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Comment by briga | Hacker News Reader

Regardless of the fact that he probably is a jerk, it doesn't seem like appropriate workplace behavior to be calling anyone a jerk. Just because you have free speech doesn't mean that your speech should have no consequences. Maybe it's unfair and a double standard, but to me it seems like a no-brainer that you shouldn't be calling people names in your workplace.

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Regardless of whether it is 'appropriate workplace behavior' to call a jerk a jerk, firing someone for it is so far outside the range of 'appropriate behavior' that it's hard to make a comparison.

Let's bring this close to home. You hire someone to mow your lawn. They come in every week and mow your lawn. And you pay them. One day you walk by and they're talking with your neighbor and you overhear them saying you're a rich a-hole and a jerk, and an idiot. I mean not appropriate workplace behavior. Are they going to still have a job or would you prefer that someone else mows your lawn? I mean they just said nasty things about you- nbd. not something that should affect their status as your "employee".

Several things severely wrong with this example. The employee didn't talk to an outsider, they didn't talk to someone the CEO would be likely to have known personally, and they're so far removed from the CEO nobody thinks they'd know them on a personal level.

You just can't talk about a CEO as if they're a person interacting and hiring people individually because they just don't.

In a small company a CEO may approve all hiring. In a larger company they delegate that. But they run the company. Everyone in the company including those hiring reports directly or indirectly to them.

When an employee communicates broadly inside a company, even if it's not directly to outsiders, that is essentially public. As we can see in this thread some random person chimed in with the details. But s/neighbor/your wife/ if that helps the analogy and insider vs. outsider is the issue. It's an imperfect one as they all tend to be.

This is why for example quarterly results are not generally communicated to all insiders in a company before they are released, because they are going to leak.

I think my analogy, though imperfect, demonstrates that when you have some sort of employment or other relationship, "bad mouthing" the other party, either in public or in private, is expected to be damaging to this relationship. The CEO of your company is the closest thing to the single person employing you. He runs the entity that employs you.

If a person I interacted with on a personal level did they, yeah, I’d be upset.

If one of my 2000 employees wrote something in Slack? No, I don’t think it would even register.

What a wild cultural difference. Where do you live?

Over here in the USA, I don't think any customer service worker expects to be able to openly mock a customer and still have a job. I struggle to imagine the idea of calling my boss a wanker to his face and still expecting to have a job. To insult the CEO seems like it might as well be a resignation - if you have that little respect for leadership, why are you working at that company?

> if you have that little respect for leadership, why are you working at that company?

What an astoundingly dumb question. Most people work somewhere to get paid, and If you think its unusual to hate the boss, oh boy, do I have news for you!

I got mouths to feed, and if I only worked at places where I respected everyone in top leadership, well ... we'd probably starve.

There's a huge difference between "I hate my boss" and "I'm willing to publicly humiliate him to his face". Are you really struggling to understand that distinction?

Over there in the USA there's a culture of extreme deference to corporate leadership, probably stemming from the slavery and servitude past. It's very similar in Brazil as well, sharing from the same past.

It's funny that such a cognitive dissonance between freedoms and rights vs the absolutist tyranny of corporate life making a mockery of those freedoms can coexist in the same society with the same staying power.

You aren’t wrong, but having worked in China as well as the states (and a short stint in Switzerland), I think east Asia (china, Japan, Korea) has that even worse, probably due to Confucius. As China is looking more and more like the future, I fear that this gets worse before it gets better.

East Asia definitely has a similar flavour of this issue, Confucianism's filial piety forces unbounded respect to hierarchies, coupled with social harmony as a virtue and criticism of anyone "above" you is highly frowned upon.

I just think it's stranger for the USA's work culture to be so deferential to leadership while its societal values are outwardly quite loud about freedoms, it's more understandable to me for East Asia to be that way. For the USA case it's probably a mixture of the servitude/slavery past with still being quite religious compared to other Western peers.

It never made sense to me in the USA, I just took it as it being what it is. I think everyone knows corporate culture is kind of a farce, but no sustainable alternative has appeared to replace it.

I was going to write a similar comment, but it turns out that isn’t what she said but rather what Atlassian has said she suggested he is.

https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2026/ex-atlassian-engineer-fig...

> … It was an irrelevant personal attack and insult directed at a colleague, essentially calling him a ‘rich jerk’.

> Unterwurzacher reportedly parodied the CEO on Slack, writing, “What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled.”

Wow. I mean, come on, thats like the least offensive thing ever. At the most, maybe tell the manager to tell them thats not the “spirit” of the workplace, but firing for this is a step too far.

If the CEO wasn’t a jerk before he certainly is now.

Yeah this should have been a quiet word from HR to not say stuff like that.

Still too far

Making powerful people feel bad usually gets a negative response from them.

Even just generally, if you make someone lose face publicly, they're prone to lash out at you since they often feel they can't back down.

My sides can't handle this much freedom. This can be hardly called an ad hominem.

With the one caveat that Australia doesn't have free speech. It's the one thing that sets the US apart and ahead of others.

There's no "free speech" at work [-places] in the USA. That's not what free speech means anyways. You can and will be absolutely be fired for saying things at work that are incompatible with your employer's opinions. I can't think of a faster way to get fired anywhere than insulting the person running the company you work for, private or public company, definitely in public.

The US has less free speech than some other countries. Especially now, but this was always true at corporations. In the US you can be fired for anything, including speech.

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