True in theory, but in practice, even HN is full of comments like "Google is evil because [link to a random unfounded speculation/whining of ex-Googler]" and people believe them uncritically.
The ex-employee implied management doesn't like criticism. Management then completely overreacts to criticism.
Are you kidding me? What world do you live in where corporate executives and companies are punished for lying?
I do see a great potential for bad consequences here.
Officially: no reason. And I get this; I vaguely know how CA employment law works and that you limit your liability by not stating a reason. It's also really hard to work through in your mind. The best theory I have is that, two weeks earlier, I raised concerns about donating 10% of ad revenue to charity. Some management likes getting feedback, some doesn't. The reason I had concerns was that this was revenue, not income. That means you need ~10% margins to break even. This can be hard to do; Yahoo and Twitter don't. Salesforce does something similar, but it's more all-around, and in a way that promotes the product without risking the company's financials.
Not only was it an overreaction, but it really has the stank of pettiness attached to it.
I don't trust either of them. At all. What I do know, though, is that one of them wrote a comment which is tremendously meaner than those of the other person.
That sort of response strikes me as crazily vindictive and the sheer anger of it makes it pretty hard for me to trust its author.
A lot of companies are very vague when they fire an employee. I've been let go twice, once for "poor performance" and once for "not the right fit". In both cases when I pressed for more detail I was not given anything concrete.
In the poor performance case I would say things like "but I had all my code reviewed and the reviewers said my code was fine...". And get responses like "we just didn't feel like your performance was up to scratch".
I was upset and angry at the time because they never provided me with any real evidence or gave me a chance to fix it. I kept coming up with all sorts of reasons (like the fact that I was 20 years older than the next oldest developer). OTOH, I am not stupid enough to air my grievances on a public forum.
You might want to reevaluate that position. You're reflexively siding with the CEO. You don't know that he's lying and saying "I think was fired because I did this" is not lying either way anyways.
I'm not saying you have to side with the ex-employee either, doing an AMA like that was pretty stupid as well. But the CEO's level of basic professionalism here leaves anything he's saying as pretty suspect as well.
You're right, thank you. I got carried away.
You are calling Reddit a web page! Nice hyperbole!
It's a kind of guilt-by-association reasoning: if someone has X bad quality, they likely have Y bad quality also. The boy who stole the loaf of bread from the baker must be the one who assaulted the farmer's daughter.
But this bias is a good thing. It causes internal disagreement, hindering solidarity, but it increases the rate at which we learn new things.