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Comment by 29athrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Always remember: as a manager you are still an employee, and you are still required to observe the law.

Being a manager does not mean you are correct by default. It does not mean you cannot receive feedback from your managees.

Also, a brief refresher: lying about someone is defamation. If you defame people's performance and cause them to lose money you are personally liable for damages.

We should sue managers more, when they indulge in bad habits such as lying about performance and making false accusations.

Some managers realize that their opinion is authoritative truth and abuse this to fork reality, creating a psychopathic fiction where everything they say is true.

We should sue each and every of these entitled tyrants.

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> Also, a brief refresher: lying about someone is defamation. If you defame people's performance and cause them to lose money you are personally liable for damages.

Genuinely curious: do you have an example of a manager who was personally held financially liable after firing an employee? I couldn't find an example in some brief Googling, but IANAL and I'm curious if this is even a possibility.

Even if it is possible, though, it seems... pretty stupid, frankly: you'd get a much higher payout from suing the company rather than the manager directly, and the manager could use corporate policy as a shield. Plus, in most organizations, HR is the one who pulls the trigger, not the manager; so who really fires you? HR could have always vetoed after all, or anyone else further up the management chain. Seems like it'd be very tough to prove that a single direct manager was unilaterally responsible for damages.

Anyway, this is why most medium-and-larger organizations now have documented processes with PIPs and such. As long as there's a paper trail, you as an employee don't have much of a chance of winning a lawsuit, even if you feel like you were fired due to your manager being an asshole.

There are limits to the freedom of expression (i.e.: what you can communicate verbally or in writing no matter what the context).

Fraud, defamation (libel, slander), perjury, etc.

No matter what your position is, you are not free from the consequences of those.

This doesn't answer my question, and I didn't say anything about "freedom of expression" because it doesn't apply here.

Again, do you have a documented instance of an individual manager, preferably at a company larger than ~100 people, getting personally sued after a dismissal of one of their direct reports?

Claims of defamation are often part of discrimination and wrongful termination suits.

Nowadays there are forced arbitration clauses that prevent you from suing your employer in a regular court. Instead, you have to go to a private kangaroo court where they make their own rules, often not published in advance and that can change at any time for any reason.

I am a lawyer. I guess it's technically true you (or more likely your company) can get sued if a manager lies about his reports' performance to their detriment (usually we'd call this discrimination) but the general notion that it is or should be more common is stupid.

If it happens more, there should be more litigation activity as as consequence.

> As long as there's a paper trail, you as an employee don't have much of a chance of winning a lawsuit, even if you feel like you were fired due to your manager being an asshole.

Yeah, if you want to win a wrongful dismissal lawsuit you're gonna have to have a hell of a paper trail yourself, or some smoking gun evidence of other wrongdoing like drunken voice mail recordings or something.

And even then, realistically, this sort of things settles out of court more often than not.

yeap and we should sue individual employees for lying about estimates and delivery dates and making false promises. We should sue when the technical design isn't right and not delivered on time. If you say to a company you can deliver on a date and cause them to lose money you are personally liable for damages. /s

If you say it's an estimate then, it's not exact as per definition. If you are upfront regarding what assumptions were used to build the estimate, even better.

It would be different if you signed something, establishing a legally binding contract to deliver something at a given date.

Plus, a late delivery is not defamation. What I am talking here is condemning defamation as an accepted way of doing business.

So that means direct reports/ICs can be held liable if they write harsh 360 reviews of their managers? or when they talk to other people about their manager in critical ways?

You seem to hate managers, whatever experience(s) that you had must have been pretty bad, I don't think what you are proposing is an answer or makes much sense or would have any impact. I truly hope you, in time, reach a healthier place.

If you defame someone in writing, that's libel. If you can prove:

1) a false statement purporting to be fact

2) publication or communication of that statement to a third person

3) fault amounting to, at least, negligence

4) damages

You can sue the person.

I don't hate managers per-se. I simply hate the subset of managers that abuse their position to defame others.

Proving this is a very high bar to meet for performance reviews.

Most formal performance reviews will be on a carefully worded standard form where literally nothing the manager selects can be libel, and even for informal references, most criticism (even if unwarranted!) is not libel.

If a form asks "How satisfied are you with 29athrowaway's performance this year? " then answering "1/10" is opinion, not fact, and also likely to be true opinion. A written statement "29athrowaway has absolutely not met my expectations this year" is very difficult to be proven false, it's plausible that these expectations indeed were not met. "29athrowaway has never ever done anything right since they were born" is rhetorical hyperbole and generally not treated as libel despite being technically not true. "I think 29athrowaway should be fired" is not purporting to be fact. "29athrowaway was rude to customers three times in the last week" is extremely hard to prove as false even if it is pulled out of thin air; even if you have all the interactions recorded, there's probably something which can interpreted that way. "29athrowaway did not fulfill their tasks in project XYZ" is a tricky one (and so most formal performance review forms will never include statements worded like that, at least if they're approved by HR/legal), but depends mostly on how well documented the assignments were, and if they can somehow be stretched to assert that you performed only 99% of them, that's not really libel.

That is not the point.

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

When you are given authority, some will use it fairly, others will not.

Some will use authority to advance their own careers at the expense of the careers of others, and create a system where loyalty, not merit, is used to rank employees.

People with psychopatic and narcissistic traits are entitled to become managers. We need psychological testing to weed them out of companies.

Psychopaths create a psychopatic fiction based on manipulation and lies. We need to make it costly so it stops.

As soon as one person tries that then it'll just mean managers are exceedingly careful with their words, and there will be zero difference in the resulting action that comes out of perf reviews. The threat of suing won't mean you get a better pay review, it won't improve your promotion prospects, it won't stop people getting pipped or fired if needed.

> We should sue managers more.

I'm very curious what you think the outcome of this would be.

Break the spirit of people that think lying has no consequences. Teach them a lesson, that they live in a country with people protected by rights.

There are A LOT of places in the world where lying is rewarded dearly. Including certain types of businesses in the US where lying a lot is basically a pre-requisite for company survival, growth and employee survival: banking, hedge funds and financial markets. The 2008 derrivatives crash was a concequence of that, the upcoming hyperinflation is a (predictable) consequence of that.

More generally: ads lie all the time.

Where does your assumption come from that lying has bad consequences for people?

I agree with you that lying is not nice and extremely annoying, but in my opinion the level of corruption globally (and in financial markets in the US specifically) shows that lying constantly can have extremely positive outcomes for those who lie and do crime. It doesn't seem to me like law is trying very hard to stop them either.

False advertisement is illegal.

Defrauding investors is illegal.

As a society we should punish lying, not reward it or glorify it.

There is corruption in politics, academia, institutions of all sorts, such as what led to the 2008 crisis, but our goal should be to make it harder. We should aim for less corruption.

If your fantasy is to be one of the bankers that got rich in 2008, my fantasy is to see those bankers in jail.

> Being a manager does not mean you are correct by default.

It means the company you're working for is giving you the autonomy to decide paths forward for yourself and those that report to you. "Correct" is not binary.

> Also, a brief refresher: lying about someone is defamation.

If you believe something, is it a lie? If you get fired because your manager _believes_ you're bad at your job, even if you believe you aren't, who's lying? Are there any lies?

> We should sue managers more, when they indulge in bad habits such as lying about performance and making false accusations.

This feels like you're speaking from a very specific position (ie, on the wrong end of perceived lies about performance). "Performance" is subjective (and is usually defined by one's manager).

I was going to go on but honestly this post feels very very....I don't really know, delusional? By this same logic a manager can (and should) sue an employee over workplace performance. The whole concept is just ridiculous (and as another person claiming to be a lawyer said below, just plain stupid).

If you are a serious manager, you should be able to articulate your opinion regarding someone's performance in terms of qualifications, experience, role fit, hard skills, soft skills, specific situations, etc. It's not just an intuition, feeling or belief. It's management, not astrology.

If you have not met a person and "believe" they have bad performance, that's discrimination. If you make up or mischaracterize situations as a part of your evaluation, that's defamation.

Your employer has degrees of freedom with regards to setting up a path to you, sure. But that employer operates in a territory where there's legislation, which will often include defamation laws. Your employer cannot do whatever they want.

These are just more non sequiturs though. Vague platitudes that avoid actually meaningfully discussing what you're suggesting.

> It's not just an intuition, feeling or belief. It's management, not astrology.

Facts aren't intuition, feeling or belief but their perception _can be_. Being late to work every day for a month _can be_ firable, or not.

> If you have not met a person and "believe" they have bad performance,

If you haven't met a person but have observed their behavior, it's literally not discrimination.

> If you make up or mischaracterize situations as a part of your evaluation, that's defamation.

If you mischaracterize your manager as making things up, that's also defamation, no?

> But that employer operates in a territory where there's legislation, which will often include defamation laws. Your employer cannot do whatever they want.

And as I pointed out in the previous post, this goes bidirectionally (and functionally means nothing).

I say if your manager defames people, sue them personally for defamation.

Personally, so that they personally face the consequences of their misconduct out of their own pocket.

It was not that hard to understand, I am sorry you could not understand this simple thing.