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Comment by Yokohiii | Hacker News Reader

I cannot follow you. By no means you can openly criticize the managers of your own company. Even nowadays this could be handled as mutiny. On top of that, management is usually only half transparent at best. Causing doubt if the decisions are just bad or nobody got the whole picture.

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You are right and I was not clear.

What I mean: Since they all signed NDAs they are not allowed to openly criticize their company—ever. Not when being hired and not after being fired. Since 173 were fired it's easy to ignore NDAs because they won't get caught. But it's not right, they break a significant agreement and this is so typical for employees (just head to Glassdoor and how much internal stuff is disclosed).

We don't know what kind of NDAs SC employees had to sign/how valid they are. At least some of the issues are listed as only appearing after a while. Journalists likely are a lot more receptive to/asking around for employees with complaints when there is a general air of failure (or total overblown hype) surrounding a company.

> We don't know what kind of NDAs SC employees had to sign/how valid they are.

Every employment contract has by nature a NDA embedded. And those are much stricter than dedicated NDAs since employment contracts get rarely negotiated line by line, most employees just accept and sign employment contracts.

I think it's right to speak publically when called for (for instance with whisteblowers). Without people doing that, we'd actually have much less transparency in our democracy.

Companies where employees actually keep secrets do so by earning the trust and respect of their employees, not by writing ironclad employee agreements.

In this particular case, for these employees, I think it boils down to whether they honor their loyalty to the company vision more than their employee agreement.

No offense and I am no lawyer. But I think you get something wrong about NDAs. It is useful to handle confidentiality of company information. I.e. during the process of signing contracts with music giants or even the strategy decision to do that, can apply to an NDA. But at some time this information will go public. An NDA could only apply if you later leak confidential details about contracts for example. There is also a lot of complaint about the management and it's behaviour, NDAs won't stop individuals to reveal someone has bad manners, but there is always a possibility to accuse them of slander.

tl;dr obvious fact > nda > deals behind closed doors

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