"The Machine Fired Me"
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This is a WTF story someone linked on hacker news. TL; DR; The manager missed the deadline to renew a contractor's contract, nobody could stop the system from firing him, and he had to leave work (without pay) for 3 weeks.
The Machine Fired Me
It was 7am when my phone rang. Instead of an alarm, it was my recruiter disturbing me from a pleasant dream. It was too early for a phone call or to be caught off guard, so I did not answer. I went to
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@sockpuppet7 And he ties it back in to our Blender thread!
PS: I am willing to bet the recent issue with YouTube Piracy filter blocking MIT courses and the Blender Foundation are the result of The Machine being the ultimate decider. Even though YouTube's support team clearly knows that these don't violate terms and conditions, the Machine decided otherwise. And they will have to fight it to death to bring the videos back online.
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You shouldn't have fucked with him, then.
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@boomzilla I saw that on Showtime - funny as hell!
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@dcon said in "The Machine Fired Me":
Even though YouTube's support team clearly knows that these don't violate terms and conditions, the Machine decided otherwise. And they will have to fight it to death to bring the videos back online.
There was a small incident, many years ago, which was the opposite. Someone, somehow, managed to upload a short porn video on YouTube that stayed up for many hours. It got shared on many websites and got thousands of views, so there's no way they didn't know about it, but they were somehow unable to delete it.
Random source I managed to find: https://www.bluegartr.com/threads/45351-Undeletable-porn-on-Youtube (too bad all Digg content got deleted...)
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I was fired. There was nothing my manager could do about it. There was nothing the director could do about it. They stood powerless as I packed my stuff and left the building.
Interesting story. But I'm pretty certain a contract is a legal agreement between humans. If the company director is there and tells you you're not fired and it's all a mistake, you're allowed to stay no matter how many emails you receive or how many accounts get deleted.
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@anonymous234 Yeah. I'd have happily accepted my lovely paid vacation.
And it would have been paid, no matter how many bridges I had to burn.
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@anonymous234 It seems the contract had to be renewed and his manager lost the deadline for doing that. So I guess no human signed the renewal and he was fired for real.
OTOH in the comments he mentioned he considered suing them, it's not explained enough
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@sockpuppet7 Not having a contract renewed is not "firing". He worked for the agreed-upon amount of time. I'm not sure why he feels so butthurt over that.
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@blakeyrat That's not how I interpret:
I was on a 3 years contract and had only worked for 8 months. Just before I was hired, this company was acquired by a much larger company and I joined during the transition. My manager at the time was from the previous administration. One morning I came to work to see that his desk had been wiped clean, as if he was disappeared. As a full time employee, he had been laid off. He was to work from home as a contractor for the duration of a transition. I imagine due to the shock and frustration, he decided not to do much work after that. Some of that work included renewing my contract in the new system.
Sounds like he was supposed to be there for 3 years, but because of managerial
at a crucial transition period, the information on his contract didn't get properly updated in the new system, and it terminated him after 8 months instead of the agreed-upon 3 years.
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@masonwheeler Well if that's true he might have grounds to sue, but it's still one of those "do you really thing this is a good use of your political capital?" things. Suing your employer over 3 days of missed work?
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@blakeyrat First off, it was 3 weeks. That's a non-trivial amount of money (about 6% of the entire year). Second, where did I say "and therefore he should sue them"?
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@blakeyrat said in "The Machine Fired Me":
"do you really thing this is a good use of your political capital?" things.
Sounded like that was his conclusion too.
Suing your employer over 3 days of missed work?
3 weeks.
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I would say that the manager that missed the deadline should be fired for this snafu. It seems he is somewhat incompetent.
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@brisingraerowing said in "The Machine Fired Me":
I would say that the manager that missed the deadline should be fired for this snafu. It seems he is somewhat incompetent.
That's the other problem. The guy who screwed up? He's already gone. He wasn't going to stay with the new company. There's nobody to punish. (Okay, there's a hit to the guy's reputation, but that's it.)
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This is why you always treat "THE MACHINE" like your little bitch. Also I don't understand how no one could go "Fuck the system. Ignore any emails or whatever". Weird.
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@stillwater said in "The Machine Fired Me":
Also I don't understand how no one could go "Fuck the system. Ignore any emails or whatever". Weird.
Well, they tried that to start off with. But the system was defending itself:
the system wouldn't allow her to enable my account
Jose couldn't print a temporary badge for me because my name appeared in RED and flagged in the system
All the necessary orders are sent automatically and each order completion triggers another order. For example, when the order for disabling my key card is sent, there is no way of it to be re-enabled. Once it is disabled, an email is sent to security about recently dismissed employees. Scanning the key card is a red flag. The order to disable my Windows account is also sent. There is also one for my JIRA account. And on and on. There is no way to stop the multi-day long process.
Even if they had been able to manually revoke stuff - which apparently they couldn't - every time one part of the termination process finished, another one started. And they couldn't stop it. It's all very well to say "ignore the emails", but that doesn't help the guy who can't log in to anything because all his credentials have been automatically locked out and nobody can re-enable them.
The real lesson is that automated systems need to have manual overrides. Because there's no way the designers can anticipate everything, and the corner cases will get you if you don't allow a way around.
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@scarlet_manuka Not having any manual overrides is bizarre. Also this is in no way the employee's fuckup.
This reminds me, when I could not login and log my daily hours and work details because of some JIRA fuckup, I just came into work, did fuckall and told the manager "I ain't doing shit till you fix my JIRA" ( mind you, the salary gets cut if JIRA does not report a certain minimum number of hours per week). This was around 3 - 4 days before the salary gets processed. Well that sent them scrambling and fixed my shit in no time.
Lesson learnt: The only way to make management fix system level fuckups is by leveraging your choice to not work. Telling them gently and expecting a fair response is a fucking fairytale.
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@stillwater It depends on your management, I suppose. If something like that happened to me I know I could trust my management to make it right one way or another, and I would do my usual work to the extent possible. But if I had hostile management that did not respect me, that might well be another story.
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@stillwater said in "The Machine Fired Me":
This reminds me, when I could not login and log my daily hours and work details because of some JIRA fuckup, I just came into work, did fuckall and told the manager "I ain't doing shit till you fix my JIRA"
Last place I worked that had a system like this, I couldn't get that far. Without an active contract, I couldn't even get near the building, let alone past the badge-reader at the door.
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@da-doctah said in "The Machine Fired Me":
Last place I worked that had a system like this, I couldn't get that far. Without an active contract, I couldn't even get near the building, let alone past the badge-reader at the door.
Yeah, I'm surprised the dude/dudette (I don't remember by this point) was allowed to continue working as long as they were. Guards shouldn't be able to bypass badge entry without checking ID and the personnel directory. He/she could have been a disgruntled employee.
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@heterodox said in "The Machine Fired Me":
Yeah, I'm surprised the dude/dudette (I don't remember by this point) was allowed to continue working as long as they were. Guards shouldn't be able to bypass badge entry without checking ID and the personnel directory. He/she could have been a disgruntled employee.
His manager and director confirmed that he should be allowed in.
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@adynathos said in "The Machine Fired Me":
His manager and director confirmed that he should be allowed in.
Oh, right. I read it a day ago and have already forgotten the details. :P
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@heterodox said in "The Machine Fired Me":
@adynathos said in "The Machine Fired Me":
His manager and director confirmed that he should be allowed in.
Oh, right. I read it a day ago and have already forgotten the details. :P
Trying to keep up with all the other threads around here, that's not all too surprising...
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@blakeyrat Because it's pretty inconvenient when a boss tells you you're going to have a job and then you don't.
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It has happened to me once. I got an automated email informing me that my contract would expire, unless my manager would request it to be extended. However, the system had the wrong information - the person who should extend my contract was no longer my manager, and the system didn't allow him to extend my contract.
There was nobody in the system who was authorised to extend my contract. So, eventually, my badge was blocked and my accounts got deactivated. It took a week to get everything fixed.
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It wasn't the fault of an automated system in my case but I was on two occasions sent home for the rest of the week until my contract/renewal paperwork was done. They couldn't let me on site without official approval, which they didn't have.
