What it feels like to be bullied out of a job you love
First, this is basic human behavior. It appears this SVP had a job to manage social interactions and the author was stepping out of their role. Typical company policies are to manage social media via a point team, i.e. employees don&#x27;t discuss work publicly. The author even mentioned this:<p>&gt; In fact, I was so prolific on social media that I got the attention of several industry analysts who asked how my company used social media for brand promotion and marketing. Of course, since I was in engineering, I sent these inquiries over to our PR department.<p>The SVP was likely feeling the author was impacting company public relations, independent from the point team.<p>It would be equivalent to someone in marketing force pushing code to production.<p>Regarding the authors feelings -- again, he&#x27;s stepping out of his role and not coordinating with the marketing team. Of course leadership would ask him to knock it off or be fired.<p>&gt; His stern look communicated that he was talking about my career and was clearly not messing around. I felt bullied, threatened, and scared. Because I feared being unfairly scrutinized and I&#x27;d just had my job threatened, it was tough for me to feel comfortable saying anything about my work life on Twitter after that.<p>Shouldn&#x27;t have been talking about work life on twitter anyway... The way the author discusses &quot;bullying&quot; is literally every interaction in a business. Organizations must be clear and consistent. Leaders need to be as well. Yes, they can fire you; yes, they can tell you what to do. That&#x27;s life, that&#x27;s the way human designed structures work.<p>&gt; There are a few reasons why I think this happened to me. Being a young Black man in the tech field put me in a vulnerable position where different equals disposable. Maybe being privy to Rick&#x27;s inherent lack of knowledge of the very thing he professed to be an expert on gave me some perceived leverage over him; thus, I was a threat to be eliminated. My lack of seniority and title also put me at a disadvantage. Ultimately, I believe that in true bully fashion, he got his kicks by using his power to affect other people&#x27;s lives for sport.<p>Maybe that&#x27;s true, but in all likelihood the author was stepping out of line. Discussing race in this context seems to detract from that actual events. The author even quit his &quot;dream&quot; job to to work in social media...<p>&gt; This eventually led me to quit and pursue my passion for social media marketing outside my &quot;dream&quot; company.<p>Clearly, the author wasn&#x27;t interested in their engineering job and decided to do something else -- fine, but not what the company hired them for.