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Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

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201–210 of 368 posts

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#201
post #182

They worked together but this was just a public discussion about a change to an open source projects' docs site. The response was private so he shared publicly because it's relevant info for the community. Everyone is screaming harassment, I don't see any evidence of that. Everyone's in the comments talking about professionalism, this isn't the time for professionalism. BLACK LIVES MATTER! Scream it from the rooftops…

"The response was private so he shared publicly because it's relevant info for the community."

Made me feel very positive to see this comment in the replies, thank you! It was very difficult to focus the discussion on Twitter to why the engineer would feel sharing publicly was necessary in the first place, despite potentially losing their job.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#202

CA Labor Code section 1102 seems to prohibit firing employees for political activity: "No employer shall coerce or influence or attempt to coerce or influence his employees through or by means of threat of discharge or loss of employment to adopt or follow or refrain from adopting or following any particular course or line of political action or political activity." Perhaps publicly criticizing the company you work f…

Harassing a coworker on Twitter is not political activity.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#203
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the mob is trying to rule because it finds the US government illegitimate because they're majority isn't being represented in the government. In order for Democrats to win the House they have to get more votes than 50%. Democrats received millions of more votes for Senate but don't control that chamber. Democrats received more votes for the Presidency twice this century and have been denied the power of that br…

Trump is the president of the States, not the people. Anyways, he won 304 out of 538 votes, which is, in fact, a majority.

Yes, we all know how an archaism in our system allows for what is now the most powerful branch of government to be controlled by the minority in this country.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#204
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm starting a new job soon and I'm trying to figure out how I'll handle these "silence is complicit" characters. My personal policy is to not discuss political/social issues at work.

Kill em with kindness. “Thanks for letting me know how you feel about this, I consider this a valuable opinion and think deeply on it”. Then go ahead and do whatever you were going to do anyway, but at least let them know you’ve heard and acknowledged what they had to say. Sometimes folks just want to be acknowledged, that doesn’t seem like too much of a burden.

But do you actually acknowledge them? I think this is fine if you're taking it to heart and actually internalizing the discussion a bit. Otherwise, it's disingenuous.

Edit: this is very basic EQ and active listening, not sure why it's controversial to have good social skills.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#205

CA Labor Code section 1102 seems to prohibit firing employees for political activity: "No employer shall coerce or influence or attempt to coerce or influence his employees through or by means of threat of discharge or loss of employment to adopt or follow or refrain from adopting or following any particular course or line of political action or political activity." Perhaps publicly criticizing the company you work f…

You can attend a rally. You can’t harass and incite harassment against a coworker for not attending. The harassed coworker is the one whose political rights needed to be protected here.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#206
post #30

> “Intentionally not making a statement is already political,” Dale wrote in the tweet No it’s not. And this reminds me of the Dictatorship of the small minority [0] from NN Taleb. There are small intolerant minorities who are extremely vocal on certain matters to the point their opinions resemble a dictatorship [0] https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

Almost every day on HN I read that multiple flavors of "FB/Palantir/Google/MS engineers who do nothing while Zuckerberg/USG/China invades more and more of our privacy are complicit in the cog that is Zuckerberg's ambition", but when it comes to race relations, suddenly engineers should be allowed to work in silence. I understand there's nuance, but I only hope the hivemind considers this nuance the next time they pil…

HN is not a uniform group of people speaking with one voice. It's a group of different people with different opinions on different subjects who speak up at different times.

It's tempting to personify things that are too complex to grasp in detail, but this roads lead nowhere.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#207
post #68
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the unfortunate reality is that some people are intolerant of others who are insufficiently supportive of certain causes, and the only way to deal with those people is not to deal with them. The subject of this thread seems to be one of those people.

I think the unfortunate reality is that this isn't about individual people expecting support for certain causes. What you're looking at is fundamentally a social phenomenon - a belief that's been spreading from person to person and community to community that every person in the social group must support the correct causes in the correct ways, that anyone who doesn't go along with this is actively going against the c…

I would go even further and say s/tech/human/ and s/well over a decade/millenia/ :-)

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#208
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the world we're moving towards. People have been more outspoken in these past few years about demanding "hard conversations" from family and peers. This mindset taking root in the workforce is the logical next step. You can't shut it down or else you're "part of the problem." You can't ignore it and be silent or else you're "part of the problem."

[flagged]

I think this wins the prize for the largest strawman in this entire thread.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#209
post #112
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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). C…

> 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". Okay. I'm not attached to the particular semantics of "mob rule," but if you define it deliberately such that it doesn't apply in this scenario, then of course it doesn't apply. I just meant, very simply, that it's rule by someone other than who the people expres…

The "mob" in "mob rule" does not refer to a mafia. Perhaps that's the source of this confusion?

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#210
post #84
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why your default position is that conservatism is anti-minority. It just seems intellectually lazy. Thiel is a pretty hardcore libertarian, so it makes sense that he looks at the world through a lens of personal responsibility, as opposed to group tribalism. It's merely a question of first principles. If you disagree, that's fine (and plenty of people do), but accusing him of being racist (or racist-adja…

See #7 in my updated comment. For a hardcore libertarian he sure loves government contracts. Also I'm not accusing him of being a racist, just trying to point out that he's a major figure in the alt right circus and that it might have something to do with how Facebook deals with Trump.

> For a hardcore libertarian he sure loves government contracts.

Dumb who gives, dumber who does not take.

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