SpaceX fires employees who wrote open letter complaining about Elon Musk | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX fires employees who wrote open letter complaining about Elon Musk

theverge.com

13 pointsthecopy18 comments

This is a pretty distasteful action. Rather than addressing concerns the company has opted for the tin pot dictator approach.

Writing an open letter is pretty distasteful. Make your complaints internally and privately.

Should’ve used Twitter, I heard its buyer said people should be able to post “pretty outrageous things” on there, which I suppose could include asking their company’s owner to act like an adult (which, to Musk, is likely outrageous as someone who doesn’t believe in being held accountable for his behavior and actions based on all available data).

Should be able to post.

Should have no consequences for anything you post.

How are so many people getting this wrong?

You seem to be under the impression that a company is some sort of democracy. The now-unemployed organizers of this action were too.

That the organizers would get fired was entirely to be expected; any company would. Certainly when you work for an egomaniac like Elon Musk and you publicly call him an asshole, there's only going to be one outcome.

Elon declared himself a "free speech absolutist" not too long ago. He would never do something like this.

Free speech means you’re allowed to say it, but I t doesn’t mean you’re also free from any repercussions. You have a fundamental misunderstanding of free speech.

You’re right but Elon’s idea of free speech is little more than “speech I like”, and is the opposite of what free speech is.

That being said, employees of a company don’t have free speech rights. And hypocrisy is not illegal.

Elon is well within his rights to fire people writing open letters, and everyone needs to realize that companies are not democracies.

Woah woah woah.

>That being said, employees of a company don’t have free speech rights. And hypocrisy is not illegal.

Care to rephrase that hombre?

Everyone has free speech rights. No exceptions. If you're pissy enough to fire someone over a disagreement like that, that's one thing, and highly unprofessional to boot as long as they are still doing their job.

I don't have to agree with you as an employee. And I have the right to voice my disagreement. They should thank him though. They get their Unemployment a shot at a less toxic workplace, and hopefully they've been networking enough to catalyze resistance vs. an evident cult of personality.

> Everyone has free speech rights. No exceptions.

Plenty of exceptions, to wit: not in the workplace, and certainly not using your employer's communications infrastructure, as was the case here.

You can say whatever you like in North Korea, so long as you're prepared to accept the consequences.

I think that when you get offered pay to do a task, and accept that pay for that task, that you give up the right to bitch about said task.

This seems reasonable. I wonder how many people it was

Working for a lifestyle company is hard because there’s no protection from the thoughts and actions of the owner. Good or bad, the lack of feedback makes it hard to operate as in a normal company. And as we see here, “my way or the highway”.

Perhaps critical things should not be based on a such a company - leave these to the boring, sensible ones and let the boutique companies posture and proceed as they think best. “Just execute” doesn’t generate social media hits.

The professional way to give feedback up the chain is privately and constructively, starting with your manager, and/or HR depending on the issue.

An open letter is not professional and publicly criticizing your company or executives is a pretty standard cause for termination.

Who knows? Perhaps they tried to give feedback "up the chain" first and were stone walled?

Giving feedback does not imply that they have to do what you want...

Note: the key to managing up is not to vent what's on your mind and go back to giving your bosses what they want in the first place.

The key is to make them suffer your suffering until they realize that if they don't do something, they won't get what they want. As a middle manager, part of that escalation process is to use every means at your disposal to get things to work then inform the next layer when you've run out of options, and hope they aren't dicks and can send some additional resource your way.

You will very quickly discern the practitioners of good (servant) leadership from the bad (narcissistic) generally based on how much they have to have dumped on them before they realize "oh shit, I kinda need them, maybe I should engage".

However, you will be surprised how much once you get toward the top becomes a game of intentionally not doing anything because of the general chaos that ensues with lack of ability to reallly work out to the T downstream effects.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com