'Oh sh*t': Fired Reddit employee does AMA to criticise his dismissal, CEO responds telling everyone all the ways in which he did a lousy job

Employee claimed it was over his philanthropic concerns, employer said he was just incompetent

You might get away with going on a tirade against your former employer on Reddit if you work for a regional industrial lubricants company - the CEO of which may have not heard of the content aggregation site or check it regularly – but it's probably not advisable if you actually worked for Reddit.

This is what David Ehrmann did as he set up an AMA (Ask Me Anything) yesterday, saying he was "laid off" for "officially, no reason".

"I vaguely know how CA employment law works and that you limit your liability by not stating a reason," he explained. "It's also really hard to work through in your mind.

"The best theory I have is that, two weeks earlier, I raised concerns about donating 10 per cent of ad revenue to charity. Some management likes getting feedback, some doesn't.

"The reason I had concerns was that this was revenue, not income. That means you need - 10 per cent margins to break even.

"This can be hard to do; Yahoo and Twitter don't. Salesforce does something similar, but it's more all-around, and in a way that promotes the product without risking the company's financials."

Ehrmann was clearly hoping to come across as some kind of philanthropic martyr, but Reddit CEO Yishan Wong soon crashed his party, commenting:

Reddit CEO Yishan Wong's response

"Ok, there's been quite a bit of FUD in here, so I think it's time to clear things up.

You were fired for the following reasons:

Incompetence and not getting much work done.

Inappropriate or irrelevant comments/questions when interviewing candidates

Making incorrect comments in public about reddit's systems that you had very little knowledge of, even after having these errors pointed out by your peers and manager.

Not taking feedback from your manager or other engineers about any of these when given to you, continuing to do #2 until we removed you from interviewing, and never improving at #1."

Minutes later, another user replied with a simple but succinct: "Oh sh*t".