201–210 of 578 posts
Remarkably similar to the 1981 Timothy Zahn story "Job Inaction".
Now I want to see a story that takes the "lost in the company" myth to farcical extremes, with an entire legion of stormtroopers having to fend for themselves in a remote corner of a Superduper Star Destroyer.
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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.
To clarify, I find it incredulous that a 3 year contract requiring full-time, on-site, business hour presence wouldn't legally require a company to treat that person as a full-time employee with benefits.
The problem is that not everyone wants to live in Detroit, KC, LA, Chicago, say. So instead they fly back and forth.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would HR IT have worse software developers than other industries?
Because HR in general has worse employees than other disciplines? Seriously, in my 20+ year career, I've run across very few legitimately talented people in HR. The department seems to attract the kind of people who have little to offer intrinsically; who happen to be willing to facilitate the necessary protocols, as minimally effective as possible, while claiming "people skills" that end up being little more than of…
This is literally an episode of Better Off Ted.[1] In it, the titular Ted is inadvertenly deleted from the company system when trying to correct a misspelling of his last name. Eventually, he is forced to interview for his own job as the system had already put out an ad for his replacement. I think the most striking part of it, and of the true story from the post, is the human factor - the idea that the humans involv…
I have a story in a similar vein, although a much less scary one. In that instance, The Machine Cleaned Out My Desk. I had a cubicle at the company HQ, but was for some period of time working from home in another state. I still kept quite a few things in the cubicle (notebooks, mugs, etc), which I used when I was in the area. When I finally came back, I noticed, after a month or two, that my office number has not bee…
automating business processes is actually a similar activity to doing programming!
When it's done competently, the business runs smoother. But if there are bugs (and as anyone who programs knows, there are always bugs), things go wrong. And yet, people who know not anything about complex systems design attempt to write up business requirements for such automation are numourus.
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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.
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.
Some cursory research told me that new accounts with a lot of market activity were a "red flag" for the automated system due to similarity with bots that created new accounts to evade bans, which I guess makes sense. Of course this is the internet and you have no particular reason to believe I was or wasn't cheating on World of Warcraft, but for what it's worth this HN account is linked to my real identity and if I were cheating all the time I would know better than to brag about it or even obliquely reference it in my posting here.
> 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…
Ethical behaviour, from my perspective, would be to compensate the employee, regardsless of his legal rights. In a more worker-central system, the worker should have easy recourse to an official judgement for his money.
In the Netherlands there is even a concept of culpability in laws regarding firing. Mess up too much, and the employer will have to pay a premium on the disengagement fee. And while our economy is moving towards a lot more 'sole employee contractors' with less worker-rights, you still have rights and a way to affordably enforce them. For them (only) basic contract law holds. That would probably mean paying the full 3 years in this context. A contract _is_ a contract.
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This is interesting. On the one hand, you have been promoted to a new role, so you have reached a compatible level of expertise. You can put that role on your resume and sell yourself. On the other hand, you never, ever actually performed in that role, with the new responsibilities. How can you list that on your resume ! I am not sure what is the right answer here... but as your new employer I would take your last pr…
There is a very clear right answer here provided you consider promotion from a clean point of view. A promotion is a _recognition_ that you are _already_ operating at a given level. It's an acknowledgement by TPTB that you deserve a given title. Anything less than this leads to a result where you may not actually be performing at the level the new title requires, which means you could conceivably be promoted and imme…
aka the peter principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle)