Laid-Off Tech Worker Kills 3 in Silicon Valley

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Office-Park-Slayings.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

by Mistone • 18 years ago

39 56 18 years ago

jmah• 18 years ago

http://www.siport.com/ : SiPort is a fabless semiconductor company, incorporated in 2004, that received its first round of funding in 2005.

Sounds like they design ASICs for portable devices (audio, video decoders). Or perhaps "designed".

http://www.siport.com/management.htm : The system cannot find the file specified.

How morbidly apt.

alaskamiller• 18 years ago

There's a lot of fabless IC design startups around here in Silicon Valley and some of them are run like white-collar sweatshops. Second-rate engineers are imported from China or India with low pay but the lure of H1-B sponsorship to work on designs in hopes of flipping it to a bigger semiconductor company or back to OEMs in Asia.

This might be what happened but I think his project, or maybe the whole startup since they ride or die on a single product, got fubared and he was let go. He might be in the middle of relocating to the US or trying to get his family over, or maybe the company screwed him over on pay.

Either way, it's not an excuse to kill but that might be the motive. He probably already landed back in China by now.

cool-RR• 18 years ago

holy shit.

dfarm2• 18 years ago

I always thought this kind of thing was always done by uneducated postal workers and the like. Pretty disheartening to see a fellow engineer act so stupidly.

Time to reconsider getting a concealed weapons permit I guess. Condolences to Agarwal and Pugh's (and anon woman's) families.

ricky_clarkson• 18 years ago

What will you do with the concealed weapon? Shoot his bullet in mid-air?

mechanical_fish2• 18 years ago

I think it's the placebo effect. That's why I carry a homeopathic concealed weapon: a small vial of water with some floating specs of rust in it.

ivank• 18 years ago

Maybe prevent the deaths of two or more people? Is this really so far-fetched?

yummyfajitas2• 18 years ago

It's also completely useless for the police to carry weapons. After all, the best we can possibly hope for is that they might shoot someone's bullet in mid air.

Therefore, I propose we stop giving weapons to the police as a cost saving measure.

bprater• 18 years ago

If you knew that everyone else had the potential of carrying a concealed weapon, would you be at likely to shoot someone else?

In my state, Florida, it's relatively easy to secure the paperwork to carry concealed, and it tends to be a strong deterrant here.

jumper• 18 years ago

I think the basic motivation for carrying a concealed weapon in situations like these is what if the guy never plans to stop killing? What if he just carries on hunting people for so long as his ammo lasts? That gives you a possibility of making a difference by putting him down early.

Likewise, why bother wearing body armor, they'll just shoot you in the face! Except... sometimes whether by their aim sucking or not having time to aim properly, and etc., it does matter. Chaotic situations like these have many possible challenges to present you, some of which a concealed weapon can help you with.

I think a lot of people have hate for guns and hence irrationally choose to ignore all the utility of them, in this case by suggesting a situation where it is ridiculous to stop bullets with more bullets, essentially a strawman argument, ignoring all the situations where you can use bullets to prevent someone from firing more.

iigs• 18 years ago

I would like to nominate firearms, and especially the political landscape around firearms, as an informally off-topic subject for this site.

Everyone that has an opinion about this topic has a strong one (even me), and I've never seen a forum of any charter not fall into 1) banal, uninformed bickering or 2) scary monoculture or homogeny of thought, relentlessly punishing dissenters.

The value of HN (to me) is that it is well tended, and this looks like an additional loss of focus that isn't welcome in my opinion.

sh1mmer2• 18 years ago

I think this clearly shows education doesn't have too much to do with mental health. People with a lot of education can be just as sad and disheartened as anyone else. Layoffs aren't a happy time for anyone, but for someone who was already in a bad place it looks like it can be a tipping point.

zandorg2• 18 years ago

It's to do with brain chemistry, say psychiatrists. It can affect anyone, even well-off civil servants.

But losing your job is not a chemical imbalance, it's something real.That's harder to treat (I personally think psychiatric drugs should not be used when the problem is real).

byrneseyeview2• 18 years ago

Education correlates pretty well with impulse control, which correlates well with not shooting up your office. There is also a fairly strong correlation between being law-abiding and having a high IQ. So while it's true that some educated people commit crimes, it is absolutely false to pretend that they're equally likely to -- or that this story is anything but an aberration.

shimi• 18 years ago

10 Years ago I was an uneducated postal worker

I can't remember having the urge of shooting my bosses or workmates

dfarm2• 18 years ago

Sorry for the generalization shimi. I thought for awhile about how to express that idea and couldn't think of a good way. But you're right, education and/or intelligence are not the predictors. I guess it just seems to me that it SHOULD be.

Also, though my statement is essentially indefensible, I did want to point out that I was not saying that all postal workers are uneducated, but rather was referring to the postal workers that had opened fire years ago as being the intersection of the set "uneducated" and the set "postal workers." I apologize.

blackguardx• 18 years ago

My school, Case Western Reserve University, had a student shooting at the business school a few years back.

A business major went on a rampage because he thought some sysadmin had deleted his personal webpage. He went on a shooting spree at the Peter B. Lewis building and shot a few people, killing a fellow student. His target, the sysadmin, was unharmed, though.

Prrometheus• 18 years ago

Is this what the 80s recession felt like?

dhughes• 18 years ago

Yes, except for the feathered hair and skinny ties.

vaksel3• 18 years ago

it was bound to happen eventually. Isn't TC's tracking of layoffs now up to something like 60K people in the last 2 weeks?

With odds like that, it'll be impossible to find a new job...add on top of that the crappy stock market that wiped out people's savings, the downturn in the economy that slashed new job opportunities and many people simply won't be able to survive(hell this guy had a mortgage payment on top of everything else).

So they turn to blaming the guy who made their life miserable. And that would be the guy in charge, who yanked the ground from under their feet.

time_management5• 18 years ago

More appropriate is the "law of extremely large numbers". The vast majority of people will not resort to homicide over a layoff, but 1 in 500,000 might, so when you have a few million layoffs, bad news like this occurs.

I think people are more freaked out about the economy than is necessarily reasonable. It's very bad, but it's not like the entire technology sector is in a hiring freeze. There are still good jobs available; it's just harder to find them. I actually think that this upcoming decade-long crisis will be good, in the long run, both for technology people and average Americans, because the bloat and parasitism of the corporate/managerial/financial class has essentially starved the real economy and those who work within it, and this crisis stands to bring about their demise.

anaphoric• 18 years ago

I agree with you to a point. But people can 'survive' on a dollar a day if they have to. Food, water and air is all we really need.

vaksel3• 18 years ago

But we are supposed to be better than that. This guy wasn't some bum who dropped out of high school, and now spends all his money on drugs and liquor. I mean what happened to the American dream? You work hard all your life, get a good education, get a good job then someone else fucks up and you have to go live on the street?

nihilocrat2• 18 years ago

I am genuinely surprised more people don't go postal after layoffs. Maybe adult-aged people are just more likely to commit suicide alone or just bury their pride while they lose all their savings and move in with parents/friends.

vaksel3• 18 years ago

yeah suicide I don't get at all...if you are going to kill yourself anyways...why not take the people who drove you to it with you?

Or do something wreckless w/o caring about consequences? Steal a Ferrari and drive it at 180 mph w/o a seatbelt until you crash or jump out of an airplane w/o a chute etc.

Slashing your wrists in a bathtub or eating a bullet alone by yourself just seems like a waste of an opportunity

aneesh2• 18 years ago

It doesn't seem like the ground was yanked from under his feet.

"Wu, a test engineer who worked at SiPort less than two years, was "let go" Friday morning because of his performance, a company spokeswoman said. Early police reports indicated he was laid off, but the spokeswoman said that was not the case."

http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_10993931

mindaugas• 18 years ago

It makes me sad. Because the saddest news makes biggest headlines. And I hate this when people love disasters. I'd rather hear the success stories.

code_devil• 18 years ago

This is really sad. Recession or No-Recession, he would have done the same thing. I mean you can always cut your expenses, get a low paying job or go back to your home country(if you are an immigrant). His actions basically affected 3 families directly + also might indirectly bring uncertainty in the lives of other fellow colleagues at the startup.

browngeek• 18 years ago

"Police arrest alleged gunman in office park slayings that left 3 dead" http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_10993931

natch• 18 years ago

byrneseyeview2• 18 years ago

Hacker News is not Slasher News or Shooter News. This is a generic crime story. Flagged.

aneesh2• 18 years ago

I'm surprised at comments here condoning the murder. Getting fired from your job is no excuse for taking someone's life. I don't care what the economy is like - I don't think this guy deserves sympathy, especially not from an educated, smart community like this. Millions of people have lost jobs before, and they've struggled, tried hard, and moved on without resorting to violence.

I know a family member of one of the victims, and they didn't deserve this.

BFalkner• 18 years ago

Some people were just speculating what the motive(s) might be. I read nearly all of the other posts before getting to yours and didn't notice any even imply that it was justified.

Laid-Off Tech Worker Kills 3 in Silicon Valley

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