The mistake Mr. X. made here was not about caring about his job or even criticizing his employer. He contacted an outsider, with his company's email server, ostensibly on their behalf. At bigco, you just can't do that folks. Everything that leaves corporate walls must be vetted by legal, (and probably marketing too). There are lists of 100's (maybe 1000's by now) of innocuous seeming words that you just can't use. Language, nationality, gender, and racial issues all must be considered.
Like it or not, at Bigco International, everything is a press release.
Personally, I would have given the guy a warning. What he said was quite harmless and almost certainly common knowledge, but we don't know the whole story here. He may have been warned before, or AA burned by this type of thing before or both. Its unfortunate, but understandable. In the name of tolerance and acceptance, we've built one of the most intolerant and litigious societies ever. This is just one of the many sad side effects.
Sun was one of the first companies to open the blogging floodgates, officially. [...] I note, with some pride, that we’ve had maybe ten thousand person-years of blogging since we launched, and we’ve never had any material disclosures or legal trouble. Nor have I heard of any over at IBM or Microsoft or Oracle or any of the other companies who empower their people.
But what is really weird is that Mr X and AA.com come off pretty well in the email. A bit of humility and a focus on the future. I even liked AA a little bit more after reading it..... until I realised they fired him for sending it.
I can't help but think that this approach cannot work anymore in the current communicational golden age. We really have social media, twitter, blogs. Content accessible to the public is not constrained by publishers anymore. If you're a big organization, people want to hear things from your employees directly and not from the usual boring PR channels, and they find a way to do so because it's so easy.
I believe companies have to embrace allowing their employees to communicate independently while making it clear that what they say is not the official position of the corporation. There's simply no other way, the age of controlled communication channels is just over. A good example is MSDN blogs - anyone at Microsoft can launch his or her blog and talk about whatever they want (except, of course, confidental information).
Ouch. I have top-tier status on AA, and they will be getting a note from me about this. Not cool.
That said, I am still confused as to why Dustin thinks AA's website is so relevant to its business model. Their website is not very Web 2.0, it's true. But, they make up for that... I can fly non-stop from Chicago (my home airport) to thousands of cities around the world on AA quite cheaply. They have three-class international service, which means I can use frequent flyer miles to get a really nice seat once in a while. They have lounges. They have international partners where my status benefits can be used. I get free domestic upgrades to first class. They have customer service that cares. (I have never been greeted by name on Southwest, but it happens rather frequently on AA.)
So anyway, the legacies are not totally incompetent. I fly at least every month and I would never even consider WN or JetBlue. The fare is about the same, and I have no chance of receiving anything other than a middle-seat on the back of a 737. No thanks. Perhaps the website UX is nice, but the rest of the trip won't be. And when I'm in a metal tube for 18 hours, I don't really give a damn about how much AJAX the website had.
(I am a little defensive here, I know. AA has been really nice to me, so I feel that they deserve some compliments for that.)
One of the original reasons why I disagreed with Dustin. Slick Web 2.0-y goodness does not imply a better user experience. Copious amounts of whitespace is easy on the eyes, but also doesn't automatically imply discoverability or readability. I know first-hand of at least one top-50 website that is very Web 1.0 but absolutely excels at what it does.
Agreed. Dustin just comes off as whiny and self-important, though I don't think the employee should have been fired considering the content of his email.
Also, booking flights is very straightforward on aa.com. Dustin could have provided some substantive comments on usability, but instead simply called it ugly and slapped together a minimalist southwest.com knock-off. The only thing that really annoys me about the site is how confusing it is to get a list of your current reservations.
A majority of the public only shops based on price and availability. Unless the website is so bad that they can't figure out where to put their credit card number, it doesn't matter.
I hope Virgin hires this guy and makes a media event out of it. I will now never fly American Airlines ever again in my life. This sincerely pissed me off.
Spare the boycott for a cause which merits it. AA just lost a competent and passionate employee and announced themselves as a lousy place to work for creative people.
Clearly AA prioritizes the wrong things. I'm betting the guy broke some policy, but is it really a firing offense? Are they going to sack the middle-management bonehead who blew this up into a much more embarrassing spectacle?
Like I really needed another reason not to fly AA. These days, its Jet Blue or Virgin America if at all possible.
AA searched their exchange database for the text I posted, found the guy, and fired Mr. X on the spot.
As upsetting as this is, it's just not that big of a surprise. Some companies take non-disclosure very seriously. Why didn't Mr. X just use gmail? I can't imagine discussing any company's internals on their own email system.
OTOH, maybe Mr. X just committed corporate suicide by email. That's one way to escape the insanity.
Thanks for the update, Dustin. I sure hope Mr. X lands on his feet fairly soon and I applaud your contribution. I like to think that integrity still trumps idiocy.
Sadly, the sole purpose of an HR dept. is to keep a company from getting sued. The bigger the company, the more that's their sole focus.
This guy admitting anything but the most perfect of environments and purity of process, while not a firing offense to normal folk, opened a vector for the possibility of the hint of something bad being done. So he had to go.
Yeah they do, but it's a tough situation for everyone. If the HR person didn't fire Mr. X, someone else more opportunistic and less scrupulous would've done it - and the original HR guy's head would've rolled with Mr. X's.
Things like this will keep happening so long as we're willing to trample all over each other in our race to the "top".
A bit off-topic, but Dustin Curtis' site really hurts my eyes reading on my MacBook pro... I have a really hard time reading his text, and when I look away, I have very pronounced stripe patterns in my vision.
I have the exact reverse here. I love sites and applications that use a dark background; bright backgrounds are like staring into a lamp. It probably depends on the environment you tend to read in; I usually read in a darker room.
I have the same issue with light text on dark background pages, I generally dislike them. It actually affects my vision for a few seconds after I look away from the page, before my eyes adjust again. That page could certainly do with a little more contrast between text and background at any rate. I recently created a site that does make some limited use of light text on dark background and found this post from a few years ago to be a good resource for looking at the issue from both sides (the comments are an important part):
For as long as I can remember I have not liked reading large amounts of light text on dark backgrounds. It's always felt as if this was some kind of genetic predisposition for me. While for others, the opposite (i.e. strongly preferring light text on dark background) seems to be true.
I'd be really interested if anyone has heard of some solid research on why certain people prefer one over the other.
I have to admit, looking at Dustin's site, I thought "huh, interesting choices from a UX designer." I also found it hard to read now that you mention it...
I guess AA took some of that advice to heart here.
I can only hope this guy does land a job someplace where the company culture isn't completely and utterly fucked all across the board, all the way from the hangar to the board room.
This dialog comes near the end, Lester and Perry discussing the paradox of working for a big company. According to Cory's bio, he never worked in a big company, but he nails it here.
Lester: "They said that they wanted me to come in and help them turn the place around, help them reinvent themselves. Be nimble. Shake things up. But it’s like wrestling a tar-baby. You push, you get stuck. You argue for something better and they tell you to write a report, then no one reads the report. You try to get an experimental service running and no one will reconfigure the firewall. Turn the place around?" He snorted. "It's like turning around a battleship by tapping it on the nose with a toothpick."
Perry: "I hate working with assholes."
"They’re not assholes, that’s the thing, Perry. They’re some really smart people. They’re nice. We have them over for dinner. They’re fun to eat lunch with. The thing is, every single one of them feels the same way I do. They all have cool shit they want to do, but they can’t do it."
"Why?"
"It’s like an emergent property. Once you get a lot of people under one roof, the emergent property seems to be crap. No matter how great the people are, no matter how wonderful their individual ideas are, the net effect is shit."
"Reminds me of reliability calculation. Like if you take two components that are 90 percent reliable and use them in a design, the outcome is 90 percent of 90 percent - 81 percent. Keep adding 90 percent reliable components and you’ll have something that explodes before you get it out of the factory.
"Maybe people are like that. If you’re 90 percent non-bogus and ten percent bogus, and you work with someone else who’s 90 percent non-bogus, you end up with a team that’s 81 percent non-bogus."
"I like that model. It makes intuitive sense. But it’s depressing. It says that all we do is magnify each others’ flaws."
"Well, maybe that’s the case. Maybe flaws are multiplicative."
This is nothing but positive, actually. Someone who is passionate, thoughtful, and caring about his trade will have a _much_ greater impact, career, and reward at a different organization than the one described by
http://dustincurtis.com/dear_dustin_curtis.html
From the point of view of the management - this is someone who wrote an article about the company having big time bureaucracy, lot of teams that don't talk to each other and hinting that the company culture is all messed up. well, what can one expect.
Very truly yours (and hoping I don’t get fired for being completely incompetent),
but yeh I hope it turns out positive, the guy seems to have a good attitude and is apparently talented, so will be nice to have people like that at companies where I can actually get the benefits of someone caring about ui
IMHO, any employee not on the customer service team that reaches out to customers should be awarded not punished, given that it's done somewhat reasonably. In most cases filing a complaint with the customer service people would get you nothing - you need to talk to the ux designer.
And this, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is a lesson in why establishing a brilliant culture in your company is of utmost important. It's amazing to me to see all the praises in this thread for JetBlue and would be interesting to see a case study comparing the differences in culture between the two brands.
That is not ironic. I expect people to use words they don't understand anywhere else, but come on hacker news, I expect more from you and the people who comment here.
There's a common attribute that makes for good designers, good engineers, good employees, and good companies. For a long time, I couldn't figure out what it was. Was it practice? Was it skill? Was it innate ability? Turns out, it's none of those. It's taste.
Steve Jobs also cited 'taste' as the fundamental difference between Apple and Microsoft. His high-and-mighty attitude almost made me want to puke, as Dustin's does here.
[+] [-] noonespecial|16 years ago|reply
Like it or not, at Bigco International, everything is a press release.
Personally, I would have given the guy a warning. What he said was quite harmless and almost certainly common knowledge, but we don't know the whole story here. He may have been warned before, or AA burned by this type of thing before or both. Its unfortunate, but understandable. In the name of tolerance and acceptance, we've built one of the most intolerant and litigious societies ever. This is just one of the many sad side effects.
[+] [-] mseebach|16 years ago|reply
Hardly. If Sun can, then sure AA can too:
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2009/10/16/I-Just-Wan...
Sun was one of the first companies to open the blogging floodgates, officially. [...] I note, with some pride, that we’ve had maybe ten thousand person-years of blogging since we launched, and we’ve never had any material disclosures or legal trouble. Nor have I heard of any over at IBM or Microsoft or Oracle or any of the other companies who empower their people.
[+] [-] Quarrelsome|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jf|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DrJokepu|16 years ago|reply
I believe companies have to embrace allowing their employees to communicate independently while making it clear that what they say is not the official position of the corporation. There's simply no other way, the age of controlled communication channels is just over. A good example is MSDN blogs - anyone at Microsoft can launch his or her blog and talk about whatever they want (except, of course, confidental information).
[+] [-] cakesy|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrockway|16 years ago|reply
That said, I am still confused as to why Dustin thinks AA's website is so relevant to its business model. Their website is not very Web 2.0, it's true. But, they make up for that... I can fly non-stop from Chicago (my home airport) to thousands of cities around the world on AA quite cheaply. They have three-class international service, which means I can use frequent flyer miles to get a really nice seat once in a while. They have lounges. They have international partners where my status benefits can be used. I get free domestic upgrades to first class. They have customer service that cares. (I have never been greeted by name on Southwest, but it happens rather frequently on AA.)
So anyway, the legacies are not totally incompetent. I fly at least every month and I would never even consider WN or JetBlue. The fare is about the same, and I have no chance of receiving anything other than a middle-seat on the back of a 737. No thanks. Perhaps the website UX is nice, but the rest of the trip won't be. And when I'm in a metal tube for 18 hours, I don't really give a damn about how much AJAX the website had.
(I am a little defensive here, I know. AA has been really nice to me, so I feel that they deserve some compliments for that.)
[+] [-] potatolicious|16 years ago|reply
One of the original reasons why I disagreed with Dustin. Slick Web 2.0-y goodness does not imply a better user experience. Copious amounts of whitespace is easy on the eyes, but also doesn't automatically imply discoverability or readability. I know first-hand of at least one top-50 website that is very Web 1.0 but absolutely excels at what it does.
[+] [-] wakeless|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Imprecate|16 years ago|reply
Also, booking flights is very straightforward on aa.com. Dustin could have provided some substantive comments on usability, but instead simply called it ugly and slapped together a minimalist southwest.com knock-off. The only thing that really annoys me about the site is how confusing it is to get a list of your current reservations.
A majority of the public only shops based on price and availability. Unless the website is so bad that they can't figure out where to put their credit card number, it doesn't matter.
[+] [-] jasonlbaptiste|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dschobel|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] butterfi|16 years ago|reply
Like I really needed another reason not to fly AA. These days, its Jet Blue or Virgin America if at all possible.
[+] [-] hwijaya|16 years ago|reply
http://twitter.com/hwijaya/status/5436741226
[+] [-] edw519|16 years ago|reply
As upsetting as this is, it's just not that big of a surprise. Some companies take non-disclosure very seriously. Why didn't Mr. X just use gmail? I can't imagine discussing any company's internals on their own email system.
OTOH, maybe Mr. X just committed corporate suicide by email. That's one way to escape the insanity.
Thanks for the update, Dustin. I sure hope Mr. X lands on his feet fairly soon and I applaud your contribution. I like to think that integrity still trumps idiocy.
[+] [-] trevorbramble|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wakeless|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelcampbell|16 years ago|reply
This guy admitting anything but the most perfect of environments and purity of process, while not a firing offense to normal folk, opened a vector for the possibility of the hint of something bad being done. So he had to go.
[+] [-] potatolicious|16 years ago|reply
Things like this will keep happening so long as we're willing to trample all over each other in our race to the "top".
[+] [-] billswift|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drusenko|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DarkShikari|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dcurtis|16 years ago|reply
I feel I can take risks with my blog that I can't take elsewhere. Sorry if it bothers you.
[+] [-] jonny_noog|16 years ago|reply
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200608/light_text_on_d...
For as long as I can remember I have not liked reading large amounts of light text on dark backgrounds. It's always felt as if this was some kind of genetic predisposition for me. While for others, the opposite (i.e. strongly preferring light text on dark background) seems to be true.
I'd be really interested if anyone has heard of some solid research on why certain people prefer one over the other.
[+] [-] jlees|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] butterfi|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marknutter|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nrr|16 years ago|reply
I guess AA took some of that advice to heart here.
I can only hope this guy does land a job someplace where the company culture isn't completely and utterly fucked all across the board, all the way from the hangar to the board room.
[+] [-] davi|16 years ago|reply
An articulate explanation of how good intentions at big companies can often be implemented only slowly.
[+] [-] gvb|16 years ago|reply
This dialog comes near the end, Lester and Perry discussing the paradox of working for a big company. According to Cory's bio, he never worked in a big company, but he nails it here.
gvb
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Lester: "They said that they wanted me to come in and help them turn the place around, help them reinvent themselves. Be nimble. Shake things up. But it’s like wrestling a tar-baby. You push, you get stuck. You argue for something better and they tell you to write a report, then no one reads the report. You try to get an experimental service running and no one will reconfigure the firewall. Turn the place around?" He snorted. "It's like turning around a battleship by tapping it on the nose with a toothpick."
Perry: "I hate working with assholes."
"They’re not assholes, that’s the thing, Perry. They’re some really smart people. They’re nice. We have them over for dinner. They’re fun to eat lunch with. The thing is, every single one of them feels the same way I do. They all have cool shit they want to do, but they can’t do it."
"Why?"
"It’s like an emergent property. Once you get a lot of people under one roof, the emergent property seems to be crap. No matter how great the people are, no matter how wonderful their individual ideas are, the net effect is shit."
"Reminds me of reliability calculation. Like if you take two components that are 90 percent reliable and use them in a design, the outcome is 90 percent of 90 percent - 81 percent. Keep adding 90 percent reliable components and you’ll have something that explodes before you get it out of the factory.
"Maybe people are like that. If you’re 90 percent non-bogus and ten percent bogus, and you work with someone else who’s 90 percent non-bogus, you end up with a team that’s 81 percent non-bogus."
"I like that model. It makes intuitive sense. But it’s depressing. It says that all we do is magnify each others’ flaws."
"Well, maybe that’s the case. Maybe flaws are multiplicative."
"So what are virtues?"
"Additive, maybe. A shallower curve."
[+] [-] adw|16 years ago|reply
And, yes, that's depressing.
[+] [-] mwexler|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gaius|16 years ago|reply
That's always the way with any non-trivial undertaking. Recognizing this is the hallmark of actual experience.
[+] [-] ghshephard|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] padmanabhan01|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arohner|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daleharvey|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dtran|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pyre|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] symptic|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raquo|16 years ago|reply
Last line from his email, ironically.
[+] [-] cakesy|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|16 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|16 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dangoldin|16 years ago|reply
It seems the proper thing to have done would be to make the email untraceable to Mr X rather than just anonymizing the name.
[+] [-] njn|16 years ago|reply
Steve Jobs also cited 'taste' as the fundamental difference between Apple and Microsoft. His high-and-mighty attitude almost made me want to puke, as Dustin's does here.