I would be interested in what constitutes as "jaywalking" in a software company. Something everyone does but can be grounds to termination? Can anyone tell me about specific cases?
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What does it feel like to be fired from Facebook?
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Re: What does it feel like to be fired from Facebook?
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Generally when there's a termination it's because there's a pattern, not a one-off thing. Edit: People who get fired want to believe that they did one "stupid" thing and it was "unfair" they were fired. Hiring a new person and training them up isn't exactly cheap, easy or straightforward. I realise there are exceptions but logic would tend to suggest that in most cases businesses don't fire people for one-off mistake…
Going by the way the rules were applied in the (somewhat mysterious original post) there's no reason to believe the rules are applied in this way.
The perspective of the post is from the person who was let go though. And I don't think that from their perspective they're lying or obfuscating, but perspective is a curious thing: it's different from person to person, and by necessity it favours the person who has it.
Re: What does it feel like to be fired from Facebook?
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is another one of those "I got fired but I won't tell you why" posts. There was another post on here not too long ago about a guy, who for very vague reasons, got fired from Google. I don't understand why you wouldn't disclose why you got fired if you are going to write a post about how you feel after getting fired. It doesn't help anyone else because we don't know what mistake you made that we should avoid. It…
> I don't understand why you wouldn't disclose why you got fired if you are going to write a post about how you feel after getting fired. He wrote "I won't go into what it was to protect my identity and that of all involved." So the person thinks it would be easy for Facebook or his former coworkers to identify the case if he told us what specific policy violation (s)he was fired for.
He thinks it would be easy to identify him from the cause, even though according to the post many people in the company do it routinely
Re: What does it feel like to be fired from Facebook?
#24> For instance, on harassment: telling a coworker of either gender that you like their clothes can be reported as harassment What a terrible society we're developing for ourselves.
Generally when there's a termination it's because there's a pattern, not a one-off thing. Edit: People who get fired want to believe that they did one "stupid" thing and it was "unfair" they were fired. Hiring a new person and training them up isn't exactly cheap, easy or straightforward. I realise there are exceptions but logic would tend to suggest that in most cases businesses don't fire people for one-off mistake…
did you read the linked Quora post? it pretty explicitly details that Facebook has a whole list of zero-tolerance "violations" that they will fire you for doing even once, without warning.
Re: What does it feel like to be fired from Facebook?
#25It's unlikely Facebook would fire anyone without the complainant having enough of a case to be legally actionable. Thus, it's safe I think to assume that there was a pattern of unsolicited advances towards an individual. I admit this is conjecture, but it's a common story and as such makes a valid theory for what happened here.
Nowhere is it implied the reason for firing was related to harassment, but instead the rules relating to that were only used as an example to illustrate a point.
Re: What does it feel like to be fired from Facebook?
#26I would be interested in what constitutes as "jaywalking" in a software company. Something everyone does but can be grounds to termination? Can anyone tell me about specific cases?
maybe login in with somebody else's credentials? or some other security-related or procedural stuff that he bypassed to make things easier? using non-authorized (personal) equipment or software? just speculating
Re: What does it feel like to be fired from Facebook?
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Generally when there's a termination it's because there's a pattern, not a one-off thing. Edit: People who get fired want to believe that they did one "stupid" thing and it was "unfair" they were fired. Hiring a new person and training them up isn't exactly cheap, easy or straightforward. I realise there are exceptions but logic would tend to suggest that in most cases businesses don't fire people for one-off mistake…
Going by the way the rules were applied in the (somewhat mysterious original post) there's no reason to believe the rules are applied in this way.
Firing employees for minor things is bad for morale & causes high turnover. Especially in software, a company wouldn't want to fire engineers arbitrarily, since it's hard to train new ones & transfer an engineer's knowledge of the codebase. That makes me really doubt his claim that this was "like jaywalking."
Re: What does it feel like to be fired from Facebook?
#28It's unlikely Facebook would fire anyone without the complainant having enough of a case to be legally actionable. Thus, it's safe I think to assume that there was a pattern of unsolicited advances towards an individual. I admit this is conjecture, but it's a common story and as such makes a valid theory for what happened here.
if (s)he broke a written rule or policy that's all they need, (s)he admitted to breaking a rule that (s)he thought was minor, like jaywalking, explicitly said it was not like harassment.
Re: What does it feel like to be fired from Facebook?
#29At a previous job, I had a Sys Admin who once wrote a guy up because he used telnet instead of SSH to connect to a client's server. All I could think while reading the article was, "He must've used telnet..."
shoulda fired whoever left telnet running on the client's server first?
The client themselves would often leave the telnet service running because their employees would use it to connect to the server internally. Our clients were not the most tech-savy individuals, either, so if it was an issue where we needed to fix something and they hadn't bothered to turn the SSH service on, we could either call them and bounce around personnel until we found someone with root access whom we could convince to turn on the SSH daemon...or we could use telnet.
This, to my mind, mirrors the "jaywalking" metaphor. It was bad practice, but it was either "Fight the client and force them to improve their own security so that we can safely assist them," or, "Do something we know is unsafe in order to get the job done quickly so that the client will stop bitching at us while paradoxically making it more difficult for us to help them."
Re: What does it feel like to be fired from Facebook?
#30It's unlikely Facebook would fire anyone without the complainant having enough of a case to be legally actionable. Thus, it's safe I think to assume that there was a pattern of unsolicited advances towards an individual. I admit this is conjecture, but it's a common story and as such makes a valid theory for what happened here.
The only thing she was interested in was whether I had done the action that was held against me, and whether somebody had asked me to do it. Think again of what I did as jaywalking. Yes I did it, and nobody made me. I was working on a special project with a VP at that time, and he had nothing to do with it. She asked me why I did it, and I explained - jaywalking takes you from point A to point B faster, it's not a conspiracy to create a traffic jam. In other words, in what I did there was no damaged caused, no intention to harm anyone, and no way for me to profit from it. If a week prior, I had typed a few different keystrokes, I would never have been in that room.
Sounds like they took a code shortcut, possibly violating NDA/privacy agreements or using unapproved/a competitor's 3rd party tools. Does not sound like harassment.