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A Difficult Situation

blog.sendgrid.com

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121–130 of 485 posts

Re: A Difficult Situation

#121

Post by DigitalJack »

courtewing wrote: post #73
forrestthewoods wrote: post #19

I have little to no knowledge of laws in this area. However my gut tells me that Sendgrid is opening themselves up to a hell of a lawsuit. Can anyone who actually does know about such matters comment?

What in particular do you think makes them vulnerable to a lawsuit? I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that in the US, it is legal to fire most non-contract employees at any time, without any notice, and for pretty much any reason (or even lack of a reason) other than outright discrimination based on nationality/gender/religion/etc. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment and specifically the "Sta…

The timing is what makes them vulnerable. They can claim whatever they want as the reason for firing, but the timing will look bad in they eyes of sympathetic jury.

Re: A Difficult Situation

#122

Post by vellum »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #19

I have little to no knowledge of laws in this area. However my gut tells me that Sendgrid is opening themselves up to a hell of a lawsuit. Can anyone who actually does know about such matters comment?

I doubt it. For something this public, they must have consulted with employment law specialists before firing her.

Re: A Difficult Situation

#123

Post by dobbsbob »

Surprised they don't already have DDoS protection should be standard for this kind of service.

Whenever I put up a new service/site, the first thing I think about is my competitors attacking me with DDoS, disgruntled ex employees or crazy customers.

SendGrid especially. They're handling bulk emails, you know spammers are going to try to abuse the service and end up cut off. Stands to reason said spammers may launch a botnet attack on the site I'd have wrapped up DDoS protection from day #1 and said twitter lynch mob wouldn't stand much of a chance.

Re: A Difficult Situation

#125

Post by erikpukinskis »

Can someone explain to me why "she can no longer be effective in her role at SendGrid"? She tweeted an inappropriate comment that someone made to her in a public forum. I genuinely don't understand why this would affect anyone's professional relationship with her.

Re: A Difficult Situation

#126

Post by [deleted] »

Yver wrote: post #120
mtrimpe wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike when he very publicly fired an employee in the heat of the moment after his company was being DDoS'ed. I think the fact that Paul Graham, after applying Occam's razor, preferred to think it was done from a compromised account speaks volumes here.

Occam's razor doesn't point towards the hypothesis of all of the corporate accounts being hacked and none of the employees reporting it. I don't know why anyone would believe it could be a hack hours after it was posted and nobody in the company reacted to it.

[deleted]

Re: A Difficult Situation

#127

Post by ChuckMcM »

Proleps wrote: post #64
nilkn wrote: post #26

Even if I agree with the decision, this is incredibly hard to read. I hate to see someone lose their job over something like this. Yet I can't disagree with anything he wrote. I personally hope she will learn from this and another company will give her a new chance. The odds of that are slim given how big this has become--it's front-paging repeatedly on HN and /r/programming. But I'd hate to see her whole career ruin…

According to this article[1] this was not a single mistake, but a pattern of how she handles things. [1] https://amandablumwords.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/3/

That added some much needed back story to this very sad chapter.

Re: A Difficult Situation

#128

Post by rdl »

mathrawka wrote: post #8
rdl wrote: post #3

This is the most reasonable statement I've seen so far in this whole fiasco. It's a shame he took so long to post it; it should have been the first SendGrid comment this morning.

I believe that it is the most reasonable statement because he took time to look over the entire situation and gauge it properly.

I think you could get a reasonable response to an ongoing crisis out in less than a day. They should have discussed this last night, as soon as it broke, with CEO, HR, legal, her, etc.

Being deliberate is fine, but when you make something a priority, you can get to the bottom of it faster and still get the right response.

Until they got DDoSed to hell, this apparently wasn't a serious priority for them.

Re: A Difficult Situation

#129

Post by jerrya »

metaphorm wrote: post #49
jerrya wrote: post #14

The situation wasn't that difficult, and Sendgrid's response was inappropriate. Welcome to the Corporate State where every problematic statement you make as an errorful human being prone to making mistakes will be used against you to preserve the corporate bottom line. An actual appropriate response from SendGrid and Play Haven would have been recognition that its employees are human's first, and all of us are subjec…

1) free speech is a guarantee that the government will not pass laws preventing you from expressing yourself. it has nothing to do with your private employer. 2) Adria Richards acted in a way contrary to what her employer was paying her to do. If your job is public relations, but you generate animosity instead of good will you are incompetent at your job. That is grounds for termination in the old fashioned sense, ha…

free speech is a guarantee that the government will not pass laws preventing you from expressing yourself. it has nothing to do with your private employer

Yeah, this is a common fallacy.

There is the first amendment which regards the relationship of our government to our free speech, and then there is free speech that we, as humans, intellectuals, give to each other.

Her speech was piffle, and should have been treated as such. A regrettable mistake, but one that humans make, and ultimately of little impact to the company.

"I Joe Bob, CEO of SendGrid disagree completely with Adria Richard's behavior, she made a mistake. But I know her, I respect her, and there is no way I would fire her over these particular comments, over this particular mistake.

I believe that a Hacker Culture is respectful and encouraging of speech and accommodating of the mistakes we all might make.

I encourage Joe Briggs of Play Haven to take a step back and consider this, even as I support his former developers there in their private communications."

Re: A Difficult Situation

#130

Post by gregd »

onemorepassword wrote: post #86

I'm still missing something. Although it's obviously the right conclusion that she can no longer function a evangelist, I find it hard to believe that she now has zero value for the company. You don't completely discard a previously valued employee over one fuck-up. Unless either that person is utterly useless in any other capacity, there is previous history or they are completely unwilling to accept that they made a…

What value to you suppose she had at Sendgrid when she fucked up her current position, "In light of the events over the last 48+ hours, it has become obvious that her actions have strongly divided the same community she was supposed to unite. As a result, she can no longer be effective in her role at SendGrid."? Developer? Janitor? Office Manager? What?

People get fired all the time over one fuckup...some are colossal and some...not so much. What are you missing?

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