I'll let my nastygram say it for me. I told you in freepmail what was going down in the morning, that I was letting go (firing) a member of my group. For everybody else's benefit, it is important to note that this has been an agonizing decision, but it finally came to a point where I had no choice in the matter. It is always really hard to terminate someone. But this was someone that I really liked and had a lot of respect for. Among other things, he's Army and he's still in the reserves, and he's a good soldier. It's what he was born to do.
But some very bad things happened and I had to make the call that we had to term him. It was both a very hard thing, and an obvious thing at the same time. I had his supervisor fly out to his office tonight, and it was supposed to go down first thing in the morning (Wednesday).
Terming someone in IT is peculiarly complex task. They own the "keys to the kingdom" as it were. So... it's particularly risky when such things go wrong...
Here's the nastygram I sent just minutes ago. Names are redacted with [brackets]:
_________________
[to: VP of HR; CFO; IT Management]
I am not very happy just now.
As a rule, it is a *very* bad idea to post a job opening on our intranet for a position where the person in that job has not yet been notified that they will be let go. For a position in the IT group it is especially bad: [redacted: link to job opening]
As it would happen, R[name redacted] fielded a phone call from S[name redacted] this evening, asking about same. The cat being out of the bag… he confirmed and conducted the exit meeting on the spot. Fortunately for all of us, S[...] was not particularly angry and had actually expected something like this. His reaction has been calm and controlled. His account has been locked out, and we are proceeding with the necessary security protocols for the situation. The good news is that it would appear that the risk of any intentional damage is not high at this point.
S[...] will still be coming in to the [redacted] office in the morning to meet with T[name redacted] for the requisite HR items, and to return his company owned equipment to R[...].
We should all view this as a dodged bullet. S[...], as a member of IT, had “domain-administrator” level access to E[company redacted] systems. I cannot even fully express the extent of the potential damage he had the power to do to E[...]’s systems, had he the inclination to do so. Whether measured in lost connectivity, or lost work product, the damage might have been quite extreme.
It is also important to say that, for S[...], this was a *lousy* way to find out that he was losing his job. We may have had our problems in the employment relationship, but he deserved better than this.
Our procedures and controls between HR and IT have generally worked well in the past, and I’m sure that this was merely a simple mistake. It is important, however, to perhaps use this as an opportunity to review those procedures and reinforce the importance of double-checking every step to make sure that things like this don’t happen in the future.
Regards,
[Ramius]