I foresee a lot of 'Gosh, I just don't remember how to do that any more. I've been focusing all of my energies on staying alive, and that old stuff I used to do just didn't stick with me. Have you tried turning the machine off and on again?'

(I also see a lot of 'missed calls'.)

I gave up on calling customer support when I was told that.

Any tech worker or engineer that says, "I foresee a lot of 'Gosh, I just don't remember how to do that any more..." Isn't worth their pay.
Anyone with experience would ask them to push the big red mushroom button in the server room. Doing the malice that H1B's won't do.

You are thinking of the Halon or whatever PC gas used, button usually behind glass.

Hell, in our current one, it's right under the fucking light switch. No box or safety pin. Seriously.

So which big red button were you referring to?

The power button that not only kills power to the server room, it usually kills the output to the UPSes in racks so everything goes down at once. Far more elegant than downing a server the normal way, and much quicker, too.

In most of the datacenters I've worked in, there's a power panel outside of the computer room itself. They usually have a big red lever that firefighters can pull to cut all power to the room and send the UPS's to ground in an emergency. I've never seen one set up with a button.

A shiny candy like button.

I'm partial to using the two keys it takes to launch a nuclear missile (or to end a relationship on Seinfeld).

It's the history eraser button you fool!

You can imagine the shock and dismay when half the racks lost power because one of the admins moving a server pulled the wrong plug. Boy did I like sending that email to *EVERY FUCKING BODY*. It wasn't me, but naturally if you report the outage you are responsible for it.

Well, it can't be worth much since the bank isn't going to pay them. I'd keep the answers short and potentially wrong also. And turn that phone off at night.

The only thing worse than this idea would be for the courts to back it up.

The very EXISTENCE of this idea tells how far the oilgarchy has come in destroying worker rights.
Such an idea would have never been discussed aloud even 4 years ago.

whoopsies I dropped it!

For some reason they knew when we turned them off.

I've worked for several employers with continuing cooperation clauses in their employment and severance contracts over the years. While you normally don't get paid anything for simply being on call and available, you ARE paid if you actually do any work. The last one I got even specified that I would be paid at a rate equal to my prior salary PLUS an additional 5% for every month I'd been separated from the company. Since the CC clause length was 48 months, I would have theoretically been paid more than double my prior salary if they'd called me up in the final month. The increasing compensation not only rewarded the former employee for assisting the company, but was also intended to discourage company management from calling up former employees over trivial shit. EVERY continuing cooperation agreement I've had ALSO imposed limits on the number of hours the company could require. The same contract I mentioned above limited them to no more than 25 hours a month. Anything more than that and they'd have to cut me a contract (and my contract rate is $225 an hour).

I can't see how the SunTrust version is enforceable or legal. If someone is an employee, you have to pay them. If someone is coming to your office and performing work under your direction and a contract, they're an employee. I'm floored that the contracts even made it past SunTrust's legal department.

Non-compete clauses are actually illegal in some states, and in the states where they are legal they have to be relatively specific.

Legal will happily rubber-stamp a "you can't ever work on anything ever again" non-compete clauses. Something similar has been in every employment contract I've seen.

The company does not expect the clause to be enforceable. It's a tool to threaten former employees.

I hope the former employees are lawyering up.

I doubt they could prove in court that you did now how to "fix" the problem when called.

I mean, really. Why would anyone even answer the phone?

How is Suntrust to know their former employee is even to be entrusted with giving good info even if they CAN find someone to answer?

A lump sum of "x" number of weeks' pay or a payout over time or what? Did I miss that?

Whatever it is, within 5 seconds after the last of the severance has been paid, I would forget everything I ever knew about their operation.

Prove I didn't really forget.......

2 weeks for 1 year of service, plus an additional week for every additional year of service, ie; 5 years service would get you 6 weeks' severance pay and a COBRA informational packet.

What the hell?

They should have been smarter! Utter bullshit.

The cavalier way in which IT workers who lose their jobs to outsourcing are treated has completely dried up any sympathy I had for any other displaced workers. You would have to have gone on a really great interview, three levels of management, lasted four hours, recommended by several people who already worked in the department, and possessing all of the required skill-sets - only to find out that the interview was a sham, and they hired the H-1B - who needed to be trained because they did not possess all of the skill-sets the listed on their resume.

One good interview after another, but not a single offer.

the argument you rightly mock in your reply title. As sure as eggs is eggs.

In fact, that is one of the current crashes in the system now.
Car loans, student loans, like mortgages, are turned into debt bonds and sold off.
in fact, the very bank that gave you such a low interest rate made more money from selling the loan.

And just as the mortgage scam produced, down the line, people who could not pay their loans,
the student loans are now defaulting, but the banks that loaned the money don't care, cause the Gov't was backing them up,
and cause they sold the loans off.
The people holding all the bad bonds are the pension funds, including state funds, who now have worthless paper and are attempting to get out from under their pension obligations.
( see Illinois, for example)

You have to make sure your credit union or community bank holds its own paper, if you want an honest loan.

"Beep. The number you have dialed is no longer in service. Beep"

IT sucks the life out of you when you're ON the payroll. For any company to expect any kind of loyalty after they downsize you AND you're not getting compensated for cleaning up the new kids' messes is utterly contemptible.

Fuck that mess.

asking where the files were for some project I had overseen while I was employed there. Just two weeks prior I had been let go without any warning due to budget cuts (actually, the owner's divorce after being caught having an affair with a client). At the time I left I briefed my coworkers and immediate supervisor on all the projects and their status, where all the correspondence was, the files, permits, etc. This was before this company committed to an actual server, so everything was kept on Zip disks in actual paper folders and on the hard drive of the workstation each of us were assigned. I always backed up the working files of my projects on a just-in-case Zip disk I kept in my desk and I let everyone know where this was and what I used it for.

Anyway, when the frantic call came, I told them where the files were in the hard drive.

"We already formatted that computer."

I was dumbstruck as to why they would do that, since the only change since I left was the owner's twenty-something son had been plopped down in my previous chair at my previous desk to stare blankly at my previous computer, apparently to listen to music and play solitaire, but whatever.

"Okay, try the Zip disk in the project folder."

"We can't find it in there. We thought you had it."

"Really? What would I want with it?" I had changed industries so apart from the program I used at my previous job and my then current job there was nothing in common between the two employers. "What behavior in the previous six years led you to believe I would take it? No, I don't have it. It was in the project folder when I gave it to you two weeks ago. Anyway, just pull it up from the backup Zip disk, you know the one I kept in my desk."

"I thought that was just your personal stuff. We erased it."

"No. That's not what was on that disk." The morons never even looked at it.

I never got another phone call from them.

When I first got the call I really wanted to help. I took a lot of pride in my work (still do), so in some way I felt the success or failure of the projects I left behind reflected on my reputation. But with every word uttered in that short conversation I felt my concern melt away until at the end I was left without a single fuck to give.

My career has taken a few turns since then, but that experience is one that pushed me away from small "family" companies run by self-important Republican captains of industry to my current union job where I'm just a number. A number with benefits, vacation, and retirement, that is.

and sometimes they are!

I begged for help at one job. I wanted to train others so I could be away from the job at times. But when you really care about your work, you aren't willing to let it suffer just because the higher ups are butt holes.

I got calls for a long time after I quit. It didn't take long for them to try and re-hire me once they figured out everything I had done for them.

And then companies are puzzled that they are having massive data breaches. This is not a coincidence. Get rid of the people that are loyal, hire people for pennies that aren't, and you have a recipe for disaster.

greed pure and simple.

for short term gain.

it was customer service) worker threatened to publish all of the hospital's medical records online if they didn't force the subcontractor running the outsource facility to finally pay them what they were owed. It worked.

I was leaving on my own and gave six weeks notice, but when a perceived conflict of interest was discovered between the retailer and my new employer I was gone by noon the next day. This was bullshit on a "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" level but I didn't really care.

I was a supply chain auditor, but for the most part I was a human buffer between supply chain, merchandising and loss prevention and an archaic inventory system. Every second monday I would run and print about twenty different reports and put them in binders on a shelf in my office so those guys could find them. I had shown a few people how to do this but I hadn't had a chance to talk to any of them before I left.

The first phone call came about a week later and it was from loss prevention "Hey Jos, who did you give your southwest cargo theft by carrier binders to?"

"I didn't give them to anyone"

The second call came a few days later from supply chain. "Hey Jos, where are the red binders? I need to know how many pallets to expect for weeks 40 through 51."

"They were on the same shelf they always were when I left"

The next call came only about fifteen minutes later from the store manager.

"Hey Jos, facilities fucked up and threw away everything in your office, we really need you to run your reports and show some people how."

So I drive over and head to the back-office, and indeed my office was empty, they even threw away the old AS/400 terminal from which I created the reports having mistaken it for an old monitor and keyboard.

So I drove to another store with the store manager, loss prevention manager, some girl who had been hired to replace me two days before and used their terminal to recreate all the reports.

I then learned from loss prevention that corporate was absolutely furious that I had been allowed to access the AS/400 to recreate the reports that they had thrown away. Then a month later they offered me my job back because the girl they had hired quit.

Just that the only reason I was leaving was because I had been presented with an amazing opportunity. And looking back, it was an amazing opportunity, I can't imagine my life today not having made the move I did.

I went in a few more times informally to help with their reports until they hired someone who stuck around.

I see some 13th Amendment issues there.

Fuck capitalism and the capitalists.

. . . because it is not "involuntary servitude." Unless bound by a contract provision to do so, employers are not required to provide severance pay upon termination at all. Severance pay is something an employer offers -- usually with certain conditions -- and the terminated employee receives only by agreeing, in writing, to the conditions set out by the employer. And besides, the employer could argue that a portion of the severance pay actually is compensation for any post-employment work performed.

I'd leave them so wide open to hacks, they wouldn't know what the hell hit them.

By the time they got around to calling me, their crap would be in such disarray it would no longer matter what *anybody* did.

Do you think it's really a coincidence that all of these massive data breaches are happening while all of our IT jobs are getting outsourced? I sure as hell don't.

I'm not even playing about that.

My job was to get program funding and run the programs, for medium sized agencies.
Twice I have had employers who screwed me by over by breaking their employment promises.
One reneged on the agreed upon salary increase after I got the grants, and the other refused to give me promised time to keep my license credentials up to date.

Quick as I lined up another job, in a matter of weeks, I left.
Luckily other jobs were available at the time.

The programs were never replaced at either agency.

All completely unfavorable to the worker. Why am I not surprised?

Just sayin'...

I know a few people who have had such obligations, but it was part of a fairly large severance package.

If they are getting $100,000 severance and can answer a call later down the road about an unknown server password or something I don't see the big deal. I've had former employers call or email me about similar things in the past.

if you are required to answer to their beck and call for two years. Screw that.

I would refuse to provide ongoing tech support if that severance package wasn't large enough to cover any occasional work I might do for them.

If they actually call these people in later, they're just asking for a data bomb. Do they not have any idea what IT people actually contribute to the success and safety of a company's data?

Morons.

A lot of Americans have been duped into believing that they are not labor, when actually they are. If you are earning most of your income via a paycheck, then even if you are a software engineer, you are labor. So they convinced them they are not labor & they vote against labor & surprise, surprise, TPTB go & give their programming jobs to India.


PS - I'm a former IT worker & so is my husband. We have both had to train our low wage replacements to qualify for severance, & it is a shitty thing to do.

shipped our jobs to India.

The minute your severance money stops, you are not on the hook for anything. Simply don't return calls or emails. If they persist, tell them you can speak to your attorney. That will be the end of it.