When Chinese Employees Ask for Justice, Facebook Silence Their Voices

You don't have to follow company rules - but again, company can terminate you with or without reason. In this particular case, Yi was fired because he's "lack of judgement", after Yi spoke to the press without formal approval and acknowledging he works for Facebook and refused to agree to the gap order warning.

Regardless, whether FB is hiding anything, speaking in front of the media representing the company without proper authorization is a common sense taboo. Yi should have know that better during first month of new employee training bootcamp. Also, this is not a of case of whistleblowing as Yi was simply protesting, he neither knew first hand nor had any evidence of FB wrongdoing. Having a gag order in place is not necessarily an indication of wrongdoing(FB has had enough negative news lately already and any more of it will affect their bottomline), although lots of time it is, but we simply don't know.

In America at least, black clothing (typically formal wear, the specifics vary from place to place) is strongly associated with mourning. It's traditional garb at funerals and gatherings to pay respects for the departed. This may be different in other countries, and it's not a universal practice, but it's common enough that most everyone understands the meaning.

hay

It's quite the lengthy article but the crux of what they believe led to his suicide is here:

Relevant sources unveiled that before Mr. Chen’s last PSC, he had already been under pressure from the advertising department, so he expected to shift to other groups to maintain his job in Facebook and the opportunity to work in the United States.

According to informed sources told PingWest that, Mr. Chen’s group had undergone organizational restructuring, during which the group’s original manager hopped to another group. A new manager was hired to lead Mr. Chen’s group, but the manager soon realized that many of his ICs were already transferring groups, resulting in a sharply-increased workload per capita within the group.

Mr. Chen, who was already in high pressure, submitted his transfer request as well, and was pre-approved by another group, meaning that all that’s left is to have his own manager sign off on the transfer.

The new manager reportedly gave Mr. Chen verbal approval and told him to stay on the team until the PSC, but eventually gave him the "Meets Most" rating, which factually voided Mr. Chen's transfer request because the other group is very unlikely to accommodate a new IC who just received the worst possible rating, according to Facebook internal sources close to Mr. Chen.

Mr. Chen, who had been on the verge of collapse, was mentally pushed off the edge by a Facebook robot, according to people familiar with the matter as well as other employees on Blind, an anonymous workplace social networking app.

Two weeks before the tragedy, the Facebook advertising system experienced a Severe Site Event (SEV), which is essentially a server crash. A SEV management bot created a task for the SEV to be resolved and assigned the task to Mr. Chen, requiring him to fix the bug and submit the SEV report before the deadline, which is roughly one hour after the time of his death.

Mr. Chen tried to push the deadline to be delayed but another bot monitoring the SEV rejected the change and maintained the deadline to be met in 12 days.

It sounds like the already existing pressure in Ads + reorg + new manager blocking his transfer request + SEV caused him to just give in. Given Zuckerberg's public push on transparency, openness, and wanting to connect the world, I'm honestly quite surprised and disappointed at how secretive they've been on this tragedy.

Or link to them at least