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Comment by projektir | Hacker News Reader

This mostly comes down to employment being too important and an unbalanced relationship between the employee and the employer. If the relationship was more balanced, "you said something questionable on Twitter" just wouldn't really be that compelling.

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I was fired for nonsense two years ago and am homeless now, as of June. (I said something that could be construed as sexist and violent when written down with flair). I'm Tweeting the most flagrant stuff I can think of to get attention. I'm being warned now that it may hurt my employ-ability... which is more attention than anyone paid when I privately emailed about being wrongfully terminated and needing work for 18 months. Kind of ironic.

Tomorrow will be my first day at a Day Labor line... my latest Tweet storm is about taking illegal immigrants' jobs and making their babies starve; offering for my former employer, OpenTable, to give $200k worth of food vouchers in their crusade against bigotry (my old compensation :).

I'm looking forward to meeting my next employer who takes all of this as seriously as I do.

I think this is an effect, but not a solution. The harder answer is we treat others the way we would want to be treated if the roles were reversed.

I'm not sure how "we should treat others better" can be implemented in practice? That seems to be in the same bucket as "people should be smarter".

> I'm not sure how "we should treat others better" can be implemented in practice?

This is an honest question from you, but to some it might seem like a no-brainer. I think a lot of it has to with personality types.

I think you're right on the power math, but I don't think addressing a social issue with social mobs like this ... is solved by addressing some sort of employment power balance.

"We'll get you fired!" only works because people have reason to be really afraid of it. People are just pulling a preexisting lever. They might, of course, find some other lever to pull, but this is a very convenient and accessible one.

I still think the solution you're asking for is working from the effect on up, that's kinda backwards and would likely have naturally unintended consequences.

You mean compared to the current "unintended" consequences of the majorly imbalanced relationship between employee and employer?

I think you're trying to use the wrong reason to address a different issue.

See my previous post.

Employer-employee disbalance is already an issue, and it is worth asking if it wasn't present, if this situation would happen at all. This is not the first and the last problem caused by that disbalance, and for anyone observing, stuff like this is old news. There were the teenagers with drunk selfies, no mob required. Lots of very random stuff can get you fired that does not involve Twitter mobs and it all comes back down to the same thing. Note that the title of the thread is "inducing employers to fire them", and explain to me how that statement makes any sense outside of a very imbalanced relationships.

You might disagree with this statement overall, but it is the one I am making.

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