[anal_reactor]

> Many of us are mature enough to follow the principle of, "if you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything."

This isn't maturity, this is selfishness. A group often benefits from someone challenging the status quo, but the individual doing that gets punished. In your view, Germans during WW2 were "mature" by not saying anything that wasn't nice about nazism, and nowadays Russians are "mature" when they don't want to discuss a war that left a million people either dead or wounded - both cases are individuals acting out of self-preservation, not "maturity".

If you're American, then maybe a good example is Martin Luther King Jr. - do you really think that he should've had the maturity to shut up and not say anything that wasn't nice about racism? Well, he got killed, just like your junior employee got fired, so I guess he was indeed a loser in a sense.

In general this is a very common pattern in corporations where everyone is "just doing their job" and "being mature" but the end result is atrocities - for example Nestle literally killing babies.

[kstrauser]

I might generalize this as “push against actions, not personalities”. Don’t like someone because you just don’t mesh? Keep your mouth shut. You have a different outlook than they do, and yours is as wrong from their POV as theirs is from yours. Someone you think is interesting and fun to be around does something bad? Resist it.

[anal_reactor]

It happens very rarely that there's someone I don't like as a person but I know they're competent in their domain. Sure, it does happen, but it's very rare.

[kstrauser]

For real? I’ve known all sorts of brilliant bastards. Or even people who weren’t actually jerks, just incompatible with me in an oil and water sort of way, like they were exceedingly uptight, or so happy-go-lucky that they thought I was the uptight one. We just didn’t get along at all, but they weren’t bad people, and certainly not incompetent, just not a good pairing with me.

[Ferret7446]

There's a difference between criticism and personal insults, and honestly if you can't tell the difference you might be a liability for your employer.

[anal_reactor]

In a perfect world yes. In reality, people often take offense in being criticized. Or ignore the feedback until the situation becomes disastrously bad.