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I don't think I've ever come across a situation where talking about your firing in the public square was a good idea. I just don't see any tangible benefit it

I don't think I've ever come across a situation where talking about your firing in the public square was a good idea. I just don't see any tangible benefit it can bring. I guess it's cathartic for the one fired, so there's that.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> I don't think I've ever come across a situation where talking about your firing in the public square was a good idea. I just don't see any tangible benefit it can bring. A big quirk of firing situations is that the company can’t (or won’t) tell their side of the story. As a result, fired employees often feel like they can take control of the narrative by posting their version of events without worry about the company telling their side of the story. In this case, the author casually mentioned that they believed they were among the top 5-10% of stack ranked engineers at Twitter as a way to get ahead of any assumptions that they were laid off for performance reasons. I’ve seen other cases where fired people try to take advantage of this asymmetry to tell outright lies. A friend had a remote employee who gradually became less and less responsive until they couldn’t be reached for entire weeks at a time. They fired the employee, who immediately took to social media to fabricate a story about being unjustly fired for some other trivial situation at work that had no bearing on the firing. Of course, the failure to communicate or get any work done wasn’t mentioned at all, leaving readers to believe that the only contributing factor was the trivial, unrelated work situation stated in her posts. And it worked phenomenally well! She had a number of invitations to join other companies from people who thought they were helping right an injustice that had occurred to this person. (Note: I’m telling this story as a response to the parent comment, not implying it’s what’s happening in the linked blog post). So there can be some weird upside to taking control of the narrative if (and only if) one has a social media audience to share the narrative with.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

> I don't think I've ever come across a situation where talking about your firing in the public square was a good idea. I just don't see any tangible benefit it can bring. A big quirk of firing situations is that the company can’t (or won’t) tell their side of the story. As a result, fired employees often feel like they can take control of the narrative by posting their version of events without worry about the company telling their side of the story. In this case, the author casually mentioned that they believed they were among the top 5-10% of stack ranked engineers at Twitter as a way to get ahead of any assumptions that they were laid off for performance reasons. I’ve seen other cases where fired people try to take advantage of this asymmetry to tell outright lies. A friend had a remote employee who gradually became less and less responsive until they couldn’t be reached for entire weeks at a time. They fired the employee, who immediately took to social media to fabricate a story about being unjustly fired for some other trivial situation at work that had no bearing on the firing. Of course, the failure to communicate or get any work done wasn’t mentioned at all, leaving readers to believe that the only contributing factor was the trivial, unrelated work situation stated in her posts. And it worked phenomenally well! She had a number of invitations to join other companies from people who thought they were helping right an injustice that had occurred to this person. (Note: I’m telling this story as a response to the parent comment, not implying it’s what’s happening in the linked blog post). So there can be some weird upside to taking control of the narrative if (and only if) one has a social media audience to share the narrative with.