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.
Was stringing together a couple dozen tweets really the best format to share a story like this?
There is a lot that's left out. Once she vaguely mentions that another employee who was "involved" was still getting all of his peer bonuses (which may or may not have been PB's for his "involvement", we don't know), the whole thing just crumbled into a victim story for me. OF COURSE the MALE coworker can do WHATEVER HE WANTS, as long as we don't actually have any details about it.
Also, generally shit will hit the fan if you tell anyone to fuck off, especially if they're your manager. Again, we don't know that she told her manager to fuck off for being racist (??) because this is a terrible story told in a shitty format. But it's implied. Just like everything else in this "article".
tl;dr she got exactly what you would expect when you're intentionally stirring shit up at any company. I'm not sure what she expected.
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
I can't help but look at it from the other person's perspective.
They went to HR and were clearly upset/disturbed. HR then told this guy clearly to avoid contact at work. The guy then ignores this order and confronts the person.
I can only imagine the confronted person would say anything to avoid this author. Basically the author approached them (when told not to) and said "Hey, I am gunna get fired cus of you!". Who wouldn't just say whatever to get out of the conversation?
I can't imagine why they thought this would good to publish. Despite it being vague I can only fill in details with unfavorable assumptions.
I am reading through this and I bet my 200$ that this person’s manager/team was primarily white and therefore this person has faced severe racism and bullying as a result of their race:
> I had joined Apple on a student OPT visa
> I was constantly being excluded from work meetings and events. There were meetings that I would be the only one who was not invited
> my manager [...] started laughing and making fun of my last name
> My manager was giving indirect negative feedback through the iBuddy rather than speaking with me
> I would enter the meetings and they would stop talking and make really strange gestures. I was ignored, ridiculed and attacked in the team meetings
> “You escaped a war zone; it is obvious you have many mental problems.”
> “My husband worked for FBI and I can get you deported on a cargo boat if I want.”
Sounds like a bunch of bully high schoolers that never mentally graduated from high school.
I also would like to point out that this post is ranked way lower than it deserves on HN homepage, despite having higher points and shorter time than many of the posts above it. That’s quite unfair. It dropped from #1 to #7 within an hour.
Her explanation does sound like it was crafted by a political PR group - which makes sense considering her profession - but I'm still happy to take her word for it.
However, it's pretty easy to see how it could be considered a racist and bigoted tweet and I'd expect her to have realised this before sending it.
EDIT: I totally agree that scuttling someones life on career off the back of one tweet is unfair - I 100% agree with that. As I said in the original comment, the bullying she experienced was totally unfair.
I don't believe, however, that her career is ruined by it - evidenced by the fact that she's now gainfully employed. I think it's definitely a red flag on her resume but by doing volunteer service after the fact I'd be surprised if any company wouldn't see this as "I did something dumb, I learnt and grew from it".
Professionals in PR should naturally be extra-vigilant about issues like these.
I read this almost as a form of 'suicide by cop' in the workplace.
To me it reads as though the author is unhappy with the job they signed up for, but instead of exerting the mental fortitude to resign, is instead throwing a public tantrum lashing out at the CEO in public.
What was the imagined outcome? All that will come of tarnishing the employers brand and degrading yourself like this will be an immediate dismissal and a social 'blacklisting' preventing future job opportunities.
Is that the desired outcome? I feel like this discussion thread is going to outlive the authors career.
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.
It seemed to me the post was tiptoeing around the reason of the dismissal, and the author even alludes to the story behind it with:
> Seemingly everyone’s got stories of being stuck under shit managers, or dealing the fallout from things out of their control.
I don't support "character smearing" or "attacking" in any way, but as a reader of the post, I would like to know more about the reasons for his firing, even in the form of less-than-reliable internet research -- as long as no attacking takes place.
It does seem like it may have been a case of some politically motivated employees being disruptive. The part that is just irredeemable is:
> I thought about it through COVID-19, as HEY launched in the midst of a civil rights uprising and we toiled over the customer support cases of people who could afford to pay $99/year for personal email.
This sounds like the person is complaining that their supposedly privileged customers distracted her from activism. If she has a problem working for "people who could afford to pay $99/year for personal email" then she should probably find a different job where she will serve a demographic that is more palatable to her.
I really seems like this is about to become a pile-on against a company's actions based on a single tweet, showing one side of a story.
Even half-way through that one video he makes a comment/accent that (while I have really no context around) feels like a racial mockery, and some cursory reading shows that the same account had other posts (homophobic context, "buying NAACP shirt so these people [Black people] vibe with me more", etc).
Is firing someone too far? Perhaps. But this really doesn't seem like someone getting fired for a comment about bodegas.
According to the story, the other person involved was allowed to leave the company, saying it was his own decision. Nobody forced him to blog about it. He, however, chose to take the topic of his leaving the company public, in a way that one can easily see would sound like derision to somebody who was a victim of assault: http://objo.com/2013/01/31/funemployment/
So now it's internet mob behaviour if she posts her side of the story?
> we're firing this one person who published a modest amount of info about internal communications, which is a violation of policies in our employee handbook
I find her totally out of line and disagree with her politics but I have to give her that in some sense she is quite brave. Most people would never consider tweeting out something like this because they'd be afraid of getting fired immediately and also suffering a reputational damage that would make applying for future jobs difficult. But she doesn't seem to be fazed by this.
Was this just the last straw? I ask because the tweet pictured in the article seems fairly reasonable. Calling out a coworker for insulting you on twitter doesn't seem particularly objectionable.
>Publishing something that HR/PR can consider slander under your real name while being junior developer is not a recipe for stable employment. These guys tend to freak out over minor stuff like that.
That's to me the equivalent of saying: "sitting on the front of the bus, as a black person, is a recipe for trouble".
Not in the sense that it's racist, of course.
But that it trivialises a problematic situation, and asks for caution from the (potential) victim.
It's not what he did that's problematic, it's the very notion that a company would consider firing someone over sharing something as innocent and truthful as this.
And that we should somehow "accept it" and just "be cautious" not to have this happen to us.
I get the sense that the author is somewhat toxic in the workplace and his managers didn't have the power to fire him, so they gave him as meaningless a job as possible to get him to quit.
I'm also surprised he isn't more concerned with anonymity. I know if he applied for an open role at my current company, based on this post he would not be hired.
The timeline in the article says that allegations were made against her about racial discrimination, and then she left the company (with all parties declining to comment). Isn't this sort of the opposite situation from your run-of-the-mill evil/apathetic HR dept stories where the victims get the short end of the stick?
If last week's shit-show was not the end of @cartainc , this definitely is
* the sales representative who whipped his dick out at a company event, and was promoted a few weeks later.
* you read the texts one manager sent to her Mom about an executive touching her under the table at a work dinner, let alone her claims that she was subsequently “admonished for ‘having her legs out’” and fired after she escalated to HR.
* the Head of Corporate Compliance was fired a week after she learned that the People Team had been instructed to stop logging complaints in the company’s whistleblower platform.
* When the company claims it fired another female executive in part for “taking unauthorized leave,” after she reported to the Chief People Officer that the CEO’s gaslighting and abuse had shaken her so much she needed a day to collect herself…
* CEO who has turned over no fewer than eleven C-suite executives in five years — and settled at least three discrimination cases in the last year alone
I agree that it's a weird detail to include, but the alternative would be:
"GitHub admits fault in firing of employee who said 'Nazi'"
...which, while true, would give people a negative impression of the employee if they only read the headline.
It's also meaningful that he is Jewish and asked his coworkers to beware of Nazis because he has more reason than a non-Jewish person to be afraid of Nazis.
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.
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