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Can confirm. Some government positions also include an extremely invasive questionnaire. One question even asked me to list names, locations, times, and substances for every instance of drug use I had witnessed over the past 10 years on condition it would not be used against any mentioned peoples for prosecution. It's basically a "tell us all your secrets" form followed by a polygraph to make sure those are all your secrets.
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OriginalGriff wrote: In the UK you can't request a criminal record check unless the role directly requires one
No longer the case I'm afraid- since it was oursourced to private companies rather than the CRB, any Tom, Dick and indeed Harry can run a check. The other trick is to leverage the concept of an enforced subject and make the job offer conditional on agreeing to fill in the form requesting disclosure.....
OriginalGriff wrote: which normally takes a couple of months and doesn't give you full details, just a "yes / no" on relevant convictions.
Or a couple of days, depending on who you use
OriginalGriff wrote: doesn't give you full details, just a "yes / no" on relevant convictions.
Again, not quite - it will give details of any unspent convictions, or all convictions in the case of enhanced disclosures (think in terms of working with vulnerable people, kids etc).
I personally think that it SHOULD be restricted in the way you outlined - but then companies would find ways around it - a wise man once told me "there's what's legal, and then there's what you can get away with" - for instance a "friend" was asked do you have any spent or unspent convictions (which you're not supposed to ask - that's the point of spent convictions!), and when he answered honestly (not realising that in that case you're permitted to "present yourself as someone without convictions", the company suddenly decided that the job for which he was applying didn't exist.....which is rather naughty.
C# has already designed away most of the tedium of C++.
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OriginalGriff wrote: - several years inside for fraud and embezzlement -
Aw Griff... you promised me you wouldn't tell anyone!
... such stuff as dreams are made on
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I worked at a bank many years ago where an entire dev. team was let go in the week between Christmas and New year. They were all contractors so they were told by their agents.
Keep your friends close. Keep Kill your enemies closer.
The End
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Contracting is different, you expect to be dropped at short notice when the whim takes them. But a permie getting fired is almost unknown in our buisness.
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I know some were fired - we have a real problem to get good quality for our QA, so some have to go...
However I'm working for the same company for over 20 years and never fired - actually got a 40% raise this month to not to walk away...
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge". Stephen Hawking, 1942- 2018
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Kornfeld Eliyahu Peter wrote: 40% raise this month to not to walk away...
SO they have been keeping your wages low for the last 20? 
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sort of sacked, asked to quit.
short story: boss asked me (as the PM of a project) to lie to a client, I said no! he said go!!
5 minutes later he had my letter and I walked out after demanding (and getting) I still be paid the full notice period.
2 other successive PM's, same project also left in less than a month after I went.
6 months later that company ceased to exist - owing a sh*t load of money for unfulfilled projects.
no regrets, and if ever asked to lie again I would still do the same in a heartbeat.
This internet thing is amazing! Letting people use it: worst idea ever!
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Now in my mid-40s, I'm only at my third software company. I'm a long-term guy.
The first two companies were acquired by larger entities. Both times, a large amount of staff was let go but I was kept around for some period of time to help shut things down.
I'm not sure if there's some special meaning I'm supposed to read into this.  The nice thing about this (for me at least) is that when they want you to stick around when others are being let go, they're willing to compensate.
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I was laid off once (along with the entire company) in 2001, when the startup I'd joined a year before crashed and burned.
/ravi
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Twice. Celebrated both 
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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I tried to fire a guy once, went through HR process of a written letter warning him to get his sh*t together, 3 weeks later after actually getting HR to agree to sack him comes the Friday he was to leave HR informs me they don't actually have a process to fire the guy. A year later before he left useless POS he was.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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Yes... during GFC of 2008... I was the victim of thieves in suits at big banks taking down every one but themselves
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I work only since 6 years and in the same company so my personal experience is limited. In the history of our software team nobody was ever sacked, at most they weren't confirmed after the customary (paid) internship period.
GCS d-- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L+@ E-- W++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- ++>+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
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A year or so after I left a rather big company (50k users in Europe alone), one of my former colleagues added all of the European servers into a SCCM (SMS at the time I guess) collection to be rebuilt.
The cost was around £18.000.000.
He still works there so, no, I don't think it's possible to get fired from an IT job. 
A fair few of my current colleagues also cements this belief.
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About 12 years ago I was the IT manager at a tourist attraction in the North West of England and had been there for two years. I had markedly improved the IT infrastructure and had even brought in several old PCs from home to make life easier for staff who were having to share obsolete kit between large numbers. I brought in lots of older, but perfectly serviceable kit, such as drives, printers, monitors etc.
One day I was called in to the meeting room and was told that I was being made redundant, and that I had 30 minutes to collect my belongings before I was to be escorted of the premises. I then proceeded to walk around each office, pointing out all of the kit I had brought in, telling them that I wanted each piece returned within 24 hours, including one of the drives in the main office server. They baulked at the last one, eventually paying me considerable more than it was worth to keep it.
They were unable to print off payslips that month, as the NCR paper they used required an impact printer, and the only one there was my old Epson dot matrix. This went home with me!
I had brought in a 24" Dell CRT monitor for the use of a lady in the office with poor eyesight. This I left for her, but made it abundantly clear to the management that this was my personal gift to the lady, not the company, and had them document this in writing before I left.
Pettiness can be so satisfying at times!
=========================================================
I'm an optoholic - my glass is always half full of vodka.
=========================================================
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effectively fired... TWICE... just called "incompatible with work environment" within 2.5 months of the the 3month probation period, and the other called a "retrenchment financial reasons" when I stood up and didn't want to take pay drop, that was at month 4, 1month into the 6month fixed term contract that followed from the first 3month fixed term contract
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Never been fired; but...
Have been told that I would never even be considered for promotion / pay rise - unless I shaved off my beard. This was shortly after EDS took over the company I worked for (Unilever Computer Services). A couple of months later I accepted another job and on handing in my resignation, the new (American) boss offered me "whatever money I wanted" to stay. I looked him in the eye and told him it was exactly that attitude that was why I was leaving. Never seen anyone look so confused.
Have been made redundant - by a very long-established, household name UK company (Prudential Insurance - an entire division folded after the Piper Alpha oilrig disaster, and a few other losses, in '88 cost them a fortune). We were taken offsite for a "meeting" where we were told of the closure. On return to the office, if your name wasn't on the list, you didn't get back in the building. Security gathered your belongings and handed them to you on the street. I was a "lucky" one and got an extra three months working there, and we all got reasonable redundancy terms.
Have also been the line manager responsible for firing a couple of people. One a new-hire, still on probationary period. He was Russian, and despite having got through interview somehow (I didn't interview him) he spoke almost no English and knew nothing about programming. The other was a long-time employee who had allowed a mix of poor health, a horrible attitude and laziness, combined with being the only person in the company who knew about a particular system, to effectively allow him to hold the company to ransom. He was the only guy who could fix it, so he figured he could take as long as he wanted. Repeatedly drifting in an hour or two late, leaving an hour or two early, taking a couple of hours for lunch and sleeping inbetween. When he was gone we just developed a new system on different hardware.
Worked freelance for nearly 25 years and I've not sacked myself yet!
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I got let go a few times. The last time, I was out of work for almost 8 months, and in that time I got diagnosed with ADHD. This made sense out of the job losses and the previous 45+ years.
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I thought it was ADHD; turns out it was (is) boredom from working with unreasonable people.
"(I) am amazed to see myself here rather than there ... now rather than then".
― Blaise Pascal
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The supervisor was being a bit of a jerk to a fellow developer. I stood up and said something, and the next day the company downsized its IT staff by one member for "cost reduction" reasons. I was really tired of working there and was happy to get a 13 month package.
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend; inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. -- Groucho Marx
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A friend of mine got sacked along with the entire team because the parent company which started the smaller company/project (I have no idea how corporations work) couldn't keep the wages anymore, the financier left or something like that. The way my friend tells it he almost felt sorry for the CEO who personally apologized to everyone (who was let go) for not having reliable investor.
That was that and the entire team was let go except the Team Lead.
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Yep. Once was a downsizing, they just ran out of projects. Kept people on for a while doing internal things, but no new work came about, so they just had to let a bunch of us go. No problem.
Second was the company hired a nitwit manager, who then hired other nitwit managers whose only qualifications were being buddies with #1 at a previous company. We clashed pretty hard, and eventually it came to a head. Glad it happened, from what I hear via the grapevine, it's turned into a sweatshop.
Turns out you hire stupid people, you get bad results. Surprise!
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Lets just say I have been disciplined... LOL...
But as a manager, I have had 2 interesting cases.
1) A programmer that was not great, and not interested in improving. His biggest (and most common) mistake was allocating stack memory and returning a pointer to it, out of the function that allocated it.
His fatal mistake was suggesting that MY JOB as his manager was to review all of his code, and make sure that it is shippable... And that if it worked in the debugger, but not in real life, he was in the clear...
I fired him.
2) Another employee at another company was basically a bad hire. The guy was useless. It took him weeks to do a day or two of programming. He had a set of 20 tasks items and a week before he went on vacation. I was quite busy, but he assured me he was making his way through the list. He was leaving Thursday. It was my mistake for trusting him, but at this point, I thought he was just slow. On Thursday at 5pm, he says he did not finish (but we had to ship internally for docs to be written), and when queried, he barely had like 4 items done. All minor stuff, mind you.
I was incensed over this, so I handed his work to another programmer on Friday morning(the best in the group, to be sure), and he finished EVERY REMAINING item by like 2pm on Friday. This was not even his code base. He complained that the quality of some of the code was bad.
And this started my insistence on code reviews. Literally daily reviews for new programmers until they earn the right to be given more latitude.
When he came back from vacation, I started the process to let him go, which involved sending him to training, etc. etc. He milked it for about 2yrs. LOL... I actually left the company before he did, as I discovered the CEO was lying, and eventually was sent packing.
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I worked at Nationwide Insurance in the US and was fired. I had a manager who hated me and tried to get me fired. I BCCed a reply to one of her nasty emails to a employee relations lawyer and HR was moving to fire me at her request. The keystroke loggers caught my email after the fact, so they retired her, then fired me.
Nationwide Insurance and other large corporations have a habit of over hiring consultants, offering positions to the ones they like and getting rid of the ones they don't like. The process for Nationwide was a 3 year cycle.
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