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Atlassian says it had right to fire engineer for suggesting CEO is 'rich jerk'

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31–40 of 163 posts

Re: Atlassian says it had right to fire engineer for suggesting CEO is 'rich jerk'

#31
post #9

> “Employees disagreed in the chat, which resulted in Cannon-Brookes angrily interjecting to tell off the people who were complaining,” Puckett said in an opening statement at the hearing. On the company’s internal “Outrage Notification” Slack channel (a play on the “outage notifications” staff receive about technology issues), employees including Unterwurzacher mocked and condemned the comments from Cannon-Brookes,…

> It takes a certain amount of entitlement and lack of awareness

Your comment would make sense if it were talking about the CEO.

Otherwise, it's a unwittingly sad comment on the quasi-feudal nature of these corporations.

Re: Atlassian says it had right to fire engineer for suggesting CEO is 'rich jerk'

#32
post #5
post #4

[flagged]

> Both sides should be able to end employment for any reason whatsoever What an uninformed take! That's why we have labor laws and such a thing as "wrongful termination" exists.

Well, no, saying that the law is wrong doen't necessarily mean someone is uninformed. Those are distinct things.

Re: Atlassian says it had right to fire engineer for suggesting CEO is 'rich jerk'

#33
I think the cult of personality always backfires, pun intended. Our company biggest product was a celebrity making fun commercials for the actual product. Works wonders. Personally I don't have a problem with him, I enjoyed his movies in the past. But not everybody does. Internally, the company tried to push this cult so deeply that it was part of the hiring process, part of the onboarding, even obscured some of the CEOs messaging. And you wonder, what happens when you hire someone who doesn't like this celebrity?

Many of us are mature enough to follow the principle of, "if you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything." But not so when you have young developers flowing in and out of the company. In one of the town halls, a 24 year old dev, was put on a mic, and simply said, "I don't like X, he is super annoying, why do we keep plastering his face everywhere."

I've never seen an entire company freeze before. There was no way forward, no way backwards. The script had been broken. The dev, thinking he wasn't heard properly, sent the same message in our townhall slack channel. I did what I believe 90% of other people did. I screenshoted it.

The kid got another job a few months after. For once we saw the emperor wore no clothes.

Edit: million typos

Edit 2: in case it wasn't clear, no was not fired, he just found another job.

Re: Atlassian says it had right to fire engineer for suggesting CEO is 'rich jerk'

#37
post #34

Is it really surprising she was fired? It's completely okay to say whatever you want and stand up for yourself, but you are not a child, own the consequences rather than whine

No using the legal process if you think your company is violating the law is also part of "stand up for yourself".

If a rich guy can't take some minor criticism maybe he's the whiner.

Re: Atlassian says it had right to fire engineer for suggesting CEO is 'rich jerk'

#38

I think the cult of personality always backfires, pun intended. Our company biggest product was a celebrity making fun commercials for the actual product. Works wonders. Personally I don't have a problem with him, I enjoyed his movies in the past. But not everybody does. Internally, the company tried to push this cult so deeply that it was part of the hiring process, part of the onboarding, even obscured some of the…

I am guessing this is Salesforce and the celebrity is Matthew McConaughey who’s real chummy with Benioff.

Brave of the developer to bring it up. This cult of personality is pervasive throughout the tech industry.

Re: Atlassian says it had right to fire engineer for suggesting CEO is 'rich jerk'

#39
There’s no reason a company should put up with enemies within. In rare instances a disgruntled employee might be able to make a positive contribution. In most cases, even if the employee has valid reasons, by the time they are disgruntled there’s no coming back. It’s best for everyone to move on.

Re: Atlassian says it had right to fire engineer for suggesting CEO is 'rich jerk'

#40
post #9

> “Employees disagreed in the chat, which resulted in Cannon-Brookes angrily interjecting to tell off the people who were complaining,” Puckett said in an opening statement at the hearing. On the company’s internal “Outrage Notification” Slack channel (a play on the “outage notifications” staff receive about technology issues), employees including Unterwurzacher mocked and condemned the comments from Cannon-Brookes,…

It would be nice to know what comments the CEO decided to make in those same official channels though. The article doesn't say, except to quote someone as saying he angrily told people off. What was the communication, and should it be without consequences?
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