fuck the algorithm that killed Better Off Ted too…
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Did he by any chance submit a change order to unplug a server?
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I’ve heard it was a transitional period
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…yet
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Star Trek is hardly the best analogy here — that episode being a step outside the show’s usual premise, into supernatural horror instead, with a particularly unconvincing “explanation” at the end — and also with everybody disappearing and only one character being left.
The film The Net and the TV series Nowhere Man both seem to have Mr Diallo’s kind of experience as their central idea, not that I’ve seen either one of them.
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There’s also the episode of MASH where the army declares Hawkeye deceased.
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Not even that. His boss stopped processing the status of his contract, so the contract ended. The boss should have been put on gardening leave, and replaced by somebody willing to do the job.
If the system truly was designed to require another laid off employee to tick a box to confirm his/her contractor was still employed that is a huge fail.
I once supervised a contractor and I had to process monthly invoices to keep them employed. It doesn’t seem like too different from that to have to tell some HR system they are still employed.
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It seems more as though the contract wasn’t set up on the new system properly, rather than there being a requirement to constantly renew it.
I was on a 3 years contract and had only worked for 8 months. Just before I was hired, this company was acquired by a much larger company and I joined during the transition. My manager at the time was from the previous administration. One morning I came to work to see that his desk had been wiped clean, as if he was disappeared. As a full time employee, he had been laid off. He was to work from home as a contractor for the duration of a transition. I imagine due to the shock and frustration, he decided not to do much work after that. Some of that work included renewing my contract in the new system.
Presumably that was part of what he was supposed to be doing in the ‘transition’ period.
I am always surprised by the employers who think they can fire people and still expect them to be trusted to do work for them.
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I’d speculate that the business rules provided to the supplier (and presumably implemented correctly as well) would have included suitable processes for when a supervisor is removed - that responsibility becomes delegated to their replacement or superior. And all would have been well.
It’s only later that someone borked the system by introducing a sort of suspended limbo for the manager - a non-boolean state of neither employed nor removed.
Engineers (including myself) are prone to falling into assumptions that someone either is or isn’t on the payroll at any given time.
When the accountants come up with shenanigans like “well, yeah, they do work here, but are not counted not for tax purposes” (without officially letting the security implementation team know) then first-order logic starts to fail…
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True - I worked for a startup that was acquired and the first thing the new owners did was fire the CTO (my boss). Then they found out that only he knew the passwords for various key infrastructure devices. So they demanded he hand them over, to which he not unreasonably responded, I don’t work there anymore deal with it yourselves.
So they had the rest of us spend weeks trying to break into our own routers and servers (which failed)
Escorting people off the promises with no handover might seem like the big tough new boss thing to do, but it can bite you very hard.
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Given my experience, its likely that the scoping and design period was compressed and edge cases like this were ignored or put in the “we’ll do that later” pile.
Some VP will have said “how often does this happen? we’ll deal with that manually” and then forgotten all about it
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Oh Mr. Stross, he’s some material for you.
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Love the twist ending: they figured out why.
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Here I was expecting the computer to fire anyone investigating.
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Late stage capitalism. You’re laid off, so you won’t get paid anymore, but we still need you to work for us. Oh, and you’ll need to provide your own office. Umm yeah… I’m going to have to ask you to come in on Saturday. Mmm, yeah, I’m going to have to go ahead and ask you to come in on Sunday, too. We’ve got some new people coming in and we need to play catch-up. That’d be great, thanks.
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been there, done that.
it was an effort to avoid getting sued again for hiring “permatemps”.
it’s exactly the same as a lot of companies do. hiring people for 38 hrs a week to avoid health benefits, or hiring contracting companies to avoid employing undocumented workers directly.
billion dollar companies will do whatever they can to avoid labor costs. the only fixes are breaking them up, prosecuting the higher ups, or creating laws which actually protect workers.
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