Yes, I know this is an old one, but I’m a bit behind the times due to a health issue and couldn’t pass up on posting this anyway.
Matthew Epstein has found a unique and wonderful way to try to convince Google to hire him.
I hope they do.
[via Laughing Squid]
A Malaysian social activist who publicly criticized (via Twitter) the way his pregnant friend was being treated by her employer was forced to apologize 100 times also via Twitter as part of a defamation settlement with BluInc Media, the aforementioned employer.
Fahmi Fadzil, an opposition politician’s aide and respected commentator on social issues, claimed on Twitter in January that his pregnant friend had been poorly treated by her employers at a magazine run by BluInc Media.
Fahmi wrote an apology to BluInc on Twitter a few hours after making that allegation, but the company’s lawyers later sent him a letter demanding unspecified financial damages for defamation and another apology in major newspapers, said Fahmi’s lawyer, Syahredzan Johan.
Syahredzan said Fahmi settled the case this week by agreeing to apologize 100 times over three days on Twitter, where he has more than 4,200 followers. Syahredzan declined to say who suggested the terms. AP via Yahoo
This seems ridiculous. First off, the first apology is the only apology that matters. Beyond that, it becomes rote, mechanical and ludicrous without meaning. And annoying. I’m sure that Fahmi’s 4,200 followers got it the first time.
Fahmi’s actions irritate me. My feeling is that the employee should avail him or herself of either a manager or HR should he or she feel that something isn’t right. If not HR, then the employe should find someone else in the company who has any sort of authority to report the alleged wrongdoing.
If there truly isn’t any such route available, then I can see where someone could get frustrated enough to want to post it publicly, however passive aggressive (albeit potentially self-destructive) the act may be. But no matter how frustrated the employee may feel, it still doesn’t give an him/her or any other third party claiming to represent the employee to publicly the right accuse a company of wrongdoing in a public forum. It’s a one way allegation. And if an employee (or third party) really wants to address and solve an issue, there is a need for two way conversation.
It’s about the employee/employer relationship. An employer has a duty to provide a safe working environment for its employees and the employee has a duty to follow the process and procedures of a company. If either of those tenets break down, the breakdown needs to be addressed within the organization.
I’ll admit that I don’t know what the issue was, nor am I sure that the accusation Fahmi made in itself wasn’t valid. Big companies can do horrible things in all aspects of business. I just don’t think that throwing an accusation up on Twitter was the most constructive way to handle the situation. Nor do I think it reflected very well on Fahmi himself.
The penalty may also damage his credibility as an activist — how much will his readers trust him after he’s agreed to retract one of his statements 100 times? BluInc probably considered all of this when negotiating the settlement, and in a way the punishment they arrived at is pretty ingenious. [Jezebel]
This being said, however, I don’t think it hurt his popularity in any way. He now has 5,529 Twitter followers, 1300 more than when he started.
Inc Magazine ran an interesting story regarding David Karp, the founder of Tumblr.
In this first person piece, David very openly and candidly describes his less than traditional approach to running a company, but what stands out is how often he refers to his team. Despite the title, (The Way I Work), more often than not, his narrative starts with “we” more than “me”.
We roll out changes to the site every day at 11 a.m. We stagger out small changes, so we can see what works and what doesn’t. We chose that time because we want engineers around if there’s an issue. Plus, it’s early enough that there’s not much traffic. Basically, everything that was finished the day before gets pushed the next morning. It could be a bug fix or a new language file—say, a feature that was translated into French. Or it could be a new feature that’s dark launched—the public can’t see it, but we have the ability to test it.
At the risk of sounding trite, this POV is so refreshing. The days of top heavy government-style management need to be over. Over extended hierarchies just weigh a company down. The structure of the office has changed. It’s not the big bosses who know everything and the cogs below to make it run. Now it’s about recruiting talent at every level and attributing the appropriate respect for each role. Now I’m not so naive to think that companies can run without leadership. Certain expertise is required in certain roles. It is, however, that sweet spot, where the lines of leadership and employees blur that the company can find its voice. And David seems to sense where that line is.
For every new feature we add, we take an old one out. A lot of big sites don’t do that, and it’s a problem. Twitter started as a beautifully simple product, but it’s now going the same route as Facebook. The drive to innovate can overencumber and destroy a product. My goal is to keep Tumblr very focused.
So there it is. Whether it’s developing technology or running a company, the principle is the same.
Keep it simple. And with simplicity comes success.
Alex Blagg of BajillionHits.Biz brings up a very good point:
Don’t ever, ever, ever mention MySpace in an interview – ever.
[via Laughing Squid]
Sometimes there’s just no avoiding it.
via Nick Douglas and Laughing Squid
Techcrunch notes a very interesting recruiting tactic by its own parent company:
On the other hand, perhaps it’s better to just take your boss along with you and avoid the whole mess altogether.
Yes, yes I know. Where the hell has HRLori been? The short answer…after 10 months of unemployment, I found a job that I absolutely love. It’s amazing how wonderful life can be when you get to go to a place that appreciates you and what you do.
That being said, I really don’t want to be rubbing salt in the wounds of those who were affected by the latest round of layoffs at Yahoo.
Much of what’s been written about the layoffs came to light via confidential information released to various forms of press. One can be certain that Yahoo Product head, Blake Irving isn’t happy at all about the leaks:
One can’t blame him, though. This is confidential information after all. And along with the legal, financial and PR implications, there’s the enormous people (read: employees) implication in releasing this kind of information prematurely. If the employees didn’t know that their product was being phased out, they do now. Which means more disaffected employees, which means low morale, which means low productivity, which means more layoffs.
Round and round and round it goes, where it stops…
On another note, my dear friend, mikl em, who was in that round of layoffs tells me that [although he was], “”Affected by the reduction in force” as it were. I’m pleased with my prospects & with having some time off first. :)”
As always, I wish him nothing but the best.
File this under “we shoulda seen it coming”. The National Labor Relations Board is taking issue with a company who fired an employee for making disparaging remarks against said employer.
The labor relations board announced last week that it had filed a complaint against an ambulance service, American Medical Response of Connecticut, that fired an emergency medical technician, accusing her, among other things, of violating a policy that bars employees from depicting the company “in any way” on Facebook or other social media sites in which they post pictures of themselves.
Lafe Solomon, the board’s acting general counsel, said, “This is a fairly straightforward case under the National Labor Relations Act — whether it takes place on Facebook or at the water cooler, it was employees talking jointly about working conditions, in this case about their supervisor, and they have a right to do that.”
It’s one thing to for employees to constructively discuss working conditions and how they need improving without the threat of backlash and another for an employee to make derisive comments about her manager on her Facebook page. In this case, Dawnmarie Souza, the terminated employee, evidently had some very choice words for her former manager when he wouldn’t allow her union to step in to defend her against a customer complaint.
Ms. Souza then mocked her supervisor on Facebook, using several vulgarities to ridicule him, according to Jonathan Kreisberg, director of the board’s Hartford office, which filed the complaint. He also said she had written, “love how the company allows a 17 to become a supervisor” — 17 is the company’s lingo for a psychiatric patient.
Really? Is this ever appropriate?
I just can’t see this particular situation being about employment rights. Ms. Souza is not a whistleblower who was terminated because she brought unfavorable conditions to light but rather an employee throwing a virtual temper tantrum in public at her manager’s expense. And while Ms. Souza may have friended co-workers on Facebook, it’s quite probable that her entire audience was not solely made of co-workers. Which may take some steam out of the “concerted protected activity” argument.
Either way, she’s got her hearing.
An administrative law judge is scheduled to begin hearing the case on Jan. 25. Marshall B. Babson, a member of the National Labor Relations Board in the 1980s, said a broad company rule that says one cannot make disparaging comments about supervisors is clearly illegal under labor law. But he said an employee’s criticizing a company or supervisor on Facebook was not necessarily protected activity.
We’ll just have to see where this goes. It’s sure to be groundbreaking either way.
