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The Machine Fired Me

idiallo.com

271–280 of 578 posts

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#271
Automation, speed, and efficiency has a risk which rarely acknowledged.

I phrase it as "the faster you run, the more painful the fall."

I find this to be universally applicable, from the most literal situations through the most abstract ones.

If I ride my bike, and I hit a bump, I can expect to fall, and perhaps break a bone or dislocate a shoulder. The chance of a very serious injury is relatively low. If I drive my car at 100mph and I hit a bump, there is a good chance there will be a fatality.

Same thing applies to any system.

The more cumbersome, slow, and manual a system, the less of a chance that a systematic and far-reaching failure will happen. The scenario in this article would not have been possible if this was a manual process.

I am not a luddite. Quite to the contrary, I value progress. However, people dismiss black-swam events for large automated systems far too often. Even though the risk of any such event is small, once it happens the damage is extensive. Circuit breakers and manual intervention overrides need to be designed from the get-go. Unfortunately, they are only added after something bad happens.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#272
post #263
post #161

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…

"We were only following orders" suddenly feels even more scary when they come from a computer and not a human.

It shouldn't. Blindly following orders from humans has much the same results.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#273
post #96

It 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 think you misread the article. The author assumed that the recruiter accidentally thought that he had been fired after reading the list of fired employees, as there were other employees with the same name. In reality, he had been fired as his contract had not been renewed. He wasn't actively fired, but rather his contract expired because someone failed to renew it. A big part of the problem here seems to be rather…

I think you misread the article.

The author's contract hadn't even ACTUALLY expired. The end date was wrong on the system. That doesn't actually affect his contract.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#274
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. It's a theme I run across in many US-worker situations we read about on HN. There is such a lack of basic rights, but also basic norms when relating to workers. 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 ev…

None of what you says really applies in this case. According to the article the thing that triggered this was the failure to renew his contract. If it had renewal intervals, that means he wasn't legally entitled to 3 years. This is likely why he wasn't paid for the interim either. The best the company could do would likely be to bump up the future rate or offer a "signing bonus". Being a contractor is not at all like…

It does though, failure to renew a contract should be announced in writing a month in advance to allow the employee to search for a new job and take holidays that may be left. If the announcement is late, the employee is entitled to an extra months' pay.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#275
post #211
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their account got cancelled because the contract did not get renewed. Sounds like the company fulfilled the terms of the original contract, just (accidentally) didn't renew it. Many long term contracts require periodic renewals and/or options. >Some of that work included renewing my contract in the new system... When my contract expired, the machine took over and fired me.

That's weird though. Was it a three year contract or wasn't it?

Probably informally thought of as a three year contact but legally written as a shorter one for tax etc. purposes.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#276
post #188

Peeling back the layers a bit, it seems a major misfire in this whole story is that the employee in question was a short-term contractor... But a shot-term contractor who was apparently quite valuable to his team. Smart companies'll make people in that position permanent employees. The machine is so automated partially to make sure legal compliance of two companies sharing one employee is executed upon correctly (bec…

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.

If it had truly been a 3-year contract they wouldn't've had the renewal issue.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#277
Strange. In the end he even explains what actually happened. His old manager didn't renew his contract in the merger with another company.

Also it seems that they didn't pay him the 3 weeks after? The US is a really cruel system. How can it even be called work if you only have a contract for three years? How can you call it "friends" what you make as relationships in such an environment?

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#278
post #161

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…

Recently we had a lot of tourists drive through the unfinished tunnel Vaðlaheiðargöng (Iceland) because Apple Maps already marked it as part of Route 1. So we had people drive a workers' road past multiple signs banning entrance, and then drive on gravel through a tunnel filled with heavy machinery and workers. Quite funny.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#280
post #261

" 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.

I think I would get a compensation bonus without even having to ask out of this (in the EU). Since he got a new contract, I hope he did negotiate a bit on the new terms in that contract.

Would have been clever to negotiate the missing three weeks pay into the new contract, e.g. as a signing bonus.
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