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Comment by moistgorilla | Hacker News Reader

So apparently he had been given a promotion and took a leave of absence to participate in a prestigious fellowship and was fired for having a low performance review? What metrics were they going by for the performance review if he wasn't even working at the time?

I have a feeling this lawsuit will actually go somewhere.

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Part of that is right out of the Microsoft playbook. Promote you right before the review cycle. Give you a bad review by comparing you to all your peers in your new level. They had a limited number of promotions and good scores to give out. This way they didn't have to give a promotion and high score to the same person.

mm yes sounds fishy a bit like women on maternity leave getting a bad appraisal.

and allowing only women to appeal sounds like an automatic win on sex discrimination grounds.

Sounds like HR had a quota to fill and took the easy route and screwed up.

Ah yes, to fight with inequality and racism companies now use quotas - a system where they hire based on gender and race.

No HR had a quota to get rid of x% and took what they thought was the easy target.

Its incompetence in Yahoos HR function

well there are more than a few companies which sponsor a women's only executive leadership training system/etc. There are all sorts of ways for people in the right positions to drive the company where they want it to go and drive out those they don't want and have it all covered up nice and neat

>So apparently he had been given a promotion and took a leave of absence to participate in a prestigious fellowship...

That doesn't mean he was competent.

I honestly don't see what you're getting at.

Obviously he was competent enough to get a promotion by whatever metric they were using.

I perfectly see where he is getting at, having witnessed how "promotions" go at yahoo myself :P

How do "promotions" go at yahoo?

It's a rather clubby environment where social climbing is key.

And those people aren't getting let go

I've seen and heard of people getting promoted to get them out of somebody's hair. That may involve a in-organization horizontal or vertical promotion, or a glowing reference for another job. Promotion for incompetence is a thing.

I'm not saying this was the case, but don't assume just because he was promoted or because they gave him a leave of absence (!!) that it must mean he was great.

If working at Yahoo is really so Kafkaesque that getting a promotion is meaningless in determining how you're doing and the value you're providing the company, then they deserve to lose the lawsuit.

I suppose it would explain some other things about how Yahoo's been doing recently.

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