Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#311

Post by defen » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 5:58 AM UTC

baddox wrote: post #303

defen wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Whether Facebook has the legal right to fire him is not what is being discussed.

What are we discussing? Whether Facebook was justified in firing him? By definition if they didn't fire him for a prohibited reason, it was justified, right? Is your argument that it was "unfair" to fire him for an act of speech?

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#312

Post by seesawtron » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 6:29 AM UTC

mgleitub wrote: post #16

nsainsbury wrote: post #4

I think a key phrase here is "he was dismissed for publicly challenging a colleague’s silence". In other words, he publicly harassed a colleague who (for what could be any number of perfectly valid reasons) preferred not to publicly state their beliefs. That would seem to me to be an eminently reasonable reason to fire someone. If you go around publicly harassing your colleagues to publicly state their political opin…

Indeed -- here is some additional context that the article doesn't provide: The fired employee Tweeted today: >In the interest of transparency, I was let go for calling out an employee’s inaction here on Twitter. I stand by what I said. They didn’t give me the chance to quit [0] He then specifically cited [1] the Tweet in question that was the cause: >I asked @Vjeux to follow @reactjs's lead and add a statement of su…

I initially thought it was about not taking a stance on BLM publically.

EDIT: It is indeed about that!

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#313

Post by sky_rw » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 6:54 AM UTC

DenisM wrote: post #265

sky_rw wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friend, you may not be aware that there is an election in a few months. This chaos will continue to escalate all summer and into the fall. Then once Trump wins re-election your really gonna see some slacktavism.

sky_rw has a good point and the post does not deserve the downvotes. There very well might be a direct connection between the upcoming election and the protests.

:shrug: people are mad because they don't want to admit that that Trump still has a real shot. Or they just assume that anybody who even tables the idea is racissss. Oh well.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#314

Post by pdr2020 » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 7:27 AM UTC

yowlingcat wrote: post #290

jedimastert wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 the…

I enjoy reading thoughtful posts that canvas all the possibilities, rather than pressing another singular opinion.

This was intriguing, thank you.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#315

Post by pryce » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 7:38 AM UTC

renaudg wrote: post #137

“I do get a sense sometimes now among certain young people, and this is accelerated by social media, there is this sense sometimes of: ‘The way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people, and that’s enough.” “Like, if I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself, cause, ‘Man, you see how woke I w…

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" in a cavalier way, just to feel good about themselves without it actually risking them anything probably describes a lot of online "woke" flamewars but (to me) doesn't very well characterize what happened here.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#316

Post by rumanator » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 7:39 AM UTC

kjksf wrote: post #127

baddox wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you had any suggestion for the website of an open source project, wouldn't you discuss that publicly? I don't think you would privately contact the single person who is in control of the project's website, at least not initially.

Suggesting changes to the website was not a problem. Trying to mobilize Twitter mob against a person that declined your suggestion was a problem.

> Trying to mobilize Twitter mob against a person that declined your suggestion was a problem.

That sounds less like a suggestion and more like an order.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#317

Post by rumanator » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 7:42 AM UTC

DenisM wrote: post #196

marta_morena_24 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. This guy is the textbook definition of toxic. There is nothing worse than people who want to inflict their own opinion on others. Yeah you can think of Trumps tweets what you want, censorship is a big thing too you know... The problem is not Trumps tweets, its that 40% of Americans are supporting Trump that should worry us. But then again, you can't inflict your own opinion on others. The only way to do somethin…

>The only way to do something useful here is to educate people about how wrong they are in supporting Trump. The only way? How about reconsidering your own position and offering people something they would like better?

> The only way? How about reconsidering your own position and offering people something they would like better?

What if people like the police having free reign to assault and even commit murder arbitrarily because of false associations with, say, safety?

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#318

Post by rumanator » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 7:46 AM UTC

lightgreen wrote: post #307

stevehawk wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in particular because our president refuses to be eclipsed in newspaper headlines so he's likely to keep doing things that keeps these protests relevant for the next few months. (unlike #occupy)

I’m not American, and I always wonder why it’s always about Trump. The police in the US reports to the mayor, governor, whatever, but not the president. George Floyd was killed in the city where mayor and governor are democrats. In Seattle where CHAZ is mayor and governor are democrats. In New York where police brutally attacked protestors they are also dems. Why Trump is responsible for anything? What Trump is doing…

> What Trump is doing exactly?

He has been doing the same old Trump-y things, such as publicly praising violent crack-down of protests in places like Mineapolis as being "beautiful".

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattperez/2020/06/11/beautiful-...

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#319

Post by mshroyer » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 9:22 AM UTC

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.

I love XKCD, but that strip is philosophically and historically ignorant.

Free speech isn't the First Amendment. Free speech is a broad foundational principle of liberalism, and the First Amendment is just an encoding of this principle in the context of the U.S. government. But go back to Mill's "On Liberty" and you'll find that he was just as concerned about threats to free speech stemming from social disapprobation as those from the government.

Anyway, I prefer this modified version of the strip: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ECqxDQGVAAAXUgK?format=jpg&name=...

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#320

Post by downerending » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 10:26 AM UTC

rumanator wrote: post #224

mgleitub wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed -- here is some additional context that the article doesn't provide: The fired employee Tweeted today: >In the interest of transparency, I was let go for calling out an employee’s inaction here on Twitter. I stand by what I said. They didn’t give me the chance to quit [0] He then specifically cited [1] the Tweet in question that was the cause: >I asked @Vjeux to follow @reactjs's lead and add a statement of su…

> This is specifically targeting an individual front-end engineer at FB, which in my own estimation crosses the line from criticism of executives or general policy, to specifically trying to instigate public outrage against a co-worker. More importantly, it sounds like he was bullying colleagues to force them to comply with his personal desires on how to do activism by proxy. Worse, he was trying to force colleagues…

"bullying" is definitely the word. And no one should be forced to take a political position, especially in a work context. There's a reason why our forbears left their politics at the workplace door.

Beyond that, I'd be nervous that a co-worker like this might advance to physical violence.