101–110 of 485 posts
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.
It is never appropriate to distribute photographs of people without their permission, in any context. I think SendGrid is justified in their decision.
That's ridiculous. Not only is it completely legal (assuming the people don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy), it's enormously common. Half the photographs on Twitter would violate the social rule you're suggesting.
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…
No one committed any action that was overtly horrible on it's own.
In a vacuum: Two guys were making childish jokes, and a woman was offended and told her friends about it, with a picture of who.
The only reason this is on anyone's radar at all is that people made a fuss of the message due to the issues of gender segregation of women, and the feelings of oppression from men. Combined with rash action on the part of one company.
this was a non-event, turned fiasco, turned tragedy.
She's defeated, annihilated, crushed, destroyed, eliminated, pulverized, eradicated, downed, nullified, smashed, obliterated, felled, wrecked, finished, demolished, suppressed, shattered, exterminated!
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 the fact that Paul Graham, after applying Occam's razor, preferred to think it was done from a compromised account speaks volumes here.
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…
Even worse, she went off the deep-end by claiming that people disagreeing with her were all trolling, or worse, somehow being racist. She also posted comments where she discounted other people's opinions simply because of their race.
There was not an ounce of remorse on her part for what she did. She firmly believed that she was some sort of holy warrior for feminism, and that she was standing up for future women programmers, or something like that. It's also odd considering that she doesn't even have a programming background; her background seems to be in HR and marketing. She basically hangs around programmers, but is not really a part of the programming community.
What was also bad is that she implied that SendGrid supported her in all of this (http://i.imgur.com/eHOC3tA.jpg), thereby dragging them into her personal crusade.
As a tech evangelist it is her job to build goodwill and she did anything but that. She took advantage of her huge listener base and used her platform as an evangelist as a personal soapboax for her own holy war.
Hopefully she learns from her mistakes. The best thing she can do at this point is to issue a public apology. Another company may give her a chance then. The problem is HR issues like these are very touchy and toxic and most companies would sooner not deal with it. This is because people who display this kind of attitude can be extremely toxic. I read many comments from women programmers who completely disagreed with what she did, and they said that she completely overreacted. Does any company really want to have a person who will scream "Sexism!" at the drop of a hat? Sure, the guys may have been immature, but nothing they said or did was even remotely sexist. Most of the people who I've seen defending her are either white knights, or other women who share her "brand" of feminism and who also, unsurprisingly, share her lack of technical background or experience with the programming community.
The irony is that one of the guys shamed on twitter, who lost his job, has had a much easier time finding a new job. I don't think Adria will have a same luxury.
The biggest irony in all of this, of course, is that what she perceived to be a morally-righteous stance has completely backfired and bit her in the ass, causing her to lose her job.
Who didn't see this coming? And when she pulled SendGrid, her employer, publicly into the fray via her twitter feed, who didn't know it was simply a matter of time? I mean, what else could SendGrid possibly do? She basically forced them to fire her. Her value to the company is being a public face to developers . She very publicly destroyed that value. Further, she pulled SendGrid in with her tweet about them "support…
TH3 B1TCH 1S D0WN!
