Of course there will still be backups of various files to varying degrees so this is not about “covering your tracks”, rather it’s about not consciously leaving things laying around in an easily accessible location. Basically I left it clean of things I had received or created. Now let’s be clear – all material of an ongoing work nature goes into shared locations – but I worked on the assumption that the machine would be nuked and anything of ongoing value to the org was moved off. Yes, it was a corporate machine for corporate purposes but most people accumulate some things of a personal nature they do not wish to necessarily share with who know who. Same again for “My Documents” (the pronoun “my” is somewhat debatable on a corporate machine anyway) and other places I accumulated files. I permanently removed all of those from the machine before handing it back. Almost all of those existed in PSTs on the local machine along with who knows how many tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of received emails. For example, you build up a lot of baggage over 14 years – try 71,141 sent emails for a start. You want to hope that your previously loved machine will be handled ethically and simply wiped, but I planned for it to be pilfered in the most obscene of ways. ![]() My old machine – I hoped for the best and planned for the worst Maybe I did a good job of the exit strategy, maybe people just forgot about me quickly or maybe it was a bit of both, point is it was a clean exit and I’d like to share the things I did which contributed to that. With almost four months of corporate-free air now behind me, I’ve had zero cases of people needing me for knowledge, access rights or anything else to do with my previous job. Ex-employees often have easy access to corporate data and really, it’s in nobody’s best interest for you to depart the workplace still being able to mess with their things. It’s not just about not leaving people in the lurch, mind you, it’s also about your responsibility to the organisation to ensure you don’t still have access to things you shouldn’t have. But secondly, this should be useful for others because we do tend to create a long tail of dependencies on us as technical people. As I was preparing to exit, I made a bunch of notes in a draft blog post because firstly, as I recently wrote in How I optimised my life to make my job redundant, I find this helps me ensure I get things right. You build up a lot of dependencies over 14 years, a lot of access to systems and a lot of people who count on you. As I’ve now widely publicised, I left Pfizer a few months back after 14 years with the firm.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |