I myself was “canceled” privately from an employer where I had worked for over a decade. Fortunately the issue stayed in-house and my name did not go public.

I wrote an on-topic email about my life experiences and challenges concerning a medical issue, linking to relevant CDC and WHO medical guidance on the topic and suggestions on how the company could take steps to mitigate discrimination against people in similar circumstances.

Despite my good intentions, desire to bring hard data from authoritative sources into the conversation, someone presumably took offense and reported me to HR - I assume the allegation was promoting discrimination, even though I was not expressing any opinion of my own and simply linking to data from authority data from sources & pointing out problems and challenges that the data showed we would face in fighting that exact same discrimination. Sadly ironic.

I never learned the details of the allegation nor had a chance to defend myself. Multiple employees vouched for me, including people from the minority that presumably initiated the complaint, and many others sent me private messages saying how they thought my contributions were constructively adding to the conversation. The investigation was completely opaque, and the ultimate explanation was that I simply used bad judgment. That’s at-will employment for you. No opportunity to appeal, confront accuser, present evidence contrary to the accusations. A decade of good reputation and sound judgment meant nothing when (presumably) a minority reported me for discrimination.

The same HR investigator who investigated me previously investigated allegations of sexual misconduct by a female employee of a manager I knew well. The employee was performing poorly and filed misconduct allegations against the manager too. The manager had kept extensive documentation and was cleared. We were virtually certain the sexual misconduct allegations were bullshit and retaliation: and ironically the target was a supporter of the employee. The target ended up being fired. (Despite it being highly likely there was any more than he-said-she-said evidence with no corroboration.) The problem employee was on medical leave for months and eventually left the company.

Moral of the story: (1) Don’t expect fairness from HR. Their job is to protect the company from liability. They don’t care about you. A big company doesn’t care one whit for fairness and will fire you based on a calculation about liability of the situation going sideways (like PR explosion) (2) Don’t post about non-work topics at work, even if it’s being discussed, unless that’s your job. You never know what risk you’re exposed to. (3) Everything you post publicly online will be around forever. Even if you delete it someone might have an archive. Have sensitive discussions only in private group chats over end to end encrypted messengers, potentially ones that support message expiration (delete history after 1 day | 7 days | etc).

I was fortunate to be able to sign a mutual non-disparagement and NDA with my employer as part of an agreement to mutually terminate my employment, for consideration of staying on paid leave until a certain date so that I could job search without having to explain my departure, and receive my next stock grant. I’ll never be able to work at that employer again unless someone very high rank makes an exception.

The most frustrating part of the whole situation was never receiving a real explanation with any detail about what I was alleged to have done wrong, or what corporate policy I was alleged to have violated, nor have an opportunity to rebut the accusations. I also don’t believe my management chain stood up for me or defended me despite my long record of good judgment and high job level.

The silver lining is that I fortunately found an even higher paying job at a higher level with another tech company. My ability to get a promotion had probably already stalled out, and doubly so after that episode. So the threat of termination resulted in a higher level and considerably higher paying job at another employer, with an small group of people who know what really happened.

I got lucky though in that sense. I’m pretty sure that the person who reported me is a Twitter activist about that topic. I’m fortunate that they didn’t attempt to direct the outrage machine against me, otherwise I might have ended up in the same boat, publicly canceled. I stand by what I wrote as being reasonable, defensible, unbiased, and non-discriminatory (I was proposing ways to fight that discrimination!); merely discussing the topic and mentioning data and facts that the cancel crowd don’t like could get you canceled. My bad judgment was choosing to discuss the topic at work at all (even in a discussion about fighting discrimination).

Be careful what you write. I for one would appreciate if more companies adopted Coinbase’s “no politics or non-work chat at work” policy [1]. Employees could and should engage in the political activism they are passionate about on their own time, not by trying to manipulate the company’s strategy, or engaging in internal debates (unless necessary to contact the company‘s business and establish its social policies, as part of one’s job role) in my opinion, especially through strongarm tactics. This would free employees from the distractions of wanting to oppose extremist viewpoints they disagree with. At my last company I knew large networks of employees who disagreed with what these vocal extremists were writing internally but were afraid to say anything against it for fear of what ended up happening to me.

[1] https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-is-a-mission-focused-comp...