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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.'"
So you're saying Seagate's HR department doesn't have good TRIM support?
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
Just shows how far HR is from people doing the real work.
And that's why you see stuff like need 5 years for low level jobs as well as the need B.S / PHD for lot's of tech jobs that don't need one.
The inference was that SeaGate bought Vaidyanathan on as a little corporate theatrics, manipulating appearances while they looked for a partner organization.
He was able to sue under a Minnesota law that makes it illegal for
I've posted the link to the relevent law a couple of comments down but it would seem that the most important issue was one of fraud. SeaGate in effect lured him into Minnesota with promises of a job that didn't exist and he suffered the financial repercussions. His eventual firing wasn't at issue, but rather that SeaGate seemed to have hired him away from a decent job so as to put him in a placeholder position as a means of drumming up a little business - they weren't hiring him in good faith.
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.
Minnesota is a "At Will" employment state, which is a misnomer. Basically it means they can fire you at any time, for (almost) any reason, without any warning or compensation, unless otherwise covered by federal laws (for example, mass layoffs). Most states have laws similar to this. In this case, they caught Seagate on a technicality -- the jury believed that Seagate willfully misrepresented the job to him, and thus was in violation of a state law.
Without knowing the case specifics, I can't say with authority how likely this is to be overturned, but if Seagate can demonstrate that the project fell apart for business reasons that could not be reasonably anticipated, it'll die on appeal. And it is very likely that it will.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I'm going to guess somewhere in the 1.9 Million dollar range, but who can say for sure?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Liability was based off of a contract term called reliance or promissory estoppel. Because he relied on a promise of a job, and it cost him a bunch of money, he is given damage for what he went through. I am not a lawyer but that is the basic premise of the term. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promissory_estoppel
They broke Minnesota law by lying to him. The job did not really exist, simple as that. The verdict was for Punitive Damages "compensation in excess of actual damages - a form of punishment awarded in cases of malicious or willful misconduct" not Liability damages "compensation for actual damages"
From TFA:
The basis for the case is a Minnesota statute that makes it illegal to induce "any person to change from any place in any state, territory or country to any place in this state to work in any branch of labor through or by means of knowingly false representations."
Drill baby drill - on Mars
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.
http://saveie6.com/
What do you think his chances for future employment are? Any employer is going to Google him and discover that this happened. Granted he won the case on the merits, but if a company has a choice between a candidate that hasn't ever sued an employer and one who has, who do you think they'll choose?
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.
Which is why judgements should be a percentage of gross profits, with each consecutive conviction for the same offense increasing that by 5% until the company is wiped out and its shareholders suffer massive losses.
Then they'd listen. Or move to China where you can practically grind your employees into hamburger and everybody cheers how you brought the bottom line up.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
To be honest, there are people out there (a lot of them with businesses and living in Florida) who want to just take advantage of others as much as possible. Without the thread of punitive damages, those people would break the law where it only got their company into trouble and the only punishment would be that they'd have to pay out what they normally would have had to any ways, which isn't really a punishment at all as its what they should have been doing. Punitive damages are a threat to them so that hopefully they won't do it in the first place or won't do it twice.
When I was younger, I used to think punitive damages were getting out of control too, but now I see that they have a purpose. People get greedy on both sides of the bench.
Yeah. Just the other day I saw a job advertised where experience with Windows Vista was required to get the job, but nothing was said about being expected to work with Vista.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
My favorite:
* Requires 10 years of C# experience
(The .NET Framework was created in 2002.)
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
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
Yeah. Just the other day I saw a job advertised where experience with Windows Vista was required to get the job, but nothing was said about being expected to work with Vista.
That's just a check to make sure the applicant is a glutton for punishment...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
I think what got them was the fraud part. It would be like you having a fast track job at MSFT working on the integration of Windows 8 and the X360, and I lure you away saying "Hey we want to give you a high profile job at Apple designing the "one more thing" we are gonna roll out next year" and when you get there the "job" is answering Steve's emails.
Now it doesn't matter if you were paid the same as if you were actually working on the "one more thing" because by hiring you away for a fake job you just got torpedoed from the fast track you were on and may take ten years to get back into that position, if you ever do at all. So I'd say that it is good to set this kind of precedent so that you don't fuck over peoples lives playing a game of "who has the bigger corporate penis". After all without any kind of ruling against this kind of douchebaggery, what is to stop say someone like Oracle from just hiring away key developers from rivals for non existent jobs just to hurt them before acquisition? You take out the right people in a company at just the wrong time and you can seriously mess them up, and if this were allowed without punishment you could just toss those key people after keeping them in a holding pattern until the damage is done.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
In my view they need to also be careful that it doesn't have the effect of discriminating. The last thing that the HR department ought to be doing is going back to the days when certain folk weren't considered good enough even if they could do the job.
And I'm not really exaggerating that much, in order to get work experience you have to have a job, but in order to get a job they're expecting to have several years of experience for even a basic job. Maybe they don't really mean it, but they could still end up in court explaining why it is that they're not advertising the positions accurately.
It's the Erie Doctrine. Basically, Federal court applies the laws of the state.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erie_doctrine
$1.9m? It's not like they did something serious like share MP3s online.
That's nothing. I once saw a web developer job that listed in its requirements "10 years of HTML experience".
...and this was in 1999.
Hogwash.
So many people confuse education with intelligence. Education will *amplify* intelligence no doubt. But having done 4 years of pushing paper only means your good at pushing paper. It does *not* promise talent. in fact, most talent is driven from individuals during college. The corporate workplace wants and needs drones.
End Rant.
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
As does the motivation for the genuinely wrong plaintiff, and for that matter their lawyer.
Not saying we don't need some form of Tort reform, but what lawyer is going to take a case on contingency, wherein their best possible outcome is the fees they would have charged anyway, and what plaintiff is going to bring a lawsuit where their best possible outcome is provable damages and months in court and their worst possible outcome is bankruptcy.
Companies can afford to piss money away on lawyers, normal people cannot.
Been happening forever. Companies that think "years of experience" = good and just decide they need an arbitrary amount without any real consideration of what that means.
Something along those lines I remember was back in 1999 when my roommate was looking for jobs. I had a wide skillset and was looking for a few kinds of jobs, a Linux sysadmin being one he was interested in. There were more than a few positions, what with this being .com boom time and all that. They all wanted MCSEs. Yes that's right, they wanted a Microsoft certification for a Linux only job. Reason was, of course, MCSE = sysadmin in their mind. They didn't know what it was, what it meant, any of that, just that MCSE = sysadmin. He was actually told this at one point. He got exasperated with a recruiter and yelled at them (he wasn't getting the job anyhow) for the stupidity. They said something to the effect of "MCSE is the industry standard degree for all systems administration."
This shit will always happen.
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.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
How about comparing an 18-year old with no work experience and no college with a 22-year-old with no work experience and a 4 year degree? Because that's really the difference in comparing career entry points.
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".
The difference here is, that man was highly qualified and working in a field where I don't imagine you can drum up employment simply by wandering from house to house asking if anyone needs their lawn mowing.
He now has a CV (okay, resume, seeing as he's in the US) which shows he moved for this job and was promptly made redundant. Now, for a lot of HR people that's going to be a red flag - and they'll use it to disqualify him from future jobs.
I'm not sure that's sufficient grounds to argue that Seagate have effectively ended his career - I've never yet got a job through the formal HR process - but I'm not familiar with his field. Clearly Mr. Vaidyanathan thinks it is, and has managed to find a lawyer who can persuade a jury likewise.
I can just imagine the interview.
"So, Mr. Vaidyanathan, I see you live in Minnessota now. How do you feel about relocating for this new role?"
"I don't have a problem with it, but there's a good chance I'll have to fly back fairly regularly - possibly at short notice - over the course of the next year or two."
"Really? Why's that?"
"I'm suing my former employer".
Nothing surprising about that, in any country in the world.
Don't do stupid things until you at least have stuff on paper. I was "promised" a huge raise / promotion by the head of the school I was working for. By his count, I would be god earning a living just from the interest on my wages. My immediate boss was about to retire and they wanted me to fill that position AND take over the IT of a few other schools they were merging with. When I asked for it written down, I got a bunch of excuses about hiring practices, HR regulations, local borough advertising requirements etc. but "the job was mine". I politely declined and he kept harassing me for the next few days about it until we had a sit-down meeting, just me and him.
I learned several things:
1) Bosses don't like being told that you don't trust them, but the look on their face when you're honest is priceless.
2) Having another job already lined up - at higher wages and better conditions/hours - is a very, very large bargaining chip, especially if you don't tell them about it until halfway through the meeting (and especially if they don't realise that you could SEE the changes coming months before everyone else and already have something lined up). Having it actually written on paper, with full contracts, is a BIG advantage.
3) The wonderful job / promotion you were offered initially pales in comparison to that which is offered after several rounds of the two employers directly fighting over you.
4) No amount of wonderful job offers actually materialise until you see something on paper - in the end, they could only afford a part-time student on half my hourly rate to replace me. Needless to say, their IT suffered quite a bit. God knows what they'll do when my old boss actually does retire.
5) Talking to me like a child and telling me that it's a wonderful opportunity for someone "my age" is made even more funny when they later go to my immediate boss and actually find out my true age and then all the condescending things they said in the meeting suddenly come flooding back to them. They thought I was 19, turns out I was 29. He either read my HR records wrong or just didn't bother to check at all. My immediate boss literally had to say the line "You *do* know how old he is, don't you? He's not a kid who'll fall for something like that."
6) The satisfaction of going to a new job the next week and occasionally returning to visit your old workplace would cater for any amount of monetary loss once you witness what they have done to the place and who they end up hiring. It's made even better when your new job is paying twice what they were offering you.
I will honestly never forget the look on his face: "Don't you think that's a great offer?" "No." "But why not, it's a wonderful opportunity for someone your age!" "Because I already have a superior offer and, to be honest, I just don't trust you can do what you're promising." Turns out, I was right.
Big deal, I have 35 years with C# and I am only 34.
You can't handle the truth.
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
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.