Ask HN: Fired from first job, now what? - <AUTHOR> I was recently fired from my first software job out of college and I don't really know how to bounce back smoothly.
For some context, I'm 22 and graduated with a B.S. in both Computer Science and Mathematics in May. I took a job just before graduation with a small custom software development firm that focuses on custom web and mobile applications for businesses in and around my local area, and in which all employees work remote full-time, which I've since learned may not be the best situation for me. During the interview, much of the discussion revolved around mobile experience, and as such I believed that I'd be primarily working on mobile application development, which may have been true had our contracts at the time not all been web applications. I had no real experience with the stack the company used, nor significant experience with web development.
I live in an at-will employment area, so I was fired without notice, because I was taking too long to accomplish tasks and milestones on the contract I was assigned. This is an issue that had been discussed with me a 3 or 4 weeks prior to the termination of my employment, and my employers and I agreed to a 2-week probationary period to assess my progress before deciding on continuation of my employment. At the end of this period, I was not proactive in obtaining feedback on my performance, and as such received little-to-none. Today, I was told that my performance was not satisfactory, and I was let go, which seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Now I'm unemployed and have no idea what to do next. I've considered looking for freelance work while I find a solid job, but I don't really know what to look for. I've reached out to my former employer to receive more feedback on my performance to know exactly what I need to improve on, so I feel that I'll have a solid foundation to make the changes necessary to be a better employee, but how do I overcome losing my first serious tech job due to performance? <comment><USER2> So you got hired straight out of school, and then let go because you weren't fast enough at working with a non-trivial technology that your employer knew (or should have known) you had little experience in? That doesn't seem reasonable to me at all.

My advice would be to not worry about this and simply job hunt as if this didn't happen. You may need to explain the situation to prospective employers. Mismatch between the job you were hired for and the actual job seems like an honest and succinct description of what happened.

<comment><USER3> Given the short length on the job I don't think it warrants even putting on your resume. It will probably do more harm than good.

<comment><AUTHOR> I definitely don't want to lie to potential future employers, is there a particular way I should handle any questions about the gap?

<comment><USER4> I'd say the opposite, put it on your resume because at this point it's experience that makes you stand out compared to other fresh graduates. Any and all experience is important to landing a job at this stage of your career.

Say you started or finished a couple of months earlier so it looks like a 3/6 months contract and tell employers that the contract wasn't renewed because they ran out of work, which is probably half true anyway.

You shouldn't lie but this is massaging the truth in your favor ;)

<comment><USER5> I agree with putting it on your resume. This is great experience if you can be honest in your self reflection. Ie realize remote only is probably not a good idea for your first job out of school. Realize that you'll need mentorship. Etc.

I have no problem leaving the job off the resume ("resumé" means "summary" not "comprehensive"). If asked you could say that you listed all experience that you felt was relavant. But personally I think it is a valuable thing to have listed.

However, I strongly discarded with the parents suggestions for "massaging" the resume. Those sugggestions are pure lying. There is a big difference about highlighting certain aspects of a career and stating things as fact which are not true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I got fired (well, laid off) under very similar circumstances, at a similar age, working for a company in a similar niche.

My experience, which may not be the same for you, was that the small company was in financial trouble and tried to hire grads as a cost-cutting measure, then discovered that people with no experience don't work very fast, and that they weren't getting the kind of contracts they thought they'd be getting.

The emotional response to getting fired is going to suck and probably already sucks, but it's important to remember that your emotional response isn't a completely objective take on what happened. You're still a grad, you still have a degree, you now have months of experience, and hopefully the next job will be better.

</comment><comment><USER7> First off, you'll be okay. You're a good writer and seem to have a good attitude. Everything will be fine and one day, you'll look back at this and laugh.

Second, it sounds to me like you worked for assholes. What kind of shithead takes a new grad, sells him/her on mobile, drops him/her into a totally new stack and then pulls out the fire hammer because he/she wasn't meeting milestones?? This makes my blood boil and I don't even know you.

To answer your question, put it on your resume and be incredibly open about what happened. You have nothing to be ashamed of and I bet that you learned a ton.

Best of luck, bud!

<comment><USER8> Second that - this will be a great story in 5 years. Just try to shrug it off and go for a second job. You have more experience now. I recommend not doing remote work as a junior. You can learn much more in-person and will get more feedback on your work.

<comment><USER9> Exactly. Just being hired once brings you a step ahead of other fresh grads.

I second the recommendation against remote work at this career stage. My first tech job was (and it still kinda is) remote with a very hands off boss and I managed to burn myself out with very little work and acquire one hell of a procrastination/anxiety problem. Got moved to part-time maintenance with the expected pay cut and I'm slowly getting better now.

Of course, my story is a worst case scenario, but it's good to know how sideways things can go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If a company has to fire someone a few months after hiring them, it's typically the company's fault, not that person's. Take your time finding a real job now, not some sweatshop/bucketshop gig.

</comment><comment><USER11> tl;dr — Pretend like it didn't happen. The company failed you, not the other way around.

Specifics:

Unless you credibly represented yourself as someone who could produce from "day 1" (figuratively), then you should probably still be in the training/development mode with a senior person giving you a significant amount of support and scaffolding. This sounds especially true since you say you had no experience with the stack. If they were giving you support, then the issue was most likely with your senior person rather than you.

The only possible way that you failed was simply by not doing work by spending entire days procrastinating (note that most folks only have about 4 or 5 strong productive hours of thought work a day). If that's the case, I recommend you read the book _Getting Things Done_.

As others have mentioned, don't even list in on your resume. Resumes have "relevant" experience, and it sounds like that company was irrelevant in terms of your development.

<comment><USER12> > you should probably still be in the training/development mode with a senior > person giving you a significant amount of support and scaffolding. This > sounds especially true since you say you had no experience with the stack. > If they were giving you support, then the issue was most likely with your > senior person rather than you.

i agree. Quoting the OP:

> in which all employees work remote full-time, which I've since learned may > not be the best situation for me

this is a good observation.

as a new grad i'd expect you to be able to ramp up slowly over a period of months if dropped into an existing team on an existing project with some experienced and capable devs you can learn from while working on initially relatively simple tasks like basic bug fixes or enhancements.

there's a good chance you would find it much harder to ask for help (or have colleagues notice in passing that you are getting stuck with some inane idiosyncratic organisational or technical obstacle they can immediately help you with) if everyone is remote.

you may get more mileage out of getting a junior job in a larger organisation that explicitly has some kind of well-defined and resourced training / development program for grads, if you can find such opportunities. small businesses tend to need you to start making them money right away (by billing you out to the clients or so on)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was hired by a corporation out of college and then fired for mostly political reasons after 4 years.

Since then it's been quite hard to find a steady job. It sucks pretty bad, because I don't have any connections.

But, I've also downsized my life a lot and focused on what is free and what is really beautiful in life, like my relationship and my health..</comment>


Ask HN: From "IT Manager" to Software Engineering Management - <AUTHOR> Has anyone successfully made the transition from a management position in an IT department to a management position in a software engineering organization? Can you share your experiences? <comment><USER2> Haven't done it myself, but would suggest you try and take on some IT software projects on your team. Maybe start with some scripts or automation and offer to help on other IT software projects.

Once you have some real-world experience and a reputation for delivering, you can branch out.

Would also suggest that you be as capable on the development side as your developers. Python is perfect to start with.</comment>


DOJ filing: how the Flash Crash was achieved, moment by moment [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/SaraoDOJ04-21-2015.pdf

<comment><USER2> Does someone have more information in whether the 'spoofing' used is illegal?

From Nanex ([http://www.nanex.net/](http://www.nanex.net/)) I occasionally read of a practice called 'quote stuffing' which involves mass cancellation of orders.

It seems so ridiculous that no one on Wall Street in prosecuted and yet this guy from the UK somehow gets charged with what seems to be the common practice of HFT firms. Does anyone have more information on this?

It just seems so out of place that the damage caused can be so single handedly. If someone had nefarious intentions in a foreign government attacking financial infrastructure is probably something like our generations nukes - without the blood. I'm still dumbfounded by the scale of damage by something economic theory/markets say shouldn't happen.

Am I an area 51 guy or is something seriously wrong?

<comment><USER3> read the articles - post Flash Crash they changed the rules to explicitly bar the practice, but this case alleges that spoofing was also illegal under a different rule.

The PDF was linked from: [http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-k-man-arrested-on- charges-tied...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-k-man-arrested-on-charges-tied- to-may-2010-flash-crash-1429636758)

"The case is part of a crackdown by criminal and regulatory authorities on manipulative tactics used by high-speed traders, including spoofing, which was specifically outlawed in the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial overhaul law.

That law was enacted after the flash crash; the CFTC is alleging that Mr. Sarao violated the Commodities Exchange Act, which also prohibits manipulative trading. It is also alleging that he violated the anti-spoofing law for trading he engaged in beginning in 2011."

<comment><USER2> I get that. Its just quote stuffing still exists, at least according to nanex. Wouldn't that be spoofing too?

Also this guy seemed to do this from his small house, on his own in Hounslow without any significant infrastructure, with terrible cross atlantic latency. It just seems so wrong that hes charged yet anything engaging in quote stuffing is let go.

He uses a @hotmail email address. It's just so extreme how he seems out of place. Somehow he had the resources to crash the market, or even cause a small portion of the damage in huge, liquid markets? The S&P EMini is probably near the top 5 most liquid instruments on earth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Flash Crash discussion begins on page 23.

"SARAO's activity created persistent downward pressure on the price of E-Minis. Indeed, during the dynamic layering cycle that ran from 11:17 a.m. to 1:40 p.m., SARAO's offers comprised 20 to 29% of the CME's entire E-Mini sell- side order book, significantly contributing to the order book imbalance. During that period of time alone, the E-Mini price fell by 361 basis points. In total, SARAO obtained approximately $879,018 in net profits from trading E-Minis that day."</comment>


Optimization of Hamerly's K-Means Clustering Algorithm (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://colfaxresearch.com/cfxkmeans/ <comment><USER2> The mlpack library ([http://www.mlpack.org](http://www.mlpack.org)) also has a C++ implementation of Hamerly's algorithm, as well as Elkan's and some other accelerated variants. My experience has been that while Hamerly's algorithm can be a lot faster than the unaccelerated implementation, it's not always the fastest---that depends on dataset conditions.</comment>


The Electric Chair That Might Soon Be Used in Tennessee - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nidhisubbaraman/electric-chair-tennessee-edmund-zagorski <comment><USER2> All this complication around methods of execution baffles me.

Why don't we use a massive dose of fentanyl or some other opioid? I've got to be missing something, because that seems like a simple, one-step process that doesn't risk the pain of paralytics and potassium chloride.

I think the death penalty is a useless relic, but if we're going to do it, why make it so bizarre?

<comment><USER3> That would require either the state finding a legal source of fentanyl that is willing to sell them the drug for that purpose (challenging, given most pharma companies refuse due to some mix of principles and not wanting their product to be associated with death) or the state contracting with black market suppliers.

Given the state imprisons low level illicit drug suppliers, I'm guessing the hypocrisy of granting legit contracts to illicit drug manufacturers is enough to make the black market route a non-starter.

<comment><USER4> It's not just principles that causes the issue for pharma companies (although the principles are, I think, real and truly held by the senior executives of those companies) - the EU has also banned export of any drugs for use in executions which makes it legally problematic for them too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Death penalty is barbaric but these methods are just cruel.

Why not use preferred methods for euthanasia, like exit bag? It's fast, painless and cheap.

<comment><USER6> There's a fantastic documentary called 'How to kill a human being', with Michael Portillo (former UK politician), made back in 2008.

It covers this quite nicely - Includes an interview with a death penalty advocate and asks about a 'theoretical painless execution method' and the advocate agrees that if such thing were available it would be ideal.

Then later, after Portillo has done a bunch of investigation, hypoxia (I think) is landed on as an ideal solution. It's put to the advocate, who then squirms and insists that it's not a suitable 'punishment'.

My memory is hazy since I haven't seen it in a decade, but it's a fantastic doco and probably freely available now.

<comment><USER7> What is a doco?

<comment><USER6> Apologies, looks like it's a local saying: [https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/doco](https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/doco)

I'm being an egg ([https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Egg](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Egg)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There is a similar case (Bucklew v. Precythe) that will be tried before the supreme court this year.[0] In that case the plaintiff claims that his eighth amendment rights would be violated if he were to be lethally injected, as it may cause him significant pain due to a unique medical condition.

[0]: [https://www.oyez.org/cases/2018/17-8151](https://www.oyez.org/cases/2018/17-8151)

</comment><comment><USER9> "practicing engineering without a license." is a new one to me, didn't realise they had that in the U.S.

In the UK you can call yourself an engineer and nobody is going to charge you for that. However, if you want to do any serious engineering then you do need a few letters after your name for some professions. I am glad Isambard Kingdom Brunel and other 'engineers' were able to work without having to be qualified in some official way.

I don't see this chair or any of the other U.S. methods as being particularly humane. There is a lack of instant-ness which then becomes 'cruel and unusual punishment'. Firing squad places burden on the firing squad, even if results are instant and therefore not 'cruel and unusual'. How come blunt force trauma and a 'dead man's switch' hasn't been tried? Evil-wrong-doer is given a switch that he/she can let go of 'when they are ready', then extremely heavy object and the magic of gravity could solve the matter of instant resolution.

</comment><comment><USER10> Regardless of one's view on the death penalty, I've always found allowing people to view an execution to be incredibly disturbing.

<comment><USER11> I feel the same way, but I guess allowing people to view the execution is a way to show the public that the person is in fact executed and the state didn't just say that the person was executed.

<comment><USER12> Wouldn't viewing the deceased body have the same effect?

<comment><USER13> No. A visit to any decent wax museum will show why.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> OK, USA has the death penalty. Good or bad that's another story. Meanwhile, just use a firing squad. Efficient and humane.

<comment><USER4> What's to say a particularly notorious criminal doesn't get the firing squad aiming a bit too far to the left (victim's right) to miss the heart and deliberately inflict additional suffering? I know there's more than one of them but still...

<comment><USER15> I mean... we could use a tank. Take the entire head off...

<comment><USER13> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowing_from_a_gun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowing_from_a_gun)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> With nearly unlimited appeals, I have no problem with the death penalty, but I do wish that DNA testing was made de facto and free for inmates. That said, I say bring back the firing squad.

</comment><comment><USER17> Wow!

Buzz Feed has a poor rep, but the headline is not a hyperbole.

<comment><USER18> Buzz Feed News has a stellar rep.

<comment><USER19> But "Buzz Feed" does indeed have a terrible rep for peddling the most cynical mindless clickbait type of content the web has to offer, and it is literally 2/3 of the "Buzz Feed News" brand for better or (obviously) worse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Zagorski kills 2 people, then sues the state so they can't use an alternative and must use the electric chair?

More power to him.</comment>


Internet Explorer 10 Dev Preview 3 - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/09/13/ie10pp3.aspx

<comment><AUTHOR> They've added:

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Advanced Layout

       CSS Regions
       CSS3 Multi-column Layout
       Flexible Box ("Flexbox") Layout
       Grid Alignment
       Positioned floats

       CSS3 3-D Transforms
       CSS3 Animations
       CSS3 Gradients
       CSS3 Transitions
       CSS3 Text
          The text-shadow property
       Hyphenation

       Panning and Zooming
       Removal of style sheet limits

Document Object Model (DOM) support

       Advanced Hit Testing APIs
       CSSOM Floating Point Value support
       Media Query Listeners
       Pointer and Gesture DOM events

ECMAScript 5 (ES5) support

       The strict variant of ECMAScript ("ES5 strict mode")

F12 Developer Tools (Not available in Metro style apps.)

Improved support for workers

HTML5 support

       Asynchronous Script Execution
       Application Cache ("AppCache")
       Drag and Drop
       File API
       Forms Validation
       Progress and Range Control
       History
       Parsing
       Sandbox
       Web Workers
       Channel Messaging
       Web Sockets
       Spellcheck

       Indexed Database API ("IndexedDB")

       SVGSVG Filter Effects

       Web performance APIs</comment>


Why Privacy Is Actually Thriving Online - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/03/privacy-is-dead/

<comment><USER2> This article might be the most unintentionally perfect example of double speak I personally have ever read.

Privacy is publicity, publicity is privacy.

Hot damn we have the perfect dystopian future slogan for the NSA.

Just because you didn't take a photo of something doesn't mean that:

        Your cell carrier doesn't know where you were
        Google maps doesn't know where you were
        Other people didn't take pictures
        Security cams didn't take pictures
        License plate readers didn't record you
        Your car didn't record you
        Your refrigerator didn't hear you talking about it

Online privacy isn't about people in your personal circle not knowing about something you did. It's about the gobs of unintentional personally identifiable data you leave strewn about the world as you go about your seemingly innocuous daily activities. Somebody, somewhere can statistically confirm who shittyanalogy is in the meat world. That's not because I have any desire to correlate my personal life with my digital. That is because I have no real online privacy.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well its not fair if you judge the extent of privacy by some teens deleting there facebook photos. Things are systematically designed online to make people okay when they are potentially giving up privacy. More thoughts on [http://kashif.io/thoughts-on-privacy](http://kashif.io/thoughts-on-privacy)

</comment><comment><USER4> So, to summarize, not all information in the world is online, therefore privacy can't possibly be decreasing.

I do not like this article.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, it's funny, the article touches lightly on the NSA but never addresses the fact that they have practically every Email, phone call, or digital communication intercepted.

Let's add to this the increase of video and audio surveillance, and oh yes, more new gadgets like Google Glass which enable just about anyone to record a stranger on the street without a notice.

Yep, because some teens regularly delete Facebook posts, privacy is on the upswing. Makes perfect sense.</comment></comment>


I Am Not a Monster: Science has turned the squid from a monster into a marvel - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/53/monsters/i-am-not-a-monster <comment><USER2> If you found the article interesting, i highly recommend this book: "Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness". It is a fascinating description of how cephalopods are the closest thing to intelligence that is built vastly different from us. The author also explores philosophical questions (à la Thomas Nagel) What does it feel like to be an octopus? Does it have multiple selves? The book doesn't have all the answers and sort of fizzles out at the end, but definitely one of my better reads this year.

<comment><USER3> Curious—that book _just_ caught my eye at the library. Time to go pick it up.

<comment><USER2> Definitely worth a read. If you end up with the official audio book on Audible (which is what i did), the narrator is pretty good too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Screw that, cephalopods are monsters. Cuttlefish are almost literally tiny Cthulhus: they drive their prey insane (with a hypnotic moving chromatophore pattern) before devouring it.

And that's pretty freakin' rad. Nature is at least as strange and twisted as our deepest fears. It's a big amazing world.

<comment><USER5> Do you have a source handy for the mini-Cthulhu thing? I've never heard of cuttlefish actually mesmerizing their prey before.

<comment><USER4> See it happen here: [https://youtu.be/l1T4ZgkCuiM](https://youtu.be/l1T4ZgkCuiM)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am not afraid of squids in specific or cephalopods in general; I fail to see how anything we have learned about them would do anything but increase that fear if I was.

</comment><comment><USER7> Great article! Also I found it funny when it showed the illustration from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea due to the fact that "Nautilus" wrote it :)</comment>


Microsoft's new fluid office document is Google docs on steroids - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/19/21260005/microsoft-office-fluid-web-document-features-build <comment><USER2> I wish they would fix Outlook's HTML rendering instead.

<comment><USER3> If they can't bother with fixing its broken pop3 and imap implementation...

Outlook might be nice with exchange but I don't understand the people who use it with non exchange account. It doesn't even work properly for basic functions.

<comment><USER4> works fine for me for both my zoho accounts (IMAP) and Gmail accounts. I don't even have an Exchange account

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > open-sourcing Fluid Framework might have sounded surprising five years ago

An awesome trend.

FYI: a nice fluffy intro vid [i] and a preview [ii]

[i] [https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/in...](https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/introducing- the-first-microsoft-fluid-framework-experiences-in/ba-p/1345543)

[ii] [https://fluidpreview.office.net/unauth](https://fluidpreview.office.net/unauth)

</comment><comment><USER6> Reminds me of object Linking and Embedding. Can't recall if it was a MS thing or Mac OS just that it used to crash my Color Classic Macintosh way back when.

</comment><comment><USER7> This looks really cool, and it's funny to think that this isn't a million miles away from the original promise of OLE.

</comment><comment><USER8> I guess they expect the big money in being either the host of all that or the trusted point linking hosts and clients.

I'm not looking forward to the future where Microsoft knows when I read which email and puts content (and later ads).

</comment><comment><USER9> Sounds kinda like the free form style in one note</comment>


How to quickly check RAM on Linux - <AUTHOR> https://ib-aid.com/en/articles/how-to-quickly-check-ram-on-linux/ <comment><USER2> How does the given command check RAM?

      dd if=/dev/zero of=/run/zero.bin bs=1G count=8
      sha1sum /run/zero.bin

/dev/zero is a special file that always returns zeros. Nothing in there looks like it touches more than a trivial amount of RAM.

Plus, this test can't tell if a bit is always zero.

</comment><comment><USER3> Also look at memtester[0] as a userspace tool.

[0] [http://pyropus.ca/software/memtester/](http://pyropus.ca/software/memtester/)</comment>


Slavery existed in Illinois, but schools don't always teach that history - <AUTHOR> https://www.propublica.org/article/slavery-existed-in-illinois-but-schools-dont-always-teach-that-history <comment><USER2> It sounds strange that slavery exists in Illinois, but if you visit Carbondale, it makes sense.

Southern Illinois is rural, agrarian, and southern. The Mason-Dixon Line goes straight through Springfield.

Illinois is both a northern and southern state.

The problem is that people confuse Illinois and Chicago.

</comment><comment><USER3> We know so little about slavery and the Black experience in the US. Like the nation is too ashamed to teach it. This is another shocking account: [https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/437573/blacks-were- enslav...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/437573/blacks-were-enslaved- well-into-the-1960s)

</comment><comment><USER4> If you'd like a more detailed analysis rather than a short Q&A, this would be useful

[https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/42004076](https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/42004076)

EDIT: Not same author</comment>


The Pursuit of Knowledge by Stephen Leacock - <AUTHOR> http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks04/0400261h.html

<comment><AUTHOR> "Now, there may be observed as running all through the processes of education two rival principles, in a sense conflicting and yet complementary to one another. One of these is the principle of compulsion, of having to do what we do not want to for the sake of some external or ultimate end. The other is the principle of spontaneity, of doing what we want to do because we want to do it."

Good discussion of what education really means.</comment>


Ask HN: Is facebook deliberately preventing/discouraging users from logging out? - <AUTHOR> I always feel even though the text on log out dropdown is static, it takes suspiciously unusual time to load the dropdown. This can be observed on slower connections. <comment><USER2> It causes an XHR request to [https://www.facebook.com/ajax/bz](https://www.facebook.com/ajax/bz), so yeah, it's not 100% instant

<comment><AUTHOR> But it seems suspiciously slower and I am on a 2mbps connection and it always seems to me that part loads slower compared to other parts of the page. Also it is just static text mostly, so it seems to me a deliberate attempt to discourage users to log out.</comment></comment>


Amazon's warehouse worker tracking system can automatically fire people - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-system-automatically-fires-warehouse-workers-time-off-task-2019-4 <comment><USER2> Worked in a warehouse for a german online retailer as a picker a few years back - tracking everything you do is totally normal - people worked through breaks to reach their limit, too and the break is a joke because it's a huge hall and more than 50% of the time is spend reaching the break-area and to go back.

Someone at Amazon basically throught why does a human have to look at the statistics after a few months and replaced it with some code - but besides that, that tracking and pressure is probably common in almost all online retailer warehouses. Maybe some cynic asshole thought that not letting the team-lead to do firing prevents keeping employees that perform bad but have good reasons for it - like beeing older or having medical problems.

<comment><USER3> Why ? What's the big deal if a package costs a few more cents to fulfill?

Is it a competitive disadvantage - or just standard greed ?

<comment><USER4> Amazon's sales are in the billions of items annually [1]

If you can save two cents on each of 5 billion packages, you save $100 million per year. Most employers will give raises and promotions to people who deliver operational expense savings that large.

[1] [https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312518...](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312518121161/d456916dex991.htm) Five billion items to prime users

<comment><USER5> The problem with this is the savings are usually negligible compared to spendings of higher management.

I think it utterly destroys the image of the company if it cannot act "humane".

It's fine to keep costs under control ..but..if you are then organizing super expensive meetings across the world it just looks bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > An Amazon spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider, "Approximately 300 > employees turned over in Baltimore related to productivity in this > timeframe.

Why do they talk like that? I think they're erasing doubt that this is a corporatist nightmare place to work.

<comment><USER7> It's a warehouse. We life in the 21th century. In theory if we would sit together and structure the existing workforce without all the bullshit overhead of accounting, bullshit jobs and priorities life quality and sustainability, no one would need to work and we could achieve this in the next 5, 10, 50 years.

I get that amazon should pay there workforce properly and as long as we have this, it should be something people can and should do in a social way but Baltimore is a US City, they don't even have a working health care system.

A warehouse job is a warehouse job. No education needed, why wouldn't a computer system should not fire people on simple productivity numbers?

<comment><USER8> > A warehouse job is a warehouse job. No education needed, why wouldn't a > computer system should not fire people on simple productivity numbers?

Increasingly, this viewpoint bothers me. To be honest I don't know the ins and outs of working in an Amazon warehouse but I suspect it's not as brainless a job as you imply.

Further, why does that attribute make this ok? Why wouldn't it similarly be ok if the computer could fire people automatically if a threshold of unit tests failed or if a developer failed to meet LOC quotas?

<comment><USER9> Because there's more metrics to programming than LOC and if a company treats it like the only metric then they deserve to go under. Working in a warehouse does not have multiple dimensions to it. You are paid to pick up things, put them in boxes and then pick up more things. That's it. It's easy to measure.

For comparison sake, I know someone who runs a company sorting refuse. Each person in the warehouse needs to sort through 500kg of refuse every day. That's it. Literally nothing else matters. It's not a complex job, so the metric is not complex either.

<comment><USER10> My wife says programmers just press buttons and look at a glowing rectangle all day. I think you've just done the equivalent.

Having worked both in software development and at a warehouse, I can vouch that both have multiple dimensions.

Oddly enough, both jobs involve sorting algorithms, and both can be completely derailed by poor management.

<comment><USER7> Let me work in a warehouse. What do you think how long does my initial training will take to be a picker at an amazon warehouse?

I will tell you: between 2 days and 6 weeks.

"shrinking its warehouse training time from a conventional six weeks to as little as two days."

How long do you think i have to train your wife to setup a kubernetes cluster, make sure it is secure, backuped and works efficient? Then when she knows that, how to build images, and write code in java, go, bash, ansible etc.?

If the answer is longer than 6 weeks, you see the difference. And don't get me wrong, i have seen people who had a 3 year education and start as juniors and miss a lot for years until they get it all right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't think there is a huge ethical problem with automatically terminating employees based on metrics. Quite the opposite, it could make this process more fair.

The problem is in how the metrics are used and there is no real difference between an ill-meaning profit-hungry manager and an ill-meaning profit-hungry algorithm.

Laying off employees for bathroom breaks or short (days, few weeks) fluctuations in productivity is wrong. But it's wrong if an algorithm does it or a human does it. Algorithms could be used to prevent firing an employee in such a situation.

<comment><USER12>
        > ... Algorithms could be used to prevent firing an employee in such a situation.

I think you're being _very_ optimistic and a bit naive about the motivations of a business that would resort to such algorithms.

They want to maximize the throughput rate of picking boxes and minimize their cost. Sure, it sounds "objective" to say that everyone who doesn't meet the pre-agreed work criteria would be fired (and not-fired if they meet it).

But who gets to set that threshold? Who determines what is reasonable? What if that performance threshold can only be met by fit young people and only until their bodies can't take the stress anymore? How will workers even assess whether or not they can do the job until they try?

This is an ugly practice. If it survives, it will be coming to a cubicle near you someday. Hope I am retired by then.

<comment><USER13> >But who gets to set that threshold? Who determines what is reasonable? What if that performance threshold can only be met by fit young people and only until their bodies can't take the stress anymore? How will workers even assess whether or not they can do the job until they try?

If it's harmful to the worker, then it should fall under the purview of OSHA in the US.

Otherwise, that threshold is set by consumers who choose to patronize businesses that treat their employees in a certain way. Almost all of the time, for goods that can't be distinguished from one another, consumers will choose to patronize a business offering the lowest price available to them, hence the businesses that squeeze the most out of the workers survive and the others do not.

<comment><USER12>
       > ...then it should fall under the purview of OSHA in the US.

Will OSHA end up being an algorithm as well?

Sorry, but contrary to techno-libertarian fundamentalist beliefs, institutions and courts just can't keep up when things are so insanely lopsided in favor of the rich and powerful.

That said, nothing is going to stop amazon from instituting whatever crazy "expert system" they want to abuse warehouse workers until they're all robots.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is the path to these awful decisions forged by human malice or is this just an organic byproduct of corporatism? Is it that nobody cares and are just hoping they don't get called out in the press, or is this stuff generally happening under the radar under the blanket of "efficiency?"

Also, what a pleasant mobile reading experience! [https://imgur.com/GXiVkvE](https://imgur.com/GXiVkvE)

<comment><USER14> I didn't read the article because by the time I'd clicked 4 different popovers of one sort or another I figured it wasn't worth it. Then I follow your link to Imgur, and get _another_ quantcast modal. Aargh!

<comment><USER15> How do you use anything on the web without adblock? :S

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Only three days ago the NYT published "I Used to Work for Google. I Am a Conscientious Objector." and already we see that someone has coded a automated employee firing system. I assume the same culture that developed the idea persuaded the programmer to implement it.

Software is eating the world, but often not in the way we believe it to do.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/opinion/google-privacy- ch...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/opinion/google-privacy-china.html)

<comment><USER17> It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.

As long as the check clears what is the problem with implementing stuff?

<comment><USER18> It's likely the same that happened at Amazon. The programmer probably didn't create a procedure to fire people, instead it forwards matching data sets to another system. The programmer of that other system implements procedures for terminating employments given a list (which could have enough ethical use cases). Putting both together results in an unethical system but I doubt everyone involved knew about that.

<comment><USER19> Why is it ethical to terminate bad employees when a human determines said employee is bad, but unethical if software makes the determination?

Ethnic bias would be eliminated in the latter case.

<comment><USER20> Depending on what information you're using, you can easily accidentally code ethnic or other biases into the system.

<comment><USER21> Amazon corporate offices have inter-faith prayer rooms and mothers rooms. I have a feeling they don't offer these basic amenities to hourly employees.

Given the fact that warehouse employees are pissing in gatorade bottles because they don't have time to use a bathroom I would suspect that participating in a religion that requires stopping work to prayer mid-shift or stopping to go breast feed would cause their quotas to drop.

So it's already pretty clear there's a huge bias towards only certain types of people who can even operate successfully in their warehouse as opposed to their corporate offices.

Although I guess it's all by design, reading through comments here or anywhere on HN about worker mistreatment outside of high earning tech salaries and you can see how little empathy exists among many people here. These are the people Amazon wants and needs working for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This type of monitoring always leads to employees missing breaks, bathroom visits and working off the clock.

Algorithms have no understanding of human limits and will push and push. Employees are scared to miss quotas since they will get fired and employers feel that they can push employees more since quotas are being met. At some point, it becomes a sweatshop where workers are strained to their limits.

We have seen this type of high-pressure work previously and it does not end well for both employers and employees. Employees revolt and employers have to concede to demands or face employee dissatisfaction which leads to societal disruption.

Companies think that they are improving their bottom line but in the long run, they disrupt society to the point of chaos for all.

This time may seem different because it's a high tech world but as long as humans are part of the equation we will see a similar result to previous situations. It's bad for everyone even if you are not the employer or employee.

</comment><comment><USER23> So, Manna is finally becoming a reality: [http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm](http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm)

</comment><comment><USER24> This reminds me of 'Manna', by Marshall Brain, a sci-fi short story in which an automated, AI-driven management system (Manna) gradually takes on more and more responsibility and authority over the world of humans in the workplace, leading to dystopian consequences. There's a lot more to it than that (I'm bad at blurbs) but it's highly worth a read.

[http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm](http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm)

Once again, fiction predicts reality..

<comment><USER25> or someone read it and thought "I like that idea"

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Computers Don't Argue - Gordon R. Dickson

[https://www.atariarchives.org/bcc2/showpage.php?page=133](https://www.atariarchives.org/bcc2/showpage.php?page=133)

</comment><comment><USER27> I don't see anything wrong with this.

Most of the warehouse operations will get automated soon. So it's better (from the laborers' perspective) to keep manual labor as efficient/profitable as possible, otherwise they'll make it attractive to automate all manual labor.

i.e., those who are considered good warehouse workers, are at risk of losing their jobs too to automation if the not-so-good workers are not fired.

<comment><USER28> Just because robots exist does not imply humans should accept being treated like one in order to be maximally competitive. Societies get to collectively decide what the floor is for human treatment, not just market forces. (Hint- the market has no floor in this regard.)

(I upvoted your comment for making a salient point that I think has merit though I disagree with it.)

<comment><USER13> That would have nothing to do with Amazon choosing to automate a process. Society, i.e. government, has the power to decide what the floor is for human treatment. The people lucky to live in democracies can choose to vote for representatives that provide minimum amounts of paid leave, maximum amount of hours worked, etc.

<comment><USER29> Unfortunately governments plan in 5 year cycles, companies plans of Amazon scale are typically longer than that. I fear we will, and in some ways already have, reached a point where corporation actions influence government decision through public perception. PR is corporate propaganda, although it's currently inconsequential save for consumers being ripped off, in a democracy if you can convince your company is doing good and politicians are bad, then the role of government in regulating those companies is subject to people whose careers are being decided by the electorate that believe the words of a private entity more than a public one. Suddenly reform is off the cards.

In more recent events people keep saying these huge companies need to pay their fair share of taxes, yet politicians have made no headway with closing the mechanisms that allow them to avoid it, and if people lose their jobs because companies are suddenly forced to pay taxes they would have otherwise look to avoid paying, then the government will most likely be given the blame.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Many of the comments here make me think of the interview I heard yesterday with David Graeber (anthropologist, author of Bullshit jobs).

He made the point that it seems always to be the people who do something useful who get the worst pay and conditions.

</comment><comment><USER31> I have been a longterm dreamer to work for amazon AWS. But honestly speaking as much money as this company does, I am not sure I want to support this... as this is a tech forum with big AWS fans here, don't you think that without separation of the blue-collar-cruching part and AWS there is a serious risk? Would you support this organization?

</comment><comment> bash-j How is this any different to one of the many gig economy workforce companies like Uber, Lyft, Postmates, etc? How much human interaction do these employees have before they are fired? Do humans tell these people if they are performing badly and offer training to improve?

</comment><comment><USER32> Its not like data aka algorithms has not been used for decades to decide this sort of thing.

I suspect IBM punch card systems have been used for this predating the First IBM computers.

Having the computer decide is new and could well cause more problems than having a low level manger do it..

<comment><USER33> Not sure if you're aware of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust)

<comment><USER29> Surprised I've never heard this book or IBM's specific involvement with the Nazi regime. Strange how of the many times IBM has been mentioned this isn't one of the glaring facts that atleast one person brings up.

<comment><USER32> Its interesting that in WW2 NCR got the contract to build the 4 rotor Bommbes and Not IBM

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> They terminate customer accounts in the same way for no reason so this certainly shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. Amazon is simply too big to care about people whether they be customers let alone employees.

</comment><comment><USER35> Every month, Amazon's warehouse system gets closer and closer to the one depicted in Manna [1].

1: [https://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm](https://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm)

</comment><comment><USER36> It kind of reminds me of [https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-fired- me](https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-fired-me)

</comment><comment><USER37> The real treat will be when they turn it on the managers.

<comment><USER38> This happened at Netflix. I don't know if it was automated or not but the person that came up with a firing method was fired by said method

[https://www.fastcompany.com/3056662/she-created-netflixs- cul...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3056662/she-created-netflixs-culture-and- it-ultimately-got-her-fired)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> that's why i don't want to buy on amazon...

</comment><comment><USER29> What a type of algorithm like this will never account for (and what it should really be used for) by design is nepotism.

</comment><comment><USER40> Hah. Having crohn's disease I would be royally screwed. =/

</comment><comment><USER41> Amazon is basically building "Manna" for their warehouses: [http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm](http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm)

</comment><comment><USER42> At least there won't be any gender/race bias.

<comment><USER28> Not necessarily. If it fired people who listen to rap music while they worked, would it be racist? Some might argue— no— because it also fired white people who listen to rap. But it would be a rather obvious discriminatory practice. Now we must use our imaginations to consider less direct examples of the same phenomenon. For what it's worth, I have no reason to believe that amazon is not an equal opportunity human soul extraction and disposal system.

<comment><USER43> I get your point, but I'm going to do a "well actually" anyway....

The majority of people who buy rap are White.

[https://genius.com/discussions/281920-The-majority-of-hip- ho...](https://genius.com/discussions/281920-The-majority-of-hip-hop- listeners-are-white)

<comment><USER44> How does that say anything about people who _listen_ to rap, as opposed about people who _purchase music_?

<comment><USER43> People are buying music and not listening to it? Right now, the top steaming artist is Drake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> this sort of thing has to stop

</comment><comment><USER25> tips on avoiding Amazon ?

</comment><comment><USER45> This sounds like it would be illegal in Europe because it falls foul of "automated decision making".

Article 22 of the GDPR:

> The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based > solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal > effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her.

<comment><USER46> Does the GDPR have anything to do with employment law? Seems unlikely.

<comment><USER47> Of course the GDPR applies to a company's employees. They don't stop being people just because they are also employed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Is this legal? Can a computer have standing to terminate a contract? Can a computer enter in to a legal contract?

Edit: High frequency trading would seem to suggest it is? Is there nominally supposed to be a human in the loop?

<comment><USER49> Computers don't need standing, they act on their controllers' behalf.

<comment><USER48> There's a limit to that somewhere though? There's some minimum input that the controller needs to put in. If Outlook took it upon itself to send "you're hired" emails to all applicants for a job, that wouldn't be legally binding right?

I suspect the line isn't where I would _like_ it to be in this situation though. Thinking about a generalised rule, requiring the counterparty be human if the original party is human? That seems reasonable and workable?

<comment><USER49> There doesn't need to be _any_ rule, because computers simply don't make decisions that have legal relevance. Nothing a computer does is legally binding; things humans do using computers may be. Computers only facilitate things that humans do. If Outlook sends "you're hired" emails, it is legally binding if its controller intended to enter into a contract, and not if it was an error or accident. You don't have to consider the behavior of the computer at all when deciding legal ramifications.

<comment><USER48> "because computers simply don't make decisions that have legal relevance"

The computer is automatically firing people, that seems like legal relevance to me. It is making the decision (on some level) without human input.

High frequency traders buy and sell without human interaction. Is that not another example?

If there were an error, as with the Outlook example, there was absolutely no human input, so obviously there wasn't intent, therefore it isn't legally binding.

There is a continuum between a human doing everything, and a human doing nothing. At some point a legal line is crossed. On one side the computer is following a humans instructions, on the other it is working independently. Where is that legal line, what happens if a computer enters into a contract when working independently?

<comment><USER49> No computer runs without human input. My computer isn't firing people right now. Why? Because I didn't set it up to do so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Utterly horrifying. No better than terrible slavery - while Bezos travels by private jet and enjoys his luxury super-yacht

[http://superyachtmag.com/2017/08/06/456-foot-lurssen- superya...](http://superyachtmag.com/2017/08/06/456-foot-lurssen-superyacht- project-redwood-on-track-for-delivery-in-2019/)

<comment><USER51> I mean it's certainly dehumanizing but... they're not being whipped to death after working endlessly in the hot sun. I'm not saying it's not awful working conditions, but the ability to leave alone makes it better than slavery.

<comment><USER50> You are right. My apologies - I should have said: "just a bit better than slavery".

<comment><USER52> No, you could have said "at least it's not slavery".

I empathize with your outrage, but you're being hyperbolic. I think you should avoid this because it's a good way of discrediting your position.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


PDP-11/34 says hello from 1978 - <AUTHOR> http://www.nycresistor.com/2014/05/15/pdp-11/ <comment><USER2> Very nice these old machines are still getting some love. It's very unfortunate the later models don't have switches (or any sort of front panel) anymore. Toggling in a program from the switches is a feeling that you don't get from the octal keypad.

<comment><USER3> There's some cool videos bootstrapping a 8800 via switches and then paper tape over here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv5b1Xowxdk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv5b1Xowxdk)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Now you can load up Dave Mills' Fuzzball software and have one of the first IP routers.

</comment><comment><USER5> They found a tape of "Digitized Monkey Brains." I wonder if this is from the project that led to "always mount a scratch monkey." [http://edp.org/monkey.htm](http://edp.org/monkey.htm)

<comment><USER6> Almost certainly not. That used a VAX 11/780 since the earlier combination of PDP-11/05 and PDP-11/44 wasn't fast enough for the monkey experiments.

This NYC Resistor recovery involves a PDP-11/34 from storage the Bronx, so it wasn't fast enough and is in the wrong place. Also, you'll note that the image on flikr references the same aphorism.

More generally, a lot of people have digitized monkey brains in one sort or other. For example, I know someone in the early 1990s who worked on digitized slices of rhesus monkey brains, in order to re-register them to assemble a 3D model.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Pic-Mapper - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN, long time no post! Recently, I wowed a few guys on a local fishing forum when I showed them how their iPhone's geotagging feature was giving away the GPS location of their "secret" fishing spots! (See http://www.sanjosebass.com/forums/marina-beach-stripers-128-780.html)<p>I couldn't find a web based tool to do this, so I created one. Not sure if anyone else out there will ever have the need, but if you do http://pic-mapper.com is the answer! <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: <http://pic-mapper.com></comment>


Delicious javascript tagging field upgraded - <AUTHOR> http://roberto.open-lab.com/2010/02/10/a-delicious-javascript-tagging-input-field/#comment-135

<comment><AUTHOR> Updated and renamed the component to jquery.tagInput (tagBox was already taken).

New version features: 1) esc key close the dropdown 2) clearing the tag will close the dropdown 3) tab on dropdown will select the tag

fixed a bug on safari, and a strange behavior pressing return.

Cheers

<comment><USER2> This is great! I think we'll definitely be using this in our most recent project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice component

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, this feedback always appreciated :-)</comment></comment>


A fully working PC in a mouse - <AUTHOR> http://interestingengineering.com/mouse-box-is-fully-working-pc/

<comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8931999](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8931999)</comment>


Ask HN: Are Microsoft certifications worth much? - <AUTHOR> Been in the field for 10+ years as dev - never had any need for certifications. Just wondering though if I am missing out on any opportunities and it'd be worth it to get some Azure certifications. <comment><USER2> You should give more info, are you in the us? If you are working as a dev then in my experience certification is not worth much. If you are working in a way that has a very particular work area (the old days, novell netware engineer) then it mattered.</comment>