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What Happens When One of Your Coworkers Dies

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Re: What Happens When One of Your Coworkers Dies

#51

Post by twistedpair »

brc wrote: post #37

One of my close relatives passed away this year. She was the partner in a professional services firm, and well like by her staff. The entire company had a day off on the day of her funeral, and many of them were distressed by it. It was not a shock as she had been ill for quite some time, but it does entail an adjustment. This is going to become more of a common occurence as the baby boom generation start moving towa…

This will be even more common than you intimate since many of these boomers can't afford to retire. Work until they drop.

Re: What Happens When One of Your Coworkers Dies

#52

Post by steven2012 »

One of my coworkers, my mentor and someone who taught me what it meant to be a good programmer, was murdered by his wife, who also murdered their two children and then killed herself.

It took place over a holiday, and I noticed he hadn't shown up afterwards. After a couple of days, I asked my boss if he was on vacation, and he said no, so I emailed him. His body and his family were found the next day by his neighbors. I actually saw his face on the evening news and my heart started racing, because they made it seem as though he was the murderer, but as events came out, he and his beautiful children were the victims.

It was really horrible because he was one of the star programmers at work and responsible for a lot of the success in the company. Everyone loved him and he deserved to be loved. It really hit our company hard, and we had things like counselling meetings but all that did was fuel our anger.

Basically there's nothing you can do. You just have to deal with it and move on. It's been 10+ years, but I'll never forget him though, he deserves at least that.

Re: What Happens When One of Your Coworkers Dies

#53

Post by _wp3r »

DigitalJack wrote: post #45
_wp3r wrote: post #38

I have personally experienced this on five occasions in the work place. I can say that only once did no one have any idea that there was an issue. I have seen CO's, junior enlisted, and the inbetween. The powers of self loathing are in my experience not the driver, the most dangerous force is self confirmed failure. The type or scale of the failure does not matter, only the persons value of that failure matter. That…

Are you talking about suicide? The man in the article died of natural causes. Even so, I totally agree with regards to failure and its magnitude not necessarily (or even frequently) having a relationship to the self loathing one can feel due to that failure. I struggle with this a couple times a year. Holding one's self to overly high standards can be unhealthy.

I am talking about suicide. I felt the article was mostly about that thought process with the reality being kind of the side note.

When I have run across people that I thought were having a hard time with failure, they are usually measuring themselves against the completely self contrived version of the peer that they see as being better. My context may be skewed, but the guys that have the hardest time are the ones that thought no one else was having any issues. This is of course a symptom of the military culture, but can play out in the tech world as the insanely successful skew the perception of failure, upward. By that I mean tech people measure themselves against, not the just doing fine peer, but to the exploding all expectations peer, which is completely improbable and truly self defeating.

Re: What Happens When One of Your Coworkers Dies

#54

Post by AznHisoka »

MartinCron wrote: post #13
jboggan wrote: post #8

This has happened in my experience before, and it is one of the strongest reasons for good source control that is infrequently considered. It was a tragedy when a very wonderful and dear researcher in our group died suddenly, especially to his three children and wife that he left behind. It was also a great loss as well that we could never recover some key bits of source code from his computer, and that a very promis…

Just yesterday I was nearly run over by a taxi (in Seattle, what?) running a red light. As I realized he wasn't stopping I thought to myself, "at least all my code is checked in and pushed". True story.

God, I hate taxis.. always beeping at you when you take 1 second to cross the street or make a turn (if you're riding in front of it)

Re: What Happens When One of Your Coworkers Dies

#55

Post by Gigablah »

jbm wrote: post #43
theorique wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Japan it happens so often they have their own word for it: karoshi . Sararimen fall over dead at their desks, and others simply avert their eyes and focus on their work while a manager urgently calls for white-gloved personnel to spirit the corpse away to the undertaker. Nobody even misses a beat. The work must go on.

Karoushi incidents are national news and are rare (although overwork is common, for reasons that are too much to get into in this post). These also happen in Korea and other parts of Asia; more so than Japan now, possibly. I'm breath taken by the casual disregard for life that you imply the Japanese have.

It reads like overdramatized amateur fiction.

Re: What Happens When One of Your Coworkers Dies

#56

Post by aortega »

Thankfully never happened to my coworkers.

But many years ago I reported a pretty severe vulnerability in a common piece of software. A patch was issued and that was it. One of the developers then stopped answering emails and later I learn he died, probably by suicide. To this day I don't know if both events were related but I try to be extra nice when reporting vulnerabilities to developers since then.

Re: What Happens When One of Your Coworkers Dies

#57

Post by chime »

edgesrazor wrote: post #22

I had something like this happen at a small software company I worked about 15 years ago. Our owner had written a specialized program for his wife to sell on the side, but under the company's name. One weekend, after a very big fight, she ended up committing suicide after he'd left the house. The next week, they had me going through her email to get a list of customers she had been working with. I can't begin to tell…

I have to do that when my client's employees quit or are let go. Even though I know they are alive and healthy, I still often wonder if I will ever see them again in my life. So many people have come and gone over the years that I can't even remember. When I disable their account and archive their emails and documents, it feels like I am saying good bye to them for ever. Groupon's bots will soon find out that user 'jsmith@example.com' is no longer here.

My archives will be slightly larger but nightly backups of active users documents will get a bit quicker. I used to have lunch with you user 'rjackson' but now that you got fired for doing something pretty bad, we will most likely never talk again.

And with that one command, a person leaves my life forever.

Re: What Happens When One of Your Coworkers Dies

#58

Post by bluekitten »

steven2012 wrote: post #52

One of my coworkers, my mentor and someone who taught me what it meant to be a good programmer, was murdered by his wife, who also murdered their two children and then killed herself. It took place over a holiday, and I noticed he hadn't shown up afterwards. After a couple of days, I asked my boss if he was on vacation, and he said no, so I emailed him. His body and his family were found the next day by his neighbors…

Luckily I haven't had such experiences so far. I guess people go through too many daily stresses, especially in tech life. As the only girl in my team, its hard for me to say no to unpaid overtime because most of other folks can't seem to say no to overworking themselves afterhours and on weekends, giving people others who don't a bad name.

Re: What Happens When One of Your Coworkers Dies

#59

Post by flatline »

kfcm wrote: post #20

I've been through this four times. Three died at home; one at work. These were all at small companies, so we all knew each other--many for decades, and over different jobs. The last two passed away about eleven and twelve years ago. One may think it's haunting to still see e-mails from them in my archives. But the really haunting thing is listening to them speak in the voice mails our phone system e-mailed back then.…

I got a Facebook notification about a friend's birthday the other day, who passed on from brain cancer over two years ago. It is an eerie feeling, for a brief moment it's like she was still alive and well just everyone else on Facebook, and her death was just a bad dream.

Re: What Happens When One of Your Coworkers Dies

#60

Post by kabdib »

When we were doing the Apple Newton, Ko Isono (who was working on the tablet sensor code) committed suicide. Our manager got us into a common area, then told us the news. We were pretty shocked.

Many of us went to the funeral in the east bay. I remember it was very cold and rainy, and that I didn't mind.

We put Ko's name in the "About Newton" page. Nobody in management objected to that.

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