I agree this sounds pretty damning for the company. But life has taught me to always get both sides of a story before reaching any conclusions.
Unless the whole thing is an outright lie. It's a brand new Stack Exchange user. There's absolutely no legitimacy to any of the story at this point. People do this sort of thing all the time on the internet, after all.
But assuming it isn't totally fabricated -- even if the guy was completely unprofessional, rude, and/or vulgar (lets say, he stormed out and told everyone to go F themselves), I still can't see it being acceptable for them to cancel his return flight home if they flew him out in the first place.
But I don't think we'll ever get the other side of the story in this case because I don't think we'll ever get confirmation that this is even real.
Though often times people make new accounts to post on law.SE and workplace.SE.
The only other side of the story that would be ok is literally “OP’s whole story is made up” and the interview never happened. If the candidate misrepresented him/herself then shame on candidate AND shame on company. Otherwise, shame on company.
Why? How? On what grounds?
My thoughts exactly. The person claims they've been stuck in the airport for 3 days and eating scraps? That seems awfully dramatic to me. Like someone looking for generous internet strangers to offer assistance via Venmo.
It's that OP is lying. I take BART in the SF bay area about twice a month, and have ran into the same scammer a few times. He claims he has to go see his kids, has $xx money for a southwest plane and needs $yy waving around something that says southwest on it.
The thing I find odd is the hanging about the airport bit--after allowing an hour or so denial/rage/bargaining I'd be finding my way to the Greyhound station.
Though, I've had times in my life where I have had to take a chance on job interviews that I didn't have the money to get to. I drove to Vancouver from Calgary with $20 in my pocket, borrowed $50 for a rail pass and crashed on someone's couch on the promise of an interview that wasn't even a guarantee of a job because I was so broke. I got the job and it was water under the bridge, but if I hadn't got the job, I'd have been screwed.
Nah, I'd do it like this "Since you've cancelled my return flight, and I have no means, I'll be contacting local press and seeing if they have any interest in my story. My second round of calls will be to local law firms to see if they have any interest in becoming part of case law in exchange for some pro bono work since you've left me no way to get home after my interview with me".
Trollers just like to troll.
Scammers just throw stuff out there and see if anyone bites. Asking “but why would he tweet it, why would he post to Reddit, why would he email me? Etc” all come down to: because it works.