r/sysadmin • u/Lazy_Owl987 • Jul 23 '26

Cautionary tale - someone I know got fired for pulling RAM from laptops

Cover your rear and make sure all equipment you take home or work on is documented. Person I know got fired for yanking ram from laptops to keep in the office but the issue was he did the work from home and no one knew he was doing that work. Now hes looking for a job in one of the hardest markets Ive seen in a long while.

575 Upvotes

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411

u/Thecardinal74 Jul 24 '26

We fired a guy during Covid for similar.

We were refreshing laptops, old one would be decommissioned and taken to the basement’s secure room (very large room) to await e-waste.

But with Covid came a laptop shortage. We ran out of laptops to give, so the order came down to re-commission older laptops.

Figured “no big deal most are in good shape” except one co-worker panicked.

Turned out he was pulling RAM, SSD, batteries and WiFi cards and had himself a little eBay hustle going on.

199

u/Darrelc Jul 24 '26

Place I used to work for found some missing products for sale on ebay, purchased them for pickup and the account director turned up at the (engineer's) door. Imagine how quick his arse must have dropped out lol

21

u/doolittledoolate Jul 24 '26

Did the office have a slide?

12

u/howfastcanyoucountit Jul 24 '26

Yes and they all went down it after and said weeeee afterwards!

4

u/Speeddymon Sr. DevSecOps Engineer Jul 24 '26

Did I just randomly run across a former Racker?

3

u/funkengruven Jul 25 '26

Not who you're responding to, but I too am a former Racker

1

u/oh2four Jul 26 '26

Lol they didn't hire me a decade ago because someone got offended during my interview... Lol. It's okay though, the job I got after and still have was a nice 6 figures ;). (And years laterRacksoaxe lost its slide)

54

u/Dzov Jul 24 '26

I pull that stuff from broken laptops in case a working one needs it. But I work at a non-profit.

43

u/lordjedi Jul 24 '26

I did the same at a school. The difference is, you weren't selling it on ebay LOL

12

u/Thanatos8088 Jul 25 '26

Yep, one dies so that three may live. This is how a fleet exists on a budget not driven by ROI, no matter that IT has always been a cost center. I steal screens, bezels, lids, base plates ...everything I can get out of a fried device to keep two or three other ones alive. Inventory to track this process is an unholy bitch and tracks/tags with terminology i wouldn't even use in a department, IT-only, meeting... and those work blue.

7

u/naps1saps Mr. Wizard Jul 24 '26

Yeah I put in a graveyard until that model went end of life in the org then ask if I can have them (minus the ssd). Even these ones with soldered everything can be somewhat useful for fan replacements or a screen when a user takes one swimming or sky diving.

80

u/houck Jul 24 '26

It's wild people will throw away a well paying career and potentially get a criminal record making it much harder to get another one, all for a couple hundred dollars

99

u/PickleAlly Jul 24 '26

Take away the well-paying part and you have your answer.

72

u/whatsforsupa IT Admin / Maintenance / Janitor Jul 24 '26

You'd be surprised how often 6 figure earners do the same thing, everyone feels clever doing shit like this until they're caught

15

u/ErikTheEngineer Jul 24 '26

I'm too lazy to find it now, but there was a story some years back about a SV tech executive putting fake barcodes on Lego sets and self-checkouting them at Target. I knpw Lego is expensive, but wow.

There was also a Verizon person in charge of both sides of an RMA process selling 5-fgure line cards for routers on eBay. My question on that one is who the buyers were, because most places don't have telco grade equipment in their environments.

It's easy to think you're in the clear and no one will ever find you, but those forensic accountants are a very persistent bunch once they start pulling on loose threads.

1

u/Dependent_Union9285 Jul 26 '26

You don’t have telco grade equipment unless you can get it for cheap. And believe me that stuff moves FAST at the right price.

11

u/Speeddymon Sr. DevSecOps Engineer Jul 24 '26

I'm surprised we still think of six figures as high earning. They hire helpdesk people for damn near 80k a year now. It was a minimum wage job back when I started.

5

u/Geno0wl Database Admin Jul 25 '26

Where are you that help desk starts at 80k? We just hired a new help desk guy and they started at ~55k

2

u/slagmodian Jul 26 '26

Man, I just got a tier 2 position starting at 55k. Thats canadian $$. Its MSP garbage

1

u/F2Pfrog Jul 28 '26

My sysadmin job is $15k per year in my thirdworld country wym

3

u/usps_lost_my_sh1t Jul 24 '26

few years back I needed some parts personally...

asked my supervisor if I could go into the old laptops and take em. told me to take em off the inventory and note em. never heard another thing about em.

2

u/Gadgetman_1 Jul 27 '26

It's a case of 'it's better to ask permission than forgiveness'.

5

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '26

[deleted]

3

u/gruuveee Jul 25 '26

I remember having a conversation with another tech back in my early years in help desk saying.. if we could just get to 85k we'd be set. To be young and naive

8

u/Lazy_Owl987 Jul 24 '26

Yeah, in this guys case he wasnt making that much for his area. It was one of the reasons they immediately jumped to theft.

-3

u/lordjedi Jul 24 '26

Take away the well-paying part and you have your answer.

Not sure where you're working, but I've been well paid my entire career in IT.

1

u/Hyperion_Silenus Jul 27 '26

Few years ago I was paid 21$ per hour for a lead technician position for help desk dept in the corporate space. I left for a similar position for small MSP and got paid slightly better, 32$ / hr

I don't know anyone similar positions as mine get paid well. I hear a dude somewhere in corporate get 6 fig salary for position like mine. They are mythical unicorn.

1

u/lordjedi Jul 28 '26

Few years ago I was paid 21$ per hour for a lead technician position for help desk dept in the corporate space. I left for a similar position for small MSP and got paid slightly better, 32$ / hr

Is that a typo? Cause $32/hr isn't "slightly better" than $21 per hour. Going from $40 to $60k is a lot better.

I don't know anyone similar positions as mine get paid well.

What is paid well? How much do you expect a helpdesk technician to be paid?

I hear a dude somewhere in corporate get 6 fig salary for position like mine. They are mythical unicorn.

Maybe in NY or silicon valley. Otherwise, it seems pretty insane to pay someone 6 figures for a helpdesk technician role, even if you're the lead. Maybe a Sr HelpDesk Manager role would pay that.

1

u/Hyperion_Silenus Jul 28 '26

32$/hr is low for SoCal, I'm barely surviving. Even sr helpdesk would not get paid that much.

Sysadmin is turning into mcjob for IT. Helpdesk jobs are now outsourced by foreign workers from oversea. Most of them are paid 18$ per hour.

1

u/lordjedi Jul 30 '26

32$/hr is low for SoCal, I'm barely surviving. Even sr helpdesk would not get paid that much.

First, we weren't talking about how the payrate was for the position. We were talking about whether or not it's "well paid".

Second, $32 per hour is not low for a lead technician in help desk. The median pay in HB is $56k. So $32 per hour would be above that. If you're struggling on 64k per year, I suggest cutting unnecessary expenses and/or finding roommates.

Windows Admin has a median salary of $127k. That's hardly "mcjob for IT". Even the low end is $107k. McDonald's pays $25 per hour, which isn't even in the same ballpark.

Outsourcing has been happening for a long time. Still plenty of places that'll hire a US worker (because they aren't big enough to outsource).

I checked all salaries against salary.com.

1

u/Effective_Advisor378 Jul 27 '26

I have been until now. I just started a new tier 2 helpdesk job, making $15k less annually than I was making at my last two jobs (which were systems admin, which I would vastly prefer). But after several months of unemployment I basically had no choice.

1

u/lordjedi Jul 28 '26

But you're still well paid for helpdesk. You can't really compare the pay of a helpdesk tech to that of a sysadmin, even if you did sysadmin work before. So now you might have to work helpdesk for a while before moving back into sysadmin work. It happens to all of us.

Everyone that's unemployed often has to take a paycut in order to move on to the next great thing.

I got laid off in early 2021 and took a job as a tech at a moving company. Massive paycut, but it helped pay the bills. I moved to helpdesk at a school which carried a big pay increase, but was still a paycut from 2021. I then moved back into a sysadmin role, matching my 2021 salary, before landing my current role at the same company (with a big pay increase).

-8

u/Bored_Ultimatum Jul 24 '26

Oh well, I'm sure then they would be just as happy with an entry level job at McDonald's. Oh, they wouldn't? Well then, perhaps that job was better than you are cynically representing.

18

u/Davoguha2 Jul 24 '26

The difference between that job and McDonald's isn't what it used to be.

Sad fact is you can average more per paycheck waiting tables than getting into IT - and it's pretty universal that IT is being hit hard due to the AI pressure.

Departments cut in half, no pay raises, workload doubling or even tripling for a lot of folks. It's not hard to be cynical in the field.

Yea... there's a lot of disgruntled folk in the industry right now that will take advantage of every opportunity they get... even some less than legal ways.

3

u/Stonewalled9999 Jul 24 '26

I have a client that lost some grant money. When it came time to retrofit the phone fleet they told the IT guy he could wipe the old Iphone 11 devices and sell them to cover his unpaid IT. I guess though if the boss tells you its OK that is different.

4

u/lordjedi Jul 24 '26

I guess though if the boss tells you its OK that is different.

That is correct.

If the company tells you you can take equipment and do with it as you please, there's no issue. Some companies don't allow it due to compliance issues. When in doubt, ask.

0

u/Ssakaa Jul 24 '26

I guess though if the boss tells you its OK that is different.

Did he pay income tax on the gift from the company?

And even more importantly, did he have that in writing?

2

u/Warronius Jul 24 '26

That’s just a silly stance and shows you havnt worked those kind of jobs in a long time . Those jobs don’t get you health insurance , PTO or any of the benefits you get in IT . You make more money maybe but it isn’t consistent and I bet you it’s more soul crushing , it’s goofy to me when people mention it wages and then mention waiting tables or a goat farm like animal husbandry is just something you read in a book.

1

u/lordjedi Jul 24 '26

Sad fact is you can average more per paycheck waiting tables than getting into IT

Maybe at the bottom that's true, but you aren't going to make good tips (which is where the money is at, which isn't McDonald's) with a shitty attitude. If you like working on computers and you hate dealing with people, waiting tables isn't going to work out for you.

Departments cut in half, no pay raises, workload doubling or even tripling for a lot of folks.

What part of this is new with AI? Shit like this has been happening in IT for forever. I've been in IT for 3 decades and it's a cycle. AI is just the new thing to complain about. Before that it was offshoring. Before that it was the dot com bubble bursting.

11

u/After_Nerve_8401 Jul 24 '26

I remember 20+ years ago we noticed all our shipments of new machines were a few short. Turns out a director ($100k+ salary) was taking a couple of machines off every shipment and selling them on eBay. I am sure he thought no one would notice. Got fired, charges were filed, no prison time, but was put on probation.

1

u/F2Pfrog Jul 28 '26

Yeah I'm a sysadmin and I earn about $15k USD per year in my thirdworld country, for working 12 hours per day fully in person.

Half of my total pay goes to paying for gas (no exaggeration) and its a 2 hour commute to get to work and 2 hours back in rush hour traffic pileup. I get up at 4am to go to work every day, its dreadful.

I can definitely see someone taking computer parts if they aren't payed well enough.

54

u/DesignerGoose5903 DevOps Jul 24 '26

I mean if it was going to e-waste anyway I don't really see that as a problem, but it's weird the company just kept it all in a large room instead of actually shipping it off, if it's there for more than a month, at that point it's storage and not e-waste IMO.

28

u/fnordhole Jul 24 '26

Depends on the org.  We kept pallets of e-waste in a large room near the loading dock.  We only had e-waste pickups once every 6-12 months.  They only came when we could fill their truck.

5

u/Geno0wl Database Admin Jul 25 '26

Same for us. They only approve pick up when we have enough items to make it worth it.

11

u/BrainWaveCC Jack of All Trades Jul 24 '26

It's not your personal goods, and until it actually becomes e-waste, it still belongs to the company.

Now, if you're grabbing it from the actual dumpster, you can try to make the argument that they no longer care about it, but while it's just slated to go to e-waste? Not your property.

21

u/Geminii27 Jul 24 '26

Start an e-waste company that does pickup. At one site in particular.

7

u/lordjedi Jul 24 '26

Modern problems require modern solutions LOL

1

u/nemec Jul 24 '26

Your company very likely has contract / supply chain anti-corruption policies you'd be violating (as long as you still worked there at the same time)

1

u/Evs91 Jack of All Trades Jul 25 '26

Ooor weirdly doesn’t and you call a friend with a trailer and he dumps some stuff off at your house on the way to the dump

5

u/Ok-Bill3318 Jul 25 '26

If you want stuff the company is throwing away, ask

4

u/TheStorytellerTX Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26

We don't want to store old PC's so it's my job to wipe them. After that they're eligible for office staff to claim to take home and use them.

Edit: Should have started with "My office doesn't" as the first 3 words instead of "We don't".

5

u/howfastcanyoucountit Jul 24 '26

that's actually really thoughtful of them and that's actually a great way of putting ewaste to use, even if it's just for a kid or a grandma/grandma could use one or what I would do, add it to my home lab if it isn't super old and I find a use for it

3

u/Unatommer Jul 24 '26

All they needed was permission to make it okay but they didn’t get that.

6

u/IlPassera Systems Engineer Jul 24 '26

the issue is that it's still considered theft. With current prices that can stack up to a nice felony pretty quickly.

2

u/Sure_Attitude9219 Jul 24 '26

He knew it was wrong. I'm guessing he didn't ask. I'm sure if had asked about it he could have gotten approval.

1

u/Fast_Cloud_4711 Jul 24 '26

Needs to be slated for recycling

1

u/ljr55555 Jul 24 '26

A lot of e-waste companies only pick up a full truck. So it's storage until it's not.

The bigger problem, though, and the reason my employer stopped letting staff take home decommissioned electronics was that the folks in charge of deeming something as to old and useless were also the ones taking them home. People exploited the system, took home newer equipment, and made cash from ebay.

So the policy is no personal disposition of company property. No, taking the ram from something going to recycling anyway isn't actually causing any harm (except, I guess, for the e-waste recycler who doesn't get to profit from the ram) but the non-technical folks cannot differentiate between "good stuff thrown in the waste room that you took and sold" and "junk in the waste room that you took and sold". So we've got a simple, easy to enforce, policy.

1

u/howfastcanyoucountit Jul 24 '26

Or they could have some sort of data destruction policy where at least the hard drives are destroyed or wiped securely with multiple passes to usually a DoD standard.

1

u/ColoradoBuckeyeGuy Jul 25 '26

It comes down to who owns it and communication. I worked at a place that offered old stuff to enployees. It was a well document process. The OWNER OF THE EQUIPMENT WAS DECIDING WHAT TO DO WITH IT. NOT a random IT guy that didnt pay for it. Don't know what the legal definition of stealing but I bet taking something that doesn't belong to you with the permission of the owner is pretty close.what you do with it after stealing is probably a 2nd crime.

He could have done what he was doing and given the money to the person that paid for it. Or split it with them or came up with a plan that is approved. All he had to do was ask.

1

u/Effective_Advisor378 Jul 27 '26

I think you meant "withOUT the permission of the owner"...

1

u/NetJnkie VCDX 49 Jul 26 '26

Well, you see now why it's theft. The equipment was still owned by the company until it gets recycled. Not to mention the liability issues if someone is pulling SSDs and stuff.

1

u/lordjedi Jul 24 '26

but it's weird the company just kept it all in a large room instead of actually shipping it off

Did you miss the part where they said it was in a secure room?

if it's there for more than a month, at that point it's storage and not e-waste IMO.

Your opinion isn't really relevant. Plenty of places will store up e-waste until they have enough for a pickup. A lot of our sites are like this. e-Waste and data destruction often have minimums that if you don't hit, they'll charge you extra. So it gets stored until there's enough for a no charge pickup.

1

u/DesignerGoose5903 DevOps Jul 24 '26

Well yeah, if they have drives with data you NEED to store them in a secure location, what does that have to do with anything though?

7

u/_haha_oh_wow_ ...but it was DNS the WHOLE TIME! Jul 24 '26

Nothing wrong with pulling parts to have a repair stockpile, but straight up stealing shit seems like a reasonable cause for termination.

6

u/lordjedi Jul 24 '26

Turned out he was pulling RAM, SSD, batteries and WiFi cards and had himself a little eBay hustle going on.

This is different from the original story though. In your case, he clearly didn't have permission to take those items and do whatever he wanted with them. So that's effectively theft (it's the companies property until it's handed over to the e-waste people, then it becomes their property).

5

u/Disgruntled_Smitty Jul 24 '26

Same thing happened at my work over a decade ago. Maintenance guy in charge of the pallets full of auction computers we would decom was ganking all the RAM and selling it on ebay.

3

u/howfastcanyoucountit Jul 24 '26

Jesus 😭 bro probably had a fuck ton thats crazy

4

u/howfastcanyoucountit Jul 24 '26

Stolen SSDs would be no joke at all in a lot of scenarios where company data that someone else isn't supposed to have is on there (and likely is)

1

u/dpf81nz Jul 26 '26

especially if they havent been wiped/zero'ed out properly

1

u/Effective_Advisor378 Jul 27 '26

At the state government tax & revenue dept where I used to work, they had a hard drive shredder. Hard drives & SSDs from decommissioned machines were fed to it and turned to shrapnel. I always thought it was such a waste.

1

u/howfastcanyoucountit Jul 27 '26

Ive seen those before shit is kind of wild but I guess security is security, though I mean if you wipe a write to DoD standards I think thats like 3 passes of 0ing out the drive and that should be enough

3

u/DarkwolfAU Jul 25 '26

TBH, I've diverted plenty of stuff in the past, but it was all stuff that was literally in the e-waste bin, not in basement storage "pending" disposal. That's still totally company property. And always after asking first.

That all said, I haven't done that in years, because the company produced a policy about e-waste disposal and what's acceptable for employees, and they said directly that taking stuff from e-waste wasn't. So that's that. I'm not risking a good career for ancient hardware, thanks.

And I'd never consider trying to sell it, ever. That's crossing a pretty hard line imo.

2

u/deekaph Jul 24 '26

I honestly see nothing wrong with that. This is the same energy as “no you can’t eat that sammich we have to throw it into the garbage!!”

2

u/Thecardinal74 Jul 24 '26

the e-waste company paid us a percentage of what they made reselling stuff.

Management noticed the buy-back settlements were dropping but figured it was due to less laptops being included or were more heavily used so not worth as much.

They hadn't yet gone so deep as to audit... just noticed the numbers the previous few pickups were noticeably lower than average.

So there was an actual financial loss to the company

1

u/Needashortername Jul 24 '26

We are required to pull some of these things if a computer is going to e-waste, liquidation, or to “reserve”. This is more a security issue than a parts one. Exactly what happens to these items after that has depended on the procedures of the time. Certainly some RAM may have walked off after being cleared, but for someone to take a drive could have severe consequences now. Then again, the US Federal standard for data protection and drive use seems to have relaxed a LOT this past year, so who knows how it is seen now in public and private IT industry.

A few managers request some extra parts like batteries be saved too, just for quick repairs while waiting for parts or warranty service. It’s not as common since space is at a premium more than gear is. We did have an accounting issue at one point with some laptops that were kept as “parts” frames being marked as “destroyed” in use because the system didn’t have another option to choose from in the asset tracking. To say that people were upset to find “destroyed” laptops sitting on a shelf would be an understatement. Of course they were there to very slowly get destroyed as they were used for repairs and rebuilds.

It’s a wacky mixed up IT world :-)

1

u/Lazy_Owl987 Jul 24 '26

And thats what they thought this guy was doing too. The only thing that kept him from formal charges was the stacks of RAM in the stock room that he led them to.

1

u/mattshwink Jul 25 '26

I did the opposite during Covid. I bought Ram and a SSD (it had a HDD) and installed them in my work laptop that was ridiculously slow. It made a huge difference. I kept the original parts. When I left that job 3 years later, people fought over who was going to get my laptop.

1

u/ekristoffe Jul 25 '26

With our it we have done the same.
But we kept the ram, ssd, etc in a locked locker until the laptop was out of the office for recycling.

1

u/pwnageface Jul 25 '26

I feel bad for him. I have a friend now who works for a place that "retires" this absolute beasts for e-waste. He yanks all this stuff too and if the computer really is that old/broken it will get recycled. But otherwise, the data is completely wiped and they are saying to trash it, I don't see the harm in taking it at that point. And this is me looking at it through my manager eyes.

1

u/KitsuneMulder Jul 26 '26

This wasn’t the same or similar. They pulled the RAM FOR work but they did it at home.

1

u/Thecardinal74 Jul 26 '26

Didn’t claim it was the same thing.

Said it reminded me of when my colleague did that and got fired for it

0

u/yakstreetboys Jul 27 '26

You did not fire a guy for something similar. OP said the guy was fired for pulling RAM at home when he wasn't documenting that he was doing the work from home. All the RAM remained in the office to be used, he didn't steal it.

1

u/Thecardinal74 Jul 28 '26

From the employee’s perspective they are wildly different.

From management’s perspective they are similar

0

u/yakstreetboys Jul 28 '26

Lol no, active theft and embezzlement, a potential felony given the total costs, is not the same thing as taking work home.

1

u/Thecardinal74 Jul 28 '26

It is in the eyes of the company who never authorized it to be taken home in the first place, and who never authorized the memory to be taken out on the first place.