Reddit CEO Yishan Wong smacks down former staffer on Reddit AMA

A FORMER Reddit employee hosted his own ‘Ask Me Anything’ session on the site after being sacked. Then the boss jumped in to explain the real reason.

Boss publicly slams former worker

OUCH. This has to hurt.

A former Reddit employee has been publicly shamed by the CEO after hosting his own AMA on the site.

It all started when a user known as “dehrmann” started a thread called “I am a former reddit employee. AMA”

He said he was laid off by the company and when asked why said “officially: no reason” before going on to say:

“And I get this; I vaguely know how CA employment law works and that you limit your liability by not stating a reason. It’s also really hard to work through in your mind.

“The best theory I have is that, two weeks earlier, I raised concerns about donating 10% of ad revenue to charity. Some management likes getting feedback, some doesn’t.

“The reason I had concerns was that this was revenue, not income. That means you need ~10% margins to break even. This can be hard to do; Yahoo and Twitter don’t. Salesforce does something similar, but it’s more all-round, and in a way that promotes the product without risking the company’s financials,” he said.

Enter Reddit CEO Yishan Wong, who said he wanted to clear up the ‘fear, uncertainty and disinformation’ on the thread — also known as FUD — before embarking on a brutal take down of the former staffer.

The full response from the CEO. Pic: Screengrab, Reddit.

“You were fired for the following reasons:

1. Incompetence and not getting much work done.

2. Inappropriate or irrelevant comments/questions when interviewing candidates

3. Making incorrect comments in public about reddit’s systems that you had very little knowledge of, even after having these errors pointed out by your peers and manager.

4. Not taking feedback from your manager or other engineers about any of these when given to you, continuing to do #2 until we removed you from interviewing, and never improving at #1.

“Criticising any decision about this program (link provided for people who aren’t familiar with the program and its reasons) had nothing to do with it. Feedback and criticism, even troublemaking, are things that we actively tolerate (encourage, even) — but above all you need to get your work done, and you did not even come close to doing that.”

That wasn’t the end of the comments — a full version can be seen here.

As the next commentators wryly observed “oh sh*t”.

“I guess the AMA is over :(” said another.

Reddit CEO Yishan Wong. Pic: Twitter.