And people can latch onto being fired because almost everyone has experienced it at least once. That moment, of "what do I do now?", is probably one of the worst feelings in the world. And the glee these assholes have in actually doing it (remember no one is supposed to enjoy firing anyone, MBA101) is even more enraging since it confirms everything the 99%ers have been protesting about. These guys are fucking with other peoples' livelyhoods and making a joke of it.
The employee in question was presumably trained on the policy upon starting work and presumably informed of the costs of violating the policy.
The employee violated that policy, damaging company relations in the process, and was fired. That's a separate issue from the whole salary debacle. That Steve Jobs replied with a smiley face is immaterial to the broader problem at hand. Steve Jobs would in all likelihood reply to the end of the world with :-O. Who cares?
That Google terminated an employee in violation of what they indicate was a clear policy, is again, irrelevant to the discussion. It serves as nothing more than an attempt to get emotional response using something only tangentially related to the core issue.
If the said employee felt the policy was unethical and possibly illegal, violating it is not the answer. There is no indication that the employee was making a moral stand. More than likely, he couldn't follow directions. And he got fired.
This logic would not fly in any other industry. I don't see why SV thinks it is exempt. You never see a "policy" like this being defended in banking or whiteshoe law firms.
Also stop calling it a policy. Policies are written down, recorded, and published. One manager having an informal meeting about an unofficial policy doesn't make it policy. The reason this lawsuit is making waves now is because the policy was never put to ink. It was never put to ink because these companies wanted as little evidence as possible. Does that sound like a good policy?
I think it's really the 99.9%.
Being in the 1% top income in the country kind of rings hollow if you still can't afford a house.
I'm Canadian, so the irrational fear of communism/socialism is much lower here.
Not that I'm advocating for communism of course. Any system that honestly believes that a dictatorship[1] needs to be established first and that it will simply "whither away"[2] has been proven by history to be wrong.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletariat [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withering_away_of_the_state
Yes, it sucks to get fired, but firing is a necessary part if running almost any company.
In the big scheme of the moral calamity that this whole thing is, this particular exchange feels oddly trivial to get its own article. But I think it's just the sort of thing that people can and will latch on to easily.