@DonielF @Daniel this is cool to see -- users meeting or finding out they know other users. It hasn't happened often for me but it's neat when it does. (Meeting several folks at the celebration for five years of Mi Yodeya was great!)

@peterhsaysreinstateMonica thank you. The CEO change was a few days after they fired me, so if that level of the company was involved it could have been either "do this thing the outgoing one wants while we still can" or "do this thing the new one wants before he gets here so he doesn't have to". I did send email to Joel (before the change) but got no reply, so no hints there.

@MonicaCellio I have met a number of MY people, but only once intentionally. A couple of times someone I knew in real life later turned out to be someone I knew on MY and a couple of times I coincidentally met someone in real life after having interacted with them here.

I even once found out that a relative of mine is one of the regular users years after the first time we'd interacted on MY without knowing the other's real-life identify

(possibly even before we'd ever actually met as we're related through marriage)

@MonicaCellio Ok, but these look to me micromanagement things from a CEO level. Why was it so important for them to fire you without any communicatable reason? You applied for a job by them, and you were rejected, but you were not far away from the successful application. Thus, you were near of becoming an employee. And a CEO switch meant from the company, that the jobs of all employee are in danger.

@MonicaCellio On this reason, I suspect, your firing was not initiated from the CEO level. I suspect, it was initiated from a lower level, from a person who considered you as a danger to his/her job. An he/she wanted to eliminate his/her possible follower, to decrease the chance of his/her firing. Here comes our most "loved" *Director in the picture. Doesn't she sit now in the position, were also you applied last year?

@MonicaCellio Many years ago, the list of the internal and external employee of the company was available on the StackExchange.com. As far I know, it is not so today, but what was very obvious, that only very few of them has a work in direct contact with the site network. People working on such places knows this very well, and typically they start internal wrangles. Furthermore, I don't really believe that the SE would pay more for a job only because it is a famous company.

@MonicaCellio On these reasons, I don't believe that it would be so nice to work by them.

Some of the concurrents (maybe quora?) had some similar problems already, as far I know, there the reaction of the management was that now all of their mods are employee. This change happened because there was a similar conflict with a volunteer mod. Some similar is imho possible also on the SE.

@peterhsaysreinstateMonica I have no reason to believe it came from the CEO. I tried to escalate the matter to the CEO (which at the time I thought was the next step up from the director; didn't know the CTO was in the management chain), but got nowhere. I have no idea if either CEO cares about me.

I applied for a position as a community manager, not a director. I didn't threaten the director's job. I'm also very glad now that I wasn't hired; only a few months later the HNQ debacle happened and it became clear that things were changing in how SE interacts with the community.

@MonicaCellio If they had applied you, you had became an external employee, like Shog or Cartaino?

@peterhsaysreinstateMonica I'm not sure what you mean by "external CM", but, I would have been an employee on the same team as Shog, Jon Ericson, JNat, and a few others. There are currently 6 CMs, I believe.

@MonicaCellio Sorry I wanted to say "remote". I.e. people who don't work from the NY office, but from remotely, mostly not even from NY.

Some of them focus only on Stack Overflow and some focus on the broader network. One focuses on international sites.

@peterhsaysreinstateMonica oh, yes. Many SE employees are remote (all over the world). I would have done that.

@MonicaCellio Then it is totally mysterious to me. You really were not a danger!

@peterhsaysreinstateMonica maybe they thought I was, in some way I can't see. I don't know; they have never told me what I supposedly did to violate the CoC, despite repeated requests for this information and for a discussion so we could resolve whatever the problem was.

(I can't imagine a scenario where my being a moderator threatened anybody's job, but maybe it threatened somebody's ego or quarterly goals or something? Dunno.)

@MonicaCellio You clearly did not violate the CoC, I think everybody knows it. The real question is, why did they do it then. As far I know, only 3 CMs can mod/de-mod people: Tim, Shog and Jon Ericson. But you weren't de-modded by them, instead by an internal employee.