It's called a legitimate question; I didn't have the data you had, so I asked the question I was curious about.

Don't be a cunt.

Given the unit will undoubtedly spend most of the time "off", what about power consumption when the unit is turned off? We know most appliances today aren't really "off" when they're "off", so why not look at that?

They obviously had IT in some capacity; whoever they had set it up did them dirty if they didn't emphasize the importance of backups.

I know; I've been "that guy" who helped out a small company get on their IT feet, as it were. I always stressed the importance of backup routines, of how to take care of their data. I gave them scenarios where, if I get called for X, I won't be able to help them if they weren't on top of their backup routine. I always asked them what that'd mean to them and their business. I made a point of driving this home.

Of course I've received those calls, and I've asked the question, "What do the backups look like?". If they're my customers their backups are usually up to date and ready to go. An evening's worth of work, maybe a weekend, and they're back in business.

If they aren't, then my price just went up. WAAAY up.

It was unthinkable to run a company without reliable backups 25+ years ago. Today I'd call it criminal negligent. How many more stories does the CIO need before s/he make this a priority?

Just incredible how this keeps happening.

As a young programmer I watched senior coders get laid off and realized several things:

1) The more you make, the more attractive the target for cost reduction
2) You could have extensive knowledge about coding and a specific codebase, it won't save you.

Since then I spend my free time finding skills that my current environment is lacking, then develop those skills and put them to use. In the intervening 20+ years in the field, I have never once been laid off despite making what I make ( admittedly violating rule #1 ). Even were I laid off, I have several companies that would jump at the chance to have me back ( given my skillset and work ethic ).

I think working for larger corporations stifles people; they let themselves get comfortable in the pigeon hole they've been assigned, so they are ill prepared when lean times come.

Leave it to a CEO to frame this as a marketing problem instead of a skills and competency problem.

I've been poking proxmox for the past couple years, using it at home and in smaller environments and such...really impressive. I know there are some sophisticated functions that esxi can do that proxmox can't, but if you aren't one of those edge cases then you should be fine.

I really appreciate it's clustering and HA capabilities that you get out of the box, and you can't beat the cost ( even if you buy support ). It's really a game changer for the smaller to medium environments, particularly those that were on vmware stuff before.

Proxmox is my VM host of choice, but there are plenty of others with different strengths and weaknesses.

Anyone who hasn't at least planned their escape from VMware deserves whatever happens to them.

Of course you design your policies and procedures to protect against rogue employees, particularly in IT and especially with admins who have greater levels of access.

Suggesting otherwise exposes your own ignorance as to how IT security operates in companies ( or how it's supposed to ). Everywhere I've worked, suspended employees were treated as terminated as far as their access to resources were concerned ( up to and including email ). Most places would ask you to tell them if you were traveling out of country, and would suspend your credentials as a precaution if you were ( predominantly in IT and finance, oftentimes HR as well ).

It's a question of minimizing risk. Admins have enough access to shutdown operations for extended periods of time, so of course you would disable their access when the situation warrants it. You wouldn't trust them not to interfere with millions of dollars of productivity/day, and as an admin I wouldn't want them to.

But hey! I'm not sure why I'm wasting so much time trying to educate you on this; the less you know and the more you spread your "knowledge", the more work I get.

That is how companies see suspensions, at least competent ones. And here, with this story, we see WHY.

But by all means, continue to believe otherwise in the face of contrary evidence. My contracting rates are very reasonable ( considering the alternative of course ), so it's in my best interest that more companies think as you do instead of following my advice.

Suspension means the employee isn't performing their job duties; hence they don't need access to the system. Same thing applies, admittedly to a lesser extent, to when admins go on vacations.

On top of that, suspensions are not done with the assumption that the employee is coming back; it's more of a "get the person out of here NOW while we build our termination case" type of thing. Suspensions are almost always for ethical reasons, which is precisely the type of person who shouldn't have access, and therefore usually lead to terminations.

As we can see here, disabling his credentials was clearly called for, so between yours and my perspectives, which would you say is more correct?

...doesn't negate the question; why wasn't his account disabled? A suspended employee has no reason to access secure systems, this should be the default.

I'm having a hard time imaging a reason for suspension that wouldn't necessitate the need to disable his credentials.

Dunno about you, but I'm perfectly happy waiting for any movie to be released to streaming before watching it. Hell, most are trash anyway, but even the few I'm interested in seeing I can wait on.

Of course, we aren't talking about what *kinda* of streaming is the best.

Thank you, that makes sense.