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Trenches Comic: Thurs. August 25, 2011
Bogey
I'm back, baby!Santa Monica, CAModerator mod
I'm back, baby!Santa Monica, CAModerator mod
Secrets.
08/25/2011 - Anonymous
A few years ago, I had the pleasure of doing some temp work for a firm that contracted out to a pretty big game developer. The testing staff was us contractors and maybe five, six full-time employees- that way the company didn’t have to pay a large testing staff if they didn’t need to.
About two weeks into my assignment, I learned just how draconian NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) can be.
I had gotten to know some of the other employees pretty well- including a soft spoken girl named Annie who sat in the cube next to mine. Like all of us there, she was really excited about working at this particular company. On this particular day, we had been working on an RPG, and all of us had been stumped by a specific puzzle in the game.
We had just come back from lunch and were settling back into our cubicles, when suddenly, Brian, our main testing supervisor, steps into our row accompanied by a pair of the largest men I had ever seen. They were security guards- the ones that I usually saw in the mornings as I walked in the door. Quietly I noticed him tap on Annie’s shoulder. She looked up and took off her headphones.
“Hey, Annie?” Bill quietly muttered.
“Hey, what can I do for you?” she asked.
“Uh, there’s a problem.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, here’s the the thing. You violated your confidentiality agreement. You’ll need to vacate the building immediately.”
“Wait, what? I… what are you talking about?”
“At lunch today you were discussing aspects of one of the games you were testing to another employee. Annie, I-”
“I am so sorry, I had no idea that I wasn’t allowed to-”
“You need to leave the building. Now.”
The girl was led out of the building by the guards in tears, and the rest of us just sat there, mouths agape.
Bogey on
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Yeah, the company was a jerk, sure, no question here.
Oh, and yeah, Bart is a jerk too.
e: ah Mike and Jerry are in on this, nm
Non-Disclosure Agreements do not go hand in hand with Labor Law.
I like this strip, some good Ol' fashioned favoritism.
kingworkscreative.com
kingworkscreative.blogspot.com
Yeah I had to read it twice to catch that. Pretty great.
Two guys sucked in through in their teeth after hearing it, and one girl said "ouch, that's harsh". The other ten or so of us stayed quiet.
Our trainer left the room, came back with two security guards and pointed the three of them out, who were then escorted out of the building and never seen again.
Ouch, that's hars a sound and ethical piece of business. Those upstarts had no future in the world of banking.
your = belonging to you
their = belonging to them
there = not here
they're = they are
I don't think the “Aren’t we cancelled?” guy got fired
...right away anyway...
What companies can do also depends on the state you work in. A lot of these these stories' outcomes would be highly contestable in California for example. Conversely companies in Texas can fire you without giving any reason at all, because it is a "right to work" state.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure this is what must have happened.
This isn't exactly a horror story. This is pretty standard for software development. Maybe the company was bad at training the team on their NDA's, but there are all sorts of jobs where you can get fired for discussing what you're working on with coworkers.
"Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more" from Henry V
http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/269700.html
they don't it be like it is but it do
"When you stare into the abyss the abyss stares back at you."
Nietzsche
kingworkscreative.com
kingworkscreative.blogspot.com
Steam: Chagrin LoL: Bonhomie
It's still a horror story. It just happens to occur all the damn time.
Bort is an asshole.
Except you have to sign an NDA or an employer agreement. Which is on paper. That she could read. She also could of clarified if she was confused. Also if she was in public with a coworker discussing the work, that's a big nono because the public could hear and have inside information on the company. There was a case where I worked where two employee's had a discussion in a restaurant with each other about a client. Turned out the clients wife just happened to be sitting near them that evening and overheard. They were both fired the next day.
The question would be, was she given the NDA, explained it's reason and details and encouraged to read it, or was she told 'sign this, it's just about how you can't talk about stuff to outsiders' as a three second aside during the thousand other things she signed during her induction.
I think you're overshooting the content and point of the story. It's not about how she was fired for no reason. It's about how she was a seemingly nice, inoffensive employee and was fired for something that seemed to be very minor.
You're extrapolating a whole bunch about this story that isn't actually there.
would it matter?
it was a legal document she signed.
When you sign a document without reading it, it is no one's fault but yours. If she's stupid enough to sign anything without reading it, she deserved to be fired.
You're absolutely correct. I've endured more than my share of eye rolls because I don't sign things until I've read them.
But that said, just because someone is within their legal rights in doing something doesn't mean you can't call them a douchebag for doing it.
your = belonging to you
their = belonging to them
there = not here
they're = they are
There's no way a manager would remember her name, and anything left on your desk when you're laid off is thrown out.
Also, it's weird that the rotating banner on the front page shows the strip from this upcoming Tuesday. I wonder how many of these strips they already have done... though the (C) 2010 in the corner seems to be an indicator that they've had these on the backburner for a while.
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