What To Do After You Fire a Bad Sysadmin Or Developer 245
Esther Schindler writes "The job of dealing with an under-performing employee doesn't end when the culprit is shown the door. Everyone focuses on security tasks, after you fire the idiot, such as changing passwords, but that's just one part of the To Do list. More important, in the long run, is the cleanup job that needs to be done after you fire the turkey, looking for the hidden messes and security flaws the ex-employee may have left behind. Otherwise, you'll still be cleaning up the problems six months later."
Blame them! (Score:5, Insightful)
idiot? (Score:5, Insightful)
Real mature there guy... With an attitude like that. You'd better have alot of backup plans in place. It sounds like you are a shit place to work for.
Do us ALL a favor. Name your company. So we can avoid it.
Re:idiot? (Score:5, Insightful)
That was my immediate impression as well. When I hear/see the phrase "fire the idiot", my first thought is "was this guy the problem, or is it the workplace?"
Well, with a boss like you... (Score:3, Insightful)
...it's hard to imagine the relationship went sour,
"...after you fire the idiot, such as changing passwords, but that's just one part of the To Do list. More important, in the long run, is the cleanup job that needs to be done after you fire the turkey,.. "
It may be too late (Score:5, Insightful)
If your department was properly managed... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Here be Dragons (Score:5, Insightful)
The actions necessary depends on what you mean with "underperforming". If that person didn't do much more than sitting in a corner playing games I would say that there's not much to do, but if it was a person taking shortcuts you need to figure out all traces from that person and remove them one by one. And you can't be sure if that was a skilled person.
If it's bad enough you should treat it as a bad virus outbreak and build a completely new system in parallel with the old and move the business information to that system and cut off the damaged system from the net. It's a dirty and tedious job but someone needs to do it.
This also highlights the need of segmenting the network into different segments, one for sales, another for HR, a third for management and then one or more for the operations so that if one segment is compromised you don't run the risk of having everything exposed. Of course - this goes against the process of using virtualized servers since you can't do physical segmentation on a virtual machine.
Re:Blame them! (Score:4, Insightful)
under-performing or metrics may them seem to be (Score:5, Insightful)
under-performing or metrics may them seem to be under-performing??
Made to do the work of 2-3 people??
Pulling 80 hour weeks that lead to errors and under-performing over time.
Evil companies (Score:5, Insightful)
Companies are large organizations. Each person in the organizaton may concienciously do their job with good intent but without seeing the bigger picture (not their job) and therefore without knowing the consequences of their actions. The people at the top who, in principle, see the bigger picture, are often so far removed from the details of what is happening that they too do not know what the company is doing, except in respect of the shareholders and overall finanical performance. So, the company runs on policy and no one knows what it is doing. The company can be uber-evil when everyone in it is as nice as can be.
The company is more/other than the sum of its parts.
Stop calling them turkeys for starters (Score:5, Insightful)
Fire the Abusive PHB (Score:5, Insightful)
The submitter comes off as an angry, abusive tool. Maybe he should fire himself for having a hand in hiring an "idiotic turkey" to begin with.
It's likely that the developer wasn't all that bad, but stopped giving a shit after being berated by an abusive asshole for umpteenth time.
Maybe I'm a bit biased, but .... (Score:5, Insightful)
I tend to side with the critics here, asking if maybe management (including possibly the person posting the original question) are really the ones to blame?
I've worked in I.T. for something like 25 years now, for companies big and small, though the only times I've held a title of "manager", I was really only tasked with managing outside consultants or developers. I've always preferred being relatively "hands on" with the problem solving and system/network administration tasks at-hand, vs. spending my day in meetings and typing up Excel spreadsheets trying to explain what the "team" was doing.
Bottom line? Sure, there are a LOT of people out there trying to get hired in I.T. as support people or sysadmins who REALLY don't know what they're doing. If more companies would let the people actually DOING those jobs interview these people, they'd be able to weed out far more of the bad seeds before they even started. What I see, time and time again, is some I.T. manager who thinks he's simply "too busy" to interview some potentially really good people who apply for positions, and then he gets in a panic when it comes down the wire and he absolutely can't go without employing another person any longer. He winds up asking H.R. to find him someone good, and of course they don't know squat about I.T. so they pick through the resume submissions based on "standard issue" criteria like the college degree they claim to have, or the number of certifications they list. If he does "second interviews" with these pre-selected people, he may just be trying to pick the best of a bad bunch at that point.
But another problem is with how the I.T. workers are managed. You can have some really top-notch people working for you, yet they're made out to be clueless, inefficient screw-ups because they're actually trying to use their brains to decide which tasks on their plates are REALLY most important to the company. Meanwhile, some upper management character is throwing fits about relatively inconsequential items his ego demands be put "front and center". If you're busy working a difficult problem affecting a whole division of the company and by doing so, you didn't get some new computer issued to somebody first thing in the morning ... guess what usually happens? It's that idiot in I.T. who caused the employee not to have that shiny new PC on their desk on time. Nobody's even aware of the work the I.T. guy was actually in the middle of doing.
And here's the kicker.... You can say all you like about this simply being a "lack of communications" issue. "If management was simply kept informed about what I.T. was doing, everyone would be better off." But so many computer problems are of a "need to fix this yesterday!" level of importance, your good I.T. rank and file employees are going to concentrate on getting that done -- not on getting sidetracked with emailing status updates to key people. Management needs to realize that a certain level of TRUST is required here. You have to say, "I don't really know what Joe Q. has been doing the last few days, but that's ok. I trust Joe Q. because when I make an effort to find out if anyone feels Joe helped them with their issues, I get loads of positive feedback that he did." Micro-managing I.T. is almost never wise....
Re:Maybe I'm a bit biased, but .... (Score:5, Insightful)
I enjoyed that rant. We tried to solve the problem of IT setting priorities by forcing all of the department heads to prioritize their top 3 items each week. As an example of what we were dealing with, our CFO took a month to put together his list and came back with 5 items on his "top 3" list of projects. After we started to work on his priorities he came back with a new top priority to add to the list. So we put it ahead of #1 on the list and "Project Zero" was born.
He wasn't alone: the president of the company had a meeting with us about a huge initiative he wanted to undertake immediately. Starting the next week he put other items that were more pressing (but not important) at the top of his list. He did this every week. Every week we warned him that we were not going to work on his other project because he was prioritizing these other things this week. Every week he said he understood and signed off on our statement of work. A year later he got pressure from the board of directors and threw us right under the bus. Called me into a huge meeting to yell at us for not getting his project done "in over a year". I calmly produced 60 pages of signed off work orders from him, proving that at every turn he decided to have us work on something else and he bore the full and sole responsibility for the project's delay. You know what? Nobody cared.... I believe the direct quote was "I'm tired of excuses. I expect results, not excuses."
Lesson learned. Don't work for crazy people.
An abusive employer? (Score:5, Insightful)
By using terms such as "culprit", "idiot", and "turkey" you indicate that you are a big part of the problem.
Only gross mismanagement would let you get into such a mess in the first place.
It sounds like he is well rid of you.
Re:Maybe I'm a bit biased, but .... (Score:4, Insightful)
Ain't it the truth? On the other hand, there is a lot of knowledge sharing to be gained from respectful listening. If you have weekly operations or status meetings, make sure that someone from IT is at the table. Everywhere I've been where that was the practice has been a pleasant and effective workplace. When systems are running well, they're essentially invisible, and this is a highly desirable state of affairs. It's quite the opposite of neglect, but if there isn't active communication about what's going on, how do you ever expect to tell them apart? (Until it's too late, of course, and the chronically-underfunded, under-appreciated infrastructure finally falls down hard.)
Re:Even more slowly (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:An abusive employer? (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe a case of projecting my experience onto the submitter, but it came off to me like he's the poor bastard who has to clean up the mess, rather than the boss. Having been in that boat myself (and still, to this day, occasionally find slushy little coiled piles of things like "converting" AM/PM to 24h format using 13 chained "if/then/else" statements) I'm willing to give a lot of leeway for "frustration venting."
I fired a sysadmin (Score:2, Insightful)
Prepare, and execute quickly.
After too many actual shouting conflicts with others, and numerous lies ("even I will have trouble upgrading X11") he had to go. First I arranged for our previous guy, who had gone off to be a consultant while finishing his PhD, to return (at his new rate+housing) for continuity. Then I spent 3 hours with the firee, discussing in detail why he had screwed up in so many ways. I gave him the option of quitting or being fired, he chose the latter for unemployment benefits.
We went to his office, I told his assistant to change all the root passwords, and said clearly that I knew he could screw us anyway. That helped a little, and he was so unaware of his misbehavior that no bombs were left behind. My previous guy was on site the next day.
We eventually hired an excellent professional. He's still doing a great job there through many changes after 20 years, although I left that organization a few years after that hire.
Re:Here be Dragons (Score:4, Insightful)
I would also advise, informing your legal team of the decision. You could also hire a security firm (one with a good reputation) to scan your network for security flaws. If you take enough measures to protect your customers data then even if he does have a backdoor it won't come back to hunt you. Additionally consider instead of having a single admin consider having an admin team that watches each others actions, that way you are less likely to have a single admin ruin everything for you.
Re:An abusive employer? (Score:4, Insightful)
By using terms such as "culprit", "idiot", and "turkey" you indicate that you are a big part of the problem.
Only gross mismanagement would let you get into such a mess in the first place.
It sounds like he is well rid of you.
Parent post should be modded up +5 insightful.
I agree this poster does sound like a very poor manager or the company he works for has management issues.
What training programs do you have in place ?
Was this person doing a poor job because of company work practices ?
Was he faking that he knew what he was doing because no one showed him how to do it properly ?
If these above questions could be answered then I think you would find that you would not need to be asking what to do after your Sysadmin / developer went off and found greener pastures.
Re:Here be Dragons (Score:5, Insightful)
Easiest answer: Run an audit. That is what I do. I run an audit on all access methods and devices and change the Pwd while I am at it.
The easiest answer, pray.
A bad (as in lazy, surly, abusive) sysadmin who left traps will leave them in places not detectable by an audit.
I have yet to go to a business as a sysadmin where they didn't use default passwords (P@ss1234, now how many businesses use that gem) which are on just about every device or local admin account. The smartest businesses had a different default password for each type of device/account but you end up with password reuse across a pattern of devices and accounts. The thing is, almost no business will go around and change this on every single device/server when someone who knows the password leaves.
I left my last position on less than amicable terms (basically they were setting me up to get sacked by giving me impossible tasks, so I chose to leave). The CEO had no clue, but my boss understood I knew the public IP addresses, domain admin/root passwords and router passwords of our 5 biggest clients off by heart. I could see the fear in his eyes when I left (it was senior managements decision to sack me, they wanted to downsize without having to pay anyone out). Of course I'd never actually do anything harmful to that business (they were doing that well enough on their own) but anyone who employs a sysadmin knows that you need to hire trustworthy people and treat them well or it will turn around to bite you in the arse.
Hiring good people and not pissing them off is pretty much the only defence.
The first rule (Score:5, Insightful)
I have been in IT for nearly 25 years now and have learned a few things along the way. The first rule is that most employees referring to others as idiots, turkeys, incompetent etc need to look first in their own seat.
It is generally a reaction I expect from a dev or sysadmin covering his own faults by passing blame to others. I find most people just want to do what they where hired to do and do it well and given the proper chance and assistance will do just that.
In the last 5 - 10 years though it is generally a result of understaffing and insane deadlines causing less than desired results.
Re:The first rule (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree. There's nothing an incompetent manager likes more than a scapegoat.
This is why you fail (Score:4, Insightful)
when the culprit is shown the door.
But the person who hired him still works at the firm... that's the real "culprit".
Re:Here be Dragons (Score:1, Insightful)
Wow, that's really an useful and elaborative answer. After reading it, one really has a clue about why hypervisor VLANs won't work.
</sarcasm>
Re:Fire the Abusive PHB (Score:5, Insightful)
You are being a tad too gentle on management in this case. Anyone who uses that sort of language on a public website is showing a lack of professionalism that goes beyond incompetence. Professionalism in the workplace exists for a bunch of reasons, one is to maintain cordial relations between people who work together so that you don't end up with a tit-for-tat culture in the workplace.
Re:Slowly (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Here be Dragons (Score:5, Insightful)
You forgot about hypervisor exploits.
If you must use hardware separation, you ***MUST*** ***USE*** ***HARDWARE*** ***SEPARATION***.
Re:Here be Dragons (Score:4, Insightful)
Mod up.
"If it can be accessed, it is vulnerable." -Geezer's First Law of System Security.
Re:Maybe I'm a bit biased, but .... (Score:4, Insightful)
(posted as AC cause I moderated)
I've worked on all sides of this coin, as developer, sr. dev,, architect, manager and even latent founder and lots of other short temporary roles. I've worked at everything from a 1 man shop, to fortune 100. I've worked in government, restaurant, warehouse, sales, wholesale, entertainment, and basically everything but medical (I have a rule against killing people with code, even if it's not mine).
And after years of experience, I must say one of my first bosses nailed it with his funny anecdotes towards employees...
"There's two kinds of people in this world, lug nuts and ball bearings. Both are good employees, but they have to be managed completely differently."
Lugnuts need to have project plans, statuses and meetings. They need organization, management and regular motivation.
Ballbearings just glide along. You give them a task and they work it, and keep working. Some will go off in wrong directions, but you can be sure they are chugging away at the task. They don't deal with interruption much, they don't like meetings, and they usually prefer to finish things to perfection.
Each type has their advantages and disadvantages. Lugnuts are typically seen as dependable because they are constantly managed. Ballbearings are seen as solvers and self-motivated. But both need to be reset every now and then onto the correct path.
So yeah, complete generalization here - but it does help to understand motivations and managing. And you see a lot of ballbearings in IT. Enjoy...
Here ARE Dragons (Score:3, Insightful)
Backdoors from the current IT person aren't important?
Re:Here be Dragons (Score:2, Insightful)
Ah, once again HR proves itself incapable of hiring a good system administrator / employee and instead either went with the cheapest person available or one with lots of certifications and little experience. I'd fire the HR department as well after showing the bad employee to the door.
Re:Here be Dragons (Score:4, Insightful)
To be fair, he was complaining about phyisically segmenting the virtual machines that exist on a single physical machine. Of course, that's fundementally impossible, since these virtual machines share the same computing resoruce. His complaint may be a ridiculous complaint, but nevertheless.
Not so ridiculous I think. There was an article here on Slashdot a couple of days ago about the possibility to spy from one virtual machine onto another one running on the same virtual host by observing the cache line eviction pattern. All VM's share a same cache, and by observing which cache lines gets thrown out (presumably due to the usage by the other VM's), it is possible to infere what goes on in these other VMs.
Re:Here be Dragons (Score:5, Insightful)
"Why are you requesting three roles here? I thought you just needed a computer guy".
"Having a team adds flexibility and redundancy, for example, if one gets hit by a bus or goes on vacation, the others can cover."
"How likely is he/she to be hit by a bus? And we'll just not let them go on vacation if that's what it takes."
"I doubt we'll be able to hire someone qualified if we don't allow them vacation time."
"Oh, we'll give them vacation time, we just won't let them take it. Or, if we have to, we'll make them carry their laptop while they're away."
"Then that's not vacation, is it?"
"Quit being such a whiner. Oh, and the salary you asked for? Find someone for 60% of that. Revenues are down."
"Didn't the CEO just get a huge bonus?"
"What does that have to do with anything?"
TL;DR: Companies don't make hiring decisions based on what makes sense, they make them based on how little they can spend.