[krapp]

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.

[crooked-v]

> 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.

[perl4ever]

...you never know these days if you are talking to someone on the Internet who believes "code is law".

[jacques_chester]

Judges, taken as a whole, tend to believe that law is law.

[nailer]

I had a similar situation where it was proven that law is law while contracting at nab, a bank in Australia, years ago.

- 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.

[ubernostrum]

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.

[pbhjpbhj]

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.

[ubernostrum]

Constructive dismissal is treated as "you quit, but you quit because the conditions imposed on you were such that you had no choice, and we will treat that as the company firing you rather than you voluntarily choosing to quit".

[Gibbon1]

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.

[ashelmire]

>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.

[krapp]

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.

[girvo]

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!

[krapp]

> 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...

Yeah, judging from this thread and the negative scores on some of my comments, I was way off base about that.

[madeofpalk]

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.

[ashelmire]

"Contractor" in tech means, "we want you as an employee but we're too cheap to obey the laws involved or make a commitment, so here's a 3 year contract, hope this never goes to court!". Frankly, it's a way for companies to avoid the law, though California at least has recently made this an illegal sort of arrangement via new work rules.

[stickfigure]

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!"

[inimino]

> 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.

[krapp]

Maybe, but the humans who didn't renew his employment status knew how the system worked. They screwed up more.

[inimino]

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.

[krapp]

>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.

[inimino]

"Self-destruct sequence initiated, cannot abort." should be left in the world of sci-fi.

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.

[lolc]

> 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.

[krapp]

>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:

    "When my contract expired, the machine took over and fired me."

The wrong termination date wasn't entered, the correct, existing termination date wasn't updated in time. Those are two different scenarios.

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

The contract was a 3 year contract, the new system hadn't been updated to reflect that.

[astura]

The article implied that it was a 3 year contract that required periodic renewal.

[s73v3r_]

The system screwed up because it didn't prompt enough for human intervention.