She Worked for Twitter. Then She Tweeted at Elon Musk.

NYT ^ | December 23 2022 | By Katherine Rosman

[SmokingJoe]

Sasha Solomon, a software engineer, joined others in the media business who lost their jobs this year after publicly taking on their employers.

In the middle of a workday, Sasha Solomon, a 34-year-old software engineer in Portland, Ore., put her French bulldog, Bosworth, on a leash and walked down a leafy street to a favorite coffee shop.

It seemed like an ordinary November afternoon, or as ordinary as it could be for someone working at Twitter under its mercurial new owner, Elon Musk. Ms. Solomon ordered a latte for herself and a drip coffee with cream for her husband. Then she and Bosworth headed back home.

Sitting at her computer on her living room couch, she tried to check the latest messages on Slack, only to find her account was locked. She then pulled up her work email account, or tried to. Also locked. She logged onto her personal email account and saw something in her inbox from a human resources executive at Twitter.

“Your recent behavior has violated company policy,” the email said, according to Ms. Solomon. She turned to her husband and said, as she recalled in a recent interview, “I guess I don’t work here anymore.”

With that, Ms. Solomon had become part of a small number of media industry employees who lost their jobs this year after using Twitter to take on the institutions where they worked. In Ms. Solomon’s case, she directly challenged her boss in a series of tweets. She said she is not sure whether those tweets caused her to lose her job, or if she was just one of the roughly 3,700 Twitter employees who got the ax in layoffs that began soon after Mr. Musk took ownership of the company in October.

[Scarlett156]

Thanks!

[Scarlett156]

Haha. (You don’t kick them out because.....?)

But in a sort-of defense of these people, it’s hard to take things seriously these days. You can have the best attitude, great work ethic, sturdy constitution, all kinds of knowledge and expertise, and.......your job ends up being a joke. A bad joke.

Or - as has happened to me - people see you doing okay and decide to take revenge over petty grudges. Bye, bye employment.

Or someone who just got hired complains about you because you won’t be “nice” and let them take some of your work or hours. (I’ve been fired and forced out of many jobs that I did well in because I wasn’t nice enough, and a lot of the time not being nice meant I didn’t want to date people.)

So, I’m not saying these youngsters have a great excuse for being lazy, useless puds or anything, but I can see part of the reason of how they get there with startling clarity.

And: Merry Christmas! (I almost typed “Merry Xmas!” because that’s how I usually type it, but then I was like, “OH WOW I CAN’T DO THAT ON THIS BOARD!!!”)

[Chickensoup]

Yes but you assume the husband was born male!