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Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost

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Re: Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost

#31

Post by ramblerman »

Without tumbling deep into a flame war, I'd like to ask a sincere question. I have trouble understanding the sexism behind the remarks, and why the instigator needs to apologize (for sexism).

People get offended for all kinds of things, nobody can claim a monopoloy on that. (http://imgur.com/EX5v4 stephen fry quote)

- If they would both have been gay and talking about a homosexual topic, someone in that room would be offended.

- If they were creationists dismissing darwin, someone would be offended

- 2 women discussing ‘shades of grey’, someone would be offended.

- A dongle and forking, and Adria is offended.

To me it seems she is offended by the sexual overtones. A pruder man might be offended by that too, or many a religious man. I just don’t see the link to sexism.

I get it's lowbrow humor. It's not professional. It's probably not suited for a public event like that. The dongle joke was men comparing their 'dongles' and the suggesting they wanted to "fork" the male speaker.

How are women being put down or belittled at all here. How is it sexist?

Re: Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost

#32

Post by niggler »

pyre wrote: post #18
cooldeal wrote: post #2

For the life of me I cannot fathom why PlayHaven went to the extreme step of firing the dev in question. What he did was certainly wrong, but certainly not a firable offense. A stern warning from HR would've sufficed. Also, I don't understand the hate and DDoS directed towards SendGrid. I think if any, PlayHaven should've been subject of it and pressured to reinstate the dev in question. SendGrid should've been press…

| For the life of me cannot fathom why PlayHaven | went to the extreme step of firing the dev in | question. | | What he did was certainly wrong, but certainly not | a firable offense. A stern warning from HR | would've sufficed. - The ultra-conservative approach is to distance yourself from anything that could be construed as being supportive of a "boys' club" in tech. - According to CrunchBase, PlayHaven only has 5…

"They could have paid for his PyCon expenses (therefore he was there representing the company), and they felt that he did a poor job representing the company."

Doesn't explain why one person is still an employee while the other gentleman was canned.

"It's possible there were other reasons they wanted to fire him before PyCon, but this became a good excuse to act on them."

I strongly suspect this happened, given the comment in the PlayHaven response: "we will not comment on all the factors that contributed to our parting ways."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5418123

EDIT: clarifying that one person was not fired.

Re: Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost

#33

Post by monksy »

niggler wrote: post #25
redthrowaway wrote: post #22

I think the most interesting part of this post was a simple observation that I, for one, hadn't seen elsewhere: We don't know why PlayHaven fired the dev in the first place. Sure, the controversy undoubtedly played a role. But we don't know if the dev was on the ropes, if he wasn't pulling his weight, or if his boss simply didn't like him. This may have been a gross overreaction, or it may have been the straw that br…

"We don't know why PlayHaven fired the dev in the first place." Many, including myself, have raised the question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5418714 1 hour ago

The lack of transparency is not indicative of further "guilt". Anything more than what was said is speculation.

Re: Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost

#34

Post by shirro »

Extremists play a role. Where do you draw the line on sexualisation at a tech conference? Perhaps we need unpopular people like Adria to create debate on what is acceptable and what isn't. I don't always agree with RMS but I think the world is a better place for having him around influencing opinion one way or another. At least these people aren't flying planes into buildings though shaming people with photos is clearly heading towards the dark side. The bigger issue is the unfair dismissals that resulted.

Re: Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost

#35

Post by jere »

HiroProtaganist wrote: post #11

You guys realize, all this shit (all if it, Adria, the "post-mortem" blog posts, etc), is just a land grab for page views right? http://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator...

Wait, you're saying Adria traded her job for a few page views and death threats?

Re: Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost

#37

Post by niggler »

monksy wrote: post #33
niggler wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We don't know why PlayHaven fired the dev in the first place." Many, including myself, have raised the question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5418714 1 hour ago

The lack of transparency is not indicative of further "guilt". Anything more than what was said is speculation.

Given that one employee was retained and the other was let go, the firing could not have stemmed 100% from the issue at hand. One person was clearly not a " valued employee," unlike the other person from playhaven.

Re: Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost

#39

Post by recoiledsnake »

mhurron wrote: post #15
cooldeal wrote: post #2

For the life of me I cannot fathom why PlayHaven went to the extreme step of firing the dev in question. What he did was certainly wrong, but certainly not a firable offense. A stern warning from HR would've sufficed. Also, I don't understand the hate and DDoS directed towards SendGrid. I think if any, PlayHaven should've been subject of it and pressured to reinstate the dev in question. SendGrid should've been press…

> For the life of me cannot fathom why PlayHaven went to the extreme step of firing the dev in question. The appearance of bringing negative publicity to your employer will often get you fired. Make the complaints sexual in nature and you can probably kiss that job good-bye, this is how society handles these things basically everywhere. She brought negative publicity on her company, so she also risked her position. >…

>Oh pull your head out of your ass

Do you really need to use abrasive language like this to get your point across? This isn't Reddit.

>People acted angrily with the tools they knew best.

Yes, the people who were looking to get her fired did so, and succeeded very well. Do you seriously believe the female or feminist tech community has the resources to perform DDoS?

Re: Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost

#40

Post by obviouslygreen »

sammyd56 wrote: post #8

"Because of my experiences growing up, I have triggers. This means that I’m always scanning for danger; for situations that seem like something from the past that could hurt me. When I recognize something that matches, I can overreact and feel intense fear, anger or anxiety. This is something I’ve worked on a lot. It’s much better now than 10 years ago but there are some things that send me over the edge." http://but…

I'm not sure what direction you're going with it, but it seems to me this actually makes it worse as far as how she handled the situation.

This is a person who knows she's prone to overreacting, but not only does she apply to and accept a job that puts her in overwhelmingly male-dominated situations, she continues to both overreact and fail to recognize or address it.

For someone who claims to have gone through truly traumatic things (and I certainly don't doubt that), she's done an unbelievably poor job of restraining herself. If this is better, I imagine she must have been totally unemployable (not to mention incapable of normal human interaction) for a long time.

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