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

351–360 of 368 posts

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#351

Post by notSupplied »

SirensOfTitan wrote: post #118

Bullying for a good cause is still bullying. It feels like a lot of righteous bullies out there don’t want to put in the real effort of changing minds, so they take up their pitchforks in public forums. It’s hard work influencing people for the better, it takes a lot of empathy and a lot of patience.

I'm starting to wonder whether "for a good cause" is exactly the reason why this is happening. People are mistakenly believing that as long as the ends are just, the means couldn't possibly be wrong.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#352

Post by toyg »

alslsls wrote: post #347
toyg wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. With that outlook, we would never have had the social movements that changed Europe for the better in the XIX and XX century. In modern terms, stuff like BLM influences who your colleagues are, how you treat them, and how you react to their demands for fairness.

> BLM influences who your colleagues are Does someone need to 100% support BLM (the political movement) to make an acceptable colleague? What if someone: opposes racism and thinks police's use of force should be more regulated, but disagrees with some BLM tactics/approach to achieving change? For example, what if the destruction of property from the protests, or calls to defund the police, actually cause a backlash a…

> Does someone need to 100% support BLM (the political movement) to make an acceptable colleague?

No, and I never said as much.

My point is that stuff like BLM is relevant enough that should not be considered a taboo subject between reasonable adults on the workplace. Nobody should be forced or publicly shamed into agreeing on this or that action, and there are well-known ways of resolving this sort of disagreement (i.e. voting) while respecting each other.

I am not supporting what happened in this case, I am only disagreeing with people in the thread turning it into an excuse to never talk about politics on the workplace. If we don't face problems and talk about them, we will never solve them.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#353

Post by jedimastert »

notSupplied wrote: post #350
yowlingcat wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

More people should do what you do when judging others. On your last point: This is what I fear most as well, a permanent radicalization of this individual. One important principle in management is that you must be extremely careful NEVER to humiliate someone in even the slightest way in front of audience (any meeting >3 people by my book). The mere suggestion that "something didn't go well" can trigger extremely hurt…

I will admit that the original comment came off as more judgey than I would have liked. And I completely agree that the firing being so public was not a good thing.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#354

Post by pryce »

notSupplied wrote: post #349
pryce wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an important conversation to be had over how activism should operate, in which areas, about what's effective, what turns people off and leaves them hostile, and what measures are justified on what issues, versus what measures are completely disproportionate. That said, this person stood up for their principles (rightly or wrongly) and lost their job because of it. Your quotation about people "casting stones"…

"He stood up for his principles" is an incorrect abstraction of what happened. Huge difference between "I'm waving the BLM flag because I believe in it." vs "Hey look everyone, Pryce refused wave the same flag as I do, get the pitchforks!" The other developer, for all we know, could be in total agreement with BLM!

> "He stood up for his principles" is an incorrect abstraction of what happened.

Absolutely, my phrasing here actually reductive to the point where it doesn't tell us whether he had moral standing to do so - (and that's by design; I actually don't know enough from this article, or others to know whether I agree with his behaviour or not, so I haven't weighed in on that). I'd agree that "standing up for their principles" describes segregationists too- i don't think it tells us who has the right side of an issue.

Whether Dail is right or wrong here is actually irrelevant to my critique above: my intended point was supposed to be:

that the comparison between this person (whose activism at their workplace cost them their job), versus Obama's critique (of people issuing issuing barely-thought-through rebukes online that they aren't invested in), is a pretty unhelpful comparison.

People asserting changes to what is or isn't acceptable in their workplace are absolutely risking blowback for it, and I maintain that's not remotely the same thing as the online brigading / mob justice / cancel-culture conducted by people who can often be trigger-happy as they stand to face no adverse consequences if their critiques are rejected.

I apologise if my phrasing above made this less than clear. It looks to have been interpreted as clearly siding with Dail's position on matters.

---

EDIT: Your choice of example is also interesting though: "Hey look everyone, Pryce refused wave the same flag as I do, get the pitchforks!" is a clever choice on a BLM-related issue; as regardless of what happens in Dails case, it actually quite well characterizes the President's position (and his support bases position) on kneeling in the NFL -and now other sports-, to the point where he has called for the firing of people who refuse to stand for the anthem (and/or) flag.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#355

Post by alslsls »

toyg wrote: post #352
alslsls wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> BLM influences who your colleagues are Does someone need to 100% support BLM (the political movement) to make an acceptable colleague? What if someone: opposes racism and thinks police's use of force should be more regulated, but disagrees with some BLM tactics/approach to achieving change? For example, what if the destruction of property from the protests, or calls to defund the police, actually cause a backlash a…

> Does someone need to 100% support BLM (the political movement) to make an acceptable colleague? No, and I never said as much. My point is that stuff like BLM is relevant enough that should not be considered a taboo subject between reasonable adults on the workplace. Nobody should be forced or publicly shamed into agreeing on this or that action, and there are well-known ways of resolving this sort of disagreement (…

> I am only disagreeing with people in the thread turning it into an excuse to never talk about politics on the workplace.

If I was running a company, I would prefer employees not to talk about politics because it will create needless arguments that have nothing to do with the job at hand. If I am an employee, if there is a disagreement about something, how do I know there is not going to be a long-standing hatred from a colleague about my position on a topic that will manifest itself in unpredictable ways.

There are too many activists which make every topic good vs evil and life vs death.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#356

Post by FalconSensei »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #223
dvtrn wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And he seems from replies and subsequent tweets to still be taking shots at the former coworker. I passively wonder if there wasn’t already some history between the two we just aren’t privy to

Or this guy could just be a total asshole. Think of it another way: If you so demand that everyone post messages of support for your political stance, those messages completely lose all meaning. Does anyone in North Korea really give that much of a shit about all the praise for their "Dear Leader"? No, they just don't want to be killed or sent to a prison camp.

Exactly!

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#358

Post by umvi »

rumanator wrote: post #230
holler wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. It's endemic of the political and cultural climate we're in right now, where mob rule is becoming the status quo. Personal politics should be just that, personal.

> Agree. It's endemic of the political and cultural climate we're in right now, where mob rule is becoming the status quo. I'm not sure we should mark this down as a political and cultural climate thing. I'm more convinced the guy was simply an asshole and it so happens that he felt strongly about politics.

The thing is... he's not the only one. It's been happening for a while now at Google and other big tech companies - if your personal ideological views don't conform with the majority's... prepare to be browbeaten into conformance.

Hence, many people are very secretive of their beliefs if they don't conform, and they may even "play along" like Winston does during the "Two Minutes Hate" (1984). Unlike 1984, we don't have a state or federal "thought police" but we kind of have something similar - a "thought mob" that patrols coworkers for evidence of thought crime.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#359

Post by umvi »

caseysoftware wrote: post #301
baron816 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is interesting to consider in combination with the xkcd "showing you the door" free speech comic. If staying silent is unacceptable and saying something "wrong" is unacceptable, then it's in your own self interest to learn the "acceptable views" (whether you agree or not) and mouth them whenever the Powers that Be demand it. That's quite twisted.

> then it's in your own self interest to learn the "acceptable views" (whether you agree or not) and mouth them whenever the Powers that Be demand it.

Wow, that sounds eerily like 1984:

"In the Two Minutes Hate [Winston] could not help sharing in the general delirium ... Of course he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to do otherwise. To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction. But there was a space of a couple of seconds during which the expression of his eyes might conceivably have betrayed him."

Basically, if you have to do that, it means there is some implementation of thought police around you that you are hiding from.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#360

Post by umvi »

SirensOfTitan wrote: post #118

Bullying for a good cause is still bullying. It feels like a lot of righteous bullies out there don’t want to put in the real effort of changing minds, so they take up their pitchforks in public forums. It’s hard work influencing people for the better, it takes a lot of empathy and a lot of patience.

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." --C.S. Lewis
Post reply on HN