Slashdot Mirror
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."
I think we nerds need to get more facetime access to the rest of the world. All these "stranger danger" kids are now stranger danger adults.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
I am pretty sure being a developer evangelist doesn't involve you alienating more than half of developers with your tweeting.
I think that he's right. In the time that it took to turn around and take that picture, she could just as easily have said "Hey, cut it out! Those kinds of comments are inappropriate, and I'm offended, okay?" This is a point where saying "don't make a federal case out of it" may be apropos. Does she want them to walk around wearing big "L" for losers on their foreheads, or "D" for "dicks" for what offensive things they said? Maybe she needs to reread that Scarlet Letter book.
*Joke about dongle*
*drama*
*Rocks fall, everyone gets fired*
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Since the jokes were in reference to "big dongles" and forking a man's repo and made no references to women or female anatomy, it seems like Richards is actually being homophobic.
If sexism were to be defeated, it would mean hearts and minds would change and it would become a non-issue.
This is something very different. This is a chilling effect and a one-way weapon against males. The same would never happen if the roles were opposite. This is no different than the mentality we generally maintain that it's funny for women to hurt men but tragic and horrific for men to hurt women.
This doesn't "fight" sexism, it defines it. The worst thing is all of this harm is done without the benefit of a trial, a warning or any sense of fairness.
At conferences, most of the moronic, insulting, self-serving and offensive comments I hear are labeled "marketing". However I can't complain about them.
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.
Good for her. She stood up for herself when she was threatened (triggered). What was the trigger? She saw a photo on main stage of a little girl who had been in the Young Coders workshop. She realized immediately that she had to do something or that little girl would never have the chance to learn and love programming because the ass clowns behind her would make it impossible for the little girl to do so. What did these ass clowns do? They began making sexual forking jokes. What happened after the forking joke? A dongle joke. Incredible. Just like Popeye, she "couldn't stands it no more" and took action.
What did she do? She did what any hero would have done in her situation. She took a photo of the offending hipster males and posted it for the whole world to see. This was an outstanding, very brave effort for a woman who had just been triggered. She was applauded by the feminist blogosphere, and in the end was fired by a man in a position of power. The fucking patriarchy. Fuck them. Don't believe me, read the entire blog entry she wrote. It is all totally supported by the ideology that rules our campuses today. To quote her:
Classic. Who can read that without a tear? Can anyone provide a place that I can donate to her legal defense fund?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
From this recent posting it seems that she, too, appreciates doing colorful comments.
IMO she deserved it. This was a matter for reprimands by the conference and if needed by their employers, NOT but the public at large. She breached the two mens privacy in a serious way and if I was her employer I'd be worried about blow back from what she did now and what she'll do in the future.
IMO it's never OK to "twitter shame" someone, it's the pinnacle of passive-aggressive behavior where you take a complaint public and ask for mob justice. What happens next time where she calls for the pitchforks and torches and someone actually is harmed by some mentally ill person that got fired up by her?
Two people at a conference telling jokes you find offensive? Ok, say something to them. Her taking it to Twitter is no different than the faceless drones threatening her via twitter - too coward to confront someone face to face - instead attacking someone via the Internet.
She is a self described activist, who is too afraid to confront two nerds?
A bit of human decency, on both parties (aka: talking to another human being) would have mitigated this entire situation and two people would still have their jobs.
Come on you puritan sods! Grow a pair of balls.
Now if the developers made a sexual joke about that Adria woman , than I would consider this sexual harassment. But some wordplay? On Forking? And big dongles? What's next; "Oh no's, he said that we should go 'finger' the cullprit who broke into our unix account. Let's put tar and feathers on him and carry him around on a metal bar!"
I am goddamn happy I live on the ole' Continent where you can swear profanely on the workfloor when you break your skull underneath your desk while searching for that loose USB cable or make funny comebacks to loose the tension like that female developer who shouted "that's what he said" after the frantic cry of the assistant server-admin "i can't get it up!".
You are creating a generation of scared, stressed, puritan bastards. One visit to a Scottish , Flemish or Basque pub and they probably faint upon hearing the "feck this pissbeer" or "my, those are big jugs. No offense lady!"
No, no they shouldn't. They're not drones.. They're not slaves. They're employees. There's supposed to be a difference.. Telling jokes should not get you fired. Bad performance at your job should get you fired.
These PC pantywaists are going to be the ruin of us all. Telling a joke based on stereotypes is not 'sexism.' Deciding (not) to hire or fire someone based on gender is sexism. Of course, insecure people like Richards rule the roost now so now suddenly we're all responsible for HER feelings.
Only one of the two were fired. The person who was offended was also fired.
But really if she had just said something to them quietly no one would have been fired. But she had to take it to crowds of people who weren't even there.
As a owner of a tech company I can say with all honesty that I don't discriminate at all when I hire. All I see when I am hiring is how much money you can make me. That is it. My employees are nothing more then an investment. That being said it is bullshit like this that makes me think twice about hiring women. When I hire a women I have to take into account the risk of a sexual harassment charge that does not really exist if I hire a male.
Is it? Richards herself tweeted publicly to a friend about stuffing his pants next time he goes through a TSA check. If the first guy deserved to get fired for making stupid jokes to his friend sitting in the audience at a conference why shouldn't Richards get fired for doing the same thing publicly via Twitter?
You don't have a right to not be offended.
So fuck off.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Firing Richards herself is the moronic thing.
She was also there on the company dime, wasting her company's resources. Her company doesn't control the PyCon environment. Her company isn't paying her to moderate it. Sometimes being an adult includes tuning out annoyances and getting the job done. If you can't do this, then don't venture outside your company's sphere of control. Maybe the jokes were crass, but they weren't directed at her (or at anyone or any gender in particular).
She got fired for not doing her job.
There is *no* right not to be offended. US case law (and the First Amendment) is clear on this.
If the guys are being inappropriate, that is one thing, but no-one ought to claim they have a right to not be offended. What was offensive to Richards was clearly not offensive to many other people. Personally I find hyper-sensitivity to be somewhat offensive, yet I don't feel the need to wage jihad against her. I've seen this behavior before from women (including getting guys chucked out of university for chuckling at inappropriate jokes). If *she* was offended then it is up to *her* to point this out to the culprits - without doing so in an offensive way herself. That's what a mature person would do. She can't claim they were threatening in any way, because their apologetic posture shows they were probably approachable for a mature person to make their point to.
Furthermore, there are a number of troubling aspects to Richards' claim (and those that support her narrow-minded point-of-view):
Who gets to decide what is offensive or not?
Should government, the legal profession, or business decide what is an appropriate joke or not?
There is only one solution, Free Speech. Free Speech is not about stuff you agree with - it is a principle that protected stuff you don't agree with (provided it is not out-and-out hate speech; eg. such as the racist and anti-Semitic core doctrines of the political ideology called Islam).
The solution is for companies to say, "We did not mean to offend you. However, we stand up for Free Speech for all out employees and don't believe we have the right to dictate what they can think or say, provided it is legal.". Too bad the World is full of beta personalities who cower at the thought of causing offense, rather than alpha personalities who may be brusque, but at least they stand up for moral principals (even if this is unpopular).
So grow some 'nads by fellow Slashdotters. You are either for Free Speech, and would not fire these guys (even if you would take them aside in private to tell them to cool it off a bit), or you believe in Political Correctness where someone else may dictate what you can say, hear and think. The real problem with PC is not that it dictates and denies what people can say, it denies that multitude of other people the right to hear (what can often be unpleasant but truthful).
She is a modern feminist. Men are bad, rules don't apply to her, and if anyone dares disagree, they are WRONG!!!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Why not blame the people actually doing the firing? Some random person posting on twitter does not have the authority to fire anybody. The people who make the decisions (in both companies, in this case) should take responsibility for their actions.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
She's obviously a true geek which means avoid confrontation and resort to passive aggressive behaviour.
Two men being immature at a conference and they lose their livelihood because someone quasi-famous tweeted about it? I'm sure many people would disagree but the tons of triumph in the reporting that they lost their jobs is very distasteful to me especially in this job market. I don't want to live in a society where everyone is so uptight that they don't say anything without 5 levels of mental filtering because other some random stranger can completely screw them over.
If you bother to have read it, 2 men didn't lose their livelihood. 1 man did, and the person (who is female) who tweeted it did.
Sort of surprised you are +5 insightful when you missed the whole point.
2 people make a joke amongst themselves, loud enough that a person in front of them could hear it. Instead of turning around and asking them to stop, she posts on Twitter about it. She turned something that was private (as in, just a few people around where aware of) into something very very public. Public beyond the event she was at, she brought it out to the real world. On top of it, she included a photo of the guys.
She completely over reacted, and made a big issue out of something that might of been in bad taste, but was in a small way. And she lost her job for it. Which is good. Unfortunately, one of the guys lost his job also, which I don't feel he should of. But thanks to her, what he did became public and his company comes out looking bad.
She went drama queen and it cost her job. Also cost a father of 3 his job also. Her fault for losing her job, and her fault for getting that other person fired.
Be seeing you...
News flash:
They didn't make a sexist joke
They made a penis joke via "dongle"
Jokes about male genitalia are not inherently sexist. In order to be sexist, the joke would need to directly denigrate women.
Inferring that any joke that referencing male genitalia is sexist on the other hand, is sexist in and of itself.
As a woman, "self-proclaimed nerd", I am highly offended by the actions of Adria Richards. Her offense offends me. Did anyone commit any wrongs towards her? Absolutely not. These men weren't talking to her, or even about her. Now, if one of them had pointed at her and said something like, "I'd like to use my big dongle on her" or something, then perhaps it would make sense to be offended. Even if that were so, who cares? If she wants to label herself with stereotypes, "nerds" are generally classified as socially-awkward and sexually frustrated. Why was she so surprised by their conversation? They weren't even being sexually explicit, they were cracking puns. I wish that I had been at the conference with her and seen her tweet. I would have found her, sat next to her, and whispered to her asking her if she's seen any big dongles recently. It's honestly women like this that make people not want to hire women. I would have been angry with her even if she had tried to settle this woman-to-man, so to say. There was nothing to settle, nothing to fix. No one did anything wrong. Her passive-aggressive attitude led to the firing to people who didn't deserve it.
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
Our boss gave a curt ultimatum:
"Don't make dick jokes near people who hate 'em."
"If you act like a boor
We will show you the door."
(We can fire them, since we can't castrate 'em)
I'm Message Approval Man, and I approve this message.
But it wouldn't bother others of us at all. Why are your personal feelings more important than mine? Or why is a single person's feeling more important than the other twenty people they work with?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
You know, I try to avoid making comments on things I know are going to be controversial because I'm always going to piss off xx% of people, and I really don't set out to piss off anyone. (Except when I do...) But sometimes, something so heinously, irredeemably, goddamn stupid happens, and I have to vent or I'll simply explode. So here goes all my friggin' karma... PLEASE NOTE: My opinions are simply based on events as they have been described.
While I wish I could be all diplomatic and say that everyone involved shares the blame for this incident, that wouldn't be honest. He's a nerd, making nerd jokes, to another nerd, at a nerd convention. The stuff he supposedly said is just silly. Sure, there's SORT OF innuendo there, but it's like middle school stuff. There was nothing overtly-sexual or graphic about it, and he was having what he thought was an at least semi-private conversation. It was those two computer nerds in WarGames. It wasn't a truck stop on the Jersey turnpike.
I get that she found it offensive, and that's her right. But the fact that she was (supposedly) smiling as she took the damning TwitPic just seems... I don't know. Malicious? What was that supposed to be? "Heh, I'll fix YOU! I'm going to tell the INTERNET!" The whole thing just seems so damned petty.
Replace her phone with a gun, and now we're closer to what happened; *Bang!* There goes your job.
Let's take that analogy and run with it, as one might with a pair of scissors! (Well, as I might, anyway.) If I overhear someone making dumb comments behind me, I'm probably going to just roll my eyes. The most I might do, is tell them to shut up. I'm not going to turn around and SHOOT them. (Probably.)
She defends her actions, saying that in order to make the IT industry safe for women, she HAD to shoot him.
I really don't want to sound biased just because I'm a guy, because on its most fundamental level this has nothing to do with gender. Look at the situation; You have two people carrying on a private conversation, albeit a dumb and juvenile one. A third person overhears them, and instead of asking them to kindly shut the hell up snaps a photograph of them, grabs the internet bullhorn (With which they are apparently quite skilled), and says "Internet, you wouldn't BELIEVE what these two bozos just said!". Then one of those 'bozos' loses his job. Twitter shaming; No less asinine and juvenile than the dongle jokes.
I want to see more women in the tech industries, I want to see more female makers and tinkerers. Why? It's not just because I think we need more beauty to balance out the neckbeards. It's because I think technology and making things are TOTALLY FUCKIN' AWESOME and everyone deserves a turn!
This is not how that happens. This is how the gap gets bigger. Please stop. Sexual harassment is a completely reprehensible thing, and it happens way too often. In the tech industry, in every industry, in society in-general. But every time an incident like this gets ink, it only makes things harder on those experiencing legitimate harassment.
Okay, putting all that aside, so far, this has just been my reaction to what actually happened at PyCon. That was admittedly a very small slice of the pi--incident. (I couldn't go through with it, sorry.) Let's talk about the aftermath.
So, 'Mr-Hank' loses his job... That's really unfortunate... I think his employer overreacted, but the reality is, with the way everything goes viral these days, dropping him like he's radioactive and ON FIRE probably seemed like the best course of action from a PR standpoint, since it was like he was very publicly being accused of sexual harassment, and you don't play around with that. I even feel bad about his apology, because while it was ultimately the right thing to do, it just felt like too much for what he did, like it was just more shaming...
Ms. Richards loses her job, which is also unfortunate, but I can't say that I hold her blameless. Her employer had no choice but to fire her; they're a media
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
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