Microsoft employee's phone tweet leads to ouster | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft employee's phone tweet leads to ouster

news.cnet.com

20 pointsSuraj-Sun12 comments

That's a dumb reason to fire someone, unless Microsoft somehow pays their recruiters negative money.

Violating a partner company's NDA to give personal opinions of an unreleased product can be a severe matter.

For comparison, if a Sony employee tweeted the following: "The iPhone 5 is using Sony's CMOS camera module, that's pretty cool. The call quality on the iPhone 5 is ok, I would rate it a 7 out of 10" -- do you think that Apple wouldn't mind?

It costs something like $100,000 to hire a new employee. Is this worth spending that much money on when you could just say, "hey, don't do that"?

(With Apple, yes, because Apple is very fickle about this sort of thing. But with Nokia? What's Nokia going to do about it? Go back to their own OS over a pre-release review? Seems unlikely.)

First you assume they'd need to backfill the post. Second, I've never heard that number before, and don't believe. I've hired a lot of people, at F500 and startups and it has never been perceived as that costly. Firing is costly though, but hiring less so. And a place like MS, the hiring process is fairly streamlined.

Lastly, what's Nokia going to do about it? Share less info with Microsoft because they don't trust them. That early preview of the phone with the in-progress camera -- well don't give it to MS now. Wait another month or two and get the camera issues worked out first, they may tweat it. Down the line, they could use an NDA violation to get out of some contractual agreement they don't like.

This is the big leagues. This is a multibillion dollar play. Unless this guy was a Scott Guthrie or David Cutler, I think they won't lose any sleep over it. Recall MS has pushed out far bigger fish than him in the past year or so (Bob Muglia, Amitabh S., Robbie Bach, J. Allard).

> "We routinely do not discuss personnel matters, but I can confirm that Joe Marini no longer works at Microsoft,"

I love it. We'll tell you what we otherwise wouldn't about a person who got fired for telling what we otherwise wouldn't tell you. That makes them so trustworthy and consistent.

Confirming employment is standard, isn't it?

This is probably because he quit before he got fired ( according to reports). There was nothing else to say

I'm not sure how telling everyone that Microsoft is working on a Nokia phone is leaking confidential information. Didn't MS partner with Nokia recently for the purpose of making Windows 7 phones?

i think he actually tweeted thrice about the phone, and one of them was his rating of the camera quality/phone as 8/10

Makes you wonder if he would still be employed if he had used 10/10.

That's... extremely informative, I'd say.

I think he would've been fine with just the first tweet--we all know that a Nokia WP7 is coming. But then he goes on to tweet two more times and review/rate an unreleased product. Not smart.

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