Comment by throw3e98
10 days ago
Reading between the lines, this is corporate-speak for "this is a terminable offense for the employees involved." It's a holiday weekend in the US so they may need to wait for office staff to return to begin the process.
They might as well wait till business hours to sort things out before publishing a statement. Nobody needs to see such hollow corpo speak on a Sunday.
No, admitting fault as soon as possible makes a big difference. It's essential to restoring credibility.
If they had waited until Monday the thread would be filled with comments criticizing them for waiting that long.
https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/um-what-happened-to-th...
> we probably won't have something to report back until next week.
The forum thread is locked.
Yeah, but the problem is that by not making it clear that additional actions may be coming, they're barely restoring credibility at all, because the current course of action (pulling the article and saying sorry) is like the bare minimal required to avoid being outright liars - a far cry from being credible journalists. All they've done is leave piles of readers (including Ars subscribers) going "wtf".
If they felt the need to post something in a hurry on the weekend, then the message should acknowledge that, and acknowledge that "investigation continues" or something like that
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> It's a holiday weekend in the US so they may need to wait for office staff to return to begin the process.
That's not how it works. It's standard op nowadays to lock out terminated employees before they even walk in the door.
Sometimes they just snail mail the employee's personal possessions from their desk.
Moreover, Ars Technica publishes articles every day. Aside from this editor's note, they published one article today and three articles yesterday. So "holiday weekend" is practically irrelevant in this case.
> That's not how it works.
Some places.
> It's standard op nowadays to lock out terminated employees before they even walk in the door.
Some places.
You're speaking very authoritatively about what's "standard", in a way that strongly implies you think this is either the way absolutely everyone does it, or the way it should be done.
It's standard op nowadays to acknowledge that your experiences are not universal, and that different organizations operate differently.
> You're speaking very authoritatively about what's "standard", in a way that strongly implies you think this is either the way absolutely everyone does it, or the way it should be done.
Neither. I just meant it's common.
The comment I replied to said, "they may need to wait for office staff to return to begin the process."
I think the commonality of the practice shows that Ars Technica doesn't need to wait for office staff to return to begin the process, if office staff is even gone in the first place (again, Ars Technica appears to be open for business today). There's certainly no legal reason why they'd need to wait to fire people.
Does Ars Technica have a "policy" to only fire people on weekdays? I doubt it. Imagine reading that in the employee handbook.
Besides, President's Day is not a holiday that businesses necessarily close for. Indeed, many retailers are open and have specific President's Day sales.
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