Atlassian says it had right to fire engineer for suggesting CEO is 'rich jerk'

Bootvis

Proving her point.

mohamedkoubaa

Paywall to read this story is amusingly ironic

tag2103

https://archive.is/7p7LD

SpicyLemonZest

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.

Alupis

> “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...

152334H

“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.” Perhaps it is difficult, but it doesn't look like she was trying

therobots927

If my employer ever deidentifies my anonymous online comments I will be immediately fired

cynicalsecurity

Atlassian never heard of the Streisand effect.

rvz

This firing is going to "backfire" in ultra-wide 4K.

firefoxd

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.

breppp

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

helterskelter

"The beatings will continue until morale improves"

4d4m

Surprisingly thin skin

neversupervised

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.

janice1999

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.

dpark

It feels like a stretch to claim that mocking your CEO (deservedly or not) counts as collectively discussing or protesting working conditions.

Arainach

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).

MultifokalHirn

“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.

chimon

A close friend of mine said Atlassian is one of the the worst companies she has worked for, second only to Okta.

OutOfHere

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.