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SendGrid Fires Company Evangelist After Twitter Fracas

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Re: SendGrid Fires Company Evangelist After Twitter Fracas

#371

Post by doktrin »

knowtheory wrote: post #291
zevyoura wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your experiences sound awful and truly disheartening, and I hope we can move towards a better and more inclusive future for everyone. However, I do feel compelled to make one point about this part: >Okay, time to speak up! Hi, I'm a woman in tech. And this upset me, but not for the reasons you think. I agree that Adria went too far in publicly Tweeting and "name and shaming" these guys. But the vitriol and hate that…

You are making a quantifiable assertion. If you'd really like to back up the claim, go grab some of the threads on this subject, and spider the account pages of the people posting to the threads. Plot them by amount of karma and # of days since the account was opened. As much as i do think /r/mensrights are assholes who are making this situation worse, i would assert that there is a preexisting strain of this behavio…

>You are making a quantifiable assertion. If you'd really like to back up the claim, go grab some of the threads on this subject, and spider the account pages of the people posting to the threads.

I don't see how plotting thread discussions on HN would even vaguely correlate to the Twitter abuse the GP was referring to.

Re: SendGrid Fires Company Evangelist After Twitter Fracas

#372

Post by elbear »

king_jester wrote: post #314
zevyoura wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your experiences sound awful and truly disheartening, and I hope we can move towards a better and more inclusive future for everyone. However, I do feel compelled to make one point about this part: >Okay, time to speak up! Hi, I'm a woman in tech. And this upset me, but not for the reasons you think. I agree that Adria went too far in publicly Tweeting and "name and shaming" these guys. But the vitriol and hate that…

> I agree those comments are absolutely horrifying, and the act of people I would never associate with. There is no way you could know this. People you associate with may be misogynistic or engage in trolling on the internet but they don't tell you or you aren't around to experience it. Bottom line is that the tech community does have issues with misogyny along with the rest of western society, although you are right…

Society in general has issues with misogyny, not just western society.

Re: SendGrid Fires Company Evangelist After Twitter Fracas

#373

Post by king_jester »

[deleted] wrote: post #258
raganwald wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would feel really uncomfortable if I was in the same room as this person. What if I accidentally say something that she finds offensive? Am I next? People say the same things all the time in companies where women complain about inappropriate sexuality. "What if I say something that offends her?" Most of us are good, inoffensive people. We are saddled with growing up in a world that is changing. It used to be accept…

[deleted]

> The problem here is that the jokes were so innocuous that it would be difficult to tell just what would set her off and potentially get you fired.

That's the thing, depending on your background and experience with sexism will depend on how confused you are about what may be construed as sexist or inappropriate for the workplace. If anything, the whole pycon incident shows the need for more information, education, and formal sensitivity training in the workplace, not firing people every time HR thinks its time for some CYA-style action.

Suffice it to say though that dick jokes contribute to a sexist atmosphere and can contribute to impostor syndrome and are often outright transphobic.

Re: SendGrid Fires Company Evangelist After Twitter Fracas

#374

Post by pifflesnort »

jack-r-abbit wrote: post #349
jmagoon wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what's commonly known as the ignorance of privilege. It's white people saying, "Why can't I make jokes about black people, when black people can make jokes about me?" It demonstrates a total ignorance of what it means to be a discriminated against demographic.

I'm confused. Are you saying that just because a person is white they are not allowed to be offended by stuff and not allowed to question the validity of others who are offended?

Well, according to Adria Richards: "Black people CANNOT be racist against White people. Racism is a position of the oppressor who has the power".

http://imgur.com/xPztO6k

I don't think Adria represents women in the industry, or anyone other than herself. I feel sorry for SendGrid, PlayHaven, the developer who lost his job, and the fact that this is distracting from the real issues of sexism in technology.

I don't feel sorry for Adria. She represented her company in a grossly unprofessional manner by publicly naming, picturing, and shaming (including the use of "ass clowns" to describe them) two developers. You don't have to be sexist to be unprofessional. I just hope SendGrid has their lawyers ready to deal with the potential fallout of firing her.

Re: SendGrid Fires Company Evangelist After Twitter Fracas

#375

Post by gregd »

dfxm12 wrote: post #286
gregd wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please do not mistake the social ineptitude of others in the tech industry, as applying equally to the rest of us.

Likewise, no one should think all women behave like Richards.

I wasn't gender specific in my comment.

Re: SendGrid Fires Company Evangelist After Twitter Fracas

#376

Post by Proleps »

JohnBooty wrote: post #279
blhack wrote: post #20

I really wish that this whole thing could have ended amicably (perhaps with Adria apologizing to the devs [by the way, the guy who was fired has already publicly apologized]). It's too bad that sendgrid had to fire her, I would never wish that somebody had their livlihood taken from them like that, but her job was to be a developer evangelist, which is a job she isn't realistically capable of performing anymore. I wo…

> I would feel really uncomfortable if I was in the same > room as this person. What if I accidentally say > something that she finds offensive? Am I next? I wouldn't feel uncomfortable around her at all, because I find it very easy to avoid saying sexually inappropriate things to women I don't know. I have quite an off-color sense of humor myself. I joke a lot and a lot of those jokes involve sex, bodily functions,…

> I wouldn't feel uncomfortable around her at all

It is extremely easy to offend this woman. Just look at her twitter posts https[0], she plays every card in the book in this occasion she plays the racism card while arguing that she can't be a racist herself[1].

[0] https://twitter.com/adriarichards/status/313946261055221760

[1] https://twitter.com/adriarichards/statuses/6039856858

Re: SendGrid Fires Company Evangelist After Twitter Fracas

#377

Post by niggler »

zevyoura wrote: post #338
knowtheory wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are making a quantifiable assertion. If you'd really like to back up the claim, go grab some of the threads on this subject, and spider the account pages of the people posting to the threads. Plot them by amount of karma and # of days since the account was opened. As much as i do think /r/mensrights are assholes who are making this situation worse, i would assert that there is a preexisting strain of this behavio…

I don't really want to devote more mental energy to this topic than it's already consumed. I do agree that there are problematic elements within the tech community, and HN. I acknowledged this in my post: "Of course, there is some overlap between [extremists] and the tech community..."

"I don't really want to devote more mental energy to this topic than it's already consumed."

The problem is, unless more mental energy is expended on this topic, it will be repeated. Better to have the full conversation now than to continually punt the issue.

Re: SendGrid Fires Company Evangelist After Twitter Fracas

#379

Post by knowtheory »

adamnemecek wrote: post #294
knowtheory wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mm. A lot of these comments preclude the possibility that Adria might grow, change, or rehabilitate herself. And as such, these come off very much as if they're putting nails into her coffin. There are people who do deserve to be run out of their industries, Stephen Glass, or Jonah Lehrer come to mind immediately. That is not a proportionate or reasonable response to what has happened here, but then, nothing about th…

Sure, she might. But say you are evaluating Adria and another, equally competent candidate for a position. Why would you pick Adria knowing that if you hire her (despite the fact that she may have changed), you might trigger some 'undesirable reactions'? Just for the record, I feel like Jonah Lehrer's transgression was much less objectionable than Adria's.

Now, that is especially interesting. Because Jonah Lehrer has proven to be a plagiarist and a fabricator on a large number of occasions. On top of that, he demonstrated that he does not understand that he has a responsibility to the truth and accurately representing the world to others.

That's basically the journalistic death penalty. I don't trust anything he writes, and neither should you.

Adria's behavior was dumb, and egregious in a way, but i doubt she anticipated that it would lead to anybody's firing (let alone her own). She was not acting out of malice (so far as anyone can determine) or in direct contravention to the core tenets of her profession. It was also a single incident.

Re: SendGrid Fires Company Evangelist After Twitter Fracas

#380

Post by protomyth »

knowtheory wrote: post #300
WalterSear wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also happens to men in female dominated fields and social enviroments. It's not inherently sexist - humans use stereotypes to categorize everything and everyone, and we haven't, as a society, codified how we should navigate these kind of conflicts without butthurt.

But men in female dominated fields tend not to get death threats and photos of beheaded corpses, or threats of rape. The way that women get treated in male dominated fields like tech really has gotten worse.

No, but males do get automatically suspected of being pedophiles. Companies / daycare / pre-k - 6 have a strong prejudice against hiring males in education. Insurance companies and some parents play a pretty big role in this situation.
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