The Ultimate Dystopian HR Feature: Bidding on a Deceased Coworker's PTO
Description
This image is a screenshot of a tweet by user Soren Iverson, known for creating satirical UI mockups. The tweet text reads 'Workday bid on deceased coworkers PTO'. The attached image displays a fictional mobile app screen with a green header labeled 'Time Away'. A prominent pop-up modal is the central focus. Inside the modal, there is a profile picture of a man, above which it states, 'Rodney has passed away. Want his PTO?'. The text continues: 'He accrued 115 days. Bidding starts at 8am PT on Thursday. Please do not use company time to place your bids.' Below this are two buttons: a bright green 'Remind Me' and a light grey 'Buy for $47,503'. At the bottom of the modal, a disclaimer reads, 'Omnicorp reserves the right to deny excessive PTO usage. More'. This is a piece of dark, satirical humor criticizing corporate culture's potential for dehumanization. It imagines a grimly transactional feature within an HR system like Workday, where a colleague's death is immediately converted into a morbid auction. For developers, especially in large enterprises, it's a hyperbolic reflection of impersonal corporate processes and the often-clunky, feature-obsessed nature of enterprise software
Comments
70Comment deleted
Our new 'Agile Bereavement' feature ensures that even in death, an employee's assets are swiftly re-assigned to the backlog. It's not a bug, it's a feature for maximizing resource utilization
Workday just launched a Kafka-backed “dead-letter queue” for unused PTO: when a colleague’s life-cycle event fires, their vacation days hit the topic and the first consumer thread gets the long weekend - grief handled with exactly-once semantics
After 20 years of optimizing HR systems for 'efficiency,' we've finally achieved peak enterprise software: turning bereavement into a microservices-based auction platform with real-time bidding APIs. Next sprint: implementing blockchain for immutable PTO inheritance smart contracts
When your company's HR system treats PTO accrual like NFTs and implements a Dutch auction for a deceased colleague's vacation days, you know someone took 'resource optimization' and 'employee lifecycle management' way too literally. The real horror isn't the $47,503 price tag - it's that some architect probably got promoted for designing this 'innovative benefits marketplace' that gamifies grief and turns bereavement into a bidding war. Peak enterprise software: solving problems nobody has while creating dystopian UX that makes you question whether the system passed any ethics review, or if 'Omnicorp' just auto-approved it through their automated governance pipeline
Workday turning a coworker’s PTO into a Dutch auction to retire ASC 710 liabilities - complete with “don’t bid during company time” - is the most enterprise thing I’ve seen
Workday's masterstroke: Decoupling PTO accrual from vital signs for seamless resource reclamation
Somewhere there’s a Jira epic called “PTO Liquidity,” a Kafka topic obituary-events, and a feature flag bereavement_beta - because when your OKR is “increase PTO utilization,” you accidentally ship a secondary market
This has got to be fake. Even so, it's the most dystopian thing I've ever seen. Comment deleted
It's fake. The creator of this screen created other similarly dystopian screens that has gone viral. Comment deleted
Asking employees to donate accrued vacation time to cover the hospital stay of a sick coworker is apparently already acceptable. We need to shut the economy down until we can figure out how to get the plastic out of our brains imo Comment deleted
Which banana Republic are you from that you have limited sick days? Comment deleted
India has limited sick days Comment deleted
the orphan crushing machine is working as intended Comment deleted
Scuse me? Could you explain me the first part? Comment deleted
Someone told me a story about that happening where they worked, years ago. Can't say whether it's true or exaggerated tbh Comment deleted
Lol what a type of a commie cuck you need to be to participate in such events lol I know, such species exist, but each and every time I'm shocked lol Comment deleted
What does communism have to do with this Comment deleted
They support such stupid social "support" interactions lol Rearrange some valuable things belonging to someone because we have "poor marginalized people need it more". Literally commie approach Comment deleted
The people you're talking about have no idea what communism is, and neither do you lol Comment deleted
You don't need to even know who is marx or lenin to be a stupid commie, duh... By the way - making assumptions about knowledgebase of someone you don't even know is too harsh. You should attack arguments, not the person. Comment deleted
I'm attacking you based on your read of the situation, not your personality Comment deleted
If it's not real it will be real Comment deleted
its not a serious product or image, like the other posts from the guy Comment deleted
Oh wow, glad I live in Europe then 😅 Comment deleted
some people don't have sick days at all, and have to use their vocation days, of which they have about 10 per year. (Oh wow, glad I live in Europe then 😅)² Comment deleted
And then what? Come to work with influenza/covid/fungal necrosis? 😂 or else what? Work will come to you? 😂 Comment deleted
friend of mine went from German Amazon to US to get more money, had to crawl with broken leg to work the same day he broke it. said — was worst decision ever, happy to be back to civilized human world. Comment deleted
No, he didn't have to. He was probably ordered to, at best, but my question still remains unanswered: what if he just didn't? Like if he went home and called in 'sick'? Is US so third-world country they don't even have osha or other workplace inspection bureau? I'm too lazy to look it up, but I'm almost certain, that amazon has unions. They would back him up too, right? RIGHT? Comment deleted
you can just get fired in an instant. Comment deleted
...and be eligible for compensation...? Riiiight? Comment deleted
I'm not sure. my wife got fired by a massage in whatsapp just like that. I had an American C-level dude in a German company, who wasn't aware that people have rights in here. he was trying to fire me in the same manner. my lawyer was laughing his ass out. here I got about 10K€ compensation. but practically you can go for court in case you get fired. whether you can win this... I'm not so fit in their juristic system. Comment deleted
afaik it depends highly on which state you're in and where you're working. texas? rights were never an option. california? not quite europe, but you've got some options. amazon? ha. small independent company? they'll probably still try fucking you over, but you've got a lot more leverage in a company where you alone are 10% of the workforce. startup? you can probably get them to bankrupt themselves trying to get basic workers rights, but you still won't get any. oh, they don't have money anymore? no payday for you, shoulda chosen a more stable company Comment deleted
tldr it's a hellhole, but depending on circumstances it can be ok Comment deleted
there's some unions, but they're usually quite weak and/or underrun with big corpo suckups. And plenty of companies are willing to go to war (figuratively) with unions over minute stuff just to discourage them from doing anything. remember when the tesla factory in sweden tried busting its union and basically got completely blocked from all swedish trade because of that? yeah, they only even tried that because the american managers thought they could use american methods in europe Comment deleted
good times though, I had a good laugh when that was happening Comment deleted
er, I looked it up, and some minor corrections: - tesla sweden didn't try busting their union, they simply ignored a demand from the union for mechanics - they didn't get blocked from all trade in sweden, they got blocked from all trade in the nordics. so including norway, finland, iceland and denmark. Some unions in other european countries also went on a workstrike against tesla in solidarity. The 120 (!) mechanics at tesla sweden that were the source of the union demands also went on workstrike, for the record. There were also other sympathy strikes, like the swedish post refusing to deliver license plates, or electricians refusing to service tesla charging stations. - there's no tesla factory in sweden, this is just mechanics that service cars Comment deleted
also the garbage company stopped collecting garbage from tesla lmao Comment deleted
yeah. in Germany tesla butchered people resources the American way and people were getting sic all the time. if I remember correctly, they went for a court and have been told there exactly that 👆 Comment deleted
The tldr is: - in most places in the US you can be fired "at will" - even if you have protections (many of which have been stripped by the current administration) you can be fired for some made up reason (eg, reduction in force, performance). - you could potentially sue for wrongful termination, but you would need pretty clear evidence and the means for a lawsuit - depending on your termination, you may be able to collect unemployment income assistance, but that partly depends on the company upholding their end of the paperwork Comment deleted
You're fired, you lose medical insurance and you die, so many cases like that https://www.abetterbalance.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Pointing-Out-Walmart-Report-FINAL.pdf Comment deleted
Yeah i live in America and i get 10 pto days a year. Sick, vacation, death in the family, it doesn't matter. You get 10 days paid and anything else you take off you don't get paid Comment deleted
Wait you can cate off more days? Damn. Here you would be beheaded if you dont show up Comment deleted
Depends on who you work for. My company if you use up all your pto you can request a day off but they may or may not approve it and you won't get paid. Otherwise you can call in sick but you won't get paid if you have used your 10 pto days already. And if you miss more than 2 days sick you need a doctors note. Comment deleted
Damn here you need doc note for all days, you can ask for additional pto which will be paid but you cant just not show up Comment deleted
first time I hear of a company in austria requiring doc note for sick days Comment deleted
Wtf Comment deleted
Here is the same. Some companies may allow 1-3 dqys (which are paid by them) but for more than that you need doctors note (and is paid by social insurance) Comment deleted
bruh Comment deleted
Better than stateside lol Comment deleted
I call it "human-looking things with no dignity", tho Comment deleted
I don't even 😭 Comment deleted
me please Comment deleted
…bonk? Comment deleted
I can get sick only for 25 days in a year Comment deleted
PTO? Comment deleted
Paid Time Off Comment deleted
whats that? Comment deleted
It's when you pay for a vacation from your gross instead of paying for a therapist from net salary Comment deleted
Lots of people call themselves communists these days but they're mostly liberals in denial Comment deleted
Marx had a great critique of modern economic systems. It's an academic work anyone in government or economics should read and understand. "Marxists" are annoying losers on twitter Comment deleted
"Broken clock shows right time 2 times a day", huh? Logic laws approve that you could be right in your conclusions, but be totally wrong with your thought process. Same with commies and Marx. And I got argues about communism since I was 5 lol Comment deleted
If you want to continue you should bring some "great critique" to the table and use it as arguments. Comment deleted
I can link you a wall of text but you're not going to read it Comment deleted
You have chatgpt to make it lean, duh... Comment deleted
And again you're making assumptions about my intentions. Why? I have my will to do it by myself. Moreover, I've asked you to provide me with those arguments. But you are refusing me with such privelege because you are assuming that I would be such disrespectful man not even to read your reply. No! I would at least put a clown emojie if it would be very bad. And you'll get a reply if it will be a good text. That's how communication works. Comment deleted
Humanity is doomed Comment deleted
Why don't you try this essay written by some little-known backwoods dipshit named Albert Einstein? https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/ Comment deleted
Meh, Albert had not enough modern data. Only ideas and theories that socialism will work. Modern data, even my life experience tells me likewise. I have too many examples of planned fuckups, or even manmade horrors. Well ok, planned economy could work fine in Albert's vision. If you have a quantum PC making planning for the future and following the plan is controlled by AI and humans are not participating in the management/government. Anyway, it's not communism but techocracy. Oh, last but not least - Albert's vision of "planned economy" crumbles beyond "I don't give a fuck about anyone except me" argument. You can't oblige everyone to care and be responsible lol. Comment deleted
You've missed the point entirely while also demonstrating that you have no idea quantum computing is a scam. I'm done, goodnight Comment deleted
Oh, so just "you wrong", that's all? Goodnight then. Claiming shit with no arguments, knowing how to attack a person... Typical commie lol Comment deleted