from Hacker News

Ask HN: Would your company fire you when you place orders automatically?

by haosdent on 9/16/16, 3:59 PM with 0 comments

As we know, Alibaba just fired 5 programmers because they wrote an automatical script to buy mooncakes(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12504850).

>It is just a javascript running in chrome that checks the text on a button. If it changes to 'buy' then hits the button again and again. The unexpected thing is, after hitting the buy button, the site does not jump to the payment page, instead, it just increases the item number! That's why four people can order more than a hundred mooncakes.

> They didn't pay the abnormal orders. One of the four unlucky men said he had called the administration immediately after he found the problem and wanted to cancel the abnormal order. What happened next? He got an interview with an HR after 30 minutes, at 16:30. And at 18:30, he had been officially fired.

>The HR who faked the exit interview just got an 'internal punish'. God knows what is an 'internal punish' but she was not fired. And the three developers who wrote the system got a 3.25 on his KPI which means 'just leave the company you rubbish' because the employee should not see the comment of the HR in the system.

I was shocked that this happens in a "great" company which have more than 250B USD.

My question is would your company fire you when you write a similar automatical script to place orders in your internal system? If so, why your company would fire you?