He announced the company would be giving less money to employees, and blamed it on some babies, when he's earning, by himself, much more than the two incidents cost, and supposedly presided over a successful quarter.
Seems, if nothing else, a poor way of handling things. Even if you're a "tight-fisted homo-economomicus shareholder" the end result is bad, because in the end his gaffe and the subsequent publicity meant that he reversed the cuts, so the company won't get to keep that money.
I'm not against high pay for executives or that kind of thing, so I'm fine with him making oodles of money if he's doing a good job. Part of doing a good job in that position, though, is not sticking one's foot in one's mouth.
Also: I think there are certainly times when people just try and twist words to score political points, whatever the actual facts. This case doesn't strike me as one of those, really.
He announced the company would be giving less money to employees, and blamed it on some babies...
He announced the company would be giving the same money to employees but the distribution would change: more healthcare (as mandated by Obamacare), less 401k.
In my case, I read the mother's article first, and then Tim Armstrong's original remarks and followup statements. This substantially colored my reading, and not for the better.
If I brought political biases to my reading, they had more to do with a pre-modern conception of loyalty: true authority is built on loyalty towards those who are led. And I looked at this from the perspective of a parent, and from that perspective, the lives of children often weigh heavier than things like self-survival.
AOL absolutely did not desert these parents, and that's where my post was is undeniably in the wrong—and where I wanted to revise it shortly after posting, before I got caught by noprocrast.
Now, I've said things in my life which were dumb and out-of-place. (In this thread, even.) And upon re-reading, I'm willing to extend Tim Armstrong the benefit of the doubt: he may have hit upon a spectacularly poor way to explain why employees were losing benefits, despite having the best of intentions. But his remarks could be easily and predictably de-anonymized, with obvious consequences:
On Thursday, within minutes of Armstrong’s utterance, my husband began fielding questions from colleagues: Wasn’t the CEO talking about his baby?
And not did these remarks effectively single out a specific employee, they also singled out a specific 1-year-old girl—who already has significant problems—and they linked her to the company-wide benefit reductions (at least for those coworkers who knew the parents). And this is where I got too angry to read Tim Armstrong's actual words accurately. Which I regret.
