"For security reasons (and to protect the PII of all our users and customers), everything was being shredded and/or destroyed" - what!? That is ridiculous. The only possible thing you need to destroy would be the hard drives. Why on earth would you shred everything?
This is common compliance nomenclature. The only people paying the high cost to have a full sized piece of equipment destroyed are governments or R&D companies with unique prototypes.
The hard drives are most likely being shredded since that is a common practice and certification feature offered by most disposal companies.
The servers are being "destroyed" because thats how they will be accounted for in inventory and tax purposes to account for full depreciation. The company isn't "selling" the servers to the disposal company so they are marked as "destroyed."
Unless specified in the contract the disposal company will sell the chassis without the drives to a reseller or if they are being paid to dispose of the system, they will separate the components and recycle the metal.
The same goes for the power and network cables, they will go off to a recycler, its how disposal companies off-set their pricing.
Remember 10 years ago at big company, the external audit company required picture evidence that the electronic equipment was being destroyed. We requested it to the disposal company, and they sent us pictures of a guy with a hammer smashing a motherboard
The whole situation so ridiculous and bureaucratic
This is correct. Once upon a time, I worked for a company doing this type of disposal. They had 18 wheelers full of equipment show up a couple of times per week. Drives were pulled and put in a pile to be shredded. Everything else was tested and either restored to working order and sold in bulk to organizations in need of cheaper computers, parted out on eBay, or scrapped.
Everything else was tested and either restored to working order and sold in bulk to organizations in need of cheaper computers, parted out on eBay, or scrapped.
Happy to say that my company shreds its old hard drives, then puts new ones in the old laptops and desktops and spruces them up for reuse.
We team up with a local organization to give them to poor children and families each Christmas. IT always sends around a bunch of photos afterward of kids who don't always know where they'll sleep from night to night clinging to a used computer like it's a life ring and they're in the middle of the ocean. I've been told that for some of them, it's the only present they'll receive the entire year.
We don't qualify for a tax break or any other renumeration for this. We do it because it's a nice thing to do.
(I have no idea what happens to servers. Not my department.)
Also thought that was quite wasteful. Even ethernet cables are cut. Why not just put them online for free pickup?
Also I can't help wondering if the switch to cloud makes sense for stack overflow now again because their traffic collapsed. I took the whole post as something that should be mourned a bit, not gleefully destroyed.
I wondered that, too. The scalability of cloud is ok when you are growing but truly wonderful when you are shrinking.
Stack Overflow used to serve over half a billion page views per month on only 25 servers[0]. I wonder how much traffic they get now, excluding crawlers?
Anecdotally, one of the reasons for SO's decline is that an LLM gives you the SO answer without the condescending snark. SO could have fixed that years ago, but didn't. So perhaps it might turn out to be yet another example of the dictum that culture eats strategy for breakfast.
Where? Should they drop them at a starbucks out front? Have an employee volunteer their home address? Put them out front at the office? How long should they hold onto the "free" cables that people are going to ask ridiculous questions such as "Do they work? When were they tested?" Are you going to force people to take all the cable or allow random selections? Are you going to waste the cost savings of moving to the cloud to have one of your tech people monitor requests for pickup? What if no one picks them up are you calling the recycler out again to pick up the cables you could have just given them?
Anyone who has posted "free" things online knows it comes a cost, thats the logic part I was referring too. When you work through the scenarios the "logical" conclusion is to give them to the recycler that you already have out at the datacenter for the systems you are decommissioning.
This is such an absurd argument. It's wild that you took the time to write this. But the next time you run into a problem like this, just ask a co-worker. I'm sure they can handle the logistics of giving something away for free.
I would say they evaluated it would cost more for them to remove the HDD and sell the machine than just shred them. And they would not risk to forget a HDD inside
