@TessTalks:

Let me guess... You only read what was posted here, and not everything posted on the blogger's website...

@Areyouagoodlittleconsumer:

AHAHA! Sues and WINS???

You must have had some old food for breakfast, because the bacteria is affecting your brain.

This guy used his company email address to write to a blogger and basically slander his employer. Not only did he more than likely violate a NDA, he portrayed the company he works for in a negative light.

Read his letter before making claims. He got what he deserved. Period.

Although sadly most people don't have the time, money or energy for that these days.

And yes PR departments are there to make sure the company looks good while it buttfucks paying customers so the denial can continue unabated and the majority of customers can feel good about being abused.

I hope he sues and wins.

@Buffet:

Those 'Yes men' keep their jobs. Under your definition, I am one of these 'Yes men', and I sleep like a baby.

NDA aside, he slandered the company from his company email address. An employee, regardless of their position, is expected to portray their employer in a positive light. Companies go as far as not allowing people to smoke outside their buildings, in order to not be associated with cigarettes. What makes you think that this is any different?

Have you even read the letter?

@gingerCE:

Your reasoning?

Read the letter the employee sent. He generally slandered the company by agreeing with the complaintant. Some of the stuff he put in parenthesis was blatant slander.

The worst part? He did it from his company email address. He obviously got caught via the email logs.

He got what was coming to him.

@Buffet:

Yes, but firing someone from their job for portraying the company in a negative light via email correspondence which can be percieved as an official response from the company is the LEAST they should do.

The fact that you have to go out of your way to insult someone is childish. The fact that you don't get the reasoning behind someone getting fired is ignorant.

Yeah, the economy sucks, and jobs are hard to come by. But that doesn't mean that someone who was dumb enough to write an email from his business email account that basically slanders the company should keep his job.

So learn to think before you shoot your mouth off, Mr. lacks the mental facilities to figure out that this guy deserved what he got.

@Radi0logy:

Empathizing is okay; Portraying your company or any of it's policies or anything else about them in a negative light is not. No matter how terrible you think the company you work for is, or how quirky their policies can be, you are a representative of the company. If you disagree with anything having to do with them, it has the chance of losing a customer.

No offense, but I would have fired you.

I'm not going to lie for any company. Neither would I intentionally disparage a company I worked for. Just the same, I'm not kissing anyone's ass. The truth is the truth, no matter who utters it. All you yahoos who are so caught up in this NDA should examine your own integrity. Are you a "yes man", weilded like a puppet on a string, or a real man who refuses to compromise his values? I sleep peacefully.

I'll piss anywhere I damn well please.

Sounds grossly unfair. "Too is spelled with two 'o's you moron. I wouldn't work for a moron in the first place, but if I did, you'd get the ass-whoopin' of you life if you tried to fire me. My outrage is fueled by your casual use of the term 'fired'. Releasing someone from their job is a very serious action in today's economy - not to be taken lightly. People have families and responsibilities. No, I haven't been fired, and I don't have a family. It just pains me to see those who do. So next time, think before you shoot your mouth off, Mr. illiterate, spelling bee failure sissy.

You basically proved the main problem with unions: immunity from being fired. This is grossly unfair to anyone with a decent work ethic who actually works hard.

On another tip, I find the designer's site unreadable. Total headache for me.

@Cant_stop_the_rock: I'd agree with this as being the reason. While not for a technological part of the company, I answer the inquiry emails that come through our comany's website too. In general, in responses, you have to remain polite, professional, relatively impersonal (a little flair here or there is OK, but no personal information) and concise. Not only were those comments unncessary to answering the email, they had a sense of complaint to them. I know I wouldn't have gotten away with an email like that either, though I don't know if I'd be fired for it.

Unfortunately, a corporate web designer usually is not a customer service rep. That said, it makes sense that he was terminated for breach of NDA.

Also a posting from a shareholder chastised AA for their lack of poor judgment.

@dancing_bear: Or maybe not.

There has to be more to this story.

@El_Guapo:

I honestly feel like the tone of mr x's response had nothing to do with caring about the customer or whatever. It was a prideful, although eloquent, "hey it's not my fault, i'm good" kneejerk response to someone's criticism...

Actually they could sue Ben for libel.

Two - It's not his job to engage directly with a customer. He may be the person who receives the feedback, and works to design around that feedback, but it's not his job to directly talk with a disgruntled customer. His job is to design the site, period. There are public outreach departments that spend minutes, maybe even hours sending out pre-canned, un-authentic messages to those unfortunate enough to fly on AA, and voice their discontent.

All that being said, AA wasted a valuable asset and opportunity. Mr. X obviously cares about his work, and cares enough to send a genuine, heart felt message to a customer (and fellow web designer). In the end, it's easier for AA to callously throw Mr. X under a bus and hire a new UX designer, than gently reprimand and encourage a motivated customer-centric individual. I guess that's why AA is a failing business, who frankly, wouldn't be missed.

What did he disclose? The old - 'wait until next year our website/car/magazine/tv show will be much better'??

@tundey: That's what I thought. He had to have known the risk he was taking by responding in the firs tplace. That he did it via company e-mail was just asking for trouble.

@elizass: Get over yourself, please.

@AK47: Oh, I don't find it hard to believe that he got fired for a one-off offense. It happens, and generally companies tend to take NDA breaches very seriously.

Now you understand why most employees in the airline business prefer to belong to a union.

This is all the more reason to start your own airline.

Good job making a story out of nothing yet again.

@bonanz: I'll side with AA too. Mr. X essentially posted a "AA sucks!" e-mail in public space, and most companies will readily fire you for that. Mr. X was just more eloquent than most people.

If you have a problem with your company culture, do you really think airing it on a small-time blog is the best course of action? Will it result in any changes? No. Will it cause problems for you? Clearly yes.

It would have been a different story if Mr. X had simply said, "We know our site has issues, and we're working on them. In a big corporation, that can take time." Instead, he chose to point fingers at every department in the company and say why they were each messing up the site.

Public company bashing = got fired. Makes sense to me.

Everyone is looking at this as an isolated incident that got Mr. X fired, but I'd venture a guess that this may have just been the nail in the coffin. Perhaps Mr. X had other issues that were pointing him toward the unemployment line, and this just sealed the deal.

I understand your point. However, reading the guy's posts, and looking at what he's done, I stand by my point.

I don't see the problem. I do web development and design where I work. I do NOT respond to any outside customers for any reason. It's not my job.
If the e-mail the webmaster (my manager) he responds, that's his job to interact with the public. There are rules in place at most companies for a reason.
This guy broke the rules, knew he was breaking the rules as he wanted his identity hidden, and was fired for it. He was NOT helping a customer, if anything he was helping someone who was criticizing the company he worked for, showing no loyality.

BTW, LOVE the way he ended the email.

"Very truly yours (and hoping I don't get fired for being completely incompetent),"

Maybe he didn't know the company wanted to go water skiing?

Toe the line. Read about the origin of the phrase: [en.wikipedia.org]

Funny, I was thinking the same thing about the gray on black!

I don't usually mind gray on black, but I think his choice of font in combination with the colors made it hard to read.

My mistake, I only read the actual letter and didn't see the permission granted in it. This Mr. X is a Mr. Moron.

@Cant_stop_the_rock:

According to Dustin, Mr. X explicitly authorized him to post the email, removing only his name.

@Cant_stop_the_rock:

"I am republishing it here with permission from him, but he did ask that his name and some other minor details be withheld."

Basically he helped the kid understand that working at a big company isn't like doing the school website, and that for the businesses of your friends families.

The kid's what, 22. I doubt he's EVER worked for a company with 30+ employees. Probably never done anything but freelance. Mr X helped this 'Denis' understand that he knew squat about how businesses work.

Did he authorize it? I didn't notice that in the letter. If he didn't authorize it, this Dustin kid better watch his back ;)

The headlines here are usually a bit exaggerated, but it's not often that they are completely false. Whatever gets people to click I guess.

I don't think that's the part they fired him for.

[dustincurtis.com]

"The problem with the design of AA.com, however, lies less in our competency (or lack thereof, as you pointed out in your post) and more with the culture and processes employed here at American Airlines."

"However, there are large exceptions. For example, our Interactive Marketing group designs and implements fare sales and specials (and doesn't go through us to do it), and the Publishing group pushes content without much interaction with us… Oh, and don't forget the AAdvantage team (which for some reason, runs its own little corner of the site) or the international sites (which have a lot of autonomy in how their domains are run)… Anyway, I guess what I'm saying is that AA.com is a huge corporate undertaking with a lot of tentacles that reach into a lot of interests. It's not small, by any means."

The guy sent an e-mail to an outsider in which he complained about the corporate culture at his company, and that e-mail was posted (likely without permission) publicly. Bad, bad, bad thing to do.

AA wasn't paying him to say what HE thought, and in any case, he shoulda kept his pie hole shut. That's what NDAs are for.

@Charlotte Rae's Web: No doubt. His comment came across the same way to me as well. No details were shared, so I can't imagine that this is an NDA issue.

I think AA didn't like the fact that he said that it was tough to design well at a large company. Perhaps they thought that put the company in a negative light or something silly like that. @_@

This is one of the few times on this site that I have to side with the corp. *GASP*
Obviously the blog that originally did the redesign is a young kid and I'm sure unaware of how large corporations operate with regards to public communications.

He even lists the email from the UX developer as "AA responds" implying (unwittingly) that this was some sort of response from AA corporation as a whole. I'm sure aside from NDA, AA has policies in place about speaking to "media" on behalf of AA, and I'm sure they have some policy about tweeting/bloggin etc.

Nothing really interesting here. IMO the UX guy messed up and AA exercised their right. And I can't really blame them.

I don't even really buy that the guy was trying to offer "customer service." It really seems like he just got burned up by some kid's blog comments, and couldn't hold back from responding and defending his personal work, and in turn sort of knocking the AA corporate environment for the website...then he gave the OK to post it...This is one of the first times on consumerist (detailing a "negative") that I don't disagree with the companies actions.

I think we should give Mr. X the key to the city.

@bohemian: 2nded on that. A former employer got a ~free~ website due to the designers being used by the division. Of course it was crap and we never got any updates. Upon actually getting a different paid service the site advanced greatly into the new millenium (this was in 2005).

That said, I don't get the extreme measure of firing him over this. At worst all Mr X did was to say that AA has a hidebound culture that makes innovation difficult. This is not an uncommon thing in large corporations, particularly ones the size of AA. Anyone who's read Dilbert knows this sort of thing happens all the time and that it's everywhere. So I don't see how this could be viewed as a such a startling revelation that Mr X needed to be fired over it. Reprimanded maybe, but fired?

That said, the OP was pretty foolish to spend time on a mock-up and tell AA they had to use it. I mean, seriously. It's one thing to take user feedback and look into customer suggestions. It's another for a customer to decide unilaterally to redesign an entire Web site and to assume the authority to implement it, merely because he thinks it's better.

Sheesh.

@NeverLetMeDown: I think this is the gist of it. You have to be careful about what you say online. This is why I don't even have my job on Facebook. I don't even want there to be any inkling that I am saying anything in a public forum about my work.

Mr. X authorized the email to be posted, in essence speaking to the press about internal company business, and, in effect, criticizing the company in a public forum. Not surprised he got fired.

How did he "help" the customer? The customer complained about the website, and the designer said "you're right, out site is awful, and i'm going point fingers at everyone".

I'm not saying that the guy was wrong, but large companies have communication departments for this very reason. They don't want all the employees reaching out to the public and telling them the inner workings on the company. They want to be able to tell a single story.