zlacker

>>boffin+(OP)
I very much doubt it. “Every part of the company forgot I existed except for the payroll server” is a popular urban legend - the experience of being “forgotten by the algorithm” is ubiquitous in modern life, it’s fun to fantasize about that phenomenon giving us a major windfall that offsets all the minor inconveniences it has caused us - but anyone who’s worked in or near the payroll department knows this just doesn’t happen. If you haven’t seen how that particular sausage is made, it might surprise you. Generally speaking, the default state of your salary payment is “denied”, and it has to be actively approved by a manager, supervisor, or some other real person at your company.

>>fwlr+id
What? No. This is not how salaried payroll worked in … 8 companies over 20+ years, 10 of them in people management.

>>op00to+Ye
I’m surprised to hear that. Maybe ”denied by default” is a bit too evocative and not clear enough - I mean that if the payroll department stopped coming into work and managers stopped doing their payroll responsibilities, the payments themselves would stop very quickly. In the systems I have used the payments are generated automatically, but someone has to click “Approve” on them for them to actually happen.

My broader point was that these “the company forgot about me but I’m still getting paid” urban legends rest on the belief that there’s essentially a cron job with a list of salary numbers and bank accounts, and every week it automatically transfers the appropriate amount to each account. And that’s not an accurate picture of payroll.