The choice is not between saying nothing, and completely devastating that person. Surely there is a third (or even fourth, fifth) alternative.
Also, saying nothing doesn't lead to the belief it is a shitty workplace. Just because someone posting in a forum that he's been fired from Company X for a reason he doesn't understand, that doesn't automatically mean that Company X is wrong and shitty; not everyone jumps to this conclusion, and certainly not based on the absence of any response from Company X.
True in theory, but in practice, even HN is full of comments like "Google is evil because [link to a random unfounded speculation/whining of ex-Googler]" and people believe them uncritically.
So tell me which part of this statement (true or not) deserved for him to be publicly drawn and quartered by somebody in a significantly more powerful position than him?
Officially: no reason. And I get this; I vaguely know how CA employment law works and that you limit your liability by not stating a reason. It's also really hard to work through in your mind.
The best theory I have is that, two weeks earlier, I raised concerns about donating 10% of ad revenue to charity. Some management likes getting feedback, some doesn't.
The reason I had concerns was that this was revenue, not income. That means you need ~10% margins to break even. This can be hard to do; Yahoo and Twitter don't. Salesforce does something similar, but it's more all-around, and in a way that promotes the product without risking the company's financials.
It's far more likely that this is the first time he's ever been given clear reasons for why he was fired. I've never been fired, but when other employees I've known have been fired they've never been given reasons this clear. It's always a variant of "it just wasn't working out." This can lead to very genuine confusion, and so I think it's really jumping the gun to assume that he was deliberately lying about the situation.
Most cases you're probably thinking about are of CEOs of big companies issuing CYA-statements that minimize legal attack surface. Here, the guy just exposed himself completely. Also Reddit is not Goldman Sachs; it's value is directly proportional to how much people like the company, and Reddit finds itself in the middle of another funding round.
I do see a great potential for bad consequences here.
I doubt the unemployed guy would have the resources to mount a legal attack anyway. As for bad PR, take a look at this thread (or the reddit thread): the majority of people are reflexively siding with the CEO.
You are spot on. Perhaps a better way to have handled was to private message the guy with the reasons, update the thread that the private message was sent with the reasons and then let the guy divulge anything.
Not only was it an overreaction, but it really has the stank of pettiness attached to it.
I think the issue is that we are all trying to figure out who is in the right in this situation based on a handful of reddit comments. At the end of the day we don't have enough information to understand what truly happened.
I don't trust either of them. At all. What I do know, though, is that one of them wrote a comment which is tremendously meaner than those of the other person.
Because the CEO just exposed himself for a serious lawsuit if even an iota of this statement is not true, not to mention a media shitstorm and total loss of faith of his subordinates. This is strong evidence in favour of believing him over the other guy.
Emotions can make people do extremely irrational things. Regardless, there's still the more fundamental point that I can't find anything this guy wrote that justified that sort of extremely intense response from the CEO. His criticisms were incredibly light for someone who was fired and his speculation about his own firing was very mild-mannered.
That sort of response strikes me as crazily vindictive and the sheer anger of it makes it pretty hard for me to trust its author.
Considering the level of professionalism by the CEO in just posting this kind of strong vindictive statement against an ex-employee who has little to no recourse (who should know better) it's strong evidence not to believe him at all.
Well, "vindictive" doesn't mean "liar". Someone vindictive could nevertheless be honest to a fault; in fact, their honesty could stem from the same source as the vindictiveness against someone who had been dishonest.
It's a kind of guilt-by-association reasoning: if someone has X bad quality, they likely have Y bad quality also. The boy who stole the loaf of bread from the baker must be the one who assaulted the farmer's daughter.
Yes, but the CEO did it in response to a guy being stupid enough to lie about his termination on his former employer's web page. And the guy is still just a random ex-Redditor, so he can lie low for a bit - get a job in a softwarehouse that won't bother figuring out his Reddit handle, build positive references. This guy can step out of the spotlight anytime he wants.
Lie about his termination? I think that is taking it a bit far. Confused? Upset? Angry? Wrong even? Sure. Lying? Probably not.
A lot of companies are very vague when they fire an employee. I've been let go twice, once for "poor performance" and once for "not the right fit". In both cases when I pressed for more detail I was not given anything concrete.
In the poor performance case I would say things like "but I had all my code reviewed and the reviewers said my code was fine...". And get responses like "we just didn't feel like your performance was up to scratch".
I was upset and angry at the time because they never provided me with any real evidence or gave me a chance to fix it. I kept coming up with all sorts of reasons (like the fact that I was 20 years older than the next oldest developer). OTOH, I am not stupid enough to air my grievances on a public forum.
> being stupid enough to lie about his termination
You might want to reevaluate that position. You're reflexively siding with the CEO. You don't know that he's lying and saying "I think was fired because I did this" is not lying either way anyways.
I'm not saying you have to side with the ex-employee either, doing an AMA like that was pretty stupid as well. But the CEO's level of basic professionalism here leaves anything he's saying as pretty suspect as well.
> You might want to reevaluate that position. You're reflexively siding with the CEO. You don't know that he's lying and saying "I think was fired because I did this" is not lying either way anyways.
This is because (as I think you implied) HN, in a show of consistency with other online forums, is fond of reaching conclusions that are contrary to (any) conventional wisdom. This is a source of bias: I'm a current Googler who thinks Google is great, but this opinion doesn't change anyone's mind.
But this bias is a good thing. It causes internal disagreement, hindering solidarity, but it increases the rate at which we learn new things.
Not everyone does, but many do. Also, if he had left it at, "I don't understand why" then he would have successfully maintained the fog of possibilities and both parties could continue playing the vague game. Instead he posited a theory about management disliking his charity ideas. Though the CEO's response was a bit much.
Sure it would be nice to have other options, but the reality of social media and group-think means they could really only say nothing or say everything. I don't like it, but to deny that is a dangerous gamble for any company.
Uh, no. Social psychology is a complicated subject and there is no way to distill 'social media and group-think' into a single set of choices for all situations. Most companies say nothing, but if they do say something, it certainly isn't a good idea to seem vindictive when you do so, and is an especially bad idea to do it on a public forum. Luckily they know their audience well and being a jackass is applauded, so their position wins - as long as he can't convince people their response isn't genuine. Group dynamics and public opinion can get as complex as chess.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fallacy_of_the_exc...
The choice is not between saying nothing, and completely devastating that person. Surely there is a third (or even fourth, fifth) alternative.
Also, saying nothing doesn't lead to the belief it is a shitty workplace. Just because someone posting in a forum that he's been fired from Company X for a reason he doesn't understand, that doesn't automatically mean that Company X is wrong and shitty; not everyone jumps to this conclusion, and certainly not based on the absence of any response from Company X.