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.
> automating even the simplest procedures can be very tricky
automating business processes is actually a similar activity to doing programming!
When it's done competently, the business runs smoother. But if there are bugs (and as anyone who programs knows, there are always bugs), things go wrong. And yet, people who know not anything about complex systems design attempt to write up business requirements for such automation are numourus.
Or, stop letting the people with business degrees effectively write software via SAP. They're not trained for it, and they don't know how to think through edge cases or reduce fragile entanglements across areas of concern.
Idea: Require every action taken by an SAP or similar system be tagged with the name and telephone number of the MBA who created the action in SAP.
> perhaps it's best to have people on-site manually approve any destructive steps.
Or, almost certainly cheaper, manually deal with the 1 in 10,000 case like yours.
In this case, a simple notes field in the request system would perhaps have sufficed. Perhaps there is/was, and it wasn't filled out because it wasn't recognized as being some manner of exceptional request. Perhaps if there was manual approval, removal of your stuff would still have been approved.
It's literally impossible to catch all of these, because human error will creep in. Sounds to me like your case was dealt with adequately. (Perhaps not from your personal perspective!!)
If my research notebooks actually ended up in the trash, the loss of productivity would have certainly not been cheaper compared to implementing a simple checkmark requiring the approval of the manager of the person whose desk was cleaned out.
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,
I am normally big on Solidarity with fellow Workers but the humans in this loop really should be automated away, because they knew what they were doing was a mistake and did it anyway, so what value were they adding? In fact they were worse than automation because at least that can be debugged, but there is no fix for the bureaucratic mindset.
Especially since you could tell them to stop and they would say "yes" and then carry on anyway...
Another story from the same company, group A would enter their requirements into system 1, group B would pick up work tickets from system 2. Group A thought that group B were idiots who could never do anything right, and group B thought that group A were idiots who could never make up their minds what they wanted.
But the real problem was group C who maintained systems 1 and 2 and "integrated" them with people in India manually rekeying from one to the other with frequent typos. They thought they were saving money but never considered the cost of delays and re-work in groups A and B...
>you could tell them to stop and they would say "yes" and then carry on anyway... //
This was discussed/commented on at length a couple of weeks ago. In Indian culture, apparently, the "yes" is like a verbal tick - kinda - and just acknowledges you've spoken without giving any commitment to doing anything (nor indeed indicating any level of understanding).
Not exactly. If you ask "do you understand ?" and "will you do it?" they will tell you yes as well. It's not a verbal tick. It's just not socially acceptable to say no.
Tons of people have this exchange out of politeness. The person asking “How are you?” doesn’t really want to know details. The person answering is expected to be brief and positive. It’s only among friends that the same question is expected to get an honest and detailed answer.
As a Finn I typically answer what I really feel at that moment. It creates funny situations, but in general I think if you ask me a question I should give a truthful answer. Why would you ask if you don't want to know...
I tried this and it worked poorly; people tended to get annoyed at me for answering the stupid question that they asked. Now I just go with "not too bad" in various tones of voice.
I escalated it to building security, where I had some mates, and they reviewed what CCTV evidence there was but couldn't find anything.
I don't even really blame the cleaners; people left expensive electronics, phones, wallets, whatever on their desks all the time, never any issues at all, I don't think any of them would have taken anything that wasn't from the pile, it was probably at least tacitly sanctioned by their management (who probably helped themselves first too).
Yeah, I think that's the difference. They won't touch anything that's clearly for someone else. But in their mind, the previous tenant had abandoned that stuff. It was free real estate. They didn't think it was stealing because they didn't think it belonged to anyone.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I agree. It's a theme I run across in many US-worker situations we read about on HN. There is such a lack of basic rights, but also basic norms when relating to workers.
Ethical behaviour, from my perspective, would be to compensate the employee, regardsless of his legal rights. In a more worker-central system, the worker should have easy recourse to an official judgement for his money.
In the Netherlands there is even a concept of culpability in laws regarding firing. Mess up too much, and the employer will have to pay a premium on the disengagement fee. And while our economy is moving towards a lot more 'sole employee contractors' with less worker-rights, you still have rights and a way to affordably enforce them. For them (only) basic contract law holds. That would probably mean paying the full 3 years in this context. A contract _is_ a contract.
None of what you says really applies in this case. According to the article the thing that triggered this was the failure to renew his contract.
If it had renewal intervals, that means he wasn't legally entitled to 3 years.
This is likely why he wasn't paid for the interim either. The best the company could do would likely be to bump up the future rate or offer a "signing bonus".
Being a contractor is not at all like being an employee despite how similar the responsibilities are. You have to watch contract details like renewals like a hawk. This guy and his recruiter should have included compensation for failing to notify when not renewing.
Not sure how this works in other jurisdictions in the EU but in Germany a work contract can be silently renewed if both parties act as if it had been renewed even if the contract itself says it has to be renewed explicitly and in writing.
If you keep showing up to work and your superiors keep managing you (and especially if you keep getting paid) the contract remains valid beyond its stated expiry date.
It does though, failure to renew a contract should be announced in writing a month in advance to allow the employee to search for a new job and take holidays that may be left. If the announcement is late, the employee is entitled to an extra months' pay.
I doubt that's correct legal analysis. This worker is not an employee of the company, and so cannot assert rights afforded employees. There might exist special termination provisions in the contract, but that's speculation.
While I agree with the letter of your legal analysis, it should not be "the best the company could do" to make the worker whole. It ought to be expected that both parties behave ethically.
The worker should not abandon the company during their time of need because of an unfortunate legal SNAFU. The company, in turn, should take it upon themselves to ensure that the worker doesn't suffer economically for having done the right thing by them.
Why wouldn't a contractor leave the company when the company has done everything in its power to show the contractor the door? Aside from doing the job properly, the contractor has zero obligation to the company whose property he's working on.
In the 2-3 days after the glitch, when "there was an emergency on the multimillion dollar tool I was working on", I think it was good of the worker to not get hung up on the contract status and trust that it could be worked out by people in good faith.
Workers and management on a team ought to be able to trust each other to that degree, even if we understand that the interests of all parties are not fully aligned. That trust goes both ways.
Take that too far, tolerating abuse of trust, and you betray your obligation to yourself. But in small amounts, it's admirable.
Do you seriously think I'm suggesting that they stay indefinitely without pay?
Or, if you are saying that they shouldn't stay even for a day, even in the face of an emergency, then I disagree. Even if they don't have a legal obligation to do so, I respect those who would, like this worker. And I would prefer to work along such people as colleagues, trusting that if they could help it, they wouldn't leave their team in the lurch.
I don't like the idea that complete lack of trust and hairtrigger hostility should be the default mode of workforce participation.
There's no moral obligation to work without pay, even for one day, even if you've gotten "promises" that you'll be made whole. An ethical company would send him home if they didn't know they could pay him or not, whatever the reason. If they need him to work THAT DAY because of some corporate "emergency", they should pay him cash on the barrelhead or make a similar arrangement, until they can get his regular paychecks going again.
As advice to a worker in this situation, it certainly makes sense to gut it out and take the risk of doing work without pay. It's, for most people, probably a much smaller risk than risking getting "really" fired without first having another job lined up.
What if the worker stayed, expecting that the company would make things right, but when it was discovered that companies simply don't DO that and haven't since the 1980s, files a lawsuit or otherwise takes aggressive action to force the company to treat them fairly?
For what it's worth, I attribute the worst amoral behavior to corporate personhood rather than capitalism. Thus my preferred remedy is to eliminate corporate personhood, rather than capitalism.
The part of being ethical in business outside the legalise still holds?
I would agree with your point of professional contracting: contract for the worst and write out scenarios in contracts.
In this case though the employer acted in a way that signalled renewal and the contractor delivered in good faith. Back to contract law and ethics: are services delivered possibly without contract but in good faith without value and compensation?
Failure to pay employees is "wage theft" in the USA.
The Netherlands sounds a bit employer friendly in the UK mess up at all in firing some one you automatically lose even if the employee is as guilty as sin and was caught bang to rights
He elaborates a bit in the comments - it seems he's entitled to the money, but couldn't be bothered: "So I had to do an appeal, and go through a long process that I did not care much to go through. I had a mind in quitting after all."
Sounds very strange that he wouldn't care to do a bit of paperwork, which he from the sounds of it could probably well justify to do on company time, with the manager and director being supportive. Or get the agency to do it for him, and bill them for the trouble. Or whatever. Something smells a bit fishy about that part of the story.
The bit about the manager and director is in the main article. There's nothing about pay, but they're presented as entirely sympathetic and angry about the system on his behalf.
As for "fishy", I find it very strange that someone writes an article emphasising twice that they're out three weeks of pay, but then couldn't be bothered to do anything about it. There's breach of contract, this isn't a long and arduous appeals process, it's open and shut, and if it isn't you have a lawyer deal with it, and recoup expenses, too. And if the guy just doesn't care about it, then why does he mention it twice?
And for the purposes of this, and the other sub-thread that is incredulous about this, this is not an American thing: If you're a contractor in Europe, and you don't get paid, and you then don't do anything about that, then you don't get paid. There's no process that automatically fixes things when the aggrieved party doesn't ask for them to be fixed (and yes, even in Europe, there's a bit of annoying process and paperwork to deal with).
The article is written, I think, to criticize the reliance on machines—not this individual company. I don't think he wrote it out of a grudge.
Even if he's legally entitled to the money, bringing a lawyer into the mix is likely to sour his relationship with his client (he's a contractor), and—rightly or wrongly—could give him a bad reputation in the local community, making it harder to find work in the future.
I'll also note that small, claims court might be able to handle a case over just a few weeks pay. He wouldn't need a lawyer for that. The risk and costs of losing are more manageable. He could send some emails about the pay he lost asking nicely citing the work he did while there. Then firmly. Then, once at a better employer, he can take the case to small, claims court.
I'd actually rather people sue over this to establish some kind of case law where companies' legal teams tell their management to make a default policy of giving the missed pay on demand. There might already be case law on it.
I suspect this is the difference. If this company is incapable of not firing someone, I imagine their appeals process could be equally miserable. Sure, maybe the manager and director want to repay him, but actually releasing funds to pay someone who "wasn't employed" is going involve a lengthy battle with some HR/Accounting computer system that just wants its invariants not to vary. Depending on somebody's financial position, I can see them deciding to just walk away on even a large chunk of money to avoid the mess.
The good thing about places like that is (a) they don't actually care about the money, it's a rounding error. For some smaller firms paying someone for three weeks of not working (regardless of fault) could actually be a problem. (b) They also have a legal department who's invariant is "don't get sued for breach of contract because of a stupid mistake that a small cheque can make go away".
But, of course, the author is perfectly within his rights to just not pursue this, and I have no idea what processes he'd been told to expect for this -- it's just strange that he would emphasise something he doesn't care about in the post.
> a legal department who's invariant is "don't get sued for breach of contract
This is a good point. I was thinking that no matter how trivial the money, actually dragging a check out of the accounting system would be a serious hurdle. But the solution I missed would be to sic legal on it - their machine tends to beat out everyone else's.
“Made available? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the appeals department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the forms, didn’t you?”
“Yes, yes I did. They were made available in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.'”
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.
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?
Real story from one of the (big) french telecom companies I worked for, as a contractor (a few years ago)...
In that company, a regular employee was given a full desk, contractors were only given 2/3 of a desk (meaning 2 desks put side by side for 3 persons).
Also, contractors were NOT allowed to go to ANY conference. Even when it was about technical stuff that was directly for their project. We had to rely 100% on a transmission of information by our managers/team leads. This led to humorous results, to say the least.
Things like: a BIG meeting with plenty of people and managers, who then decided a HUGE technical change on the network, without the ONLY expert because he happened to be a contractor. Once given the results of the meeting, the guy was in a "WTF?" shock. He told me that be immediately binned the request: it basically asked him to disable the authentication server! Not the best decision for a BIG ISP, LOL. Seriously, that's almost beyond belief. (But I have other incredible stories similar to this one).
As a contractor, I have really been mistreated A LOT. So much so that I've sworn never to do it again.
I'm a contractor in France, the treatment depends on where one is working. Canal+ and PSA were bad, but the current situation is good, there's no difference between myself and the employees.
Sounds like departments were using contractors as full members of staff. Contractors should be brought in for a specific purpose, as a consultant to staff, as an extra pair of hands to follow the whims of staff.
If contractors are the only expert in a domain, there are big problems. Of course in corporations this is quite frequent - middle managers have yearly budgets for contractors, but aren't allowed to use that money to increase their headcount.
A company I work for decided to get a contractor in to run a £40m project. This makes sense for a management perspective, they get to blame the contractor (who's already left) if it fails, and they get to claim the glory if it works. It's terrible for a company though.
If I want 500 cables run in a data centre, or even 5 cables if it's a long way, I'll get a contractor in. Saves me a day by not having to do that work neatly and lets me do more important things (like ranting on HN). If I want someone to build me a fancy gui, I'll specify the frameworks, and let them mess around with the look and feel, but ultimately I own the output of the work, I need to be able to deal with it as if I wrote it myself.
I don't really know if there's wage theft going on. I suppose the client company got some free work out of him, but the company can argue he shouldn't have been in the building. His badge didn't work, etc. But maybe the will let him bill those hours retroactively.
If he's working for a contracting company, why would he lose wages? Wouldn't he still have a contract with that company? I work for a contracting company (in the EU), and if the client lets me go, I still get paid until a new project can be found.
Their account got cancelled because the contract did not get renewed. Sounds like the company fulfilled the terms of the original contract, just (accidentally) didn't renew it. Many long term contracts require periodic renewals and/or options.
>Some of that work included renewing my contract in the new system... When my contract expired, the machine took over and fired me.
As I interpreted the piece, it was a three year contract which was stored in an old system, and not transferred when that system was replaced. So the firing was triggered by the system no longer seeing any valid contract.
If that's true, it would be breach of contract. But if it was a rolling contract expected to end after three years, then yes, it would be a weird situation but not a breach.
As I read the piece, it was a three year contract which was included in the old HR system, but not ported to the new one. If that's true, it was certainly breach of contract - "we forgot to upload the paperwork" doesn't get you out of honoring it.
With contract staff, the duration is usually a not to exceed. Also, it’s typically a contract to deliver a person with specific skill, not a specific person.
There are exceptions, but they are pretty rare in tech.
It's not weird - the vast majority of long term contracts I've seen (for services my company provides) are several years long but requires the other party to renew the contract at periodic intervals.
So the contract was negotiated at a specific price point for (say) three years but every X months the other party can opt out by not renewing. They only commit for a certain term.
Perhaps he should've written it as an "adding" instead of "renewing" since it's an existing contract with the merged company that needed to be properly added to the take over company.
How do you think you will enforce that contract? Hire a lawyer? You might as well go to the ATM grab as much cash as you possible. Then put it all in a garbage can and light a match. It will be far less costly and more productive then attempting pursue that contract.
Sue in small claims court for week 1. Win. Obtain judgment.
File lien against company assets. Sue in small claims court for week 2. Win. Obtain judgment. File lien against company assets. Repeat as necessary. Offer settlement in return for not suing anymore.
Is this just wishful thinking that, if something went wrong with your paycheck, the world would be just and there would be an easy legal remedy waiting for you?
From what I understand, you can only sue for $1000 or less in small claims court. An IT contractor who is making $1000 or less per week has bigger problems.
I have good news for you: the small claims limit varies by state and, according to data from this website[1], the average upper limit is $8K (median is $6K, with the lowest being $2.5K).
Or has been done in the UK send bailiffs to the company head office :-)
Of course you'd shop around for the Bailiff company with the worse reputation and get them to send the lads who moonlight at that dodgy night club as Bouncers.
In reality it would be: spend court fees..sue in small claims court. Win. Good luck collecting in many cases. Filing for a lien? Good luck with that pointless venture...
Once you have a judgement, you contact the Sheriff to help you collect. With a judgement, you are able to take things from them in order to make your judgement. Usually once that actually starts happening, the company will cut you a check pretty quick.
In most states, the fee to file in small claims is somewhere between $30-$100. Filing for a lien with the local sheriff is another $100 or so. Well worth it for 3 weeks wages.
I don't know, does US not have a small claims court? In UK you'd pay £90 to file a case, you'd get a judgement in about a week and the company would be ordered to pay. Like I really don't understand this entire issue. Did he even ask HR to be compensated for this time? I feel like the whole article is missing some crucial information.
Yes, the US has small claims courts. They are run at the state/county level, so fees and maximum recovery values vary. Fees generally run $30-$100 and max. recovery somewhere around $5k. After winning a case, filing a lien with the sheriff is another $100 or so.
During the 1980s, one idea became paramount in business management schools, books, seminars, etc: The worker must be disposable. Any worker who becomes important to the success of the organization must be fired immediately upon this realization. If you permit that person to remain, they will become even more integral to the organization. Eventually, they will realize this and ask for more pay. Eventually, they will want pay which is greater than industry standard for workers in their position. That can never be permitted to occur (lest the industry standard wage rise), so they will have to be fired at that point. And then, the loss will do great damage. Best to fire them as soon as they become indispensible and deal with the smaller amount of damage then.
This sort of thinking kind of makes sense in a world where almost every company is a big factory company with their workers primarily doing repetitive physical labor. And the business management world has not adapted at all to the transition to mental labor. Their businesses fail and suffer for this, but as it's a universal condition (yes even among Google and such... if the company has a physical office, then they haven't even done the obvious to benefit from the move to mental work) there's not much pressure motivating change.
> Why has this company not made their loyal worker whole?
IMO because the generally demonstrated position of the labor force is that companies do not have to (which I hate, to be clear).
IMO, employees buy into the employer/owner-propogated myth that they are "lucky to be employed." As a result, employees greatly undervalue their labor and give up any leverage to make employers do the right thing.
Having been around the block a few times, I view 'work' as a transaction in which my employer and I need to realize fairly mutual benefits: most people don't. Employees generally see jobs and titles as a way to assess their societal value. And employers, knowing that, can do pretty much anything they want to people, dangling the occasional carrot to encourage higher worker output, but mostly working w/sticks.
This is also contributes to the zero real wage growth in a supposedly tight job market.
TLDR: power dynamics and poor 'game play' on the part of employees
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I had a situation once, when Symantec firewall stopped working on my company laptop. Not the whole SEP suite, not the antivirus, just the firewall part. After 2 months I got my first angry email from robot, then I started getting them every month with big red text trying to scare me with every possible corporate hell, and it gradually started to CC it to higher and higher management in the company. Meanwhile nobody could fix it and it didn't help that IT support was outsourced to another country (I called them several times with zero results). At some point said managers started visiting me personally (because I assume their inaction was escalated even further). In the end nobody fixed this specifically, but I managed to accidentally do it when fixing virtualbox install - after increasing some obscure "Network Filter" limit in Windows both SEP and VB started working again.
I think wasn't auto fired like OP only because such trigger wasn't implemented in the company, yet. No IT support available can be really bad.
Every so often, I see a 'brilliant' claim like "99% of what IT does is routine, so it should be outsourced or even automated!"
The percentage is debatable, but the more important issue is what that 1% looks like. Because it's definitely not 1% of their value, it's the high-stakes stuff that needs a context-aware human to apply a fix or good decision in place of whatever The Machine is trying to do.
(And if you're going to keep experts on full time to handle the occasional 1% case, there's no longer much reason to outsource everything else.)
>>"Thomas Midgley, Jr. (1889–1944) was an American engineer and chemist who contracted polio at age 51, leaving him severely disabled. He devised an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys to help others lift him from bed. He became accidentally entangled in the ropes and died of strangulation at the age of 55. However, he is better known for two of his other inventions: the tetraethyl lead (TEL) additive to gasoline, and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).[19][20][21]"
Wow, talk about someone who really never learned the importance of thinking things through.
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.
On the one hand, you have been promoted to a new role, so you have reached a compatible level of expertise. You can put that role on your resume and sell yourself.
On the other hand, you never, ever actually performed in that role, with the new responsibilities. How can you list that on your resume !
I am not sure what is the right answer here... but as your new employer I would take your last promotion with a big grain of salt. A resume is not a score sheet of levels accomplished in a game, it is a list of things your have actually done.
At least at Google, the whole point of a promo is that you've been working at the new level for some time before the promo cycle. And the new employer was not really in the equation, I'd already received my offer from them.
I'm not particularly familiar with the system at Google, but at any somewhat decent tech company in order to get a promotion you have to already perform as you would in your "future" role for some time, with higher-level expectations and responsibilities.
For example, is someone with level I is up for level II promo, she/he has to match level II criteria long before actual promotion is due.
In reality promotions mostly happen in organizations due to political lobbying with the powers.
Even in these 'decent' tech companies you will see some people getting rapidly promoted and moving up the hierarchy, while genuine performers are stuck in the process and minutiae. Its just what kind of leverage your manager has with the upper management.
I think everyone should at least experience once to what length a company can go in order to keep someone they really need that threatens to leave.
It happened once to me: in a 150k people company that had a well defined promotion model very similar to Google. I gave my resignation notice and suddenly all the HR pep talk was out of the roof. I gained two levels and was promoted to director level.I still left but felt stupid I didn't threaten to leave earlier.
It made me realize that there are two types of workers. The ones that will play fair game and believe the HR pep talk, as we just saw in the previous comments, and the ones that realize that the fastest way to go is to bypass this and play politics in order to fastrack it. It is another type of skill.
A big thing to note in these political systems. People tend to emphasize your interface to the systems as 'Company thinks X about you', 'Company values your work' etc.
Companies are not living systems and in general its just people making decisions.
I've been walked over many times now, but once, after all the work, I was nominated for an award the company's annual meet. My manager, his manager and all the way up assured me that based on what I had done the award was coming my way. I was even asked to prepare a small speech to give on the stage, they even asked for a photo to put up on slide deck with a small bio.
Two days before the meet, my manager and the director called me into a meeting room to tell me that I wouldn't be getting the award, and they didn't want it to be painful surprise to me during the meet. And they had tried everything they could.
Eventually my manager told me during lunch later that big time political lobbying had gone into this, and VP making decisions had no option as he would be cornered politically on other issues, if he didn't relent to demands of rewards from other corners.
Google or any other company. Performance has nothing to do with how you get paid/rewarded in any company.
Curious, do Google regularly give free stuff to their customers (advertisers) hoping that in a few months those customers will upgrade to a higher service?
There is a very clear right answer here provided you consider promotion from a clean point of view.
A promotion is a _recognition_ that you are _already_ operating at a given level. It's an acknowledgement by TPTB that you deserve a given title.
Anything less than this leads to a result where you may not actually be performing at the level the new title requires, which means you could conceivably be promoted and immediately fail to meet expectations in the new role.
> On the other hand, you never, ever actually performed in that role, with the new responsibilities.
For what it's worth - that's not necessarily true. Several places I have worked gave promotions in retrospect - after you have been performing the additional responsibilities for a while. It's sort of like a 'dry run' - they want to make sure you can do it before officially thrusting it on you.
What made you think that you were entitled to something that you were supposed to receive on a date which was later than the date on which you resigned?
I resigned effective the 2nd of a month, and the promo was effective the 1st of the month. See above "resignation (slated to be effective after the promo)". So the resignation was scheduled for the day after the promo.
I actually stayed an extra week to receive the promo.
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.
It is entirely possible they weren't planning on getting promoted.
I was due for a performance review about a week before I handed my notice in at my old job. The review didn't happen because my boss was incapable of communicating with his employees and actually scheduling appointments with them, but had it happened, I was fully prepared to push for a payrise, even though it would only be a couple of dollars an hour, and for only 3 weeks.
You wouldn't turn down a promotion because you know you're about to hand your notice in. You act like everything is normal and you're going to be working at the company for the foreseeable future, right until the day you hand your notice in, which should be at the minimum notice period.
Otherwise what would happen if you decline a promotion, then your new job offer falls through? You'd be left looking like a prize dick.
I had a similar thing happen, except the company was acquired and we thought we were being laid off. 30 days after I started with my new employer, I received notice of being equated to a higher rank in the new company, and a very significant stock grant.
It's not that uncommon - promotion takes so long and has so many moving parts - you might as well interview somewhere else, since if it doesn't succeed you'll just be doing the whole thing again in six months.
I have an ex-colleague that was promoted 2 weeks after she resigned, just days before she left the country. The announcements came in the right order, first leaving the company and later being promoted. It puzzled lots of people, but this stuff happens.
except that this doesn't work in a high demand market such as the Bay area right now!
Your old manager may have said that to encourage you to stay, but at the end of the day he will promote whoever needs to be promoted in order for that person not to leave. It is all very simple offer and demand at the end of the day.
I was once in a company where the CEO liked to brag that in this company everyone is fairly paid in regards to their competences. You can guess what happened next, we went to have a couple beers with colleagues one evening and started talking about salaries. We realized that we had salaries that didn't really match what the CEO was pretending. The laws of the market are simply too strong, you will always need to sometime pay someone a lot because of circumstances or because that person had another offer to match.
At the end of the day, companies benefit a lot from information asymmetry (they know everyone's salary, but you know nothing). They can claim a lot of things without you having the ability to verify it.
The point here is not the raise, but the promotion itself. It's leverage for joining other large companies ("I was a Senior SWE at Google, so you'll need to offer me a Staff SWE role"), and as the OP notes, it lets them come back to the new level without having to go through the promo gauntlet again.
1) Employee gets promotion, effective in the future (at #3)
2) Employee resigns, to be effective after promotion (at #4)
3) Promotion is to be effective at this date
4) Resignation is to be effective at this date
In my understanding, the employee's resignation is to be effective after the promotion it to be effective, so that the they would resign with the new/promoted level.
Because large companies give the promos as trailing indicators of performance, meaning that to be promoted requires an acknowledgment of prior sustained performance at that level. Entitlement to the level is actually accurate and above board.
Generally in cases like these, they don't want to waste the promotion(the new position) and they give it to whoever is next in line and wants to stay longer.
A very logical thing to do. In big companies it takes time to build a case for a promotion(position). If you were not going to use it, it was always a good thing to give it to somebody else.
Plus asking somebody to sustain a position for somebody who was promoted and still wants to leave seems like bonkers even from the HR perspective.
Google do not have position quotas. At least they didn't have them when I worked there a few years ago.
So getting a promotion is not done by competing with others for the same slot, but by earning the merit from doing a great job.
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.
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.
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.
Was this is the US?
There are benefits to having a national, public, unique ID # for each person and this is one of them; it reduces the number of 'they had the same name' mistakes to nearly zero
I'm not that knowledgeable but I thought SSN aren't public information and that they are not used throughout information systems to identify people because they are 'sensitive information'
Social Security numbers are unique. They don't work as a great identifier because they can be mistyped, can be hard to verify, and people don't want to give them out too much.
SSNs should be unique, the only exceptions are fraud or errors.
According to the Social Security Administration:
> At its inception, the SSN's only purpose was to uniquely identify U.S. workers, enabling employers to submit accurate reports of covered earnings for use in administering benefits under the new Social Security program. That is still the primary purpose for the SSN.
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.
I think it's just a failure of imagination. Granted, very few folks leave here and no one can remember anyone leaving and coming back. But the team that runs the machine now knows of this edge case and are addressing it.
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.
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.
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.
The author assumed that the recruiter accidentally thought that he had been fired after reading the list of fired employees, as there were other employees with the same name.
In reality, he had been fired as his contract had not been renewed. He wasn't actively fired, but rather his contract expired because someone failed to renew it.
A big part of the problem here seems to be rather that there were no warnings of his impending "departure" to the correct people. There were no emails to his manager reminding them that his contract was ending, or to the author himself. Even if it was intended for his contract to end, it would still be a good idea to have that email sent out, just to remind them. I can totally foresee somebody forgetting that their contract is finished.
The article says that his former boss, who left the company, neglected to file the paperwork on extending his contract. There was intent to extend, and everyone thought that’s what happened, except for the fact that it didn’t actually happen.
There's the contract that was signed, and then there's the HR documentation as it appears in the system. The contract was signed, but the HR documentation wasn't.
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.
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.
Having known a couple of founders who built their companies to a greater than 5000 person company, this is actively done. Founders need control over who they employ, promote, fire, etc. While it doesn't matter much at the entry level stage, as you move up the seniority chain, there is a lot more politics. HRs major purpose is to make sure that things that are done to employees are done in a legally justifiable way. If management wants to see someone gone, they make sure there is a paper trail. If someone needs to be moved up faster, they facilitate that. Essentially, they are there to do upper management's bidding, not to employ their own thoughts. Headstrong people don't survive there.
In my experience HR isn't filled with "bad" employees per say, it's filled just with bureaucrats. They care more about following policy to the letter just to do it rather than actually thoughtfully applying policy which generally involves following the spirit of the law by bending rules rather than the letter of the law.
Two reasons really. HR is not a profit center, and no one who picks the software will actually have to use it. Zed Shaw takes this up to 11 in a presentation he did in Montreal https://vimeo.com/2723800
I had to do a back transaction once in Greece and they did ask for my mother's and my father's name. Strange for a German but it seems to work for them.
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).
I can vouch for this. As a freelancer I actually had exactly this happen: I was working for a client with a time-limited contract. The contract expired on New Year's Eve and they failed to renew it so I expected to have been terminated.
One week later they send me an e-mail asking when I'll be back from vacation. They refused to renew the contract (which explicitly said it required a formal written agreement to be renewed) but wanted me to keep working for them. So I went back to them and they kept paying me.
Several months later we had a disagreement and they claimed the terms of the original contract no longer applied because they hadn't renewed them. But my lawyer confirmed that in fact the contract was still valid because they implicitly extended it and the requirement for a formal renewal was invalidated (they failed to provide a new contract so the extension was still subject to the terms of the initial contract even though it had expired).
We didn't go all the way in court so I can't say whether this would have held up, but they ended up reaching an agreement with me where they pretty much gave up on everything except my legal fees, so I guess their lawyer wasn't too hopeful.
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.
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.
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).
This has been a real problem with facial recognition. Faces used to train engines are typically Caucasian, so the ability to distinguish other ethnicities is quite sub-par.
Isn't there a problem with shadow contrast which makes features more difficult to pick out on darker skinned faces? I vaguely recall an East Asian developer giving that reason for why he developed on Western data-sets.
Yes, but then you need special equipment rather than standard cameras (that usually filter IR); which would prove the point that it's about physical limitations rather than racism.
That's not racism, that's laziness. Or perhaps just being a bad engineer, if you want to be more cynical about it.
It's not that hard to find both conscious and subconscious examples of systemic or individual racism. Engineers taking the easy path with webcam facial recognition is probably not a good one and serves only to give more fuel to those who claim people jump to the racism cry too quickly.
If you ship a product because it only works for white people and that's good enough, that is definitely racism. Just as it would be sexism if you shipped a voice recognition product that only worked for men.
Laziness and racism aren't mutually exclusive. Historically in America, white people haven't considered black people as fully human. You can read the various declarations of secession or the 3/5ths compromise for that. Or the long post-Reconstruction history of slightly more subtle ways.
Sure, laziness was involved here. But deciding a product was good enough to ship without caring that it worked for black people requires the effective belief that black people didn't really count as people. At least, not people that mattered. Imagine the reverse: if the product didn't work on white men, would it have been shipped? Of course not.
When laziness just happens to have a blatantly racist outcome in a place where there is a centuries-long history of racism, Occam's Razor suggests the explanation is racism. If laziness could not have caused the bad outcome to happen for white people, then it's pretty clear that pure laziness is not the real cause. It's instead white people being differentially lazy when it comes to black people. That's clearly racism.
As a confirmatory example, look at the American justice system. In a lot of places and times, the same nominal laws applied to white and black people. But they were enforced very differently. Serious crimes against black people were ignored. Minor infractions by black people were enforced vigorously. [1] Were the cops lazy? Sure, everybody's lazy sometimes. Was that why there was a racially different outcome? Definitely not.
[1] Examples of this are all over Loewen's "Sundown Towns" for example.
I think it's important to start talking about, and acknowledging, that nearly every second of the average person's life is thinking about something that is within their own universe of their life's experiences.
So plausibly, this really was an innocent and understandable mistake. Maybe they grew up in a town full of white people, and maybe all of their friends and coworkers are white. I understand what they did is technically racist, but that's because of that particular combination of people. Let's use _this_ 'experience' of "racist", but not it's exact definition. For example:
- It was racist you forgot your mother in law's birthday (who you see once a year.)
- It was racists you didn't lift the toilet seat. (Edit: I grew up in a culture where it was offensive to not raise the seat)
Definition: Any unintentional side effect from not thinking about someone* outside of everything you've experienced, and presumably causing harm to that outsider.
* Usually this person is disadvantaged in some way. But almost everyone is disadvantaged in some way, thus neutralizing this particular point IMO.
Does that sound rational? I don't think it does.
The world is full of suffering, and I'm advocating people help and love the people they are surrounded by. If many people did that, it would be easier to recognize each other, where ever you come from. Why? Because hate will push away everything it is unfamiliar with, but love will accept everything it is unfamiliar with.
(Now meta argument, do I expect people to change? No. So I try accepting them instead.)
Again, something can be racism and something else.
> Maybe they grew up in a town full of white people, and maybe all of their friends and coworkers are white.
This is not an accident. All-white contexts in America are the result of personal and systemic racism. People who grow up in those contexts are, unsurprisingly, more likely to be personally biased and will regardless do things that further systemic racism.
People in that condition have a choice: they can either overcome their upbringing or they can continue to support white supremacy. If they do the latter, well, then they've made a choice. You can accept that if you want. I don't.
I don't think it's likely that all the folks in Vermont are racist or that the system of governance there is supremely racist - yet Vermont has an absolutely tiny percentage of non-white folks (3.1%)
Less than 15% of the U.S. is African American so it's not at all surprising that there are areas where there are very few black folks as a result. That's nobody's fault and shouldn't be described as racist because, well, it isn't.
3.1% is about 1 in 30 people. That's not that small. And this isn't 100 years ago, I'm pretty sure people in Vermont have seen a black face on TV/film.
This is historically ignorant. I don't blame you personally, because the American education system is very bad at covering America's racist history. But you're still basing your estimation of "likely" not on real data, but on what you'd like to be true.
If you'd like to learn more, start with Loewen's "Sundown Towns", which describes how hundreds and possibly thousands of towns across the US were turned and kept white:
It's also not necessary for a lot of white people to be actively racist to preserve white supremacy. As is clear from Loewen's book, all it takes is a small number of people willing to be active (e.g., making threats, burning crosses) to drive off new black arrivals. The majority can be passively accepting of a racist system without lifting a finger.
But that doesn't mean they won't end up biased. White people who don't know many black people are more likely to be biased, and all-white towns produce people that are more likely to have racist views. (For more, see Loewen's Ch 11, "The effects of sundown towns on whites".)
This is neat, in a conversation about the technical aspects of image recognition with webcams in low lighting conditions, you're talking about secession and the 3/5th compromise. Let's try to stay on topic.
> But deciding a product was good enough to ship without caring that it worked for black people requires the effective belief that black people didn't really count as people.
Nobody ever said "oh it doesn't work with black people? Who cares LOL." I was going to make a crack about mental gymnastics but this isn't even that. You're just making shit up at this point.
> When laziness just happens to have a blatantly racist outcome in a place where there is a centuries-long history of racism, Occam's Razor suggests the explanation is racism.
No, even using your sentence here you admit the cause is laziness but then try to reframe it to racism because that fits your world view. Just like the fact that we're talking about webcams and you're talking about the 3/5th compromise and the American justice system.
Is there institutional/structural racism in the US? Absolutely. Webcams aren't a good example of it, sorry.
I do not admit that "the cause" is laziness. Laziness is part of the causal chain, sure. Single-cause thinking is a poor way to do a failure retrospective.
We don't know whether or not they knew it didn't work with black people before they shipped it. Maybe they did and dismissed it with technical hogwash, as you are here. Maybe they did and decided it was an ok flaw. Maybe they didn't know because the company doesn't have any black employees and nobody though to test it on black people because the people in charge don't know any. Or maybe they do and just don't care. There are many possible paths to this decision, but any of them demonstrates systemic racism.
And this is on topic, because the broader topic is social implications of technology.
As an aside, your attempt to narrowly define the topic so racism can't even be spoken of is a pretty typical move from people experiencing white fragility: http://libjournal.uncg.edu/ijcp/article/view/249
Seeing someone interact with others after drinking enough kool-aid to fill a pool is actually pretty entertaining. Thanks, I needed a break from work.
Speaking of work, have you tried testing your definition of racism on non-white subjects and products, such as Black Entertainment Television? It doesn't hold up very well.
My definition of racism is pretty standard among people who study it. I'm talking about a societal power system, like capitalism or communism. The US was undeniably racist to start out; black people were property, and only white men could vote. The level of white supremacy has declined some since then, but hasn't been eliminated. And it has been going back up in the last few years.
You could mean two things by "testing your definition of racism on non-white subjects": in the US or elsewhere. Either way, yes, of course I have. When going elsewhere it's necessary to speak of "the dominant racial group", and that can be helpful here too. So taking BET, we can ask questions like, "What effect are they having on non-dominant racial groups?" And, "Do their actions tend to increase or decrease the racial power imbalance?"
My first impression is that they are having positive effects on a non-dominant racial group, and are acting to decrease the racial power imbalance. Therefore, no, they are not racist.
Since you are anonymous person with a new account turning up to be a dick about the topic of racism, I presume your question was entirely insincere. But just in case, I hope you find the answer useful.
> That's not racism, that's laziness. Or perhaps just being a bad engineer, if you want to be more cynical about it.
It can be both. An attitude that considers facial recognition software acceptable if it only recognizes light-skinned people is both lazy and racist. Only choosing to test on light-skinned people is racist because doing so assumes dark skinned people are an exception or an outlier, rather than an equally valid part of the set of "human faces."
True, but that doesn't really contradict the premise of my comment.
The assumption of ones own race being the default color for humans (rather than an arbitrary value) that leads to facial recognition software being trained on a data set so narrow that the resulting software can't even recognize skin colors that diverge from that norm is as much about implicit, albeit unintentional, racial bias as it is the particular technical problems involved and the need for engineers to cut costs and meet deadlines.
It's not entirely racist, but racism is a component.
> That's not racism, that's laziness. Or perhaps just being a bad engineer, if you want to be more cynical about it.
I wasn't ready to admit the genius of the show before, but I am now: what you said is quite close to a line from the same episode (said by the sociopathic boss, Veronica) when told by the protagonist that the sensors were effectively racist "[...] it's actually the opposite of racist, because it's not targeting black people. It's just ignoring them. [company] insist the worst people can call it is "indifferent.""
I agree. It's a well known problem where the training set isn't representative of the underlying population. While it can certainly be argued that the engineers should have recognized this deficiency and taken corrective action, I really don't understand why all the respondents to your post are so quick to assert racist intent based on clickbait headlines from Forbes.
It's not an active racism on the part of the engineers. It's way more subtle than that.
There could be a hidden assumption on the part of the engineering team that light-skin is "normal" and anything else is a special case. Nobody is saying "I hate black people" or anything of the kind.
Or, as happened with a voice recognition system a former employer used, it was tested on the engineering staff, who happened to be all male. As a result it didn't work well for most women who tried to use it. There was no intentional exclusion of women from the test data, and I'd argue, no intentional exclusion of women from the engineering teams. But it is reasonable to say that systemic sexism that excludes women from engineering careers helped this system fail.
These kinds of problems are difficult to solve, because they aren't active decisions on anyone's part. They evolve out of pervasive conditions, and unconscious biases. At root, the source is still racism, or sexism (or another form of discrimination).
Because it is racism. It is ignoring a large swath of humanity based on the color of their skin. You may not want to think of it as racism because it's not the burn a cross on their lawn type of racism, but it's still systemic racism.
> It is ignoring a large swath of humanity based on the color of their skin.
No, it's an insufficiently sensitive contrast filter combine with too narrow a training set. Screaming racism at everything that is even marginally approaching the topic of race detracts from real racism and ignores the actual issue here - shitty software.
But laziness around something that dispropotionately impacts people based on their race is racist. If you know your system has a harder time training against non-white faces, and you choose to train it only against white faces to be lazy, that's still explicitly racist. This isn't even a case of negligent racism ("oh well I didn't know my system wouldn't work for people with darker skin because only my white coworkers tried it out"). The example here is a case of the engineer explicitly deciding to avoid the harder case of darker skinned individuals, knowing that the results would be poorer for those individuals, and thinking it doesn't matter if the system doesn't work well for people with darker skin. That is explicit racism.
Skin color is not synonymous with race. Every race has people that span a wide range of skin tones, and skin tone fades with age, so you may as well be arguing it's ageism.
Actually, even if it is accidental or subconscious, I'd say this is a perfect example of systemic racism--racist behavior (I'm referring to an algorithm/device specifically here, which you can safely call objectively racist) which is normally within society's acceptance level which, when magnified to a societal scale, is no longer acceptable. Another symptom of this illness is that you might not even notice as a member of this system the system is broken if you're white, but you would if you're black.
Personally, I think it could be understandable people didn't consider race when developing facial recognition technology, especially when we've only had mainstream awareness of this for under a decade and many people live in racially homogeneous or dominated cultures. However, I don't think it's acceptable for organizations, and the time when you can safely say you didn't understand biased learning data will be over soon. There are considerations you need to make scaling your tech from personal project to something the public will consume.
Also, the day will come when computers can point out racist stuff better than the average human can now, albeit with a high false positive rate. I say this because it's relatively easy; even if you only count a subset of tweets talking about racism as not trolling, that's still a shockingly high number of meaningful things about the world many people aren't seeing.
It is racism to realize the negative aspects to other races, nevertheless pitch it as universally functional, and push the cost/pain to other races. Laziness is some of it, some of it is the realization that only other races bear the brunt of the cost.
Most cheap cameras actually don't filter out IR; it often shows up as blue or purple. You can use this fact to see if an IR remote is working -- just shine it at your cellphone camera or webcam. Whether there's enough IR sensitivity to be able to illuminate a face is another question.
I find this phenomenon of protecting oneself from being called racist fascinating. Your opinion is not exactly racist, but you had to bring up another minority, in case someone accuses you?
You're right, it's not always the case, but in that format the second sentence is usually a justification of the first. Also, Black Mirror is not a comedy.
Every time I watch it I'm laughing my ass off. It's definitely not serious, or even satirical.
Most sci-fi has the problem of trying to model a situation with limited social scope. The fact that they never turn out true is because society has social safeguards to prevent it from happening that the writers don't model.
We call it a comedy when it _intends_ to make people laugh. Just because _you_ laugh about it, doesn't mean that it also intends this.
I know you could now say that they actually intend it. But I doubt that. (X)
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.”
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)
I have noticed that people following machine orders is also used by corporations to force customers to give up on their rights. I have a minor dispute with one of our communication providers and it is a real nightmare - according to the law I have the right, but the system does not include it and people don't know what to do in this case. Some other people higher up just wait until I give up.
A leasing agent for my apartment put the wrong (slightly cheaper) rent amount on our lease, and only realized as we were moving in, well after all parties had signed.
She told us we needed to sign a corrected lease because there was no way to make the rent billing system charge us the lower amount.
We explained to her that the building’s legal obligations trumped what their computer would do. They figured out how to change the amount in their billing system.
I encountered that several years ago. Federal law says that if you request a cable box with an enabled Firewire port, cable companies are required to provide it. I requested such a box from my local Time Warner cable TV company. They had no clue what I was talking about and said their software had no facility to let them enable the Firewire port on my box. So I called the State Utilities Commission in my state. I explained the situation, and that the cable company was violating federal law. The next day I got a call from the owner of the local Time Warner franchise personally. They managed to find a way once they were in danger of having their license to operate in the state revoked.
"Make game of that which makes as much of thee." is a quote from a book thousands of years old (The Rubiyat by Omar Khayaam) but it is as applicable as ever.
My wife is a victim of the OPM breach and had someone apply for (and in some cases open) numerous accounts with her data. One of those accounts was with T-Mobile and after three months of phone calls and strongly worded bills we filed an FCC complaint. A T-Mobile rep called us two days later and the issue was resolved (or so it seems anyway, haven’t heard anything in the past few weeks).
Don’t pay the invoice until they either fix it or let it go (they can’t go to court as you’re in the right from a legal point of view).
That’s what I always do with shitty utility providers - it’s funny how the “computer says no” excuse suddenly disappears when they start to be out of pocket.
Careful, automatic processes can give you trouble, cancel your service or hurt your credit rating.
I recommend complying with the process, mentally account for the extra costs when you sign up, stick to defaults and avoid complexity whenever possible.
On the other hand nowadays companies do respond to complaints much better than a few decades ago if you file complaints through their websites. Taking it to social media may also result in quick and drastic measures.
By the time I arrive to this stage, I’ve already got a replacement lined up and all it takes is to flick a switch.
> hurt your credit rating
From experience, the problem eventually gets resolved and they cancel any black marks on your credit report. But personally I never cared about mine anyway.
The other thing about credit reports is that 1) companies not in the business of providing credit have an uphill battle to claim that you're indebted to them, and 2) you can challenge such things, and the law requires them to show evidence.
Due process has favored debtors for some time now, but the information isn't published, leaving shady "credit cleanup" companies to charge hundreds to do what you can do in many cases simply by logging into a website.
that could pose a problem in some European countries as it is very easy to get a court order (no humans involved, it`s an automated process) to collect the money from you. it would be your duty to prove you don`t have to pay.
the burden of proof would be on the plaintiff`s side, but as I said as it`s automated the defendant has to act, if he fails to do so in a certain amount of time the court order becomes effective
That’s very common with badly designed anomaly detection systems. Customer support say the system has detected something wrong in the customer behavior and ask, often order, to stop or fix whatever they’re doing. Neither customers nor support are able to intervene
So true. Recently I was at the pharmacy, the doctor wrote a wrong prescription and my wife was in the car having a hefty migraine. They wouldn't give me the drug even though they could see she has been using it for years and the wrong prescription could be solved afterwards. I think such people will be the first to be completely replaced by robots, I for sure wouldn't notice the difference, in fact I expect a robot to be inhuman so it would be less frustrating.
If you are a human and you can see in the computer that the prescription is regularly updated and you can even call the doctor if you doubted it. You can even check the prescription afterwards and if my story doesn't check out, do something about it. The migraine was pretty bad, imo it was like not treating a broken leg because of a missing insurance card or something.
There are very good reasons why a doctor might decide to change a prescription for someone, and listening to the patient over the doctor in some of those cases would not only be a bad idea, it could be potentially fatal or cause long lasting problems.
For example:
- Evidence of abuse of a drug.
- A second prescription which interacts badly with the first.
- Changing health circumstances (pregnancy, some sort of deficiency, failing internal systems, etc).
The correct thing to do in a case like this is to stop and coordinate with the prescribing physician. Having a pharmacist look at some change compared to how things were done prior and have a patient tell them it's a mistake and they should ignore it without consulting the prescribing physician is almost never a good idea.
You're really blaming the wrong people. Blame the doctor for screwing it up, your wife for not checking the prescription, or the government for creating/enforcing the relevant laws that would have put not only the chemist but their entire franchise underground for "doing the right thing". Laws are laws, broskie, don't expect everybody to break them for you.
If the migraine was really bad (bad enough to cause tangible damage) maybe you should sue the doctor for damages, or if it wasn't that bad, report him/her and go somewhere else next time.
So in effect he's right to suggest the pharmacist should just be replaced by a robot because you would have them follow the rules no matter what with all humanity stripped out. If there was more than one pharmacist available it wouldn't have killed him/her to go and take a look at the wife in the car.
The pharmacist can, and should, use their human judgement to refuse to dispense drugs even when prescribed. But they don't and shouldn't use their human judgement to dispense drugs that weren't prescribed; this is by design and for good reason. It's a two-person rule: you only get the drugs if both the pharmacist and the doctor formally agreed you should get them.
The problem seems to be that the drug has indeed been prescribed, but the writing was erroneous. This is not about "should we freely sell drug", but about "should we use human judgment in addition to paper orders".
Clearly, some commenters are also trying hard to be robot-swappable. :)
The prescription was for the wrong drug, i.e. the wrong drug was prescribed and conversely the right drug was not prescribed. The pharmacist can, should, and quite possibly did use their human judgement to refuse to dispense the wrong drug, even though it was prescribed. But by design they don't have the authority to dispense the right drug without getting a doctor to formally prescribe it.
I really wouldn't be surprised if it turned out a large percentage (over 35%) of hacker news commenters originate from robots / ai / chatbots being trained / tested surreptitiously.
It doesn't matter if the pharmacist thinks -- or even knows -- that they are doing the "right thing", pharmacists cannot prescribe medications. Their life would be over in a heartbeat if anybody ever found out that he or she legally provided a drug to somebody without a prescription. Additionally, pharmacists should use their best judgement to deny valid prescriptions, similar to how a bartender would use their best judgement to not sell alcohol to a customer.
You are right and make an interesting point.
Part of the advantage of dealing with a human is that one hopes they can deal with whatever strange problem it thrown at them.
If you can’t deal with corner cases, or have none than leveraging rules/software is the way to go.
I think of vending machines and parking meters as automation of simple tasks, but what to do when they break?
I think google tries this by trying to “automate all the things”. It works most times but when it goes wrong it makes it very frustrating to correct.
When they (the machines) break, a human should be able to override, i.e., I was once stuck in a malfunctioning parking garage (no ability to pay, barrier stayed shut), so I lifted the barrier and let everyone out without paying. This could be illegal, but keeping me in a parking garage without telling me how long it will take is also a crime. Please don't make human un-openable parking garages, ever (meaning: don't let a robot decide whether a human is allowed to leave).
This is a completely different scenario to the one described above. You yourself are potentially breaking the law (if the boom gate is damaged, assisting in potential theft of services rendered, etc) to prevent your car being stuck in the parking lot (which very likely has a clause in the conditions of entry, so may not be illegal).
The two key points are that you are committing the crime yourself, not asking somebody else to, and that it is in fact only potentially a crime, and even then it's relatively minor, and could be argued strongly in court.
You are not asking somebody else to illegally sell you opioids (for example) with no prescription. From what it sounds like, nobody was in real danger, just pain, and you expect people to risk everything they've spent their entire life working for just to prevent an hour of pain for some stranger?
We don't have a suing culture so much here so I don't think that is relevant. Also, I feel that medical personnel should minimize suffering to the best of their ability, they don't take an oath swearing to fully emulate an emotionless robot.
Get a grip on reality dude. Nobody is going to risk their livelyhood to stop somebody being in relatively[0] moderate pain for an hour. The fact that you expect strangers to do this for you is really very selfish.
Not sure how suing is related to the comment you replied to. If a chemist hands out drugs to people without prescriptions and they get caught, they will lose their licence, be barred for life, lose their store, get a massive fine, and in some cases serve jail time. Nothing to do with suing.
My mother had a pharmacy and she often called the doctor to solve this issues. The doctor is a phone call away, and the pharmacist job is to do whatever he cans to improved the patient's illness.
In which case you blame the programmer who wrote the code, not the employee following the software. Your idea of deferring to the rules over all common sense is the core of the problem. It doesn't matter if we are talking about government rules over which they'll enslave you if you break them or corporate rules over which they'll fire and blacklist you if you break them.
Hell, most humane countries do it like that way already. My pharmacist parents in Norway wouldn’t have a problem with this, based on anecdotes over the years.
That's more about CYA. The pharmacist would risk a lot by giving out the medicine without proper prescription. They may know it's OK, but they won't risk an overzealous prosecution, for example.
I wouldn't do that either. Because if I did that in the wrong instance, I would be fired. I'm sorry for your wife's migraines, but it's not worth me losing my ability to support my family.
Mistake? *chuckles* We don't make mistakes!
*crashing sound as an improvised plug for the new hole in the ground falls straight through*
Bloody typical! They've gone back to metric without telling us!
Recently we had a lot of tourists drive through the unfinished tunnel Vaðlaheiðargöng (Iceland) because Apple Maps already marked it as part of Route 1. So we had people drive a workers' road past multiple signs banning entrance, and then drive on gravel through a tunnel filled with heavy machinery and workers. Quite funny.
The problem isn't that people refer to a machine as authority but that the process has no abort button.
When you design business processes like these, firing, hiring or managing people always keep in mind something can go wrong. Always include an abort button to either stop or roll back the process.
It's a little unfair, though. There was heavy rain, fog, and a second article [0] says it was also in the middle of the night. The photo there also does make it look easy to mistake as a road.
I remember Dwight and Michael arguing in Michael's car over whether the GPS was right as it kept telling them to go right which was directly into a lake.
Oh, yeah. From that picture, it took me a second to realize I wasn't looking at a wet road-top and instead water in a lake, which is very close to the same height as the surrounding road.
I'm glad it wasn't me driving there at night and in the rain, I could see myself making the same very bad mistake.
Where the orders comes from has nothing to do with anything in terms of who is held responsible. The person who acts is responsible. That they were following orders is not a valid excuse. This was what the Nuremberg Trials established for us. It doesn't matter if someone told you to do something, you still have the only capacity to make the decision whether you actually do it or not.
Humans are very quick to abdicate their own moral authority, and it is the most repugnant human impulse that exists. If someone puts a gun to your head, and tells you to kill someone or die, you are still responsible for whoever you kill. Others might consider your actions understandable, even forgivable, but you're still a murderer and still one who valued their own life above anothers.
If you do something because you were "just doing your job", that's even worse. That's exactly identical to doing something for money. Which is usually looked very poorly on by society.
yeah, but punitive justice is the least consequential thing in those situations. The major reason you'd punish someone there is to stop someone from willfully repeating the scenario. There exists a path for learning and prevention in automated systems too.
The danger I see is the stifling of potential human subjective decisions. That broad decisions will be made and carried out without a sanity/humanity check by humans.
I think measures should be put in place for a guarantee of human intervention in the case of situational anomaly or system error as well as an emphasis on redress.
Since automation scales and a human workforce doesn't, a guarantee of human intervention might not be practically possible.
Anyone have any ideas on how this kind of thing might be mitigated?
I think it won't be mitigated, given my experience working as a data scientist. It will be ignored because it is profitable to ignore it. If we slowed down and figured out how to make machines mimic human empathy before we make them make decisions it could be mitigated, but we won't do that. Ask your boss about it.
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".
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."
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Somebody who is in your building, is doing work under your direction, and has not been told they are fired hasn't been fired. A judge in court for the lost wages would laugh you out of the room if you tried a "well but actually, the system..." argument in that situation.
I had a similar situation where it was proven that law is law while contracting at nab, a bank in Australia, years ago.
- When I first started, it took months to get me added to the project phase to bill my time.
- When I was finally added, I couldn't bill it because that project phase was over
- Then a few months to find a solution, then I was asked to bill to the new project phase
- I couldn't bill my old time to the new project phase as it wasn't running in the time I first started.
The bank kept promising they'd work out a way for me together compensated for the time. They continued to do this after I ended the contract.
I kept chasing them, and they went quiet. Then they said they weren't paying me for the time I worked because I hadn't entered my time correctly, then blamed me for walking out the door before I'd been paid the money they owed.
I called a lawyer. nab responded as above. The lawyer told nab that Australian law doesn't care about their billing system - mentioning the specific law helped.
They paid all the money a week later. I should have asked for costs and interest too, but oh well.
Constructive dismissal is treated as "you quit, but you quit because the conditions imposed on you were such that you had no choice, and we will treat that as the company firing you rather than you voluntarily choosing to quit".
I worked as a contractor for a couple of months at a company with 100k+ employees. And then got hired.
Once a year human resources would decide my 'contract' was up and order IT to terminate my network access and payroll to stop paying me. Had another lady got hired from contract around the same time. The day she started working they terminated her email account and it took them six weeks to restore it.
>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.
IANAL either, but I did get a Bachelor of Law; one thing that was hard for me to get while I was studying is that while I thought of the law & contracts as a series of instructions that get executed by the "CPU" (our legal system), really for the most part it's being executed by humans who really dislike cute "this then that, screw context" thinking. I would not be surprised at all if a judge would laugh at an employer that tried to make the argument that he was "terminated" due to a clerical error and automated systems, therefore they don't need to pay him...
But, it depends! It's never black and white for this stuff. It'd be an interesting case though, and I'm sure it's happened before!
> I would not be surprised at all if a judge would laugh at an employer that tried to make the argument that he was "terminated" due to a clerical error and automated systems, therefore they don't need to pay him...
Yeah, judging from this thread and the negative scores on some of my comments, I was way off base about that.
"Contractor" in tech means, "we want you as an employee but we're too cheap to obey the laws involved or make a commitment, so here's a 3 year contract, hope this never goes to court!". Frankly, it's a way for companies to avoid the law, though California at least has recently made this an illegal sort of arrangement via new work rules.
> The system did exactly what it was intended to do, it was the humans who screwed up.
It was the humans who designed and who chose to deploy a system without a human in the loop, and without an override (even after a director was involved) that screwed up.
They screwed up, but that happens. The point where the system takes over and even the higher-ups can't override it is where the story becomes Kafka-esque.
If you build an automation system that goes out of human control after a human error, that is a failed design.
>If you build an automation system that goes out of human control after a human error, that is a failed design.
Unless it was designed with the intent that human intervention should be impossible once a process was started. That would make it a very poor design, but not a failed one.
I've seen lots of internal software that doesn't have failsafes or rollbacks - the operator is simply trained to follow procedure and then is expected to follow it. Software that considers operator error is more complex, and therefore more expensive, to produce. Cost often supersedes quality or flexibility when these systems are developed.
"Self-destruct sequence initiated, cannot abort." should be left in the world of sci-fi.
If there is a physical process that cannot be stopped (rocket, nuclear reactor, oil well) then of course the system must be designed around that physical fact.
But this is an HR process. The "moving parts" are people.
If it was designed with the intent that human intervention should be impossible, the design was a failure.
Perhaps more likely it was just a failure of implementation (there's a cancel button but nobody knows where) or of imagination (nobody thought about whether the process could be canceled or not).
What if instead of HR, this was a financial process, playing out over days or weeks, entirely beyond the company's control. Would any sane CFO approve such a thing?
> Cost often supersedes quality or flexibility
That helps to explain it, but it doesn't excuse it.
No! It happened in the middle of a contract which wasn't terminated. There's no two ways of looking at it. A wrong termination date entered somewhere doesn't change the contract.
> Paying people not in your employ is fraud, [...]
The person was still employed. If anything in this story was fraud, it was the company stopping payment based on a wrong termination date. They even knew the date was wrong and still didn't pay. Clear-cut case!
Of course, if the parties later agree that the contract was in fact canceled at that point, that's how it is. Because parties can agree to cancel a contract. What a sucker though in this case.
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".
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.
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.
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.
It only takes 1 person to ruin the experience for hundreds, or thousands, of others in online games. Given each of those people is a source of recurring revenue to Blizzard-Activision, the actions taken against cheaters is understandable.
This. I got a false positive on Runescape about 4 years ago, they won't even let you appeal because it was a serious offence. Lost my best account, and they cancelled my membership. Never paid for the game again after that, on my new account.
Well I wasn't cheating in any way, just using the auction house/trade chat much more than a typical new account because most of my MMO experience was in EVE online and I like the "economic PVP" of cornering markets and flipping for a profit.
Some cursory research told me that new accounts with a lot of market activity were a "red flag" for the automated system due to similarity with bots that created new accounts to evade bans, which I guess makes sense. Of course this is the internet and you have no particular reason to believe I was or wasn't cheating on World of Warcraft, but for what it's worth this HN account is linked to my real identity and if I were cheating all the time I would know better than to brag about it or even obliquely reference it in my posting here.
So, based on past experience and the experiences of others - that is bannable behavior to them. They don't want people playing the AH on items - they certainly don't want people cornering a market - they just want a simple method for people to trade goods for gold.
Yours is simply the latest in a line of those who have followed the letter of their Auction House rules, but not the nebulous and unwritten "spirit".
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.
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.
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.
Want to bet it was structured as six 8-month contracts to dodge some legal requirement that you provide extra benefits to any contractor retained for three or more whole quarters? ;)
“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.
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...
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.
There is a difference between a new monarch 1) letting a symbolic but insignificant fraction free to gain popularity / manufacture consent for the governance of the new monarch 2) clearing out all the prisoners.
Symbolically different alliances/parties fight each other, but within one such party/team the partners are competition too! Why liberate an old partner, if that increases your commpetition? Often the strategic value of this partner was low as the prisoner has been out of the loop, destabilized, broken. Automagically everyone agrees that "agitators are agitators" and a large fraction of the populace already believes whatever the political prisoner was accused of by the previous government.
Regarding petty criminals and the "expense" of housing prisoners, that story really gets old very fast to be honest. Although seldom depicted in caricatural movies, we know historically there were no dedicated mental institutions. In the past they locked them up with normal criminals, no distinction. And they did forced labour like textile industry, like proto-factories. From the perspective of government thats an income, not an expense!!
> It wasn't until modern times that prison became a place for common criminals, in those days only political offenders would be put away
I don't think it was universally true, for example, when the Bastille prison in Paris was taken at the start of the French Revolution, it held only common criminals, with the political prisoners having been moved before the start of the unrest.
Yeah, the French did a lot of things differently, the French national consciousness was matched only by its material wealth, so they could afford such frivolities.
Sure, probably the main cause. You can't have a financial crisis without material wealth. If you're going to hang yourself, the first thing you need is a rope.
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.
> and for security reasons we're unable to offer further details
To give a little behind-the-scenes here, I worked for a bit for a web hosting company that had this as standard policy. This was because, before it was put in place, scammers would actually use coordinated campaigns of support calls with otherwise legitimate accounts in order to extract piecemeal details about how the company's fraud investigations worked, then reorganize their scamming to precisely evade the time periods and credit card checks used at the time.
This was how Simplii and BMO (two Canadian banks) were hacked earlier this year.
> The hackers explained that they were able to breach the banks’ sub-par security by using an algorithm to generate account numbers and then posing as customers who had forgotten their passwords.
“They were giving too much permission to half-authenticated account which enabled us to grab all these information,” the email said, adding that the system “was not checking if a password was valid until the security question were input correctly.”
At my company, there was a specially-trained fraud department that could handle cases like that, with specially arranged hoop-jumping to prevent social engineering for information. I would expect that Paypal has something similar, but maybe the phone drone in that case was too untrained or unmotivated to transfer things to them.
Financial fraud prevention gambits are complicated.
It may be possible that PP thought someone else was using your account.
What should happen in these scenarios is simply a validation of some kind ie payment only goes through if you click on the email your received.
I used to travel to SF from Canada a lot and my bank would block my Visa even though I told them not to.
In the US there's no password in Visas, i.e. no chip-and-pin, which is totally crazy = huge fraud.
It's funny to think in the Silicon Valley, top tech companies in the world ... everyone is still using that old mag stripe stuff when pretty much the rest of the world has moved on.
The US largely migrated to chip and signature in 2015. I think a large majority of credit card uses today are chip in the US because the issuers quickly sent out chip cards, most terminals got updated to use them, and swipe is rejected often if chip is available.
To be clear, this is chip (and sometimes signature for large purchases) but not chip-and-pin, so the original statement of no passwords generally holds true, but the mag stripes are generally not used anymore.
There are still idiot retailers that won't support the chip for debit transactions. Or even stupider, some let you choose between credit or a debit after inserting to the chip reader and reject you for choosing debit.
Mag strips are often used by ATMs and machines that you stuff cards into for tickets (train, museum etc).m I don’t know why but I’ve never encountered an ATM that uses the chip. I’m an MRI radiographer with expertise in the area of mag strip erasure. Chips are fine though and work after repeated exposure to 3T magnets.
I’ve inferred that the newer ATMs I’ve encountered use chips: the card stays in the machine for the entire transaction and is released to you right before the cash is dispensed.
I don't think I've ever used an ATM that doesn't do this since I started using them some time in the late 90's, even when the cards had magstripe and the chip was a twinkle in a beach's eye.
Pbh101 and eythian - where in the world are you? I’m in New Zealand usually and France currently and I’ll pay attention in the U.K. next week. I’d love the strip to be redundant.
From NZ, now in NL. In both places, the card is virtually always ingested into the machine, and only released as the second-last step (before you get the cash.)
In actual practice TONS of people ruin their chips or regularly run them while doing stupid things like holding onto the card and bending it slightly or pulling it out early. When it fails to go through because they couldn't follow directions or because its outright broken they keep using their cards for months or until they get a new one expecting the retailer to deal with their half broken credit instrument and complaining energetically if it doesn't work.
Since a relatively small number of complaints ruins the parent companies perception of how well the individual store is doing as far as customer service the store level doesn't want anything to inconvenience their customers especially since literally 99.9999% of swipes are from legit customers not thieves.
The retailer either accepts swipes or not, ditto for your bank, the fact that there is a fall back feature if chip fails isn't a security failure unless it opens up a new avenue. (Someone could just print a magic strip unless one or both blocked mag strip charges)
At some retailers lights will flash around both the swipe slot and the chip slot on the machine when it is time to pay, but I’ve experimented with swiping a chip-enabled card and every time the machine immediately says ‘Insert Chip’. I think retailers still really want to accept swipes to prevent chip reliability issues from resulting in lost sales, but they also want to heavily prefer chip transactions because then they aren’t as liable in fraud cases. So perhaps they’ve bought credit card machines that have conditional-swipe failover for this.
It is about processing fees IIRC. No way to avoid the fraud liability but you can get a lower cost per transaction by having chip and being certified to take payments through it (including some extra auditing)
Given how craptacular the terminals are here, not having the fallback would lead to a nontrivial amount of lost sales. (Sooo.. I can’t pay? Guess I have to abandon this cart of groceries and find a bank branch...)
The chips also don’t seem to last as long as the magstripes for some reason (which makes zero sense when you think about it). I’ve had to get my card replaced 3x in the space of two years.
This even works in chip-and-pin systems, at least here in Australia. Makes me sad, I don't really understand why falling back to what we're trying to replace is considered a good idea :(
I tried to delink my bank account from PayPal, so I could close it, and it refused cos I apparently owed $1.27 even tho my balance said $0. I tried to add a credit card but it was flagged as suspicious. Contacting PayPal they said I needed to go into the bank and put some money, my account so PayPal could take it. But I had already closed the bank account.
After PayPal refusing to help. I resolved it by opening a new PayPal account. Adding my credit card (not flagged suspicious) and transfer $2 to the account. Then I could delink the bank account and close it. Then I closed the new account I opened.
I never knew I had a negative balance. Until after 2 years of it using PayPal they sent me a random email to inform me I had 30 days before they would pass it to debt collectors. So I figured better to close the account. Never use PayPal anyway.
I donno. This is PayPal Australia, maybe they operate differently. I couldn’t even figure out how my account got into a negative balance to begin with.
Unfortunately I don’t have any of the old emails otherwise I would upload it.
I've heard nothing but bad things about PayPal and how they often hold your own money hostage. Why don't people switch to alternatives? Are there no good ones?
The reason sellers don't go elsewhere is that buyers really like it, because it gives buyers a lot of power.
I've had them be annoying to me before. My favorite PP fact I found out the hard way: never put the string 'aleph' in the note field. Apparently that's flagged as a Terror-Word(tm), and it held up a transaction of mine for over a month.
I still use them, but only under modified-casino rules: never play with money you can't lose. Have a separate bank account just for them, so they can't get up to shenanigans with more than you intend; never depend on them for anything time sensitive; and never send money anyone depends on for anything important.
Never hold a PP balance. If you receive money into your PP account, treat it as unavailable unless you successfully spend it on goods or services.
Never link your PP account to a bank account.
Only fund your PP account with a credit card, so you have some protection when things go wrong.
The problem is that securily sending someone's money to someone else while avoiding fraud is hard. So you have a service that is difficult and expensive (for the merchant typically), or you have one that sucks for some users but good enough for most.
For what it's worth, I've never had a bad experience with PayPal. I've heard all the horror stories, but nothing has come close to that. I sold something on Ebay once and the buyer didn't receive the item, and did what he should and reported it to Ebay/PayPal. Paypal started the dispute resolution process, and I uploaded a receipt of me sending it. The dispute was resolved in my favour.
I started accepting donations from a community gaming website via PayPal and I was very hesitant about using it due to the bad stories I've heard. A couple of months and a couple of hundreds of dollars later, no problems yet.
The biggest 'problem' I've had with PayPal is moving to a new country. You can't add International cards to your account, and you can't change the country of your PayPal account. The only solution for me was to create a new account, which is fine I guess.
But then I guess you never have a bad experience until you do.
We had a problem where after about 10 years, PayPal suddenly decided that our account was in the wrong country, and the only solution was to close it. Kafkaesque.
> I sold something on Ebay once and the buyer didn't receive the item, and did what he should and reported it to Ebay/PayPal. Paypal started the dispute resolution process, and I uploaded a receipt of me sending it. The dispute was resolved in my favour.
How is that not a bad experience for a buyer who never got an item he paid for?
It might be a bad experience for the buyer (I'm not sure - I guess maybe PayPal still reimbursed them? idk?), but I did my part. It's not on me to lose money when I did everything I could.
The buyer kept emailing me after it, 'updating' me on the situation, which I mostly ignored. I believe he was in some smaller town and he knew the postman and had a very strong suspicion that he stole it, or something like that.
Depends on the country. In central europe the seller is responsible until the package arrives at the buyer (for private transactions, not business) so in this case Paypal would resolve in favor of the buyer and you'd have to get the money from the package service.
This is an insufficient explanation. When I pay you money I expect to get something in return. I have zero insight into who dropped the ball nor do I care. Your obligation wasn't to drop something at the mail it was to provide the customer with product whether this involves a rocket ship, fedex, or literal magic.
Every real merchant who deals with the public at scale accepts this and refunds in such cases. Presumably they eat the cost or THEY purchase insurance for the shipping and roll this into the cost so they don't have to tell customers I'm spending YOUR money on drugs and hookers and don't care if you actually got anything for it.
Such interactions absolutely destroy relationships with customers and the customers bank is likely to issue a charge back to protect their relationship with their customers.
For me, it depends on the context. In a B2B transaction, my basic assumption is that the vendor will ensure that the goods are delivered, and will make things right if they fail.
In my personal life on the other hand, I'm regularly prompted at checkout to decide between registered post with insurance, or regular post without. If I opted out of insurance, I wouldn't blame the seller for the package not arriving or any damage (presuming of course that it was packaged appropriately), and I'd fully expect Paypal to resolve in their favour after verifying that the package was actually sent.
It's true that this would ruin the customer relationship which is why some businesses may offer to make things right anyway, but I personally wouldn't expect it.
That said, the consumer protection laws in my country (Australia) are fairly strong so I may well be entitled to redress; this is just my personal attitude.
If you accept PayPal as a merchant, every dollar you have received is 100% at risk until you have a) received it in your bank account, and b) removed it from any account for which PayPal has the information necessary to perform ACH withdrawals. For merchants, PayPal is a nightmare.
As far as alternatives, customers seem to love PayPal, because they side with buyers effectively 100% of the time in any disputes. So even if there were a convenient PayPal clone (which there isn't, at least in the US), you still wouldn't match the conversion rate that PayPal has, as many people will only use PayPal.
So, you can either accept a lower conversion rate by going with something like Stripe (because users don't want to enter their CC information directly on small merchant sites), or you can accept PayPal and be essentially guaranteed that at some point your account will be closed and you'll be screwed out of a significant amount of revenue. Currently, these are the bad choices that merchants face.
There are exceptions to every rule, but in the vast majority of cases, they side with buyers. I once had someone that admitted in email that they were trying to extort me into refunding them. PayPal actually wrote back saying they were going to go to bat for me with the card issuer after I showed them these emails, but the card issuer didn't budge. I have no idea if PayPal sent the card issuer the emails, I just know that I wound up being out the money.
So you aren't just fighting with PayPal, you're fighting with card issuers as well. PayPal will side with buyers in most cases, and in the few instances where it is obvious that the merchant is correct and PayPal tries to do the right thing, then the card issuer will pick it up and screw the merchant from their side of it.
Regardless of who does the screwing, the merchant is the one that suffers in the end by accepting PayPal.
Companies have been using PayPal for over a decade without their accounts being closed.
Very large companies have nothing to worry about from PayPal, but small merchants have a very high percentage chance of being screwed by them. See http://www.paypalsucks.com/
Suppose I sell things on my website, and you visit it and buy something. You pay with a credit card. Maybe I accept credit cards directly and you pay that way, or maybe I accept PayPal and you pay me that way, and pay PayPal with a credit card.
Now suppose it turns out I have misrepresented the items I sell. When your item arrives, you find that my site was pretty much fraud. You try to contact me to demand a refund...but no one answers the phone or responds to email. That's because I took all the money from you and the rest of the people I deceived and moved far away, to someplace safe from extradition to the US and that won't enforce US civil judgments.
So you call up your credit card company, tell them what happened, and they quickly refund your money. As do the credit card companies of all the other people I took advantage of.
Where does the credit card company get the money for all those refunds? They aren't going to get it from me. They certainly have no interest in eating those losses themselves.
What they do is require a business that accepts credit cards to have an account at a "merchant bank". When someone pays that business by credit card, the credit card company does not pay the business directly. They pay the merchant bank, which pays the business.
In order to be allowed to do this, the merchant bank has to enter into a contract with the credit card company that says that the merchant bank will pay the credit card company for all refunds and chargebacks. The merchant bank will try to get the refund money from the business, but if they fail they have to make up the difference.
The way merchant banks do this is they hold back some of the money they receive from the credit card company for the business, to build up a buffer to cover refunds and chargebacks. As the business establishes a track record and the merchant bank becomes more confident in its estimates of the refund/chargeback risk for the business, they will adjust the amount they hold in reserve.
I don't know exactly how it works when a buyer uses a credit card to pay PayPal, but somewhere between the credit card company and the seller there is an entity taking the role of the merchant bank and guaranteeing that the credit card company won't be left holding the bag if the seller can't cover refunds/chargebacks.
I suspect that the entity is PayPal itself, and most of the incidents you hear about of them holding some seller's money is them increasing the reserve because there was some change in his selling pattern that suggested the current reserve was no longer in line with their estimates of his refund/chargeback risk.
I think people don't switch to alternatives because the alternatives, at least the ones that provide strong consumer protection, almost all have the same or similar mechanisms to try to make sure that if the seller is bad it is the seller who pays.
They could switch to alternatives that do pay the seller directly with no mechanism for a refund other than asking the seller, such as most cryptocurrencies, but then they would probably lose a lot of buyers unless they were very well established businesses with outstanding reputations. (But if that were the case, then they probably could accept credit cards without their merchant bank requiring a large reserve).
Taking money from paypal is a risk, as there's a period of time it's in paypal before you extract it
Sending money to a store on paypal doesn't seem to be a problem
As I understand it, expensive processes required for compliance with financial system/anti-money laundering laws make a moat for most money transmitting businesses. That moat prevents upstarts from challenging incumbents effectively.
Presumably someday cryptocurrencies will be able to fill the PayPal niche, but that requires a more robust buyer-merchant ecosystem than exists at present.
Bitcoin supports multisig transactions, which allows a buyer and seller to choose a third-party mediator who can side with one of them in the event of a dispute. If you find that all the counterparty risk in your transactions are placed on the buyer this is a problem with your use of Bitcoin, not Bitcoin itself.
We already have this mediator in the fiat world, though. It's called PayPal, or the bank that issued my VISA, or whomever else sits in between the merchant and myself. It also takes a ~2-3% cut for this service, and returns ~1% to me in cashback.
Why will this be any cheaper, or safer, or fairer with Bitcoin? All the incentives in this business align with the buyer. 90% of the time, I have a choice between many equivalent merchants, all of whom want my business. I will go with the one that supports my cash-back credit card - whose issuer will almost always side with me in a dispute.
Once these escrow services become popular in the crypto world, you're back to square one. The reasons for why PayPal sucks for some of its users have nothing to do with fiat money, and everything to do with the nature of the escrow business. It would be just as shitty for said users if it transacted in Bitcoin, Dogecoin, or silver bullion.
We already have third party mediators; paypal and visa.
The mediator can decide against your case just like Paypal or Visa can. Even worse, now I have to find some random mediator the seller trusts.
How is that better than plain bank transactions or paypal? The fees are not even cheaper for that "privilege" of having some random mediator play paypal-on-the-blockchain.
I purchased the board game "Cuba" from someone on gumtree (we're both Australian) and paid them with Paypal. For the transaction note I wrote "Cuba" and my (Australian) address.
This is what I received from Paypal:
To ensure that activity and transactions comply with current regulations, PayPal is requesting that you provide the following information via email to ComplianceTransactions@paypal.com
1. Purpose of payment XXXXXXXXXXXX attempted on 29 May 2016 in the amount of 53.00 AUD, including a complete and detailed explanation of the goods or services you intended to purchase. Please also explain the transaction message: "Cuba and postage to 4113. <my address>."
They obviously have a block on the word "Cuba" and there was some back and forth to let the transaction through.
> 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.
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?
That can be difficult if security features rely on humans not being able to subvert the process, I think. But for other processes, this should be the default!
I make and upload electronic music to SoundCloud. Once I sent a joke DM to my friend, another SoundCloud user, mimicking a typical spam post at the time. SoundCloud's spam filtration system autobanned and deleted my account. I had it back a couple days later but a bunch of stuff is still off with my account(fewer plays, likes, followers, etc).
Once we let the machines make the decisions, and rely on them to do a "better job" there will be cases like this where it's just cheaper and easier to just follow the program and explain what happened.
Actually we are building a zoo for ourselves where humans will make no decisions at all about anything of consequence!
Remember when the United Airlines system flagged specific passengers for removal? Throughout every step of the process employees were blocked or discouraged from exercising common sense to come up with a creative solution and bargain with passengers.
I'm incredibly sad at how much of my programming goes into monitoring the performance of my coworkers. The worst part is when I write a new tool and take a look at it before management does. Usually only 1 or 2 people are doing the tasks that management is asking everyone to do daily.
My former boss was once a programmer. Then he became a manager, so he wrote tools to help monitor his department. That went well for years. Then another manager was brought in to "help" him, and months later he was fired. I guess it was kind of obvious, but it still made an impression on me how cold blooded it was.
The metrics* gathered on us were pretty meaningless, and didn't meet the cardinal rule of being actionable, but we still had to go over them each and every week. And some of the actual work was producing reports on productivity for other parts of the company in different places.
*Despite the fact we were programmers and every person in the department had a different role, we were scored based on tickets done and tickets that failed qa.
I had a related experience wherein I asked Paypal for a debit card. They denied my request and locked my account (with money in it) until I provided a multitude of documents to verify my identity and ownership of my bank account.
Of course, they could provide no information about why this happened or how to avoid it. I became a lot more conservative about using Paypal again, and never did make another request for a debit card.
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.
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"...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
They said they talked to "their recruiter" which usually means they are a full time employee of another organization which has a three year contract to place this person with this company.
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.
To clarify, I find it incredulous that a 3 year contract requiring full-time, on-site, business hour presence wouldn't legally require a company to treat that person as a full-time employee with benefits.
> Does a staffing agency pay as a W-2 employee and provide an insurance plan?
Not necessarily. Some will, but the coverage is usually not awesome. Then the question is, do you want the health insurance, or is it better to get obamacare because the staffing agency is likely going to be more temporary?
I'm becoming more an more of a believer that health insurance should be separate from employment. Mostly because your health is permanent and employment is most likely temporary.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
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...
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.
"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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...)
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.
Yes and no. You’re assuming all systems have a sane way of integrating. You’re also assuming that whoever build this has knowledge of all moving parts and has thought through all edge cases.
When you put in the killswitch, is this for a step, for a workflow, for a subsystem, for the whole thing? It’s alluring to think that you have the option to stop everything, but do you really want to stop everything if there are thousands of things happening in the system?
Can a human think through what happens to what in this situation? If the builders of the system missed it, what are the odds that an operator will catch it?
For example: gas stations. They have a big red button that stops everything. If a pump if on fire it makes sense. If the trash can near the pump is full and you cannot throw your garbage away would anyone stop everything for the can to be emptied?
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.
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.