Laid-Off Tech Worker Kills 3 in Silicon Valley | Hacker News Reader

Laid-Off Tech Worker Kills 3 in Silicon Valley

nytimes.com

39 pointsMistone56 comments

http://www.siport.com/ : SiPort is a fabless semiconductor company, incorporated in 2004, that received its first round of funding in 2005.

Sounds like they design ASICs for portable devices (audio, video decoders). Or perhaps "designed".

http://www.siport.com/management.htm : The system cannot find the file specified.

How morbidly apt.

There's a lot of fabless IC design startups around here in Silicon Valley and some of them are run like white-collar sweatshops. Second-rate engineers are imported from China or India with low pay but the lure of H1-B sponsorship to work on designs in hopes of flipping it to a bigger semiconductor company or back to OEMs in Asia.

This might be what happened but I think his project, or maybe the whole startup since they ride or die on a single product, got fubared and he was let go. He might be in the middle of relocating to the US or trying to get his family over, or maybe the company screwed him over on pay.

Either way, it's not an excuse to kill but that might be the motive. He probably already landed back in China by now.

I'm surprised at comments here condoning the murder. Getting fired from your job is no excuse for taking someone's life. I don't care what the economy is like - I don't think this guy deserves sympathy, especially not from an educated, smart community like this. Millions of people have lost jobs before, and they've struggled, tried hard, and moved on without resorting to violence.

I know a family member of one of the victims, and they didn't deserve this.

Some people were just speculating what the motive(s) might be. I read nearly all of the other posts before getting to yours and didn't notice any even imply that it was justified.

it was bound to happen eventually. Isn't TC's tracking of layoffs now up to something like 60K people in the last 2 weeks?

With odds like that, it'll be impossible to find a new job...add on top of that the crappy stock market that wiped out people's savings, the downturn in the economy that slashed new job opportunities and many people simply won't be able to survive(hell this guy had a mortgage payment on top of everything else).

So they turn to blaming the guy who made their life miserable. And that would be the guy in charge, who yanked the ground from under their feet.

More appropriate is the "law of extremely large numbers". The vast majority of people will not resort to homicide over a layoff, but 1 in 500,000 might, so when you have a few million layoffs, bad news like this occurs.

I think people are more freaked out about the economy than is necessarily reasonable. It's very bad, but it's not like the entire technology sector is in a hiring freeze. There are still good jobs available; it's just harder to find them. I actually think that this upcoming decade-long crisis will be good, in the long run, both for technology people and average Americans, because the bloat and parasitism of the corporate/managerial/financial class has essentially starved the real economy and those who work within it, and this crisis stands to bring about their demise.

I agree with you to a point. But people can 'survive' on a dollar a day if they have to. Food, water and air is all we really need.

But we are supposed to be better than that. This guy wasn't some bum who dropped out of high school, and now spends all his money on drugs and liquor. I mean what happened to the American dream? You work hard all your life, get a good education, get a good job then someone else fucks up and you have to go live on the street?

You can get ahead, it's just harder during a depression.

I am genuinely surprised more people don't go postal after layoffs. Maybe adult-aged people are just more likely to commit suicide alone or just bury their pride while they lose all their savings and move in with parents/friends.

yeah suicide I don't get at all...if you are going to kill yourself anyways...why not take the people who drove you to it with you?

Or do something wreckless w/o caring about consequences? Steal a Ferrari and drive it at 180 mph w/o a seatbelt until you crash or jump out of an airplane w/o a chute etc.

Slashing your wrists in a bathtub or eating a bullet alone by yourself just seems like a waste of an opportunity

It doesn't seem like the ground was yanked from under his feet.

"Wu, a test engineer who worked at SiPort less than two years, was "let go" Friday morning because of his performance, a company spokeswoman said. Early police reports indicated he was laid off, but the spokeswoman said that was not the case."

http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_10993931

"Police arrest alleged gunman in office park slayings that left 3 dead" http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_10993931

I always thought this kind of thing was always done by uneducated postal workers and the like. Pretty disheartening to see a fellow engineer act so stupidly.

Time to reconsider getting a concealed weapons permit I guess. Condolences to Agarwal and Pugh's (and anon woman's) families.

What will you do with the concealed weapon? Shoot his bullet in mid-air?

I think it's the placebo effect. That's why I carry a homeopathic concealed weapon: a small vial of water with some floating specs of rust in it.

You mean you are carrying a small vial of water that says it has rust in it, but doesn't actually (or at least has a very low probability of having a rust molecule).

That's more correct, actually, and I used to use one of those. But I decided it didn't have enough firepower. Now I prefer my homeopathic Death Star, in case I get attacked by a whole planet at once.

Maybe prevent the deaths of two or more people? Is this really so far-fetched?

It's also completely useless for the police to carry weapons. After all, the best we can possibly hope for is that they might shoot someone's bullet in mid air.

Therefore, I propose we stop giving weapons to the police as a cost saving measure.

British police don't usually have guns, and I always felt safer for it when I lived there, fwiw.

Yes, but they have surveillance cameras everywhere. It's a bit Orwellian.

Most of those cameras are privately owned, and on private property. I'm ok with that.

Does the state have the right to demand and view the tapes?

Maybe you felt safer, but the numbers suggest your feelings were incorrect.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/798708/posts

Note: I realize the US has high murder rates. Murder rates are not indicative of general safety, since most murders consist of one crook killing another. To put a face on it, think Tony Soprano or Stringer Bell taking out the competition. Most robberies (at least those reported in crime statistics) consist of a criminal robbing a civilian.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4713753.stm

If you knew that everyone else had the potential of carrying a concealed weapon, would you be at likely to shoot someone else?

In my state, Florida, it's relatively easy to secure the paperwork to carry concealed, and it tends to be a strong deterrant here.

If you knew that everyone else had the potential of carrying a concealed weapon

...then I would probably never leave my house.

Then it's good for you that only the bad folk carry....

I think people have the capacity to be both good and bad, depending on often quite random stuff that happens to them.

I'm just glad to live somewhere that the majority of people, "good" or "bad", don't carry - I'd hate to live somewhere the opposite was true.

> I'm just glad to live somewhere that the majority of people, "good" or "bad", don't carry - I'd hate to live somewhere the opposite was true.

How do you know that the majority of the bad folk don't carry where you are?

I've been places where everyone was carrying. Why should that have bothered me?

I think the basic motivation for carrying a concealed weapon in situations like these is what if the guy never plans to stop killing? What if he just carries on hunting people for so long as his ammo lasts? That gives you a possibility of making a difference by putting him down early.

Likewise, why bother wearing body armor, they'll just shoot you in the face! Except... sometimes whether by their aim sucking or not having time to aim properly, and etc., it does matter. Chaotic situations like these have many possible challenges to present you, some of which a concealed weapon can help you with.

I think a lot of people have hate for guns and hence irrationally choose to ignore all the utility of them, in this case by suggesting a situation where it is ridiculous to stop bullets with more bullets, essentially a strawman argument, ignoring all the situations where you can use bullets to prevent someone from firing more.

I would like to nominate firearms, and especially the political landscape around firearms, as an informally off-topic subject for this site.

Everyone that has an opinion about this topic has a strong one (even me), and I've never seen a forum of any charter not fall into 1) banal, uninformed bickering or 2) scary monoculture or homogeny of thought, relentlessly punishing dissenters.

The value of HN (to me) is that it is well tended, and this looks like an additional loss of focus that isn't welcome in my opinion.

I think this clearly shows education doesn't have too much to do with mental health. People with a lot of education can be just as sad and disheartened as anyone else. Layoffs aren't a happy time for anyone, but for someone who was already in a bad place it looks like it can be a tipping point.

It's to do with brain chemistry, say psychiatrists. It can affect anyone, even well-off civil servants.

But losing your job is not a chemical imbalance, it's something real.That's harder to treat (I personally think psychiatric drugs should not be used when the problem is real).

I would bet that these sorts of workplace homicides would decrease by 50-90 percent if our country did one thing right: implemented universal healthcare. I've been through layoffs, and the healthcare mess is the scariest thing about losing a job. Food and living expenses can be brought down, but healthcare premiums are ridiculous and inflexible.

Thanks for your response. I'll point out that I'm in the UK, but I don't know whether it's better in the UK than the US. The UK system is pretty effective, and you get disability 'welfare' (called benefits here) to tide you over until you're better.

So, the hospital is free, the drugs are free, the consultant (who checks up on you perhaps quarterly for 20 minutes) is free, and living expenses free too.

Free meaning National Insurance is paid, but you get that paid too.

As someone who has lived in both countries for many years at a stretch, I'm very glad that I effectively still have the British safety net because I'm still a citizen and can go back there if I get really sick and lose my job and healthcare here.

I know a lot of Europeans who went back to the EU when they had health problems. This would even work for an American, because many EU hospitals will treat anyone who comes in needing care.

It infuriates me when anti-universal-healthcare people (they still exist) argue that US healthcare is superior because foreigners come over here for medical care. What year are they living in, 1979? Now, people leave the US for critical treatment.

The US healthcare system is terrible. Although some argue that universal healthcare leads to long waits and difficulty getting appointments in some specialties, it's just as bad over here as it is in, say, Canada or the UK. We have all those problems to an equal degree... and medical bills, on top of that.

In Manhattan, some of the top doctors have stopped participating with insurance companies, because the companies (which are manned by the sorts of people who would be in guard towers of prison camps in other kinds of societies) often refuse to pay for bullshit reasons, leaving the doctor unpaid, or "negotiate" pay that is below subsistence level for the doctor. We've had a two-tier health system (insured vs. not) for decades, but now we're approaching a three-tier system (self-insured vs. crappily insured vs. not) because of the sliminess of insurance companies and the crappiness of their policies.

In addition, doctors have to carry malpractice insurance, the premiums of which are set, in large part, on a statewide basis. Base rates can vary by almost two orders of magnitude within a specialty, from a few thousand dollars per year to a few hundred thousand. The high-premium states lose doctors and it becomes almost impossible to get a specialist if you live in one of those states, with 3-month waits for appointments not being uncommon.

The US healthcare system is terrible; it's not just "left-wing propaganda" on the continent that says so. It actually is horrendous. Even many center-right Republicans are coming around to the need for an overhaul of the system.

If you are not from the US and/or not already familiar with US healthcare, listen to this person. This is the sort of experience 99% of people on insurance get. Sure, we have insurance, but it's a crapshoot whether the company is going to actually pay for all the expenses it should be. This lulls the "insured" into a false sense of security, and provides a great incentive to not go to the doctor.

The crappitude of US health insurance, one should note, is a relatively new development. In the 1980s and '90s, there were still uninsured people, but it was generally the case that, if you had health insurance, you'd get every treatment that was necessary, pretty much fully paid. This is no longer remotely true.

If universal healthcare is implemented and these insurance gangsters are no longer needed, an added bonus will be the glorious contraction and meltdown of this rancid boil of an industry. When the stock of my utterly evil health insurance company (HealthNet) hits $0, I'm taking the day off from work to celebrate.

Sounds like in this case though he may have been a foreign worker on an H-1B, who wouldn't qualify for nationalized health care anyways.

This is entirely speculation, but knowing Chinese foreign visa holders... it's likely that he was very close to his green card, and thus bringing his family over to the US, and then he got laid off - 5 years down the drain, and even if he gets another job it's another 5 years before he can see his family again. That kind of stress can make a man do strange things.

Sounds like in this case though he may have been a foreign worker on an H-1B, who wouldn't qualify for nationalized health care anyways

Why not? Foreigners still pay taxes, right? Their health still has value, right?

As a foreigner in Taiwan, I get national health care.

Personally my feeling is that chemical imbalance is the symptom not the cure. It takes a very mature society to practice preventative medicine. We clearly aren't that society (look at the obesity epidemic).

I'm sure that people who are mentally unwell have a chemical imbalance, that doesn't mean it isn't caused by diet, environment or simply their human experience constantly training them to be a in a particular state.

Education correlates pretty well with impulse control, which correlates well with not shooting up your office. There is also a fairly strong correlation between being law-abiding and having a high IQ. So while it's true that some educated people commit crimes, it is absolutely false to pretend that they're equally likely to -- or that this story is anything but an aberration.

10 Years ago I was an uneducated postal worker

I can't remember having the urge of shooting my bosses or workmates

Sorry for the generalization shimi. I thought for awhile about how to express that idea and couldn't think of a good way. But you're right, education and/or intelligence are not the predictors. I guess it just seems to me that it SHOULD be.

Also, though my statement is essentially indefensible, I did want to point out that I was not saying that all postal workers are uneducated, but rather was referring to the postal workers that had opened fire years ago as being the intersection of the set "uneducated" and the set "postal workers." I apologize.

My school, Case Western Reserve University, had a student shooting at the business school a few years back.

A business major went on a rampage because he thought some sysadmin had deleted his personal webpage. He went on a shooting spree at the Peter B. Lewis building and shot a few people, killing a fellow student. His target, the sysadmin, was unharmed, though.

Is this what the 80s recession felt like?

Yes, except for the feathered hair and skinny ties.

This is really sad. Recession or No-Recession, he would have done the same thing. I mean you can always cut your expenses, get a low paying job or go back to your home country(if you are an immigrant). His actions basically affected 3 families directly + also might indirectly bring uncertainty in the lives of other fellow colleagues at the startup.

It makes me sad. Because the saddest news makes biggest headlines. And I hate this when people love disasters. I'd rather hear the success stories.

Hacker News is not Slasher News or Shooter News. This is a generic crime story. Flagged.

holy shit.

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