL comes to an end in the near future, a sunset of REUL by the end of 2023 has been included in the Bill.
17 The sunset will accelerate reform and planning for future regulatory changes, benefiting both UK business and consumers sooner.
18 The sunset will also increase business certainty by setting the date by which a new domestic statute book, tailored to the UK’s needs and regulatory regimes will come into effect.
19 A power to provide for an extension to the sunset has been included in the Bill, ensuring the efficiency of the REUL revocation process should a lack of parliamentary time, or external factors, hinder progress towards reform of retained EU law prior to the 2023 sunset date.
So, if the bill passes, and the government were to do nothing, all the those 2400* pieces of REUL will lapse at the end of 2023 unless they invoke clause 19 and extend the sunset date. That's the "bonfire" that many people refer to. I don't think it's helpful language and I don't think that UK gov has ever phrased it like that, but even the FT jumped on the bandwagon with "The UK government has invited people to use a new website to identify EU laws they wish to scrap, in a move that would deliver a “crucial boost to productivity”. Much as I don't like him, I can't find any direct quotes from Rees-Mogg about scrapping EU laws and not replacing them (5 minute web search, so I didn't look very hard).
Of course, no one's suggesting that the government will do nothing before the end of 2023, but there's a view that there aren't enough civil servants working on this in order to review and replace all the REUL - the Grauniad article below has a couple of quotes to this effect. The government could just assimilate a lot of the REUL or extend the sunset date - the bill allows for that both of these. Note also that the Brexit treaty limits what we can do in some areas, like employment law, to prevent the UK reducing regulations which would allow us to compete on "unfair" terms with Europe.
My view, for what it's worth, is that it's a bad and pointless bill overall. There's a need, as Peter2's first post highlights, to separate UK law from the EU court and case law, but the rest of the bill is pointless; REUL legislation could stay on the books to be dealt with in some sort of priority order and that priority shouldn't be based on whether or not it came about because of our membership of the EU. If we're going to change employment law then the EU-derived elements are less important than zero hours, employee definitions, IR35, etc. in my opinion (other opinions are available).
* they've just found another 1400 laws that will also need to be covered by this bill. See
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/nov/08/government-finds-extra-1400-laws-scrap-rees-mogg-brexit-bill
The fun comes with some regulatory processes and with measurements. Rees-Mogg has shown already that he basically retains some weird nostalgia for Imperial units which is shared by nobody on the planet who actually has to use them for serious purposes.
We are now trusting this imbecile to efficiently remove deleterious EU laws and retain good ones; I rather think some folks have rather too much faith in the abilities of a complete plonker with very, very bad handwriting.
If Rees-Moggs wet dream passes, roughly 3800 laws will be burned on 31sr December 2023, unless a minister specifically saves them from the fire.
They originally said it would be 2400, but found another 1400 last week.
There isn't even enough time between then and now for ministers to even to read all their titles, let alone make a sane decision as to whether each should be kept.
Worse, it makes all 3800 of those laws "secondary legislation". That means no Parliamentary oversight, just a minister making arbitrary decisions and announcing that they just changed the law. And if MPs don't like it, they can just go hang.
The ministers could do almost literally anything. It's a carte blanche that makes Henry VIII look trivial.
It is an act of violence upon the rule of law. Political terrorism, one might say.
@Peter2 - The elements that you quote are reasonable in terms of taking CJEU and its case-law out of UK law. However, there are more worrying aspects to the bill.
If the bill were simply, as assumed by many, a means of getting rid of EU legislation and replacing it with our own then that would be sort of OK. We delete the EU employment laws, write our own and parliament gets to debate, modify, amend and approve them. However, the bills states:
45 This Bill simplifies the status of RDEUL, ensuring that all RDEUL is treated as equivalent to domestic secondary legislation, thus clarifying that it may be amended in a similar way.
This means that the EU laws that we decide to retain (RDEUL) will not follow the parliamentary process which primary legislation would follow - committee stages, first/second readings, amendments, etc. They simply need a minister to change them and a committee stage to confirm that they are being changed in line with the act that covers their status as secondary legislation - i.e. this act. So, we could decide to retain EU employment laws, safety laws, consumer protection laws, ...... etc. and then a minister could make sweeping changes to them now, or at any time in the future, and parliament can't amend or modify it - it only gets to vote on it. This isn't about playing to the Brexit crowd, it's about removing huge swathes of law from parliamentary oversight.
This means that the EU laws that we decide to retain (RDEUL) will not follow the parliamentary process which primary legislation would follow - committee stages, first/second readings, amendments, etc. They simply need a minister to change them and a committee stage to confirm that they are being changed in line with the act that covers their status as secondary legislation - i.e. this act. So, we could decide to retain EU employment laws, safety laws, consumer protection laws, ...... etc. and then a minister could make sweeping changes to them now, or at any time in the future, and parliament can't amend or modify it - it only gets to vote on it. This isn't about playing to the Brexit crowd, it's about removing huge swathes of law from parliamentary oversight.
So if the minister tried to make sweeping changes then while parliament gets a vote, says "no" and that's the end of the "sweeping changes".
Additionally, the bill says:-
54 This Bill establishes a power to update. This power enables UK Ministers and devolved authorities to amend ‘any secondary REUL’ and regulations made under the powers to restate and powers to revoke or replace in this Bill, to take account of changes in technology or developments in scientific understanding. The power is not intended to make significant policy changes, but is only intended to make relevant technical updates to REUL for these specific purposes. The power is designed so that it can be used more than once, so that it can continue to be used on the same piece of legislation as multiple advances in science and technology take place over time.
Which means that a committee couldn't actually sign off on "sweeping changes" in the first place.
So yeah, i'm still not seeing any rational causes for the panic about "book burning" and the like. It looks like somebody has been stuck reading either extreme left or extreme right wing news sources which are omitting quite large and important bits of information to create lots of misplaced emotion over stuff that I (and everybody even skim reading the act) finds incredibly boring and uninteresting.
From the horse's mouth:
The Bill, most notably, would:
- place a “sunset” on REUL – causing most, but not all, of it to expire at the end of 2023
- enable, via statutory instrument, most REUL (if it takes the form of legislative instruments) to be exempted from the sunset
- enable the “sunset” to be postponed (for some but not all REUL) until as late as 23 June 2026, via statutory instrument
- rename any remaining retained EU law after 2023 “assimilated law”
- formally abolish, for wholly domestic law purposes, the principle of supremacy and other general principles of EU law after 2023
- enable the effects of supremacy and general principles of EU law to be preserved or recreated in specific cases, via statutory instrument
- give the UK courts a new legal framework for reconciling inconsistent sources of law when they include those of EU origin, which ministers can influence via statutory instrument
- grant a suite of delegated powers to UK ministers and devolved authorities to revoke, restate, replace or update REUL/assimilated law by statutory instrument
- remove or downgrade existing forms of Parliamentary scrutiny of statutory instruments when they propose to modify or revoke law of EU origin
- expand the permitted use of Legislative Reform Orders (LROs) so that they can revoke retained direct EU legislation
- abolish the Business Impact Target in the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act 2015 (SBEEA)
But I fear we are straying from the subject at hand.
If you trust the government of the day - whatever colour - then you're right. However, if you're a bit cynical then "Significant policy changes" doesn't restrict much. You could gut the working-time directive if you wanted and claim that it wasn't a change of policy (the policy to limit working time hasn't changed), but merely a technical update (changing the limit from 48 to 53 hours is merely a technical change).
As for book-burnings - see my crossing post; we probably agree on that.
I'm done on this thread - fun as it is, I think it's gone a bit off-topic.
It’s not EU Law any more, and inflammatory misleading language EU Supremacy means nothing these days since we left.
It’s EU derived law, that in almost all cases the UK supported and voted for. Same as any law we signed up to from the UN and CoE are derived law…. so the UN Convention of Human Rights is not Supremacy of UN Law… it’s lW we agreed to incorporate.
In the UK you have a consultation period first, which would be 45 days for 100+ dismissals. Then you have the notice period (3 months).
For working in the notice period, it will be difficult to argue they needed you to work to the last day if they have removed all access to company facilities and email.
I've been through it a few times, engineers like me are expected to work to the end (for a given value of work), IT staff go straight away (for obvious reasons).
Technically the consultation period is to look for alternatives to redundancy, in reality there's not much consultation going on.
With the rush, and the large number of different legislations in place, I would expect there will be some mistakes made in the process as HR will try to do the absolute minimum they have to, and frequently stray over the line. Of the dozen or so times it's happened to me, they have had to abandon the process about 75% of the time due to messing up or fork out extra money to compensate for getting it wrong.
Last one for me was a change of terms and conditions that was going to be fire and rehire if you didn't sign, except one of the changes they wanted to make was one that they couldn't legally fire you for if you declined, which I did.
Did you know that in most places the "consultation" period is put on hold if you raise an official greivance? That can take a week or two to resolve and can then be appealed for another few weeks grace if you are close to a work anniversary and a few extra £ in the package ;-)
Well Here in blighty.
I know of a case where a person waiting on a Build to complete (approx 20 minutes or so to run) was bullied for chatting whilst waiting for the build.
The person made a complaint with a witness.
The person was disciplined for making the complaint on under the basis when they reported it to their line manager, they used profane language.
Given an informal disciplinary which seems to be being told that they were being disciplined.
Then glowing probation report, and fired the next day on basis they didn't pass probation.
As the person had not been there for two years, no recourse.
In the UK, the fact that you were actually needed should have come up in the consultation process.
What should actually happen:
You get notice that your position is at risk of redundancy, and that a consultation process is commencing
You then get informed that following a review, you are not actually going to be made redundant.
Until the whole things goes down as there is no one to maintain it with required knowledge.
Twitter runs its own data centres and has build most of their infra, pipeline and data storage systems in-house so firing literally only people who understand these systems sounds lot more like traditional bank outsourcing their IT for cost reasons...
Difference here is of course that there is no branch staff to save the mess. If lights go out of Twitter for longer period of time, very likely they never return.
That and lots of previously inactive Twitter users logging in purely to post what their new Mastodon address is, and hunt through the people they follow to find out what their new addresses are to follow them there as well... not like that's precisely what I did last night after not posting on Twitter in ages. :)
There's quite a detectable shift in my timeline since it happened - tons of people astroturfing post-truth and pro-Musk memes.
Some of it may be bots; some may be prodigal children who had departed for "Truth Social", "Gab", etc. and are now returning to support the new boss.
Now is probably a very good time to launch a Twitter-like service in competition with the current soap opera. El Reg techs could knock it together and we could crowd-fund it.
Or perhaps two services. One would be child-friendly, heavily moderated, dull but worthy. The other would integrate with Only Fans and make us some proper cash.
Ever since 'puters learned to talk to each other we have been enjoying social networks, including BBSs, Usenet, IRC, among others, so I doubt we are going to decide not to bother now. Heck, you could crowbar pen pal magazines into the mix too, without trying too hard.
And there is also a potential contender for Twitters crown flexing itself on the ropes as we speak - Take a bow and introduce yourself 'Mastodon'. The great FOSS hopeful will, perhaps, soon have us all 'Tooting' in twice as many characters. If it manages to hook itself into all the disgruntled Twits muttering to themselves in the corner and makes it easier to take all your followers with you, and makes it easier to find those ex Tweeters you still have an interest in reading what they 'Toot', then...why not the Mastodon era?
What a wonderful world!
@Tron
Are you suggesting that El-Reg followers are worthy of being 'Only Fans' creators? Being a creator, as opposed to a mere wide eyed user, is the only way you make money from 'Only Fans', and reading the comments and articles herein doesn't have me releasing the locks on my wallet in expectations of the authors becoming visible on 'Only Fans'. It takes a bit more than wit and humour to make cash on 'OF'...alas.
I agree. What size team do you think we should hire? For sizing estimate, I understand that a “Twitter replacement” is Mastodon. Mastodon have *seven* employees, Twitter had 7500.
People are claiming this is all about moderation, but it really isn’t. Twitter had a team of fifty moderators, and fifty compliance. That’s it. And they were able to scrape along with 350 employees until 2011, and 4000 employees (same as Musk’s cut) until 2019.
Mastodon may have seven employees but there are a great many server administrators and moderators running 'their own' federated Mastodon instances. It's a distributed system so little need for anything in the centre.
Although I very much like the idea of a distributed Twitter killer I'm concerned that a plethora of federated servers supporting the previous Twitter user base will result in less efficient use of resources (servers, power, administrators, moderators etc) than a centralised service. Would it be worth it? On balance: yes, probably.
Which of course the company will be paying for, most likely along with my and their children's tuition, and possible their grandchildren as well.
Fire me mid week and then expect me to check the my company email on the weekend when you remote wiped my work supplied laptop and froze my accounts? You can't see it but I am making a particularly obscene gesture in your general direction, but luckily for both of us, the webcam on the aforementioned bricked laptop isn't sending.
If you feel like having a courier drop off a new one, I will be happy to repeat it for you, and then tell you where to shove it. Expect to pay return shipping on the hardware if you want that back as well.
Honestly, I expect some peoples backs are to the wall, but really, if you just got stabbed in the back in the first round, why would you go back? It's not like this is the end of the shitshow. The curtain just opened. Everyone that says, or goes back, can expect to be wearing waders and shoveling shit for the foreseeable future. I'd be trying to beat the rest of the pact to interviews or knocking on the doors of VC's right now. If you try to stay and the same thing happens again, you may be job hunting in a deepening recession during Christmas. I also expect that many of the bigger companies are going to be even tighter on hiring starting with their next quarter.
Why would you go back? For income, of course. I would go back without a second thought.
While on the job I would continue looking for a new job while eliminating any retrievable information I had about the place, collect my personal belongings, ect. As soon as I found a new job, I would start it, and send The Boss at the old place a short I Quit message. And this is where the advantage of at-will employment for the employee comes in. Quit without notice, and the company can legally do nothing about it.
He told them they were being let go, they should just take their severance and use this time to find another job. Unemployment is still only 3.7% and someone Twitter considers 'essential' after jettisoning half the staff presumably has some highly marketable skills.
If the letter of the law says they have to "work" during the contracted 60 day WARN ACT period they can do the "quit quitting" thing and do the bare minimum - show up and pretend they engaged at solving whatever problems cropped up due to their absence but without actually solving them. They know the plan is to let them go once they've showed a (presumably younger and cheaper) person who wasn't laid off their job. They can screw that up too.
I would never lift a finger to help a company that let me go "by mistake" during a Thanos snap layoff (you can't even call this "decimation" as it was much worse) and if I was forced back to work to earn my severance I'd do my best to actively sabotage them. They can't take away my severance, and they've already fired me, so their only power would be to make me show up and sit at my desk (or on a Zoom call if I was remote) for 60 days before my firing became official.
Seems clear there was little to no thought put into this layoff. Maybe it really was a Thanos snap - just cull 50% of people in a fair, random and impartial way like he promised? Knowing Musk's twisted sense of "humor", that idea would probably appeal to him.
"No thought put into this layoff"? Of course there wasn't, how long has he been in charge, two weeks? In that time how can anyone possibly have a handle on the inner workings of a company or who is or is not vital?
It is quite possible that 50% of Twitter's employees are, indeed superfluous, but nobody can say that yet with any degree of certainty or know which 50% can go!
Now a more cynical person than me, might well conclude that this was yet another knee-jerk reaction by someone who has a psychological need to be in the limelight and doesn't have anyone close, able or willing to say 'now Elon, you are a really really clever person, in some fields, and in others you are a complete twat - and this is one of the latter, so just stop and have a think about it'!
"a tacit acknowledgement that the world's richest man's decision to gut the biz may have been hasty"
Author seems to be confusing the above opinion with "a tacit acknowledgement that the world's richest man's decision to layoff certain members of staff may have been hasty".
"Former staffers have already filed a lawsuit against Twitter alleging WARN Act violations,"
Reports from elsewhere says that people redundantised were in accordance with WARN, and some reports even claim that people were given 3 months pay instead of the 60 days/2 months. Does the Reg have anything to say about those reports? Or is "Like many of the layoff reports from Twitter and elsewhere, it's been hard to get confirmation of hard numbers and details, and this layoff recall is no different." the best that can be offered?
"while others who were dumped were actually necessary to Musk's $8-a-month fee-speech future for Twitter."
Whilst they may have been tasked to implement such a feature had they stayed/not laid off, their services are by no means "necessary" as there are no shortage of people that Twitter could hire to implement said feature.
In the UK you can't (or at least should not) make someone's job redundant (technicality) and then hire someone else to do the job. I'd expect that to be true elsewhere too. There are ways around that, of course. There always are.
I think at least part of Musk's problem here (apart from his arrogance) is that he has had to delegate the task of selecting who to 'let go' to people who probably don't like what he's doing. As such, they will 'quiet quit' and just do what they're told and submit a list of 50% of their team. They may even deliberately suggest the 'go getters' as the most likely to land on their feet at another employer. Worse yet, he may have based the selection on HR appraisal records; in my experience many people who get poor appraisals are actually very useful to the business (which showed me that the appraisal system I was required to implement was counterproductive).
A company I once worked for made my job redundant and then offered me a different, better paid job instead (including much training). A few years later my new job was made redundant and they paid me off based on my new salary. With my shiny new training I was very happy - though I recall it was a bit stressful at the time.
I can well imagine that the shake up at Twitter will see some winners and some losers - it is ever thus.
Ages ago I worked for a company that was taken over by a US firm and it went through a couple of redundancy cycles as they tried to make the takover pay. The first time they did it they didn't really understand UK law, which says that if you get volunteers for redundancies in roles that are losing staff then you have to take them. One of the product lines ran on embedded APL and in the first batch of lay-offs both the APL engineers volunteered, left with a decent pay off, then came back a month later as contractors.
I've been through almost exactly what the Tweeps are going through when IBM nuked my business line here in the US, so when I say the Tweeps won't win, I mean it. Notice the timeline. WARN says 60 days notice, which is what I got. They've been given 90 days in which they are technically still employees, they're just not allowed on site or in to work (same happened to me). To see that they're still technically employees, notice that the company specifically told them that they are bound by the employee handbook. (Depending on what the handbook says, that may mean that they technically can't get employment elsewhere for 90 days if Elon is feeling vindictive, although in CA I doubt he could make it stick, nor would it be worth his time/money to deal with the lawyers.)
Musk claimed Twitter was losing $4 million a day when he took over and that was the reason for these massive cuts.
Having cleared it out the entire board and senior management, did he really need to make more cuts to the normal staff.
Because I bet the combined salary of all those at the top was a pretty massive chunk of that $4 million...
As someone who used to use Twitter a lot, it is definitely noticeable.
I joined Mastodon back in April and it's been refreshing, none of the bitterness that you would normally see on the birdsite is visible.
However over the last week it has been evident that his takeover has had an effect - in that my timeline has definitely slowed down. It used to be really busy first thing in the morning or in the evening UK time, but it's now like a ghost town (hence the title).
From what I can see, mainly from the daily email/spam of whats been happening, of those new accounts, they seem to be porn bots. Before it used to be handy seeing 6 tweets I probably missed over the previous day. For example this morning's email is 2 useful tweets & 4 scantily clad images which I don't want & could get someone in trouble if they opened it up in a work setting.
I was seriously considering setting up a 'friends and family' server
Likewise. I've got a commercial full-fibre connection and a nice fast virtualisation server - I could quite quickly stand up a nice Devuan[1] VM and stick Mastadon on it.
[1] I'd use FreeBSD but I can't find a convenient HOWTO and I can't be bothered to work it out for myself. There is, however, a set of instructions for Debian which are quite easy to adapt for Devuan.
Not making a comment on whether they should or should not have been sacked but the argument is about violation of WARN which requires 60days notice or 60 pay in lieu. I believe the article quotes a Twitter statement stating the workers will be paid by (and technically in the employment of) Twitter until Feb 2023 - that covers the 60 days required. Or am I missing something?
That's because the Musky one said "I want half of them terminated!" and his Muskinions took him literally!
All of the remainder are keeping shtum, and all the ex-Twitter employees ...... well, they all been "You're terminated, fscker!"
---------> Hired to do the job! Obv!
Sounds like Musk arrogantly ended up firing the one person who knew the root password for some vital servers, and is now trying to unfire everybody who might be that person in the hope of getting access again.
If it was me, I would be devising the most ridiculous wild goose chase I could imagine for them as payback for the way I'd been treated.
If I had any passwords I’d destroy them to make sure I can’t be accused of doing or planning anything naughty.
(Actually, I handed over computers and backups with all passwords changed to 1234. And for one account that hadn’t been used and nobody knew a password, there was 2FA connected to my private phone, so when they recovered that account, they had to call me and I read the 2FA code over the phone to them).
"If it was me, I would be devising the most ridiculous wild goose chase I could imagine for them as payback for the way I'd been treated."
The people you'd fuck off by doing this probably wouldn't have been responsible for the layoffs and, more importantly, they might be reviewing your CV in a few years time at a different company. It's a small world and bridges are best left unburned, in my experience.
No idea who Musk is, but he must be doing something right if his antics can rile such <heavysarcasm>esteemed personages</> like the EU's internal market commissioner Thierry Breton and the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk into making foolish threats and silly statements. What has Volker Türk been doing lately about the open air prison camp in the Gaza Strip?
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