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.'"

Comments

My aunt went through same thing

[Billly Gates]

She was a VP of human resources. She was offered a position that paid up to 180k a year. She sold her home and looked forward to the new position. It turns out they only planned to keep her for a 3 month project and laid her off. The job details made it appear that it was permanent and no mention of temp to hire appeared in job description.

She lost her home, savings, and moved back in with her parents. She is 55 and is too old to be rehired and lost everything. I hope she can quote this case as an example. Something has to give in this country. The rest of the 1st world does not have any of this nonsense and has much more support services. She is about ready to work at McDonalds and beg. Sometimes I hope these people and companies ROT.

Respectfully, I disagree

[Weaselmancer]

But having done 4 years of pushing paper only means your good at pushing paper. It does *not* promise talent.

I agree with you here. Talent is not a guarantee with a college degree absolutely. But it does guarantee something that actually is important to employers. A college degree is a statement that you can attempt a large and difficult and often times dreary task and stick through it to the end, and actually see it through to the end. A degree says determination. Employers love determination. That's what gets projects done on time.

in fact, most talent is driven from individuals during college.

Here is where we disagree. K-12 is like that, but college certainly isn't. I loved college intensely. If I hadn't gotten married along the way I'd be a prof myself by now. Where else can you go into a building and have PhD's explain interesting things to you all day long? It's wonderful.

I loved my engineering courses. I look at the world with new eyes now. For example, I know that shape a power line makes is a catenary, and I know why it looks like that. Hell, I even liked the goofy other stuff they made me take. I still lean on my Economics class for insights into the world around me. I know why the GDP is important. And public speaking. I teach classes on our software every so often and each time I walk into a room full of strangers I think of Dr. Dial who taught me how to speak to crowds. And even a poetry appreciation class where they taught us how to pull meaning from words and dissect advertising. I can tell you how you are being manipulated by any advertisement 9 times out of 10. I mostly avoid TV and advertising now because of that class.

I positively bloomed in college, and found it to be the most enriching time of my life.

Re:talking down...

[ledow]

Er... I *don't* want people to know my real age. I *do* look younger than I am and, yes, I do dress down (nothing that could be described better than "casual" during working hours) and have done so since I left uni. It's a kind of privilege that comes from being one of the highest-paid people in my workplace and one of the most critical (my employers are *always* worried about me leaving / getting caught under a bus). The official rules state that the dress code applies to everyone. Somehow every school head I've ever worked for has successfully managed to carve out an exception for that rule for me without me even having to ask or it having to come up in any conversation - while simultaneously berating other staff about exactly the same thing.

I like people being off-guard, getting the wrong idea and underestimating. It makes work-life fun, especially when things like this happen. My entertainment at work is primarily derived from watching other people's pathetic attempts at screwing me over. I actually won a contract by that method once - I was asked to look at an IT system that a large educational company had put into a school. I delivered my verdict to the school in question after the existing contractor had introduced himself to me while I was studying the system. Because I was "just a kid", they came up with lots of bullshit excuses for why the system was so bad, told the school not to hire kids to work on it, and basically tried to smear my name. It proved embarrassing for them when I had to deliver a report to the school on the suitability of their system, having been hired to do exactly that, and was able to quote lots of shortcuts and corner-cutting that they'd done and then tried to pass off with made-up technical explanations (and in some cases had unwittingly implied in what they'd said because they didn't think a "kid" would be listening to what they *weren't* saying). Not only did they make a fool of themselves, they were unable to counter in the meeting because they were caught completely off-balance - having believed that I was just "the IT kid" the school had brought in, rather than an IT consultant hired to evaluate their system - they lost the support contract to me.

It wasn't a one-off. People agree to meetings with me because they assume I'm just the IT kid and they can out-speak me when it comes to meetings between them, myself and my bosses. One guy tried to sell us a Linux network that could "run the Ranger suite" of network management software that we were using on the Windows domains for kids - apparently "there's this thing called WINE that will just run everything Windows on Linux". He didn't like the meeting where I pointed out that I actually know the WINE code quite well, and have my own patches for it, and that I could demonstrate how well WINE would run an AD-connected, group-policy-integrated network management Windows app that would do things like enforce kids not clicking on Control Panel or forcing file associations or even doing things like manage AD users when run on Linux. Let's just say, if you could get past the setup routine at all (with lots of hacks) then it probably *wouldn't* crash if you just ran the desktop client portion of it but it would be hard-pushed to then do things like remove the control panel from the Linux desktop, or stop kids accessing USB drives. He actually stormed out of that meeting (I'd never seen someone do that in a professional meeting before) and lost several hundred thousand pounds worth of contract - I heard he was sacked sometime after. I offered to build a Linux thin-client system better than the company were offering in an afternoon, and did it.

Or when the IT teachers try to claim that their lessons were unable to continue because the IT gear was out of order (i.e. the "blame our not meeting OFSTED inspection criteria on the IT guy" rap). Turns out they never think that I might actually have complete logs of everything, including service and computer availability down to the nearest 5 seconds, or that I de