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The Machine Fired Me

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Re: The Machine Fired Me

#51

Post by noncoml »

ethicsengineer wrote: post #47

Engineers need to read The Trial by Franz Kafka. I don't think people fear soulless beurocracy without any possible resolution enough.

One of my favorite parts:

-- Before the Law

A man from the country seeks the law and wishes to gain entry to the law through an open doorway, but the doorkeeper tells the man that he cannot go through at the present time. The man asks if he can ever go through, and the doorkeeper says that it is possible "but not now". The man waits by the door for years, bribing the doorkeeper with everything he has. The doorkeeper accepts the bribes, but tells the man that he accepts them "so that you do not think you have failed to do anything." The man does not attempt to murder or hurt the doorkeeper to gain the law, but waits at the door until he is about to die. Right before his death, he asks the doorkeeper why even though everyone seeks the law, no one else has come in all the years. The doorkeeper answers "No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it."

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_the_Law

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#52

Post by jiaweihli »

terlisimo wrote: post #18

I had a sort-of related experience with PayPal where the machine said "No." I've been using it for at least 10 years at that point. What I did was try to pay for some cheap VPS hosting in Italy. The transaction was denied. I thought there was some problem with my CC, so I immediately tried to do a $1 transaction with some other company and it went without a hitch. So I contacted PayPal support about it and the next d…

I've heard nothing but bad things about PayPal and how they often hold your own money hostage. Why don't people switch to alternatives? Are there no good ones?

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#53

Post by bb88 »

jedberg wrote: post #9
bb88 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because a contract is not employment. A contractor has less protections than an employee. It's both good and bad, but typically a contractor gets a higher rate than an employee since health insurance, etc is not provided.

OP was pointing out that if they were a contractor for three years, they were violating IRS rules.

Not necessarily. If the employee is going through a body shop (and it sounds like he was, since he had a recruiter) then he might be an employee on W2 of the staffing agency, but not on the actual payroll of the company. That's different than forcing the person on a 1099 as part of an employment contract.

In the end he's still a "contractor" in the eyes of the company, and typically if something goes wrong, he's gonna be the first to go.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#54

Post by crooked-v »

terlisimo wrote: post #18

I had a sort-of related experience with PayPal where the machine said "No." I've been using it for at least 10 years at that point. What I did was try to pay for some cheap VPS hosting in Italy. The transaction was denied. I thought there was some problem with my CC, so I immediately tried to do a $1 transaction with some other company and it went without a hitch. So I contacted PayPal support about it and the next d…

> and for security reasons we're unable to offer further details

To give a little behind-the-scenes here, I worked for a bit for a web hosting company that had this as standard policy. This was because, before it was put in place, scammers would actually use coordinated campaigns of support calls with otherwise legitimate accounts in order to extract piecemeal details about how the company's fraud investigations worked, then reorganize their scamming to precisely evade the time periods and credit card checks used at the time.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#55

Post by isostatic »

rectang wrote: post #45

> I missed 3 weeks of pay because no one could stop the machine. Why has this company not made their loyal worker whole? He stayed there when they needed him even when their system was trying to lock him out. They need to fix this. If they don't, they are not a company anyone should work for. Perhaps the worker did not want to risk making a big stink, but a manager should have taken the initiative. Humans were involv…

Surely a 3 year contract means the company is in breach of it by not paying you?

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#56

Post by krapp »

newest_user_ wrote: post #5

I read it and still don't really understand why there was no one administrating the system. Who could have stopped the system (with the appropriate emails to cover their ass). I also do not understand why a check couldn't be cut. Submit to accounts payable with an email approval?

The system didn't need to be stopped. The employee's contract wasn't renewed, which is indistinguishable from a decision terminate him, so the system executed the termination as scheduled.

The system did exactly what it was intended to do, it was the humans who screwed up. Humans who presumably understood the way the system was designed, and didn't care enough to do some due diligence.

>I also do not understand why a check couldn't be cut. Submit to accounts payable with an email approval?

He was fired. It doesn't matter that people didn't intend for him to be, he was, it went through the system, it was a done deal. Paying people not in your employ is fraud, even under the best of intentions.

The real lesson here is that few of us, no matter how much money we make, how into the culture we are or how long our tenure has been, are more than a row in a database to our employer, and we can be dropped at any time. The contractor in this case would not have had much more "job security" with humans in the loop.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#57

Post by coderdude »

jiaweihli wrote: post #52
terlisimo wrote: post #18

I had a sort-of related experience with PayPal where the machine said "No." I've been using it for at least 10 years at that point. What I did was try to pay for some cheap VPS hosting in Italy. The transaction was denied. I thought there was some problem with my CC, so I immediately tried to do a $1 transaction with some other company and it went without a hitch. So I contacted PayPal support about it and the next d…

I've heard nothing but bad things about PayPal and how they often hold your own money hostage. Why don't people switch to alternatives? Are there no good ones?

Because there is a disconnect between reality and what you hear. PayPal is fantastic.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#58

Post by cornellwright »

rectang wrote: post #45

> I missed 3 weeks of pay because no one could stop the machine. Why has this company not made their loyal worker whole? He stayed there when they needed him even when their system was trying to lock him out. They need to fix this. If they don't, they are not a company anyone should work for. Perhaps the worker did not want to risk making a big stink, but a manager should have taken the initiative. Humans were involv…

Yeah the company is lucky he wasn't well on his way to finding a job somewhere else at this point.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#59

Post by milesvp »

eridius wrote: post #35
arglebarnacle wrote: post #32

I was misatakenly caught in an automated ban wave in World of Warcraft for "botting" just a couple months after joining, but as soon as a human reviewed my account I was reinstated immediately. The automated system flagged my account a second time a few weeks later, and when I appealed they simply said that although they didn't see any evidence of rule-breaking behavior, nobody got caught by the automated system twic…

Simple explanation: they did in fact see what you were doing and just didn't want to tell you because they don't want to teach cheaters how to evade bans. They were hoping after the first review that you would start playing by the rules.

Even simpler explanation is that false positives are real. All sufficiently complex systems have them. I'd imagine that triggering a false positive the first time greatly increases the likelihood that a second false positive is triggered.

I'd also further assert, that simply being an HN reader means you are more likely to trigger a false positive than the rest of the population. Blizzard does some very aggressive memory scans, and they look for tools that are much more common with developers than the rest of the population. I've personally used a well known library for code injection, that if I'd had it running on an unrelated binary while playing WoW they would have seen the signature of the library, and likely Blizzard would have eventually banned my account.

I don't know if the parent was doing things that Blizzard considers naughty or not, but I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt given what I've read about Blizzard's Warden.

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