One of my coworkers, my mentor and someone who taught me what it meant to be a good programmer, was murdered by his wife, who also murdered their two children and then killed herself.
It took place over a holiday, and I noticed he hadn't shown up afterwards. After a couple of days, I asked my boss if he was on vacation, and he said no, so I emailed him. His body and his family were found the next day by his neighbors. I actually saw his face on the evening news and my heart started racing, because they made it seem as though he was the murderer, but as events came out, he and his beautiful children were the victims.
It was really horrible because he was one of the star programmers at work and responsible for a lot of the success in the company. Everyone loved him and he deserved to be loved. It really hit our company hard, and we had things like counselling meetings but all that did was fuel our anger.
Basically there's nothing you can do. You just have to deal with it and move on. It's been 10+ years, but I'll never forget him though, he deserves at least that.
His parents flew in from Europe for the funeral. It was unreal to imagine what they went through, my coworker's entire family was essentially erased. I wrote his father a letter explaining what his son meant to me. I never received a response... I didn't expect one either knowing what they went through, but I felt like it was my obligation to at least let them know.
This is both mistaken and a distraction from a very important topic.
EDIT: It's mistaken that she was banned for her two comments. It's unreasonable to read her comments and conclude she was hellbanned for asking a question about Steam and correcting someone about her gender. There's also no way to know whether she was hellbanned, or simply posting comments via Tor. If a new account posts comments via Tor, those comments are autokilled. It's not till the newbie status wears off (i.e. until your username is no longer green in your comments page) that using Tor won't cause your comments to be autokilled. This is done for obvious reasons: spammers use Tor to spam annoying things. Lastly, there are plenty of nefarious things that one can do to be deservedly hellbanned on HN; bans are issued for more reasons than just writing comments. Oh, and, if you are hellbanned and are sincerely sorry for what you did, you can email info@ycombinator.com with a sincere apology and may get leniency. I know from experience.
Can we please get back to letting people unwind about their heartwrenching experiences with mortality now?
Bluekitten's still green, so it's unlikely to be the Tor issue you describe.
It's perfectly reasonable to conclude she was hellbaned for those things: given the available evidence, it's the most plausible interpretation.
Being able to apologise and get unbanned might be a reasonable defence of the system except the entire point of hellbanning is that you can't tell when you've been hellbanned.
The lack of transparency or accountability in the HN moderation system is itself a very important topic.
The meaning of "troll" has been diluted so much in recent years, that it's now largely used by the media, and people in general, to mean someone who expresses a view that you disagree with.
And it's used to describe people on twitter who harass or post abusive comments.
"troll" used to mean something. Now it's just a stock insult.
Luckily I haven't had such experiences so far. I guess people go through too many daily stresses, especially in tech life. As the only girl in my team, its hard for me to say no to unpaid overtime because most of other folks can't seem to say no to overworking themselves afterhours and on weekends, giving people others who don't a bad name.
> Sometime it is very difficult for human to understand GOD and his punishment !
OP isn't stupid. He has no problem comprehending the wrath of your imaginary friend, nor the imaginary nature of the aforementioned wrath. He lost a dear friend and mentor. The one who has trouble understanding reality is you.
A few months ago, I was on the losing end of a head-on motorcycle versus Jeep Cherokee crash and spent several days in the hospital. I had some pretty severe injuries but somehow managed to not smash my head in -- I don't wear a helmet and, although I had several broken bones, I somehow escaped with only had a few cuts and scrapes to my head.
Several of the doctors and nurses said (words to the effect of) "someone upstairs must have been looking out for you". I'm an athiest and I get really annoyed when people say such things but, at the time, the best way I could think of to respond was to simply keep my mouth shut and not respond at all, so I said nothing.
It was about the fourth or fifth person who made such a remark when I finally went off. "Oh!? Well why the fk wasn't he looking out for me a few seconds earlier? He could have stopped that Jeep from turning in front of me -- but he didn't, did he? Get out of here with your religious bullsh*t!"
I really hate to be like that or respond to people that way but I just couldn't take it anymore. Apparently, however, "the word spread" as not one more person said anything even remotely similar to me the rest of the time I was there.
(Similar/related: all the "praying for you" comments posted to my Facebook page. I responded to those with something along the lines of "I don't believe in God so don't waste your time praying but, if you must, pray for the doctors who are operating on me instead.")
> "Oh!? Well why the fk wasn't he looking out for me a few seconds earlier? He could have stopped that Jeep from turning in front of me -- but he didn't, did he? Get out of here with your religious bullsh*t!"
So supposedly you were the rational party to the exchange, yet you failed to see that people (although you don't share their exact worldview) were just trying to be nice and went full-on asshole in return. No wonder the word spread quickly.
I'm not religious, but I have enough empathy to understand that when someone says "god bless" or similar, it's meant sincerely, and I care much more about a world in which strangers are sincere to each other than one where everybody understands there is no god.
It can lead to a very dangerous fatalism. If you think it's in God's hands whether you survive a crash, why wear a seatbelt?
More generally I get annoyed when someone says something false, even if I can't immediately see what mistakes it's going to lead them to make. My experience is that even the most benign-seeming of errors can cause problems sooner or later.
> My experience is that even the most benign-seeming of errors can cause problems sooner or later.
But of course you don't mean the mistake of mistaking a genuine attempt to be friendly for something to be indignated about. No, when someone speaks from their position into your life, that is not okay. If you speak from your position into theirs, it's super objective and correct, and to downvote them into oblivion is a perfectly adequate response. Who here would care if they're hellbanned? Just another peddler of religious beliefs, nuke them.
Oh, but as Bill Hicks said: Newsflash, you're dead too. Mistakes lead to a bad outcome, so does perfection. So I don't quite get the posturing.
We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing. -- Charles Bukowski
Yet from what I can tell, not believing in a particular fairy tale doesn't mean that every single thing you otherwise hold true isn't a fairy tale as well. It doesn't take a lot of science or introspection to realize that, does it? When people say "Planet Earth" instead if exactly describing the configuration of all matter and energy in the universe, does that make you angry, too?
> But of course you don't mean the mistake of mistaking a genuine attempt to be friendly for something to be indignated about
Projecting much? I never said anything about being indignant; it annoys me, or maybe saddens is a more appropriate term, but that doesn't mean I respond in anger. Pretending you think someone's right when they've just said something wrong may be the easy way out, but being truly friendly requires being more honest (and sure, sometimes it turns out it was you who was wrong all along).
> Who here would care if they're hellbanned?
I think HN's hellbanning is a terrible practice, I've said so repeatedly, and if you have any suggestions for how I could prevent it then I'd genuinely welcome them. But I don't think "don't downvote anyone" is a good response.
> Yet from what I can tell, not believing in a particular fairy tale doesn't mean that every single thing you otherwise hold true isn't a fairy tale as well. It doesn't take a lot of science or introspection to realize that, does it? When people say "Planet Earth" instead if exactly describing the configuration of all matter and energy in the universe, does that make you angry, too?
I'm not perfect, and I never will be. That doesn't mean I shouldn't try to become better.
I am sorry, I expressed myself very badly. I didn't mean to jump at you for the votes etc., but the general reaction to that post really astonished and saddened me.
And when I said "posturing", I was not even just thinking of this thread, but general delusions about being objective. I can see being "more objective", but even that will always be vague, and I think "objective, period" is out of the reach of anything within the universe. Simply because it's in and part of it. Yes, I get that religious stuff can be annoying, but so is thinking you're suddenly sooo objective just because you're not religious... On the scale between subjective and objective, the needle doesn't even visibly move, so to speak.
When someone expresses genuine condolences in an awkward way, a huge drama over religion and calling that person basically evil and wrong is kinda tragic. Like petty fights at a funeral. But you shouldn't be the scapegoat for that, just like that Indian poster shouldn't be the scapegoat for pushy religious people they were mistaken for.
General idea: If someone says something that means something nice in their culture, but means "asshole" in the one of the listener, they still said something nice, it's just misunderstood. Each knowing the culture of the other better would fix that. That's how I see it, anyway.
Getting annoyed and telling people off doesn't result in fewer instances of dangerous fatalism, because that is not a very effective way of convincing people. It may as well have the opposite effect: "See, God is great, he even takes care of this smug bastard"
Similarly, getting annoyed when people say something false doesn't result in fewer problems, as you are unlikely to communicate in an effective way when annoyed and are unlikely to convince anyone of the falsehood. Again, it may well have the opposite effect: the non-occurrence of armageddon never dissuades a cult of their beliefs, but rather makes them stronger.
And if you say something like "Well, they should listen if they know what's good for them", then you show that the rationalization of your behavior is just a facade. Then you are not truly interested in preventing problems. If you were, you would try to be effective, not just right.
> it can lead to a very dangerous fatalism. If you think it's in God's hands whether you survive a crash, why wear a seatbelt?
This seems like a red herring. I'm not a religious person, but the notion that it's possible for a divine power to influence human affairs doesn't necessarily imply the absence of free will.
Do you have evidence of this dangerous fatalism? Other than the tiny percentage of fanatics who want to be martyrs, I don't consider religious folks to be an especially reckless bunch.
No, I don't have a study or anything, this is just personal experience.
> Other than the tiny percentage of fanatics who want to be martyrs, I don't consider religious folks to be an especially reckless bunch.
You see a more subtle form in the conservatism that goes with religion; many religions oppose positive social changes, and I think that's partly because of the assumption that nothing could be truly wrong with the world the way it is today.
> It can lead to a very dangerous fatalism. If you think it's in God's hands whether you survive a crash, why wear a seatbelt?
Hand-wavey answer: something about the devil tempting Jesus to jump from the top of the temple because why not ? since he's the son of god obviously big daddy will save him right ? Then Jesus says something about not "testing" God.
Sure, there are arguments. But there are arguments for a lot of things in the Bible, and very smart, very knowledgeable people still disagree about what it prescribes. My experience is that if you base your decision-making on reading the bible and doing what you think it says, sooner or later you'll do something bad. (If you follow the advice of a major church you're less likely to do obviously bad things, but IMO the social/political policies religions tend to advocate are also bad, though in more subtle ways)
As a fellow atheist and motorcyclist, may I suggest that you start wearing a helmet? I mean, when there's no afterlife to look forward to, you should probably wear the appropriate safety gear.
"God and his punishments" == "bad things that happen, life being unfair" etc.?
I read this as someone trying to give their condolences the best way they know how, according to their beliefs, in a language that is not their native tongue.
I reread what he wrote and I have to say on reflection you're probably right and my first reaction was probably too harsh. However, there is something wrong with expressing sympathies for a person's death by saying something that amounts to "yeah, that's because my imaginary FRIEND punished him". It implies the dead person was killed by an all-knowing supernatural force as a response to a transgression.
I am not rude against GOD and i am not complaining. Here i was trying to express my views as i seen many-time that good people are suffering and bad people are enjoying !
The word "punishment" does not mean what I think (hope) you want to say. Punishment implies a crime, ie. something you knew to be wrong, could have chosen not to do, but since you did do it, you're being punished. That sentiment, of course, is offensive.
That said, I think the bulk of the vitriol fueling the down votes is the mention of God - that's also what the comments are all about. It's sad how the inclusiveness and tolerance of the modern rationalist ends abruptly at religion.
A quick scan of jigneshg's past comments reveals that they are definitely not a native English speaker, and as was pointed out above, in Indian culture, this is a perfectly polite way to empathize with another's suffering. The irony that this apparent cultural misunderstanding has caused jigneshg's karma to plummet gives me no end of mirth, but the clearly anglophile Western (and perhaps white male) reaction to jigneshg's statement is no more accurate for it. There's plenty of self-righteous indignation to go around this holiday season, so maybe a little forgiveness is in order, after examining the situation?
As an American male who is white, my first reading of
jigneshg's comment led me to a negative reaction, similar to those expressed above. So, for my part, race and gender had a great deal to do with my initial reaction, and I felt it important to bring that to light in my comment, because many of the reactions to jigneshg's comment insist that his language says something that, in the Indian context, it does not say. That insistence is unapologetically Eurocentric, since the West holds no monopoly over the English language or its use/meaning in India. Furthermore, those reactions are consistent with the racism I have witnessed among white males on a self-righteous power trip. It's a simple misunderstanding, blown wildly out of proportion because the parties reacting aren't taking the time to acknowledge that a misunderstanding has taken place.
Also, to make it abundantly clear, adopting another culture's religious concept and using it as a gamified point system – karma – is kinda shitty. Karma isn't a point system, except in the most limited Western view of the concept, and here HN deploys it synonymously with points, and jigneshg, who is likely SE Asian (based on their use of English) is getting nailed to the cross according to a Eurocentric, stripped down definition of Karma. That power dynamic (abstract though it may be) is what makes this racist.
My point was that you reaction would not have substantively changed if you happened to be a white American female or a black American male.
Even taking into account the fact that Africans Americans are more religious as a group than their white counterparts, I don't think religiousity (except in the most extreme examples) would affect one's initial distaste upon reading the phrase
> Sometime it is very difficult for human to understand GOD and his punishment !
in that context.
My initial negative reaction was due mostly to the fact that I'm a native English speaker - which is where the misunderstanding stems from as well.
That's totally true. In fact, because I'm atheist, the theological tune of the comment is what really raised my hackles, initially. I can't speak tot he reaction that black Americans might or might not have, so like I said, I just referenced my own reaction and experience, which I believe should have been more accommodating. But like you suggest, reacting as a native English speaker is totally natural, because we're all just reading words in English. Other than a wonky turn of phrase, there's little that marks the comment as being given by a non-English speaker. For my part, I'm just bitching here in the comments, b/c I'm not entirely sure where I can send a message requesting that people's karma points be restored. For me, that feels frustrating, and so instead I lash out at a kind of privilege that is more ready to correct than understand. Ultimately though, I think yours was a good quetsion to aske.ll
I've had this happen a few times over the years. It's really tough.
In one case it was a very popular and looked-up-to engineer. Out for a jog one day and an unknown heart defect dropped him dead before he hit the ground. People were very broken up over it and donated food and all sorts of things to his widow and kids. I think a small charity was set up in his name.
In another, nobody really knew the guy outside of his group. But he had had a very bad cough for a few months that to be honest, had become kind of a workplace annoyance and was blamed for everything from loss of productivity to a rash of URIs that ran through the office for a few weeks. He didn't show up one day and everybody assumed he had finally decided to take some time off and attend his cough. The next day it was announced he had died. There was no further information and nobody outside of his immediate group and management really knew anything about him or how to reach out to his family. His desk was filled the next week.
Finally, a guy I knew and my friends all used to work with, broke off to try his hand in the restaurant business. Things didn't go well and mired in debt and suffering from some mental illness issues took his wife and daughter hostage and committed suicide (his wife and kid made it out with very minor wounds). I think everybody was in such shock over such a mild mannered person doing such a crazy thing that people wanted to get over it as quickly as possible and pretend like we all didn't know him at all.
In the first case, everybody really took a day or two to come to terms that it had happened. Work really ground to a halt. People showed up to work, but took lots of time out of the office in coffee shops talking and processing the event. We named a room after him and had some ceremonies, everybody showed up to his funeral. It really took a few weeks for everything to get back to normal.
In the other two people really just carried on pretty normally by the next day or two.
In the last case, because of the way he went out, very violent and unpleasant, I think there was definitely an effort on the part of people to just...forget about him and pretend he had never existed. There was some occasional chatting about the event and how unexpected it was. But it was really detached like an event on the news involving a minor C-grade celebrity. But of course, we hadn't worked with him in a couple years at that point so his impact in our day-to-day was pretty minimal.
I think it really has to do with office popularity to be honest. If you're buried up in a corner someplace and don't interact with anybody...it's easier for people to get over it.
Right. What time of year was it in the first case? I would think it's easier to get over if it's the summer or around Christmas when people are going home for vacations.
That's a good question, it was...10, 11 years ago? I think it was spring or early summer. Looking back, I think the endless ceremonies, reminiscing, room naming...his office was a shrine for a couple months and nobody emptied it of his personal affects until his widow came and asked...I think it extended out the difficult feelings longer than it would have if everybody had been driven back to work or gone on vacations or something.
Someone in my company died of illness - someone quite young so it was a surprise and a shock to all around him. It has been more than a year and his computers are still on his desk...
My first day on the job I erased the whiteboard in my office. When a couple people walked in and saw what I was erasing (a short inspirational phrase on the corner of the board), everyone had a look of horror on their face.
It turned out that a close friend of the company had been in the office and written that phrase on the board. He died the next day. That was 2 years before I erased it, and everyone had been keeping it as the last thing to remember him by.
An Exec I worked for died. I was fairly new and didn't really know him, so I just kept working. Others were a lot more affected. I remember there being group meetings to talk about his life etc. After about a week, someone said in one of the meetings, "That's enough crying, back to work." Seemed harsh at the time, but everybody went back to work. A room was named in his honor. Life goes on.
This has happened in my experience before, and it is one of the strongest reasons for good source control that is infrequently considered. It was a tragedy when a very wonderful and dear researcher in our group died suddenly, especially to his three children and wife that he left behind. It was also a great loss as well that we could never recover some key bits of source code from his computer, and that a very promising cancer drug trial was derailed because we couldn't articulate why the compounds were chosen for study in the first place.
He died of a heart attack at age 42 after pulling three 90+ hour weeks. It completely changed my attitude towards work. May he rest in peace.
Just yesterday I was nearly run over by a taxi (in Seattle, what?) running a red light. As I realized he wasn't stopping I thought to myself, "at least all my code is checked in and pushed".
In 2004 when I was working in Seattle, in the course of a year there were three accidents on 5th and Battery that were exact mirrors, IE: car going too fast, hits a pedestrian on the same corner. I don't remember the first, the second a German tourist was killed, and the third my co-worker and I were walking to lunch over at the Two Bells. She was hit. I'm not a superstitious or religious person, but something just didn't seem right and I lingered a few seconds on the curb and jumped back just in time - good or I'm sure we would have both been killed. Luckily she survived, and I'd even say it was a (positive) catalyst in major life changes for her - she made a job change, moved to a different city, took up new hobbies, got in shape, etc. After the event, I'll just say that: a) the city of Seattle is completely negligent in not fixing the traffic flow in that spot, b) the Seattle Police Department is truly evil (their handling of the "investigation" afterwards was appalling) and c) you will never erase the image of a car hitting a co-worker / friend/ other human being from your memory. Work is a good thing and should be fulfilling, but something like that is a good reminder that work is just one part of our life.
I know that intersection, as it's just on the edge of downtown, the traffic is thin enough to let people think they can go faster than they really should.
When I was learning how to drive a car my instructor told me: see the light turned green, hold on, wait for an idiot, then wait for a taxi cab, then go slowly.
Similarly, my mother always told me to drive as if the oncoming person who appears to be stopping is NOT, and that people with turn signals on are liars or forgetful, and will continue straight, when evaluating safety of turning right.
Sometimes it feels like I drive like the stereotypical granny, but this has saved my bacon several times in the past two decades.
When I've worked at places that had poor source control and/or poor documentation, I've resorted to trying to push for it by walking around saying, "Suppose I (or fill-in-the-blank) get hit by a bus? You'll all be up a creek."
Obviously not a common thing, but it is a scary thought to think it's quite possible to work yourself to death in an office based environment. I'm sure many of us (including myself) can think of similar times in our lives when we worked this hard, heavily intoxicated with the energy poison of your choice, working multiple all nighters in a row. Even when you're young you're not invincible.
In Japan it happens so often they have their own word for it: karoshi.
Sararimen fall over dead at their desks, and others simply avert their eyes and focus on their work while a manager urgently calls for white-gloved personnel to spirit the corpse away to the undertaker.
Karoushi incidents are national news and are rare (although overwork is common, for reasons that are too much to get into in this post). These also happen in Korea and other parts of Asia; more so than Japan now, possibly.
I'm breath taken by the casual disregard for life that you imply the Japanese have.
Busy people, in general, avoid getting caught in other people's problems. Tokyo is filled with people who are busy. They may ignore beggars on the street and may not give up their seats. Taking it from there to an extreme (that they are immune to any fear of death) is an ugly reaction.
During the 3/11 earthquake, I was shocked and appalled by the stupidity of one of my co-workers who went on coding as normal while the building shook. (It was experienced as a Shindo 6 earthquake in Yokohama, so it was quite strong - I never ever experienced anything like it in my life). He probably saw it as macho, but it was dangerous - other people then were confused as what to do. He eventually left the company for not being very competent. (Good riddance.)
For every person like him, there were 50-100 people on the staff who were shocked, shaking, crying or scared. I find they reacted pretty much as I'd expect people in any school in Canada would have reacted. It certainly was more-or-less how we reacted when one of our class fellows put an end to his life.
I find it distasteful that people fetishise another group of people (especially people with the same capitalist democratic strain of lifestyle) to the extent that they basically superhuman or inhuman.
過労死 is just a compound word basically consisting of "too much work death."
Using your "they have a word for it so it's common and blithely ignored" logic, you could say that "infanticide" happens all the time and is ignored in English-speaking countries simply because there's a word for it.
You don't find it a little suspicious that there's a widespread medical euphemism for "this baby suddenly asphyxiated and we don't know how?" OK, not all SIDS cases are infanticide, most probably aren't, but it's nearly impossible to tell for sure.
What the hell are you talking about? People don't die from work exhaustion at their desks in Japan. I live in Japan and I've never even remotely heard of anything like that through my years here. And Karoshi is not even used the way you pretend it's used. You obviously have no idea what you are talking about.
There was a rash of news reports about fifteen years ago suggesting exactly that: that people regularly die at their desks in Japan from overwork. Since then, I've read that it was a vast exaggeration, but perhaps the person to whom you're responding missed those reports. They may not know what they're talking about, but it's probably not entirely their fault.
well with Internet nowadays it's really easy to check the information compared to 15 years ago. There's really no excuse to write something as if you are sure of what you are saying without double checking, especially on these kind of topics.
People generally don't double-check things that make for interesting stories and fit their view of how the world works. And for almost everyone, when it comes to foreign places they have not personally visited, that view is made up of stereotypes frequently bordering on racism.
My uncle worked for a financial services firm in the 80s. A consultant was in a computer room working on something very early in the morning and had a heart attack.
Someone discovered the guy, called 911, and went about their business. Due to some combination of bureaucratic bungling and security nonsense, the ambulance folks didn't know someone had died, and were either turned away from the building or taken to the wrong location in the building.
Long story short, the body wasn't removed until early evening. People thought he was taking a nap. I always found that so sad. The poor guy probably had a family and people who gave a shit about him, but the people around him couldn't be bothered to treat him with respect.
wow thats cruel, the guy could maybe have lived if the ambulance would have been there quickly, a heart attack doesn't necessarily kill you when you react fast enough.
I was working as tech support at a manufacturing plant. As I'd be walking around a lot fixing things I got to know everyone fairly well.
Manuel was the production manager. A nice guy, always seemed relaxed but always got shit done. He had been working there for about six months.
One morning I get in and hear the news from the somewhat insensitive IT manager, can't even remember how he said it, just remember not liking him at all after that.
About an hour earlier Manuel had been waiting at a round-a-bout. A semi carrying a load of fuel comes down from an off ramp approaching the round-a-bout and the breaks begin to fail. The truck driver attempts to veer but then the trailer starts to skid and pivot.
It crashed to the ground in front of Manuel's car and everything explodes.
I drive past where it happened every time I go to visit my folks. It's been at least 15 years. Someone is still putting flowers there.
Some day soon, leave a flower yourself with a note — just what you said here, ‘nice guy, got shit done’. Let them know that someone else remembers him.
I walked into work one day, and in my email was a remembrance note about a coworker who had just died. I did not know him, but in the email there was a picture of him fly fishing, and then another picture of him standing by his wife. He was an overweight, balding man in a Wal-mart jacket. Something about his "everyday, average guy" look scared me. I never knew him and if it weren't for the email, I'd never have known of him.
I grew angry, and could not figure out why. Was I sucked back into this reality that we all die when I had been working hard to deny it? Was it that someone could die, and some stranger like me had no interest or comprehension of his accomplishment? Was it that I only judged people by their accomplishment, when hypocritically, I had none of my own? Why did I suddenly hate this man, who I never knew existed, and only knew because of his death?
He was a father. He surely comforted his children on the first day of school. He went shopping for them on their birthdays. He had loved ones who grieved for him. Loved ones who had no talent to describe how great he was to them, but only knew he was great to them.
I still don't understand the oddness of my reaction, or why it still haunts me. We are all born in a blur of a gigantic population, and he was simply deleted from my inbox as my company insisted I delete my emails when it approached 150 mgb capacity.
I had something like this happen at a small software company I worked about 15 years ago. Our owner had written a specialized program for his wife to sell on the side, but under the company's name. One weekend, after a very big fight, she ended up committing suicide after he'd left the house. The next week, they had me going through her email to get a list of customers she had been working with. I can't begin to tell you the amount of discomfort you feel going through a recently deceased person's email - especially when it was mixed with personal messages. I got in, found all the work related messages, forwarded them to my manager and got out - I couldn't bear to be in there any longer than I had to. No one at the company was very close with her, but it was still a complete shock.
I have to do that when my client's employees quit or are let go. Even though I know they are alive and healthy, I still often wonder if I will ever see them again in my life. So many people have come and gone over the years that I can't even remember. When I disable their account and archive their emails and documents, it feels like I am saying good bye to them for ever. Groupon's bots will soon find out that user 'jsmith@example.com' is no longer here.
My archives will be slightly larger but nightly backups of active users documents will get a bit quicker. I used to have lunch with you user 'rjackson' but now that you got fired for doing something pretty bad, we will most likely never talk again.
And with that one command, a person leaves my life forever.
I'm assuming this story is a Facebook generation thing.
Not sure if it's a disassociation of the difference between/loss of real friendships and acquaintances or perhaps the constant need to get attention which people are starting to use the death of others to get (amongst other things)
I can't tell if this story is true or not, it's certainly well written and of literary value.
But it is not normal to light candles, create movies and put people who have passed away's photos up in the workplace.
Those true friends in the workplace will go to the funeral, this sort of darkness in getting off on people who we barley knew who have died, kinda scares me the most in this story.
Things get a bit more strange when you don't meet the people you work with. I work somewhere with a large staff that's entirely remote. In the five years that I've been working here, we've had three deaths (so that's about 1 in 400). One was a very grotesque suicide by somebody who was very unhappy and everyone they interacted with knew it. The other two were strokes. The whole company gets an email when this happens but little more than that. I don't even think we offer grief counseling.
I'm very senior here and know that I worked with the people but don't remember any of their names by now. Very few people do, in fact. Only one person I know remembers the name of the guy who killed himself.
There is one name that I remember though. We had a guy who had a very debilitating stroke and tried to come back to work. After about a month of some incredibly strange behavior from him, he was let go. He just never came back the same after his stroke.
Sitting down all day is really bad for your health. So is not having regular interaction with other people. When working remote it's really important to have some regular group activity that you do.
A good friend and co-worker died recently, worked together for 10 years. Hard worker, lived in Cali and flew out every quarter. We shared being assholes who get shit done by working hard, long, and speaking truth to power.
He died by driving fast, impatiently, killing his wife and unborn child. We shared a love of fast cars and recklessness.
His death has helped me re-evaluate. Selling (trying) my fast car, going part time to travel. Working hard for a company and dieing suddenly seems so ultimately unfulfilled.
That sounds a good idea about re-evaluating your life. I was working at a place where many did unpaid overtime and you could see the strain it was having on them and their families. Company's typically do not thank you for extra work.
Buy a VW Bug - "all show and no go" but you will enjoy tootling from A to B with a noisy engine in what is essentially a glorified basic go-kart.
It always surprises me that people need such an event to rethink their life. I put my life and goals in question around every month, if not every week. Could you tell more about why you didn't do that before? Would be interesting for me to read.
No incident or action happens in a void. A lot of the plans were previously tooling around, but the realization I am putting my wife's life in such significant danger through aggressive driving was made very real by the death of my co-worker and his wife.
The amount of required introspection on a weekly basis to re-value or evaluate the various components into question is exhaustive. As an adult I am forced to make long term choices, like mortgages, marriages, the like.
I would not get far if I was mentally re-evaluating the status of my marriage every week. Or the investments I have considered 'long-term', but these things are all instrumental in making the kinds of radical changes that were/are required to move on from here.
When I first started working as a manager for a group of folks, my own manager insisted that if one day someone in my group didn't show up for work and there wasn't a phone call or email or a note, he said to always try to get in touch with the individual to see if everything was ok. My manager was so insistent on following this practice so I asked him why he felt so strongly about this. He said he had an experience in which he had one of his folks not show up for work - no phone call, no email, no note so he tried to reach the individual by phone. After no response given multiple attempts to reach him, by late afternoon, my boss decided to drive out to the individual's house. When he got to his house, he found the gentleman passed out in front of his house. Thankfully, this story ended up with a happy ending.
We are going through this where I work currently, a co-worker, a good friend, passed away on the 13th. We'd been joking the day before about what food item he was going to bring in the next week though we all knew what it would be.
While he had been sick for a few years, at times appearing in colors no human should ever appear in, he had been improving steadily and was in very high spirits. To say it caught us off guard is one thing, it caught his doctors and family off guard as well.
It is very odd to have lost two friends who just happened to be coworkers since I started at my current company almost sixteen years ago. I lost my former manager six years ago and this friend who recently died was on the same team.
As a group, those closest never ventured into terrible. Oh we hit the gutter for humor but only in how it relates to our other loss years before. Jokes/comments along the lines of "God probably needed help keeping so and so in line" or "Great, now they are going to team up and take over the place".
Mourning will really hit Saturday at the funeral, its possible that terrible is reached the days after that but only directed at those who don't come who should have come. You know the type, there people you work with who really don't care about anyone else but they sure make a show of it when someone higher up is around. Got them, should be interesting if suspicions are right.
Forgetting, well that won't be all the quick. We still bring up the name of the first to pass from time to time, some people have an over sized impact on organizations when they are alive and when viewed with the rose colored glasses of the past. Yet shouldn't we always only remember the good days?
When we were doing the Apple Newton, Ko Isono (who was working on the tablet sensor code) committed suicide. Our manager got us into a common area, then told us the news. We were pretty shocked.
Many of us went to the funeral in the east bay. I remember it was very cold and rainy, and that I didn't mind.
We put Ko's name in the "About Newton" page. Nobody in management objected to that.
The factors that lead to suicide are generally a lot more complicated than that. If you get to really know someone who is suicidal, you'll realize that there doesn't tend to be all that much connection between reality and the urge to kill oneself.
If we want to reduce the number of suicides, we need to do a much better job at addressing of mental illness. Anything else is just window dressing.
We would have to know they are suicidal ahead of time. By that point if I knew they were suicidal, I would definitely talk to that person a lot more and invite them to events with my friends.
This happened to me last year. A young guy with a wife and two kids hit his head getting out of a cab and died a few days later from sudden complications. He was the life of the party type of guy, kinda like the Kramer of the group. Really well liked. I had a voicemail from him on my phone that I hadn't listened to yet.
It really does make you think for a while that you shouldn't take any day for granted. But, just like in the article, after a few months we all just settle back into our routines.
I worked with a business analyst once who dropped off his laptop for me to take a look at on a Friday afternoon. Odd, because we did regularly scheduled maintenance and he brought his external monitor in.
On Monday morning his mother called to report he had killed himself.
It was so abrupt and took the group by surprise. I do remember thinking that it would change everything. Life went on, though.
I've been through this four times. Three died at home; one at work. These were all at small companies, so we all knew each other--many for decades, and over different jobs.
The last two passed away about eleven and twelve years ago.
One may think it's haunting to still see e-mails from them in my archives. But the really haunting thing is listening to them speak in the voice mails our phone system e-mailed back then. Voices from beyond.
I got a Facebook notification about a friend's birthday the other day, who passed on from brain cancer over two years ago. It is an eerie feeling, for a brief moment it's like she was still alive and well just everyone else on Facebook, and her death was just a bad dream.
I get spam PMs from my deceased cousin from a minor social networking site she joined. Her account has been compromised. I contacted support to provide obituaries and such, I hope they disabled the account. While I don't mind so much, getting these kinds of messages would be horrible for her father.
I don't think this article is just about how people react to a coworker dying. It's an observation that regular presence of someone, particularly in the workplace, doesn't automatically lead the relationship past an acquaintance level. Obligatory social routine and superficial small talk might make us feel comfortable with each other, but beyond that, there might be nothing deeper there. Some of us our surrounded by familiar faces and conversations each day, while entirely disconnected and alone.
Honestly, I've had a fear of being 'Colin' for years.. that if I were to be gone one day, all people I come in contact with, besides family and friends, would remember are the inconsequential things about me. Its an ego thing I'm sure -- that I feel I should be remembered.
I make an effort to have some real impact on as many people as I can. Something they would remember. I have no idea if I've been successful. All anyone really wants is to do something meaningful.
I hope that Colin had a great group of people outside work that could memorialize him properly.
Two friends died when I was a student. A guy from the company I was working at died on the Air France flight from Brazil. They were all very young. It's entirely possible this happens to other people I know, or to me.
FWIW, I think it's good and healthy to think about death, perhaps even to think about it often. There used to be a time when people put skulls on their desks to be reminded.
A few of the folks that I know who are approaching 50 have started checking the obits in the paper frequently, so that they won't have an awkward encounter when they run into an acquaintance at the store, on the street, etc. and ask "How's so-and-so/our mutual acquaintance/your spouse?"
Oh god. We actually had a conversation about this here a while back, how the obituary industry is due to be disrupted... we hewed it through a few rounds of getting to the core problem and it ended up as a business idea for making a targeted version of Bang with Friends, "Bang with Widows".
At one company where I worked, I resented the fact that the executive assistant to the CEO made more than I; after all, she was non-technical and "simply a secretary". Then she had a heart attack at her desk and died instantly. I felt guilty for my thoughts and resolved to find out exactly what her job entailed.
About 2 years later, her replacement was struck by an aneurysm at her desk and died several weeks later. I had been interacting her a lot for work-related projects and had had learned how stressful, difficult and important that job was and did not begrudge her her salary at all.
One of my close relatives passed away this year. She was the partner in a professional services firm, and well like by her staff. The entire company had a day off on the day of her funeral, and many of them were distressed by it. It was not a shock as she had been ill for quite some time, but it does entail an adjustment.
This is going to become more of a common occurence as the baby boom generation start moving towards an era of high mortality and are in senior positions. There are actually companies around which can help with transitioning through a period like this, including grief counselling for staff, strategies, etc. I worked with someone on a project once who worked for one of these firms. Up until that point, I had never even considered that they would exist.
I've had this twice. Once to a car accident on the motorway in 2002. Once to a bizarre form of leukaemia such that (from our perspective) the guy had back pain on Thursday, and died over the Easter weekend by Tuesday in 2009.
Still think of them both from time to time. Some of my now-ex colleagues still comment on the anniversary of their passing on Facebook. I don't think I could honestly remember the dates if they didn't... Their names always stick with me though.
Reminds me a little too much of the regrets of the dying[1]. Ingrained deep within our mammalian brains is the instinctual desire for community and personal intimacy. We'd do well to remember ourselves and what makes us happy before we're reflecting from our own death bed.
A while back I found a website (or article?) that interviewed elderly people who where essentially on their deathbeds. What do you regret, what would you do differently, etc. etc.
Without fail, every single person said they wish they went to work less, and spent more time with their loved ones.
I personally, am not good at learning lessons from other people, usually I have to learn "the hard way". I hope I can learn this one from others.
> Without fail, every single person said they wish they went to work less, and spent more time with their loved ones.
I always wonder how much truth there is to that though? I mean, if you actually loved your job and preferred working to spending time with your family, wouldn't you still feel obliged to give that answer?
I don't think so. Someone saying this on their deathbed is not necessarily opining about how much they loved work vs. family in the moment. They're assigning a long-term absolute value on the amount of time they spent with each.
Say you spend 80 hours a week at a job you absolutely love, and 20 hours a week with a family you kind-of-get-along-with. At the end of your life, it might be that you decide "time spent at work" no matter how much you enjoyed it in the moment is just less fulfilling than "time spent at home" even when the day-to-day of home life is not as immediately gratifying.
Well put it this way: if you say you wish you'd spent more time with your family that's not going to upset anyone. If you say you wish you'd spent less time with them and more time doing something else, that's not very nice.
I worked with someone who joined our development team as a junior. He was a bit aloof, and slightly arrogant. I moved on soon after he started, he IMed me for the contact details of a contractor we worked with, and that was the last I heard from him. I was not surprised to hear, a few months later, that the guy had been fired, because of his attitude.
Fast forward another few years, and I was Googling (or was it Facebook searching?) ex-colleagues who I'd lost touch with. My search led to news articles that referred to his death. He was killed in a bizarre road-rage incident, where he was clearly the aggressor.
His family had created a memorial page on Facebook, but hadn't reported him deceased. I reported his FB profile as deceased, it was memorialized and I moved on.
I spoke to the ex-coworker about what happened (the same one who told me about him being fired a few years earlier), and he pointed out how kind the eulogies were- not really describing the arrogant prick we worked with.
A classmate fell to his death from his apartment's terrace in a skyscraper a few months ago. We were just coming back for our second year of Grad school. He was full of life, working on a startup for which he had won some funding via a competition, spending the summer at an Angel investor group, serving as a favorite TA for a top VC professor. He was a self-made immigrant and the best parts of life were right ahead of him. Nobody knew what happened, but it hit too close to home.
His parents requested that his name was not mentioned on social media until they had a chance to take him home to Europe and tell their family at home. We got together to honor him and express condolences to family and after a week or two, things went back to normal on the outside. On the inside questions still remained, not about what happened, but about the implications it had on us, his classmates, who are just like him in too many ways to count.
But many years ago I reported a pretty severe vulnerability in a common piece of software. A patch was issued and that was it. One of the developers then stopped answering emails and later I learn he died, probably by suicide. To this day I don't know if both events were related but I try to be extra nice when reporting vulnerabilities to developers since then.
We had a fellow in our QA department pass away suddenly. He died at home from "heart failure". I think everyone assumed it was a drug overdose, amid hushed rumors of rather strange behavior during a previous-job Vegas trip. It was sad, because he did good work. Like this fellow, a lot of people simply had superficial contact with him.
I wish I could say that his death motivated me to have more meaningful contact with everyone. But it didn't; it simply made me realize that you can't force that even if you want to. At least not for me. Some people seem to have meaningful exchanges easier than others, and I'm just not one of those people.
I have personally experienced this on five occasions in the work place. I can say that only once did no one have any idea that there was an issue. I have seen CO's, junior enlisted, and the inbetween. The powers of self loathing are in my experience not the driver, the most dangerous force is self confirmed failure. The type or scale of the failure does not matter, only the persons value of that failure matter.
That being said.
Go in to work tomorrow and make a forceful effort to engage with anyone that you think may have any issue with failure overwhelming them. The only weapon that can help is others.
Are you talking about suicide? The man in the article died of natural causes.
Even so, I totally agree with regards to failure and its magnitude not necessarily (or even frequently) having a relationship to the self loathing one can feel due to that failure.
I struggle with this a couple times a year. Holding one's self to overly high standards can be unhealthy.
I am talking about suicide. I felt the article was mostly about that thought process with the reality being kind of the side note.
When I have run across people that I thought were having a hard time with failure, they are usually measuring themselves against the completely self contrived version of the peer that they see as being better. My context may be skewed, but the guys that have the hardest time are the ones that thought no one else was having any issues. This is of course a symptom of the military culture, but can play out in the tech world as the insanely successful skew the perception of failure, upward. By that I mean tech people measure themselves against, not the just doing fine peer, but to the exploding all expectations peer, which is completely improbable and truly self defeating.
When I was working for an Indian out sourcing giant we had a 9 floored building each with a wide gallery. I liked working beyond 8pm and when I was about leave at 9pm I noticed a small crowd near one of the parking entrance.
Soon found that someone had jumped from one of those galleries. An sms from the individual to his elder brother blamed the extreme work pressure. Knowing his team and manager, surely that did not seem to be the case.
Yeah, I think it would go well with that bored, disconnected tone talking about terrible, inhuman things.
JACK (V.O.)
I'm a recall coordinator. My job is to apply the formula.
....
JACK (V.O.)
Take the number of vehicles in the field, (A), and multiply
it by the probable rate of failure, (B), then multiply the
result by the average out-of-court settlement, (C). A times
B times C equals X...
JACK
If X is less than the cost of a recall ... we don't do one.
It was interesting working in a "high death rate" environment, and seeing the ways different organizations dealt with that.
The military (US, especially) seems to rely on tradition. I still think the US Army "last roll call" is among the best.
There were contractor and local companies who did basically nothing, and where the big issue was getting personal effects packed up/returned, and risk that final paychecks (or, in some cases, 6+ months of pay held until completion) would be paid out. And some where the loss of enough people led to the company folding, too, so there wasn't even anyone to pay that money.
Probably not frequent enough to be meaningful for a silicon valley tech company with mainly 20-50 year old employees, but maybe in an industry with older people (or, in 10-20 years, in tech), there will be companies which differentiate themselves by how they handle this kind of thing.
There are some conferences where one of the first parts of the yearly meeting is listing all the former attendees who have died in that year; for the more ee-specific conferences where the average attendee is ~50-60, it's a much longer meeting.
I've not had a coworker die but I've experienced immediate family loss (my mother when I was 10) and I know that being around things that reminds you of that person can be very difficult. I chose to move away (obviously not when I was 10, but as soon as I was 17 I moved a few towns over, now I live at the other end of the state, and as soon as possible I'll be leaving the country, but it seems that sometimes you can never go far enough).
It's interesting though, the way a conversation like this will turn in a community like HN. It goes into religion, but sort of the opposite of how it turns out in RL (or at least here in the bible belt of the U.S.) - most people will say "I'm praying for you and your family." and it's usually received with a "thank you" or similar, here on HN though (and in a lot of communities, such as at a university) these sorts of comments will be met with anger that someone believes something differently.
Personally, I've never had much use for religion. Most of my family is highly religious, and it's never seemed to do them much good though it does help them cope when bad things happen. And that's where I see the value in it. I know it's unhealthy to try to runaway from past pain, but that's how I cope. And when my family says things like "Well, God works in mysterious ways." I know that they are just trying to cope as well, and I have no right to judge them for that.
Empathy is a very important thing, I think, and people who get all defensive when religion comes up should take a step back and think about their own beliefs. The majority of these people (myself included) will talk about science, how we believe in things we can prove. But the simple fact is that isn't really true, is it? I believe, for instance, in the speed of light, and that highly gravitational objects can bend light and even space itself. However, I personally have not measured light or the effect that gravity has on it. I've read papers about it, and I've watched documentaries. But it's still just faith.
I was at a start-up that was essentially a bunch of young lads who had all been close friends since school. Without going into too much detail or focussing on the human tragedy, one of us died in an accident and, looking back, I think it really delayed the growth and progress of the company by a year (or maybe two) while everyone came to terms with loss, death and their place in the universe.
I think the company was quite lucky to get through the experience intact, and it was probably only the presence of a couple of older, more detached execs that made that happen.
Moving houses, I found a t-shirt I kept meaning to give back to an intern I had had a few years before. We were close in age when I was at that job and we spent a lot of time together outside of work. I looked him up and found his Facebook page, where the last post was a year old, a memorial post from one of his family members. No information on how he died. It hit me a lot harder than I expected.
Holy crap, it's been a couple of years since I even learned he died and it still breaks me up a little.
When I was 20 and studying at university I worked during my summer break at a small company. We went on holiday for a couple of weeks over Christmas but just after Christmas Day I got a call from my manager telling me that one of the guys in my team was killed in a car accident and his wife badly injured.
I went to the funeral which was heartbreaking, the place was never really the same again without him. I still think about him every now and then, even though that was more than 10 years ago now.
I have seen a lot of departments in my office understaffed. Immigration department, Talent management department, the HR department etc., who job is seen as mostly mechanical and less stressful. In reality, they juggle between a lot of things and are stressed. People keep on calling them and act as if the they are there to serve. I have raised this concern in my organization, but only to deaf ears.
I worked with a guy who went golfing on one of the hottest days, drank too much and died of heat stroke in his sleep. Healthy guy too who was in perfect shape and ate disciplined nutritional food everyday and ran 5km in the morning while we ate mystery noodle bowls from a chinatown takeout window and rolled out of bed late
Well that was a cheery way to start my day. That and the chargeback from a confused customer, and the (really) mirror I broke by accident. Perhaps I should just crawl back into bed and watch movies....
Colin’s boss is on vacation this week. He recorded a message by webcam.
He’s lying on his side on a hotel bed. He talks about the clarity of
Colin’s press releases as palm trees shudder in the wind behind him.
“I wish I had gotten to know him better,” he says. “He seemed nice.”
Reading this kind of made me rage...and sad.
Tragic, but the inequality, and the indifference free market creates, makes me steer clear away from corporate environments. I'd rather be a writer or an artist working on one's creation and dropping dead than die for someone's marginal materialistic desires.
I know this is just one way of looking at it, maybe the company was a great place to work at and the words alone do not carry justice.
Unsettling. Knowing that you can die at any moment, yet you work to fulfill the desires of those above you.
When I start a company, I don't want people below me or be insensitive. I'm gonna pay them well, make their work not overwhelming (by creating more software to automate and lighten their workload). Maybe I'm just young and naive. but I sure as shit not going to be an insensitive jerk to my partners in crime. Nobody is killing themselves or getting sick because of being overworked. Fuck that ferrari man, if someone kills themselves in the process of making money for you, I'd be devastated. I don't know how I'd feel when I turn old though, as your frontal cortex deteriorates, causing you to have less empathy and concern for your surrounding.
> you work to fulfill the desires of those above you.
If this is your attitude towards work for hire, then almost anything you do will be unfulfilling. Work to fulfill your own desires. For some, work is a means to an end. To others, the product of their work fulfills them. If you work to earn enough money to see your family thrive, then your work should be fulfilling because your family is provided for. If you work to enrich the lives of the markets you serve, your work should be fulfilling because you know that you are making the lives of others better in some marginal way.
Except, people are more than supervisors. Maybe it's the vacation that he's been planning with his wife and kids for 5 years. You can just as easily make a rule like "To all parents: Family time is not work time. Not even a death at the office trumps that. No exceptions."
I'd rather be a writer or an artist working on one's creation and dropping dead than die for someone's marginal materialistic desires.
It doesn't seem to me like he died "for" work.
People die, often randomly, and sometimes at surprisingly young ages. It's a Gompertz curve. With the Internet, we hear about it a lot more than we would have, 25 or 50 years ago (even though early death was more common in the past).
I agree with the spirit of what you're saying, but I don't think we have any good reason to assume his death was work-related.
It took place over a holiday, and I noticed he hadn't shown up afterwards. After a couple of days, I asked my boss if he was on vacation, and he said no, so I emailed him. His body and his family were found the next day by his neighbors. I actually saw his face on the evening news and my heart started racing, because they made it seem as though he was the murderer, but as events came out, he and his beautiful children were the victims.
It was really horrible because he was one of the star programmers at work and responsible for a lot of the success in the company. Everyone loved him and he deserved to be loved. It really hit our company hard, and we had things like counselling meetings but all that did was fuel our anger.
Basically there's nothing you can do. You just have to deal with it and move on. It's been 10+ years, but I'll never forget him though, he deserves at least that.