Tech workers have found themselves in a world where they could be laid off without warning, regardless of their performance or seniority. It’s unsettling, and kind of scary.
A lot of advice about dealing with layoffs focuses on financial concerns, like having an emergency fund built up, paying off debt, and so on – all excellent advice, and arguably more important than what I want to discuss here. (Actually, if you haven’t even started any of that, stop reading now and work on that instead.)
Tech companies that lay off their employees are often generous with severance, but they are also often cruel in vanishing them from their workplace within a few scant hours – or even instantaneously. When that happens to you, you’re permanently locked out of your (um, former) work computer and network. All your files and account accesses become unreachable.
This can be a big problem, because tech professionals accumulate artifacts, like scripts and other customized, personal tooling, that they use to make them more effective at their jobs. If yours only live in your employer’s systems, and you get laid off, you lose them all.
So, let’s discuss what you should do to avoid losing your work artifacts due to a layoff.
Disclaimer: I Am Not A Lawyer! The plan I describe here must not be used to steal any confidential or proprietary information from your employer, or otherwise break the law or violate the terms of your employment. It’s up to you to ultimately figure out which artifacts are fair to keep.
Step 1: Uninstall non-work software
Your work computer is not your personal hardware. It should not have any of your own software on it that isn’t pertinent to your job. So, uninstall all of those extraneous applications. Examples include:
- games
- non-work chat or video apps (looking at you, Discord)
- personal financial software
- social networking apps, unless you use them for work responsibilities
- streaming apps (frequent travelers might opt to let these be!)
Step 2: Assess remaining software
Consider the remaining, work-related personal software that’s still installed – in particular, software that is licensed to you. I’m not talking about apps that were bought by and are owned by your employer, and licensed to you under their own agreement; that’s not your software. This is for software that you licensed and/or bought on your own, as an individual.
If any license for that software is associated only with your work email address, you’ll want to replace it with one associated with a personal email address. Otherwise, if you’re laid off, you won’t be able to verify your license’s email address, and could have trouble renewing the license or seeking support.
The process for converting a license to a different email address is most likely going to be vendor-specific. Hopefully, self-service is an option; it may be enough to log in to the vendor’s own site and update your account there. You might need to file a support ticket otherwise, especially if the address is embedded in the license key itself.
Save a copy of any license keys for your personally-owned software. Hopefully you can copy or export them directly from your apps; if not, you might have to dig into your email archives to find them. Again, if they are linked to your work email address, see if you can get them reissued under a personal email address.
Step 3. Update email addresses on online accounts
Inventory all of your personal online accounts and find any where you only provided your work email address. These could be accounts for:
- news sites
- forums and discussion sites
- investment services
- public educational resources
- professional associations and conferences
- public developer systems (e.g., GitHub)
- online shops
- travel and hospitality companies
- delivery and logistics companies
- general professional sites (e.g., LinkedIn, Glassdoor)
Once you lose your work email, you might not be able to perform password resets, and you won’t receive any email messages about the accounts. Add a personal email address, and consider dropping your work email completely.
As I clarified with software: This isn’t for accounts which you only have due to your employer’s sponsorship, like for work-tracking / project management sites, cloud providers, employer-sponsored training and education resources, or password storage systems. Those accounts are either required for your job, or benefits explicitly tied to your employment, so when you’ve been cut loose, you ought to lose access. You may happen to have your own separate personal accounts for some of those same services (e.g., your own AWS account); those are the ones to focus on.
Also make sure that your work email is not used for multi-factor authentication (MFA) for your personal accounts.
Step 4. Log out of personal online accounts
Stop using as many personal online accounts as possible on your work machine. The primary targets here are social networks, which you shouldn’t be accessing from your work systems anyway – with some exceptions, such as posting on behalf of your employer. If you’re not sure whether you should log out of something, imagine that some nefarious IT drone will log in to your former work computer after you’ve surrendered it, and dig around inside your browser. If you wouldn’t want them to see what you’ve been posting, log out now.
Keep track of what you stay logged in to, so you know what to take care of if you are laid off.
Step 5. Move off non-work personal files
Some examples of what to look for:
- pictures, photos, or any other images
- personal documents, such as tax statements or benefits confirmations
- official records related to your employment, such as offer letters, promotion notifications, or performance evaluations
- music
- movies
- non-work e-books
The fewer of these that remain on your work computer, the better.
Step 6. Backup or sync remaining files
What you have left should be only those personal files you use for day-to-day work, such as:
- notes
- scripts and dotfiles
- basic tools
- general-purpose spreadsheets
- wallpaper images
- collected clip art
- application add-ons and extensions
- personal contact lists
- personal fonts
- timesheets
- saved articles and posts
- work-related e-books
- browser bookmarks (export these from your browser)
Set up either a regular backup schedule or a remote sync to copy these files to somewhere you can access without your work computer, such as an external hard drive or an online storage system like Google Drive. Check with your employer’s security policies to understand what you’re allowed to connect to. For example, it’s common to be forbidden to, or even unable to, plug in a flash drive.
Remember, this isn’t for saving off your employer’s proprietary information, such as code and internal documents. Also, never ever copy off protected information like PII or data subject to HIPAA, GDPR, or the like. Even if your work computer is permitted to hold protected data, your own hardware isn’t.
Activating the plan
If you follow all of the steps above, you should be in a pretty good position if you are laid off. The core idea is to draw a clear line between your work and personal artifacts. That’s always wise, even if you’re never at risk.
But, if that day comes, be ready to execute the rest of the plan. Fortunately, there’s not much left to it!
If you might be laid off soon, or know you will be, then on your work computer:
- Log out of all remaining personal accounts. Consider changing their passwords later, just to be extra safe, if you actually are laid off.
- Delicense all your personal applications and remove license keys from the system. Consider uninstalling the apps.
- Run your backup or sync process one last time, then deactivate it and uninstall any dedicated tooling for it.
- Delete any of your remaining local artifacts that you don’t want left behind.
On the other hand, if you get shut out without warning, you can’t do as much. Still, your risk is minimized.
- Change the passwords for all remaining personal accounts that you didn’t get a chance to log out of. If possible, log in to those accounts and terminate the open sessions tied to your former work computer.
- If you were using a remote backup or sync connection, sever it, so that if the work computer comes back online at some point, the connection isn’t restored, and your files aren’t copied back over. A password change or key invalidation may be in order here.
Easy to miss
I’ve tried to make this prep plan generally useful for knowledge workers, but since I’m a software engineer, I probably missed some artifacts that are critical for other lines of work. I likely missed some obvious artifacts for software engineering too! So, do leave a comment for anything else that should be included.
Featured image original photo by arbyreed: https://www.flickr.com/photos/19779889@N00/5454366440 . Licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/
Vector Beta 