Reminds me of 'There Will Come Soft Rains', a 1950 short story about a smart house dying.
http://www.btboces.org/Downloads/7_There%20Will%20Come%20Sof...
The Machine Fired Me
151–160 of 578 posts
Re: The Machine Fired Me
#152I'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 or they weren't built to stop midway. This is (in my opinion) one of the reasons why everyone talking about getting rid of dedicated IT ops in their organizations is making a mistake. You can have devs building integrations and automation all day, but you still need sysadmins who can see the whole picture and override them wh…
Don't worry, you can still pay outlandish prices for top tier A-Z support, where you can argue for a week with a drone that no, their system is not properly following the HTTP RFC, and here's the TCP dumps to prove it.
Imagine if we didn't have an operations engineer who knew how to trace down the problem using a TCP dump. Or if it had been a developer who was, by the proper "DevOps" hygenics, denied access to the boxes to run TCP dumps.
Yeah, they're fixing it. No, we don't have a timeline.
Re: The Machine Fired Me
#153Interesting read, but I did want to touch on this paragraph at the end.
> PS: I am willing to bet the recent issue with YouTube Piracy filter blocking MIT courses and the Blender Foundation are the result of The Machine being the ultimate decider. Even though YouTube's support team clearly knows that these don't violate terms and conditions, the Machine decided otherwise. And they will have to fight it to death to bring the videos back online.
According to Blender the issue is that YouTube is requiring them to switch to monetized. No more free rides once you're that big.
https://www.blender.org/media-exposure/youtube-blocks-blende...
Re: The Machine Fired Me
#154Earlier 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?
The reason sellers don't go elsewhere is that buyers really like it, because it gives buyers a lot of power. I've had them be annoying to me before. My favorite PP fact I found out the hard way: never put the string 'aleph' in the note field. Apparently that's flagged as a Terror-Word(tm), and it held up a transaction of mine for over a month. I still use them, but only under modified-casino rules: never play with mo…
Never hold a PP balance. If you receive money into your PP account, treat it as unavailable unless you successfully spend it on goods or services.
Never link your PP account to a bank account.
Only fund your PP account with a credit card, so you have some protection when things go wrong.
Re: The Machine Fired Me
#155I 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 had a related experience wherein I asked Paypal for a debit card. They denied my request and locked my account (with money in it) until I provided a multitude of documents to verify my identity and ownership of my bank account.
Of course, they could provide no information about why this happened or how to avoid it. I became a lot more conservative about using Paypal again, and never did make another request for a debit card.
Re: The Machine Fired Me
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
I resigned effective the 2nd of a month, and the promo was effective the 1st of the month. See above "resignation (slated to be effective after the promo)". So the resignation was scheduled for the day after the promo. I actually stayed an extra week to receive the promo.
Your story is inconsistent? > I resigned just after I had gotten a promotion, but before the date when the promo was effective If I get sick before my insurance is effective...I don't get my coverage. If I resign before my raise is effective...I don't get my raise.
The point here is not the raise, but the promotion itself. It's leverage for joining other large companies ("I was a Senior SWE at Google, so you'll need to offer me a Staff SWE role"), and as the OP notes, it lets them come back to the new level without having to go through the promo gauntlet again.
Re: The Machine Fired Me
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 tr…
Talking to my friends who work for very large companies, at least in their cases it seems like it's often easier to get a new job at another small company than to get a transfer - for what it's worth.
Re: The Machine Fired Me
#158Earlier 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…
We had a problem where after about 10 years, PayPal suddenly decided that our account was in the wrong country, and the only solution was to close it. Kafkaesque.
I wrote about it here: https://www.cogini.com/blog/paypal-know-your-customer-failur...
Re: The Machine Fired Me
#159I 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 make and upload electronic music to SoundCloud. Once I sent a joke DM to my friend, another SoundCloud user, mimicking a typical spam post at the time. SoundCloud's spam filtration system autobanned and deleted my account. I had it back a couple days later but a bunch of stuff is still off with my account(fewer plays, likes, followers, etc).
Re: The Machine Fired Me
#160I had a somewhat similar, but much less serious experience at Google. I resigned just after I had gotten a promotion, but before the date when the promo was effective. Much to my surprise, the resignation (slated to be effective after the promo) somehow cancelled the promo via some automated system. However, a promo at Google is a huge deal. I really wanted the promotion to go through, so that I would have that level…
You need to stand up, stretch, and look really carefully at the world at large and your place in it. Getting a promotion at Google isn't actually a big deal at all, man. You went from generating $2M and being paid $225k of it to generating $2M and being paid $250k, plus you get an extra word in your title https://csimarket.com/stocks/GOOG-Revenue-per-Employee.html
Yes, because getting a raise that is more than 50% of an average full-time worker's entire yearly wages is not a big deal at all.