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

281–290 of 368 posts

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#281

Post by tshaddox »

scarmig wrote: post #253
baddox wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see any attempt to mobilize a Twitter mob against a person, unless you just consider all disagreements on Twitter to inherently imply a desire for a Twitter mob to come to your side.

Imagine someone went to Gab (or whatever the right wing mob platform du jour is) and denounced a colleague and published their contact info on it. There's no explicit call to contact or harass the person. Is this appropriate?

I’m not too familiar with Gab, but are you implying that Twitter is exclusively a platform for left wing mobs? If so, you are mistaken, and this coarse impression of what Twitter is should not be projected onto every single tweet.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#282

Post by _bxg1 »

thrwaway69 wrote: post #249
_bxg1 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is these really are issues that need to be talked about and addressed, and they really have fallen on deaf ears in the past because of lack of popular force. The people in charge just keep posturing, brushing it off, saying "yeah yeah we'll get to it", and waiting for the news cycle to move on. Nothing ever changes. But the problem is that society at large, especially on the internet, apparently just sucks…

Sometimes I wonder if answer to all of these problems is to divide lands based on ideology, politics and other factors. People are then given a choice to migrate between them every 5 years or so. Nations shouldn't be so big and migrating shouldn't be that hard. Just divide and divide until the group of people stop complaining. Racists can live with racists. Progressives can live with progressives.

That just sounds like our current system of states

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#283

Post by baddox »

philistine wrote: post #234
baddox wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's certainly not the case. The electoral college was designed such that each state's legislature chooses how to attribute their electoral college votes. Many states in the first few presidential elections just had their state legislatures assign the votes. But still, I find it difficult to believe that the people who designed the electoral college would think it's okay that we held a national election, we got to…

Have you considered the idea that what the founding fathers believed is irrelevant? Just asking, I'm not an american.

I think it is largely irrelevant, except that it can be useful to debunk people whose arguments depend on false claims about what the founding fathers believed.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#284

Post by baddox »

sebastialonso wrote: post #247
baddox wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not clearly more aggressive. What part of his language do you think are in any way aggressive?

> Intentionally not making a statement is already political. Consider that next time you think of Recoil . This part right here, pal. Asking is proposing something, and politely accepting whatever answer is given back. What he said was closer to coercing and appealing to community shaming, which is evidently not professional.

That is not coercion or appealing to community shaming. Those are both terms that have meanings. Telling people to consider the actions of the developers of a software project is not coercion or an appeal to community shaming.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#285

Post by scarmig »

achiang wrote: post #252

So here's a nuanced view I'm sure will get downvoted into the ground: both FB and the employee were right, but along different dimensions, and this outcome was not only inevitable, but desirable. The employee, as a white male in tech, is absolutely morally right to use his privilege to call out other powerful white males for their silence. And make no mistake, silence is complicity. Many smart philosophers have writt…

I want to push against this silence is complicity mindset.

Looking at your profile, I can point out countless atrocities that you don't explicitly denounce. Do I see you upset about how Israel has amped up its program of settler colonialism in Palestine in the past few weeks? How the PRC is running literal concentration camps in Xinjiang? Or, moving along to the USA, how men have extraordinarily high suicide rates? Or how the elderly are being sacrificed at the altar of economic growth in the midst of COVID-19? Or, thinking long term, the tens of millions of people who will die because of climate change?

I don't. And, for what it's worth, I wouldn't be surprised if you have "correct" points of view on all of those. But you're still being complicit in deprioritizing those things and prioritizing your own set of causes, at the expense of human lives. And if you're indeed complicit in a conspiracy of silence on them, you've got blood on your hands.

Brandon Dail was demanding someone add some kind of explicit support for BLM to a Github repo. Where does that stop? I can think of hundreds of very worthy causes that need more publicizing. Is what we ultimately need some long list of evils that every open source project needs to denounce before right-thinking people can choose to use them? And, if you choose to use e.g. Linux, can I denounce you for choosing to use software that is complicit in a conspiracy to terminate black men's lives?

People can prioritize and take action on different causes in whatever way they want to. It's fine to ask individuals to reprioritize, but you're not entitled to anything. And, tactically speaking, ever-increasing stridency of tone and denunciation of imagined enemies is not an effective way to gather support for a cause.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#286

Post by scarmig »

tshaddox wrote: post #281
scarmig wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine someone went to Gab (or whatever the right wing mob platform du jour is) and denounced a colleague and published their contact info on it. There's no explicit call to contact or harass the person. Is this appropriate?

I’m not too familiar with Gab, but are you implying that Twitter is exclusively a platform for left wing mobs? If so, you are mistaken, and this coarse impression of what Twitter is should not be projected onto every single tweet.

Twitter is a platform for mobs of every sort, and if you have a mob of followers and you attack a colleague, publishing his contact info, you are de facto encouraging the mob to attack him, even if you play dumb after the fact.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#287

Post by baddox »

scarmig wrote: post #286
tshaddox wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not too familiar with Gab, but are you implying that Twitter is exclusively a platform for left wing mobs? If so, you are mistaken, and this coarse impression of what Twitter is should not be projected onto every single tweet.

Twitter is a platform for mobs of every sort, and if you have a mob of followers and you attack a colleague, publishing his contact info, you are de facto encouraging the mob to attack him, even if you play dumb after the fact.

There was no attack on a colleague (a public disagreement is not an attack). The person who was fired has less than a third the followers of the other person (and probably very significant overlap between the follower groups). There certainly was no publishing of contact info, unless you consider all public mentions on Twitter to be publishing contact info (which is preposterous). Your impression of what happened is mistaken.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#288

Post by defen »

baddox wrote: post #284
sebastialonso wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Intentionally not making a statement is already political. Consider that next time you think of Recoil . This part right here, pal. Asking is proposing something, and politely accepting whatever answer is given back. What he said was closer to coercing and appealing to community shaming, which is evidently not professional.

That is not coercion or appealing to community shaming. Those are both terms that have meanings. Telling people to consider the actions of the developers of a software project is not coercion or an appeal to community shaming.

At the end of the day it doesn't matter. No one's rights were violated. Apparently you have a different definition of what constitutes appropriate public speech for employees than Facebook does, but so what? You're not his employer. This guy said something and got fired for it. That is the system working how everyone wants it to.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#289

Post by ab_c »

achiang wrote: post #252

So here's a nuanced view I'm sure will get downvoted into the ground: both FB and the employee were right, but along different dimensions, and this outcome was not only inevitable, but desirable. The employee, as a white male in tech, is absolutely morally right to use his privilege to call out other powerful white males for their silence. And make no mistake, silence is complicity. Many smart philosophers have writt…

If you only donated $50 to cancer research whereas your coworkers donated $200, would that give me the right to tweet that out to everyone? It's okay if I attempt to coerce you thru public shaming, right? Bullying is okay if it's for a good cause?

As for Dail's victim, you don't know whether he has or hasn't helped in his own way. This Dail guy wanted to coerce a coworker to do something that RISKS HIM GETTING FIRED. He said no to Dail; this doesn't mean he hadn't or wasn't willing to help.

I don't like FB and I hate Zuck's stance, but no company would allow someone like Dail to continue bullying coworkers and creating a hostile work environment. I wouldn't be surprised if he already had a list of prior complaints. HR doesn't usually fire people based on a first-time offense.

If you are ever in charge of fundraiser or are looking for people to join a worthwhile cause that you support, try to understand that you'll gain more allies if you're not shitting on & shaming people to do what you want.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#290

Post by yowlingcat »

jedimastert wrote: post #211
yowlingcat wrote: post #48

I didn't expect to agree with Facebook corporate but here I am. It's one thing to privately disagree with a coworker about their action or lack thereof with respect to a contemporary event. But to drag it into a public setting is a severe violation of boundaries and borderline harassment. It's a huge liability risk to FB -- to scold your colleagues in public for their desire to separate the political from the profess…

> borderline harassment Possibly personal opinion here, but given the current charged (understatement) political environment and twitter's propensity for "scarlet lettering" people via mob harassment, I don't think this was borderline. This seems like a deliberate attempt to get a large group of people to harass a co-worker because of differing opinions about how and when to communicate political opinions.

It would be a personal opinion I share. But there are a lot of details I don't know. A whole range of possibilities I can imagine, from least like to most likely:

- The former employee may have genuinely thought that a public "conversation" could result in a positive outcome (perhaps believing "sunlight is the best disinfectant")

- The two may know each other previously - perhaps the former employee may have felt they had more of a mutual level of trust/familiarity than they actually had?

- The former employee may have been wanting to leave Facebook anyways and (cynically speaking) wanted to go out in a blaze of glory and resign in a high profile manner

- The former employee may be neurodivergent in some way and have difficulty navigating the subtle boundaries of spaces of privacy that exist along the spectrum of 1:1 to effectively "in public"

- The former employee, frustrated and angry and activated by the heat of the moment, willfully decided to sic the mob on the other person

Honestly, I don't know this person so it's hard to say. And I do know it is often the case the hindsight is 20/20. But, I wonder, in this former employee's entire time at Facebook, did their manager ever notice any of these kinds of aspects in that employee's interpersonal interactions or collaboration style? In my experience, hints of these things surface fairly quickly in the workplace, especially during the ramp-up phase or the first time some sort of an adverse situation is encountered, whether it be subpar code, a deadline that doesn't make sense and is hard to change, or a stakeholder that isn't exactly aligned with reality and isn't very easy to get there. If this former employee (consciously or unconsciously) takes such an adversarial approach to conflict resolution with a colleague, one wonders if this was the first time they have ever done that, or merely the first time they ever did this to such a degree.

But who knows. The past few weeks and months have been insane. Many people are seeing more psychological stress and social unrest now than they've seen in their entire lives. A lot of them are not prepared to handle these kinds of situations in a manner they won't regret. It's unfortunate that it has to turn out this way, but on the other hand, this kind of behavior really can't be condoned. It's emotional blackmail.

I really hope this former employee takes to heart a valuable lesson from this, but I have a feeling that the exact opposite will happen; to be fired so publicly, with the humiliation that comes with that, is the perfect accelerant to a radicalization that might already be in progress. I don't know where we go from here.

Post reply on HN