AOL CEO Fires Somebody for Pulling Out a Camera in a Meeting About Layoffs | Hacker News Reader

AOL CEO Fires Somebody for Pulling Out a Camera in a Meeting About Layoffs

theatlantic.com

55 pointshglaser69 comments

Most of the comments here are missing the obvious point: it's bad form for managers to publicly admonish their subordinates, let alone publicly firing them (always a sensitive topic). The CEO could have said "no filming please" and then fired him later. He could have even asked the executive to be removed from the meeting if he was concerned he was a leaker.

IMO the CEO should have gotten the executive's side of the story before making a decision like that. It's got to hurt morale even more to see how expendable people at any level are.

I think he was trying to make an example out of him. Perhaps he already knew that Abel was leaking company information? (A fireable offense) This just seems like a very well calculated move.

Anyone referring to a part of the organization as loserville isn't worried about morale.

If indeed the individual was leaking company information, it would make this an even more poorly calculated move.

Firstly, you may know this individual was leaking company information, but the rest of your employees do not. So what is, to you, a righteous punishment would seem to everyone else as arbitrary and vindictive. A display of force may be a calculated move, a display of force that appears random and arbitrary, is just stupidity.

So you just rightfully fired someone while dropping morale through the floor because it looks like you're out for random blood.

I think he had a point that he was trying to get across, and did it very efficiently.

I'm not defending what he did by any stretch, just trying to understand it and propose an explanation. When work environments are hostile like that, you either put your head very far down, or you get your resume onto the market.

Do you have any evidence of that at all?

No. But to be clear, I'm not defending the firing, only explaining where it may have come from.

In that case, I think it was because spiders laid eggs in his ears, which hatched into brain spiders and controlled his further actions. Do I have evidence for this? No. But to be clear, I'm not defending the firing, only explaining where it may have come from.

So you're saying ARmstrong elected to give this guy severance and unemployment benefits instead of firing him for cause and having to deal with none of that?

This is 100% correct. This is an HR nightmare in the making. The guy will likely get a much bigger settlement from this incident than he would from getting laid off. Regardless of whether he violated company policy, the CEO had no proof of filming, didn't make it clear that this was a proprietary event, didn't do a whole suite of things any halfway competent lawyer will throw at him.

This just makes me dislike AOL even more.

He may have already been on the CEO's "radar" so to speak and this was the tipping point. The CEO didn't say "you over there, put that away" rather he called him out by name and fired him on the spot.

> didn't make it clear that this was a proprietary event

how do you know?

Well, the article mentions a "tipster" that described the event. This seems like important information that should have been included if it was said.

So true. Someone needs to mail him a 3.5 floppy disks with management tips plastered all over it. No sense in buttering up "layoffs" as "impacts" if he can't keep his cool. Rough day I guess.

Maybe I'm old fashioned but I think the story is that someone thought it was OK to randomly start filming a company meeting - one where they were discussing future layoffs & partnerships apparently.

edit: don't know if they were filming or taking still shots - either way.

It was a conference call. The whole thing's being recorded anyway.

And hey, if you're innocent, you've got nothing to hide, right?

Because two wrongs make a right? If you're a person with character, you handle the impropriety of others in a mature and professional way.

Then again, if you're a person with character, you don't refer to your business meetings as a "locker room" or use terms like "loserville."

> you handle the impropriety of others in a mature and professional way.

Sure, and sometimes the mature and professional way is to fire somebody.

(Now, the execution of that was less than ideal, but a firing in general was not entirely out of line.)

Execution and Result are not independent things. Firing someone in a professional, mature, tactful way is a different thing than what the CEO did. They're not just different styles: the firing of a person is an act intended to have a particular business outcome, and those different routes will have different outcomes.

To quote Steven Brust, "The relationship between ends and means isn't one of justification, it's one of proscription."

I don't approve of the execution, but I cannot condemn the decision to fire.

True. I don't take issue with the fact that he was fired, but, rather, with how it was done.

No one should be fired without the opportunity to defend themselves or explain their actions. Being fired should also be a private matter, as studies have shown it's bad for morale which is bad for business.

WHAT you do isn't the only thing that matters; HOW you do it is equally important.

Not sure who decides what's officially mature & professional but suspect it's a matter of opinion.

In a way, yes. What is mature and professional behavior are decisions made by society. It's an opinion, but a consensus opinion of the society you participate in.

All manner of behavior - that you shouldn't steal, that you shouldn't lie, that you shouldn't wear your trucker hat to a business meeting - are all just the opinions of society. Some are made into legal contracts while the rest remain social contracts, but that doesn't mean they're any less important or valid.

"that doesn't mean they're any less important or valid."

We'll just have to agree to disagree.

I don't think it's at all apparent that the guy wasn't getting laid off anyway. I imagine the unemployment claims will be easy either way, but at the very least Armstrong did him a favor by kicking him out so he didn't have to listen to a half-hour of hooey about how sorry the company is for laying them off. We're talking about 1,000 people, there's going to be a lot of touchy-feely in that call.

Please could someone with knowledge of UK employment law say what the difference here would be? I'm guessing the guy is still firable, but with a more formal process?

Why are open questions being down-voted? Is there something wrong with the questions?

Somewhat off topic, but I found it incredibly ironic the time (at our company, not AOL) I was told not to take pictures of a slide deck being presented at an all hands (I could barely make it out from where I was, and I would use my iPhone to zoom in) - given that every single person (numbering in the hundreds) on the conference call was able to just screen shot each and every page of the presentation.

People are weird about camera's "visibly" in their presence. Have you ever noticed how places like Starbucks will go absolutely batshit if you take out a zoom lens (like a 70-200 on a Canon SLR), but not blink an eye if you snap pictures with your iPhone.

I wonder if anyone in audience was wearing GoogleGlass at the time...

"Have you ever noticed how places like Starbucks will go absolutely batshit if you take out a zoom lens (like a 70-200 on a Canon SLR)"

no, not at all, maybe it's different in different parts of the country, but if you start shooting with a long telephoto inside a coffee shop its pretty rude to the people there.

If you want to take photos in coffee shops use a more discreet camera and a 35mm lens, not a telephoto, it will look less creepy.

You're repeating the point I was trying to make - the Long Telephoto lens freaks people out, but my iPhone (which actually does a better job of capturing details in low light than my EOS-10D+70-200) has always been ignored.

The big lens is considered "rude" and looks "creepy" whereas the discreet camera (or iPhone) doesn't cause issues.

It has nothing to do with what you are doing, just what you are doing it with.

Extending this, a normal power lens by definition "sees" about what your eye can see, a telephoto much, much more.

Inside a though, zoomed out, in dark light - my telephoto lens is pretty much useless. People are just put off by the sheer physicality of the lens, not so much what it is doing.

Likewise, (getting back on topic) - the poor guy fired at the AOL event wasn't fired for what he was doing, so much as the fact that he was visibly doing it.

It seems harsh, but in the same it's inappropriate to snap photos of a meeting with so much impact.

Isn't it reasonable to think that is a most appropriate thing to memorialize?

Is there a problem here? You shouldn't be recording a video like that on your phone.

It's shitty behaviour by the filmer, certainly, but it is also terrible that firing someone in that manner is even legal. (In the UK it would not be, misconduct must be handled by verbal then written warnings. Only a narrow range of "gross misconduct" can result in immediate termination - and even then it wouldn't be handled with "you're fired.")

We're an employment-at-will country here in the US, you can be fired for (almost) any reason or no reason at all at any time.

Yeah, we say that but I've never seen, or even heard of it, being used that way literally. When I was with $LARGE_TELECOM for 5+ yrs it was at-will but warnings+paperwork had to be done to justify firing someone. Or it had to be in a wave of layoffs.

Definitely not:

"We just got a new coffee machine in the lobby. It's great. How was your weekend Bob? That's nice. Oh by the way, did you get the news? You're fired. Extra cardboard boxes are by the printer. You don't work here anymore so don't touch the last bit of coffee; Susan's got a string of meetings this morning and hasn't had a chance to get a cup yet."

Employees are expensive, there is often little sense in throwing them away before seeing if you can fix them. Furthermore most bosses are, contrary to popular belief, decent people.

what a god-awful process an employer has to go through to fire a bad employee. That's a terribly bureaucratic law that only protects bad employees.

What's awful is that you seem to think you shouldn't have to do those things to fire someone. Just a verbal, a written, then fire. What's so awful about that? Do you want to be able to fire someone on less than 3 warnings[1]?

And yes, I understand there are some things - like maybe bringing a gun to work or punching a co-worker is auto-termination on the spot. But besides those outrageous things, you should be able to give a person a fair chance if it's a performance issue.

1.Depends on what is a "warning". At $LARGE_TELECOM, you get 2 warnings. First is verbal/email. The 2nd warning is in the form of a 6 month probation. That's a 6-month-long warning. If you haven't figured out how to succeed by then, I think you're now fair-game of getting fired.

(Shrug) As long as it's legal for me to quit with no prior notice, it should be legal for the company to fire me the same way.

I really don't understand the European notion that a private-sector job is some sort of government-sanctioned entitlement.

That implies that an individual person has the same resources as a Company. If you just quit, it's assumed you know what you're doing. And I'm guessing you're probably assuming a certain privilege that others may not have. If you're on HN, you probably are among the people who are paid well, have savings and can get another job in no more than 6 weeks. There are a lot of people out there who aren't as fortunate; who will be stricken with horrible-hardship if they're job just disappears.

You quitting without warning won't harm a big corporation as a whole, but a bigcorp firing a person without warning has a chance of nearly destroying that person depending on what job and situation we're talking about. Especially in USA where health-insurance is connected to employment. A sudden dismissal can really cause someone to die.

That implies that an individual person has the same resources as a Company.

No, just the same rights. "Privileges" should have no place in the law.

Put another way, as an employer, why should I lose my rights of free association simply by partnering with one or more other people in a corporation?

Ah, then we simply cannot agree. The ability to exercise a right is just as important as the right itself. The sudden termination of a job is more difficult for the employee than the employer in almost all cases so the law should help balance that out. Either it's harder to fire people or the government needs to arrange for basic-income & healthcare for the unemployed.

You should be able to get unemployment insurance for at least 6 month after you are fired - in most cases it's enough to find a new job. There is problem with very low cap on unemployment payout (~2k/month which is not enough to live in many parts of the country) that has to be fixed but otherwise it's not like you will starve the next day.

In Denmark you have 1 month of resignation if you resign your position.

And if the company wants to resign you these rules apply:

Time with the company, time of notice:

0 - 6 months, 1 month.

6 months - 3 years, 3 months.

3 - 6 years, 4 months.

6 - 9 years, 5 months.

9+ years, 6 months

The first 3 months in your position you can be resigned at any given time, and is seen as a trial. You can also resign at any given time within the first 3 months.

You can get better "deals" if you work within an union, or for the government.

I don't like the idea/law because all it's doing is protecting bad employees from getting fired quickly. I'm going to hate myself for using him as an example, but Steve Jobs was famous for firing people in elevator rides if they couldn't clearly explain what they did at the company. I agree not because it's steve jobs, but because it is important to get bad employees out as quickly as possible. Negative employees tend to make the people around them more negative, lazy employees tend the make the people around them lazier. If you're not firing them for being lazy, you're implicitly telling other employees that it's somewhat okay to be lazy. The longer you keep them around, the longer you're letting your team absorb the negative behavior. I'll let the employees go have their second and third chances at competitors, who will be weighed down wasting time and energy rehabilitating bad employees.

Ah, so the problem we have here is defining what "bad" is. You don't know an employee is bad without talking to them about the problem first to make sure they're aware of the problem and giving them at least 1 chance to correct it. Even in jobs where lives are directly at risk, like an air-traffic-controller, get 1 warning. No company is so important that you're justified on firing people for performance issues without at least 1 warning.

Also, I'm going to put some of the blame on the employer. The employer needs to improve their interview process if they really have such a problem with bad performers, not make firing easier.

Can you proceed with the firing before the second "6 month" warning has finished?

If this is just warnings for under-performance in an office, this seems fine (so long as I don't have to wait the 6 months).

In less white collar jobs I don't think your warning system is necessarily appropriate. A restaurant manager should not have to issue warnings for an employee showing up to work without pants, they should be able to fire on the spot.

The 6 months is only for performance issues. I'll say that showing up to work without pants generally falls in the "extremely wrong" things to do, like punching a coworker, setting your cubicle on fire, sending a nude image to an email-distribution. All fair-game for instant termination. It doesn't have to be 6 months if something "extremely wrong" happens during those 6 months. Maybe 6 months is only appropriate for at&t. I'm just saying they need a "reasonable chance" to give you enough data to measure performance change. That's different for different industries/companies. For a start-up with lots of coding, maybe only 1 month is needed to measure any change in performance. But some of the blame goes to the employer as well. In theory an employer should almost never have to deal with an unfixable bad employee. If a company really keeps having repeated problems with bad employees, the interview-process probably needs some fixing.

It is the UK.

Why not? Is a meeting with 1000 people an off the record sort of thing? Does the CEO not stand behind his words?

Also what kind of non-game plan involves telling people they'll be fired in a week, maybe. You can't reveal game plans when there are none.

A video like what?

What about the video contents mandates it shouldn't be recorded?

That's really bad form by Armstrong. For all he knew, the guy was taking a snapshot to post on the company blog as part of his job or something. Or maybe he was just checking his phone.

At the very least, if you fire somebody over that, you at least announce "no filming please" and fire him privately afterwards.

I doubt that there is any business reason for taking pictures of an execution. Armstrong would know if there was. He caught a leaker in the act. The question is how do you handle it? If you want to make an example, you do it on the spot. If you want to be professional, you tell him to put the camera down and do it later.

If you refer to a part of the company as "loserville" then you're not too worried about appearing professional.

> If you refer to a part of the company as "loserville" then you're not too worried about appearing professional.

He was citing the press they were getting, or at least that's how I took the article. This is not the type of thing you announce on a public phone call (that people may get laid off) because all of your employees are now going to be job surfing irregardless of what division they are in.

My cousin was in that meeting, apparently the back story is that he was responsible for a design that everyone is against.

He says he was probably going to be fired anyway.

Wouldn't multiple divisions of AOL go ahead and publish the Photo if someone took a similar picture of another company?

Take TechCrunch for example. Wouldn't they publish a Photo of MSFT having layoff's if someone sent them a picture?

Why shouldn't they publish such a picture?

You are trying to suggest some sort of hypocrisy here, but I'm not seeing it. Expecting loyalty from your employees and expecting loyalty from employees of other companies to their company are entirely separate issues. If somebody gets a photo of MSFT layoffs, that is MSFT's problem, not TechCrunch's.

Sadly, I probably would have had the same reaction. Between the stress of things not going well and the stupidity of others, I start to get a short fuse.

I'm not sure I would have fired the guy, but I suspect I would have at least said, "Put that f'n camera away before I shove it up your ass". Actually, saying that would probably be worse.

"You can't fire me! I'm being laid off!" (Though I'm sure there was more to it than that...)

My bet is that traffic to job postings increased dramatically from AOL office networks after that meeting. :)

Isn't a meeting with 1000 people pretty much public anyway? Media reports aren't making patch look like 'loserville', patch simply is 'loserville'.

It was a conference call. There is zero chance to keep it from being recorded. The next one will still be filmed/audio recorded, but with a little more discretion.

Maybe it's the new normal among the power elite/police forces/NSA.

Was the person under NDA? Forbidden from filming beforehand?

The most of you seem to be leaping to the defense of the CEO for something that could've been a personal action based on a perceived slight instead of a corporate policy.

Out of the 1,000 or so there, wonder how many others started to record as soon as that went down. To also start recording would've been my immediate reaction.

I don't know anything about AOL specifically, but I've worked for a handful of BigCo's. All have required signing some sort of agreement at the start of employment which explicitly forbids leaking confidential information. So it's very likely that this person was under an NDA. What may be surprising to people who haven't worked at a BigCo is that due to legal implications, often times companies actually have guidelines about what should be discussed in recorded formats versus in person/phone.

True that, from my POV I received requests on an event by event basis. Many of these people probably had to sign as part of employment.

AOL is a public company. It's actions at large events are public unless explicitly noted otherwise.

What is large? Stagehand here, 1000+ is large. I've been made to sign agreements for smaller venues.

Edit: To elaborate, smaller venues can easily close doors. Not so much in auditoriums or arenas. Concession is selling goods, other building customers are milling about right behind your event's curtains. Employees of the building are milling about as well, waiting for your talking to be done with.

Pipe and drape is not a privacy filter. You are often in a private space used by the public.

Rather pissed edit: Now that I think about it, this guy is at the helm of a company that sells out people's privacy to anyone with cash and legal assurances. He is firing someone for using a camera while booming his voice over a PA[1] system much like those my friends and I have handled over the years. Screw him.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_address_system

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