Former Xbox chief operating officer Helen Chiang says she was not fired for a policy violation. In a lengthy LinkedIn post titled “Clarity is Kindness,” Chiang wrote that the claim is “not accurate” and that “silence should not be mistaken for agreement,” as Pure Xbox reports.
As we covered when Chiang left Microsoft in October, a source told Eurogamer she had allegedly been “terminated for policy violations,” a claim Eurogamer said it could not independently confirm. Xbox declined to discuss personnel matters at the time. Chiang had been promoted into the COO role in July, and Pure Xbox notes she spent 21 years at Microsoft.
Her post goes point by point. Chiang says she did not leak confidential company information to the press, and that she has never communicated with any journalist outside limited, company-authorized interviews. She says she did not leave Xbox to join a competitor, writing that “my end game was always to keep building here.”
She also denies engaging in “discrimination, bullying, harassment, insider trading, embezzlement, or other fraudulent activity,” and says she did not leave because she was passed over for a bigger role. She adds that she did not ask for her most recent job and that the last time she interviewed for a position was in 2011.
Chiang does not say why she left. She does raise a concern about process. “I believe in fairness, accountability, and holding ourselves to the standards we expect of others. Those standards only mean something when they’re applied consistently,” she wrote. “I have serious concerns about how they were applied in my case, and I believe those concerns deserve to be taken seriously.”
She says she wants to avoid her exit being “reduced to an inaccurate story about incompetence, ambition for the next big job, or a Nelson-level scandal.” Windows Central says that line does not refer to former Xbox figure Major Nelson, but to a fictional character named Nelson in Microsoft’s internal conduct training videos.
Pure Xbox points out that “clarity is kindness” is a phrase Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has used repeatedly since taking the job. Chiang closes the post with a line that leaves the door open: “This is not how I ever imagined my story here would end. And it is not the whole story.”
