The Machine Fired Me
idiallo.com
idiallo.com
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.
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.
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...
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).
“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.
—“How do you do?”
tipping of hats ensues
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).
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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Now we're not just talking about a lost opportunity to reward a loyal worker. If you're right, somebody ought to be going to jail.
(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.
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.
>Some of that work included renewing my contract in the new system... When my contract expired, the machine took over and fired me.
There are exceptions, but they are pretty rare in tech.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/small-claims-suits-h...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Then complain to the employers, who are the ones who created that culture.
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.
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?
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.
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
I billed 40 hours a week the entire time.
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
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.
And if there's anything in the comments about "the manager and director being supportive", I don't see it -- where did you get that?
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).
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'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.
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.
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.'”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
maybe the engineer that designed the system got themselves fired while they were testing the system
Wow, talk about someone who really never learned the importance of thinking things through.
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.
I actually stayed an extra week to receive the promo.
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.
Too late though. :)
They don't stay, and you end up wasting a perfectly valid promotion while some one who would stick longer with you could have got it.
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.
Maybe someone just unassigned your employee id to the role, because in reality you weren't actually taking the job!
> I resigned just after I had gotten a promotion, but before the date when the promo was effective
If I get sick before my insurance is effective...I don't get my coverage.
If I resign before my raise is effective...I don't get my raise.
All of this is what "effective" means.
As I understand it, it goes like this:
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
I understand the surprise.
I had interpreted that as being resignation effective before the promotion. But I was probably wrong.
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.
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.
aka the peter principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle)
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.
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.
The span at the level lower than your performance is accommodated by an excellent bonus and stock refresh.
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.
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/03/identity-the...
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'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.
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.
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.
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 author's contract hadn't even ACTUALLY expired. The end date was wrong on the system. That doesn't actually affect his contract.
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.
It’s a shit situation and the company should have made him whole, but on ethical not legal grounds.
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.
You cant get out of "frustrating a contract" by saying its a mistake
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.
“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.”
The episode about the black engineer who isn't detected by the motion sensors is basically straight out of HP's webcam fiasco[1](although the show takes it to the logical and hilarious extreme).
[1] http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/race/2009/12/hp-webcam-c...
https://www.hulu.com/watch/81765
In my opinion, BOT is one of the best comedy shows of the past decade and that episode is widely considered to be the best one.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/the-u...
Can be solved by illuminating the face with IR though, which should work across all ethnicities.
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 the system had failed for with people with different hair color rather than skin color would they have been equally lazy?
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."
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.
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.""
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.
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.)
> 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.
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.
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:
https://www.amazon.com/Sundown-Towns-Hidden-Dimension-Americ...
These were known as "sundown towns" because non-white people had to leave by sundown or face violence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundown_town
These came about not because there were never any black people, but because white people indulged in violent ethnic cleansing. This happened most prominently during the Nadir: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir_of_American_race_relatio...
He proves this quite clearly through census data, where places that used to be racially mixed suddenly got white and then stayed that way for decades.
He doesn't give any specific Vermont examples, but Vermont had a prominent Klan presence in the 1920s: http://vermonthistory.org/research/research-resources-online...
Later, as suburbanization happened, white supremacy was maintained more subtly, through means such as racial covenants: https://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/discrimination-in-deed/C...
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".)
> 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.
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
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.
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?"
I'm not much of a TV person, so I'm not familiar with their shows. But I took a look: https://www.bet.com/shows.html
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.
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.
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).
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.
If it's not worth the trouble to see if your system works for non-whites, that's beyond lazy.
Like the soap dispensers that don't work for dark skinned people.
Don't take it seriously.
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.
1984 is also a comedy.
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!If you think this is a bad thing, then it's an organizational problem and has nothing to do with computers.
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.
Depending on the jurisdiction, pharmacists aren't allowed to prescribe stuff or treat people on the spot. That's business of a (licensed) doctor.
Clearly, some commenters are also trying hard to be robot-swappable. :)
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.
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?
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.
[0] Relative to medical emergencies.
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.
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 basically the issue we're trying to solve, where to draw that line?
It does not loose meaning because it can be aborted if stuff goes FUBAR.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
"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.
When the orders come from a computer. Will any of that happen, will there be someone responsible?
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?
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.
To this observation I highly recommend E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops, first published in 1909(!).
[0] http://www.ele.uri.edu/faculty/vetter/Other-stuff/The-Machin...
That one has actually happened: http://bgr.com/2016/05/17/car-gps-mapping-directions-lake/
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.
[0]: http://torontosun.com/2016/05/13/woman-follows-gps-ends-up-i...
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.
"Dunder Mifflin Infinity" - Season 4 Episode 3/4
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.
Reminds me of the Google Ultron IT guy story, from 2014 (I think? How do 4Chan/American dates work?)
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".
-- 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."
But it can also liberate us, and we should seek to maximize the liberating force of technology and try to disrupt the enslaving tendency.
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 renew every two weeks. You have to stay ahead of people, ideally lock in your renewal before the existing contract concludes.
I also do not understand why a check couldn't be cut. Submit to accounts payable with an email approval?
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 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.
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.
Of course, he's also well within his rights to sue over it.
If he missed out on pay then it's because no one cared enough/someone didn't care enough to sort it out.
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!
Yeah, judging from this thread and the negative scores on some of my comments, I was way off base about that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
They might be, or might not be. Constructive dismissal is a thing.
Constructive dismissal is dismissal, for all intents and purposes, without being fired.
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.
You can't just say "nah nah I fired you two weeks ago hah!"
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.
It does seem like there are two ways of looking at it.
As I read the article, the employee's manager needed to renew his contract, which he failed to do. And this is a literal quote by OP from the article:
"When my contract expired, the machine took over and fired me."
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".
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.
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.
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".
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.
A 3-year contract is a long-term contractor... Many permanent employees don't stick around that long.
Three years is a long time in contractor-land, but it's a drop in the bucket for career company employee.
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...
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.
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.
You know that one of the cause of the Revolution was a Financial crisis, right?
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!!
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Express_Flight_3411_inc...
Presumably someday cryptocurrencies will be able to fill the PayPal niche, but that requires a more robust buyer-merchant ecosystem than exists at present.
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.
How is that not a bad experience for a buyer who never got an item he paid for?
No postal system is without risk; that’s why they offer package insurance, registered post, etc.
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.
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.
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.
I wrote about it here: https://www.cogini.com/blog/paypal-know-your-customer-failur...
As a buyer, I don't care for that feature of Bitcoin.
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.
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'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.
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.
I've won disputes on PayPal as a seller.
Companies have been using PayPal for over a decade without their accounts being closed.
You're talking nonsense.
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/
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).
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.
> 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.”
Source: https://www.ccn.com/hackers-demand-1-million-in-xrp-after-br...
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.
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.
It's the other way around. If you try the chip 3+ times, and it doesn't work, you can swipe the card, and the swipe transaction will work.
When the more secure method fails, it falls back to the less secure one. It's lunacy.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
I try to pay with my prepaid card directly whenever I can.
> 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...
That's just what "The Machine" says and may not be the intended policy, even if it is now the effective one.
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 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.
It's both good and bad, but typically a contractor gets a higher rate than an employee since health insurance, etc is not provided.
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.
Does a staffing agency pay as a W-2 employee and provide an insurance plan?
I'm a contractor (1099) so I buy my own insurance. So I have it...
In either of the above cases, the company where I do my work does not provide my insurance.
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.
The problem is that not everyone wants to live in Detroit, KC, LA, Chicago, say. So instead they fly back and forth.
Edit: Slight disclaimer, "work at companies like this" in a software/IT role...
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.
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.
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.
If anyone remembers the name of the story or author, please post or let me know.
>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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is there no sense of responsibility here?
http://www.btboces.org/Downloads/7_There%20Will%20Come%20Sof...
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.
> 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.
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.)
This comment chain on HN was the first thing I found when I googled "Job Inaction Timothy Zahn".
Looks like a good read though, might save it for lunch.
I'm really old.
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.
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 :)
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.
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...
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.
Glad to hear that you are able to continue on your job.
This is already happening. It’s an emerging field cleverly called “management automation.”
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?
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.
I mean, did he get the back pay owned?
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.
Keep the decision in the hands of a human but let the machine do the grunt work.
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.
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.
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?