Reddit's CEO Allegedly Fired a Worker for Not Recovering from Cancer Fast Enough

Her optics at this point are terrible.

- CEO of a community-based site where the community doesn't like her (to put it nicely)

- Lost a very public lawsuit against a previous employer that revealed quite a bit about her personal and work habits -- and it wasn't exactly glowing, often downright damning.

- Tried to recoup legal costs for the lawsuit she started and lost

- Was ordered to pay legal costs to her former employer because of the wrongful lawsuit she brought against them

- spent most of the first parts of her Executiveship at reddit fooling around with the lawsuit

- It's strongly suspected that the damages she claimed in her lawsuit were to cover her husband's financial problems

- Her husband appears to be a real piece of work too

- Fired a community manager in the middle of a community event, regardless of the reason for firing her, it could have waited.

- and now fired a cancer patient

On top of these perceptual problems. She also doesn't appear to have any relevant leadership experience for running such a company. It's not like she worked her way up to the top position by starting in the mail room and through moxy and determination worked her way up through the management ranks.

She was a lawyer for 2 years, then spent about 3 years in BD/sales, then managed a BD team for a few years and then spent the rest of her time at Kleiner Perkins representing their VC investments before returning back to BD at reddit.

Basically she went from a very short career in law, to a career in BD. She has a total of 4 years of any kind of measurable management experience. A transition from BD to CEO is fairly unusual.

Somebody previously here on HN said it feels like reddit is being taken over by marketers, it's just as bad, it's being taken over by a Business Developer.

What's really going on here is that Ellen is trying to "clean up" reddit to make it more palatable as a strategic partner for other companies to work with. Reddit's wild-west reputation makes it difficult for many companies to work with them. This is what her focus is, probably with the ultimate goal of cleaning up the image for some kind of M&A. This is what BD people care about. Not about the ins and outs of running a company.

Reddit should be a much more valuable company, and I have a feeling the board is trying to pivot it into more of a sales channel for corporate partners to pump astroturfed advertisements to and to host special sales events or mod dedicated company/product subs for a fee. There's not much reason to continue to tolerate her at this point except that this is what they want.

It's kind of what Digg tried to do, and it may be inevitable for these kinds of narrow margin community-based sites that to start really capitalizing on the community, they go this way. But maybe they're hoping they can make the jump without screwing up as badly as Digg did. It's not looking that way however.

> The company is begging for a reddit clone to pop up and steal the users.

This has been true for a long time before Pao came on board. It's not really clear what the reddit devs seem to be doing, but empowering the mods to better manage their communities is not one of them. Something like Reddit is not terribly complicated software-wise, the large number of alternate communities (this one included) kind of goes to show it's an understood technology. It's basically a community-in-a-box at this point. The network effects will determine what happens next.

As far as these firings go, she can't reverse them. That kills any authority she may still have.

Thanks. URL changed to that from http://nextshark.com/ellen-pao-reddit-dacvak-ama/.

Yes. Most of the US is employment-at-will by default, which means that you can legally be fired without cause, notice, or compensation other than that due based on work prior to the moment of termination.

(Now, there are still reasons for which it is illegal to fire people, and, in part to avoid disputes over whether one of those were involved -- and, on the procedural end, in part to actually work to resolve issues that might be resolved short of firing -- employers will often apply substantial procedures before firing, and even when firing offer a severance package, potentially explicitly contingent on an agreement not to sue.)

All 50 states have "at-will" employment, which means the employer can let the employee go or the employee can choose to leave at any time with no reason given. There are limitations on certain kinds of jobs, and severance packages are common but only for full-time or salaried employees I think. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment

You do get unemployment insurance payouts if you are fired without cause. It's not a lot and it doesn't come directly from the employer. But indirectly it comes fm the employer because they get taxed based on how many former employees go on unemployment.

Most upper middle class jobs will give generous payouts.

Well, the fired worker who has cancer made a post where he thanked Ellen Pao and Reddit for paying for his COBRA insurance for up to a year after his firing. So, I'm not sure he was simply let go and that's that.

I'm not saying that Reddit isn't making mistakes, but I am glad that they at least finally tried to do something about the serious troll problems there.

I'm still waiting for a source that explains this mess without all the hyperbole and assumptions. However, I'm increasingly thinking that won't happen as it seems a lot of redditors have already made up their minds that this or that person is evil and this and that person is a godly saint.

I'd like to hear both sides of the stories, etc. before I make up my mind on this situation.

The fact that we only know one-side of the story* is actually the biggest "wtf?" in all of this, in my opinion.

That the reddit executive staff hasn't really addressed this entire shitstorm publicly and officially by now is absolutely mind-boggling given what reddit is. They are giving the impression that they still see this just as a conversation between mods and admins and are basically ignoring the public spill-over (except for Alexis' dismissive comments).

*(really we know less than one side of the story since AFAIK Victoria hasn't really talked about it publicly, which from her side is totally understandable for either legal [if severance is involved] or just not wanting to get blackballed reasons).

"During this time, I had sat down with Ellen Pao (current reddit CEO) to discuss my future at reddit and when I was able to move. I had told her that it would still be at least a month (but probably closer to 2 or 3) before I was finally able to move to SF, and she said she was 100% fine with that. We discussed my position, and ultimately determined that I would be returning to the Community Management team. I met some of the new members of the team, all was well, and then I flew home on day 3."

What's going on at Reddit right now is a significant story, plus HN and Reddit have a long history together (indeed, a common origin). So it's appropriate for the story to be on HN, and it has been: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9822580. When it comes to pile-on stories, though, you're right. You're also right that the topic should be discussed here in a substantive way.

Generally, any time there's a frenzy of copycat stories, the approach that works best for HN is (a) to settle on (hopefully) the most substantive version of the story for discussion, (b) downweight the follow-ups, and (c) have a new thread if significant new information arises. I don't think the current story passes that last test, though it's perhaps interesting how people are seizing on it.

No. This is one of the most significant events on the internet today . A first of its kind social phenomenon. This needs to be analyzed like everything else.

Nobody is making you click on the submission or view the comments. If this isn't what you want to see on HN, then vote or flag the article, as usual.