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If any of you are on the tech/ai/startup side of x (which I imagine is everybody here), you probably saw the following exchange:
A guy working as 'head of AI' for a company called Cline commented "Imagine the smell" under a photo of a hackathon.
Indians assumed that somebody commenting on the smellyness of a hackathon (I've been to many hackathons, and nerds smell) must be commenting on Indians, and thus freaked out.
The guy who made the comment replied to some of them saying that no, actually, he was just making a common internetism, and generally speaking to the smell of a bunch of guys in a packed room.
The guy's boss gets involved, surely due to the campaign by online Indians to get him fired, saying that he wouldn't be firing anybody.
Enough pressure happened that the guy's boss recanted, and fired the guy.
Now the internet is imagining a lot of smells, cline has earned a ton of bad will, and the general dislike of Indians in the tech community has grown.
Here are some thoughts on this:
I'm increasingly of the opinion that people should be able to filter the internet by country. I don't care what people from 9000 miles away, from a totally different culture, who have no investment or stake in my society have to say about it. I don't want to interact with these people. My life and my world is not a place for them to wage petty dramas and entertain themselves by harassing people here.
Indians specifically (and I say this as somebody who has spent a considerable amount of time in India, consuming indian culturalisms, and interacting with Indians) seem to have a particular penchant for online drama. There seems to be a particular focus on people saving or losing some form of "face", although that isn't exactly it. It's similar to honor culture you find in other societies, but maybe just its own Indian brand of it. I think what we're seeing here are two cultures which should be separated by 10,000 miles of ocean running into each other on the internet; the clash should not be unexpected.
"Imagine the smell" is not an anti-Indian slur, or at least it wasn't. It comes from image boards, and gets said under almost any moderately interesting photo of people. However, I think the massive freak out over this has turned it into one. Interdesting.
None of this would ever have happened in a non-At Will jurisdiction. The mob could howl as much as they wanted and the boss would just go "Sorry, the laws of this country prevent me from firing this person without good cause, if you don't like it vote to change things" and this would suddenly blow over.
There's a reason all this "firing" people for saying bad things stuff seems to be localized to the US (on both sides of the aisle).
Having just this year had to squeeze two maliciously incompetent employees out of my department, I have a new and deep appreciation for at-will employment. Like most of our worst laws, we have at-will employment because the worst 5% of the population ruins it for everyone.
Anecdote: The unionized civil-engineering office in which I worked had a complement of around half a dozen surveyors. Most of them were industrious, but one was lazy and a troublemaker.
The survey coordinator (engineer in charge of the surveyors) had to constantly check on this surveyor to make sure that she was actually doing her assigned work in an industrious manner.
One of my engineer coworkers warned me that I should never trust this surveyor because the surveyor once told the coworker that getting in a minor crash with an office car was an easy way to get out of work.
After the survey coordinator gave her a bad performance review, she filed an HR complaint accusing him of threatening her with violence during the performance review's closed-door face-to-face meeting. It was totally frivolous, since the boss of the office was in the same meeting and could vouch for the survey coordinator's innocence! But the investigation still dragged on for many months. IIRC, I once overheard the survey coordinator discussing with the office boss how the surveyor's union-assigned lawyer would even commiserate over the phone with the survey coordinator about how the surveyor couldn't even keep her story straight.
She had a reputation for treating her two subordinate surveyors poorly. I wasn't too aware of the details, but I overheard the survey coordinator discussing with the office boss how he would look out the office window into the parking lot and see her subordinate surveyors running to the survey van in order to avoid being late.
Once I even overheard her loudly joke in the office's coffee area, "I like my coffee like I like my men—hot and black", which I as a nigger easily could have reported her to HR for (and maybe should have).
She was finally forced to resign (not even fired!) when, during the pandemic, she coughed into her hand and intentionally used the same hand to smack one of her subordinate surveyors on the back, after which the subordinate (who IIRC had a wife with a compromised immune system of some kind) filed an HR complaint and threatened to report her assault to the police on top of that.
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Americans do not want to end at will employment because they quite reasonably think it will make it harder to get hired.
They also don’t want to take up the slack of the inevitable abuses.
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There are reasonable pros and cons. The reason Americans are paid more than the French (size of the economy, labor pool, lower taxes, more natural resources, bigger domestic market, more capital, better entrepreneurial culture, despite the origin of that word) isn’t primarily due to labor laws. The Scandinavian countries have very restrictive labor laws and low unemployment, for example, while other countries have high unemployment even with loose laws.
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I can't speak for continental Europe, but a public communication like that would be easy grounds for gross misconduct in the UK, so wouldn't make much difference
The process in the UK would be very different and there would be an investigation during a suspension and then likely a tribunal. The defendant could make the very reasonable case that this was a joke about 24 hour hackathons being sweaty and that no offense to Indians was plausibly implied, nor was this in any way a malicious or specifically targeted communication, and might well win. Unless they were contractually prohibited from any comment on social media (and even then it’s very unclear that that kind of thing would be enforceable in most cases) they would have an OK case.
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Sure, if there's some sort of clause in the contract or disciplinary policy saying you must not do anything bringing the company into disrepute (which yes, most well drafted contracts and disciplinary policies will contain). Equally, even if so the requirement for procedural fairness will mean the person would first have to be suspended then a hearing would have to be arranged and held which all takes time during which the mob will move onto the next issue du jour meaning they won't get their blood when they are baying for it regardless which acts as a factor discouraging such mobs from forming in the first place.
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The idea of having to run to the state and make my case for why I don’t want to work professionally with someone anymore is bizarre to me. For it to be illegal by default to simply cease sending paychecks to someone unless I write down magic words so the bureaucrats won’t come after me is so offensive I can’t but sputter when confronted by the fact that this is not only law in much of Europe, but a popular law, apparently.
Yes this was a horseshit firing but it should absolutely not be a matter of government policy no matter the political valence. It would have blown over anyway.
If you want that in Europe, you hire a contractor. If you are unhappy with your plumber or gardener or sex worker, you can just hire a different company for the next job. Likewise, if you want to lease your property to tenants without being bound by too many legal safeguards, lease office space to companies.
But where humans are concerned, most societies recognize that just allowing total freedom of contract will lead to bad outcomes, because very often one human party will have a significant disadvantage during negotiations. In most places, selling your kidney or signing a contract which will put you into debt slavery if certain conditions are met is simply legally void, because if it was not there would be desperate people signing such contracts and ending up enslaved. Likewise, it is very rare that a prospective tenant can write the terms of a rental contract, because the landlord likely has a dozen alternatives lined up, while the tenant does not. The same goes for employment contracts.
And it is not like the US is some anarcho-libertarian utopia for employment, either. There are plenty of rules and regulations. You can't just put into contract that higher exposure limits for carbon monoxide will apply. You can't -- at least in theory -- fire an employee for not giving you a blowjob. Or fire all of your employees matching some protected characteristic. I imagine many states would forbid you from firing women for becoming pregnant, too.
The main difference is the burden of proof. In Europe, we have a whitelist of reasons to fire someone, while the US has a
blacklistblocklist of reasons for which you can not be fired.Now, I am sympathetic to arguments that these rules have adverse side effects. But simply arguing how unfair it is that you have some obligations towards someone with whom you have traded paychecks for labor for a decade is not going to convince anyone.
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It's all perspective, right? Your right to stop sending paychecks to someone at will == their right to be thrown away like garbage by their liege whenever convenient.
Appeal to the majority is a logical fallacy but nevertheless I think it says something that in almost all societies those higher in society have obligations of loyalty to their underlings (which must be reciprocated of course).
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You can either have freedom of association or you can have the State.
For a while. In the end, there is only the State.
Order and Chaos continue their eternal dance as mutual progenitors.
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Yeah, in Europe we just arrest them.
A wrongful arrest can be expunged and removed from your record quite quickly and if handled fast can have much less of an impact on your life and career trajectory than a wrongful firing.
And if the law is so restrictive that the arrest isn't legally wrongful?
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England would jail you for that comment.
Just checked, I'm still not in jail. I'll update tomorrow and let you know if I've been detained.
EDIT: Still not detained, the bobbies really need to up their game...
Do you live in the UK?
He does, but he's on the proper tier.
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Yes he does
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