Atlassian says it had right to fire engineer for suggesting CEO is 'rich jerk'
bloomberg.com“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.”
Amazing answer.
It feels like a stretch to claim that mocking your CEO (deservedly or not) counts as collectively discussing or protesting working conditions.
Does the law protecting discussion of working conditions (in this case the handling of layoffs) really vanish if those discussions are humorous?
Is there a meaningful discussion of working conditions here? The article doesn’t have a lot of other context. If this is all that the employee in question said, I would not call it discussion of working conditions.
Yes, the "joke" only works because the implication is that the CEO is out of touch with the lives and working conditions of the average employee. It's pretty overt in meaning.
Should employees be required to discuss things explicitly? Without the natural way people talk? Especially the natural way Americans talk? Seems pretty rigid if you ask me
Proving her point.
Apparently he hates the moniker the good people of Atlassian have bestowed on him. Actually, why he would hate being called out like this is baffling to me. It would appear he did everything in his power to earn it!
> Atlassian has denied wrongdoing.
But if they say so themselves!
Marked as wontfix.
Is it really surprising she was fired?
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
No using the legal process if you think your company is violating the law is also part of "stand up for yourself".
If a rich guy can't take some minor criticism maybe he's the whiner.
This assumes that you think people operate on principles. As the years go on, it feels that people in the top seem to mostly operate on money.
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.
Every CEO technically has the power to fire anyone they dislike. I assume they usually don't out of some form of noblesse oblige, and aversion to PR problems. But mostly just because they're too busy to get involved in minor, petty shit like this.
For most normal CEOs criticism from a low-level employee would just not be worth thinking about.
No, it assumes that people should operate on principles. You're falling into the "you're naive, just accept that things are bad" philosophy, which is self-fulfilling over time.
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".
If I had to distill the social status & commensurate behaviour described in your in two words, it might sound suspiciously familiar.
The NLRB alleges that “the consequences” she faced are illegal under Federal law.
That doesn't mean they are, in fact, illegal. The NLRB alleges a lot of things - the courts will decide.
You sure seem to hate workers
It would be equally ridiculous to say "the nlrb hates the rule of law" since they make lots of allegations that end up getting ruled against in court
I saw GP as an argument that they shouldn't be illegal.
I don't know if they are legal or not. But assuming you don't want to leave a company, there is minimal tact of what to say when.
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
There’s enough of a difference, IMO, between campaigning against your organization’s plans and venting to your coworkers about the way in which the CEO delivered said plans.
Surprised? I don’t think anyone is surprised but I, personally, am grossed out by it, it lowers my opinion of Atlassian and makes me less likely to select their products in the future.
Who is surprised by this? Surely you don't imagine a woman who dared to call her boss a rich jerk was surprised when he retaliated! US women are taught very young how powerful men act when their egos are threatened.
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.
Man, you really need to take care of that tongue, CEO boots are getting spikier and spikier.
Being an adult is realizing you shouldn't fire people for saying you made a poor decision
Wouldn't she have the excuse of truth as defense?
It’s simply satire, not “truth”.
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).
Was the CEO dialing in from the headquarters of an NBA team they owned? Yes.
Were they calling to aggressively dismiss employee claims (without video I cannot prove "yelling", but that is a way that word is used in common parlance)? Yes.
Does downleveling employees have a significant negative impact on their careers? Yes.
This wasn't satire, it was truth.
The company isn’t suing her for defamation.
That’s a good point. If that was the only thing she said, it’s hard not to see it as a statement of fact (Although I’m sure lawyers could argue about pummeled):
> “What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled,”
"Why are you surprised" is such a common format of weasel-phrase, which is mysterious because it's so plainly fallacious. Just because something is predictable doesn't mean it's acceptable.
Frankly, it's still surprising to see this tip-toeing around given how much the mask has been ripped off recently.
I love the argument "freedom of speech doesn't imply freedom after speech"
For a light insult at an executive of a company at a company with a "no bullshit" culture? Absolutely!
I'm waiting for the Europeans to wake up and tell us about labor laws.
seems redundant given that the c̶o̶u̶r̶t̶ NLRB siding with the employee suggests that even in the US employees are likely protected in this case, but interestingly i feel this one is undecided, because insults are taken quite seriously in some european countries.
from germany i know that whether an insult is grounds for firing someone depends on the regular interaction the two people have, so if you take a company of rednecks (to employ a stereotype), a redneck employee calling their redneck boss some typical redneck insult would be interpreted as acceptable, and make any firing based on that illegal. but if the same insult is used by a lawyer in a law firm from a big city, then suddenly that same insult is a valid reason to get fired.
(edit: rephrase and replace court with NLRB)
The court has not sided with anyone yet. The NLRB sided with the employee and has argued her case in court.
oops, sloppy reading of the article on my part, corrected.
I acknowledge headline writing is hard, but man, there's gotta be a better way to frame this. I was prepared to take Atlassian's side here, you can't call your coworkers jerks. But the article says "rich jerk" is Atlassian's characterization of a sarcastic comment:
> 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.
The headline definitely took a side. Not surprising given the source.
It makes me glad that our company has just dropped all Atlassian products.
And this is why knowledge workers, professionals, and every kind of worker needs to unionize and potentially find a path to working for themselves or forming worker-owned co-ops to create more stable, long term stable, less toxic, and fairer profit sharing environments because corporate extraction machines treat owners like kings and employees like dirt. It doesn't have to be this way.
I think the cult of personality always backfires, pun intended. Our company biggest product was a celebrity making fun commercials for the actual product. Works wonders. Personally I don't have a problem with him, I enjoyed his movies in the past. But not everybody does. Internally, the company tried to push this cult so deeply that it was part of the hiring process, part of the onboarding, even obscured some of the CEOs messaging. And you wonder, what happens when you hire someone who doesn't like this celebrity?
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
Edit 2: in case it wasn't clear, no was not fired, he just found another job.
I've been that 20-something myself.
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.
Was his close friend the MD or something? I’m curious how this wound up playing out exactly backward from how everyone expected it would.
It was a coincidence. A few weeks earlier there was a fault at the bank's data center. The very expensive backup data center failed to go online. Management was not amused.
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.
I don’t often literally LOL here.
Bravo.
The interview for the next job must have been interesting.
Anyway, good for him. Too many agree to too much because they fear they'll lose their job.
> Many of us are mature enough to follow the principle of, "if you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything."
This isn't maturity, this is selfishness. A group often benefits from someone challenging the status quo, but the individual doing that gets punished. In your view, Germans during WW2 were "mature" by not saying anything that wasn't nice about nazism, and nowadays Russians are "mature" when they don't want to discuss a war that left a million people either dead or wounded - both cases are individuals acting out of self-preservation, not "maturity".
If you're American, then maybe a good example is Martin Luther King Jr. - do you really think that he should've had the maturity to shut up and not say anything that wasn't nice about racism? Well, he got killed, just like your junior employee got fired, so I guess he was indeed a loser in a sense.
In general this is a very common pattern in corporations where everyone is "just doing their job" and "being mature" but the end result is atrocities - for example Nestle literally killing babies.
I might generalize this as “push against actions, not personalities”. Don’t like someone because you just don’t mesh? Keep your mouth shut. You have a different outlook than they do, and yours is as wrong from their POV as theirs is from yours. Someone you think is interesting and fun to be around does something bad? Resist it.
It happens very rarely that there's someone I don't like as a person but I know they're competent in their domain. Sure, it does happen, but it's very rare.
For real? I’ve known all sorts of brilliant bastards. Or even people who weren’t actually jerks, just incompatible with me in an oil and water sort of way, like they were exceedingly uptight, or so happy-go-lucky that they thought I was the uptight one. We just didn’t get along at all, but they weren’t bad people, and certainly not incompetent, just not a good pairing with me.
There's a difference between criticism and personal insults, and honestly if you can't tell the difference you might be a liability for your employer.
In a perfect world yes. In reality, people often take offense in being criticized. Or ignore the feedback until the situation becomes disastrously bad.
I am guessing this is Salesforce and the celebrity is Matthew McConaughey who’s real chummy with Benioff.
Brave of the developer to bring it up. This cult of personality is pervasive throughout the tech industry.
I was thinking of Mint Mobile. I guess there are many examples, not even counting the cases where the CEO becomes a celebrity (like Steve Jobs).
The best email I ever received was a notification my company was moving off Jira. Atlassian’s own stated philosophy is “Open Company, No Bullshit”. I wish that was true. Maybe they would have better products.
Tell me a sad story in three words: We Use Jira.
After suffering Jira at two previous employers when it was being considered at the third org, I lobbied, pretty much begged, and cried along with many other colleagues who had this inflicted upon them previously. Yes, we indeed ended up with Jira and one another Atlassian monstrosity.
Confluence? I know most people really want a hard-to-use wiki with a special markdown flavor to write up things that instantly go stale, never to be reviewed again. Or, at least that's the only way I've really seen Confluence used?
You can fail to maintain a wiki written in any software. The value of Confluence is when everyone uses it, so there’s one place to find info to answer questions like “why the hell did we do it this way?”
Yes, but it's easier to fail when the markdown (or NIH markdown in the case of Confluence) is far removed from the code it describes. Which is why you should document closer to the products. Markdown files living by your code and even generated from code is way better than any experience I've had with Confluence (which is closing up on two decades soon enough).
I used Confluence a mere decade ago and, if anything, the 10 years after you used it only magnified its flaws relatively to what else was by then available so you didn’t miss much, and I suspect we haven’t missed much since, except more bloat.
The tricky part of that is the 'find' phase, as Confluence has a comically bad search.
Nah. The prime use case of Confluence is to tick "yes I've written the documentation".
I love confluence because it has the worst search engine I've ever used. I used to think TikTok search was the worst: no matter what you typed, you would get only videos of people dancing. World's largest rock? Here's 12 videos of people dancing the renegade. 2020 election? Here's a video of someone dressed like Donald Trump dancing the renegade. Gatorade? Surely you meant the renegade, right? Here's some videos of people dancing the renegade.
But TikTok actually fixed that, so now Confluence is back on top. Good on you, Atlassian.
If any half-competent developer tried to write his first search engine it would be better than that of Confluence. It's unbelievable.
I’m literally using a flat file to track one of my personal projects right now and I like it more than JIRA.
I’m not a fan of Jira either, but this isn’t a particularly relevant criticism. it’s meant for coordinating large groups.
I was replying to a joke so there was a bit of humor intended there. :-)
Honestly I don’t hate JIRA, it’s “fine”. There aren’t really any project tracking tools that I love.
Sorry, I missed that. I’ve seen enough wild but earnestly held beliefs on HN that I have trouble telling them from satire.
There’s no reason a company should put up with enemies within. In rare instances a disgruntled employee might be able to make a positive contribution. In most cases, even if the employee has valid reasons, by the time they are disgruntled there’s no coming back. It’s best for everyone to move on.
Yes, why surround yourself with people who are critical of you, when you can surround yourself with yes-men who will loyally toe the line? Positive contributions comes from loyal subjects who agree with their betters.
The “people who are critical of you” are very broad category that includes both toxic behavior and constructive disagreement. The former must not be tolerated, the latter can be encouraged as long as it’s not a blocker. In this case it is clearly the former and it requires suppression, but disciplinary action may have been too harsh or perfectly adequate depending on prior history with this employee. It was not said like “it was insensitive to appear in front of the team this way”. It was indeed said like he is a rich jerk. Zero added value, rage bait, polarization of the team.
> In this case it is clearly the former and it requires suppression
That's not clear at all. Why do you say so?
Read the article. "Rich jerk" are Atlassian's words, not the employee's. Even if they are it's not obviously the former.
I refuse to believe anyone, including Oracle employees, likes Larry Ellison. If Microsoft/Google/Apple fired everyone who badmouthed Satya/Sundar/Tim, half their products would fall apart overnight.
> That's not clear at all. Why do you say so?
Do you see any, even little sign of constructive criticism in what she said? Anything that could improve corporate culture or help her peers or management to understand the problem? Any hint on how it could be fixed? I don’t.
> Read the article.
I did read the article and came to the same conclusion as Atlassian.
> I refuse to believe anyone, including Oracle employees, likes Larry Ellison.
When you sign the working contract, your job is to act in the interests of shareholders. If you despise them or disagree with what they do, you can still work there and use your position to align their interests and the interests of the public. You can try to change it from within. But the moment when you decide to burn the bridges is the moment when you should leave. To me this is pretty obvious, and I’m really surprised to see here some sort of entitlement.
"acting in the interests of shareholders" (which, for the record, no employment contract I've ever signed requires) does not mean blind allegiance to management and certainly doesn't mean not calling out bad actions by management.
The employee's statement here was fact. The CEO did harm the careers of employees and did call in to harass them without even bothering to come to a company office.
The CEO, who has much more of an obligation to act in shareholders' interests than an IC, shouldn't be attacking and alienating their labor force.
> no employment contract I've ever signed requires
The sole reason for existence of for-profit corporations does not have to be explicitly stated in the contract. It’s implied and better be understood.
> does not mean blind allegiance to management…
Yes, it doesn’t. Nobody said it does.
> The employee's statement here was fact.
Sure. It it wasn’t the fact, it would be even worse.
> The CEO shouldn't be attacking and alienating their labor force.
It’s irrelevant. One person’s bad judgement does not justify another’s.
No, employees have no obligations to shareholders. They get money for their labor. End of obligation. They are not the corporation.
This is ignoring that the concept of companies having to care about shareholders above everything else is a lie spread to justify evil behavior.
> They get money for their labor.
Yes, and what is the essence of that labor? It is to create profits for shareholders. You are not getting paid to contribute to toxic culture or to seize the means of production. CEO could have been in the wrong, but the moment when the “us vs them” idea starts dominating in corporate culture is the moment company dies and those jobs that everyone is so afraid to loose are ceasing to exist.
>This is ignoring that the concept of companies having to care about shareholders above everything else is a lie spread to justify evil behavior.
Nobody is claiming the “above everything else” here
> Yes, and what is the essence of that labor? It is to create profits for shareholders
No, it's not. I'm not sure what your source of capitalism koolaid is, but employees are transacting labor for money, and shareholders do not come into it at all.
The nature of labor is stocking shelves, writing code, emptying trash bins, or whatever else you do. Full stop.
If you want employees to "think of the shareholders first", you give them enough ownership that the stock price actually makes a major difference in their life, and crucially, enough control at the company to actually influence the stock price. In practice that's the C Suite and maybe some senior VPs. No one else should be stressing out trying to make the owners richer.
This conversation is not about „employees thinking/not thinking about shareholders“. You are cherry-picking that topic and taking it out of context, for what reason exactly?
I have explained already a few times why and what context matters here. Are you struggling to understand it or just avoiding it?
You started your initial response with "When you sign the working contract, your job is to act in the interests of shareholders".
Working for a company does not mean blind allegiance to leadership, nor does it mean no criticism.
I fully agree with you, it doesn’t. However I wasn’t saying that, so I have to conclude that you are speaking to someone else here, making up arguments from an imaginary opponent, and I’m not needed here. Good luck.
That's one way to look at it. Another way is that people who are aligned with the CEOs mission will help achieve the mission, and people who are not aligned will not help achieve the mission. And it's the CEOs job to define the mission
Being aligned with the goals of an organization is different from being aligned with the organization. Do not conflate the two.
See Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
When the mission is to screw over the employees, we don't need people who will align with that. CEOs should be held responsible for the enemies they create within their organization. Treating people as necessary collateral damage is unacceptable.
The mission is usually stupid and also dumb, and it would be in the CEOs best interest to surround himself or herself with people willing to tell them that.
Meta could've saved billions of dollars if more people told Zuck that the Metaverse is stupid, because it was. The end result is the same. The death of the idea. That much is actually unavoidable, because stupid and bad ideas will always fail, with or without support. So, it shifts to a question of it being a long, drawn-out, expensive death or a quick Old Yeller type putting down.
I think the issue we're seeing across a lot of companies is that leadership is incredibly stupid. I think we have this wrong idea that, because a CEO exists purely to make decisions, they must be pretty good at it. But that's not really the case. You can only be capable of doing one thing and still be shit at that one thing, it's definitely possible.
The problem is, I think, we assume that CEOs and other leadership work like normal people, but I don't think this is the case. I think there is a brain decay that occurs as people become more rich and powerful. It's becoming evident to me that the human brain was never intended to be in that type of situation, and there are consequences. There's a sort of detachment of reality that comes along with that, and it almost seems unavoidable. Like a type of delusional psychosis that just onsets when you become rich and powerful enough.
It's not a new thing, either. You can basically see this across all of history with kings and rulers of all kinds. The really good ones do something remarkable: they predict their own oncoming psychosis. They build in controls and preventative measures so that, when they inevitable go off the rails, the damage is minimized. It's wild, isn't it? I think about everything George Washington did prior to his rise in US politics, and it can only be describes as stopping his future self from eventually becoming drunk with power.
My prevailing hypothesis is that as you advance in leadership roles there's a natural tendency to have the ego grow. After all, you have evidence for your ego: you make important decisions and you've risen up in whatever social structure. And I think there's a natural bias to surround yourself with yesmen. They create less friction, so naturally we want that. And it's hard to distinguish yesmen from people who genuinely believe in the same things as you. But the yesmen are able to hide this way, even by being "disagreeable" in just the right way (which makes it hard to distinguish). With the more proficient yesmen themselves rising to the top too.> I think there is a brain decay that occurs as people become more rich and powerful.So I think it's important for leaders to surround themselves with a distribution of opinions. I think in order to make good decisions we need friction. We need frustration. We need people to tell us we're wrong when we're wrong. We also need people to tell us we're wrong even when we're right, because the challenge of the idea forces us to think deeper. But I think the real challenge is implementing this correctly. It needs most "advisors" to be acting honestly, independently, and in good faith. It's hard to cultivate that and I think to do so you need to let people trash talk you, even egregiously. Because a misinterpretation of punishing someone can be seen interpreted as retaliation (even if completely fair), and upsetting the whole balance. Context can easily be lost
I suspect it's an unstable equilibrium, making it really difficult to maintain.
Agreed. I have held similar opinions of leadership at many of my jobs.
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
> it’s not healthy for the company either to have open dissent.
It's deeply unhealthy to not have open dissent.
That’s certainly not a universal take in leadership.
Disagree and commit is the manager’s take. Ok let’s hear it, but once the decision is made (by me) it’s time to STFU and just do it.
The disagree part often is just a way to manage your teams emotions. You didn’t get your way but you can’t say you weren’t heard. The leads always get their way.
Yeah especially when they are a CEO.
The headline is outrageous for using Atlassian's misrepresentation. Per the article, the employee did not use the term "rich jerk". Their full quote:
"“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).
Surprisingly thin skin
Yeah, I've met Atlassian's investor and advisor folks and that was my impression of them as well. Immediately unlikable people who treat people like objects.
A close friend of mine said Atlassian is one of the the worst companies she has worked for, second only to Okta.
Disappointing. A better response from Atlassian (or the CEO if this really bothered them so much) would be to look at the criticism and try to understand why this sentiment is in the org.
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.
If my employer ever deidentifies my anonymous online comments I will be immediately fired
This firing is going to "backfire" in ultra-wide 4K.
i doubt it, honestly. atlassian is too deeply ingrained in big corpo with jira and confluence.
this controversy will not have enough steam behind it to affect hteir bottom line whatsoever
It might not affect their bottom line or even how customers feel about them, but I think it will affect current and future employees.
Their garbage software hasn't hurt them, it's unlikely that one developer being fired will make any difference.
It happened in 2023.
"The beatings will continue until morale improves"
Atlassian never heard of the Streisand effect.
Always wondered why Atlassian was so big. Their software is utter garbage. Slow, clunky.
They don’t treat their employees well. Now with all the AI slop, it seems they don’t know what good software is.
Yeah if you have option to move away from Atlassian, you should do so.
Modern tools like Claude code have the ability to craft and bring dreams to reality.
Atlassian is old school. Their rich CEOs no longer care about good software. They are rent extractors.
Paywall to read this story is amusingly ironic
Gift link then: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-16/atlassian...
you have to be a rich jerk to read the article :)
Since the article is behind a paywall, the slack message she wrote (after the CEO dialed in from his NBA team’s HQ to speak about a company-wide layoff plan that also included demotions for many engineers) is this:
“ 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”.
I don't know who even routes to archive.* anymore.
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! I have no conflict of interest.
No DNS server "routes to" a domain. The correct term is "resolve". This stuff matters, it causes confusion when talking about technical topics if people misuse the terminology.
Apologies and thank you.
Why would you not run your own Unbound locally?
Cloudflare does, just not on their ad blocker resolver. There was another post on this just today somewhere on here
mullvad’s DNS routes to it with adblocking, you do not need to be a subscriber to use it: https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls
No problems with that in good old Europe.
> “Employees disagreed in the chat, which resulted in Cannon-Brookes angrily interjecting to tell off the people who were complaining,” Puckett said in an opening statement at the hearing. On the company’s internal “Outrage Notification” Slack channel (a play on the “outage notifications” staff receive about technology issues), employees including Unterwurzacher mocked and condemned the comments from Cannon-Brookes, the company’s billionaire co-founder, who had joined the meeting from the headquarters of a basketball team he co-owns, the Utah Jazz.
> “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...
>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.
If this was said on a private, non-official channel there would be no issue. She's allowed to have that opinion, and even say it. But doing so on an official internal channel is where it crossed the line.
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.
The company has an internal policy of “open company, no bullshit” and an internal channel for venting called literally “outrage”. I don’t see an “official internal” and “unofficial internal” distinction here.
I am not the CEO. I am not a leader of a company. Leaders should expect for their behavior, which has far far far more reaching effects than mine, to be criticized. CEOs shouldn't be little babies who can fire everyone but not take a little heat themselves.
If you emailed something like this about a coworker to everyone in the company, it would also be inappropriate for the workplace. Just because it was the CEO doesn't make it acceptable.
Not always, but it does make it more acceptable, in terms of tone. That's how the power dynamic works.
I don't know. "Punching up" should always be acceptable.
> Just because it was the CEO doesn't make it acceptable
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?
Yes it is acceptable because it is the CEO. CEOs and lowly coworkers are not the same people and do not deserve the same level of interpersonal communication. CEOs shouldn't make evil decisions and then think they can not have mild criticism laid against them.
Describing events as they happened is now not acceptable in any reality?
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 would be nice to know what comments the CEO decided to make in those same official channels though. The article doesn't say, except to quote someone as saying he angrily told people off. What was the communication, and should it be without consequences?
> It takes a certain amount of entitlement and lack of awareness
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.
> It takes a certain amount of entitlement and lack of awareness
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.”
Also from the article:
> 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.
She’s satirizing the irony of a wealthy ceo’s tone deafness while communicating decisions that adversely affect workers while preserving their own lavish lifestyles. Sounds like she was living out the no BS culture.
I don't see it. What part of her satire was off the mark? it was entirely factual.
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.
You're either being naively or facetiously too literal. She's saying that her point is about him, so talking about him is ad hominem, but not a fallacy because unlike fallacious ad hominem attacks, her argument about the hominem is very relevant to her working conditions and experience as an employee. Her group having just been pummelled and yelled at.
It’s a pretty literal description of what he did. If techbro bosses don’t want to get butthurt over being called out for douchey behaviour, maybe they shouldn’t engage in douchey behaviour?
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.