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>Burning no bridges is smart, even if you're
>deeply unhappy and would never consider working for the organization again.
>The world is a small place, and even if you never re-enter the
>organization, the chances of meeting some of the people in other
>circumstances are very high.
VERY sage advice, even if you don't work in Silicon Valley (or maybe especially
if you don't--smaller subset of people to run into again).
When I was laid off from my last position, a disgruntled young (read
"immature") programmer, who believed he was indispensible and therefore
resented being laid off, erased all of the files on his hard disk.
Besides being ridiculous and despicable, this behaviour was somewhat bizarre,
for the following reasons:
1. The lay off was a deep one: some people were cut because it was financially
impossible to keep them (I like to count myself in this group ;-) ). He could
have consoled himself, and his future employers, in the same way.
2. The programmer _knew_ that regular backups were being made by the system
administrator.
He wasted only 1 day's programming, and never got a good reference from that
company again. The company subsequently went bankrupt, but alhtough the high
tech. community around here (Ottawa) is not small, it's close knit. Last I
heard, he'd moved to Australia with his wife (she's Aussie) 'cause he couldn't
get work around here.
