Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Preston-Warner can snap his fingers, and someone who was getting a check to put food on the table and a roof over their head is suddenly not going to have the rent check by the end of the month.

Very, very unlikely. Even though employment laws are very employer-friendly in the US, from the sound of it, Tom built an inclusive, open company culture. One of the side effects of that is that if you abuse your power as a leader, you cause irreparable damage to the culture - which is not something you want to do at practically any cost after spending so much effort building the culture and getting it to stand up on its own feet.

Ricardo Semler, major shareholder and CEO of Semco, explained it like this: "I have a handgun in my desk drawer with a single bullet in it."

If he really had built the kind of culture where he could just fire people by snapping his fingers, surely the easiest thing would have been to fire the troublemaker at the first sign of trouble instead of waiting for her to resign and make a fuss.

How is that unlikely? Unless Github has a very, very atypical employment contract, all employees are at-will[1]. Sure, it might damage Tom or Github's reputation if he just randomly fired people[2], but he could. Saying that it would also bring down the rest of the company doesn't really help.

[1] Of course, you still have to give two weeks notice if you want to exercise that at-willness for yourself!

[2] I mean, unless he "randomly" fires all the people of race X, or something like that

It's very, very unlikely that he would fire someone on a whim. He has the ability, but it's very unlikely that he would exercise that ability.

> Of course, you still have to give two weeks notice if you want to exercise that at-willness for yourself!

No, you don't.

I explained how it's unlikely, but here we go again.

Tom has spent considerable time (as I have, in my own company) getting people to a point where they think for themselves, make decisions as a group, and generally behave as independent adults rather than the kind of infantile employees who just do what they're told by their boss. Since the latter is the way most businesses operate, it's no mean feat to get this done with a company of a dozen, let alone with one of hundreds.

If Tom decides to arbitrarily fire someone, even just one person, without going through the group-oriented processes he's spent all this time building up, he immediately undermines all that, potentially fatally.

Since he clearly cares about the company's culture (enough to make it his priority for the last half-decade), it's very unlikely he would risk that to get rid of one person.

And finally, again, there's the evidence: if he really did want to get rid of this woman, and he could, why didn't he?

> And finally, again, there's the evidence: if he really did want to get rid of this woman, and he could, why didn't he?

That's more speculation than evidence, surely?

> Of course, you still have to give two weeks notice if you want to exercise that at-willness for yourself!

That's a professional courtesy; it's almost never legally required.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com