Seagate To Pay Former Worker $1.9M For Phantom Job 354
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.'"
Just shows how far HR is from people doing the rea (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Liability (Score:4, Insightful)
At-will employment (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:bigger than seagate (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Too Much (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Just shows how far HR is from people doing the (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:At-will employment (Score:5, Insightful)
The employer has all the bargaining power unless you are extremely talented and rare in your abilities. Just because there is no loyality does not give Seagate the green light to harm other people. Laws like this need to be enforced to scare employers to be reasonable. After all if you did millions in damages to your employer he can sue you right? Same principle.
If a job is temp or does not exist they can't make an offer. It is not fair to the person nor family.
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Re:Too Much (Score:2, Insightful)
Pretty low, and this is what makes the $2mil payment just.
Re:Too Much (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Too Much (Score:2, Insightful)
1. If the person goes bankrupt he or she can not work again due to a bad credit score. This amounts to 7 years or more before it is erased. Also he or she would be forced to take jobs well under his or her ability like at a McDonalds due to Seagates bad faith.
2. This is punitive and compensatory. Otherwise Seagate will continue to do this and just make it the cost of business. This will scare it and other employers in the future of making such false promises.
Sounds 2 million is quite fair and cheap. Many punitive suites are 10x as much. As much as we hate lawyers and those who get rich by not working they do make their job as 2 million will make upper management blink and change their hiring policies.
Re:Too Much (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd be willing to not do a job that doesn't exist, for well under one million dollars.
A lot of people will even work at jobs that do exist (the worst kind, in my opinion) for 50 years and not make $1.9M.
The sad thing is that most people who get laid off probably do not get compensation equalling actual damages. I'm sure a lot of people who have been laid off would be satisfied with 1% of what he got.
I don't think Seagate was malicious or willfully misconductive. It's not like they were "out to get him" or anything. "Let's make him uproot his family and then say 'April fools!' That'll be hilarious." And I'm not saying companies shouldn't take responsibility for the people they hire. But I will say that it's not fair for one person to get "compensation in excess" while there are others of us who get laid off by someone who "didn't care what effect it had" on our careers, while we don't have the means to hire a lawyer to set it straight.
Re:Judgment warranted (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Just shows how far HR is from people doing the (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
Re:My aunt went through same thing (Score:2, Insightful)
She was a VP of human resources. She sold her home and looked forward to the new position...
[snip]
She lost her home, savings, and moved back in with her parents...
Something about this story just doesn't add up.
Re:Too Much (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Too Much (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Miserably Bad Sources for Article (Score:3, Insightful)
Employers tend not to give much of a career to people who sued their former employer, even if the suit is legitimate. Also, having large gaps on your resume makes you look bad as an employment prospect even without a lawsuit. I can easily believe he's now unemployable.
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Re:Too Much (Score:3, Insightful)
I might not have been clear, but I wasn't suggesting abolishing punitive damages, I was just saying that they should be spent on public services rather than given to the plaintiff.
The greedy defendant still has their bad behaviour disincentiveised, but the motivation for greedy plaintiff to file lawsuits in the hope of a big payoff goes away.
Then the incentive for reporting the undesirable behavior isn't there, though, and if you've been wronged you have to ask yourself "do I want to spend my next few months in court (likely not being able to work and being quite inconvenienced) just to hurt those that wronged me"? In effect, you'll be making the undesirable action more likely as it will be less likely to be reported and litigated as the only people who can fight back while not gaining anything are those that are well off enough that the undesirable action didn't really hurt them much.
Re:Too Much (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:At-will employment (Score:3, Insightful)
The employer has all the bargaining power unless you are extremely talented and rare in your abilities.
This is only true if you give it to them. The reason they have power is because there are lots of workers, and they can find another worker if they want to.
The flip side is that there are lots of companies, and you can always find another one, especially as a programmer. As soon as any company starts doing things I don't like, I start sending out resumes for another one. I am not a genius, but I work hard, provide value worthy of my pay, and I don't need to put up with garbage. (Note I didn't say I quite immediately, I start looking).
That said, from what I can see, this case looks clearly like fraud. It doesn't matter if it was a corporation or an individual who was making the promises, they failed to deliver, and apparently never intended to.
Re:Just shows how far HR is from people doing the (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Liability (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Too Much (Score:3, Insightful)
I always thought that paying punitive damages to the plaintiff was just asking for the system to be abused.
I've often thought the same thing, but I'm even more certain that if municipal governments will rig traffic lights to guarantee an increase in tickets for running red lights, inviting them to line up behind the firehose of civil punitive damages is probably even more likely to result in abuse.
I'm not saying that's the case here, but in general surely we'd see a fraction of the number of frivolous claims if they weren't a potential ticket to lifelong financial security.
We don't actually see many frivolous claims. We see one newsworthy extreme case every month or two -- out of the tens of thousands of cases that flow through the system without absurd extremes. It's like being afraid of air crashes because they're dramatic and kill a bunch of people at once, even though air travel is actually much safer than driving to the corner store.
And $1.9 million is not a ticket to lifelong financial security unless you're already pretty old, in superb health, and lucky enough to die of something that kills you quickly.
Re:Too Much (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps he DID do enough research to realize Seagate had to be serious or they would be breaking the law. Perhaps he just assumed they wouldn't break the law.
Re:Too Much (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Wow! Just Wow! (Score:3, Insightful)
This is pretty amazing. This is what people risk every time they work for an "at will" employer in a state which permits this sort of behavior. I have only ever worked in such states and I've never known any recourse for such shenanigans existed. He couldn't sue in Texas, I'm reasonably sure of that. Bizarre that Seagate was stupid enough to pull this in a state where it isn't permitted. So good for this guy.
Re:Just shows how far HR is from people doing the (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Too Much (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Just shows how far HR is from people doing the (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:vwhat better 2 year degrees + real world work o (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Respectfully, I disagree (Score:2, Insightful)
What college degree says is debt, and a lot of it. Employers love huge debts, since desperate people are easier to force work 14 hours a day with 8 hour pay. That is what gets projects done on time and gets the boss a bonus.
Re:Yea? so it was a targeted job listing.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [youtube.com] that look a lot like this analysis here [programmersguild.org].
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.
Re:talking down... (Score:1, Insightful)
Christ, you sound like a prima donna. You obviously know what you're talking about, but working with you would just be too painful.
Re:vwhat better 2 year degrees + real world work o (Score:2, Insightful)
Read the works of Carol Dweck.
What we claim to "know" about intelligence is probably just bloody wrong.
I can't take time to elaborate much more, but in short her tests showed students doing much better when told they were "Trying hard" vs. "Smart."
When you think you did well because you were smart, and not because you put forth lots of effort, it has all sorts of weird distortions in real life. In short, students who thought they were immutably "smart" did all sorts of things to protect that smartness - including not trying harder things, doing much worse when they did try because they worried about being labeled as "stupid" when they failed etc.
If you're "smart" and there's nothing you can do to change that - and you're smart because you succeeded, you'll be very careful about anything that might change your label to "stupid." And failure is one thing that will label you as stupid.
And remember, it's immutable - you're either smart [by an IQ test or something else] or stupid and there's nothing you can do to change that.
So, while I'd agree *in theory,* that there's some upper limit on the raw horsepower someone has, I don't think we really know where that limit is, and in practical terms it simply doesn't appear to work that way.
Individuals who put forth lots of "effort" are likely to vastly expand their capabilities. Perhaps one might be able to detect some upper bound beyond which they can't expand their capabilities any more, but from what I've seen, we've never determined it.
Also, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante [wikipedia.org]
This is an example of "effort" based results vs "inherent intelligence."
-Greg
Re:And that's why people can't get jobs and then t (Score:3, Insightful)
Or you could rest, relax, and enjoy life, rather than make it more likely that you'll be hired somewhere you're expected to work 14-hour days with 8-hour pay.
The whole point of working for a living, as opposed to being an enterpreneur, is guaranteed pay and not having to worry about work at your free time. If you're doing unpaid work just on the off chance it'll help your career (as opposed to, for example, simply finding some OSS project interesting), then you're getting the worst of both worlds. Stop running the Red Queen's Race and decide: do you want to get rich, in which case you should go the enterpreneur route (and accept you might crash and burn), or do you not care, in which case stop worrying about it and slack off in your free time to your heart's content.
Either go for the win or stop running the race. Simply "staying competitive" might help the national economy and its overlords, but it won't do any good to you.