If someone is supposed to be the target of your attention (be it in class, at dinner or during your every day life) societal expectations should be that you give them your attention. 20 years ago you wouldn't turn on the television in the middle of a conversation, you wouldn't turn on the radio either.
I can sort of understand if it's a child in high school, after all they're in class because they're required to be, however in a class that has been chosen (by an adult) it's not acceptable. The student should have excused herself from the class if it was so important her attention was elsewhere.
It's about one person feeling they have the right to carry on as a noisy nuisance in that environment, to the detriment of everyone else's experience.
If the person's activity was silent, making the only social breach ignoring the instructor, I'd be much less likely to consider that a problem in need of addressing.
A detail you would want to have before you came to a conclusion about this:
"At Facebook and a number of other institutions we work with, instructors cannot preclude fitness center users from answering their phones," David Milani, a spokesman for Plus One Health Management, which runs Facebook's gym, told me. He didn't want to tell me a lot more, other than that "there is no doubt that this instructor knew that."
I don't see the issue here. This person's job was not to teach yoga. It was to make employees happier, and to increase Facebook's attractiveness in the job market. Facebook came to believe that the way she conducted her class, while perhaps effective at conveying yoga, made her less effective as an employee perk. End of story. Facebook's role here, to the extent that it invests in yoga classes, is to ensure that whoever is teaching yoga is doing so in the way that maximizes the happiness of its employees.
If you want to command the respect of serious yoga students, don't teach yoga as an employee perk for hire.
Think of it in these terms: people call tech support lines all the time and unleash torrents of the worst rudeness you can imagine. How long do you think a well-run call center would retain a phone support person who chided callers for impoliteness?
If Facebook hired an office assistant and decided that it improved employee morale to also throw marshmallows at said office assistant as they walked down the hall, well that's what that office assistant was hired for. If they complain, get another one. "End of story".
If you want to be a real office assistant, go someplace else.
[yes, I am being sarcastic, I believe it is illustrative in this case]
Edit: Also Thomas, are you saying that employees have a right to be rude to personel of their company's helpdesk?
I think this is a ridiculous apples-oranges comparison.
The sole purpose of a yoga instructor at Facebook is to improve employee morale. Facebook is entirely justified in looking to optimize yoga instructors for employee happiness. This particular yoga intructor was apparently not a good fit.
I don't know that. I'd need to hear from other people in the class before making a judgement on it.
If the student was making the class worse for other students, then despite that student being unhappy about the teacher the teacher's actions were actually good for morale. (Were I a student in the class, that is how I'd have felt. YMMV.) By contrast if this was one in a long line of incidents where the teacher was ticking off students, then the firing was appropriate.
But the squeaky wheel gets the grease. The rude student complained and had enough weight to get the instructor fired. I'll probably never have enough information to have an opinion on whether Facebook made the right decision.
I think that if I was in HR at Facebook, I'd be thinking "I'm doing HR for a multibillion dollar company in a fierce battle for talent with some of the most savvy companies in the world. I do not have the bandwidth to adjudicate yoga disputes. Hey, company I contract out to for yoga classes: just send someone different next time so I can get on with my real job."
Ultimately I don't care about the specifics of this story, except that it seems like a really good parable for teaching the difference between how businesses and insiders perceive value. Substitute "PHP developer" for "yoga instructor" and you could forklift this whole thread into the "Ask HN: How can I become a consultant" posting from earlier today. "Start by not being like this yoga instructor."
(I don't think the yoga structure is a bad person; I just think she had the wrong job.)
I've corrected my reference to your name in the post above.
It seems like you are saying that if I was a Facebook employee and you were a yoga instructor there, I would be under no obligation to do so since you would be there solely for my entertainment - (I mean "morale")?
Edit: Also, you may find it hard to believe but Yoga instructor is actually a job that most instructors take seriously and pursue with the aim of teaching people yoga rather than simply improving morale. Most yoga instructors probably have gone through more training than an average office assistant. Still, for all I know the job was advertised with the description "yoga-instructor, not serious, only for the morale".
Please resist the urge to drive the conversation into absurd places, like throwing marshmallows at office workers or yoga instructors.
Facebook is not a giant yoga instruction business. The yoga instructors are there specifically to make employees happier. Not more efficient. Not more compliant with regulations. Not more accountably. Certainly not "better at yoga". Happier. That is the job of a contracting yoga instructor who teaches at companies like Facebook. You're not engaging with that point; you're just throwing marshmallows at it.
If the entire story here is that Facebook turns out to be a bad place to run a yoga class, I'm left wondering: who gives a shit? And so to your last edit: I'm sure this is a very important controversy in yoga circles. But back in the real world, we still find ourself talking about a company that bought free yoga lessons for its employees, and then got punished in the press for not doing it the right way.
>>The yoga instructors are there specifically to make employees happier
What makes the employees happy? Fake Yoga?
This is clearly a case of somebody totally uninterested in yoga, but wants to learn it because of a hype kind of a person getting into a Yoga class.
I understand you are trying to convey Facebook itself wants to sell fake yoga to its employees, so that they can get the feeling of a perk. Which is actually just a ritual the company wants to do and get over with. But if I were to be a guy in that yoga class I would raise my voice against insult to yoga and also the teacher in general, because sooner or later nothing serious will ever happen in such a company.
If I ever go to a music class or whatever class. I go there because I genuinely want to learn something. I don't like uninterested people joining and spreading nuisance to other serious participants who are serious about learning things.
For whatever it's worth, here's her side of the story:
They have a little gym there where I taught a yoga class, in addition to Pilates and cycling classes.
Right before class began, a student was typing on her phone. Noticing this, I asked the whole class to turn off their cell phones.
She obliged, put it down next to her mat, and we began.
Halfway into class, right as I was starting a demo of ardha chandrasna (half moon pose), she decided to check her phone.
I stopped talking and looked at her.
I said nothing, but I’m sure my face said it all. “Really? Your email is more important than understanding your body? It’s more important than taking time for you? It’s more important than everyone else here?”
Oh, and by the way, she was in the middle of the front row.
She stepped out and rejoined class a few minutes later. Apparently, she had gone to complain to management.
Previously, I had been asked by management to just let the students do whatever they wanted.
Come in late, leave early, answer emails, come in during class to get weights, take photos for the newsletter—whatever came up, I was told to just say yes.
So, on this day, I didn’t actually say anything to this student. I just looked at her with utter disbelief.
Two weeks later, I was fired from the Facebook gym.
I contested the decision at the time since I didn’t actually ask her to leave.
They had already made their decision.
"Come in late, leave early, answer emails, come in during class to get weights, take photos for the newsletter—whatever came up, I was told to just say yes." What did she think was going to happen?
I felt bad for her until I read this which actually is her side of the story. It appears that a similar issue must have been brought to the management's attention previously since she was told to let her students do whatever they want. The incident is in clear violation of their pleads because she stopped a class to single out the person using her phone. The fact that she did not actually say anything is irrelevant here.
Wow that's an amazing view. First of all she didnt say anything it was a god damn look, she couldve had a stomach cramp and made a face for all the person on the phone knows. The article also states that this was during a difficult pose the instructor was demonstrating, what about the "happyness" of the other employees in the class? Don't you think distracting them by talking on the phone ruins their experience and makes all those other people less happy, just to make 1 more happy? This type of rule seems in place for business purposes(business related calls comming in that can't wait) not for what might or might not make a person happy. If this employee has such ego problems that shes rude enough to answer the phone, not step out of the class and distract everyone else then complain about the a god damn look she got from the teacher, the only word i can think of using for her is "bitch" and i wouldn't want some one like that at my company.
don't laugh, yoga gossip is serious business. comming up next: the hot dog in googleplex wasn't warm enough. stay tuned for more irrelevant crap in the next episode of
'unknown people working at famous places'.
So.... she was told that she couldn't prohibit cellphone usage in class yet she tried to embarrass a mid-level or higher executive into not using his or her cellphone?
Well... if you try to shame your bosses, you get fired. This is a non-story.
Facebook is big into mobile engagement, so I suppose it's not in their interest to have social norms that involve disconnecting during daily life. But this sounds like merely a conflict between "yoga is exercise" and "yoga is new age religion" people.
1. The headline says "silence". That conjures up imagery of the loud cell phone talker, but from the context of the article it's more likely that the yoga student was texting or emailing.
2. The article also states that "Plus One Health Management told the San Jose Mercury News that Van Ness had been told that she could not prohibit cell phone use in class." I assume that Van Ness had been advised on this before she started teaching the class not after being fired, but the article isn't explicit. It might be that if these yoga classes are offered in the middle of the day, that Facebook employees might be expected to answer important emails during class.
This article is short on the facts needed to properly judge the situation.
This is silly. If you're in a class, and you disagree witih how the teacher runs things, you stop taking the class. I'd be shocked if Facebook didn't have multiple instructors.
That being said, I'd hardly be shocked if there was to the story than Good Morning America is letting on.
Not to be overly contrarian, but I wonder to what extent the setting matters. I don't know all the details, but it sounds like it was a workplace yoga studio. What if the call was a work-related emergency?
One of the virtues of having an on-site yoga studio has to be that you can take a break during the workday... but if there's a reasonable expectation of being reachable, asking everyone to leave work at the door 100% isn't totally realistic (and might mean that some people can't participate).
So while the normal rules of courtesy still apply, and the person receiving the call should probably step out if the call looks like it's going to drag on, the setting does matter.
There's a very simple solution to this problem: the cell phone user should politely walk out of the classroom and take the call outside the door. It sounds like the student in question took the call right in the classroom, which is rude regardless of the setting. Imagine taking a call in the middle of a meeting, in a conference room!
I really would like the ability to answer my phone with some kind of recorded message that would then go to hold. Lots of times I'd like to talk to the caller, but don't want to start talking until I'm out of the room and/or earshot. Does this exist?
I'm not sure about the recorded-message-then-hold thing, but Android 4.0 has a feature where when there's an incoming call, the user can hang up, answer the call, or quickly choose from a few configurable text messages to send the caller (which also hangs up the call). You could set one of those canned messages to say "Hey, I can't take your call at my present location, I will call you back in 1 minute." Not perfect, but pretty useful.
No, the setting really doesn't matter. You walk out of the class in a discrete manner. Courtesy and respect for others is universal. You certainly don't follow up your poor behavior by complaining that you got a look from an instructor.
That feels like sarcasm, but honestly, yoga has some dangerous poses in it, I think it's not unreasonable to demand few distractions when doing something possibly dangerous.
Yoga is all about reaching an inner peace through physical and mental discipline. Sitting there with your phone beeping and buzzing is an offensively poor effort to do an activity well.
Actually, exactly like those two activities. I think you're taking needless risks if you do either and use your cell phone at the same time. As do many state legislatures, with regards to the driving and phones.
If this happened as reported, then it's a ridiculous story. As several have said one can easily walk outside and take a call if it's really that urgent. However I find that in these stories there tends to be another side to it that isn't being reported. Either way I'm not really sure why it's on Hacker News, not particularly insightful or interesting.
I can sort of understand if it's a child in high school, after all they're in class because they're required to be, however in a class that has been chosen (by an adult) it's not acceptable. The student should have excused herself from the class if it was so important her attention was elsewhere.