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CrowdStrike offers a $10 apology gift card to say sorry for outage

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Re: CrowdStrike offers a $10 apology gift card to say sorry for outage

#31

‘ On Wednesday, some of the people who posted about the gift card said that when they went to redeem the offer, they got an error message saying the voucher had been canceled. When TechCrunch checked the voucher, the Uber Eats page provided an error message that said the gift card “has been canceled by the issuing party and is no longer valid.”’

Do not redeem the card!!

Bet there is a line you sign to get it that will prevent you from suing in the future.

Re: CrowdStrike offers a $10 apology gift card to say sorry for outage

#33
post #9

This reminds me of something that happened at a former employer. After I had been employed there for a couple of years, someone in HR or Legal noticed that the programmers had never signed any "our code belongs to the company" agreement. So they asked us to sign a paper to that effect, and gave us each a check for $20. My thought was that I always assumed the company owned this code, but if they were going to pay for…

This is because it's a contract oddity - if they told you to sign it but offered nothing; you could challenge it in court, and the courts have often said a "one-sided contract" is not valid (e.g., you give me copyright I give you nothing).

The $20 is "due consideration" - just like how some deals involve selling an item for a dollar.

Re: CrowdStrike offers a $10 apology gift card to say sorry for outage

#35

This reminds me of the family who was awarded $4 in damages for a wrongful death suit. [0] It's almost worse than nothing. [0] https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2018/06/01/jury-awards-family-f...

I wonder when we'll start to have some estimate of indirect/direct death toll. This took down several 911 type services and hospitals, some reported imaging down, some being back to paper and pen at ER.

Re: CrowdStrike offers a $10 apology gift card to say sorry for outage

#37
This is definitely worse than no gift card. Insulting. A general maxim: When something is a big deal, your response should make a bigger deal out of it than the complaints. $10 says "We don't think this matters." Now watch as everyone explains precisely why it does. PR 101 fail.

Re: CrowdStrike offers a $10 apology gift card to say sorry for outage

#38
post #9

This reminds me of something that happened at a former employer. After I had been employed there for a couple of years, someone in HR or Legal noticed that the programmers had never signed any "our code belongs to the company" agreement. So they asked us to sign a paper to that effect, and gave us each a check for $20. My thought was that I always assumed the company owned this code, but if they were going to pay for…

Here's what I suspect happened:

Any contract requires consideration. Without it, it's not a valid contract. It doesn't require fair consideration, so a clause giving e.g. $1 is typical for many contracts. They were nice and bumped it up to $20.

I suspect your work DID belong to the company already, under work-for-hire doctrine, but an explicit contract avoids that ambiguity. Ambiguity can be bad and super-expensive, whether during litigation or even something like an audit. If someone is buying a company, investing, making a major loan, that's the kind thing which comes up in due diligence and can be annoying.

So I don't think they were paying you for the code, so much as trying to come into compliance. Very likely, this was triggered by some similar audit for some deal they were trying to make.

Re: CrowdStrike offers a $10 apology gift card to say sorry for outage

#40
post #9

This reminds me of something that happened at a former employer. After I had been employed there for a couple of years, someone in HR or Legal noticed that the programmers had never signed any "our code belongs to the company" agreement. So they asked us to sign a paper to that effect, and gave us each a check for $20. My thought was that I always assumed the company owned this code, but if they were going to pay for…

Here's what I suspect happened: Any contract requires consideration. Without it, it's not a valid contract. It doesn't require fair consideration, so a clause giving e.g. $1 is typical for many contracts. They were nice and bumped it up to $20. I suspect your work DID belong to the company already, under work-for-hire doctrine, but an explicit contract avoids that ambiguity. Ambiguity can be bad and super-expensive,…

You think the $20 was consideration, and yet you think they were not paying for the code? Aren't these the same thing?

> Ambiguity can be bad and super-expensive

If the corporation had some ambiguity in their favor, I expect they would call it "value" and ask for as much as they could get to remove it. But if the ambiguity is in favor of an employee or client, let's remove it for a token $20. Ugly society this one is.

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