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Comment by rm999 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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