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

bloomberg.com

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

#8
I acknowledge headline writing is hard, but man, there's gotta be a better way to frame this. I was prepared to take Atlassian's side here, you can't call your coworkers jerks. But the article says "rich jerk" is Atlassian's characterization of a sarcastic comment:

> What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled

And I just don't see how that can cross the line. It's clearly meant to stoke the fires, but it's also pretty close to a recitation of the facts. Perhaps if the CEO finds this insulting he shouldn't have dialed into a layoff AMA call from his NBA team's headquarters.

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

#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, the company’s billionaire co-founder, who had joined the meeting from the headquarters of a basketball team he co-owns, the Utah Jazz.

> “What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled,” Unterwurzacher wrote.

It takes a certain amount of entitlement and lack of awareness to do this on official internal channels - with your name attached and viewable by anyone in the company, particularly during a downsizing event.

This would have been akin to printing out the statement, signing it with your name, and then stapling it to a literal bulletin board in the office hallway. There's no reality where that is acceptable...

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