26 ms·

A prank cursor resulted in an employee being fired before they started (2020)

457 points by lazyjeff 4y ago

janwillemb 4y ago
When I was in university, students changed the pointer cursor in Netscape to the off-by-one version. That was around 1995.
lupire 4y ago
Cute story, nicely ambiguous title.
mig39 4y ago
“the individual responsible for this regrettable act is no longer with the company.” Technically correct. The best kind of correct. They hired him a couple of weeks later.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  > They hired him a couple of weeks later. Says that in the article.
- silisili 4y ago
  I got a laugh out of that. It makes me wonder how many 'no longer with the company' replies to mobs are similarly a technicality. Like, giving an employee unpaid leave until the mob dies down.
  - deanCommie 4y ago
    > Like, giving an employee unpaid leave until the mob dies down. All the time. But, usually, that's not a laughable or desirable outcome. This is how bad cops who commit civil liberty violations or use excessive force continue to work for decades, or are eventually sidelined but continue to receive a salary. While in this specific case we can excuse an intern who definitely didn't know better, and ultimately nobody was harmed, we shouldn't minimize or normalize administrative technicalities as a way to get away from outrage.
    - dolni 4y ago
      Our entire justice system exists "as a way to get away from outrage" and we're better off for it. Angry mobs don't produce good outcomes. That's true even when they're angry about bad cops.
      - Spivak 4y ago
        Angry mobs are a signal of our justice system either having a gap or otherwise not working. The whole point of having a justice system at all is to transform mob rule into a dialog so when mobs form it’s usually because justice isn’t being served. You don’t see people showing up at a murderer’s house with pitchforks or workers breaking down the doors of factory owners because we have laws that (roughly) enforce the outcomes the people want. Angry mobs produce fantastic outcomes at identifying when the justice system’s outcomes fall outside of the norms they’re supposed to be enforcing but they’re terrible at functioning as judge and jury in individual cases.
        b112 4y ago
        Angry mobs are a signal of our justice system either having a gap or otherwise not working. Lately, most angry mobs start on twitter/facebook, and often are based upon exaggerations or lies, and have the aide of twitter/facebook amplification effects, which purposefully try to fan anger to drive more engagement.
        fleddr 4y ago
        "Angry mobs are a signal of our justice system either having a gap or otherwise not working" Or...radicalized always-online bullies that simply takes joy in taking a political opponent down.
        andrewflnr 4y ago
        Angry mobs are a signal of humans being stupid pack animals. It's sheer luck if they coalesce around a good cause.
        4y ago
  - justin_oaks 4y ago
    That'd be a clever attempt at damage control, but in today's world the truth would probably would get leaked. Then the company would have to deal with the fallout from that. I'd rather have the people who run companies grow a spine and stand up to the mob. They should put out a message like "We will investigate this incident. We take the decision to fire people seriously and will make a decision that is best for this company." In essence, "We hear all you loud-mouths, but we get to decide whether to fire people, not you."
    - tablespoon 4y ago
      > That'd be a clever attempt at damage control, but in today's world the truth would probably would get leaked. Then the company would have to deal with the fallout from that. The mob is loud, but it has a short attention span. The truth probably would get leaked, but (depending on the issue) the mob would likely have moved on to the next thing by then. > I'd rather have the people who run companies grow a spine and stand up to the mob. They should put out a message like "We will investigate this incident. We take the decision to fire people seriously and will make a decision that is best for this company." That's probably an all around better response, too. Just "investigate" and give no updates until the controversy is old news.
    - no-reply 4y ago
      If the team in question is the police, "we investigated ourselves and found nothing wrong."
      - kodah 4y ago
        laszlojamf 4y ago
        I don't know, it's pretty on topic, isn't it? This is the problem other big companies, e.g. banks and oil companies etc who get caught with the hand in the cookie jar. There's clearly a line where the company _shouldn't_ get to perform its own investigation. Maybe not for flipping some customers the bird, but I'm not sure whether or not it's legal cuts it either as a line. There are a lot of things you can do which are not illegal but which might warrant a mob. Obviously, again, not for some intern prank. I feel the police is the perfect example for when you don't want the "team" to decide if they did something wrong.
  - blowski 4y ago
    Apparently, this used to be a thing in department stores. If someone complained, the manager would make a deal out of “firing” the scapegoat employee and the customer would be happy.
    - ericmcer 4y ago
      What kind of psycho feels satisfied when someone loses their job. Unless the offense was like… spitting in my food or something actually dangerous I would feel bad if my complaint about general negligence or attitude resulted in someone losing their job.
      - Aissen 4y ago
        In fact it can be used as a pressure strategy to customers that do have empathy. Those might complain a bit less loud when you let them know you might have to fire someone.
      - cogman10 4y ago
        I feel the same way. However, some people are more "eye for an eye" types and nothing makes them feel better than seeing someone punished that "wrongs" them. There are more than a few people that fetishize punitive actions for evil doers.
      - eyelidlessness 4y ago
        I totally agree (with your conclusion), and I even go out of my way to give higher praise than deserved to workers to help shield them from it. Unfortunately, it’s not (always) customers’ fault that this is how it works. Increasingly, it’s not even knowable by customers that they may contribute to someone’s firing (or even be the only input!). A single mediocre review could end a job, depending on how it’s weighted. A few bad reviews almost guarantees it. Even if the customer has no idea their review is applied to that particular worker—i.e. if they think they’re reviewing the business. Knowing all this has also just generally helped me to be more patient with people when I’m on the other side of the “counter”. But a lot of people (a) don’t know it and (b) don’t have any other recourse. A specific example so I don’t sound like I’m just abstracting the whole thing: if I order a meal on Grubhub, when I get asked for a review I get very specific questions about the delivery driver, vague questions about food quality from the vendor, and no prompt about Grubhub’s service itself. When I’ve had poor service (always from Grubhub or a direct consequence of their poor service), there isn’t even a way to give feedback that goes beyond the CS front line. Those poor souls are tasked with issuing refunds as rapidly as possible and moving on to the next chat. The best anyone can do to even register a complaint that might be heard is to call out a driver or restaurant, even if neither did anything wrong. Customers don’t know they’ll probably get someone fired by taking this tack, they just know it’s the only way to be heard. And that’s not because they’re cruel, it’s because they’re horribly alienated from the thousands of tiny paper cuts they understand as conveniences, and some days their only options.
  - wincy 4y ago
    My wife used to work for a mom and pop shop in New York. Had about 50 employees, and most of the work was talking to customers and contractors in the phone all over the US. One day a customer threw a fit about my wife. The manager assured the customer she would be fired, and that was that. Manager turns to my wife and says “your name is Rachel now”. So that’s how she’d answer the phone from then on.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
    I think viral PR backlash would scare people away from this in anything but the most benign situations. That, and I’m sure HR would take issue with it (both for legal implications, and meta reasons).
  - Thorrez 4y ago
    There was a police shooting where the officer that did the shooting was fired, then secretly rehired 2 years later, then retired 42 days later with a pension. The public only found out a year after that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Daniel_Shaver#Bankruptcy_and_pension https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Daniel_Shaver#Bank...
    - retSava 4y ago
      Ah man, I saw the bodycam footage from that incident. That scarred me, it's NSFL. I've previously seen many bodycams which to me changed the view on what american LEO (can) meet on a daily basis, and the zero-time switch from a completely docile event to a deadly encounter. This made me change how I look on us leo's often hardball and pseudo-militarian approach to such encounters, because there are so many weapons in everyday society and people willing to use them against leo's. This Shaver encounter is not one of those. There were multiple rifles pointed at him, who was alone, drunk and terrified. You could clearly hear it from his voice, and he was completely compliant to the best of his abilities. The officer in charge was going all-in Rambo on him and did nothing to calm the situation. All his commands was balls-to-the-walls aggressive and multiple threats to Shavers life. The commands was confusing, even to me all sober behind a screen, and to drunk Shaver they must've been greek. He was in panic. Imo the officer giving commands, and the officer shooting, should both be considered guilty of manslaughter. They should not be allowed with guns, much less leo's.
- winphone1974 4y ago
  That's a great manager IMO. as is the discussion around if this should be an off-by-one or bad pointer error
djrockstar1 4y ago
The bonus chatter bit made this worth the read.
- sdoering 4y ago
  I need to remember the "sorry for the 'off-by-one' error" when I flip the bird in the future. It could even become a hilarious t-shirt. Maybe I should look for relevant vector graphics and start designing.
  - heleninboodler 4y ago
    The joke is a reference to the index finger cursor. It doesn't really work unless you're using the middle finger in place of a index-finger-pointing-up gesture.
    - vishnugupta 4y ago
      > index-finger-pointing-up gesture This exact gesture is used by umpires in Cricket to signal a batsman out.
      - leegraham 4y ago
        In that example the umpire's palm is facing the batsman, so that joke still doesn't work
  - wiredfool 4y ago
    My kids used to tell me that it was the sign for a binary 4.
    - JohnL4 4y ago
      Waddya mean, your kids? I learned that as a teenager myself in the 1930s, after an article in Scientific American.
    - sundvor 4y ago
robszumski 4y ago
No screenshot!? C'mon.
- Arnavion 4y ago
  He'd have to recreate it in CSS, and I doubt he wants to.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- p1mrx 4y ago
  It probably looked similar to https://imgur.com/a/AwJbbY0 https://imgur.com/a/AwJbbY0
jdoliner 4y ago
This title is really misleading, they weren't fired at all, maybe they were almost fired. And it was before they started as a full time employee, but it was for something they did while working as an intern.
- aleksiy123 4y ago
  A non misleading title would ruin the punchline. I think its acceptable in this case.
  - sieabahlpark 4y ago
- zucker42 4y ago
  I think the joke is they were fired before they started, and then hired again.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- vba616 4y ago
  The title on HN reflects and is almost identical to the original title on Chen's post. The entire point of the story is to be misleading at first and produce some mild humor.
joemi 4y ago
I'm surprised they hired him after that. If it was a big enough deal that they had to make a statement saying he was no longer with the company, why would they hire him after that?
- ajmurmann 4y ago
  To some degree this was a system or process failure. The build should have never become a beta build that gets send to the public. Many years ago I worked on an Android game where on April 1st one of the other devs swapped the game's theme for Never Gonna Give You Up as a similar prank directed at the QA team. If we had shipped this more widely, it would have been a larger organizational failure, similar to this case.
  - heleninboodler 4y ago
    There's an infamous case from Adobe where an engineer added an unauthorized easter egg that caused a runtime problem and was fired for it. The firing spurred widespread shock among the employees, and management quickly rescinded his termination. He quit shortly afterward. The takeaways here are that a rash firing for this sort of thing isn't always the best course of action, and that being fired-then-unfired leaves a bad taste in an employee's mouth. Oh, and test your easter eggs.
- kevinmgranger 4y ago
  "Recently, I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000. No, I replied, I just spent $600,000 training him. Why would I want somebody to hire his experience?" It's more like the PR / social interaction version of this.
  - charcircuit 4y ago
    That's an example of the sunk cost fallacy. If a business makes a $600k investment sometimes it's better to just cut their losses instead of trying to continue with something they have already invested time and money into.
nsxwolf 4y ago
Does this build exist somewhere?
krylon 4y ago
Reminds me of a story from "I Sing The Body Electronic" by Fred Moody where a programmer leaves a playful entry titled "Slayer Sucks Live A Vacuum" in an almost-relase-version of Microsoft Encarta. Fortunately, the good people at Microsoft knew that Slayer definitely do not suck, but it was too late to remove the entry, so they had to kind of hide it.
- Rolpa 4y ago
  The fact that Tom Arraya bares a resemblance to RMS probably had something to do with it. :)
  - krylon 4y ago
    I never thought about it, but with his big bushy beard, the similarity is remarkable. :-)
jmkni 4y ago
Why do I feel like the author was the employee in question?
layer8 4y ago
Apparently the person went on to work on GTA V: https://gtaforums.com/topic/564391-the-pointer-finger-on-the-pc-is-a-middle-finger/ https://gtaforums.com/topic/564391-the-pointer-finger-on-the...
- thrwyoilarticle 4y ago
  Satirising something that was done 20 years ago is very on-brand for GTA.
altacc 4y ago
Beware of tests and their data. Long ago the consultancy I worked in took on a tobacco company as a client, which a lot of people didn't like. One of the copy writers testing the CMS used text from an anti-tobacco campaign that was very critical of the client. The content accidently got deployed. Not a happy client!
astrobe_ 4y ago
To me, that would certainly be less irritating than the artificially friendly, helpful, engaging tone of the current product.
- layer8 4y ago
  One particular point being the “we” style of communication (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/style/writing-style#addressing-the-user https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/style/w...). It only occurs to me now that Microsoft apparently intends “we” to include the user, while in reality it comes across as “we the people behind this software”.
  - MichaelDickens 4y ago
    Maybe I'm misreading it but it sounds like your intuitive interpretation is correct? > Always address the user as "you." > > Use "we" to refer to your own perspective. It's welcoming and helps the user feel like part of the experience. Sounds to me like "you" = user, "we" = the app.
    - layer8 4y ago
      How is that “welcoming and helps the user feel like part of the experience”? It introduces a “you vs. us” dichotomy, with a touch of “we are are a group and you’re just one person”, and more often than not also “we know better what’s good for you”. Since the app is obviously not a “we”, it also suggests that it’s people doing stuff to your device and your data (“we’re setting up some things for you”), which feels intrusive. The user doesn’t want “them” to meddle with his/her stuff, they want a neutral tool that just works and does what it’s told to do.
      - astrobe_ 4y ago
        My feelings exactly. Plus, in some languages "We" can be used in place of "I" by royals (and other people with a high opinion of themselves) - as in the famous "We are not amused" |1]. That's true in my native language too. Well, perhaps we are not the target audience; I suppose MS and others made UX studies before adopting that style. "We, the computer nerds" have maybe a better idea of what's going on under the hood, so those "user illusion" [2] tricks don't work on us. [1] https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/we-are-not-amused.html https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/we-are-not-amused.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_illusion [3] [3] https://asktog.com/papers/magic.html https://asktog.com/papers/magic.html
alexklarjr 4y ago
Now he is a VC of windows update and telemetry departments.
duxup 4y ago
I was “fired” from a company once. Somewhere along the way between two companies who were bad at everything we were given access to our customers intranet to use some tools. An internal website that announced new policies once announced that a product now had a 2 year warranty, not 3. Including products already sold. Tech support (me) agents were allowed to ask questions via a comment section. So I asked “Is that legal?” The CEO (a childish man child) saw this and was horrified to find out someone dared ask… and that person was from some outside contractor. One thing lead to another and I was told I was fired for hacking their intranet (CEO didn’t now we had lawful access), but I should still come in the next day anyway. Supposedly the CEOs of both companies were told I was fired (so I was told to keep a low profile ). The next day my login was changed to a new name ;). I was a nobody support drone so it wasn’t like anyone would notice. And yes it was illegal, lawsuits and much expense was wasted on a dumb policy. CEO of our company did jail for unrelated actions. Man child CEO, I don’t know what happened to him, but he was creepy and supposedly had ties to Epstein.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
AtNightWeCode 4y ago
Fun. "It looks you're writing a letter" is more offensive than this though.
syspec 4y ago
The prank cursor, switched the index finger pointer to use the middle finger: Which makes the end of the post hilarious: > Bonus chatter: A bug was filed in the RAID database to track the problem and its resolution. In the bug, there was some discussion as to how the issue should be classified. Was it an “off-by-one” error? Or maybe it was a “bad pointer”.
- sundvor 4y ago
  Yep, great article - I'm loving this series. :) Also a lot of people commenting negatively on the whole thing may not even have been born then; Windows 3.1 was released in 1992. Those were still quite early days in the history of computing.
Semiapies 4y ago
I can't say that I believe this happened, but it's a fun story.
ralphc 4y ago
At my job in the '80s and '90s we were on a program that got us the source code for Windows. In the Windows 3.0 C code there was a label, and corresponding goto statement, "goto wearefucked;". When we got in the 3.1 code I immediately went to the same spot in the code, but they had changed it. Cowards.
indigodaddy 4y ago
He never got fired though?
croes 4y ago
Nothing in the article says he was fired. "He then ended his internship and took a two-week break before returning as a full-time employee."
leokennis 4y ago
On a sidenote, it's pretty amazing that a blog like this is allowed to live on the microsoft.com domain - anyone with experience in mega-enterprises will know how hard it is to do anything remotely reputationally risky and out of the ordinary.

457 points by lazyjeff 4y ago

When I was in university, students changed the pointer cursor in Netscape to the off-by-one version. That was around 1995.

lupire 4y ago

Cute story, nicely ambiguous title.

mig39 4y ago

“the individual responsible for this regrettable act is no longer with the company.” Technically correct. The best kind of correct. They hired him a couple of weeks later.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
chrisseaton 4y ago
> They hired him a couple of weeks later. Says that in the article.
silisili 4y ago
I got a laugh out of that. It makes me wonder how many 'no longer with the company' replies to mobs are similarly a technicality. Like, giving an employee unpaid leave until the mob dies down.
- deanCommie 4y ago
  > Like, giving an employee unpaid leave until the mob dies down. All the time. But, usually, that's not a laughable or desirable outcome. This is how bad cops who commit civil liberty violations or use excessive force continue to work for decades, or are eventually sidelined but continue to receive a salary. While in this specific case we can excuse an intern who definitely didn't know better, and ultimately nobody was harmed, we shouldn't minimize or normalize administrative technicalities as a way to get away from outrage.
  - dolni 4y ago
    Our entire justice system exists "as a way to get away from outrage" and we're better off for it. Angry mobs don't produce good outcomes. That's true even when they're angry about bad cops.
    - Spivak 4y ago
      Angry mobs are a signal of our justice system either having a gap or otherwise not working. The whole point of having a justice system at all is to transform mob rule into a dialog so when mobs form it’s usually because justice isn’t being served. You don’t see people showing up at a murderer’s house with pitchforks or workers breaking down the doors of factory owners because we have laws that (roughly) enforce the outcomes the people want. Angry mobs produce fantastic outcomes at identifying when the justice system’s outcomes fall outside of the norms they’re supposed to be enforcing but they’re terrible at functioning as judge and jury in individual cases.
      - b112 4y ago
        Angry mobs are a signal of our justice system either having a gap or otherwise not working. Lately, most angry mobs start on twitter/facebook, and often are based upon exaggerations or lies, and have the aide of twitter/facebook amplification effects, which purposefully try to fan anger to drive more engagement.
      - fleddr 4y ago
        "Angry mobs are a signal of our justice system either having a gap or otherwise not working" Or...radicalized always-online bullies that simply takes joy in taking a political opponent down.
      - andrewflnr 4y ago
        Angry mobs are a signal of humans being stupid pack animals. It's sheer luck if they coalesce around a good cause.
        4y ago
- justin_oaks 4y ago
  That'd be a clever attempt at damage control, but in today's world the truth would probably would get leaked. Then the company would have to deal with the fallout from that. I'd rather have the people who run companies grow a spine and stand up to the mob. They should put out a message like "We will investigate this incident. We take the decision to fire people seriously and will make a decision that is best for this company." In essence, "We hear all you loud-mouths, but we get to decide whether to fire people, not you."
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    > That'd be a clever attempt at damage control, but in today's world the truth would probably would get leaked. Then the company would have to deal with the fallout from that. The mob is loud, but it has a short attention span. The truth probably would get leaked, but (depending on the issue) the mob would likely have moved on to the next thing by then. > I'd rather have the people who run companies grow a spine and stand up to the mob. They should put out a message like "We will investigate this incident. We take the decision to fire people seriously and will make a decision that is best for this company." That's probably an all around better response, too. Just "investigate" and give no updates until the controversy is old news.
  - no-reply 4y ago
    If the team in question is the police, "we investigated ourselves and found nothing wrong."
    - kodah 4y ago
      - laszlojamf 4y ago
        I don't know, it's pretty on topic, isn't it? This is the problem other big companies, e.g. banks and oil companies etc who get caught with the hand in the cookie jar. There's clearly a line where the company _shouldn't_ get to perform its own investigation. Maybe not for flipping some customers the bird, but I'm not sure whether or not it's legal cuts it either as a line. There are a lot of things you can do which are not illegal but which might warrant a mob. Obviously, again, not for some intern prank. I feel the police is the perfect example for when you don't want the "team" to decide if they did something wrong.
- blowski 4y ago
  Apparently, this used to be a thing in department stores. If someone complained, the manager would make a deal out of “firing” the scapegoat employee and the customer would be happy.
  - ericmcer 4y ago
    What kind of psycho feels satisfied when someone loses their job. Unless the offense was like… spitting in my food or something actually dangerous I would feel bad if my complaint about general negligence or attitude resulted in someone losing their job.
    - Aissen 4y ago
      In fact it can be used as a pressure strategy to customers that do have empathy. Those might complain a bit less loud when you let them know you might have to fire someone.
    - cogman10 4y ago
      I feel the same way. However, some people are more "eye for an eye" types and nothing makes them feel better than seeing someone punished that "wrongs" them. There are more than a few people that fetishize punitive actions for evil doers.
    - eyelidlessness 4y ago
      I totally agree (with your conclusion), and I even go out of my way to give higher praise than deserved to workers to help shield them from it. Unfortunately, it’s not (always) customers’ fault that this is how it works. Increasingly, it’s not even knowable by customers that they may contribute to someone’s firing (or even be the only input!). A single mediocre review could end a job, depending on how it’s weighted. A few bad reviews almost guarantees it. Even if the customer has no idea their review is applied to that particular worker—i.e. if they think they’re reviewing the business. Knowing all this has also just generally helped me to be more patient with people when I’m on the other side of the “counter”. But a lot of people (a) don’t know it and (b) don’t have any other recourse. A specific example so I don’t sound like I’m just abstracting the whole thing: if I order a meal on Grubhub, when I get asked for a review I get very specific questions about the delivery driver, vague questions about food quality from the vendor, and no prompt about Grubhub’s service itself. When I’ve had poor service (always from Grubhub or a direct consequence of their poor service), there isn’t even a way to give feedback that goes beyond the CS front line. Those poor souls are tasked with issuing refunds as rapidly as possible and moving on to the next chat. The best anyone can do to even register a complaint that might be heard is to call out a driver or restaurant, even if neither did anything wrong. Customers don’t know they’ll probably get someone fired by taking this tack, they just know it’s the only way to be heard. And that’s not because they’re cruel, it’s because they’re horribly alienated from the thousands of tiny paper cuts they understand as conveniences, and some days their only options.
- wincy 4y ago
  My wife used to work for a mom and pop shop in New York. Had about 50 employees, and most of the work was talking to customers and contractors in the phone all over the US. One day a customer threw a fit about my wife. The manager assured the customer she would be fired, and that was that. Manager turns to my wife and says “your name is Rachel now”. So that’s how she’d answer the phone from then on.
- hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
  I think viral PR backlash would scare people away from this in anything but the most benign situations. That, and I’m sure HR would take issue with it (both for legal implications, and meta reasons).
- Thorrez 4y ago
  There was a police shooting where the officer that did the shooting was fired, then secretly rehired 2 years later, then retired 42 days later with a pension. The public only found out a year after that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Daniel_Shaver#Bankruptcy_and_pension https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Daniel_Shaver#Bank...
  - retSava 4y ago
    Ah man, I saw the bodycam footage from that incident. That scarred me, it's NSFL. I've previously seen many bodycams which to me changed the view on what american LEO (can) meet on a daily basis, and the zero-time switch from a completely docile event to a deadly encounter. This made me change how I look on us leo's often hardball and pseudo-militarian approach to such encounters, because there are so many weapons in everyday society and people willing to use them against leo's. This Shaver encounter is not one of those. There were multiple rifles pointed at him, who was alone, drunk and terrified. You could clearly hear it from his voice, and he was completely compliant to the best of his abilities. The officer in charge was going all-in Rambo on him and did nothing to calm the situation. All his commands was balls-to-the-walls aggressive and multiple threats to Shavers life. The commands was confusing, even to me all sober behind a screen, and to drunk Shaver they must've been greek. He was in panic. Imo the officer giving commands, and the officer shooting, should both be considered guilty of manslaughter. They should not be allowed with guns, much less leo's.
winphone1974 4y ago
That's a great manager IMO. as is the discussion around if this should be an off-by-one or bad pointer error

djrockstar1 4y ago

The bonus chatter bit made this worth the read.

sdoering 4y ago
I need to remember the "sorry for the 'off-by-one' error" when I flip the bird in the future. It could even become a hilarious t-shirt. Maybe I should look for relevant vector graphics and start designing.
- heleninboodler 4y ago
  The joke is a reference to the index finger cursor. It doesn't really work unless you're using the middle finger in place of a index-finger-pointing-up gesture.
  - vishnugupta 4y ago
    > index-finger-pointing-up gesture This exact gesture is used by umpires in Cricket to signal a batsman out.
    - leegraham 4y ago
      In that example the umpire's palm is facing the batsman, so that joke still doesn't work
- wiredfool 4y ago
  My kids used to tell me that it was the sign for a binary 4.
  - JohnL4 4y ago
    Waddya mean, your kids? I learned that as a teenager myself in the 1930s, after an article in Scientific American.
  - sundvor 4y ago

robszumski 4y ago

No screenshot!? C'mon.

Arnavion 4y ago
He'd have to recreate it in CSS, and I doubt he wants to.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
p1mrx 4y ago
It probably looked similar to https://imgur.com/a/AwJbbY0 https://imgur.com/a/AwJbbY0

jdoliner 4y ago

This title is really misleading, they weren't fired at all, maybe they were almost fired. And it was before they started as a full time employee, but it was for something they did while working as an intern.

aleksiy123 4y ago
A non misleading title would ruin the punchline. I think its acceptable in this case.
- sieabahlpark 4y ago
zucker42 4y ago
I think the joke is they were fired before they started, and then hired again.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
vba616 4y ago
The title on HN reflects and is almost identical to the original title on Chen's post. The entire point of the story is to be misleading at first and produce some mild humor.

joemi 4y ago

I'm surprised they hired him after that. If it was a big enough deal that they had to make a statement saying he was no longer with the company, why would they hire him after that?

ajmurmann 4y ago
To some degree this was a system or process failure. The build should have never become a beta build that gets send to the public. Many years ago I worked on an Android game where on April 1st one of the other devs swapped the game's theme for Never Gonna Give You Up as a similar prank directed at the QA team. If we had shipped this more widely, it would have been a larger organizational failure, similar to this case.
- heleninboodler 4y ago
  There's an infamous case from Adobe where an engineer added an unauthorized easter egg that caused a runtime problem and was fired for it. The firing spurred widespread shock among the employees, and management quickly rescinded his termination. He quit shortly afterward. The takeaways here are that a rash firing for this sort of thing isn't always the best course of action, and that being fired-then-unfired leaves a bad taste in an employee's mouth. Oh, and test your easter eggs.
kevinmgranger 4y ago
"Recently, I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000. No, I replied, I just spent $600,000 training him. Why would I want somebody to hire his experience?" It's more like the PR / social interaction version of this.
- charcircuit 4y ago
  That's an example of the sunk cost fallacy. If a business makes a $600k investment sometimes it's better to just cut their losses instead of trying to continue with something they have already invested time and money into.

nsxwolf 4y ago

Does this build exist somewhere?

krylon 4y ago

Reminds me of a story from "I Sing The Body Electronic" by Fred Moody where a programmer leaves a playful entry titled "Slayer Sucks Live A Vacuum" in an almost-relase-version of Microsoft Encarta. Fortunately, the good people at Microsoft knew that Slayer definitely do not suck, but it was too late to remove the entry, so they had to kind of hide it.

Rolpa 4y ago
The fact that Tom Arraya bares a resemblance to RMS probably had something to do with it. :)
- krylon 4y ago
  I never thought about it, but with his big bushy beard, the similarity is remarkable. :-)

jmkni 4y ago

Why do I feel like the author was the employee in question?

layer8 4y ago

Apparently the person went on to work on GTA V: https://gtaforums.com/topic/564391-the-pointer-finger-on-the-pc-is-a-middle-finger/ https://gtaforums.com/topic/564391-the-pointer-finger-on-the...

thrwyoilarticle 4y ago
Satirising something that was done 20 years ago is very on-brand for GTA.

altacc 4y ago

Beware of tests and their data. Long ago the consultancy I worked in took on a tobacco company as a client, which a lot of people didn't like. One of the copy writers testing the CMS used text from an anti-tobacco campaign that was very critical of the client. The content accidently got deployed. Not a happy client!

astrobe_ 4y ago

To me, that would certainly be less irritating than the artificially friendly, helpful, engaging tone of the current product.

layer8 4y ago
One particular point being the “we” style of communication (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/style/writing-style#addressing-the-user https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/style/w...). It only occurs to me now that Microsoft apparently intends “we” to include the user, while in reality it comes across as “we the people behind this software”.
- MichaelDickens 4y ago
  Maybe I'm misreading it but it sounds like your intuitive interpretation is correct? > Always address the user as "you." > > Use "we" to refer to your own perspective. It's welcoming and helps the user feel like part of the experience. Sounds to me like "you" = user, "we" = the app.
  - layer8 4y ago
    How is that “welcoming and helps the user feel like part of the experience”? It introduces a “you vs. us” dichotomy, with a touch of “we are are a group and you’re just one person”, and more often than not also “we know better what’s good for you”. Since the app is obviously not a “we”, it also suggests that it’s people doing stuff to your device and your data (“we’re setting up some things for you”), which feels intrusive. The user doesn’t want “them” to meddle with his/her stuff, they want a neutral tool that just works and does what it’s told to do.
    - astrobe_ 4y ago
      My feelings exactly. Plus, in some languages "We" can be used in place of "I" by royals (and other people with a high opinion of themselves) - as in the famous "We are not amused" |1]. That's true in my native language too. Well, perhaps we are not the target audience; I suppose MS and others made UX studies before adopting that style. "We, the computer nerds" have maybe a better idea of what's going on under the hood, so those "user illusion" [2] tricks don't work on us. [1] https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/we-are-not-amused.html https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/we-are-not-amused.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_illusion [3] [3] https://asktog.com/papers/magic.html https://asktog.com/papers/magic.html

alexklarjr 4y ago

Now he is a VC of windows update and telemetry departments.

duxup 4y ago

I was “fired” from a company once. Somewhere along the way between two companies who were bad at everything we were given access to our customers intranet to use some tools. An internal website that announced new policies once announced that a product now had a 2 year warranty, not 3. Including products already sold. Tech support (me) agents were allowed to ask questions via a comment section. So I asked “Is that legal?” The CEO (a childish man child) saw this and was horrified to find out someone dared ask… and that person was from some outside contractor. One thing lead to another and I was told I was fired for hacking their intranet (CEO didn’t now we had lawful access), but I should still come in the next day anyway. Supposedly the CEOs of both companies were told I was fired (so I was told to keep a low profile ). The next day my login was changed to a new name ;). I was a nobody support drone so it wasn’t like anyone would notice. And yes it was illegal, lawsuits and much expense was wasted on a dumb policy. CEO of our company did jail for unrelated actions. Man child CEO, I don’t know what happened to him, but he was creepy and supposedly had ties to Epstein.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

AtNightWeCode 4y ago

Fun. "It looks you're writing a letter" is more offensive than this though.

syspec 4y ago

The prank cursor, switched the index finger pointer to use the middle finger: Which makes the end of the post hilarious: > Bonus chatter: A bug was filed in the RAID database to track the problem and its resolution. In the bug, there was some discussion as to how the issue should be classified. Was it an “off-by-one” error? Or maybe it was a “bad pointer”.

sundvor 4y ago
Yep, great article - I'm loving this series. :) Also a lot of people commenting negatively on the whole thing may not even have been born then; Windows 3.1 was released in 1992. Those were still quite early days in the history of computing.

Semiapies 4y ago

I can't say that I believe this happened, but it's a fun story.

ralphc 4y ago

At my job in the '80s and '90s we were on a program that got us the source code for Windows. In the Windows 3.0 C code there was a label, and corresponding goto statement, "goto wearefucked;". When we got in the 3.1 code I immediately went to the same spot in the code, but they had changed it. Cowards.

indigodaddy 4y ago

He never got fired though?

croes 4y ago

Nothing in the article says he was fired. "He then ended his internship and took a two-week break before returning as a full-time employee."

leokennis 4y ago

On a sidenote, it's pretty amazing that a blog like this is allowed to live on the microsoft.com domain - anyone with experience in mega-enterprises will know how hard it is to do anything remotely reputationally risky and out of the ordinary.