If I was openly criticizing the boss my expectation would be I was putting my continued employment at risk. That ain’t rocket science.
However, it certainly would not make you popular with the true believers in the room. You would definitely feel the discontent amongst your peers in a conviction led company.
if you mean this as advice, ok, but if you mean it as "this needs to be a law", what are you even talking about, authoritarian much?
>That's how you get an echo chamber of horrible decisions made by the people who just so happen to sit at the top.
firing employees for speaking out might get you, the employer, an echo chamber, but perhaps for your product an echo chamber is the business strategy you chose. Steve Jobs was famous for his attention to detail, reinforcing and staying on message, "hold it up just this way, show everybody, look how thin it is! echo that or don't work here." Freedom needs to include the freedom to set a strategy and stick to it, and if setting the strategy is not your job but your dream, find that job for yourself, don't think you should get paid to undermine it for somebody else.
The whole (internal! Until leaked) open letter is near the bottom of that article. Wasn’t paywalled for me.
Reading it cleared up the noise in this thread pretty neatly. Sure looks like this has a great shot of counting as protected discussion of work conditions. I now know posts in this thread dismissing the letter as just “politics” or just “criticizing the CEO” have no connection to reality. It’s very restrained and focused.
Primary sources are cool.
>SpaceX must swiftly and explicitly separate itself from Elon’s personal brand.
If you had a company in which you were the majority shareholder and CEO would you put up with the people you hire circulating letters to condemn your behaviour?
Merriam-Webster defines polemic as "an aggressive attack on or refutation of the opinions or principles of another", so that demand is clearly an anti-Elon polemic.
Yes I think that should be law. You should be able to attempt to help self correct your company by speaking up and not have the your life blown up because of the misaligned interest of a select few at the top. Just quitting is the the most extreme form of protest, but not the most feasible because we all can't find jobs tomorrow. This idea is no more authoritarian than whistleblower protection laws.
>firing employees for speaking out might get you, the employer, an echo chamber, but perhaps for your product an echo chamber is the business strategy you chose.
I take it you haven't read the article. The ask by employees was for SpaceX to uphold THEIR OWN STANDARDS by distancing themselves from Elon's bad actions through his tweets. You do not get to create rules within a company and then ignore your own codified rules while firing people for non-codified ones ("deeming" speech "insubordination").
As for Musk's tweets in relation to his company, when you create company from a cult of personality, your actions for the cult and the company are blurred. So you have to be on your best behavior for both.
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You are confusing the topic here (I think purposefully).
The first idea is whether asking an employer to hold another employee accountable for the rules of conduct agreed to by all employees is allowed. It is. It falls under protected speech at work in the United States. This has been codified for decades (largely as a result of unionization efforts) and the courts know how, and were designed to, "handle it".
Second, Elon's personal actions with respect to it's effect on SpaceX. This would be for the Board of Directors to handle, but their is also clear prior art for a CEO's actions outside of their job as CEO having impact on the company. We've literally seen this with Elon before.
Elon's track record is doing things that have made him the richest person in the world, winning at multiple games many other very clever people are trying very hard to win, including engaging in fields of endeavor that the "socially conscious" among you claim that they endorse. Even Lenin and Mao would admit that Elon has accomplished things that they would wish to accomplish themselves.
That alone gives Elon credibility that vastly outpaces, collectively, yours, these disgruntled employees, and the Democratic Party who have decided he's public enemy number one because he got fed up with Twitter cooperating with a one party state to subvert the 1st amendment and suppress speech they don't like.
Let him be him, why do you have this incredible urge to control other people and make them say things you like, or punish them if they don't? Elon has earned the right to control Tesla, Twitter, and SpaceX, and Twitter was subverting democracy before Elon arrived, and that's what upsets you.
I don't care if you are disingenuous, if you're not, your sincerely held beliefs are dangerous to other people around you.
Your erroneous rationale is the paragraph about "the ask". The boss said "no assholes" (among other things) and then violated those rules (in the employees' eyes, and yours, and mine). The employees delicately asked the sub-boss to choose insubordination, and the request was denied, with additional consequences. Nobody was confused about who the boss was, or what actual rules were in place.
Your authoritarian rationale -- which I agree with -- is in your final paragraph: he ought to hold himself to a higher standard if he wants to be so rich and influential. I'd push a button that would make that the rules of the world. But that's an authoritarian POV.
it's not your company, until you own a controlling share.
> This idea is no more authoritarian than whistleblower protection laws.
the big difference is that whistleblowing is for protection against retaliation _for_ reporting illegal activities. Last time i looked, being as asshole CEO is not illegal.
When you enter into an employment contract with a company, you have a legal connection. The use of "your" is appropriate.
>the big difference is that whistleblowing is for protection against retaliation _for_ reporting illegal activities. Last time i looked, being as asshole CEO is not illegal.
They are one in the same. Speaking about conduct and activities which can affect working conditions within a company is the basis of whistleblowing protections under the law (in the US). Speaking about conduct of a CEO in relation to the rules of conduct within your company is the same legal concept.
Protecting people who speak up against authority is the exact opposite of authoritarian.
Is there a line you would draw somewhere? Anywhere?
This equity stake gives you a vote for which you can use to influence the actions of the board and thus the CEO.
Being financially dependent on the company to provide employment by no means gives you power over the CEO. Of course, criticism is not black and white - but being an asshole CEO is not illegal, and putting yourself out to "fight the good fight" sounds good on paper, but do you no good at all.
And there is a difference between acknowledging it and causing a scene. Rank and file employees engaging in a political attempt to topple the CEO is certainly unprofessional. That level of manoeuvring is purposefully causing damage.
Criticism is healthy and should be respected. Even if it is "unprofessional", that doesn't give the company the right to just fire someone for that. If you would allow companies to fire their employees for criticism, that sounds a lot like a dictatorship to me.
I'm shocked at how many closeted authoritarians here on HN crawl out of the woodwork to defend Musk every time that he faces criticism for his dictatorial actions.
If I had bad boss who isn't doing anything illegal or breaks company's policy, I would likely switch my job rather than taking the impossible task of fixing them if they don't want to fix themselves.
Abuse is abuse regardless of whether it is normalized in a company, but it is also against the law in this case specifically, so it is obviously not 'the norm'.
> If I had bad boss who isn't doing anything illegal or breaks company's policy, I would likely switch my job rather than taking the impossible task of fixing them if they don't want to fix themselves.
That's nice. It is also irrelevant.
Law IS the norm. And I could definitely bet there is no law in US which says that employee can spam other employees about how their boss is bad.
That is exactly what this case is alleging is the law that was violated. What do you think this is all about?
> The case is scheduled to go before an administrative judge in early March unless SpaceX agrees to a settlement beforehand. A spokeswoman for the labor board said it was seeking make-whole remedies like reinstatement and back pay for the workers.
The sheer number of historical atrocities this would excuse is almost hilarious.
Domestic abuse was always abuse. It always looked like abuse. We always knew it was abuse.
But, for a very, very long time, society was totally cool with it.
And what happened to the employees in this case who tried to challenge that norm from within?
What they initially wrote the letter about the boss doing might not have been illegal, but it sounds like the government agency whose job it is to monitor this sort of thing thinks firing them for it is in fact illegal.
> It's fine in most companies to complain about the boss to HR or to the boss themselves, but not fine to complain it to someone else.
There's "fine" and "not fine" as personal opinions, and then there's "legal" and "illegal"; both of those things you listed are in fact legal regardless of whether you personally consider them "fine", but firing someone for them is not.
I'm standing here thinking "yup, that's about right" and other posters are thinking this is "so not right as to be obviously corrupt".
Seriously, under which definition is firing employees for their criticism considered good leadership?
To be absolutely clear, politely communicating with fellow employees is absolutely the constructive way to handle work disagreements. The problem here obviously wasn't the constructiveness, but that there was any disagreement at all.
That's toxic leadership, but no surprise given the leader of the company.
if an employee undermined leadership's authority, it is likely that they won't last long.
Good leadership means being able to recognize criticism from your employees, but this can't come from grassroots effort within the company - it must come from the top.
If the employee disagrees with the direction of the company, and the leadership doesn't want to change (e.g., after voicing the opinion thru sanctioned feedback channels), their only option is to quit, or acquire a controlling share and _become_ the leadership.
Trying to undermine leadership through collective action via other employees is akin to a threat and an internal coup in a country ruled by a dictator - and you know how that will go.
This comment is so close to realizing why our current corporate structures are bullshit. Keep going, you're almost there.
It is hilarious that you (and many other people in this thread, it seems) would consider this letter "undermining leadership's authority". If someone's authority is undermined by a letter like this, they are not much of a leader.
I have worked at companies led by other zillionaires you may have heard of, and seen letters circulate and questions asked live in an all-hands meeting that went much farther than this letter. Those employees got good faith answers to their questions, and still work there. Now that's leadership.
That's like claiming bank-robbery is fine because "there's no law against holding money in your hands, everyone does it." For some reason you're leaving out all the most important details that make things different than normal.
In this case, those details are that certain "disagreements"--an obvious case being "we're underpaid, let's unionize"--are disagreements which that CEO is not legally permitted to fire you for.