Long story short, your contract hasn’t been renewed due to a human mistake (someone forgot to do it). The program worked perfectly, as expected. If the program would have failed, it would have also came from a human being (developer). Machines are machines, we can’t blame them...
The Machine Fired Me
251–260 of 578 posts
Re: The Machine Fired Me
#252This 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…
So true. Recently I was at the pharmacy, the doctor wrote a wrong prescription and my wife was in the car having a hefty migraine. They wouldn't give me the drug even though they could see she has been using it for years and the wrong prescription could be solved afterwards. I think such people will be the first to be completely replaced by robots, I for sure wouldn't notice the difference, in fact I expect a robot t…
Don't blame the people, blame the system. They're not uncaring, but if there's some kind of mistake and the audit trail shows it was them who didn't follow procedure, guess who it is whose now out of a job? They've got a wife and kid to feed too.
Re: The Machine Fired Me
#253Something eerily similar happened to me.
One day I arrived at work as usual and the turnstile didn’t work. I had to request a guest pass and call some colleague to escort me because I was disabled in the security system.
I went up and I obviously couldn’t open the door and access my pc.
The scary thing was that I was still in the middle of my contract, it would have expired only 3 months later.
I contacted my boss and went home.
A couple of days later they managed to reinstate my security account, although I couldn’t still access my pc for one or two days.
In these days I just helped my colleagues.
Once I got back my account I started re-requesting the 10s of permissions that I needed, and while I was doing so I found an open request to recycle my machine.
Luckily I managed to contact the guy that was supposed to take it and I stopped him just in time.
On the whole I probably lost two weeks.
What was the trigger for my termination?
Apparently someone managed to input the wrong termination date in SAP for my contract, and that started the havoc.
Obviously there were alerts before my termination but everyone ignored them because in the other systems visible to the approvers my termination date was correct.
Luckily I got paid for every single day, even when I was at home, but after three months I’m still suffering from random problems in random systems that are probably related to this mess.
Re: The Machine Fired Me
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
a major misfire in this whole story is that the employee in question was a short-term contractor. A 3-year contract is a long-term contractor... Many permanent employees don't stick around that long.
Sorry; I didn't mean anything formal by the "short-term" adjective phrase there. I meant "In contrast to a full-time employee, whom one assumes is making a career out of THAT company." Three years is a long time in contractor-land, but it's a drop in the bucket for career company employee.
I think that what 'gaius is saying is that "whom ones assumes is making a career..." part is a wrong assumption, especially in this industry. "Making career" is more of an exercise of jumping between companies every other year.
Re: The Machine Fired Me
#255It makes sense that the HR IT industry would have some of the worst software developers. It seems obvious to me at least that you can't rely on first name + last name to make a match, and if you do, you have to write code that fails if there are multiple users with such a combination, as well as falling back on soundex or double or triple metaphone as well as nickname support. Second, the screens involved in terminat…
I had to do a back transaction once in Greece and they did ask for my mother's and my father's name. Strange for a German but it seems to work for them.
Re: The Machine Fired Me
#256" I had missed 3 weeks of work by that time, and pay."
The what now? I can only assume this is in US, because in EU he would be 100000% entitled to pay for every single minute of this going on.
Re: The Machine Fired Me
#257> My manager ... decided not to do much work after that, [including] renewing my contract in the new system. > A simple automation mistake(feature) caused everything to collapse this is a great story but I must be misreading this detail somehow. it sounds like a simple _human_ error caused everything to collapse.
In that case we should send copy of "The Design Of Everyday Things" to designer of the system.
sure, we can add can steve krug and kenya hara and everyone else to the reading list -- I don't disagree with the general sentiment that we should avoid designing unnecessary dead man's switches -- but this case still sounds like it is a lot further on the "human" end of the human-machine "who fucked up" spectrum. the contractor says his boss just stopped doing his work at some point, work that included migrating the contractor to a new system.
Re: The Machine Fired Me
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surely a 3 year contract means the company is in breach of it by not paying you?
How do you think you will enforce that contract? Hire a lawyer? You might as well go to the ATM grab as much cash as you possible. Then put it all in a garbage can and light a match. It will be far less costly and more productive then attempting pursue that contract.
I don't know, does US not have a small claims court? In UK you'd pay £90 to file a case, you'd get a judgement in about a week and the company would be ordered to pay. Like I really don't understand this entire issue. Did he even ask HR to be compensated for this time? I feel like the whole article is missing some crucial information.
Re: The Machine Fired Me
#259Re: The Machine Fired Me
#260Has there ever been a attempt to prove that companys hiring and firing processes are turing complete?