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Comment by supriyo-biswas | Hacker News Reader

This has been upvoted by many people on HN, so I guess it has some value for folks here, but can anyone enlighten me as to how this outrage porn is supposed to result in curious conversation? (For anyone wondering, I flagged it.)

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That's disingenuous of you. This article sparks conversations about workplace boundaries and corpo vs personal ethics and rights, as can be clearly seen by the other comments.

Yeah, unfortunately important topics like these are typically flagged on HN and quickly disappear from the front page.

I understand why -- they tend to lead to flamewars. But I'm not sure if hiding issues like this is a good choice.

(Aside: I think it's telling that the apparent majority on HN is on Goliaths side in this case. Usually we're more on the side of the underdog. I wonder if that's just the latent misogyny showing, or if it's because OP is left leaning, or because of the pink homepage with the ponies.)

Could it be nothing of that but disregard for toxic behavior of op who either doesn’t have clue about tone, causes and consequences of the actions or refuses to own it.

With the way how the post is written, and I find the end especially toxic, with points about trump era, throwing shade on a guy with hints of racism, I cannot see that this was just some unfortunate misunderstanding.

omg your possible explanations: misoginy, ponies, anti left - you seem to forgot to add transphobia and tech bros to the same sentence to have flesh royal

To flip the political polarity, this is a matter of free speech, an issue championed by the right as of late- and involving Twitter, no less! It becomes an interesting case study once you strip away the triggering particulars and examine it from a bigger picture.

Person was fired for offending, in very harsh words, a CUSTOMER while being on behalf of a VENDOR. HN people in this thread see it as it is, without deflection attempt by OP (oh, this is DoD, this is government official, he is corrupt, he is racist, trump era, fuck you is not big deal etc etc etc).

Some people have strong feelings against Monsanto. Pfizer. Oil industry. Solar industry. Chemical industry. Meat processing industry. Would this be an excuse to write the things that this person did? No.

Imagine scenario. Instead of DoD there is a slide from a guy from Tyson. And some vegan activist, who represents VENDOR in professional capacity, literally writes the same tweets: "Fuck you", then "Blood on your hands". Will that be acceptable? Should that be ok?

To be honest, I thought the inflammatory tweet against Walmart was suspect enough, both because one would assume that if there's a VMWare business deal with a fellow corporation it would be more at risk than one with the federal government (or not: https://siliconangle.com/2015/03/17/u-s-military-drops-1-6b-...). One would think that would merit more potentially scrutiny and censure, because when it comes to the government there's an element of protected political speech (so long as it does not trigger any security concerns) that provides plausible deniability, as the OP is engaging there. So no, I don't think it's equivalent to Tyson, because the latter is more of a business risk.

> Will that be acceptable? Should that be ok?

A lot of the language being heralded as examples of brave free speech on social media are far from acceptable or okay either, but that’s where those fights take place- on the margins, at the boundaries of social tolerance.

> I cannot see that this was just some unfortunate misunderstanding

It obviously wasn't a misunderstanding. The story is about a person who insulted an air force official, and got fired as a result. There is no misunderstanding about this.

So the relevant question is, should programmers be fired for insulting government brass on Twitter? I would expect most of HN to say "No, they shouldn't".

But in this case, the overwhelming majority of posters is really pissed at OP for some reason, and I'm wondering why that is.

> to have flesh royal

I don't understand what this part is supposed to say?

The fact about government brass is deflection. See my comment above

We agree on the fact that it does spark conversation, I’m just not sure whether it’s the right kind of conversation for this place.

The "no politics on HN" rule/convention died out around 2016 or so. Turns out even though Hacker News used to not believe in politics, politics believes in hackers. And everything about this story is actually about hackers, rather than a random political story like many highly-discussed articles as of late.

It's an interesting insight into work place politics inside a big tech company. It's certainly interesting to hear that even though you may be a well paid professional, your employment is still at the whims of a bunch of spineless execs who'd prefer to fire an employee that they paid a lot of money to hire, rather than finding a way to deal with Twitter drama in a reasonable way.

I found it especially interesting that the DoD dude apparently had a history of using his position to get people fired who insulted him on Twitter (or at least trying to do so).

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