35 ms·

The Machine Fired Me

• newest_user_ 8y ago
  I read it and still don't really understand why there was no one administrating the system. Who could have stopped the system (with the appropriate emails to cover their ass). I also do not understand why a check couldn't be cut. Submit to accounts payable with an email approval?
  • MBCook 8y ago
    That’s what I was thinking. If you had a contract and your manager was saying you were supposed to be working… Why not sue for the three weeks of pay that they illegitimately kept you from earning?
    • madeofpalk 8y ago
      Because lawsuits are hard? Seeing a "why not sue" as a response is very "typical American" for outsiders.
      • MBCook 8y ago
        Yeah. It’s what I was thinking throughout most of the article, assuming that the end would be “I lost my job and there was nothing I could do about it“. It’s not like it was a three day thing, I could sort of understand that. Since they are a contractor, it also seems like perhaps the company that they are actually employed with should be paying them for the contract company’s screwup. That would also probably heavily incentivize the company they actually work for to put pressure on the contractee to fix the issue.
      • krapp 8y ago
        People like to joke about and deride America's litigious culture but the US doesn't have the same labor rights infrastructure as other countries... sometimes lawsuits are the only legal recourse a "typical American" has.
  • krapp 8y ago
    The system didn't need to be stopped. The employee's contract wasn't renewed, which is indistinguishable from a decision terminate him, so the system executed the termination as scheduled. The system did exactly what it was intended to do, it was the humans who screwed up. Humans who presumably understood the way the system was designed, and didn't care enough to do some due diligence. >I also do not understand why a check couldn't be cut. Submit to accounts payable with an email approval? He was fired. It doesn't matter that people didn't intend for him to be, he was, it went through the system, it was a done deal. Paying people not in your employ is fraud, even under the best of intentions. The real lesson here is that few of us, no matter how much money we make, how into the culture we are or how long our tenure has been, are more than a row in a database to our employer, and we can be dropped at any time. The contractor in this case would not have had much more "job security" with humans in the loop.
    • ashelmire 8y ago
      >He was fired. It doesn't matter that people didn't intend for him to be, he was, it went through the system, it was a done deal. Paying people not in your employ is fraud, even under the best of intentions. There's basically a certainty that it was a violation of his contract and company policies that made it not legally sound. A company can also pay whoever it wants for any reason.
      • krapp 8y ago
        IANAL so I might be wrong, but if they terminated his contract, I would assume they can't still legally pay him as if they hadn't. Of course, he's also well within his rights to sue over it.
        • madeofpalk 8y ago
          He's a contractor, so can't he just submit an invoice and receive a payment? Or does 'contractor' mean something different in the US? If he missed out on pay then it's because no one cared enough/someone didn't care enough to sort it out.
• mirceal 8y ago
  sounds like the machine worked perfectly. it did what it was supposed to do and followed the rules layed out by us humans. the problem is in the way the workflow is described/implemented - and even with that we would need to see some numbers around how many times the workflow ran vs issues encountered.
  • pmlnr 8y ago
    All machines should have a big red emergency stop button, including this.
    • noobermin 8y ago
      It would be nice if people who programmed these systems learn from engineers who have the mind to do this.
      • mirceal 8y ago
        sometimes there is a disconnect between the people that make the decision on the what vs people that implement it. Also, sometimes, what starts as a reasonable system evolves over time to a point where it's stupid hard to think of all the edge cases.
    • tgsovlerkhgsel 8y ago
      It's hard when it's a cobbled-together set of systems sending signals to each other, some of which are automated by human robots (e.g. main system sees exit, files a dozen tickets, some of these get picked up by different automation, some of them cause humans to trigger other processes, each of which can again file half a dozen tickets in three different systems...)
      • pmlnr 8y ago
        No, it's not. Make every step check the existence of a kill-swith entry in a shared resource, say, zookeeper, mysql, etc., before they act. If it's there, halt. A human than can do the manual cleanup.
• 394549 8y ago
  This the problem with automated business processes. It seems easy, until you think about all the exception paths. Human organizations can adapt and handle them organically, but a system needs them all specified up front. Either you spend a massive amount of work to get it right or you have a broken system. And once you have it right, it's hard to change and adapt.
  • davidbanham 8y ago
    A technique I often use in this is to leave a "human in the loop". Have control points where the system takes no further action until an administrator requests it. Instead of coding that automated cleanup routine, send a notification to an admin and let them take care of it manually. As the system matures and the edge cases become better understood it can become more automated. At first, though, leave it loose and human-powered wherever you can.
    • jschwartzi 8y ago
      Yeah, in this case the automated system should have reminded his manager and their manager that his contract was up so that they could click a button and schedule his last day. Keep the decision in the hands of a human but let the machine do the grunt work.
  • azernik 8y ago
    Or, you don't think about all the exception paths, and just add a mechanism for humans to override the system's decisions. Which clearly no one managed to do in a timely fashion in this case.
• biggc 8y ago
  3 year contract where you need to come in to the office alongside full time employees every day? How is that not considered full-time?
  • bb88 8y ago
    Because a contract is not employment. A contractor has less protections than an employee. It's both good and bad, but typically a contractor gets a higher rate than an employee since health insurance, etc is not provided.
    • jedberg 8y ago
      OP was pointing out that if they were a contractor for three years, they were violating IRS rules.
      • bb88 8y ago
        Not necessarily. If the employee is going through a body shop (and it sounds like he was, since he had a recruiter) then he might be an employee on W2 of the staffing agency, but not on the actual payroll of the company. That's different than forcing the person on a 1099 as part of an employment contract. In the end he's still a "contractor" in the eyes of the company, and typically if something goes wrong, he's gonna be the first to go.
        • jedberg 8y ago
          Yes I said that in my sibling comment.
    • TaylorAlexander 8y ago
      People always say this but I am a contractor and I have health insurance.
      • neogodless 8y ago
        There's multiple ways to interpret the statement... but can you clarify? Does a staffing agency pay as a W-2 employee and provide an insurance plan? I'm a contractor (1099) so I buy my own insurance. So I have it... In either of the above cases, the company where I do my work does not provide my insurance.
• ravitation 8y ago
  I know I'm speaking from a position of privilege, but I really don't understand how people work at companies like this... The pay must be insane. Edit: Slight disclaimer, "work at companies like this" in a software/IT role...
  • donatj 8y ago
    My thoughts as well. I've spent the last decade+ working for sub-500 person companies, largely sub-100. I find myself now through acquisition in a 1,000 plus person company and I find it… stifling. It's bizarre to me to work for a company where I don't know close to everyones name. This kind of junk never happens in small companies.
    • perl4ever 8y ago
      In a small company, you don't get the protection of the bureaucracy either. You're likely to know the CEO, but that means everything depends on their character and the culture they institute. And even if they are generally ethical, a small company CEO who does a good job probably sacrifices a lot and then feels entitled to sacrifices from employees. And if you can't deal with politics in a small company, you can't transfer to another division. There are lots of potential drawbacks of a small company, like a small town.
      • donatj 8y ago
        Talking to my friends who work for very large companies, at least in their cases it seems like it's often easier to get a new job at another small company than to get a transfer - for what it's worth.
• drewg123 8y ago
  I had a somewhat similar, but much less serious experience at Google. I resigned just after I had gotten a promotion, but before the date when the promo was effective. Much to my surprise, the resignation (slated to be effective after the promo) somehow cancelled the promo via some automated system. However, a promo at Google is a huge deal. I really wanted the promotion to go through, so that I would have that level if I decided to re-join Google (or even so that go/epitaphs would match my resume). My manager and HRBP managed to get it sorted out, but it was a pain.
  • sigfubar 8y ago
    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?
    • drewg123 8y ago
      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.
      • sigfubar 8y ago
        You should have become a lawyer.
      • RandomInteger4 8y ago
        I'm not going to lie; that type of thing -- resigning right after getting promoted -- seems like something from some alternate reality fantasy world.
        • Arainach 8y ago
          Why? Top performers are poached all the time. Plenty of people do excellent work in jobs they may not love. Both promotions and bonuses are usually tied to performance review cycles, and right after bonuses vest is the most popular time to leave.
• TimTheTinker 8y ago
  I doubt all business management software is this inflexible (never heard anyone complain about SAP "taking over"). Anyone have any idea which software product/service this may have been?
  • Analemma_ 8y ago
    No way to say without the author chiming in, but it sounds like a bespoke system consisting of totally unrelated modules (payroll, security, Jira) hooked up, badly, with in-house scripts. This is the case at a large number of companies. As you say, all-in-one systems have their drawbacks, but usually at least can handle situations like this. But piles of shell scrips to make unrelated systems talk to each other often lack error handling and rollback.
    • TimTheTinker 8y ago
      > But piles of shell scrips to make unrelated systems talk to each other often lack error handling and rollback. Sounds like the same sorts of problems you'd get with an enterprise service bus (ESB). Glad those have fallen out of favor for good :)
• smadge 8y ago
  “The Machine” used to be a metaphor for the mindless beaucracy of the State and the mindless profit seeking of Capital. They both operate algorithmically, although their “hardware” were still humans. Now we are cutting out the human entirely from The Machine, hooking control of the economy directly into trading algorithms, and the control of humans directly into automated bureaucracies.
  • danenania 8y ago
    The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.
• terlisimo 8y ago
  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 day I actually get a phone call from one of their support staff. He says my transaction was flagged as "suspicious" by the fraud prevention system. So I asked, okay... but now a Human has looked at it, can you manually approve the transaction? The answer was "No, I am not allowed to tell you why". I was incredulous, so I asked "Wait... you acknowledge that I'm not a scammer or a terrorist (since my PP account still worked and does to this day), and the party I'm trying to purchase from is obviously not either since they're still accepting PP, but The Machine thinks there is something fishy about us two specifically and there is no way for someone to manually approve this transaction?" And he said something to the tune of "Yes. I'm sorry, but there is nothing I or anyone at PP can do about it, and for security reasons we're unable to offer further details." So yeah. This was just a minor nuisance for me, I purchased similar services elsewhere. But the whole thing was a real eye-opener. That was the day I realized that there is no pleading or reasoning with The Machine.
  • Swizec 8y ago
    > I realized that there is no pleading or reasoning with The Machine. Weapons of Math Destruction was one of the most eye opening books I read recently. It's all about how Machines when set up with self-reinforcing models can become a real big problem. And how the fact nobody quite understands how The Machine makes decisions isn't helping either.
    • noobermin 8y ago
      Examples of these abound, from the article to the Ethereum DAO "hack" and too often (just look a bit lower in the comment section) the response is "The Machine is working as it should." I feel like automation is great but don't forget that people are still people and someone should be able to lift the lid and fix things themselves. My solution would be to not rely too much on these systems, but at the very least, at least include escape hatches and big red emergency buttons. Engineers do, why can't hackers do this?
• nunez 8y ago
  That is an example of a really good offboarding system.
• FLUX-YOU 8y ago
  >HR machine denies human a job >Hundred of thousands of records were missing and the web interface was not responding. Are you sure you guys didn't have an attacker on the loose?
  • romwell 8y ago
    As my understanding was that the auto-reboot and lockdown of the systems supported by this engineer were the cause of this, the attacker scenario yields to Hanlon's razor here.
  • burnte 8y ago
    The article describes that his former manager was terminated due to a corporate acquisition, and turned into a contract-worker from home "until after the takeover" and that manager never updated the HR system to show the article writer's contract was renewed. So, from the system's perspective, he was to be terminated on 3/1/17, and the system hadn't been told that was no longer true and so it performed it's programmed activities.
• arglebarnacle 8y ago
  I was misatakenly caught in an automated ban wave in World of Warcraft for "botting" just a couple months after joining, but as soon as a human reviewed my account I was reinstated immediately. The automated system flagged my account a second time a few weeks later, and when I appealed they simply said that although they didn't see any evidence of rule-breaking behavior, nobody got caught by the automated system twice unless they were cheating. I was out over $100, and I didn't even get six months to play the game. Sometimes The Machine just "knows best".
  • eridius 8y ago
    Simple explanation: they did in fact see what you were doing and just didn't want to tell you because they don't want to teach cheaters how to evade bans. They were hoping after the first review that you would start playing by the rules.
    • milesvp 8y ago
      Even simpler explanation is that false positives are real. All sufficiently complex systems have them. I'd imagine that triggering a false positive the first time greatly increases the likelihood that a second false positive is triggered. I'd also further assert, that simply being an HN reader means you are more likely to trigger a false positive than the rest of the population. Blizzard does some very aggressive memory scans, and they look for tools that are much more common with developers than the rest of the population. I've personally used a well known library for code injection, that if I'd had it running on an unrelated binary while playing WoW they would have seen the signature of the library, and likely Blizzard would have eventually banned my account. I don't know if the parent was doing things that Blizzard considers naughty or not, but I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt given what I've read about Blizzard's Warden.
      • perl4ever 8y ago
        As someone who hasn't played computer games much since the 90s, I read comments like this and am just boggled by how seriously everyone takes games these days, the players, and the vendors, and the general public. It's as if you had to get a security clearance to use a wiffle ball and bat.
• sbarzowski 8y ago
  The really surprising part is that after this incident OP still wanted to work with that company, even though from what I understand they didn't make it up to him in any way.
  • broodbucket 8y ago
    Yeah that seems insane to me. Sure maybe you go back since it doesn't seem to be malice on the part of the employer, but to not get compensation for the time you were "fired"...
  • fencepost 8y ago
    He returned to the company but jumped ship at the next opportunity, which makes sense assuming that there's going to be some lag time on opportunities - particularly since he'd just missed 3 weeks of pay and presumably wanted to keep a paycheck while he was looking.
  • Sean1708 8y ago
    They went back only until they got another offer, which makes complete sense to me.
• romwell 8y ago
  I have a story in a similar vein, although a much less scary one. In that instance, The Machine Cleaned Out My Desk. I had a cubicle at the company HQ, but was for some period of time working from home in another state. I still kept quite a few things in the cubicle (notebooks, mugs, etc), which I used when I was in the area. When I finally came back, I noticed, after a month or two, that my office number has not been updated in the system (from being "HOME OFFICE"), and sent a request to IT to change it. The next day I came back to see a pristine desk. With all my stuff gone. See, my request to update the office number triggered a relocation request. The system, in preparation of the move-in of the "new" tenant (me) into my cubicle, has removed all the belongings of the previous tenant (which also happened to be me). Luckily, all the removed stuff was put in a box, which I got back several days later, after my manager found the right person in the facilities dept. Just goes to show that automating even the simplest procedures can be very tricky - and that perhaps it's best to have people on-site manually approve any destructive steps.
  • gaius 8y ago
    The next day I came back to see a pristine desk. With all my stuff gone. Something like this happened to me too at a previous employer, some things I recovered but many were just gone, the cleaning staff apparently help themselves to stuff that “former” employees leave behind, so my fancy headphones for example were just gone. Fucks given by HR/facilities? Zero. One of many similar incidents for me and my cow-orkers. And this was a desk move literally from one row to another! It wasn’t even an algorithm per se, most of the “machine” at this place was people in India following checklists manually. You could speak to them (tho' they made this very difficult to do) and tell them to stop and they would say “yes” and do it anyway. I had a friend at another company who was mistakenly terminated, a week later his manager called him at home to find out if he was OK, the conversation apparently went, Are you sick? What happened? You fired me you bastard! No I didn't! Please come back! Too late now, I have another job.
    • romwell 8y ago
      A paper/protocol machine is still a machine, though. Sucks that it ate your headphones!
• rectang 8y ago
  > 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 involved by the end and well aware of what was going on.
  • isostatic 8y ago
    Surely a 3 year contract means the company is in breach of it by not paying you?
    • jacobsenscott 8y ago
      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.
      • rectang 8y ago
        So, wage theft. Now we're not just talking about a lost opportunity to reward a loyal worker. If you're right, somebody ought to be going to jail.
        • fixermark 8y ago
          But nobody will. This is a common story in contractor arrangements---the big, unwritten benefit of the process is that all incentives are aligned to sweep small mistakes (1) under the rug. Contracting client doesn't want to jeopardize a good contract, contractee doesn't want to jeopardize their contract, and employee doesn't want to get fired and black-balled. Who cares if it's a little illegal? :( (1) "Small" in relation to the whole contract deal; what's one employee's salary in a million-dollar agreement between two corporations?
        • 8y ago
• ethicsengineer 8y ago
  Engineers need to read The Trial by Franz Kafka. I don't think people fear soulless beurocracy without any possible resolution enough.
  • Melchizedek 8y ago
    Also read the Unabomber Manifesto (Industrial Society and its Future). Technology enslaves us. But it can also liberate us, and we should seek to maximize the liberating force of technology and try to disrupt the enslaving tendency.
    • qpooqpoo 8y ago
      Also read his two books: "Technological Slavery" and "Anti-Tech Revolution"
  • noncoml 8y ago
    One of my favorite parts: -- Before the Law A man from the country seeks the law and wishes to gain entry to the law through an open doorway, but the doorkeeper tells the man that he cannot go through at the present time. The man asks if he can ever go through, and the doorkeeper says that it is possible "but not now". The man waits by the door for years, bribing the doorkeeper with everything he has. The doorkeeper accepts the bribes, but tells the man that he accepts them "so that you do not think you have failed to do anything." The man does not attempt to murder or hurt the doorkeeper to gain the law, but waits at the door until he is about to die. Right before his death, he asks the doorkeeper why even though everyone seeks the law, no one else has come in all the years. The doorkeeper answers "No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it." From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_the_Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_the_Law
    • irundebian 8y ago
      That was a very interesting piece of text I've never heard of, although I know Kafka. Thank you!
• gscott 8y ago
  I had this problem with my health care. With the new software they are using the doctor has to click each prescription every year and ask me about it. I guess he didn't click one and when it came time to get a refill it wouldn't let me have it. It used his credentials to un-prescribe it, the pharmacy said he cancelled the prescription. On my next appointment I asked about it and he had no idea and re-prescribed it (it was high blood pressure medication not anything addictive)... He was upset about it the computer changing what he wanted.
• mmagin 8y ago
  What's disturbing is that this automated process did not verify the termination with his manager or an actual human in HR.
• draw_down 8y ago
  What assurance is there that it won't happen again? It says everyone was powerless to stop it. Pretty much the opposite of job security. If the author one day decides to just fuck off for 3 weeks with no advance notice, somehow I doubt the company would continue contracting with him.
• exegete 8y ago
  I am actually going through this right now. I'm in a position that renews yearly. I'm a regular employee but it's the way this kind of position works (I'm being a little vague on purpose to avoid personal identification). Before renewal I talked to the officer manager, he sent everything over to HR a few weeks early.... which seems to be the mistake. HR let it sit on their desk and then forgot. My office manager is working at getting them to fix it ASAP. I've already missed one paycheck (which I will receive eventually). First hint was a notice that I am going to be losing email access soon (which I still have currently). Then I lost keycard access to the building and office (it unlocks automatically at a set time, so I can still get in eventually). I've lost access to some of the resources we have (not critical to my job at this point). Got a letter in the mail about COBRA. Got a letter in the mail about retirement. I'm wondering when I will lose access to our wifi and cluster.
  • microcolonel 8y ago
    > I'm in a position that renews yearly. I renew every two weeks. You have to stay ahead of people, ideally lock in your renewal before the existing contract concludes.
  • datanut 8y ago
    U-M? ARC-TS?
• reid 8y ago
  A few years ago, I took a sabbatical from Yahoo. When I returned, I got an email a few days later from a 3rd party survey company with the subject ”Exit Survey” which began “We’re sorry you’ll be leaving Yahoo soon.” I was confused and so was my boss. Turns out some automated process included people who recently concluded a sabbatical in a mailing list for people who recently resigned...
• star-castle 8y ago
  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.
• useful 8y ago
  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.
  • def8cefe 8y ago
    > 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. This is (in my opinion) one of the reasons why everyone talking about getting rid of dedicated IT ops in their organizations is making a mistake. You can have devs building integrations and automation all day, but you still need sysadmins who can see the whole picture and override them when necessary. Having an outsourced (or even internal) hell desk that goes off a script doesn't take care of situations like this either.
    • falcolas 8y ago
      Don't worry, you can still pay outlandish prices for top tier A-Z support, where you can argue for a week with a drone that no, their system is not properly following the HTTP RFC, and here's the TCP dumps to prove it. Imagine if we didn't have an operations engineer who knew how to trace down the problem using a TCP dump. Or if it had been a developer who was, by the proper "DevOps" hygenics, denied access to the boxes to run TCP dumps. Yeah, they're fixing it. No, we don't have a timeline.
      • fphhotchips 8y ago
        The worst bit is that someone internal to that business has probably also noticed that the system isn't properly following the HTTP RFC and is fighting the machine themselves to get it fixed with similar results.
• pm24601 8y ago
  Sounds like one of those "smart" contracts at work.
• g051051 8y ago
  Remarkably similar to the 1981 Timothy Zahn story "Job Inaction".
  • crooked-v 8y ago
    Now I want to see a story that takes the "lost in the company" myth to farcical extremes, with an entire legion of stormtroopers having to fend for themselves in a remote corner of a Superduper Star Destroyer.
    • Gibbon1 8y ago
      That sounds very Warhammer 40k
  • toomanybeersies 8y ago
    Wow, that is an incredibly obscure reference. This comment chain on HN was the first thing I found when I googled "Job Inaction Timothy Zahn". Looks like a good read though, might save it for lunch.
    • g051051 8y ago
      > Wow, that is an incredibly obscure reference. I'm really old.
• rhacker 8y ago
  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 termination should display warnings if multiple employees have similar names and departments, etc... I've been in health IT for the last 15ish years so I know a lot about patient matching (wrote at least 4 patient matching MPIs in my time at different companies).. so maybe it's just my perspective.. However, that all being said, almost all processes like this are NOT automated, but instead handled by automated emails telling people to do operations. You're basically then subject to the lowest common denominator logic of people in IT that are in charge of disabling accounts- with no regard or care about who the person is. Anyway to the person that got fired like this - just be happy you are out of the environment - it is not for you. There are signs in life.
  • jergason 8y ago
    Why would HR IT have worse software developers than other industries?
    • jachee 8y ago
      Because HR in general has worse employees than other disciplines? Seriously, in my 20+ year career, I've run across very few legitimately talented people in HR. The department seems to attract the kind of people who have little to offer intrinsically; who happen to be willing to facilitate the necessary protocols, as minimally effective as possible, while claiming "people skills" that end up being little more than office politics.
      • brazzledazzle 8y ago
        It’s true in my experience. HR IT, IAM, etc. are dominated by fakes and low skilled workers. Corporate IT is often the same but for some reason HR IT is distilled mediocrity. Definitely some exceptions and exceptional people but they are used and abused by the frauds and leaned heavily on by the unskilled. I’ve had the joy of being in meetings with folks from every discipline that don’t know their field but HR IT takes the cake. Somehow they find a way to absolve themselves of responsibility by leaning on more technical teams while simultaneously touting their unique technical expertise and importance they use as a club to ignore those very same teams.
• randop 8y ago
  This story is fascinating. Computers were designed to be black-and-white. It seems like the automation tool that was in place is not transparent or restrictive that its hard to figure out why that happened to you. Glad to hear that you are able to continue on your job.
• dqpb 8y ago
  Imagine all the poor souls about to get lost in China's social credit system.
• toomanybeersies 8y ago
  On the other hand, when I left my previous job, I had access to the company Github for 3 weeks, Codeship for 6 weeks (I only realised when I started at my new job and saw the dashboard for my old job when I logged in and had to email them to remove me), and the company Google apps (including Google docs) for 7 months. Having access to my company email for several months was useful, as I unwisely signed up to a couple of services on my work email and needed to change them over, and a couple of them didn't change to my personal email properly and I had to redo it again a month later. Needless to say, my former supervisor, while a brilliant programmer, was not very good at getting bureaucratic stuff done.
• msisk6 8y ago
  I had a similar experience but in reverse. About six months ago I left my long-time enterprise-y employer for a startup in another city. So we sold our house, packed up the family, bought a new house and moved in. After 3 months it became obvious I had made a terrible mistake, so we sold the new house, packed up the family again, and bought another new house in the same city we had just left 3 months ago so I could return to my previous employer. They were happy to have me back and I ended up in the same desk and chair I had just vacated 3 months previous. Only it took awhile. Since I was already in the system as a terminated employee it required manual intervention and code changes to the employee management system to get me added back in. It took about 3 weeks before I could do anything besides go to meetings. If anything needs disrupting, it’s the employee management systems in use by pretty much all the large enterprise shops. It’s a mess.
  • zerr 8y ago
    Maybe next time just try out things at first? i.e. rent, move the family into the rented home after 2-3 months without selling the original house for some time.
    • TorKlingberg 8y ago
      Sure, but the GP wasn't asking for life advice.
      • zerr 8y ago
        It's not an advice but things to bring on to discuss why they did the otherwise.
    • msisk6 8y ago
      Yeah, my wife would agree. ;) This is probably the most epic failure of my career. I thought I did proper due diligence but obviously I didn't. A learning experience for sure.
  • lainga 8y ago
    Your company's self-image must be either very high or very low: "nobody who quits us will work for us again!"
• Blackthorn 8y ago
  They didn't even give him a bonus to make up for those three weeks? Jesus.
• jasonkester 8y ago
  The Machine can screw up in either direction. I’ve seen it go the other way. The person in question had a big percentage raise on the way as part of a promotion. It was applied, the promotion went through, then it was applied again. I’m sure it would have been just as much of an effort to fix, which probably explains why he never tried.
• notjtrig 8y ago
  Reminds me of 'There Will Come Soft Rains', a 1950 short story about a smart house dying. http://www.btboces.org/Downloads/7_There%20Will%20Come%20Soft%20Rains%20by%20Ray%20Bradbury.pdf http://www.btboces.org/Downloads/7_There%20Will%20Come%20Sof...
• reificator 8y ago
  Interesting read, but I did want to touch on this paragraph at the end. > 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. According to Blender the issue is that YouTube is requiring them to switch to monetized. No more free rides once you're that big. https://www.blender.org/media-exposure/youtube-blocks-blender-videos-worldwide/ https://www.blender.org/media-exposure/youtube-blocks-blende...
  • RyanShook 8y ago
    Are we sure that is actually the issue? Yes, YT wants them to monetize but I’m not sure if it is a formal requirement and Blender says they’re still trying to work on it with YT.
  • gcp 8y ago
    YouTube is requiring them to switch to monetized That's just what "The Machine" says and may not be the intended policy, even if it is now the effective one.
• bonyt 8y ago
  This is literally an episode of Better Off Ted.[1] In it, the titular Ted is inadvertenly deleted from the company system when trying to correct a misspelling of his last name. Eventually, he is forced to interview for his own job as the system had already put out an ad for his replacement. I think the most striking part of it, and of the true story from the post, is the human factor - the idea that the humans involved looked to the system as an authority and followed its orders blindly. I wonder what other examples there are of people blindly following technology - people driving into lakes because their GPS told them to, etc. Plus, as our society gets more and more dependent on these systems, we may lose out on the flexibility that human mediators and problem solvers once gave us. The human tendency to defer to authority may never be as terrifying as when that authority is held by an uncaring machine with a couple bugs. What was once satire has become too real. [1]: http://betteroffted.wikia.com/wiki/Goodbye,_Mr._Chips http://betteroffted.wikia.com/wiki/Goodbye,_Mr._Chips
  • doc_gunthrop 8y ago
    Reminds me of Frank Herbert's ominous (fictional) prophecy: “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
    • rixed 8y ago
      Sounds like what Brecht once wrote about the luddites, something along the lines of: "you appear to be dominated by machines only because there are men hiding behind those machines" (can't retrieve the actual quote now, was on a treatise on theater)
    • greedo 8y ago
      Time for Mentats! The Butlerian Jihad seemed so unrealistic when I first read Dune, but now it seems prophetic.
  • vvanders 8y ago
    That show was incredibly on the mark, if Black Mirror was a comedy it would have been that show. The episode about the black engineer who isn't detected by the motion sensors is basically straight out of HP's webcam fiasco[1](although the show takes it to the logical and hilarious extreme). [1] http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/race/2009/12/hp-webcam-colorblindbut-not-in-a-good-way.html http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/race/2009/12/hp-webcam-c...
• Zak 8y ago
  I believe pretty strongly that all automation should have a manual override, form the POS system at a store to the interconnected HR systems the author describes. A store chain that comes to mind as getting this right is Publix, a grocery store chain in the southeastern US. Aside from a policy of giving the customer any item that rings up at a higher price than is shown on the shelf free of charge, the cashier can generally overrule the computer if something is unreasonable. I'm sure these things get flagged for review by a manager, but in the moment, the cashier is empowered to fix the problem for the customer. I've had other stores tell me they couldn't sell me an item at all because the computer said it was a two-pack and the store only had a single item in stock. Every one of the systems in the cascade that terminated the author's employment in practice should have an override or undo button. For security reasons, it should probably set off alarm bells pretty high up, but a director was already involved, which should have been sufficient approval.
• DoctorOetker 8y ago
  This is the problem of imperative/functional programming languages, instead of using provers/verifiers. Edit: In "The Count of MonteCristo" by Alexandre Dumas, the protagonist was accused of aiding Bonaparte, and in the French island prison meets the priest who was accused (under Bonaparte) of aiding royalty. (I may have switched that around, it's been a while since reading). So even though switches in power occur, once incarcerated the evolving machine does not correct its past decisions. When you automate corporate decisions with code, there is no real judicial branch (arbitrator, judges, ...), only an executive branch (computers) and a legislative branch (programmers). Hence there is no appeal mechanism. In theory one could formalize our natural language concepts so that a verifier (for example MetaMath verifier) can act as a neutral judge. Then the automated corporate decisions would not just compute the decision to be taken, but also the proof that this is follows from the axiomatic corporate rules. Of course there is no guarantee that such a set of axioms actually encode what the corporation truly wishes, so even in the system I describe Ibrahim would get fired, BUT with the difference that he (and any superiors all the way up to the director) can see the "proof" of why this "should" happen, at which point they will understand which rule(s) were misformalized, which rule(s) did not accurately convey their intention. At this point they could fix the rule(s) and verify all the previously generated decisions with proofs, and possibly identify other individuals who where a bit meeker, and after the 3rd signal something was wrong simply went home never showing up again...
  • vinceguidry 8y ago
    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 prison became a place for common criminals, in those days only political offenders would be put away. Common criminals were variously fined, branded, and in serious cases, transported. Prison was considered a gift, the usual, Roman-era way of dealing with your political enemies once you achieved office was to execute them. Exile was considered, but someone of means would find a way to get back.
• pkaye 8y ago
  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 prepare after a week of escalation.
  • kbart 8y ago
    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.
    • vinceguidry 8y ago
      Because Name Surname 1 was already taken!
      • SparkyMcUnicorn 8y ago
        Because Name Surname 0 was already taken!
        • vinceguidry 8y ago
          No way they were forward-thinking enough to use zero-indexing.
    • Bartweiss 8y ago
      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-theft-racial-justice https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/03/identity-the...
• c3534l 8y ago
  I really don't understand why these types of systems are consistently such colossal failures, extremely expensive, and unable to be corrected by human intervention to the point where after weeks, authorized management couldn't correct the error and had to rehire the employee.
• beilabs 8y ago
  Am I the only one thinking it was a perfect time to negotiate a better salary seeing as they'd dismissed his contract leaving room open for a new one?
• fixermark 8y ago
  Peeling back the layers a bit, it seems a major misfire in this whole story is that the employee in question was a short-term contractor... But a shot-term contractor who was apparently quite valuable to his team. Smart companies'll make people in that position permanent employees. The machine is so automated partially to make sure legal compliance of two companies sharing one employee is executed upon correctly (because past lawsuits have made it clear that if you get too chummy with your contractors, you're on the hook for treating them like they're full-time). Don't want to get screwed by your own automation? Make fewer people working in your building interchangeable third-party subcontracts.
  • gaius 8y ago
    a major misfire in this whole story is that the employee in question was a short-term contractor. A 3-year contract is a long-term contractor... Many permanent employees don't stick around that long.
    • fixermark 8y ago
      Sorry; I didn't mean anything formal by the "short-term" adjective phrase there. I meant "In contrast to a full-time employee, whom one assumes is making a career out of THAT company." Three years is a long time in contractor-land, but it's a drop in the bucket for career company employee.
      • TeMPOraL 8y ago
        I think that what 'gaius is saying is that "whom ones assumes is making a career..." part is a wrong assumption, especially in this industry. "Making career" is more of an exercise of jumping between companies every other year.
    • lmm 8y ago
      If it had truly been a 3-year contract they wouldn't've had the renewal issue.
      • 8y ago
• emilfihlman 8y ago
  Umm, what? I mean, did he get the back pay owned?
• planetjones 8y ago
  Many companies have a similar system where you have to renew contractors on a monthly basis. A similar thing happened at a company I was working for, where the manager was away on sick leave and the system didn’t copy anyone else in to the ever escalating emails. With no one confirming the contractor should stay the system kicked in. The contractor’s accounts were deleted, without him knowing anything about it. It wasted a few days to set everything back up again. Luckily security never got involved. The least such a system should do is contact the contractor directly before taking action, so they have a chance to involve a human.
• iyogeshjoshi 8y ago
  This is epic, to think age of AI will come this soon :p, though programmed by human still controlling human
• Spooky23 8y ago
  This is what happens when dozens of systems are chained together and sync data in a circular way. It’s becoming really common now in biggish enterprises with systems with Service Now or similar solutions. It works well enough that all sorts of convoluted Rube Goldberg process can be built. It was better for the humans before with old crap like Remedy because it was so much harder to do anything, no project (other than upgrading Remedy) could be completed within the tenure of any executive.
• brokenmachine 8y ago
  Oh god, I recognize that stupid CA Service Desk Manager in those emails. The team responsible for designing that abomination should be locked in a maze with traps and forced to log tickets for every trap or door they need to escape or get through. Any managers responsible for choosing it should have to log two tickets...
• pknerd 8y ago
  Scrapy glimpse of what will happen when machines rule in the world.
• FrozenVoid 8y ago
  When people think of "AI takeover", they don't expect that they're already controlled by it. We're approaching the state described in this story http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
  • circlefavshape 8y ago
    Manna already exists in warehousing, I found out last weekend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice-directed_warehousing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice-directed_warehousing
• tribby 8y ago
  > My manager ... decided not to do much work after that, [including] renewing my contract in the new system. > A simple automation mistake(feature) caused everything to collapse this is a great story but I must be misreading this detail somehow. it sounds like a simple _human_ error caused everything to collapse.
  • daliusd 8y ago
    In that case we should send copy of "The Design Of Everyday Things" to designer of the system.
    • tribby 8y ago
      sure, we can add can steve krug and kenya hara and everyone else to the reading list -- I don't disagree with the general sentiment that we should avoid designing unnecessary dead man's switches -- but this case still sounds like it is a lot further on the "human" end of the human-machine "who fucked up" spectrum. the contractor says his boss just stopped doing his work at some point, work that included migrating the contractor to a new system.
• wbxperts8 8y ago
  http://theinstantsolutions.com/tag/need-seo-expert/ http://theinstantsolutions.com/tag/need-seo-expert/
• ensiferum 8y ago
  "When my contract expired, the machine took over and fired me." Your contract expiring is not the same thing as getting fired. The title is a click bait. "A simple automation mistake(feature) caused everything to collapse." No, it sounds like the system just did what it was programmed to do. The real issue was with the one guy not renewing your contract.
• hartator 8y ago
  This is not the Machine, this is just a shitty organization.
• bsvalley 8y ago
  Long story short, your contract hasn’t been renewed due to a human mistake (someone forgot to do it). The program worked perfectly, as expected. If the program would have failed, it would have also came from a human being (developer). Machines are machines, we can’t blame them...
• tigershark 8y ago
  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 and went home. A couple of days later they managed to reinstate my security account, although I couldn’t still access my pc for one or two days. In these days I just helped my colleagues. Once I got back my account I started re-requesting the 10s of permissions that I needed, and while I was doing so I found an open request to recycle my machine. Luckily I managed to contact the guy that was supposed to take it and I stopped him just in time. On the whole I probably lost two weeks. What was the trigger for my termination? Apparently someone managed to input the wrong termination date in SAP for my contract, and that started the havoc. Obviously there were alerts before my termination but everyone ignored them because in the other systems visible to the approvers my termination date was correct. Luckily I got paid for every single day, even when I was at home, but after three months I’m still suffering from random problems in random systems that are probably related to this mess.
  • std_throwaway 8y ago
    > 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.
    • tigershark 8y ago
      I told him that I was going home and he was fine.
    • amorousf00p 8y ago
      This is classic modern work culture. Make sure you document your attendance and effort during employer incompetence. Empty your time to exit the turnstile. No. At a certain level of employee experience and commitment this type of thing is inexcusable. Gaming the game is all that is encouraged these days. Complete corruption.
• gambiting 8y ago
  " I had missed 3 weeks of work by that time, and pay." The what now? I can only assume this is in US, because in EU he would be 100000% entitled to pay for every single minute of this going on.
  • 317070 8y ago
    I think I would get a compensation bonus without even having to ask out of this (in the EU). Since he got a new contract, I hope he did negotiate a bit on the new terms in that contract.
    • tqkxzugoaupvwqr 8y ago
      Would have been clever to negotiate the missing three weeks pay into the new contract, e.g. as a signing bonus.
  • macca321 8y ago
    Maybe not if he is a Contractor.
    • kbart 8y ago
      Even in such case contract usually has a clause about premature termination and related compensation.
      • garmaine 8y ago
        Did you read the article? There was no premature termination here. He was “fired” exactly because his contract expired. It’s a shit situation and the company should have made him whole, but on ethical not legal grounds.
        • molf 8y ago
          In many EU countries a contract does not actually end if you continue to show up to do work in mutual (implicit) agreement with the managers at the company you work for. It would constitute an implicit extension of the contract, effectively renewing it under the same terms for the same duration (with a maximum of 1 year IIRC).
• singingwolfboy 8y ago
  Archived here: https://web.archive.org/web/20180620074341/https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-fired-me https://web.archive.org/web/20180620074341/https://idiallo.c...
• Pica_soO 8y ago
  Has there ever been a attempt to prove that companys hiring and firing processes are turing complete?
• holga 8y ago
  Tldr, please?
• mfritsche 8y ago
  "That was something that Sobol knew, wasn't it?" "What's that?" "That people will do whatever a computer screen tells them. I swear to god, you could run the next Holocaust from a fucking fast-food register." He pantomimed aiming a pistol. "It says I should kill you now." -- Daniel Suarez, Freedom
• koliber 8y ago
  Automation, speed, and efficiency has a risk which rarely acknowledged. I phrase it as "the faster you run, the more painful the fall." I find this to be universally applicable, from the most literal situations through the most abstract ones. If I ride my bike, and I hit a bump, I can expect to fall, and perhaps break a bone or dislocate a shoulder. The chance of a very serious injury is relatively low. If I drive my car at 100mph and I hit a bump, there is a good chance there will be a fatality. Same thing applies to any system. The more cumbersome, slow, and manual a system, the less of a chance that a systematic and far-reaching failure will happen. The scenario in this article would not have been possible if this was a manual process. I am not a luddite. Quite to the contrary, I value progress. However, people dismiss black-swam events for large automated systems far too often. Even though the risk of any such event is small, once it happens the damage is extensive. Circuit breakers and manual intervention overrides need to be designed from the get-go. Unfortunately, they are only added after something bad happens.
• erikb 8y ago
  Strange. In the end he even explains what actually happened. His old manager didn't renew his contract in the merger with another company. Also it seems that they didn't pay him the 3 weeks after? The US is a really cruel system. How can it even be called work if you only have a contract for three years? How can you call it "friends" what you make as relationships in such an environment?
• blauditore 8y ago
  Wow, it seems like every single ERP software out there is nothing short of shitty. I've seen into a couple of fairly large companies now, and everywhere people were complaining about theirs. My suspicion is that decision makers are bad at evaluating those things. They see a list of features and hear that "everyone's using SAP", so they want it too. And no one gives a damn about user experience.
• PaulRobinson 8y ago
  A colleague has a story from a former boss of his that I am now telling everybody when the chance arises as it does now: Software engineers often think their job is to build a killer robot, this automation machine that destroys everything in their path. But killer robots are expensive, prone to mistakes, and forget about the humanity in a situation. Our role is to actually build something more like the Iron Man suit: a tool that helps humans do things they could not do otherwise. In this case, the tooling sounds great as a killer robot. But it's the wrong thing to have been built. Somebody should have been able to approve and decline each step and over-ride it.
• xkcdefgh 8y ago
  Sounds more like bad design than automation's fault
• oldandtired 8y ago
  For all the war stories given here and the various comments about system doing what they should or needing to have human overrides, what are the actual take-homes for programmers here? I have spent many years automating tasks out of existence or at least to the point where it takes minutes instead of hours or days to do something. My own take-homes from my own experience and all the comments here are: 1). make systems that have an interrupt and roll-back facility. 2). make sure that permanent effect actions are authorised properly. Especially when actions are for removals of any kind. 3). don't automate without good cause - hiring and firing are not good cause areas, even if certain specific sequences of actions can benefit from it. 4). think carefully of all the edge cases, you don't really want to be bitten in the nether regions by systems that cannot be stopped. 5). just because it appears to be simple, it probably isn't. So take a step back and look at the unintended consequences of that automation. 6). think strategically about what should be automated and raise awareness if there are obvious flaws with what is being requested. 7). a follow on to 6). is to not be afraid of asking questions and giving opinions. 8). if nobody will listen, then leave and find something else better to do with your precious time and experience. I am sure that there are more gems that can be added to this list. Feel free to add, discuss or dispute.
• 2T1Qka0rEiPr 8y ago
  I found this article so well written and interesting
• jeffrallen 8y ago
  You need a union, Ibrahim.
• jrootabega 8y ago
  Peculiar that he could log in to confluence but not jira. Maybe there is a layer of dramatic embellishment here?
• ghoul2 8y ago
  what I don't get is why a director-level person is willing to stand by and let this happen. Whatever the system says - if I, as manager of someone (and responsible for them) did not fire that someone, nor agree to they being fired by a higher up - I am NOT going to let security escort them out - no matter what. Is there no sense of responsibility here?
• gcp 8y ago
  So the machine "fixed" the "glitch"?
• greedo 8y ago
  A new coworker was hired on my team 6 months ago. Someone in HR inadvertently entered the wrong age on his employee record (he's in his early 40's, and they had him as 72). This lead to denial of life insurance coverage that took until this month to resolve.
• brightball 8y ago
  Sounds like a BPM managed process.
• phyzome 8y ago
  What I find curious here is the staggered shut down of access. Why wasn't it all immediate? Sure it might have taken time for parking access to disappear, since that message would have been sent over to facilities, but email and keycard access should have been shut down instantly at any large employer. My employer is I suppose mid-size, and the shutdown all happens very quickly once that ticket is filed, even though it's a largely manual process. (Of course I also find it curious, and alarming, that no one could/would shut down the automated process in his case.)
• pavel_lishin 8y ago
  > 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. Aside from the sheer inhumanity of it all, if I were laid off and "re-hired" as a contractor, I'd tell them that I'd be glad to - once they re-negotiated my new contractor salary.
• z3t4 8y ago
  This is only the beginning! And the orders will be carried out by relentless humans just doing their job.
• M_Bakhtiari 8y ago
  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.
• rivo 8y ago
  There was a HN post three years ago on how to declare someone as dead [0]. Granted, this was not the decision of a machine but like in OP's story, it's a one-way road with no way to "undo" or at least "sudo kill -9" the process, which makes it a very unpleasant experience. I can't count the number of times I've hit "undo" on Gmail. Just because I hit "send" doesn't mean I won't have second thoughts. And in this case, it appears to have been the absence of an action which triggered the whole process, making it even more likely that a wrong decision will be made at some point. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10063659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10063659
• otakucode 8y ago
  This feels a lot like something the company should be liable for. They constructed systems which inflicted upon this person significant harm. That they did it for money should be a weight against them, not an excuse to cover it. I'm not that familiar with OSHA and their regulations but do they have something about psychological abuse?
• nazka 8y ago
  Imagine with the one of the biggest edge fund, Bridgewater, starting to use AI in place of management and you have this to the next next level. It's a little bit scary.
  • debt 8y ago
    “AI in place of management” This is already happening. It’s an emerging field cleverly called “management automation.”
• linsomniac 8y ago
  This reminds me of a co-workers 6 month battle to get his drivers license back. He got a letter from his insurance company saying his car insurance was cancelled. He called them up to find out why and they said it was because his license was suspended. After several calls to the police, he found there was a warrant out for him for ignoring a traffic ticket for being pulled over in Wyoming. Now, my co-worker is from Wyoming, so it wasn't totally implausible, but the specific location he had never been to and he definitely wasn't there when the ticket was issued. The county issued a request for a copy of the ticket, since it was out of state. Weeks later the copy came and the ticket clearly wasn't for him. It didn't have his drivers license number, had a different name and address. I can't remember if it had a similar license plate number or not. ISTR that the name was incorrect. So it seems like there was a data entry problem from the ticket into the system, and his name was selected as "good enough". You'd think once it was seen that the ticket wasn't written for him it'd be all solved... Nah. He had to get up to where the ticket was issued, 300 miles away, without a car, and go through the system to prove that the ticket was invalid. Then he had to spend months calling the DA there over and over to get him to get it all resolved. It was always "I'm waiting to hear back from this person" or "I'm trying to get ahold of this other person" or "we are waiting for this paperwork".
  • tomjen3 8y ago
    Sounds like he could have saved a bunch of time by getting a lawyer to write them a note - shouldn't be hard to prove damages.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• JoeDaDude 8y ago
  I am reminded of a short SF story in which a library computer was tagging an overdue book, "Kidnapped" by Robert Louis Stevenson. After alerting the authorities, also computers, and the latter discovering that Robert Louis Stevenson was deceased, it turned into a kidnapping case and capital murder crime. If anyone remembers the name of the story or author, please post or let me know.
• megamindbrian2 8y ago
  This is a really sad story. Thank you for sharing!
• crb002 8y ago
  I'd ask for the three weeks pay. That is bull.
• derpsmcderp 8y ago
  Sounds like this is just the result of a poorly designed process with no rollbacks and incompetent staff. This seems obvious to me that its not the warning of the eeevil AI as its being made out to be. Its more a warning of the stupidity of humans who make rules, but we've always known that.
• jijji 8y ago
  In 2001 i wrote a similar automation program for a large financial company. At that time i had no name for it, so we called it "pink slip 2000". Lol
• sammy241 8y ago
  trust me having few late payments and collections on your credit report, can be very frustrating. for many years this restricted me from securing a mortgage loan to balance the already available funds with me, sort some other bills and have enough funds with me when i was to buy my house. this gave me a whole lot of stress as i got frustrated and almost gave up . i have a fellowship friend who we bond . she narrated to me how she got repossessions off her credit report by a specialist / repair hacker by the email reach QUADHACKED @ GMAIL . C O M . she met online. i was very reluctant because i have had mine for years and she had barely had hers for 2 years on her report . i gave him a try and he worked excellently well, he applied and confirmed for the removal . this gave my credit score a boost and place it on a path of constant increase . right now i'm on a 762 all thanks to them. hit them at Q U A D H A C K E D @ G M A I L . C O M .
• mankypro 8y ago
  Seems like the site got /.'d