
The Machine Fired Me - foxfired
https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-fired-me
======
romwell
I have a story in a similar vein, although a much less scary one.

In that instance, The Machine Cleaned Out My Desk.

I had a cubicle at the company HQ, but was for some period of time working
from home in another state. I still kept quite a few things in the cubicle
(notebooks, mugs, etc), which I used when I was in the area.

When I finally came back, I noticed, after a month or two, that my office
number has not been updated in the system (from being "HOME OFFICE"), and sent
a request to IT to change it.

The next day I came back to see a pristine desk.

With all my stuff gone.

See, my request to update the office number triggered a relocation request.
The system, in preparation of the move-in of the "new" tenant (me) into my
cubicle, has removed all the belongings of the previous tenant (which also
happened to be me).

Luckily, all the removed stuff was put in a box, which I got back several days
later, after my manager found the right person in the facilities dept.

Just goes to show that automating even the simplest procedures can be very
tricky - and that perhaps it's best to have people on-site manually approve
any destructive steps.

~~~
gaius
_The next day I came back to see a pristine desk. With all my stuff gone._

Something like this happened to me too at a previous employer, some things I
recovered but many were just gone, the cleaning staff apparently help
themselves to stuff that “former” employees leave behind, so my fancy
headphones for example were just gone. Fucks given by HR/facilities? Zero. One
of many similar incidents for me and my cow-orkers. And this was a desk move
literally from one row to another!

It wasn’t even an algorithm per se, most of the “machine” at this place was
people in India following checklists manually. You could speak to them (tho'
they made this very difficult to do) and tell them to stop and they would say
“yes” and do it anyway.

I had a friend at another company who was mistakenly terminated, a week later
his manager called him at home to find out if he was OK, the conversation
apparently went,

Are you sick? What happened?

You fired me you bastard!

No I didn't! Please come back!

Too late now, I have another job.

~~~
romwell
A paper/protocol machine is still a machine, though. Sucks that it ate your
headphones!

~~~
gaius
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...

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>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).

~~~
sametmax
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.

~~~
krzat
I wonder if western culture has similiar quirks that we don't even realise.

~~~
daxelrod
“How are you?”

“Good”

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.

~~~
pimeys
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...

~~~
tallanvor
It's a quirk in English. "How are you?", "How's it going?", etc. are often
greetings, not serious questions.

~~~
andai
“How do you do?”

—“How do you do?”

 _tipping of hats ensues_

------
tigershark
Something eerily similar happened to me. One day I arrived at work as usual
and the turnstile didn’t work. I had to request a guest pass and call some
colleague to escort me because I was disabled in the security system. I went
up and I obviously couldn’t open the door and access my pc. The scary thing
was that I was still in the middle of my contract, it would have expired only
3 months later. I contacted my boss and went home. A couple of days later they
managed to reinstate my security account, although I couldn’t still access my
pc for one or two days. In these days I just helped my colleagues. Once I got
back my account I started re-requesting the 10s of permissions that I needed,
and while I was doing so I found an open request to recycle my machine.
Luckily I managed to contact the guy that was supposed to take it and I
stopped him just in time. On the whole I probably lost two weeks. What was the
trigger for my termination? Apparently someone managed to input the wrong
termination date in SAP for my contract, and that started the havoc. Obviously
there were alerts before my termination but everyone ignored them because in
the other systems visible to the approvers my termination date was correct.
Luckily I got paid for every single day, even when I was at home, but after
three months I’m still suffering from random problems in random systems that
are probably related to this mess.

~~~
std_throwaway
> and went home

Did your boss send you home? If not, you should probably stay and be ready for
work assignments (even if they don't come). For good measure contact some
colleagues each day so they remember you and take a picture before you enter
and after you leave.

~~~
amorousf00p
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.

------
rectang
> _I missed 3 weeks of pay because no one could stop the machine._

Why has this company not made their loyal worker whole? He stayed there when
they needed him even when their system was trying to lock him out.

They need to fix this. If they don't, they are not a company anyone should
work for. Perhaps the worker did not want to risk making a big stink, but a
manager should have taken the initiative. Humans were involved by the end and
well aware of what was going on.

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

~~~
astura
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.

~~~
davedx
That's weird though. Was it a three year contract or wasn't it?

~~~
Bartweiss
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.

~~~
astura
If that was the case they would have not said "renew." "Renew" has special
meaning in contracts.

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

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

~~~
def8cefe
> No one was able to stop the machine because no one really knew all the
> different processes or they weren't built to stop midway.

This is (in my opinion) one of the reasons why everyone talking about getting
rid of dedicated IT ops in their organizations is making a mistake. You can
have devs building integrations and automation all day, but you still need
sysadmins who can see the whole picture and override them when necessary.
Having an outsourced (or even internal) hell desk that goes off a script
doesn't take care of situations like this either.

~~~
falcolas
Don't worry, you can still pay outlandish prices for top tier A-Z support,
where you can argue for a week with a drone that no, their system is not
properly following the HTTP RFC, and here's the TCP dumps to prove it.

Imagine if we didn't have an operations engineer who knew how to trace down
the problem using a TCP dump. Or if it had been a developer who was, by the
proper "DevOps" hygenics, denied access to the boxes to run TCP dumps.

Yeah, they're fixing it. No, we don't have a timeline.

~~~
fphhotchips
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.

------
drewg123
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.

~~~
realo
This is interesting.

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.

~~~
rinchik
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.

~~~
kamaal
That's general HR pep talk.

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.

~~~
ironjunkie
This.

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.

~~~
kamaal
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.

------
pkaye
When a previous company was acquired, everyone got a new job offer generally
better since the company wanted everyone to stick around. Well except for one
guy. A junior engineer in one of our teams. He was a really good engineer too
so we were shocked. It turned out he had the same first and last name as
another person at our company so they thought it was a duplicate entry and
omitted it. Eventually a offer was prepare after a week of escalation.

~~~
kbart
Heh, that's the real problem actually with buggy name-based systems. In my
current company we have a person officially called "Name Surname 2" for the
same reason.

~~~
vinceguidry
Because Name Surname 1 was already taken!

~~~
SparkyMcUnicorn
Because Name Surname 0 was already taken!

~~~
vinceguidry
No way they were forward-thinking enough to use zero-indexing.

------
msisk6
I had a similar experience but in reverse.

About six months ago I left my long-time enterprise-y employer for a startup
in another city. So we sold our house, packed up the family, bought a new
house and moved in.

After 3 months it became obvious I had made a terrible mistake, so we sold the
new house, packed up the family again, and bought another new house in the
same city we had just left 3 months ago so I could return to my previous
employer. They were happy to have me back and I ended up in the same desk and
chair I had just vacated 3 months previous.

Only it took awhile. Since I was already in the system as a terminated
employee it required manual intervention and code changes to the employee
management system to get me added back in. It took about 3 weeks before I
could do anything besides go to meetings.

If anything needs disrupting, it’s the employee management systems in use by
pretty much all the large enterprise shops. It’s a mess.

~~~
zerr
Maybe next time just try out things at first? i.e. rent, move the family into
the rented home after 2-3 months without selling the original house for some
time.

~~~
TorKlingberg
Sure, but the GP wasn't asking for life advice.

~~~
zerr
It's not an advice but things to bring on to discuss why they did the
otherwise.

------
rhacker
It makes sense that the HR IT industry would have some of the worst software
developers. It seems obvious to me at least that you can't rely on first name
+ last name to make a match, and if you do, you have to write code that fails
if there are multiple users with such a combination, as well as falling back
on soundex or double or triple metaphone as well as nickname support. Second,
the screens involved in termination should display warnings if multiple
employees have similar names and departments, etc...

I've been in health IT for the last 15ish years so I know a lot about patient
matching (wrote at least 4 patient matching MPIs in my time at different
companies).. so maybe it's just my perspective..

However, that all being said, almost all processes like this are NOT
automated, but instead handled by automated emails telling people to do
operations. You're basically then subject to the lowest common denominator
logic of people in IT that are in charge of disabling accounts- with no regard
or care about who the person is.

Anyway to the person that got fired like this - just be happy you are out of
the environment - it is not for you. There are signs in life.

~~~
jergason
Why would HR IT have worse software developers than other industries?

~~~
jachee
Because HR in general has worse employees than other disciplines?

Seriously, in my 20+ year career, I've run across very few legitimately
talented people in HR. The department seems to attract the kind of people who
have little to offer intrinsically; who happen to be willing to facilitate the
necessary protocols, as minimally effective as possible, while claiming
"people skills" that end up being little more than office politics.

~~~
brazzledazzle
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.

------
gambiting
" I had missed 3 weeks of work by that time, and pay."

The what now? I can only assume this is in US, because in EU he would be
100000% entitled to pay for every single minute of this going on.

~~~
macca321
Maybe not if he is a Contractor.

~~~
kbart
Even in such case contract usually has a clause about premature termination
and related compensation.

~~~
garmaine
Did you read the article? There was no premature termination here. He was
“fired” exactly because his contract expired.

It’s a shit situation and the company should have made him whole, but on
ethical not legal grounds.

~~~
molf
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).

~~~
pluma
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.

EDIT: For context, this happened in Germany.

------
bonyt
This is literally an episode of Better Off Ted.[1] In it, the titular Ted is
inadvertenly deleted from the company system when trying to correct a
misspelling of his last name. Eventually, he is forced to interview for his
own job as the system had already put out an ad for his replacement. I think
the most striking part of it, and of the true story from the post, is the
human factor - the idea that the humans involved looked to the system as an
authority and followed its orders blindly.

I wonder what other examples there are of people blindly following technology
- people driving into lakes because their GPS told them to, etc. Plus, as our
society gets more and more dependent on these systems, we may lose out on the
flexibility that human mediators and problem solvers once gave us. The human
tendency to defer to authority may never be as terrifying as when that
authority is held by an uncaring machine with a couple bugs.

What was once satire has become too real.

[1]:
[http://betteroffted.wikia.com/wiki/Goodbye,_Mr._Chips](http://betteroffted.wikia.com/wiki/Goodbye,_Mr._Chips)

~~~
zby
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.

~~~
Rjevski
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.

~~~
UweSchmidt
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.

~~~
Rjevski
> cancel your service

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.

~~~
vinceguidry
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.

------
linsomniac
This reminds me of a co-workers 6 month battle to get his drivers license
back. He got a letter from his insurance company saying his car insurance was
cancelled. He called them up to find out why and they said it was because his
license was suspended. After several calls to the police, he found there was a
warrant out for him for ignoring a traffic ticket for being pulled over in
Wyoming. Now, my co-worker is from Wyoming, so it wasn't totally implausible,
but the specific location he had never been to and he definitely wasn't there
when the ticket was issued.

The county issued a request for a copy of the ticket, since it was out of
state. Weeks later the copy came and the ticket clearly wasn't for him. It
didn't have his drivers license number, had a different name and address. I
can't remember if it had a similar license plate number or not. ISTR that the
name was incorrect.

So it seems like there was a data entry problem from the ticket into the
system, and his name was selected as "good enough".

You'd think once it was seen that the ticket wasn't written for him it'd be
all solved... Nah. He had to get up to where the ticket was issued, 300 miles
away, without a car, and go through the system to prove that the ticket was
invalid. Then he had to spend months calling the DA there over and over to get
him to get it all resolved. It was always "I'm waiting to hear back from this
person" or "I'm trying to get ahold of this other person" or "we are waiting
for this paperwork".

~~~
tomjen3
Sounds like he could have saved a bunch of time by getting a lawyer to write
them a note - shouldn't be hard to prove damages.

------
ethicsengineer
Engineers need to read The Trial by Franz Kafka. I don't think people fear
soulless beurocracy without any possible resolution enough.

~~~
noncoml
One of my favorite parts:

\-- Before the Law

A man from the country seeks the law and wishes to gain entry to the law
through an open doorway, but the doorkeeper tells the man that he cannot go
through at the present time. The man asks if he can ever go through, and the
doorkeeper says that it is possible "but not now". The man waits by the door
for years, bribing the doorkeeper with everything he has. The doorkeeper
accepts the bribes, but tells the man that he accepts them "so that you do not
think you have failed to do anything." The man does not attempt to murder or
hurt the doorkeeper to gain the law, but waits at the door until he is about
to die. Right before his death, he asks the doorkeeper why even though
everyone seeks the law, no one else has come in all the years. The doorkeeper
answers "No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made
only for you. I am now going to shut it."

From:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_the_Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_the_Law)

~~~
irundebian
That was a very interesting piece of text I've never heard of, although I know
Kafka. Thank you!

~~~
noncoml
The full text(only slightly longer) is here: [http://www.kafka-
online.info/before-the-law.html](http://www.kafka-online.info/before-the-
law.html)

------
exegete
I am actually going through this right now. I'm in a position that renews
yearly. I'm a regular employee but it's the way this kind of position works
(I'm being a little vague on purpose to avoid personal identification). Before
renewal I talked to the officer manager, he sent everything over to HR a few
weeks early.... which seems to be the mistake.

HR let it sit on their desk and then forgot. My office manager is working at
getting them to fix it ASAP. I've already missed one paycheck (which I will
receive eventually).

First hint was a notice that I am going to be losing email access soon (which
I still have currently). Then I lost keycard access to the building and office
(it unlocks automatically at a set time, so I can still get in eventually).
I've lost access to some of the resources we have (not critical to my job at
this point). Got a letter in the mail about COBRA. Got a letter in the mail
about retirement. I'm wondering when I will lose access to our wifi and
cluster.

~~~
microcolonel
> _I 'm in a position that renews yearly._

I renew every two weeks. You have to stay ahead of people, ideally lock in
your renewal before the existing contract concludes.

------
newest_user_
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?

~~~
krapp
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.

~~~
crooked-v
> 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.

~~~
perl4ever
...you never know these days if you are talking to someone on the Internet who
believes "code is law".

~~~
jacques_chester
Judges, taken as a whole, tend to believe that _law_ is law.

~~~
nailer
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.

------
arglebarnacle
I was misatakenly caught in an automated ban wave in World of Warcraft for
"botting" just a couple months after joining, but as soon as a human reviewed
my account I was reinstated immediately.

The automated system flagged my account a second time a few weeks later, and
when I appealed they simply said that although they didn't see any evidence of
rule-breaking behavior, nobody got caught by the automated system twice unless
they were cheating.

I was out over $100, and I didn't even get six months to play the game.
Sometimes The Machine just "knows best".

~~~
eridius
Simple explanation: they did in fact see what you were doing and just didn't
want to tell you because they don't want to teach cheaters how to evade bans.
They were hoping after the first review that you would start playing by the
rules.

~~~
milesvp
Even simpler explanation is that false positives are real. All sufficiently
complex systems have them. I'd imagine that triggering a false positive the
first time greatly increases the likelihood that a second false positive is
triggered.

I'd also further assert, that simply being an HN reader means you are more
likely to trigger a false positive than the rest of the population. Blizzard
does some very aggressive memory scans, and they look for tools that are much
more common with developers than the rest of the population. I've personally
used a well known library for code injection, that if I'd had it running on an
unrelated binary while playing WoW they would have seen the signature of the
library, and likely Blizzard would have eventually banned my account.

I don't know if the parent was doing things that Blizzard considers naughty or
not, but I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt given what I've
read about Blizzard's Warden.

~~~
perl4ever
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.

~~~
falcolas
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.

------
fixermark
Peeling back the layers a bit, it seems a major misfire in this whole story is
that the employee in question was a short-term contractor... But a shot-term
contractor who was apparently quite valuable to his team.

Smart companies'll make people in that position permanent employees. The
machine is so automated partially to make sure legal compliance of two
companies sharing one employee is executed upon correctly (because past
lawsuits have made it clear that if you get too chummy with your contractors,
you're on the hook for treating them like they're full-time).

Don't want to get screwed by your own automation? Make fewer people working in
your building interchangeable third-party subcontracts.

~~~
gaius
_a major misfire in this whole story is that the employee in question was a
short-term contractor._

A 3-year contract is a long-term contractor... Many permanent employees don't
stick around that long.

~~~
fixermark
Sorry; I didn't mean anything formal by the "short-term" adjective phrase
there. I meant "In contrast to a full-time employee, whom one assumes is
making a career out of THAT company."

Three years is a long time in contractor-land, but it's a drop in the bucket
for career company employee.

~~~
TeMPOraL
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.

------
smadge
“The Machine” used to be a metaphor for the mindless beaucracy of the State
and the mindless profit seeking of Capital. They both operate algorithmically,
although their “hardware” were still humans. Now we are cutting out the human
entirely from The Machine, hooking control of the economy directly into
trading algorithms, and the control of humans directly into automated
bureaucracies.

~~~
danenania
The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.

------
DoctorOetker
This is the problem of imperative/functional programming languages, instead of
using provers/verifiers.

Edit:

In "The Count of MonteCristo" by Alexandre Dumas, the protagonist was accused
of aiding Bonaparte, and in the French island prison meets the priest who was
accused (under Bonaparte) of aiding royalty. (I may have switched that around,
it's been a while since reading). So even though switches in power occur, once
incarcerated the evolving machine does not correct its past decisions.

When you automate corporate decisions with code, there is no real judicial
branch (arbitrator, judges, ...), only an executive branch (computers) and a
legislative branch (programmers). Hence there is no appeal mechanism.

In theory one could formalize our natural language concepts so that a verifier
(for example MetaMath verifier) can act as a neutral judge. Then the automated
corporate decisions would not just compute the decision to be taken, but also
the proof that this is follows from the axiomatic corporate rules. Of course
there is no guarantee that such a set of axioms actually encode what the
corporation truly wishes, so even in the system I describe Ibrahim would get
fired, BUT with the difference that he (and any superiors all the way up to
the director) can see the "proof" of why this "should" happen, at which point
they will understand which rule(s) were misformalized, which rule(s) did not
accurately convey their intention. At this point they could fix the rule(s)
and verify all the previously generated decisions with proofs, and possibly
identify other individuals who where a bit meeker, and after the 3rd signal
something was wrong simply went home never showing up again...

~~~
vinceguidry
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.

~~~
baud147258
> 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.

~~~
vinceguidry
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.

~~~
baud147258
> material wealth

You know that one of the cause of the Revolution was a Financial crisis,
right?

~~~
vinceguidry
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.

------
terlisimo
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.

~~~
jiaweihli
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?

~~~
madeofpalk
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.

~~~
_drimzy
> 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?

~~~
predakanga
Because the seller fulfilled their part of the sale (I.e. posting the item).

No postal system is without risk; that’s why they offer package insurance,
registered post, etc.

~~~
michaelmrose
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.

~~~
predakanga
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.

------
sbarzowski
The really surprising part is that after this incident OP still wanted to work
with that company, even though from what I understand they didn't make it up
to him in any way.

~~~
broodbucket
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"...

------
reificator
Interesting read, but I did want to touch on this paragraph at the end.

> _PS: I am willing to bet the recent issue with YouTube Piracy filter
> blocking MIT courses and the Blender Foundation are the result of The
> Machine being the ultimate decider. Even though YouTube 's support team
> clearly knows that these don't violate terms and conditions, the Machine
> decided otherwise. And they will have to fight it to death to bring the
> videos back online._

According to Blender the issue is that YouTube is requiring them to switch to
monetized. No more free rides once you're that big.

[https://www.blender.org/media-exposure/youtube-blocks-
blende...](https://www.blender.org/media-exposure/youtube-blocks-blender-
videos-worldwide/)

~~~
RyanShook
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.

------
beilabs
Am I the only one thinking it was a perfect time to negotiate a better salary
seeing as they'd dismissed his contract leaving room open for a new one?

------
reid
A few years ago, I took a sabbatical from Yahoo.

When I returned, I got an email a few days later from a 3rd party survey
company with the subject ”Exit Survey” which began “We’re sorry you’ll be
leaving Yahoo soon.”

I was confused and so was my boss. Turns out some automated process included
people who recently concluded a sabbatical in a mailing list for people who
recently resigned...

------
jasonkester
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.

------
gscott
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.

------
biggc
3 year contract where you need to come in to the office alongside full time
employees every day? How is that not considered full-time?

~~~
bb88
Because a contract is not employment. A contractor has less protections than
an employee.

It's both good and bad, but typically a contractor gets a higher rate than an
employee since health insurance, etc is not provided.

~~~
jedberg
OP was pointing out that if they were a contractor for three years, they were
violating IRS rules.

~~~
bb88
Not necessarily. If the employee is going through a body shop (and it sounds
like he was, since he had a recruiter) then he might be an employee on W2 of
the staffing agency, but not on the actual payroll of the company. That's
different than forcing the person on a 1099 as part of an employment contract.

In the end he's still a "contractor" in the eyes of the company, and typically
if something goes wrong, he's gonna be the first to go.

~~~
jedberg
Yes I said that in my sibling comment.

------
ravitation
I know I'm speaking from a position of privilege, but I really don't
understand how people work at companies like this... The pay must be insane.

Edit: Slight disclaimer, "work at companies like this" _in a software /IT
role_...

~~~
donatj
My thoughts as well. I've spent the last decade+ working for sub-500 person
companies, largely sub-100. I find myself now through acquisition in a 1,000
plus person company and I find it… stifling.

It's bizarre to me to work for a company where I don't know close to everyones
name. This kind of junk never happens in small companies.

~~~
perl4ever
In a small company, you don't get the _protection_ of the bureaucracy either.
You're likely to know the CEO, but that means everything depends on their
character and the culture they institute. And even if they are generally
ethical, a small company CEO who does a good job probably sacrifices a lot and
then feels entitled to sacrifices from employees. And if you can't deal with
politics in a small company, you can't transfer to another division. There are
lots of potential drawbacks of a small company, like a small town.

~~~
donatj
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.

------
PaulRobinson
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.

------
dqpb
Imagine all the poor souls about to get lost in China's social credit system.

------
Spooky23
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.

------
JoeDaDude
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.

------
mmagin
What's disturbing is that this automated process did not verify the
termination with his manager or an actual human in HR.

------
c3534l
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.

------
FLUX-YOU
>HR machine denies human a job

>Hundred of thousands of records were missing and the web interface was not
responding.

Are you sure you guys didn't have an attacker on the loose?

~~~
romwell
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.

------
toomanybeersies
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.

------
planetjones
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.

------
pavel_lishin
> _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.

------
oldandtired
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.

------
nunez
That is an example of a really good offboarding system.

------
Zak
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.

------
otakucode
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?

------
ghoul2
what I don't get is why a director-level person is willing to stand by and let
this happen. Whatever the system says - if I, as manager of someone (and
responsible for them) did not fire that someone, nor agree to they being fired
by a higher up - I am NOT going to let security escort them out - no matter
what.

Is there no sense of responsibility here?

------
notjtrig
Reminds me of 'There Will Come Soft Rains', a 1950 short story about a smart
house dying.

[http://www.btboces.org/Downloads/7_There%20Will%20Come%20Sof...](http://www.btboces.org/Downloads/7_There%20Will%20Come%20Soft%20Rains%20by%20Ray%20Bradbury.pdf)

------
rivo
There was a HN post three years ago on how to declare someone as dead [0].
Granted, this was not the decision of a machine but like in OP's story, it's a
one-way road with no way to "undo" or at least "sudo kill -9" the process,
which makes it a very unpleasant experience.

I can't count the number of times I've hit "undo" on Gmail. Just because I hit
"send" doesn't mean I won't have second thoughts. And in this case, it appears
to have been the absence of an action which triggered the whole process,
making it even more likely that a wrong decision will be made at some point.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10063659](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10063659)

------
tribby
> My manager ... decided not to do much work after that, [including] renewing
> my contract in the new system.

> A simple automation mistake(feature) caused everything to collapse

this is a great story but I must be misreading this detail somehow. it sounds
like a simple _human_ error caused everything to collapse.

~~~
daliusd
In that case we should send copy of "The Design Of Everyday Things" to
designer of the system.

~~~
tribby
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.

------
greedo
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.

------
phyzome
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.)

------
g051051
Remarkably similar to the 1981 Timothy Zahn story "Job Inaction".

~~~
crooked-v
Now I want to see a story that takes the "lost in the company" myth to
farcical extremes, with an entire legion of stormtroopers having to fend for
themselves in a remote corner of a Superduper Star Destroyer.

~~~
Gibbon1
That sounds very Warhammer 40k

------
TimTheTinker
I doubt all business management software is this inflexible (never heard
anyone complain about SAP "taking over"). Anyone have any idea which software
product/service this may have been?

~~~
Analemma_
No way to say without the author chiming in, but it sounds like a bespoke
system consisting of totally unrelated modules (payroll, security, Jira)
hooked up, badly, with in-house scripts. This is the case at a large number of
companies.

As you say, all-in-one systems have their drawbacks, but usually at least can
handle situations like this. But piles of shell scrips to make unrelated
systems talk to each other often lack error handling and rollback.

~~~
TimTheTinker
> But piles of shell scrips to make unrelated systems talk to each other often
> lack error handling and rollback.

Sounds like the same sorts of problems you'd get with an enterprise service
bus (ESB). Glad those have fallen out of favor for good :)

------
blauditore
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.

------
FrozenVoid
When people think of "AI takeover", they don't expect that they're already
controlled by it. We're approaching the state described in this story
[http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm](http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm)

~~~
circlefavshape
Manna already exists in warehousing, I found out last weekend
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice-
directed_warehousing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice-
directed_warehousing)

------
brokenmachine
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...

------
koliber
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.

------
bsvalley
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...

------
singingwolfboy
Archived here:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20180620074341/https://idiallo.c...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180620074341/https://idiallo.com/blog/when-
a-machine-fired-me)

------
randop
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.

------
Blackthorn
They didn't even give him a bonus to make up for those three weeks? Jesus.

------
mfritsche
"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

------
nazka
Imagine with the one of the biggest edge fund, Bridgewater, starting to use AI
in place of management and you have this to the next next level. It's a little
bit scary.

~~~
debt
“AI in place of management”

This is already happening. It’s an emerging field cleverly called “management
automation.”

------
jijji
In 2001 i wrote a similar automation program for a large financial company. At
that time i had no name for it, so we called it "pink slip 2000". Lol

------
z3t4
This is only the beginning! And the orders will be carried out by relentless
humans _just doing their job_.

------
jrootabega
Peculiar that he could log in to confluence but not jira. Maybe there is a
layer of dramatic embellishment here?

------
iyogeshjoshi
This is epic, to think age of AI will come this soon :p, though programmed by
human still controlling human

------
erikb
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?

------
ensiferum
"When my contract expired, the machine took over and fired me."

Your contract expiring is not the same thing as getting fired. The title is a
click bait.

"A simple automation mistake(feature) caused everything to collapse."

No, it sounds like the system just did what it was programmed to do. The real
issue was with the one guy not renewing your contract.

------
pknerd
Scrapy glimpse of what will happen when machines rule in the world.

------
pm24601
Sounds like one of those "smart" contracts at work.

------
hartator
This is not the Machine, this is just a shitty organization.

------
gcp
So the machine "fixed" the "glitch"?

------
xkcdefgh
Sounds more like bad design than automation's fault

------
2T1Qka0rEiPr
I found this article so well written and interesting

------
crb002
I'd ask for the three weeks pay. That is bull.

------
megamindbrian2
This is a really sad story. Thank you for sharing!

------
mankypro
Seems like the site got /.'d

------
brightball
Sounds like a BPM managed process.

------
emilfihlman
Umm, what?

I mean, did he get the back pay owned?

------
jeffrallen
You need a union, Ibrahim.

------
394549
This the problem with automated business processes. It seems easy, until you
think about _all_ the exception paths. Human organizations can adapt and
handle them organically, but a system needs them all specified up front.
Either you spend a massive amount of work to get it right or you have a broken
system. And once you have it right, it's hard to change and adapt.

~~~
davidbanham
A technique I often use in this is to leave a "human in the loop". Have
control points where the system takes no further action until an administrator
requests it. Instead of coding that automated cleanup routine, send a
notification to an admin and let them take care of it manually.

As the system matures and the edge cases become better understood it can
become more automated. At first, though, leave it loose and human-powered
wherever you can.

~~~
jschwartzi
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.

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

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

------
M_Bakhtiari
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.

------
Pica_soO
Has there ever been a attempt to prove that companys hiring and firing
processes are turing complete?

------
holga
Tldr, please?

------
mirceal
sounds like the machine worked perfectly. it did what it was supposed to do
and followed the rules layed out by us humans.

the problem is in the way the workflow is described/implemented - and even
with that we would need to see some numbers around how many times the workflow
ran vs issues encountered.

~~~
pmlnr
All machines should have a big red emergency stop button, including this.

~~~
tgsovlerkhgsel
It's hard when it's a cobbled-together set of systems sending signals to each
other, some of which are automated by human robots (e.g. main system sees
exit, files a dozen tickets, some of these get picked up by different
automation, some of them cause humans to trigger other processes, each of
which can again file half a dozen tickets in three different systems...)

~~~
pmlnr
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.

~~~
mirceal
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?

