I also do not understand why a check couldn't be cut. Submit to accounts payable with an email approval?

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'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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

What was once satire has become too real.

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

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...

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.

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.

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".

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.

-- Before the Law

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

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_the_Law

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 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.

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

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.

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.

maybe the engineer that designed the system got themselves fired while they were testing the system

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

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

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...

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.

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.

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.