A Twitter engineer who created cartoons poking fun at his own company was fired (opens in new tab)

That might be the greatest gift Elon could give to the world.

We can only hope it triggers the collapse of social media as we know it.

I doubt it will take even that long. Gone by autumn 2023, and good riddance

I will put some money on a wager that they increase revenue and profits and take it public again in a few years.

Yes, please.

Only if it gets rid of bots

> I’m surprised folks say that we can’t be critical of own employer. Our employers are not lords or kings.

No one is saying you can't be critical of your own employer. They are saying there are repercussions to being critical and loss of employment is a common one which should be expected.

> We choose to work for them and can replace them.

They choose to employ us and can replace us.

I worked at IBM years back. If there's one thing that binds current and former employees together it was the shared stitch & bitch about the company's way of doing things.

That would frequently happen in large public slack channels and to my knowledge (first and second hand) nobody was ever punished for that kind of talk. However, that was internal, between employees. Often it was about frustrations with how the company was run, sometimes using satire.

If that sort of thing happened in front of a client (which I never saw personally), I firmly believe that person would rightly be shown the door. It's one thing to complain about your company's problems internally, it's another to publish them.

maybe he was emulating the chief twit, who continues to denigrate the company even after he bought it

or are we already ad the mad king stage where everyone is forced to laugh when Elon posts a bad meme about twitter but if one of the peasants makes the same joke you get fed to the dragons?

> you thought it was the most money you could make.

Maximum income is not my goal. Livable income, much free time, and minimal taxes is closer to where I would be if I was looking to work at all.

As an employer I expect, at the very least, that employees act in the interest of the company - 100% - while they are employed and at work. (Provided that they are healthy and take care of their own fundamental needs first)

If they act in a way that is not in the company’s best interest repeatedly, then that is not a foundation for continuing the relationship.

Would you stay in a relationship where your partner keeps doing things that irk you repeatedly at a fundamental level, just out of goodwill for your partner? No, you would separate because it is your choice to make.

The employer-employee relationship is slightly different though in an important way: The employer has to set the direction and priorities for the company, not the employee.

So business as usual at Twitter then? I still recall the chorus of the "private platform" folks, you can even go into my comments, I warned them this would be the outcome.

That's stupid. A blind lack of dissent can easily run a company willingly and enthusiastically off a cliff.

I think that the work of this employee was to bite this hand. A company can have good reasons to allow it internally as a social control measure.

Kings used jesters as a way out to break tense moments and fights between their subjects; also to read the social undercurrents and detect hits against them.

The jester was also uniquely allowed a free card pass to transgress and jump over the rules. The fool jumping over the rules and providing comical relief reduces the desire to the rest of employees to break the same rules. They can fantasize about doing it, without actually doing it or suffering consequences. They can be also educated about the consequences as a moral of the history.

The cons of the job is that if the king is demoted, the king's personal buffon became useless, and first candidate to exemplary beheading or, in this case, being fired.

Damore was (with a lot of benefit of the doubt) totally clueless. Sure, he'll talk about how he thinks that discrimination is bad, and how he doesn't approve of sexism. He turns around and says that women are just neurotic and "more people focused", based on suspect evidence.

Of course you will point out that he was juts talking about the population, and reducing people top that is very bad mkay. He is totally not talking about the fine gals at Google! I could believe that he believes this, but the end result is that the 20% of Blind that is just misogynist assholes get more brazen.

Manu (lightly!) criticized his company with lighthearted cartoons. Demore in practice called 30% of his coworkers neurotic weaklings.