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Was firing an over-reaction?Was firing an over-reaction?Posted Mar 22, 2013 19:15 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333)In reply to: Was firing an over-reaction? by HelloWorld Parent article: Blum: Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost
> In what universe is being fired for exercising your freedom of speech a good thing?
Who ever said that freedom is free and that there should never be any consequences for exercising your freedom? And why do your freedoms matter and not your bosses? Why should his desires and freedoms be suppressed because he agreed to give you money for a while?
Your entire purpose in being employed is to be making your employer money. You are in a market selling your services, skills, and time just like somebody selling a toaster on ebay or somebody selling telephone service. There is really no difference.
No difference at all.
Your labor is just another product and you are just another salesman peddling your wares.
If you destroy your utility and threaten to cost your employer money because your behavior has damaged the relationships important partners then why should he be required to keep you employed?
This is why it's important to have a backbone in life. You just exercise your freedoms not because there is no consequence to your behavior or your actions, you should exercise your freedoms because they are right and just and you have convictions and that you are willing to stand up and be counted when it matters.
Also I think that discretion is the better part of valor. Which is why I am also a firm believer in privacy and against any sort of government encroachment or controls and I avoid disclosing information and using corporate 'cloud' services when practicable. Security matters. Strong and effective forms of encryption and plausible deniability and all that stuff matter, etc etc.
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Was firing an over-reaction? Posted Mar 22, 2013 20:08 UTC (Fri) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
> You are in a market selling your services, skills, and time just like somebody selling a toaster on ebay or somebody selling telephone service. There is really no difference.
There's a huge difference: employees are people. If you don't understand why that makes one heck of a difference, there's no point in even talking to you.
Was firing an over-reaction? Posted Mar 23, 2013 8:48 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Employers do not, generally, have a problem with their freedoms being suppressed by their employees. There is a huge power gap there, which shows in contract negotiation as well as at other times, ruining the libertarian fantasy of 'if it's in the contract it must have been freely agreed upon without coercion'.
And employers that exploit their employees really *do* exist. At the extreme end they enslave their employees and work them to death. At the less extreme end they merely ignore their employees requests regarding unimportant matters like health and safety until those employees turn to the greater power of the state to force them to do so. This happens frequently, whenever a sufficiently ethically dubious employer thinks it can get away with it and thinks the employee will not jump jobs as a result. (Heck, if you stay in one job for long enough, the employer may consider that it can do this even though you are in a position with normally high mobility. My previous employer did, repeatedly, and if it wasn't for the existence of employment legislation would quite happily have worked me until I was crippled by RSI and forced to resign, rather than pay much less than one month's pay to me on a keyboard that would fix the problem. Heck, they did that to previous employees. Nobody said that employers' abuse of employees is necessarily *rational* -- in that case, it was founded in a pathological fear of any capital expenditure whatsoever. And don't say "employers who think like that will go bust", this is not so if sufficiently many employers think like that, *or* if it's shared by only part of the management chain in a larger company.)
Was firing an over-reaction? Posted Mar 23, 2013 15:03 UTC (Sat) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link]
> you are willing to stand up and be counted when it matters.
...
> Which is why I am also a firm believer in privacy
This sounds like a contradiction. Anonymity allows precisely to escape the need to face the consequences.
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