What an uninformed take! That's why we have labor laws and such a thing as "wrongful termination" exists.
"I believe in empathy, like, I think you should care about other people," Musk said as part of the same discussion on Joe Rogan's podcast, "but you need to have empathy for, for civilization as a whole, and not commit to a civilizational suicide."
Musk specifically outlined "suicidal empathy" not empathy in general. Setting yourself on fire to keep the homeless warm on a cold night doesn't help you nor the homeless long term.
Short of lighting yourself on fire, you could (1) invite them to use an unused space to sleep, (2) donate your time, money, food, water or other goods, (3) advocate for better solutions on a local, state or nation level, or (4) at least not foment hatred against them.
There is a wide variety of empathetic actions that one could do other than burning yourself or nothing. This directly applies to every social, political or economic issue that Musk has tangled with, but instead he sets it up to convince himself and others that actually there’s nothing he can do and empathy is for losers.
Not all jurisdictions respect freedom of association to the same degree.
Employment can be anywhere on a scale from a simple exchange of time for money, to something closer to a feudal lord/serf arrangement.
According to the now discontinued CIA world factbook, the US is a "republic with strong leaning democratic ties", the 2 worst institutions in the USA are school and work.
Both are increasingly fascistic and authoritarian. Both are approved to exist at the approval of the federal and state governments. But both throw out due process, all Bill of Rights, and more.
But the monied elite? Oh yeah, their rights are preserved. They DO get all their rights.
Is the first amendment really 'Freedom of Speech', if you're saying it while living under and interstate overpass?
And before someone says "The first amendment only applies to government", remember all companies must get the approval of the same government. The government should apply the same rights to any prospective corporation, being an extension of government.
companies have legal duties to enforce code of conduct they established. It happened that Attlassian adapted freedom of speech in its code, and also likely non-retaliation policy, so there is some ground for law enforcement.
> What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled
And I just don't see how that can cross the line. It's clearly meant to stoke the fires, but it's also pretty close to a recitation of the facts. Perhaps if the CEO finds this insulting he shouldn't have dialed into a layoff AMA call from his NBA team's headquarters.
> “What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled,” Unterwurzacher wrote.
It takes a certain amount of entitlement and lack of awareness to do this on official internal channels - with your name attached and viewable by anyone in the company, particularly during a downsizing event.
This would have been akin to printing out the statement, signing it with your name, and then stapling it to a literal bulletin board in the office hallway. There's no reality where that is acceptable...
Except the reality in which the criticism is well-deserved, obviously. That's subjective, of course, and I'm not commenting on whether it applies here, but "zero public outcry allowed, no matter what's happening" is an absurd position. Of course that doesn't mean you shouldn't expect consequences, even up to being fired by the tyrant in question, but that's not the same thing as "unacceptable". Employees aren't slaves.
Again, what she did was akin to printing out the statement and stapling it to a bulletin board - or, mass emailing it to everyone in the company. It was an official internal channel everyone in the company can access...
Imagine one of your reports saying something like this about you during a team meeting, while you're standing there. Not acceptable workplace behavior... and that would be limited to just your team.
Actually, yes, yes it does. There are some things you can't say to any employee of any rank: racist or sexist harassment for example. And commenting on the performance of an employee that doesn't report to you is also generally a no-go. But legitimate, job-related criticism of the CEO, or any other senior management, is entirely acceptable. Why wouldn't it be?
Your comment would make sense if it were talking about the CEO.
Otherwise, it's a unwittingly sad comment on the quasi-feudal nature of these corporations.
The CEO was at his NBA team's HQ. He had demoted many staff members. He was then criticizing staff members for protesting those demotions.
It takes integrity and bravery to challenge the lies of the powerful.
“What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled,” Unterwurzacher wrote. Atlassian fired her a few days later, saying she had “engaged in acrimonious communications and ad hominem attacks against teammates and colleagues.”
Unterwurzacher replied, “I think it’s difficult to point out the power imbalance in a way that is not potentially described by somebody as an ad hominem attack.”
> At a March 3 hearing in Austin, a National Labor Relations Board attorney said the fired software engineer, Denise Unterwurzacher, had been acting in the spirit of Atlassian’s own stated “Open Company, No Bullshit” philosophy
I think if you have a "Open Company, No Bullshit" philosophy in your company handbook, then you can't claim "No, not like that..." when called on your BS.
If their company policy was "always obey legal orders from superiors" instead then I think they have a much clearer case at firing for cause.
If you can't take such a gentle ribbing from people you've potentially just fired, you shouldn't be CEO, because you can't control your emotions in the simplest way.
Almost none of these tech leaders deserve their station except by virtue of luck or often borderline sociopathic tendencies. To flaunt it so egregiously is a bit over the top.
this controversy will not have enough steam behind it to affect hteir bottom line whatsoever
Many of us are mature enough to follow the principle of, "if you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything." But not so when you have young developers flowing in and out of the company. In one of the town halls, a 24 year old dev, was put on a mic, and simply said, "I don't like X, he is super annoying, why do we keep plastering his face everywhere."
I've never seen an entire company freeze before. There was no way forward, no way backwards. The script had been broken. The dev, thinking he wasn't heard properly, sent the same message in our townhall slack channel. I did what I believe 90% of other people did. I screenshoted it.
The kid got another job a few months after. For once we saw the emperor wore no clothes.
Edit: million typos
Brave of the developer to bring it up. This cult of personality is pervasive throughout the tech industry.
Anyway, good for him. Too many agree to too much because they fear they'll lose their job.
I was working as a programmer at some high flying merchant bank in London in the 90's and at the pub with my workmates one night I started tearing strips off of the IT director because he was comically incompetent. Everyone was kicking me under the table because unbeknownst to me his close friend was at the table taking in my rant. Everyone agreed that I was toast and bought me drinks.
In the morning, at about 10am, security went into his office and marched him out of the building, right past my desk. I turned around and said to my team and said "See! Don't fuck with me!"
It was hilarious.
Bravo.
Another memory from that time: a stressed sounding trading desk assistant rang me asking after a trade confirmation that went missing and the client was demanding. I determined that the system I worked on didn't handle those kinds of trades. Out of curiosity I looked up the trade. It was for 2 billion GBP of UK Gilts (government bonds), thats about $5 billion USD in today's money.
It's completely okay to say whatever you want and stand up for yourself, but you are not a child, own the consequences rather than whine
If a rich guy can't take some minor criticism maybe he's the whiner.
The CEO has money and the power to fire that person if the employee is disliked. Maybe that shouldn't be a thing, maybe it should be illegal, but they'll find a way around it. Just because they can means that they will.
I wish it wasn't like that but that's how I see things are happening these days, save for perhaps a few nuances here and there.
It's ok to be angry at people for behaving in a way that is unsurprising. Otherwise, there's no room for the word "immoral".
For most normal CEOs criticism from a low-level employee would just not be worth thinking about.
You have a choice not to use said tact, but this entire "employee goes on moral crusade, gets fired, goes on moral crusade about firing", is a feature of a kind of employee that is even for other employees not amazing to be around
The statement doesn’t claim any fact: it’s a hypotheical not unlike a “based on real events” movie/book/etc that never quotes or attributes specific actions to a subject.
And that’s why Atlassian is very likely to lose over and over as they appeal (but never say never these days in the US).
> “What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled,”
As for "the consequences", those are what are at stake now. They are what the courts & to some extent the people of the USA get to decide.
If you are so burned out that you can’t help but vent publicly, it’s time to go. It’s just not healthy for you.
But of course leadership is going to take care of that for you because it’s not healthy for the company either to have open dissent. And most of us are far easier to replace than a CEO
Honestly I don’t hate JIRA, it’s “fine”. There aren’t really any project tracking tools that I love.
"“What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled,”
That is an absolutely true statement (to the degree that you can pummel a non-physical thing).
Amazing answer.
NextDNS doesn't route to .is or .ph or .fo or .today anymore.
My ISP doesn't route to .is, but it routes to the others. Using my ISP's DNS means receiving tons of spam though.
Cloudflare apparently doesn't reliably route to them either, and I wouldn't want to use it even if it did.
UPDATE: I see that https://dns.adguard-dns.com/dns-query still routes to all of them, so guess I will use it!
“ What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled.”
Seems like a fair statement to make, and she didn’t call him a jerk directly. She didn’t deserve to be fired, but I’ll be surprised if she has any actual recourse.
Frankly, if the CEO is the leader he’s pretending to be, he’d apologize to her and offer her the job back with a signing bonus.
It’s sad how little respect most of these guys have for the engineers that enable them to walk into their country clubs and call themselves “tech CEOs”.
Is he too rich for some people’s taste? Does that indicate workers are unhappy with the real/perceived pay disparity?
Is he a jerk in other contexts? Is this proxy for unapproachable, rude, or some other unbecoming set of behaviors?
It’s an opportunity to improve, or at least reflect on the perception they have in the company. Firing, and asserting the right to do so for expressing an opinion, seems to me to be a poor choice of action.
Bootvis•1h ago
Forgeties79•1h ago
tempodox•14m ago
But if they say so themselves!