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Low income SF students from Mission nonprofit ejected from Dreamforce

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21–30 of 43 posts

Re: Low income SF students from Mission nonprofit ejected from Dreamforce

#21

Personally, I would like to thank Salesforce for a strong security presence at the event. There were bomb sniffing dogs, many security staff, and vehicle barriers with armed guards at street entrances. Despite being a sponsor and speaker at the event, I was denied access (due to different badge type) to the expo hall to help the rest of our company setup our booth. It was frustrating, but at least the security was pa…

I'm curious about the demography for this event ... do you have sense for the attendees? Would be genuinely interested in what you get out of it. I've never been and am really curious what draws such large crowds.

The event is massive, something like 180,000 total attendees. They actually shut down Howard St. between 4th and 3rd and roll out astro turf and put up fake rock formations and stages.

There are tons of different badge types depending on your role in the ecosystem (developer, admin, marketing, sales, partner, sponsor, speaker, etc.). For the expo, Monday and Tuesday are for Full Pass people only (min of ~$1,000 per pass). Wednesday and Thursday allows in anyone that registered for the free Expo pass ahead of time.

The demographics skew to middle age people. Racially, mostly white, but many east asian and indian attendees. Certainly all groups were represented. I met many people coming from Australia, Europe and India.

Because of the expense of the passes, most of the attendees are decision makers within the business which I think is why it skewed older. I would understand if the group described in the article felt like they stood out in the crowd because of the racial and age difference. Also, Monday was crazy. Lots of very confused people trying to figure out where they should be going between the 3 different massive buildings the event was held in.

Re: Low income SF students from Mission nonprofit ejected from Dreamforce

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should it matter what they look like if someone from Salesforce says they are legit?

Because it explains the behavior of the security guards, presuming they didn't "get the memo" about a small group of people with fake-looking badges that are actually legitimate.

Again, why would the security guards not trust the judgment of an employee of the company that hired them? In the absence of an immediate and obvious threat, how is that justified?

Re: Low income SF students from Mission nonprofit ejected from Dreamforce

#24

Personally, I would like to thank Salesforce for a strong security presence at the event. There were bomb sniffing dogs, many security staff, and vehicle barriers with armed guards at street entrances. Despite being a sponsor and speaker at the event, I was denied access (due to different badge type) to the expo hall to help the rest of our company setup our booth. It was frustrating, but at least the security was pa…

You're happy they had security theater in full effect even though it inconvenienced you and others?

Re: Low income SF students from Mission nonprofit ejected from Dreamforce

#25
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't worry, the race of the conference attendees was also mentioned along with the race of the victims. It's to help progressives apportion blame.

> It's to help progressives apportion blame. Does this materially contribute to the conversation? What's your motive for saying it?

We're having a conversation about this because of progressives. Fascists and communists didn't write the article about the poor kids getting kicked out of the mean conference.

Re: Low income SF students from Mission nonprofit ejected from Dreamforce

#26

While I agree that security guards are most responsible here at the end of the day they are correct to blame Salesforce. If you hold an event you are ultimately responsible for what the staff does, even when they are just contractors. And that's both from a legal, and optics perspective. In this case, Salesforce did these kids a disservice by providing them substantially different badges from other attendants, and by…

Mostly agree. The Salesforce employee should have been able to escalate the issue to the right people to get it solved. Simply having a Salesforce employee vouching for them should have been rejected, as it was. There are thousands of Salesforce employees at the event, not all of them should have the power to override a guards instructions. So the guard acted correctly in that way, but sounds like they took it way too far - “Your kind don’t belong in here.” WTF!?

Re: Low income SF students from Mission nonprofit ejected from Dreamforce

#27

> He credited Pineda with trying to straighten out the situation. “Angelica did a fabulous job, she did everything in her power to keep us inside,” Sosa said. But the two security guards, who Sosa described as a black man and Latina woman, ejected them. Having read the entire article it seems this was a case of uninformed security grunts doing what they usually do. The race of the security guards gets mentioned as a…

Conference badges are often printed on-site by equipment owned by an event management company. So my guess would be that SalesForce wanted to get the badges to this group without them going through the standard conference registration process and so made them badges with supplies they had available to them - the official lanyards probably weren't ready yet (or were in the possession of the event management company) and they didn't own the thermal printers and stock used to make the official badges.

Re: Low income SF students from Mission nonprofit ejected from Dreamforce

#28

While I agree that security guards are most responsible here at the end of the day they are correct to blame Salesforce. If you hold an event you are ultimately responsible for what the staff does, even when they are just contractors. And that's both from a legal, and optics perspective. In this case, Salesforce did these kids a disservice by providing them substantially different badges from other attendants, and by…

But the legal system constrains what employers can consider in candidates. Perhaps these hires would have failed a cognitive test? Unfortunately, we'll never know because the courts read disparate impact as proof of discrimination.

It's an ugly truth, but we would be better off with more discrimination. Stupid people should hold less power in society and discrimination is the means to keep stupid people away from power.

Re: Low income SF students from Mission nonprofit ejected from Dreamforce

#29

While I agree that security guards are most responsible here at the end of the day they are correct to blame Salesforce. If you hold an event you are ultimately responsible for what the staff does, even when they are just contractors. And that's both from a legal, and optics perspective. In this case, Salesforce did these kids a disservice by providing them substantially different badges from other attendants, and by…

But the legal system constrains what employers can consider in candidates. Perhaps these hires would have failed a cognitive test? Unfortunately, we'll never know because the courts read disparate impact as proof of discrimination. It's an ugly truth, but we would be better off with more discrimination. Stupid people should hold less power in society and discrimination is the means to keep stupid people away from pow…

> Unfortunately, we'll never know because the courts read disparate impact as proof of discrimination.

“Disparate impact” which is prrof of illegal discrimination is not just unequal impact by protected category, it's unequal impact that cannot be shown to be sufficiently tied to job function.

> Stupid people should hold less power in society and discrimination is the means to keep stupid people away from power.

“Stupid people” are not a protected class; discrimination against “stupid people” is not generally prohibited, nor where this is actually tied directly to job performance is discrimination against “stupid people” that incidentally has effects on a protected class owing exclusively to the distribution of stupidity.

Re: Low income SF students from Mission nonprofit ejected from Dreamforce

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should it matter what they look like if someone from Salesforce says they are legit?

Because it explains the behavior of the security guards, presuming they didn't "get the memo" about a small group of people with fake-looking badges that are actually legitimate.

If security guards don't know how badges looks like, your security organization is crappy as hell. It does not matter whether badge looks ugly or not, guard is supposed to know it.
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