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Seagate To Pay Former Worker $1.9M For Phantom Job
Lucas123 writes "The jury in a Minnesota-based wrongful employment case delivered a verdict ordering disk-drive manufacturer Seagate to pay $1.9 million to a former employee who uprooted his family and career at Texas Instruments in Dallas to move to Minnesota for a job that did not exist. The man was supposed to be developing solid state drive technology for Seagate but was laid off months later. 'The reason that was given is that he was hired to be a yield engineer but the project never came to fruition,' the former employee's attorney said. 'They didn't care what effect it had on his career.'"
There is no loyalty between employers and employees, and that's been the case for a few decades now. It's everyone-watch-yo-own-ass, like the Wall St. mercenaries.
Time to consider employment contracts like they do for investment bankers.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
It sounds like there is evidence if you look at some of the other comments. Apparently the job didn't really exist when they hired him. They hired him for a fake position in the hopes that his presence in the position would cause the business to materialize that would make the position exist. That sounds like bad faith to me.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
The list goes on with the only thing missing being actual experience with PCs, printers, and Office suites, which is what the job description is all about.
That may be why he started his own company and now earns "a fraction of the income he earned as a yield engineer," according to TFA.
the BS B.S. requirements are just to thin the applicant pool a little.
Careful though, if the job requirements are too bullshit what you are doing is excluding the people who don't bullshit (and actually bother to read the job requirements)
I'm all for changing the "at will" bit, or at least imposing some very heavy tax penalties on companies that routinely engage in layoffs. I'm as sick as anyone of seeing people treated as some kind of disposable widget.
But even absent that, it's a different scenario indeed when they basically knew they had no project, and just hired this guy to give the illusion that they did. The fact that the project was in a far different state than they represented it to him pretty well shows they were not acting in good faith. They represented to him that he was going to be taking on a project that was basically ready, when in reality he was there to slightly improve the odds on a longshot bet and get dumped by the wayside if it didn't work out.
That's fraud, and it should be penalized. Don't get me wrong, I think it's equally despicable, and should be equally punishable, to represent a job as a good long-term prospect and then proceed to lay someone off after a couple months. But at least one time, the people doing it got caught, and got stung. Maybe the next company about to pull this trick will have a second thought. Seagate sure will. While this by no means will bring them to bankruptcy, it's a sum that'll get their attention.
That's the point of punitive damages. Actual damages would just be a "cost of doing business", punitive makes it sting at least a little. And if this guy's starting his own company, he'll probably be employing some people himself soon, if he hasn't already. I can hardly begrudge him the money knowing that.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
He might have done a bit more research on the new job
What kind of research would he have done? They told him he'd be doing X, and had no intention of giving him that job. They just slapped him in position Y as a placeholder for a few months. They were lying to him. The position didn't exist. If you can't trust the folks you're interviewing with, who else are you supposed to talk to?
perhaps worked for a few months BEFORE uprooting his entire family (which is most likely what I would have done in a similar situation).
May not have been possible.
I don't think I could personally afford to pay the mortgage on my house plus the rent on an apartment or a hotel room for 6-12 months (plus associated utilities, and transportation, and whatever else).
Then you've got the hardship of being away from your family for 6-12 months. Not just a couple hours away either. He moved from Dallas to MN. That's a good chunk of turf. If he wanted to see his family he'd be driving for a couple days or flying. Not cheap. Not easy to do.
While I do agree that this really sucks I'm not sure it's worth almost 2 Million dollars.
I think that 6 or maybe even 12 months severance should suffice in this situation. The guy actually got paid for 9 months to do his job so it sounds to me like there was a job, it just didn't last as long as the guy had hoped it would.
The guy was hired to do job X. That position theoretically expands upon his knowledge and will lead to nice resume-filler and maybe some promotions or something. Instead he was stuffed in position Y, which was a place-holder job. It did nothing for his resume. Now he's got to explain the months of crap-work on his resume.
Further, he moved 1,000+ miles. Uprooted his entire family. Moving costs... Finding a new place to live... Selling the old place... Packing everything up... Leaving all your friends behind... Not an easy thing to do.
Finally, he had a good job down in Dallas.
And keep in mind he was lured away with a lie. It was fraud. He wasn't hired to do job X and then job X went away... He was hired to do job X when nobody had any actual intention to have him do job X because it didn't exist. The company lied to him.
Part of the compensation is to pick up all those additional expenses and hardships...
Part of the compensation is to punish the company for fraudulent behavior.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
$1.9m? It's not like they did something serious like share MP3s online.
I'm all for changing the "at will" bit, or at least imposing some very heavy tax penalties on companies that routinely engage in layoffs. I'm as sick as anyone of seeing people treated as some kind of disposable widget.
That's what unions are for. Despite the hate, unions are about as pure a free-market solution to the kind of problem as it gets.
Some might argue that "free-market" idealism goes out the window when unions get special-interest laws passed in their favor, well if the corps can do it, so to should the unions.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Those are all HR filters. Getting a job by going through HR is always the hardest method. Especially if it's a more generic sort of job. Better to get your resume into the hands of actual people who know what the job entails. Usually that means having contacts. It's still a good idea even then to get some meaningless buzzwords into the resume, because I've seen some HR people push back even when the resume is handed to them from the hiring manager who says "I like this person, bring them in for an interview".
Actually, most of those ads are written so that *no American can possibly fill them*.
They're called "PERM ads", and they are designed to do an end-run around the US's H1-B Visa system. They run completely fake, ludicrous ads that look a lot like this analysis here.
Then they lie their asses off claiming they "can't find qualified Americans" for the job, and proceed to try to hire H1-B's (who are locked in to one employer and get shit wages) instead. Meanwhile, Americans who actually DO qualify for the job are shut out of the hiring process, since when the employers go looking in India or elsewhere, the job requirements magically return to what's actually going to be needed on the job.