What company fires a programmer and doesn’t walk them out the door that day and makes sure they don’t get their hands on anything?
First thing to be done is revoke all their access, turn off their work machines and pull it’s network cable.
Make sure all remote software is purged of their credentials and hunt for any subsystem that might allow entry.
The next thing to be done is to negotiate some form of a severance bond that they get after X months if everything keeps going properly.
People are really stupid if they haven’t figure this kind of procedure out yet.
One thing to consider is that the employee might not have been a programmer in IT. The description of what he developed sounds like a custom process developed in MS Access or some other software used in the business side of the office.
It also sounds like a custom application developed in house of something that might be available in shrinkwrap or download form, but it's "missing a main component that is important to us because our place is unique with special needs that are not on the market."
Which is usually not true, but management often forgets the payroll cost and opportunity cost of having a worker develop something custom instead of paying for a developed commercial software product. Then the developer leaves and in a few years something breaks and nobody knows how to fix it.
Exactly. 23 years with AT&T and another 25 in IT down here in florida. You are immediately escorted out. Badge turned over . Access removed.
What company fires a programmer and doesn’t walk them out the door that day and makes sure they don’t get their hands on anything?
None, which is why this is BS.
First sentence. Precisely. That’s what Fridays are for