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Comment by badloginagain | Hacker News Reader

Just to clarify, is he stating he was fired due to his gender/political views? I would assume the literal army of attorneys will point to various violations of Code of Conduct or Employment Agreement Damore undoubtedly broke.

He openly published a memo condemning his employer, tarnishing the brand and bringing the company under considerable negative press. I figure there must be some clause in any employment agreement stating that you can't actively cause damage to the company.

Edit: Looks like the memo wasn't intentionally released to the public, but it still caused damage. If I drop tables unintentionally on production, I'm not surprised if I'm fired- even if it was an accident.

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>openly published a memo

False. He published a memo internally for other Google employees in a culture of internal openness and intellectual discussion which had been implied to exist inside the company for a while.

His memo was then leaked outside the company, possibly by an ideological enemy. Hard to say he was "actively causing damage to the company".

"Both federal and California law also protect your right to discuss labor issues - even in a non-union workplace. This includes conversing with coworkers regarding wages, working conditions, and expressing your preference for candidates who support favorable labor issues such as higher wages for hourly workers."

This will probably come up.

https://www.employmentattorneyla.com/blog/2017/06/can-you-be...

OK, but continuing with your analogy, what about if you write a script that drops tables from a database it's pointed to, for internal use, then someone else runs it against the production server? And then you, not whoever ran it, get fired.

The analogy is flawed.

He did not write a piece of software, he wrote a piece of rhetoric which had very little to do with reality and had a lot to do with making people dislike Google and its policies.

I also write a lot of rhetoric designed to do that. The difference is I'm not a Google employee. Were I, I would fully expect to be fired, regardless of what I did with that writing (except perhaps leave it unreleased on my home computer, or write it to /dev/null).

Of course the analogy is flawed. The analogy I was replying to is even more flawed. ;)

Didn’t he publish it only privately inside Google?

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