This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
I had a colleague a while back who seemed genuinely brilliant. They had made some specific lifestyle choices, and before they joined, a few people in the work chat had made the odd joke at those choices’ expense. Nothing malicious — just the usual banter.
When they joined the company, this person went through Slack looking at old messages to see if anyone had previously taken a dig at their lifestyle. They found the messages, and managed to work with HR to get the people who’d been laughing fired.
Years later, this person was let go themselves, and since then they’ve been constantly in the middle of some controversy or other. I’m not saying they’re wrong — in principle, they have a point. But I have to say things start to smell a bit off when either you keep getting sacked or there’s always a problem with the CEO or senior leadership.
I won’t set myself up as anyone’s moral compass here — my own tolerance for certain things is genuinely low, and I work hard to train it. For me, professionalism comes before everything else. If your colleagues make jokes that offend you, stop and think about what happens to them if they lose their jobs over it. Professionalism also means being patient when the situation calls for it.
If your company lets you go for any reason — say, because it would rather replace you with AI — the professional thing to do, in my view, is to accept it and move on to the next thing. Turning into a keyboard warrior and leaking company strategies that are covered by an NDA is not professional. I know it’s infuriating, I know it hurts, but professionalism, I’ll say it again, comes first.
If one of your employees calls something out publicly, professionalism requires that you go to your comms department and craft a proper response — not react from the gut, and certainly not without getting some advice first, ideally not from Claude.
The lack of professionalism I see in this industry is staggering. We all need more patience and more professionalism — every single one of us. Have a good weekend.