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The Machine Fired Me

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Re: The Machine Fired Me

#121

Post by downandout »

astura wrote: post #118
downandout wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you accept PayPal as a merchant, every dollar you have received is 100% at risk until you have a) received it in your bank account, and b) removed it from any account for which PayPal has the information necessary to perform ACH withdrawals. For merchants, PayPal is a nightmare. As far as alternatives, customers seem to love PayPal, because they side with buyers effectively 100% of the time in any disputes. So eve…

"effectively 100%"... "essentially guaranteed"... Com'on, that's not true. I've won disputes on PayPal as a seller. Companies have been using PayPal for over a decade without their accounts being closed. You're talking nonsense.

I've won disputes on PayPal as a seller.

There are exceptions to every rule, but in the vast majority of cases, they side with buyers. I once had someone that admitted in email that they were trying to extort me into refunding them. PayPal actually wrote back saying they were going to go to bat for me with the card issuer after I showed them these emails, but the card issuer didn't budge. I have no idea if PayPal sent the card issuer the emails, I just know that I wound up being out the money.

So you aren't just fighting with PayPal, you're fighting with card issuers as well. PayPal will side with buyers in most cases, and in the few instances where it is obvious that the merchant is correct and PayPal tries to do the right thing, then the card issuer will pick it up and screw the merchant from their side of it.

Regardless of who does the screwing, the merchant is the one that suffers in the end by accepting PayPal.

Companies have been using PayPal for over a decade without their accounts being closed.

Very large companies have nothing to worry about from PayPal, but small merchants have a very high percentage chance of being screwed by them. See http://www.paypalsucks.com/

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#122

Post by perl4ever »

tbiwiti wrote: post #78
EGreg wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just the thing. Once we let the machines make the decisions, and rely on them to do a "better job" there will be cases like this where it's just cheaper and easier to just follow the program and explain what happened. Actually we are building a zoo for ourselves where humans will make no decisions at all about anything of consequence!

I'm incredibly sad at how much of my programming goes into monitoring the performance of my coworkers. The worst part is when I write a new tool and take a look at it before management does. Usually only 1 or 2 people are doing the tasks that management is asking everyone to do daily.

My former boss was once a programmer. Then he became a manager, so he wrote tools to help monitor his department. That went well for years. Then another manager was brought in to "help" him, and months later he was fired. I guess it was kind of obvious, but it still made an impression on me how cold blooded it was.

The metrics* gathered on us were pretty meaningless, and didn't meet the cardinal rule of being actionable, but we still had to go over them each and every week. And some of the actual work was producing reports on productivity for other parts of the company in different places.

*Despite the fact we were programmers and every person in the department had a different role, we were scored based on tickets done and tickets that failed qa.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#123

Post by itronitron »

useful wrote: post #74

I've had this happen, myself and an employee who I had signed the termination paperwork for shared the same first name and someone put my name in instead of his. It was hell for at least a month as different automated systems kicked in and disabled my accounts, benefits, and payments. Worse, the first notification email happened while I was presenting to the CEO and the HR contact in the meeting had noticed half way…

>> No one was able to stop the machine because no one really knew all the different processes

maybe the engineer that designed the system got themselves fired while they were testing the system

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#124

Post by tzs »

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?

Suppose I sell things on my website, and you visit it and buy something. You pay with a credit card. Maybe I accept credit cards directly and you pay that way, or maybe I accept PayPal and you pay me that way, and pay PayPal with a credit card.

Now suppose it turns out I have misrepresented the items I sell. When your item arrives, you find that my site was pretty much fraud. You try to contact me to demand a refund...but no one answers the phone or responds to email. That's because I took all the money from you and the rest of the people I deceived and moved far away, to someplace safe from extradition to the US and that won't enforce US civil judgments.

So you call up your credit card company, tell them what happened, and they quickly refund your money. As do the credit card companies of all the other people I took advantage of.

Where does the credit card company get the money for all those refunds? They aren't going to get it from me. They certainly have no interest in eating those losses themselves.

What they do is require a business that accepts credit cards to have an account at a "merchant bank". When someone pays that business by credit card, the credit card company does not pay the business directly. They pay the merchant bank, which pays the business.

In order to be allowed to do this, the merchant bank has to enter into a contract with the credit card company that says that the merchant bank will pay the credit card company for all refunds and chargebacks. The merchant bank will try to get the refund money from the business, but if they fail they have to make up the difference.

The way merchant banks do this is they hold back some of the money they receive from the credit card company for the business, to build up a buffer to cover refunds and chargebacks. As the business establishes a track record and the merchant bank becomes more confident in its estimates of the refund/chargeback risk for the business, they will adjust the amount they hold in reserve.

I don't know exactly how it works when a buyer uses a credit card to pay PayPal, but somewhere between the credit card company and the seller there is an entity taking the role of the merchant bank and guaranteeing that the credit card company won't be left holding the bag if the seller can't cover refunds/chargebacks.

I suspect that the entity is PayPal itself, and most of the incidents you hear about of them holding some seller's money is them increasing the reserve because there was some change in his selling pattern that suggested the current reserve was no longer in line with their estimates of his refund/chargeback risk.

I think people don't switch to alternatives because the alternatives, at least the ones that provide strong consumer protection, almost all have the same or similar mechanisms to try to make sure that if the seller is bad it is the seller who pays.

They could switch to alternatives that do pay the seller directly with no mechanism for a refund other than asking the seller, such as most cryptocurrencies, but then they would probably lose a lot of buyers unless they were very well established businesses with outstanding reputations. (But if that were the case, then they probably could accept credit cards without their merchant bank requiring a large reserve).

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#125

Post by astura »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #115
krapp wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The contract was a 3 year contract, the new system hadn't been updated to reflect that.

The article implied that it was a 3 year contract that required periodic renewal.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#126

Post by perl4ever »

crooked-v wrote: post #99
krapp wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Somebody who is in your building, is doing work under your direction, and has not been told they are fired hasn't been fired. A judge in court for the lost wages would laugh you out of the room if you tried a "w…

...you never know these days if you are talking to someone on the Internet who believes "code is law".

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#127

Post by perl4ever »

milesvp wrote: post #59
eridius wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mem…

As someone who hasn't played computer games much since the 90s, I read comments like this and am just boggled by how seriously everyone takes games these days, the players, and the vendors, and the general public. It's as if you had to get a security clearance to use a wiffle ball and bat.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#128

Post by jschwartzi »

davidbanham wrote: post #13
394549 wrote: post #2

This the problem with automated business processes. It seems easy, until you think about all the exception paths. Human organizations can adapt and handle them organically, but a system needs them all specified up front. Either you spend a massive amount of work to get it right or you have a broken system. And once you have it right, it's hard to change and adapt.

A technique I often use in this is to leave a "human in the loop". Have control points where the system takes no further action until an administrator requests it. Instead of coding that automated cleanup routine, send a notification to an admin and let them take care of it manually. As the system matures and the edge cases become better understood it can become more automated. At first, though, leave it loose and hu…

Yeah, in this case the automated system should have reminded his manager and their manager that his contract was up so that they could click a button and schedule his last day.

Keep the decision in the hands of a human but let the machine do the grunt work.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#129

Post by _drimzy »

madeofpalk wrote: post #75
jiaweihli wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

For what it's worth, I've never had a bad experience with PayPal. I've heard all the horror stories, but nothing has come close to that. I sold something on Ebay once and the buyer didn't receive the item, and did what he should and reported it to Ebay/PayPal. Paypal started the dispute resolution process, and I uploaded a receipt of me sending it. The dispute was resolved in my favour. I started accepting donations…

> I sold something on Ebay once and the buyer didn't receive the item, and did what he should and reported it to Ebay/PayPal. Paypal started the dispute resolution process, and I uploaded a receipt of me sending it. The dispute was resolved in my favour.

How is that not a bad experience for a buyer who never got an item he paid for?

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#130

Post by perl4ever »

donatj wrote: post #113
ravitation wrote: post #10

I know I'm speaking from a position of privilege, but I really don't understand how people work at companies like this... The pay must be insane. Edit: Slight disclaimer, "work at companies like this" in a software/IT role ...

My thoughts as well. I've spent the last decade+ working for sub-500 person companies, largely sub-100. I find myself now through acquisition in a 1,000 plus person company and I find it… stifling. It's bizarre to me to work for a company where I don't know close to everyones name. This kind of junk never happens in small companies.

In a small company, you don't get the protection of the bureaucracy either. You're likely to know the CEO, but that means everything depends on their character and the culture they institute. And even if they are generally ethical, a small company CEO who does a good job probably sacrifices a lot and then feels entitled to sacrifices from employees. And if you can't deal with politics in a small company, you can't transfer to another division. There are lots of potential drawbacks of a small company, like a small town.
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