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SendGrid Fires Employee After Firestorm Over Inappropriate Jokes
tsamsoniw writes "Hoping to strike a blow against sexism in the tech industry , developer and tech evangelist Adria Richards took to Twitter to complain about two male developers swapping purportedly offensive jokes at PyCon. The decision has set into motion a chain of events that illustrate the impact a tweet or two can make in this age of social networking: One the developers and Richards have since lost their jobs, and even the chair of PyCon has been harassed for his minor role in the incident."
only one comment was sexual in nature. the dongle one. the other one was about forking being a form of flattery, which adria misconstrued as sexual. just as the dongle comment was inappropriate, it was equally inappropriate to post their picture to twitter w/o even confronting them.
From this recent posting it seems that she, too, appreciates doing colorful comments.
I'm not sure firing her was an over-reaction. Her employer is trying to be a five-nines service provider. Her poor judgement got their services DDoS'd off the net for 5 hours today. Sounds like a pretty good case for firing to me.
Incidentally, I'm working with a customer of that company right now, and their downtime caused us a bunch of extra work. But I'm not bitter. Not at all.
cogito ergo dubito
more: https://twitter.com/adriarichards/statuses/6039856858 check this gem out!
She also has a tweet where she says, "Black people CANNOT be racist against White people. Racism is a position of the oppressor who has the power.".
There was a much more informative post that got skipped :
http://slashdot.org/submission/2558213/pycon-twitter-callout-incident
A few details you might wish to know about the incident :
0. SendGrid is an email spammer. Yes, they only send legal spam, stuff the direct marketers want you to call bacn, but really most of the emails they send you do not want. Anything bad that happens to SendGrid is a good thing.
1. Apparently mr-hank only made one sexual crack, the dongles one. He apologized for that one quickly. Richards miss-interpreted his "forking" comment as sexual, actually homosexual. If you really believed she took offense to what he actually said, then you'd eventually conclude that she was a homophobe. That isn't correct. She simply miss-heard him.
2. Richards has pissed people off by pulling similar publicity stunts several times before :
http://amandablumwords.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/3/
3. Ms Richards defense of her actions was completely fucking bonkers. Some girl "would never have the chance to learn and love programming because the ass clowns behind me would make it impossible for her to do so." Really? Joan of Arc? Really? Pfff. She's simply grandstanding to her twitter followers.
https://twitter.com/adriarichards/status/313442430848487424
4. Richards made a much worse joke about some guys balls much more publicly on twitter earlier in the day.
https://twitter.com/adriarichards/status/312265091791847425
5. PlayHaven isn't such a nice company either. In game micro-transactions sounds like your business is built upon ripping off poor people. It doesn't bother me as much as spam since I don't play any games like that, but worth mentioning.
Anyways I hope Mr-Hank and Richards find new jobs quickly and that SendGrid continues to lose business.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
No, she - and you, are completely wrong, and the reason is so trivially simple that it's a wonder you don't understand it. Racism is about treating someone based upon their race rather than as an individual. To summarise how black people can be racist, when I was at school in the 80s we had 3 black kids in our class (UK, inner London school). Two considered themselves to be Jamaican, and therefore would pick on the third who they considered to be African. Their interaction with him consisted of bullying, abuse based upon his perceived country of origin etc. Racism may be about power, but it is a position of power *under the circumstances* not whether you have over-arching power in society at large.