Because they don't trust institutions, if someone that is working for a company and does something bad, or is shown to be corrupt, it will affect the public perception of the company, not of the individual.
Also, because Americans don't trust institutions, a lot of the internal processes and cultural values are upheld by the individuals, and how strongly this is done depends on the individual's power and ability to influence. This applies to all levels of the organization. This allows for the organization as a whole to be more dynamic and effective, but the downside is that this works only when the individuals have a vested interest in the organization.
When there is a layoff, or even when a simple individual is fired, this mutual alignment is removed and all bets are off. Except for fear of legal retaliation, the individual is no longer bound to the organization. This can lead to things like:
- Executives preempting the communication of their firing and using it to swing internal opinion, or even taking key team members away with them, like Sam Altman vs OpenAI.
- Employees with access to (supposedly) restricted areas copying sensitive information: E.g, sales reps getting data from all their clients to contact them and move them along.
- Plain old espionage / sabotage. Don't forget, if a company is laying people off it means they are not doing well, and if they are not doing well means they certainly want to keep as much of what is "really happening" to themselves. Fired employees can use their internal communications to gather evidence from their boss wrongdoings, find internal memos and share with journalists willing to get a scoop, etc.
Well I am an American that doesn't trust institutions by default, so to that end I fit your description here. I'm not sure how universal it is though, we have plenty of institutions here that people do trust and depend on every day.
In this context, I think it's less about an individual's trust of institutions and more the institutions mistrust of the individual. Companies don't have to send fired employees home immediately, they only do this because they don't trust the individual to act appropriately. There's probably a bit of a death spiral there, where both sides continue to mistrust each other further, but the individual lacking trust of institutions alone wouldn't get them locked out as soon as they're notified that they've been fired.
> Companies don't have to send fired employees home immediately, they only do this because they don't trust the individual to act appropriately.
Companies don't have agency or feelings. If company leaders expect people to do their jobs properly only because they are getting paid, it's already an institutional failure, because it's not taking into account that individuals are fallible.
If the company does not have an established process to protect itself from human error, whether accidental or intentional (like an disgruntled employee going rogue), when shit hits the fan all its leaders can do is to find blame in the individual. But instead of blaming people and hoping that we can force everyone to avoid mistakes, a better alternative would be to design a system that can withstand human nature and fix the institutional process so that that error doesn't happen again. The problem is that to do this takes time and most company CEOs can not see much beyond the next fiscal year.
I could have been more clear here. When I mentioned companies there I was referring to the people running the companies. Of course a company has no feelings or agency, companies are just a legal structure around a collection of people. Don't get me started on the absurdity of arguing that companies are people, that ruling was terrible.
I don't think its reasonable to assume that a company could ever have full safeguards in place to ensure that a bad actor employee could never cause meaningful damage, unless you are okay with a completely trustless system. Companies must trust their employees at some level, generally the level of trust grows in relation to the employee's responsibilities.
Its unreasonable to assume that any system can be 100% foolproof, if that's a requirement it just shouldn't exist. In the case of companies, they have to accept dome level of risk that employees can cause damage, whether intentional or not.
> Companies must trust their employees at some level, generally the level of trust grows in relation to the employee's responsibilities.
Hard disagree. People should be trusted with the things they need to perform their role, and no more than that. You would not give access of a production database to a CTO just because they have more responsibilities than a sysadmin, and any CTO that tries to bludgeon their way into getting access to it should be considered unfit for work.
It sounds like we actually see that the same, I'm trying to make a slightly different point.
Say I'm a software developer specifically working on the frontend library for an authentication service. The company needs to trust me with access to parts of the system and infrastructure pertinent to that feature. I very much agree that I should be locked out of other areas that I don't need for the job, for example I shouldn't have access to employee records, accounting, etc.
Once I am fired, though, the company has to continue to trust me to not misuse the parts of the system that I do already have access to. If I am fired but allowed to stay for a transition period and my permissions aren't revoked immediately, the company is trusting me. If I am fired and immediately blocked, its a sign that the company didn't trust me rather than an indication of my own mistrust for the company/institution.
You could continue to work on things, but your access would be set to read-only and you'd lose commit rights, or you'd be working on a completely separate branch and as part of the transition process someone else on the team would have to be able to report they have successfully merged worked from your tree to the main one.
Going back to my original point in this thread, aren't you describing how the post-firing lockout is based on the company's mistrust of the employee rather than the other way around, right?
My point was never that there aren't security protocols that could be used, only that its not relevant whether the employee trusts the company in that scenario.
But it's the existence and application of these security protocols that can make all the difference, and having these protocols in place shows already some type of institutional maturity.
With the proper protocols in place, a company doing layoffs signals "we trust you can still perform your role as a developer, you can still communicate/collaborate with your colleagues and you can even access the source code (because who really is going to check if you are deleting the code repo from your machine?), and the removal of write-access to the systems can be seen as a smoke test if the transition can be done orderly", while the standard current procedure just says "Through no fault of your own, you will be seen now as a potential threat so we will treat you as toxic material".
Very rarely; maybe i misunderstood your point. You're saying it's an institutional failure, but not one of the leaders? So, it's the governments fault they allowed corporate structures to function this way? Or maybe you want to blame the board of directors?
Well, there are not many countries where people actually trust institutions (and, above all, the government). Perhaps Germany, Nordic countries, Netherlands, Japan, maybe a few more.
In Switzerland, we work with the government, and are generally OK with it, but proceed cautiously, as if it could explode any second. In Spain and France already, government is considered an inefficient nuisance. In many places in South America, the government is an adversary. In Russia, government is your arch-enemy, and you do everything possible to either hide from it, perhaps in another country, or actually damage it (unless you are evil and work for them).
So "trusting institutions" is a foreign, alien concept for most of the world.
I don’t think that many people trust _corporations_ anywhere. In the US, people at least can have some stake there, by owning stocks etc, which makes them more engaged. Stock markets in Europe are laughable, people rarely invest there, except through their bank funds.
The vast majority of employment in the US is so called "at will," which means an employee can be fired at any time for any reason, except an illegal one. And good luck with proving it was in fact an illegal one. Our "contracts" are barely worth the bits we use to store them. Why would we trust the company at all in this situation? It would be a mistake for every single person to take management at face value.
Americans tend to be more extreme and very individualist. Very distrustful of organizations and institutions. Many of the early European settlers were escaping religious/state persecution as well as the powerful trade guilds that dominated life in Europe at the time. I think a lot of this comes from the German immigration to the US, Germans to me seem a lot more tribal than the English. Maybe due to Germany operating as a collection of tribes and UK as an expansionist empire. Could be beer hall culture vs pub culture. When visiting Germany it was notable how small groups of people who didn’t know each other barely interacted.
If I needed help burying a body I would only ask my American friends. Friends from most other countries wouldn’t help and just encourage me to turn myself in. Not that I’ve needed this help but if I needed to do something where it was us against the world I would pick Americans to join me. I found it more difficult to make friends with Americans, they tend to maintain far fewer friendships, but the few they do maintain are held more strongly.
Because they don't trust institutions, if someone that is working for a company and does something bad, or is shown to be corrupt, it will affect the public perception of the company, not of the individual.
Also, because Americans don't trust institutions, a lot of the internal processes and cultural values are upheld by the individuals, and how strongly this is done depends on the individual's power and ability to influence. This applies to all levels of the organization. This allows for the organization as a whole to be more dynamic and effective, but the downside is that this works only when the individuals have a vested interest in the organization.
When there is a layoff, or even when a simple individual is fired, this mutual alignment is removed and all bets are off. Except for fear of legal retaliation, the individual is no longer bound to the organization. This can lead to things like:
- Executives preempting the communication of their firing and using it to swing internal opinion, or even taking key team members away with them, like Sam Altman vs OpenAI.
- Employees with access to (supposedly) restricted areas copying sensitive information: E.g, sales reps getting data from all their clients to contact them and move them along.
- Plain old espionage / sabotage. Don't forget, if a company is laying people off it means they are not doing well, and if they are not doing well means they certainly want to keep as much of what is "really happening" to themselves. Fired employees can use their internal communications to gather evidence from their boss wrongdoings, find internal memos and share with journalists willing to get a scoop, etc.