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Comment by Kukumber | Hacker News Reader

One comment is spot on:

"She didnt get fired for disclosing her salary. She got fired because her employer feels they can't risk her disclosure of other, more sensitive, information on the future. If her immediate reaction to any exiting news is to shout it out for all the world to hear, what will happen if they are working on a project that they dont want a competitor to know about, or if they get a classified govt contract, or a myriad of other situations I could envision a tech company needing/wanting security. They decided that the risk she posed wasn't worth it."

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Fire if that happens then? You can’t preemptively fire someone for something they haven’t done nor even attempted/planned to do.

Telling others your salary is allowed and should be encouraged, it is not a security concern at all nor does it imply you are going to release any actual confidential information.

So this person has at the very least demonstrated that they will broadcast to the public details of their financial relationship with their employer. Not just to their friends, or their co-workers, but to their company's competitors and to their manager's co-workers.

As far as I am aware though (and it depends on their contract/rules etc of course) that is completely fine and allowed?

Salaries are only secret if the person receiving it wants it to be. People should be able to say how much they earn without retribution. There is literally nothing wrong with it and it doesn't mean that they are going to broadcast actual company secrets.

If its a big deal for the employer then they should have put it in their contract/NDA and made that clear prior to employing them (but as I understand it that is illegal in a lot of places for good reason).

i work at a FAANG on a secret project. if i tweet about tech i’ve been using or my salary, my company would not do anything to me. i’ve even written about supporting remote work, and features we’ve shipped that i did not create.

this is such utter bs. no trust— typical shitty capitalist trash

>You can’t preemptively fire someone for something they haven’t done nor even attempted/planned to do.

You can fire someone for no reason at all in much of the US. It's employment-at-will.

True, definitely depends on where you live although I also meant that in a more broad 'moral' sense. As in, giving the reason that they /may/ release 'secretive' information without any indication that it would actually occur is ridiculous to me.

Which is crazy. But just because you can fire someone for no reason doesn't mean you can fire them for illegal reasons, which appears to be the case here.

Within reason. Firing for revealing your salary, a protected action, can get the employer in trouble even in at-will states.

If there is no law against employees revealing or discussing their salaries, then I feel this was just an excuse and it should be tried in court.

This is false. It’s not illegal to discuss your salary. Discussing a classified government contract is illegal.

Absolute false analogy.

By that logic, they should presumably be firing everyone who lists their job on their resume/linkedin.

After all, if her immediate reaction to exciting news, such as getting a job, is to tell evetyone about it, how can you trust what she would do with more serious information.

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