There are always 2 sides of the story. I'm sure reading the other side would paint a different picture.
Having said that, based on this description: yes, the manager seems weak, but as the OP themselves state, these were annoyances. Couple of pointless chat messages, badly run meetings. Annoying, but it doesn't sound like such a big deal. Esp. in a fully remote setting, where you don't have to sit next to an annoying person all day..
Also, towards the end it turns out the manager was new at the company (first 6 months), so they were probably figuring out whatever upward reporting culture Spotify has, and maybe that's why they were asking seemingly pointless estimation questions?
In any case, openly challenging the other person in a group setting and making fun of them [with a ticket], which is what happened here, is not the right thing to do (whether a peer or a manager).
Good options are: (i) have a separate 1v1 where you talk it over with the person (ii) put up with it for a while and/or (iii) switch teams (iv) switch companies, if it's that annoying.
On the flipside, firing a person for what is described in the OP seems like an overreaction. But, judging based on one side of the story is not a good idea.
Overall, I personally cannot draw any conclusions about Spotify based on this, nor do I want do :)
Also, I'm questioning whether it's a good idea to write a blog post like this. I assume the contract had NDA / other clauses that prohibit this. In many cases, those clauses are a good idea. Eg. imagine if now Spotify, with all its marketing power, were to reply to this person's claims and represent their side of the story. That would probably suck for the author here. Fortunately that will not happen.
Between the one-sided story, some red flags from the employee himself ("go read that book about how to manage people", etc.) and the absolute over-reaction of creating a website dedicated to being fired from a contract, I'm gonna say that the manager was probably not the one mostly at fault.
Person A was potentially discriminated against, which combined with the previous incident of discrimination understandably got the author's hackles raised.
Person B may have been fired for any number of reasons, very few of which are any of the author's business. I've had to fire people who were viewed as great by their peers because they were browsing illegal porn at work, or because they sexually harassed a coworker, or they flagrantly and dangerously violated InfoSec policy, or they were observed not once but twice shooting up heroin in the work locker room. HR isn't going to share any of those reasons with nosy coworkers, and the person who was fired is also unlikely to admit to it.
After that it sounds like the author made themselves a completely unbearable coworker. ~50 person startups have code quality issues, bad documentation, lack of formal processes, etc, almost as a rule. If the author was making as big of a stink as it sounds like they were about it, they were demonstrably doing their job poorly.
While their involvement in championing person A may have absolutely factored into the decision to lay them off, so could their (potentially) inappropriate prying into the decision about person B, or their general unwillingness to help the startup meet their ship dates. Or the company could've done layoffs purely based on project need, compensation, and role redundancy (how companies are supposed to do layoffs), and the first 90% of the article could've been irrelevant to the decision.
I think the post is spot on, but I don't agree with naming names especially when the other person doesn't get an opportunity to tell their side of the story. What if Ian's manager posted her own nasty missive criticizing him as an employee? Such things can damage someone's future career without any fair process to sort out the facts. I wouldn't at all be surprised that such manager exists and is not being held accountable internally, but it would be unfair to make conclusions based on unsubstantiated accusations,
Just my opinion of course, but I see the basic problem as employees using twitter. Many companies encourage employees to use twitter, social media, etc. for more direct interaction with customers, the community, etc.
What is often overlooked, is that in communication you are first an employee of a company, and your own opinions and feelings come way later.
As is clear in this example, not everybody can do this (all of the time).
She is certainly entitled to this opinion. But as an employee, she should not have expressed it. Most likely the company didn't reflect on this before allowing/encouraging her to use twitter to communicate.
I'm speculating that the company didn't have a communication strategy to contain a shit storm. And in the end just fired the employee. Firing the employee only makes sense if she has a history of causing the kinds of issues.
Well, well, speak of gaslighting. The twitter employees have been hostile to him since before him buying this dumpster fire was ever a rumor. People are almost exclusively talking about his politics.
Unless I report to him directly his management style is hardly my problem. Even if it is directly, well.. honestly don't find that stressful either. If he is being a stupid idiot I'd tell him just that, have in the past. Sometimes, folks like that are even appreciative of the candid feedback.
What is the worst that can happen, I get fired? Please. At worst it isn't a fit, I honestly don't get the big deal and people get so emotionally invested in this stuff.
I get hired to problem solve. If management is not living in reality part of the gig is to push back. Don't value my input we can part amicably, it is only a gig, not life and death.
Practically any other way. Responding as he did shows an incredible lack of judgement that shouldn't be tolerated in any employee, let alone the CEO.
The response lacks all proportionality. A former employee is saying mildly critical things about you in a public forum? Ok, I don't think anyone is really going to mistake that kind of rumormongering for gospel. Destroying that person's future employment prospects from on high is not only unnecessarily cruel, it also creates a story where there wasn't one before. We never would have heard about the thread if he hadn't done this. It certainly never would have made the mainstream news.
He could have said nothing. He could have sent the employee a private legal warning. Or he could have posted a nice non-response to indicate that they saw the thread, but as a company staffed by adults Reddit is above that kind of name-calling. He did the opposite and looked like a child.
In addition to being really poor form, his response very likely opens the company up to a lawsuit. If I were the besmirched fired employee, god forbid, I would immediately be contacting an employment attorney.
I would have fired this person as soon as humanly possible for basically (actually) telling customers of the company to go F themselves, and making horribly insensitive and inappropriate jokes at their expense.
imho the point of this article seems to be to tell the story where big bad VMWare or the target of VMWare’s employee’s ire stomped on poor VMWare employee, but I think it makes the employee look bad. I would absolutely not hire this person based on this post. Work isn’t the right time to be attacking people on a personal level.
There was a lot of discussion but it was generally polite
There was an announcement from the node people saying that had he been an employee, he would have been fired on the spot. Not retrained, mediated, facilitated or whatever. Nothing inclusive, just 'put a foot wrong, bam, fired'. There was no profanity, but it was a pretty offensive and poorly-thought out response from Joyent, a professional entity.
It was a terribly-managed situation, and while I certainly think his commit refusal was wrong, after a comment like that (the subtext is 'i personally hate this guy, froth froth froth'), I can't blame the guy for leaving.
In Damore's case: He was asked to privately(?) provide his thoughts to the company(hence while employed and on company time).
Bobb's case: He decided to write a blog post. No-one asked him nor compelled him to share his thoughts.
My view is that firing people over views and opinions is dumb as long as they are not trying to force their views and opinions on other people in the workplace.
On the other hand, my view is that one's views and opinions are private and don't need to be spewed everywhere, hence why I have a dim view of social media(notes the irony/hypocrisy of posting this on HN).
1 - according to a lot of reports from other people fired these past few days, there is no internal conversation about anything substantial, they learn more about his point of view and/or what he doesn't like in their job from his twitter posts
2 - no matter what, as a manager you are the "face" of the team and while internally you are in charge of letting people know what's wrong in their code etc ... It is extremly bad form to push the problem down to the members of your team when talking in a public facing situation. You're the manager, it's your team, you're the face, and you're also the face of the problems. No matter how deep down or high up in the chain you are, if you manage a team and behave like what Elon did in the original tweet this guy answers to, I guarantee you no one on your team respects you.
3 - the guy is in a firing spree to try and justify his overpriced unwanted purchase, and then goes on to take a dump on the work of this engineer in public with a factually wrong comment. No matter if you're my employer, you have no right to damage my reputation based on false allegations in public just to help your ego.
Yes, potential employees should know about bad culture. But this type of viscerally aggressive, anonymous complaint is completely unverifiable and by its very nature lacks any credibility. Yet the mob of public opinion will latch onto it as truth and Grooveshark (and by extension, its remaining employees) will suffer because of it.
This is exactly the type of situation that libel laws are meant to deter. Grooveshark suffers disproportionately from claims like this, because they will bear the brunt of negative public opinion. They are largely defenseless in this situation, because even if the complaint is entirely fabricated, there is little they could say to convince public opinion of that. Libel laws give them a recourse for defending themselves in these situations. Should they find the content of the post untrue or provably disparaging, they can rightfully sue (or more likely, terminate) the employee for posting this.
On the other hand, if these complaints are valid and legally provable, then there is no reason for the poster to remain anonymous. He's already effectively outed himself to Grooveshark, and therefore put himself in the line of fire. But since he's anonymous, he has no protection in the court of public opinion. Ironically, by posting this anonymously, he's actually lost any protection he could derive by attaching his name to it.
My prediction is he will be fired, and have no way of explaining it to future employers other than "I posted an anonymous rant about my employer and they discovered who I was." That's not exactly a good hiring signal.
So by remaining anonymous, he suffers because he loses legal protection, and Grooveshark suffers in the court of public opinion, on the basis of completely unverifiable anonymous accusations. If these accusations are founded (which, by the language in the post, it seems that they are not), then the poster should publicly sue the company for wrongdoing. However, it seems like there wasn't actually any wrongdoing, and this entire post is nothing more than an anonymous rant about a disgruntled employee's opinion. I grant his accusations no credibility, on account of his anonymity and especially his language (again, "that fucking bitch Julia".)
I have no sympathy for this guy. His mudslinging is only making both him and his employer look bad, and instead of being grounded in verifiable fact, it's grounded on baseless accusations and obscene, arguably libelous, language.
Yes, potential employees should be forewarned of bad culture. But there is a right way and a wrong way to go about making that warning. This is the wrong way.
Most of the incidents described here are strongly indicative of a terrible manager who’s learned to play the office politics game well. There’s little evidence here that points to systematic discrimination, but also nothing that refutes that theory— these few anecdotes are simply not enough to draw such conclusions from. I have seen and heard of similar behaviors at many companies, targeting people of all descriptions.
The most damning part is probably HR’s response and the inability to get out of the sphere of influence of a manager that is actively working against the interests of their report: if managers can block team changes, anyone who ends up in the reporting chain of a manager that doesn’t like them can feel very stuck.
(Note: due to a technical issue I was not able to read any of the posted screenshots, and so my opinion was formed only on the basis of the text).
(Note 2: I’m not saying there isn’t a discrimination problem, only that it hasn’t been demonstrated. This looks to me like grounds for an investigation, but not yet punishment.)
This was a fine read, and somewhat brave, because posting something like this just invites a bunch of people to play the 'let me judge this person and decide whether their firing was legitimate / their reaction to it was appropriate' game, as if it was remotely any of their business.
The only part I disagreed with was the section on being truthful in internal corporate communications. When it comes to firings, being discreet beats being truthful. The only thing the vast majority of people at the company need to know is that the fired person is no longer a coworker. Those who truly need to know more than that probably already do - and if not, they can quietly be told verbally.
Impenetrable corporate BS like "we had a very honest and productive conversation with Zach this morning and decided it was best to part ways" makes me think "oh good, the company is inclined to keep its mouth shut, and I don't need to worry quite as much about defending my reputation." If I'm not Zach but Zach's coworker, I think "whatever happened there (and if I really want to know I can ask around), it's nice that the company's not shit-talking him in public."
On the other hand, an honest internal email like "Greg was fired because he had a fundamental disagreement with our engineering team about the interaction between engineering and product management, and this lingering conflict led to him phoning it in" (to use, like Zack, a complete hypothetical) makes me think "great, I wonder who this is going to be forwarded to, and if the company will be just as mouthy later on to outsiders."
You might disagree, but I'd take the corporate BS version every time.
Agreed the response is too much. As a CEO getting involved in a dispute like this seems to be all downside with very little upside. If I had to draft a response in his position It'd go something like this:
> Reddit is not laying anyone off, you were fired.
> Your comments about our revenue had no effect on this decision. This type of criticism is welcome and even encouraged at our company.
> I don't believe it is in good taste to publicly discuss the reasoning for any termination unless it is absolutely necessary.
> If you'd like some additional clarification on our decision to fire you please contact me or (Someone in HR) directly.
Everything about this just reads...weird. The spacing, the conclusion, the cause... all of it.
The author got mouthy on twitter (by their own admission) about company information. I don't think this person got "bullied" out of their job being innocent. Most companies, even the most "inclusive" will target employees who are talking negatively in public about them.
It sounds like the author should've left the company instead of attempting to use weird passive-aggressive tactics to enact change. The conclusion seems to imply that they were racially profiled but the writing suggests that they were, at least in part, someone who instigated the company's response. I'm not convinced the author is making the point they want to make about actual bullying in a corporation.
I don't see how the title or the concluding statements are justified by this story whatsoever. And publicly blasting a former manager for this when their described behavior doesn't support it at all? I don't know who the author is so maybe there's some context I'm supposed to know, but this just seems distasteful, on top of the confusing writing
Having said that, based on this description: yes, the manager seems weak, but as the OP themselves state, these were annoyances. Couple of pointless chat messages, badly run meetings. Annoying, but it doesn't sound like such a big deal. Esp. in a fully remote setting, where you don't have to sit next to an annoying person all day..
Also, towards the end it turns out the manager was new at the company (first 6 months), so they were probably figuring out whatever upward reporting culture Spotify has, and maybe that's why they were asking seemingly pointless estimation questions?
In any case, openly challenging the other person in a group setting and making fun of them [with a ticket], which is what happened here, is not the right thing to do (whether a peer or a manager).
Good options are: (i) have a separate 1v1 where you talk it over with the person (ii) put up with it for a while and/or (iii) switch teams (iv) switch companies, if it's that annoying.
On the flipside, firing a person for what is described in the OP seems like an overreaction. But, judging based on one side of the story is not a good idea.
Overall, I personally cannot draw any conclusions about Spotify based on this, nor do I want do :)
Also, I'm questioning whether it's a good idea to write a blog post like this. I assume the contract had NDA / other clauses that prohibit this. In many cases, those clauses are a good idea. Eg. imagine if now Spotify, with all its marketing power, were to reply to this person's claims and represent their side of the story. That would probably suck for the author here. Fortunately that will not happen.
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