Huawei demotes employees for tweeting NYE message from iPhone

midian182

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Facepalm: Did you send out ‘Happy New Year’ messages on social media? It’s something a lot of people did, including Huawei through its official Twitter account. What the company didn’t expect, however, was for it to be marked with (sent) “via Twitter for iPhone.” The Chinese giant was so enraged by the blunder that it’s demoted the two employees responsible.

“Happy #2019,” read Huawei’s New Year’s Eve message, which was sent from a device made by its US rival. The post was quickly deleted, but screenshots were already circulating across the internet and proved particularly popular on Chinese site Weibo.

According to an internal memo seen by Reuters, Huawei’s corporate senior vice-president and director of the board, Chen Lifang, said, “the incident caused damage to the Huawei brand.”

The mistake is said to have occurred due to Huawei’s outsourced social media handler, Sapient, experiencing “VPN problems” on the desktop PC it uses to send out tweets. The issues meant it had to use an iPhone with a roaming SIM card to post the New Year message.

Like many Western services, including Facebook, Twitter is banned in China, forcing people to use VPNs if they want to access the site.

For their mistake, Huawei said in the memo that it had demoted the two employees responsible by one rank and reduced their monthly salaries by 5,000 yuan ($728.27). The pay rank of one of the employees—Huawei's digital marketing director—will also be frozen for 12 months

Sending out a tweet from a competitor’s device is never good, but this faux pas comes at an especially bad time in Chinese-American relations. In addition to the trade war, the US has long accused Huawei of spying on behalf of China, and things reached a head last month when its CFO, Meng Wanzhou, was arrested in Canada at the request of the US government. It’s led to many Chinese companies supporting Huawei by subsidizing employees who purchase devices from the company instead of iPhones.

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Your weekly Huawei bashing giveth us today...
Keep them under fire. There's weapons of mass destruction in those trucks! Wait, they have them under the school. No, they're in the lockers! :p
 
Eat your own dog food. That is, use your damn products if you stand by them, not the competitions.

Unfortunately they are not the only ones - Microsoft is using Macs as well, apparently their marketing team as well as several execs are allergic to Windows ...
 
Eat your own dog food. That is, use your damn products if you stand by them, not the competitions.

Unfortunately they are not the only ones - Microsoft is using Macs as well, apparently their marketing team as well as several execs are allergic to Windows ...
Eh, it still comes down to preference. The iPhone wouldn't be his work phone (which they probably should have a Huawei work phone in that position).
 
The mistake is said to have occurred due to Huawei’s outsourced social media handler ... For their mistake, Huawei said in the memo that it had demoted the two employees responsible by one rank and reduced their monthly salaries by 5,000 yuan

I'm confused. Does "outsourced" mean something different in China? Because in the US if I outsource work it means it goes to an entirely different company. I would have no say in disciplinary actions other than threatening to pull my contract.
 
I'm confused. Does "outsourced" mean something different in China? Because in the US if I outsource work it means it goes to an entirely different company. I would have no say in disciplinary actions other than threatening to pull my contract.
You have, if they are breaching contracts. They might be putting access to certain sites at risk, expose passwords, credentials, etc.
If you get caught by your employer using your private phone to access your company accounts, while this is explicitly forbidden, you will likely get sacked. In this case it's even worse, as they are "part of the marketing" (social media handler). We've seen people getting fired, here in Germany, because they drove the wrong car while having a sponsoring deal with another car manufacturer.
This isn't new. It's new that this is making the news, though.
 
While I think they are probably lucky to keep their jobs, I find it really distasteful to reduce pay. Either they are good enough to keep despite the mistake or they are bad enough to be fired. But don't take advantage of an employee making a mistake as leverage to cut corners and save a little money without reducing manpower. That's exploitative.
 
While I think they are probably lucky to keep their jobs, I find it really distasteful to reduce pay. Either they are good enough to keep despite the mistake or they are bad enough to be fired. But don't take advantage of an employee making a mistake as leverage to cut corners and save a little money without reducing manpower. That's exploitative.

They did keep the employee, but with a penalty, which, in the circumstances is fair enough. Given the significance of this matter, it would not have been appropriate to keep the employee whilst not implementing some type of penalty. It is certainly not about saving a little money. It is about penalising the employee for the mistake as well as setting an example to other employees. For the employee, one can assume that keeping their job with reduced pay is significantly better than being fired.
 
This is simply an example of what tracking can do for you. For every advantage there is probably more disadvantages.
 
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