There's also a difference between criticizing your employees' work publicly vs privately. (And let's be honest - most likely the employee is 100% correct here, and he's lying about their performance as expressed by the codebase.)
> Eh, there’s a difference between criticizing your boss publicly vs privately.
Well, judging from the recent stories about Twitter’s internal environment and the public examples of criticism at Twitter, privately in an organization with no viable upstream internal communication and a culture of fear and retaliation is both impossible and likely to get you fired (immediately or on a list of targets by management) without your message getting to the top, whereas publicly your message is at least more likely to get to the top before you get fired, plus you are likely to have job offers in the thread, so, its clearly the preferred strategy.
Only one of them is wildly inappropriate.