Don't be like this, don't corrode the commons for personal gain. By not speaking out you are endorsing a harmful asymmetry, make no mistake about your personal responsibility for perpetuating hostile norms.

Some other reason? Meh, it's just a job. But getting thrown into distress, financial or otherwise, warrants looking out for oneself (and family) first.

Choose your battles.

Calling for universal absolute behaviour from everyone is unkind, and, statistically not necessary for the outcomes you want.

Basically; it’s easy to say “call them out!” when it’s not you and youre not taking any risks.

Pretty nice and comfortable to sit in your armchair and say that…

I think there are a lot of people here to want someone else to do it, but aren’t willing to do it themselves.

I had a somewhat curious personal experience at Uber. I went to interview there circa 2016/2017 and got an offer but had to wait for a visa to come out. In the meantime, the Susan Fowler scandal exploded. The hiring manager reached out to me out of his own accord to express his own outrage and how he'd absolutely not tolerate toxic behavior within his area of reach, and that many others within the company shared that feeling.

Turns out he was right: the team I eventually joined was fantastic and indeed there was a very large part of the company that was deeply troubled (and often quite vocal!) about the growing accounts of harassment and injustices. Driven by pressure to get the house in order, this eventually culminated in hundreds of separate investigations, and various degrees of corrective actions (including firing several perpetrators)

Since then, I've heard my share of complaints about higher ups as well (being in a role that involves quite a bit of cross-department communication), so it's not like it's all rainbows and roses, but my main point is that if you ask the average joe in a company, they're often happy to be straightforward with you.

I'd be probably not be speaking about toxic behaviour with a hiring manager, during a high-stake hiring process. Maybe you wouldn't have either if it wasn't for her whistleblowing.

FWIW, I'm involved with hiring and have on occasion been asked by candidates about company culture (and in one case, specifically about the Fowler case). I try to be as candid and transparent as possible with these sorts of topics, because that just seems like the natural thing to do.

Just be careful so it can't be traced back to you. That can be pretty limiting, but it's better than nothing.

GP's statement has a lot of merit. Going on the attack against a well-resourced opponent should only be considered after long and deliberate consultation with legal counsel. Even if you don't involve an attorney, your opponent may/will. Attorneys are expensive and proceedings may take far longer than someone who believes themselves to be in the right may expect.

The system is imperfect, but it abstracts conflict to a higher and more-deliberate plane than bludgeoning one another with sticks or urging a mob to pick up torches.

You don't do this out of the goodness of your heart to inform other people how bad the company is, you do this purely to maximize the probability of receiving any sort of compensation from the company. Most people (?) would only consider this route if they genuinely feel that the company has egregiously wronged them, because it's a big, low-probability-of-success pain, and airing dirty laundry is easier and often more cathartic.

If you have already decided that informing other people is more important to you than a settlement (or have concluded that the effort is not worth your while), then fine, you've made a different decision, and perhaps the commons are better as a result. But if you decide to air the dirty laundry, you'll usually lose the ability to change your mind later.

That sounds like blackmail/extortion. I'm not a lawyer, but the first amendment should protect you pretty well from merely making truthful accusations, but once you threaten money in exchange for not making them it could be construed as a very serious crime.

Avoiding bad PR is one of the reasons most settlements have non-disparagement clauses, usually paired with a confidentiality clause that says you can't even talk about the settlement (and therefore you can't mention or imply the existence of the non-disparagement clause therein).

"Hey thought you should know, my 'security' company is currently for hire for businesses around town. We heard through the underground grapevine that a lot of folks may lose some product in their bodegas next month. Anyway, nice to introduce you to my 'security' business -- have a great month!"

If you revealed that your true intent was blackmail, and that's what this is, to your lawyer or anyone else then I imagine the intent in combination with the act is enough to nail you.

Give me money or I will tell the public that you did me wrong -> not extorsion

Give me money or I will tell the public that you did someone else wrong -> extorsion

I believe that the litmus test is whether you are entitled to a compensation or not.

Either can be defamation though.

In my previous classification it would be extorsion to say "pay me or I will add those things to my accusations" but not to say "pay me or I will drag you in the mud as much as possible", that is it would matter whether you keep them bundled together or not.

Why do you imagine non-disclosure agreements are standard after an out-of-court settlement? It's because "pay me or I'll badmouth you" is essentially always one of the implied threats.

You can call it blackmail if you want (and I'm being deliberately glib here, because I also think it's at least blackmail-esque), but your lawyer and the company's lawyer will absolutely understand that this is how things are done.

Also, this isn't an issue of a company doing something illegal or immoral. We are not talking slave labor or dumping toxic chemicals. This is an argument over compensation levels and therefore I don't think he owes the world his story for the cost of making himself a pariah.

Knowingly missrepresenting the working condition is exactly that: immoral.

INAL but is see no way this would damage his legal leverage... actually the opposite.

IANAL either, but I imagine posting this gives an opening for Atlassian to sue for slander and ruin the author by taking forever to debate minutiae of every sentence in the article - whereas if the author went after Atlassian directly, the case would be only about what the company did or did not do to them personally.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/michael-avenatti-guilty...

That's one quick police response. Regardless of the merits of the case, I'm scared of the headline itself.

Knowing that I have legally mandated sick leave with pay that covers me for some time has helped immensely while going through this ordeal. Not to mention all healthcare costs taken care of by the state (rather than via some weird golden handcuff scheme with my employer).

I simply can not imagine how vadly workers in the US are exposed when the unexpected happens (and it does, unexpectedly).

Also, even though most Europeans like to say what you said, the fact is still that, as a young healthy individual, the possibility of you even getting sick and needing to go to the doctor is actually incredibly slim. I haven’t visited the doctor except for the dentist in a few years but I’ve paid massive amounts into the German health care system, and I would still much prefer the American pay to the European social system. Maybe when you have a family the European way of life would have more appeal, but even then the system is somewhat collapsing as we speak, e.g. the horrible wait to get an appointment at NHS and also to some extent for the publicly insured Germans. I would still trust having resources at my own disposal instead of leaving my fate on a big, public system working the same for decades, which never happens in history.

I've also done this on yelp when I was working as a contractor when I should have been an employee. The company informed yelp I was an employee, so my review was removed (yelp only has a policy employees cannot leave reviews, they had no such policy for independent contractors at the time I left the review). This was doubly insulting because I tried to inform yelp the entire reason I left a review was because I _should_ have been an employee and not a contractor, and yelp informed me I was actually an employee so I could not use their platform!

I also disagree about it being a career ender to publicly reveal serious dishonesty in your employer. The company I work for now usually laughs when I talk about all the shit I've been through and spoken of ( I worked for two very dishonest companies, out of the dozen or so I've been with). If you work for honest people, then they have a vested interest in the dishonest being exposed (its good for their business).