Comment by krapp
8 years ago
The system didn't need to be stopped. The employee's contract wasn't renewed, which is indistinguishable from a decision terminate him, so the system executed the termination as scheduled.
The system did exactly what it was intended to do, it was the humans who screwed up. Humans who presumably understood the way the system was designed, and didn't care enough to do some due diligence.
>I also do not understand why a check couldn't be cut. Submit to accounts payable with an email approval?
He was fired. It doesn't matter that people didn't intend for him to be, he was, it went through the system, it was a done deal. Paying people not in your employ is fraud, even under the best of intentions.
The real lesson here is that few of us, no matter how much money we make, how into the culture we are or how long our tenure has been, are more than a row in a database to our employer, and we can be dropped at any time. The contractor in this case would not have had much more "job security" with humans in the loop.
> He was fired. It doesn't matter that people didn't intend for him to be, he was, it went through the system, it was a done deal. Paying people not in your employ is fraud, even under the best of intentions.
Somebody who is in your building, is doing work under your direction, and has not been told they are fired hasn't been fired. A judge in court for the lost wages would laugh you out of the room if you tried a "well but actually, the system..." argument in that situation.
...you never know these days if you are talking to someone on the Internet who believes "code is law".
Judges, taken as a whole, tend to believe that law is law.
1 reply →
Somebody who is in your building, is doing work under your direction, and has not been told they are fired hasn't been fired.
They might be, or might not be. Constructive dismissal is a thing.
No, being fired is when a person with authority tells you you're dismissed; it's an active and explicit form of dismissal.
Constructive dismissal is dismissal, for all intents and purposes, without being fired.
1 reply →
I worked as a contractor for a couple of months at a company with 100k+ employees. And then got hired.
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.
>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.
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.
IANAL so I might be wrong, but if they terminated his contract, I would assume they can't still legally pay him as if they hadn't.
Of course, he's also well within his rights to sue over it.
IANAL either, but I did get a Bachelor of Law; one thing that was hard for me to get while I was studying is that while I thought of the law & contracts as a series of instructions that get executed by the "CPU" (our legal system), really for the most part it's being executed by humans who really dislike cute "this then that, screw context" thinking. I would not be surprised at all if a judge would laugh at an employer that tried to make the argument that he was "terminated" due to a clerical error and automated systems, therefore they don't need to pay him...
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!
1 reply →
He's a contractor, so can't he just submit an invoice and receive a payment? Or does 'contractor' mean something different in the US?
If he missed out on pay then it's because no one cared enough/someone didn't care enough to sort it out.
1 reply →
Every contract I've ever worked under had termination conditions that required some sort of notice - by either party.
You can't just say "nah nah I fired you two weeks ago hah!"
> The system did exactly what it was intended to do, it was the humans who screwed up.
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.
Maybe, but the humans who didn't renew his employment status knew how the system worked. They screwed up more.
They screwed up, but that happens. The point where the system takes over and even the higher-ups can't override it is where the story becomes Kafka-esque.
If you build an automation system that goes out of human control after a human error, that is a failed design.
2 replies →
> He was fired.
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.
>There's no two ways of looking at it. A wrong termination date entered somewhere doesn't change the contract.
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:
The wrong termination date wasn't entered, the correct, existing termination date wasn't updated in time. Those are two different scenarios.
The contract was a 3 year contract, the new system hadn't been updated to reflect that.
The article implied that it was a 3 year contract that required periodic renewal.
The system screwed up because it didn't prompt enough for human intervention.