Someone at my work created a secret bot that scrapes the outlook contacts list and diffs it from the previous day, each day. This way we get daily updates whenever a new person is onboarded or offboarded.
As employees we now have more clarity about the state of layoffs and hiring decisions that most of the management team does.
I suggest doing the same within your org if you can.
Someone had done this at a previous company I worked at. You’d subscribe to a mailing list and get a daily/weekly summary of joiners, leavers and title changes. Pretty useful.
When management eventually found out they were seemingly supportive, but in the next layoff they made sure to reach out to the owner to make him “pause” the tool just before the layoffs started.
When the mailing list was unpaused again the laid-off folks weren’t mentioned, as if they’d never existed in the first place. Felt very 1984-esque.
Google has had a very visible tool internally for this for years. It lists every single person that leaves on a given day. It even has a system set up where the person leaving can email it, and the note would be attached to their leaving notice. You can also search the system and see anybody that's left at any point. So I could look for people that left 15 years ago.
The layoffs the last 2 years have been interesting in that the people aren't officially gone when they are laid off, as Google continues to pay them for 60 or 90 days. So a bunch of people who appear on this list all at once 60 days after they let go.
Boy do I miss go/epitaphs; you could actually sort by departures based on tenure as well. But I've heard you could get into trouble for scraping epitaphs or specific ganpati groups to figure out who has left specifically around layoff seaon.
We did the same informally with Slack, but it's a great tip :)
There's even some automations around leadership calendar meeting titles+invitees that I might or not have heard about. If leadership wants to play games people can play games back.
If the politics internally are nutty enough you can do alot with this sort of skullduggery… It only works if it’s secret or the folks are oblivious.
I worked at a place where this sort of thing was done. It became practice to setup fake meetings or conduct real meetings with vague titles as a misdirection.
The other scenario is if you let consultants inside the firewall. Big 5 guys always gather intel on org charts and goings on for more business. These guys aren’t very clever and are easy to manipulate with this sort of thing.
I say 99 not 100 because a certain VP in my org chart likes to schedule meetings called "News and updates" which is actually very innocent. Maybe he's playing the long con.
> I worked at a place where this sort of thing was done. It became practice to setup fake meetings or conduct real meetings with vague titles as a misdirection.
At one unnamed startup I worked at, one of the sysadmins would just read the CEO's email and let us know o_O
I remember one email he sent me, paraphrasing: "You know that tech demo you gave the C-Suite last week for that really cool thing you invented in your off-time? Yeah, well they are having their lawyers figure out if your employment contract means that they own it already."
As employees we now have more clarity about the state of layoffs and hiring decisions that most of the management team does.
I suggest doing the same within your org if you can.