Amazing answer.
It's completely okay to say whatever you want and stand up for yourself, but you are not a child, own the consequences rather than whine
If a rich guy can't take some minor criticism maybe he's the whiner.
The CEO has money and the power to fire that person if the employee is disliked. Maybe that shouldn't be a thing, maybe it should be illegal, but they'll find a way around it. Just because they can means that they will.
I wish it wasn't like that but that's how I see things are happening these days, save for perhaps a few nuances here and there.
As for "the consequences", those are what are at stake now. They are what the courts & to some extent the people of the USA get to decide.
The statement doesn’t claim any fact: it’s a hypotheical not unlike a “based on real events” movie/book/etc that never quotes or attributes specific actions to a subject.
And that’s why Atlassian is very likely to lose over and over as they appeal (but never say never these days in the US).
> “What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled,”
from germany i know that whether an insult is grounds for firing someone depends on the regular interaction the two people have, so if you take a company of rednecks (to employ a stereotype), a redneck employee calling their redneck boss some typical redneck insult would be interpreted as acceptable, and make any firing based on that illegal. but if the same insult is used by a lawyer in a law firm from a big city, then suddenly that same insult is a valid reason to get fired.
(edit: rephrase and replace court with NLRB)
> What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled
And I just don't see how that can cross the line. It's clearly meant to stoke the fires, but it's also pretty close to a recitation of the facts. Perhaps if the CEO finds this insulting he shouldn't have dialed into a layoff AMA call from his NBA team's headquarters.
Many of us are mature enough to follow the principle of, "if you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything." But not so when you have young developers flowing in and out of the company. In one of the town halls, a 24 year old dev, was put on a mic, and simply said, "I don't like X, he is super annoying, why do we keep plastering his face everywhere."
I've never seen an entire company freeze before. There was no way forward, no way backwards. The script had been broken. The dev, thinking he wasn't heard properly, sent the same message in our townhall slack channel. I did what I believe 90% of other people did. I screenshoted it.
The kid got another job a few months after. For once we saw the emperor wore no clothes.
Edit: million typos
Edit 2: in case it wasn't clear, no was not fired, he just found another job.
I was working as a programmer at some high flying merchant bank in London in the 90's and at the pub with my workmates one night I started tearing strips off of the IT director because he was comically incompetent. Everyone was kicking me under the table because unbeknownst to me his close friend was at the table taking in my rant. Everyone agreed that I was toast and bought me drinks.
In the morning, at about 10am, security went into his office and marched him out of the building, right past my desk. I turned around and said to my team and said "See! Don't fuck with me!"
It was hilarious.
Anyway, good for him. Too many agree to too much because they fear they'll lose their job.
This isn't maturity, this is selfishness. A group often benefits from someone challenging the status quo, but the individual doing that gets punished. In your view, Germans during WW2 were "mature" by not saying anything that wasn't nice about nazism, and nowadays Russians are "mature" when they don't want to discuss a war that left a million people either dead or wounded - both cases are individuals acting out of self-preservation, not "maturity".
If you're American, then maybe a good example is Martin Luther King Jr. - do you really think that he should've had the maturity to shut up and not say anything that wasn't nice about racism? Well, he got killed, just like your junior employee got fired, so I guess he was indeed a loser in a sense.
In general this is a very common pattern in corporations where everyone is "just doing their job" and "being mature" but the end result is atrocities - for example Nestle literally killing babies.
Brave of the developer to bring it up. This cult of personality is pervasive throughout the tech industry.
If you are so burned out that you can’t help but vent publicly, it’s time to go. It’s just not healthy for you.
But of course leadership is going to take care of that for you because it’s not healthy for the company either to have open dissent. And most of us are far easier to replace than a CEO
It's deeply unhealthy to not have open dissent.
"“What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled,”
That is an absolutely true statement (to the degree that you can pummel a non-physical thing).
Is he too rich for some people’s taste? Does that indicate workers are unhappy with the real/perceived pay disparity?
Is he a jerk in other contexts? Is this proxy for unapproachable, rude, or some other unbecoming set of behaviors?
It’s an opportunity to improve, or at least reflect on the perception they have in the company. Firing, and asserting the right to do so for expressing an opinion, seems to me to be a poor choice of action.
this controversy will not have enough steam behind it to affect hteir bottom line whatsoever
They don’t treat their employees well. Now with all the AI slop, it seems they don’t know what good software is.
Yeah if you have option to move away from Atlassian, you should do so.
Modern tools like Claude code have the ability to craft and bring dreams to reality.
Atlassian is old school. Their rich CEOs no longer care about good software. They are rent extractors.
“ What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled.”
Seems like a fair statement to make, and she didn’t call him a jerk directly. She didn’t deserve to be fired, but I’ll be surprised if she has any actual recourse.
Frankly, if the CEO is the leader he’s pretending to be, he’d apologize to her and offer her the job back with a signing bonus.
It’s sad how little respect most of these guys have for the engineers that enable them to walk into their country clubs and call themselves “tech CEOs”.
NextDNS doesn't route to .is or .ph or .fo or .today anymore.
My ISP doesn't route to .is, but it routes to the others. Using my ISP's DNS means receiving tons of spam though.
Cloudflare apparently doesn't reliably route to them either, and I wouldn't want to use it even if it did.
UPDATE: I see that https://dns.adguard-dns.com/dns-query still routes to all of them, so guess I will use it! I have no conflict of interest.
> “What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled,” Unterwurzacher wrote.
It takes a certain amount of entitlement and lack of awareness to do this on official internal channels - with your name attached and viewable by anyone in the company, particularly during a downsizing event.
This would have been akin to printing out the statement, signing it with your name, and then stapling it to a literal bulletin board in the office hallway. There's no reality where that is acceptable...
Except the reality in which the criticism is well-deserved, obviously. That's subjective, of course, and I'm not commenting on whether it applies here, but "zero public outcry allowed, no matter what's happening" is an absurd position. Of course that doesn't mean you shouldn't expect consequences, even up to being fired by the tyrant in question, but that's not the same thing as "unacceptable". Employees aren't slaves.
Again, what she did was akin to printing out the statement and stapling it to a bulletin board - or, mass emailing it to everyone in the company. It was an official internal channel everyone in the company can access...
Imagine one of your reports saying something like this about you during a team meeting, while you're standing there. Not acceptable workplace behavior... and that would be limited to just your team.
The CEO was at his NBA team's HQ. He had demoted many staff members. He was then criticizing staff members for protesting those demotions.
It takes integrity and bravery to challenge the lies of the powerful.
Your comment would make sense if it were talking about the CEO.
Otherwise, it's a unwittingly sad comment on the quasi-feudal nature of these corporations.
“What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled,” Unterwurzacher wrote. Atlassian fired her a few days later, saying she had “engaged in acrimonious communications and ad hominem attacks against teammates and colleagues.”
Unterwurzacher replied, “I think it’s difficult to point out the power imbalance in a way that is not potentially described by somebody as an ad hominem attack.”
> At a March 3 hearing in Austin, a National Labor Relations Board attorney said the fired software engineer, Denise Unterwurzacher, had been acting in the spirit of Atlassian’s own stated “Open Company, No Bullshit” philosophy
I think if you have a "Open Company, No Bullshit" philosophy in your company handbook, then you can't claim "No, not like that..." when called on your BS.
If their company policy was "always obey legal orders from superiors" instead then I think they have a much clearer case at firing for cause.
If you can't take such a gentle ribbing from people you've potentially just fired, you shouldn't be CEO, because you can't control your emotions in the simplest way.
Almost none of these tech leaders deserve their station except by virtue of luck or often borderline sociopathic tendencies. To flaunt it so egregiously is a bit over the top.