Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 368 posts

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#91

Post by baddox »

rboyd wrote: post #88
baddox wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "specifically targeting an individual front-end engineer at FB?" This seems to be "targeting" the person in control of the website of that open source project, and why wouldn't this communication be targeted at that person? Targeting it at anyone else, or just tweeting into the wind, would be completely ridiculous. It also doesn't strike me as "harassment" or an "attack" or even particularly hosti…

Publicly shaming the guy for not wanting to take a public stance? Sounds pretty close to harassment the way these Twitter brigades can go.

Where is the public shaming? Is there a difference between stating that you disagree with someone's actions and "public shaming?"

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#92

Post by baron816 »

nsainsbury wrote: post #4

I think a key phrase here is "he was dismissed for publicly challenging a colleague’s silence". In other words, he publicly harassed a colleague who (for what could be any number of perfectly valid reasons) preferred not to publicly state their beliefs. That would seem to me to be an eminently reasonable reason to fire someone. If you go around publicly harassing your colleagues to publicly state their political opin…

The “silence is complicit” stuff does really annoy me. Shaming people for not having the same political beliefs is already one thing. But shaming them for having those beliefs, but not sharing them in arenas they’re not comfortable sharing them in is quite extreme.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#93

Post by baddox »

jackcodes wrote: post #87
baddox wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a public open-source project. Why shouldn't the response of an open-source project toward a current important movement be conducted in public? It seems to me that the fact that both people are Facebook developers is not particularly relevant. If the other person had not been a Facebook employee, should Facebook have fired this person?

Because it’s a private discussion between two people of opposing views. Same reason you can still text your friends even if you work in public office.

If you had any suggestion for the website of an open source project, wouldn't you discuss that publicly? I don't think you would privately contact the single person who is in control of the project's website, at least not initially.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#94

Post by saagarjha »

baddox wrote: post #81
dekhn wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not mob rule, that's completely and absolutely how the legal US government operates. Overturning the electoral college would require a constitutional amendment, which is no trivial task. Mob rule is entirely different: it refers to rule imposed from outside the law, possibly by a large group. Also, the "fewer votes" really only applies to the presidency, not the senate, house, or governors.

> That's not mob rule, that's completely and absolutely how the legal US government operates. Those aren't mutually exclusive. Middle school civics class explanations of the electoral college are fine. You can understand the reasons the electoral college was created and still oppose the fact that there have been multiple recent cases where the electoral college went against the popular vote. And, not that it's partic…

On the contrary, I think the electoral college was introduced precisely to ensure that the person who won the election was not who would win the popular vote.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#95

Post by adventured »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #43
blahblahblogger wrote: post #41

Why would this open source project add something specific to the US even if just a banner? People keep saying slogans like "injustice anywhere..." or silence is complicit ... but they mean just on this US/Western issue? It seems like brigading people.

I think the advocates would agree that it's brigading. They're trying to create a climate where it's simply impossible to be neutral on their issue of choice, since they feel it's wrong to be neutral.

They don't have the numbers to impose the authoritarianism they seek (to fully remake things in the way they see fit), so the rampant threats and intimidation are meant to force joining. The best way to accomplish that, is to threaten a person's livelihood, which threatens their ability to exist. They started by just doing social ostracising, social threats of exclusion, and now they've moved on to targeting livelihoods.

Cancel culture is part of this livelihood targeting shift. Behave exactly the way we say, or you're "problematic" and we'll kill your life. And we'll cheer and dance like soulless monsters in the tweet threads while you suffer. It's going to get a lot more aggressive yet, until a line gets drawn by the companies that comply too easily with the cancel demands.

The malignant dictatorship of social media rage in the US is becoming insufferable. It's probably going to require government regulation to stop it.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#96

Post by majormajor »

dekhn wrote: post #71
dlp211 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where mob rule is becoming the status quo. The Government of the US is currently (mostly) controlled by a party that received fewer votes.

That's not mob rule, that's completely and absolutely how the legal US government operates. Overturning the electoral college would require a constitutional amendment, which is no trivial task. Mob rule is entirely different: it refers to rule imposed from outside the law, possibly by a large group. Also, the "fewer votes" really only applies to the presidency, not the senate, house, or governors.

Not the Senate?

The Senate results in huge vote power discrepancies.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#97

Post by dekhn »

baddox wrote: post #81
dekhn wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not mob rule, that's completely and absolutely how the legal US government operates. Overturning the electoral college would require a constitutional amendment, which is no trivial task. Mob rule is entirely different: it refers to rule imposed from outside the law, possibly by a large group. Also, the "fewer votes" really only applies to the presidency, not the senate, house, or governors.

> That's not mob rule, that's completely and absolutely how the legal US government operates. Those aren't mutually exclusive. Middle school civics class explanations of the electoral college are fine. You can understand the reasons the electoral college was created and still oppose the fact that there have been multiple recent cases where the electoral college went against the popular vote. And, not that it's partic…

Oh, I'm personally against the electoral college (have been since I was a kid). However, it's still not mob rule, by the virtue of the fact that mob rule is necessarily non-legal, while the electoral college is the essence of "legal".

And the people who set up electoral college (the authors of the constitution) explicitly added a mechanism to change the system via amendments (it's just very hard to get one passed).

Clearly, the college was a compromise the authors of the constitution felt that had to make to create the US. I bet a lot of them didn't like it.

When you say routinely: only 5 presidents have been elected without the majority of the popular vote, spread throughout a couple hundred years.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#98

Post by cameronbrown »

Grimm1 wrote: post #50
mgleitub wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed -- here is some additional context that the article doesn't provide: The fired employee Tweeted today: >In the interest of transparency, I was let go for calling out an employee’s inaction here on Twitter. I stand by what I said. They didn’t give me the chance to quit [0] He then specifically cited [1] the Tweet in question that was the cause: >I asked @Vjeux to follow @reactjs's lead and add a statement of su…

Politics should be kept out of the workplace.

I'm sympathetic to this opinion just for worrying about clashing cultural expectations with co-workers. In communicating ideas in a way what may be obvious to me (because of my culture), it might not always obvious to someone else and easy to mis-interpret.

At best, you're never going to change somebody's mind in a political discussion (you can only change people who are not directly participating), and at worst, there's the risk of being raked over the coils by HR or even losing your job.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#99

Post by marta_morena_24 »

nsainsbury wrote: post #4

I think a key phrase here is "he was dismissed for publicly challenging a colleague’s silence". In other words, he publicly harassed a colleague who (for what could be any number of perfectly valid reasons) preferred not to publicly state their beliefs. That would seem to me to be an eminently reasonable reason to fire someone. If you go around publicly harassing your colleagues to publicly state their political opin…

Yep. This guy is the textbook definition of toxic. There is nothing worse than people who want to inflict their own opinion on others. Yeah you can think of Trumps tweets what you want, censorship is a big thing too you know... The problem is not Trumps tweets, its that 40% of Americans are supporting Trump that should worry us. But then again, you can't inflict your own opinion on others. The only way to do something useful here is to educate people about how wrong they are in supporting Trump.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#100

Post by java_script »

He shouldn’t have been fired I think, but he also shouldn’t be a tattle-tale against his co-workers. We need solidarity with our co-workers + an end to at-will employment.

Relatedly (but not specific to this situation), if we had stronger employment guarantees people probably wouldn’t taddle to try to get people fired as much. Win-win-win all around.

Post reply on HN