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I was wondering when this would hit the news. A set of links, presented without comment (and with the employee name in question redacted):

• "Have a blog, lose your job?" (CNN/Money)
• "the official story, straight from the source" (M— J—'s blog)
• "A little more on M— J—'s story" (Scoble, a fairly high-profile Microsoft employee who blogs)
• "A Chat with M— J—" (Jeremy Zawodny, a Yahoo employee who blogs)

Note that the last two items above are by people who work for competitors of the company in question.

I'm mostly avoiding naming said company in this journal, to reduce the likelihood of search-engine users happening across my entries. (Which is also why I blanked out the guy's name, a name you can easily determine by following any of the above links.) I don't think I've said anything untoward here, but I think bloggers who are employees of high-profile companies (even more than is true for blogs in general) need to be aware that anything they say about the company could appear on the front page of the New York Times the next day. So I try to be circumspect, but also to minimize the likelihood of drawing attention to myself. (But I certainly wouldn't rely exclusively on avoiding using names; that's security by obscurity, and it doesn't work. All it would take is one person linking to an entry of mine and referring to me in the link text as an employee of company X, and then search engines would associate my entry with the name of the company. So circumspection is also a necessary part of the overall approach.)

I'm certainly not going to weigh in on the question of whether the firing was appropriate or not; among other things, I don't have sufficient data to have an informed opinion. But I will note that there are online discussions of the issue that leap to bizarre conclusions about the reasons for the firing. Of course, I don't know what those reasons were either. But some people are making pretty silly assumptions about what they were.