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The Machine Fired Me

idiallo.com

431–440 of 578 posts

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#431
post #351
post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The racism comes from saying "We recognise human faces" and then not recognising a significant proportion of humans.

That's not racism, that's laziness. Or perhaps just being a bad engineer, if you want to be more cynical about it. It's not that hard to find both conscious and subconscious examples of systemic or individual racism. Engineers taking the easy path with webcam facial recognition is probably not a good one and serves only to give more fuel to those who claim people jump to the racism cry too quickly.

If you ship a product because it only works for white people and that's good enough, that is definitely racism. Just as it would be sexism if you shipped a voice recognition product that only worked for men.

Laziness and racism aren't mutually exclusive. Historically in America, white people haven't considered black people as fully human. You can read the various declarations of secession or the 3/5ths compromise for that. Or the long post-Reconstruction history of slightly more subtle ways.

Sure, laziness was involved here. But deciding a product was good enough to ship without caring that it worked for black people requires the effective belief that black people didn't really count as people. At least, not people that mattered. Imagine the reverse: if the product didn't work on white men, would it have been shipped? Of course not.

When laziness just happens to have a blatantly racist outcome in a place where there is a centuries-long history of racism, Occam's Razor suggests the explanation is racism. If laziness could not have caused the bad outcome to happen for white people, then it's pretty clear that pure laziness is not the real cause. It's instead white people being differentially lazy when it comes to black people. That's clearly racism.

As a confirmatory example, look at the American justice system. In a lot of places and times, the same nominal laws applied to white and black people. But they were enforced very differently. Serious crimes against black people were ignored. Minor infractions by black people were enforced vigorously. [1] Were the cops lazy? Sure, everybody's lazy sometimes. Was that why there was a racially different outcome? Definitely not.

[1] Examples of this are all over Loewen's "Sundown Towns" for example.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#432

Something 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 an…

> and went home Did your boss send you home? If not, you should probably stay and be ready for work assignments (even if they don't come). For good measure contact some colleagues each day so they remember you and take a picture before you enter and after you leave.

I told him that I was going home and he was fine.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#433
post #45

> 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…

He elaborates a bit in the comments - it seems he's entitled to the money, but couldn't be bothered: "So I had to do an appeal, and go through a long process that I did not care much to go through. I had a mind in quitting after all." Sounds very strange that he wouldn't care to do a bit of paperwork, which he from the sounds of it could probably well justify to do on company time, with the manager and director being…

> a bit of paperwork

I suspect this is the difference. If this company is incapable of not firing someone, I imagine their appeals process could be equally miserable. Sure, maybe the manager and director want to repay him, but actually releasing funds to pay someone who "wasn't employed" is going involve a lengthy battle with some HR/Accounting computer system that just wants its invariants not to vary. Depending on somebody's financial position, I can see them deciding to just walk away on even a large chunk of money to avoid the mess.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#434
This is how we'll reach the singularity. Computers won't be outsmarting us, but we'll gladly stoop to their level of throwing all judgement out the window and treating our fellow men like scum just because a program tells us to.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#435
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?

As I read the piece, it was a three year contract which was included in the old HR system, but not ported to the new one. If that's true, it was certainly breach of contract - "we forgot to upload the paperwork" doesn't get you out of honoring it.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe it became custom in many parts of Europe around that time to clean out the prisons whenever a new monarch took office, obviously that wouldn't have always happened, but at least they saw it as a problem and took steps to rectify it. It did, after all, cost some amount of money to house them, and obviously the new king would have wanted room to house prisoners of his own. It wasn't until modern times that pr…

> It wasn't until modern times that prison became a place for common criminals, in those days only political offenders would be put away I don't think it was universally true, for example, when the Bastille prison in Paris was taken at the start of the French Revolution, it held only common criminals, with the political prisoners having been moved before the start of the unrest.

Yeah, the French did a lot of things differently, the French national consciousness was matched only by its material wealth, so they could afford such frivolities.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#437
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely a 3 year contract means the company is in breach of it by not paying you?

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.

> in the new system... my contract expired

As I interpreted the piece, it was a three year contract which was stored in an old system, and not transferred when that system was replaced. So the firing was triggered by the system no longer seeing any valid contract.

If that's true, it would be breach of contract. But if it was a rolling contract expected to end after three years, then yes, it would be a weird situation but not a breach.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#438
post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, that's the real problem actually with buggy name-based systems. In my current company we have a person officially called "Name Surname 2" for the same reason.

Because Name Surname 1 was already taken!

Because Name Surname 0 was already taken!

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#439
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…

Why would HR IT have worse software developers than other industries?

Two reasons really. HR is not a profit center, and no one who picks the software will actually have to use it. Zed Shaw takes this up to 11 in a presentation he did in Montreal https://vimeo.com/2723800

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#440
post #311
post #176

When a previous company was acquired, everyone got a new job offer generally better since the company wanted everyone to stick around. Well except for one guy. A junior engineer in one of our teams. He was a really good engineer too so we were shocked. It turned out he had the same first and last name as another person at our company so they thought it was a duplicate entry and omitted it. Eventually a offer was prep…

Heh, that's the real problem actually with buggy name-based systems. In my current company we have a person officially called "Name Surname 2" for the same reason.

A lot of state DMVs and other government offices apparently use name + birthdate as a "unique" identifier, which works about as well as you'd expect. It doesn't usually cause problems, because both people are accepted as 'real', but it's alarmingly easy to end up with someone else's license suspensions, voter registration, or even credit score.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/03/identity-the...

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