AOL CEO fires employee in conference call for taking photo | Hacker News Reader

AOL CEO fires employee in conference call for taking photo

cnn.com

14 pointsrexreed11 comments

Is that legal? I'm fairly sure in most of europe you wouldn't be able to fire someone for something that minor.

I listened to 2 minutes of the speech around when he fired him [1] and the guy sounded like he was itching to fire someone, he mentioned 2 or 3 times that if you didn't like where Patch was going, or if you weren't 100% committed you should leave. In fact, immediately before firing he said:

> "If you think what’s going on right now is a joke, and you want to joke around about it, you should pick your stuff up and leave Patch today, and the reason is, and I’m going to be very specific about this, is Patch from an experience — Abel, put that camera down right now! Abel, you’re fired. Out!"

Just looks like a pathetic way to try and show people he's serious. I hope he has to resign because of this (assuming the only reason for firing the guy was the picture)

  [1] http://jimromenesko.com/2013/08/10/listen-to-aol-ceo-tim-armstrong-fire-his-creative-director-during-a-conference-call/

In many, perhaps most parts of the US, you can legally fire employees without cause.

In general yes, but you're on the most solid ground if you just state no reason for firing, or something generic like wanting to align staffing with business needs.

If you actually give a reason but it appears to the court to be a malicious or vindictive one, in some states it can run afoul of the implied requirement, read into all economic relationships, of good faith and fair dealing. I'm not sure if it would apply here (probably not), but it's been applied in the past when a manager appeared to be doing things like timing a layoff to deliberately cause maximal harm to the employee, or a company had an unwritten policy of firing people before benefits vested in order to make sure the promised benefits never materialized.

Yes, it's important not to confuse "without cause" with "for any cause". You can fire people for no reason at all, but some reasons (e.g. because of their race or religion) are still out of bounds. Of course, proving such a thing can be tricky when they aren't required to have a cause at all.

This - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment

Other discussion, which already has 112 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6197081

Thanks! Didn't see the Slate article. On the plus side, the CNN article goes into some detail on the current AOL / Patch situation and the CNN commenters are quite hilarious. CNN would have benefited from the fact that Abel Lenz regularly took photos of meetings like that.

Legal, yes, but also ample grounds for a civil suit as well. One would think AOL's board would also desire a CEO who would've handled that differently.

Wow, the last time I heard of AOL was something like in 2002. Didn't know they were still alive.

They own, among other things, Huffington Post, TechCrunch and Engadget, so even if you haven't heard of them specifically, chances are you have heard of at least some of what they do.

Why?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com