Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Machine Fired Me

idiallo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 578 posts

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#71

Post by star-castle »

I'd rather be fired by a machine than fired by a database. In this guy's case, everyone of importance was on his side, it was just a technical matter to get the situation resolved in his favor.

In my case, there was a decision that employees like me would be paid out of the server budget. And then a subsequent decision came down: fire the employees that are getting paid out of the server budget! Of my department, regardless of how well we did our jobs, regardless of pay, regardless of length of employment, some of us had the 'paid like a server' checkbox checked and some of us didn't. The ones that didn't were kept on.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#72

Post by sonnyblarney »

terlisimo wrote: post #18

I had a sort-of related experience with PayPal where the machine said "No." I've been using it for at least 10 years at that point. What I did was try to pay for some cheap VPS hosting in Italy. The transaction was denied. I thought there was some problem with my CC, so I immediately tried to do a $1 transaction with some other company and it went without a hitch. So I contacted PayPal support about it and the next d…

Financial fraud prevention gambits are complicated.

It may be possible that PP thought someone else was using your account.

What should happen in these scenarios is simply a validation of some kind ie payment only goes through if you click on the email your received.

I used to travel to SF from Canada a lot and my bank would block my Visa even though I told them not to.

In the US there's no password in Visas, i.e. no chip-and-pin, which is totally crazy = huge fraud.

It's funny to think in the Silicon Valley, top tech companies in the world ... everyone is still using that old mag stripe stuff when pretty much the rest of the world has moved on.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#73

Post by isostatic »

jiaweihli wrote: post #52
terlisimo wrote: post #18

I had a sort-of related experience with PayPal where the machine said "No." I've been using it for at least 10 years at that point. What I did was try to pay for some cheap VPS hosting in Italy. The transaction was denied. I thought there was some problem with my CC, so I immediately tried to do a $1 transaction with some other company and it went without a hitch. So I contacted PayPal support about it and the next d…

I've heard nothing but bad things about PayPal and how they often hold your own money hostage. Why don't people switch to alternatives? Are there no good ones?

Taking money from paypal is a risk, as there's a period of time it's in paypal before you extract it Sending money to a store on paypal doesn't seem to be a problem

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#74

Post by useful »

I've had this happen, myself and an employee who I had signed the termination paperwork for shared the same first name and someone put my name in instead of his. It was hell for at least a month as different automated systems kicked in and disabled my accounts, benefits, and payments.

Worse, the first notification email happened while I was presenting to the CEO and the HR contact in the meeting had noticed half way through that I had been fired. Queue jokes of "was the presentation that bad?". No one was able to stop the machine because no one really knew all the different processes or they weren't built to stop midway.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#75

Post by madeofpalk »

jiaweihli wrote: post #52
terlisimo wrote: post #18

I had a sort-of related experience with PayPal where the machine said "No." I've been using it for at least 10 years at that point. What I did was try to pay for some cheap VPS hosting in Italy. The transaction was denied. I thought there was some problem with my CC, so I immediately tried to do a $1 transaction with some other company and it went without a hitch. So I contacted PayPal support about it and the next d…

I've heard nothing but bad things about PayPal and how they often hold your own money hostage. Why don't people switch to alternatives? Are there no good ones?

For what it's worth, I've never had a bad experience with PayPal. I've heard all the horror stories, but nothing has come close to that. I sold something on Ebay once and the buyer didn't receive the item, and did what he should and reported it to Ebay/PayPal. Paypal started the dispute resolution process, and I uploaded a receipt of me sending it. The dispute was resolved in my favour.

I started accepting donations from a community gaming website via PayPal and I was very hesitant about using it due to the bad stories I've heard. A couple of months and a couple of hundreds of dollars later, no problems yet.

The biggest 'problem' I've had with PayPal is moving to a new country. You can't add International cards to your account, and you can't change the country of your PayPal account. The only solution for me was to create a new account, which is fine I guess.

But then I guess you never have a bad experience until you do.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#76

Post by jacobsenscott »

isostatic wrote: post #55
rectang wrote: 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…

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

Sounds like he's contracting at a huge company. His contracting company isn't going to make waves over this. I would guess the contracting company is making $300+ an hour off this guy, paying him $50 an hour, and they have 200+ other contractors in the building.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#77

Post by derekp7 »

jiaweihli wrote: post #52
terlisimo wrote: post #18

I had a sort-of related experience with PayPal where the machine said "No." I've been using it for at least 10 years at that point. What I did was try to pay for some cheap VPS hosting in Italy. The transaction was denied. I thought there was some problem with my CC, so I immediately tried to do a $1 transaction with some other company and it went without a hitch. So I contacted PayPal support about it and the next d…

I've heard nothing but bad things about PayPal and how they often hold your own money hostage. Why don't people switch to alternatives? Are there no good ones?

The problem is that securily sending someone's money to someone else while avoiding fraud is hard. So you have a service that is difficult and expensive (for the merchant typically), or you have one that sucks for some users but good enough for most.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#78

Post by tbiwiti »

EGreg wrote: post #43
terlisimo wrote: post #18

I had a sort-of related experience with PayPal where the machine said "No." I've been using it for at least 10 years at that point. What I did was try to pay for some cheap VPS hosting in Italy. The transaction was denied. I thought there was some problem with my CC, so I immediately tried to do a $1 transaction with some other company and it went without a hitch. So I contacted PayPal support about it and the next d…

That's just the thing. Once we let the machines make the decisions, and rely on them to do a "better job" there will be cases like this where it's just cheaper and easier to just follow the program and explain what happened. Actually we are building a zoo for ourselves where humans will make no decisions at all about anything of consequence!

I'm incredibly sad at how much of my programming goes into monitoring the performance of my coworkers. The worst part is when I write a new tool and take a look at it before management does. Usually only 1 or 2 people are doing the tasks that management is asking everyone to do daily.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#79

Post by cjoelrun »

jiaweihli wrote: post #52
terlisimo wrote: post #18

I had a sort-of related experience with PayPal where the machine said "No." I've been using it for at least 10 years at that point. What I did was try to pay for some cheap VPS hosting in Italy. The transaction was denied. I thought there was some problem with my CC, so I immediately tried to do a $1 transaction with some other company and it went without a hitch. So I contacted PayPal support about it and the next d…

I've heard nothing but bad things about PayPal and how they often hold your own money hostage. Why don't people switch to alternatives? Are there no good ones?

Using a bank and had similar experiences. BBVA flagged flights booked on Southwest as gambling. Nothing they could do about it.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#80

Post by brett40324 »

drewg123 wrote: post #20
sigfubar wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What made you think that you were entitled to something that you were supposed to receive on a date which was later than the date on which you resigned?

I resigned effective the 2nd of a month, and the promo was effective the 1st of the month. See above "resignation (slated to be effective after the promo)". So the resignation was scheduled for the day after the promo. I actually stayed an extra week to receive the promo.

> somehow cancelled the promo via some automated system

Maybe someone just unassigned your employee id to the role, because in reality you weren't actually taking the job!

Post reply on HN