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Comment by OnAYDIN | Hacker News Reader

Actually the board may not have acted in most professional way but in due process they kind of proved Sam Altman is unfireable for sure, even if they didn't intend to.

They did notify everyone. They did it after firing which is within their rights. They may also choose to stay silent if there is legitimate reason for it such as making the reasons known may harm the organization even more. This is speculation obviously.

In any case they didn't omit doing anything they need to and they didn't exercise a power they didn't have. The end result is that the board they choose will be impotent at the moment, for sure.

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Firing Sam was within the board's rights. And 90% of the employees threatening to leave was within their rights.

All this proved is that you can't take a major action that is deeply unpopular with employees, without consulting them, and expect to still have a functioning organization. This should be obvious, but it apparently never crossed the board's mind.

A lot of these high-up tech leaders seem to forget this regularly. They sit on their thrones and dictate wild swings, and are used to having people obey. They get all the praise and adulation when things go well, and when things don't go well they golden parachute into some other organization who hires based on resume titles rather than leadership and technical ability. It doesn't surprise me at all that they were caught off guard by this.

Not sure how much of the employees leaving have to do with negotiating Sam back, must be a big factor but not all, during the table talk Emmett, Angelo and Ilya must have decided that it wasn’t a good firing and a mistake in retrospect and it is to fix it.

Getting your point, although the fact that something is within your rights, may or may not mean certainly that it's also a proper thing to do ... ?

Like, nobody is going to arrest you for spitting on the street especially if you're an old grandpa. Nobody is going to arrest you for saying nasty things about somebody's mom.

You get my point, to some boundary both are kinda within somebody's rights, although can be suable or can be reported for misbehaving. But that's the keypoint, misbehavior.

Just because something is within your rights doesn't mean you're not misbehaving or not acting in an immature way.

To be clear, Im not denying or agreeing that the board of directors acted in an immature way. I'm just arguing against the claim that was made within your text that just because someone is acting within their rights that it's also a "right" thing to do necessary, while that is not the case always.

> proved Sam Altman is unfireable [without explaining why to its employees].

Their communication was completely insufficient. There is no possible world on which the board could be considered "competent" or "professional."

If you read my comment again, I'm talking about their competence, not their rights. Those are two entirely different things.

> They may also choose to stay silent

They may choose to, and they did choose to.

But it was an incompitant choice. (Obviously.)

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