I really wish that this whole thing could have ended amicably (perhaps with Adria apologizing to the devs [by the way, the guy who was fired <i>has</i> already publicly apologized]).<p>It's too bad that sendgrid had to fire her, I would never wish that somebody had their livlihood taken from them like that, but her job was to be a developer evangelist, which is a job she isn't realistically capable of performing anymore.<p>I would feel <i>really uncomfortable</i> if I was in the same room as this person. What if I accidentally say something that she finds offensive? Am I next?<p>And honestly, she can't even function as a sort of "women's tech evangelist" anymore. Most [all, actually] of the women I've talked to about this are <i>furious</i> with her over how badly this portrays women.<p>It sucks...but this is on par with firing a dev who can't program.
Whether you agree with what she did, she was their "developer evangelist", and there is no chance she'll ever be able to effectively do that job for them ever again.
I feel that all the threats and horrible comments she received are disgusting.<p>I didn't find their joke offensive. But thats irrelevant. She had a right to complain. But not by posting their picture on twitter.<p>Posting that picture was a really rotten thing to do. Its an act of bullying. I can take a picture of anyone and they would have said whatever I put on the caption. And its up to them to prove to the internet that they didn't do it.
After reading her full explanation of the "incident" and the PyCon code of conduct, I have to disagree completely with what Adria did.<p>Two guys were making some silly, completely non-sexist jokes between themselves that mixed 'dongles' and 'forking' with a bit of innuendo. Despite the fact that they weren't directed at her -- or anyone, for that matter -- she took personal offense and decided the best course of action was to publicly shame them (picture and all).<p>Her reaction was far more immature than the humor that triggered it. If you're 30-something years old and still can't handle overhearing a bit of lighthearted middle school humor, it's probably time to move into a cave and cancel your internet service.
Although this would seem to be another knee-jerk, exaggerated reaction, and I personally believe that she shouldn't have been fired (and that the first guy shouldn't have been either), we should also consider the SendGrid CEO's position; his company is under attack, might fail, so getting rid of the person whom this attack is targeting seems like the obvious thing to do.<p>I'm guessing that SendGrid will loose some other customers now, as a result of this last action. Suspending her would be more reasonable.
I can't help but feel that if I, as a male, had posted the same tweet in response to some obnoxious guys behind me making situationally inappropriate comments and I was in her shoes as an evangelist at the time, no one would have batted an eye.<p>Granted, I probably wouldn't have written a long blog post about it, but I've certainly talked to event organizers in the past about obnoxious people before and had them ejected.
One thing I'm really trying to fathom here is that people really think the dongle joke, in this context, was sexist and not just mildly so.<p>Let's say a presenter put up a slide where Florida was pink and and somebody said to their buddy, "Ok, now it really looks like a penis."<p>Are large numbers of us really taking the side that this joke would be incredibly offensive, abusive and oppressive to women and should result in the pair being ejected from the conference.<p>Because that <i>seems</i> to be the stance many are taking. And I'm bewildered. To be clear, it's juvenile. I'd personally say "Are you guys 12? Cut it out."<p>Can we reserve our moral outrage for the people saying "That's so gay." or "She wants the 'D'" or "At least it's not black" in the same situation? You know, things that are actually offensive and problematic.
Does it really matter <i>why</i> she was fired? I don't understand why these two companies, SendGrid and PlayHaven couldn't have gotten together, with these two employees, and communicated about the entire incident and publicly come to an amicable resolution over it.<p>It seems that knee jerk reactions from everyone has done little to foster workable environments for anyone. I will say this though, it's out of control.<p>Firing employees on either side just screams of "we don't know how to deal with this..." All of this has descended from a fucking private dongle joke amongst peers.
This post contains no more information than did the other deleted threads. The past threads were deleted because HN mods think that the announcement is fake. This Mashable story adds no new reporting.
She could have simply turned around and told them that she found what they were saying offensive and that would have been the end of it. Instead she choose to publicly humiliate and shame them, at the cost of one man's job, and that was going to far. Frankly, she acted like a bully.<p>When I saw some other post she'd made on Twitter where she joked about telling a guy to stuff a sock in his pants for TSA searches I really felt like she was the bad actor here... it made her seem more than a little hypocritical.
The internet does a lot of good but times like this it can be scary – or just plain wrong.<p>Once the wheels of motion are turning there is <i>nothing</i> anyone can do, even the way Hacker News behaved with it's mob mentality was absurd – two people got fired, SendGrid was brought offline, some poor lady received death threats, everyone was humiliated in some capacity, and by the looks of the comment thread on the SendGrid facebook page, equality in tech has been notched back a few decades.<p>Talk about blowing something out of proportion: some guy made a <i>dongle</i> joke to a friend of his at a conference. It's kind of terrifying if you think how easily you could have been one of the characters in this. You see so many times when some poor person has his personal details spread over the internet based on a rumour. What do you even do when this happens?<p>Mountain. Mole hill.
In events like these I'm glad I'm living under protective labor laws and not in the US. That would have forced all parties involved to talk it out like grown-ups instead of resorting to terminating those involved.<p>Now there is no kind of resolution, but two people are unemployed and two companies are damaged. Nice going.
One thing that I haven't seen anyone here comment on: so much for company loyalty.<p>Say or do something wrong and your company will not even remotely try to get your back. You will be dumped as soon as feasibly possible.<p>Both companies involved here are disgusting.
When the dust settles, all that will have really changed is male workers being even more overly-sensitive to every syllable they utter when a female colleague is within earshot.<p>I've personally said "Just fork her" many times at work in front of my female co-workers without an afterthought. While I will continue to do so, if a new female employee starts after today I may just wait for her to make a penis joke before I feel comfortable enough to suggest copying someone's repository to their personal one for the sake of code contribution and/or modification.<p>Sweet cake-frosting-Christ - this all could have been avoided with a head turn and a "Hey, do you guys mind not speaking like that here? It's making me uncomfortable".
This reminds me why I hate real names on public social networking when talking about these types of issues.<p>Whatever this woman's original motive was got immediately lost in the shallow exchanges which follow, but the commentary becomes important because it is now personal.<p>I feel more contempt for the real name trolls now gloating over her firing too. None of whom I assume were present at the original event. The internet is full of bile, but I'm happier with anonymous bile.
Can you imagine how bad this is going to get when Google glass is on every nose?<p>I'm usually the guy seeing opportunity in every "doomsday" prediction but, I really see no upside for most people in being recorded all the time.<p>This is going to compound cyber-bullying effects by orders of magnitude.<p>I find the focus on her gender irrelevant. Is the story any different if it is a man vilifying and excoriating women he overhears? No. She is/was basically incompetent. A tech evangelist is basically a salesperson, her job is to create goodwill. You don't report your customers as offensive even when you think they are. And you especially NEVER bring bad will on your company brand. You deal with it and move on.
This is bad. How many people really care about the story ? The culprits aren't either parties but the people who helped to blow that story out of proportion and the companies who doesn't have the guts to stand behind their employees.<p>We should be allowed to express ourselves and to make mistakes in the process. More tolerance please. I don't want to live in a world where we can be threatened by a virtual mob for 140 characters that we wrote.
I wonder if you could re-create this whole debacle in 3 months with fake people; you could use your post-mortem to tell people that you faked them out and announce your startup PR firm.
Keep in mind that Adria Richards was acting in an official capacity as a representative of SendGrid at PyCon. SendGrid's business is transactional email, and one of their public spokespersons happily outs private conversations on social media, even distributing photographs of people without their permission -- as a SendGrid customer who takes privacy <i>very</i> seriously, I found this concerning, and I have been looking at alternatives since this fiasco.
Right now it looks like SendGrid fired her because of the DDoS they suffered a few hours ago. Once you can blackmail a company into firing someone like this .... I think it's dangerous for the company.
If SendGrid did not offer to let Adria resign, shame on it. If she refused, shame on her.<p>Shame on her for not apologizing immediately when the firestorm broke out. I suspect this would have preserved two jobs.
Let's not forget she wasn't the only one who lost her job because of this whole debacle.<p><a href="http://blog.playhaven.com/addressing-pycon/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.playhaven.com/addressing-pycon/</a>
this is exactly why I dont use any social media in my real name, and I especially dont ever reveal who I work for. the moment you stick your company name on your twitter/fb profile you are now their spokesman and they can legally fire you for just about anything.<p>media will make this a womens rights false argument and she will get a book deal plus her 15mins.<p>glad my 3 contractors i hired are remote, degenerate neckbeards who dont use anything besides degenerate filled IRC channels. media doesnt give a shit about IRC
While misogyny has gone on for centuries and needs to be stopped, obsessing over two (relatively) harmless jokes that aren't sexual in the <i>slightest</i> pales in comparison to the genuine problem, which is verbal abuse and sexism, as clearly evidenced on Richards' blog.<p>Sorry to say, but forking and dongles are just bad jokes. Not sexual or inappropriate ones. If Richards wished to take action against sexism in the technology field, she could have spoken out against it with proper evidence, because getting fussy over harmless fun is not the way to deal with it.<p>I understand her predicament. Sometimes you have just had enough to deal with, and you can't stand it. You have to release. But reason triumphs over emotion. You can't just go completely nuts over the wrong problem. Calculate your objective and create a plan; if you can't do that, honestly you don't deserve to be in the software field.
I think the end result is so dumb. People from both sides got fired, a lot of angry tweets and comments, DOS attacks, etc. I think the whole thing could have been avoided by 1) Not making a private conversation public 2) Solving any issues privately between the involved parties.
I shared this on a previous thread that was removed:<p>Wow, just wow. Five wrongs don't make a right.<p><pre><code> 1. Two men make crude jokes to one another at conference.
2. Adria shames them.
3. PlayHaven fires one of them.
4. Internet goes berserk and threatens her.
5. SendGrid fires Adria.
</code></pre>
I bet all parties wish that either these men didn't joke around like this or that she would have simply turned around and said "Y'know, boys, I'm trying to watch this lightning talk can you keep it down or keep your jokes to yourself for now?" Or, even kept her twitter posting to simply asking Pycon to take care of it.<p>Sad. This is a net negative.
Please let's just let this topic die. I think I have seen 4 high-ranking HN threads about this already. Probably, this comment of mine is not helping the situation either. sigh.
I think Playhaven owes everyone involved with this a better explanation on exactly why this employee was fired. Were they just looking for a reason to get rid of him in the first place, or did what happened at PyCon really justify his termination? Let's not forget - there's a lot of Sendgrid customers who have become collateral damage in this fiasco who have nothing to do with any of it, and probably still have no idea what's going on.
Lets play my favorite game: <i>How should it have happened?</i><p>Acceptable case: Adria turns around to the guys in question and politely lets them know that she is not cool with middle-school humor at a professional event. They are embarrassed, and think twice about it next time.<p>Best case: The <i>guys</i> around them do this first.<p>What actually happend: A chain-reaction of explosive over-reactions.
Smart move by SendGrid. The short term windfall for having ditched her is easier to swallow than having your brand name attached to this whole fiasco. After the DDoS attacks I am sure they lost paying customers, and as a startup they cannot afford to continue to take a hit like this.
The voluminous Internet reaction is an example of bike shedding, I think. We don't have strong opinions on a given topic that we don't know much about, but we all know what it's like to be ourselves in social and professional situations, and we all have strong opinions about that.
I don't understand why this whole issue is being looked at from a feminist Angle. What would the reaction be if a guy has tweeted the same thing? I am not sure if what she did was right/wrong. deciding if she is right or wrong considering it a action of a women saddens me.
There seems to be a massive trend of people getting in hot water because of Tweets, then going into damage control mode to provide context for their remarks. Part of the problem is the medium itself. Arguments, especially those that are interesting and meaningful, aren't always meant to be condensed into 140-character snippets.<p>Take this story, for example. While I'm not taking anyone's side, I think that if Adria had been able to provide context for what happened (i.e. saying more about the nature of the employee's comments and why it offended her), this discussion would have been more meaningful from the get-go. Maybe it wouldn't devolve so quickly into speculation.
1) Dongle, penis, vagina, balls, etc are NOT SEXIST JOKES. "Get in the kitchen and make me a pie." is an offensive and sexist joke.
2) She was not fired for standing up, she was fired for dragging her employer into the fight on twitter.
3) What can you tell me about her before this incident?
4) She sensationalized the incident in ways that Fox News couldn't even top.
5) SHE IS AN EVANGALIST/communicator. Are you telling me she is intimidated or doesn't know how to converse with people?<p>"Yesterday the future of programming was on the line..."<p>In the end, everyone lost here, but she did start the fire.
I'm late to the party, but I feel the need to put my voice on the other side of what seems to be prevailing opinion.<p>She was not wrong to mention inappropriate jokes. Anyone that has done sexual harassment training will know that ANYTHING that can be taken the wrong way in not acceptable. Because of the nature of sexism and sexual harassment you have to have a zero tolerance policy.<p>Going out with pitchforks regarding this incident is sending an absolutely terrible message to current and future generations of women in tech.
I just hope this 'story' ends here. Both parties having learned a lesson and walking away a little bit humbler and thoughtful.<p>I would absolutely HATE to see this become a drawn out legal battle comedy. And I would hate it even more to see Adria end up playing the victim and become some sort of 'women's advocate' showing up in some morning show couch crying and blaming 'the male tech industry'.<p>Then again, no high hopes on it being over.
Huh? WTF?<p>My impression is that inappropriate jokes were specifically targeted at a woman seated nearby. In an all male company (of 13-year old youths) it just does not happen.<p>The people that did this deserved to be reminded that it was not acceptable (although not by firing).<p>Now, firing Adria Richards is entirely beyond my understanding. Seriously, WTF? Well, this whole story is sad. Blame the messenger now?
It would be extremely cool if now it turned out that Adria and this guy were actually friends who came up with a plan how to troll everyone who has stick up their ass and/or is afraid of his/her own shadow when it comes to gender.
I followed the whole thing and however I am sad that this stuff still happens, it was inevitable that she was fired. I do hope people got more aware what social media can do now..
Github sells "fork you" shirt. <a href="http://shop.github.com/products/fork-you-shirt-mens-medium" rel="nofollow">http://shop.github.com/products/fork-you-shirt-mens-medium</a><p>Can someone please fire whoever is responsible for that? I am offended.
I for one am glad that everyone overreacted and the situation blew up. If this was swept under the rug or if there was an apology, this would have been a one-off event. The fact that people are overreacting, I hope, forces the community to have a larger discussion regarding gender issues.