Woman Fired After Complaining to Yelp CEO About
Salary Gets Open Letter From Fellow Millennial — and It’s Brutal
A 29-year-old writer in New York published a scathing
open-letter directed at a 25-year-old woman who complained last
week about her salary in an online post to Yelp’s chief
executive.
Stefanie Williams
turned to Medium to post a brazen message to Talia Jane, the
Yelp employee who
was fired from her job hours after she publicly went after
Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman over her entry-level salary.
Stefanie Williams (Image source: Twitter)
Titled “An Open Letter to Millennials Like Talia,” Williams
hit Jane hard.
“It sounds like you’ve hit some real post Haitian earthquake
style hard times, so maybe some advice will help while you drink
the incredibly expensive bourbon you posted on your Instagram
account and eat that bag of rice, which was the only other thing
you could afford!” she wrote.
Williams explained how she worked her way up from being a
restaurant hostess to a television screenwriter, detailing the
times old classmates belittled her and how she was forced to
miss holidays.
“Long hours, lots of stress, I smelled like bad citrus and
stale beer most of the time, I had to miss Christmas Eve,
Christmas Day and New Years Eve with my family and friends, but
I jumped at the opportunity,” she wrote. “And all of a sudden,
after about a year, I was making enough money to live. And after
several years, I was making enough money to live well.”
She continued:
Had you ended your whole whining disdain about full
health coverage and expensive copays by saying you had taken
a job at Starbucks, or a waitressing job in order to make
money while you were on the search for a new job that
requires the basic knowledge most teenagers with a Twitter
account hold these days, I’d have maybe given you credit.
Saying you moved in with several roommates to cut costs,
tried to budget in a way that was more practical, and
applied for jobs that were more about salary and growth than
bragging rights and trends, I’d say hey, she’s making an
effort. But you are a young, white, English speaking woman
with a degree and a family who I would assume is helping you
out at the moment, and you are asking for handouts from
strangers while you sit on your ass looking for cushy jobs
you are not entitled to while you complain about the
establishment, probably from a nice laptop. To you, that is
more acceptable than taking a job in a restaurant, or a
coffee shop, or a fast food place. And that’s the trouble
with not just your outlook, but the outlook of so many
people your age. You think it is somehow more impressive to
ask strangers for money by writing some “witty” open letter
than it is to put on your big girl pants and take a job you
might be embarrassed by in order to make ends meet. And as
someone who not only took the “embarrassing job”, but
thrived at it, made bank from it and found a career path
through it, I am utterly disgusted by your attitude.
Williams contended that “work ethic is not something that develops from
entitlement.”
“Quite the opposite, in fact,” she wrote. “It develops when you realize there
are a million other people who could perform your job and you are lucky to have
one. It comes from sucking up the bad aspects and focusing on the good and above
all it comes from humility. It comes from modesty. And those are two things,
based on your article, that you clearly do not possess.
She concluded that “there are far more embarrassing things in life than
working at a restaurant, washing dishes, or serving burgers at a fast food
window.”
“And one of them, without one shred of doubt, is displaying your complete
lack of work ethic in public by asking for handouts because you refuse to
actually do work that at the ripe old age of 25 that you think is unworthy of
your witty tweet creating time,” Williams wrote.