He Was Told to Train His Own Replacement—So He Walked Out the Door With as Many Company Secrets as He Could Grab
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I’ve never understood this…
I can understand being asked to train a new employee if you’re taking another position and things are cool with your managers, but why would anyone ask an employee who’s about to get axed to train their replacement?
It’s wild!
But it happens…and this guy knows all about it.
Check out what went down in this very interesting story.
Start now!
My old company fired a guy, made him train his replacement and then acted surprised when things went badly.
“I think notice period is kind of a dilemma.
On one side, I think it is absolutely necessary. Firing someone on the same day, telling them not to come to office anymore, making coworkers collect their stuff etc. is just a terrible way to treat people.
You can’t really win either way!
You basically leave someone unemployed without even giving them some time to search for another job. But at the same time telling someone months before that you are going to fire them can also create some interesting situations.
I used to work for a company in Japan.
There was a coworker who was told a few months before that he was going to be laid off and management also gave him the new guy who was going to replace him and basically told him to train his own replacement.
For weeks he taught the new guy everything. How to do each assignment, where the necessary files are, who he should email in which situation, what to do when certain problem happens etc. Basically all the knowledge he got from working there.
Then later we found out that during one of his last days, he brought an USB drive and copied a huge amount of company documents from the office PC.
This was about to get interesting…
And when I say company PC, I don’t mean he snuck into CEO’s office at night and hacked some super secure computer or something. The company was just terrible with IT security. We had shared computers and basically everyone could access almost everything.
If you knew where the folder was, you could just directly access it. There wasn’t much separating normal employees from a lot of internal documents. So the guy basically had an open buffet in front of him and copied whatever he could.
Later apparently he gave some of those documents to a competing company, probably for money.
Obviously I’m not defending stealing company information. What he did has its own legal and ethical problems. But what surprised me was how shocked the management was when they found out.
They didn’t see this coming…?
You literally told this person “we don’t want you here anymore” then you make him spend weeks teaching his replacement everything he knows while still giving him access to basically all of your company files and somehow you expect exactly the same loyalty from him until his final day.
Again, a proper notice period should exist. People shouldn’t suddenly lose their income with zero warning just because a company decided they are no longer needed.
But if you tell someone months in advance that you’re getting rid of them, make them train the person who will replace them and at the same time have almost zero access control on your internal documents, maybe don’t act completely surprised when something goes wrong.”
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If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a company that didn’t expect their work-from-home policy to result in better time off benefits for their employees.
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He wasn’t playing around!
And, admit it…
The petty side of you got a kick out of this story.
This worker really went out with a bang!
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