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Comment by mrmondo | Hacker News Reader

Oh and HR stated that 'the communication was in appropriate and goes against the company code of conduct...', which is very hypocritical as they let a sexist, agist, psychopathic bully loose and cause havoc throughout the company for almost 4 years as many people complained and left because of his bullying and harassment / power games. They have however since replaced this person with someone excellent who is 'healing' the org and turning things around I believe.

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Telling people not to lose their temper and behave unprofessionally in company chat rooms may be part of "healing" a previously toxic environment. I'd just take it for what it is, it sounds like you were correctly called out on some unconstructive behavior, apologize and move on, no big deal.

Yeah that was absolutely where I was going with it, I just had a number of people say that it was quite an over-reaction which is why I asked if anyone else had heard of such a response before.

Sure people may say it was an over-reaction. People also said all the toxic things that in the past that you described as creating problems in the workplace...and had no problem with doing so.

In terms of HR's reaction, there are many jobs where what you said would be considered a defacto resignation by HR/management, aka "you'd be fired on the spot'. Fast food, ordinary retail, and similar corporatized service industries come to mind...i.e. jobs that actually really tend to suck and where workers are considered highly fungible and the relationship between management and workers is not collegial.

You can't just fire someone on the spot, perhaps in Russia or China I'm guessing, but you have employee and human rights laws protecting you from things like that. You'd have to do some sort of criminal / sexual offence for that to occur and be legal.

In the US, most employment is 'at will' and employers can and do fire without cause. In this case, a marginally sophisticated employer could readily cast what was written as justification for firing with cause. And because of the way unemployment insurance rates for an employer are set, the employer has a financial incentive for so doing. On top of that, those lawyers would have access to historic chat logs to back up the company's interests.

Of course none of that applies outside the US.

Oh gosh, that sounds absolutely horrible and clearly unfair, I'm truly sorry to hear that (if you live in the states).

I'm afraid you're very wrong. Almost all employment in the US is "at-will", meaning it can be terminated by the employer at any time and for any reason. They don't even have to say what the reason is.

As I said above: Oh gosh, that sounds absolutely horrible and clearly unfair, I'm truly sorry to hear that (if you live in the states).

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