441–450 of 605 posts
Acceptable case: Adria turns around to the guys in question and politely lets them know that she is not cool with middle-school humor at a professional event. They are embarrassed, and think twice about it next time.
Best case: The guys around them do this first.
What actually happend: A chain-reaction of explosive over-reactions.
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Agreed. This has gotten out of hand fast. Two people now have lost their jobs over what is basically a harmless, if somewhat inappropriate, joke. And while I believe that Adria was wrong in how she reacted to that joke, and in refusing to admit fault or apologize afterwards, I'm not sure she should have lost their job over it. This is basically a non-issue that has been blown way out of proportion by social media.
If she was merely a developer or other non-public-facing employee, there would be no reason for her to lose her job. But she was a developer evangelist -- someone who should know that everything she says and does reflects on the company -- and even if you agree with her actions you can't deny that the storm surrounding them would make it nearly impossible for her to effectively work in a job which involves meeting an…
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> 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.
zevyoura was asserting that the behavior seen on twitter is not representative of our community, and that those sentiments are isolated to a set of bad actors. My assertion is that there is a substantial number of people who share that same ill will here on hacker news. Most of the threads that have been posted to HN have been dog piles of hating on Adria Richards. So the question is are those people new and in fact…
I'm sure it would be naive to believe that there was 0 overlap, but HN (and most programming sites) are not bastions of hate speech.
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 worked with a bright, lovely young woman who had taken two terms of Java, with an eye toward a CS degree. One of her professors told her in office hours that she smelled really good. So she was doing marketing. Little creep-outs can have a huge impact, and you will unfortunately find so many of them in nearly every tech setting that if you hang in there, you just get accustomed to saying nothing. But saying nothing is not the ideal course of action, because based on the numbers, lots of women don't hang in there. Adria is right that the little girl on the slide might never make it to PyCon (in a dev role...) if things stay the same.
Imagine if roles were reversed, and lucrative, enjoyable, interesting jobs were mostly held by straight women, and every time you went to a professional conference, you had to endure non sequitur pictures of men in bikinis, and uninformed, under-dressed plastic booth bros, and people assuming you're an uninformed booth bro no matter how you look, and the after-party at a male strip club, and countless unattractive old women chatting you up when you'd rather write code and all manner of little, alienating crap. In this bizarro world, you would likely not believe the sense of relief when another man spoke up about all this stuff that had gone unquestioned.
Your comment about feeling uncomfortable around Adria is ironic, given that feeling uncomfortable is exactly what Adria was trying, however imperfectly, to fix. Unfortunately, the comfort of straight white men has again ruled the day, and SendGrid fired a black woman to preserve it. I hope she finds a truly wonderful lawyer.
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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?
Hmmm...'colorblindness' by a privileged group is a refusal to acknowledge the real inadequacies between social groups. Basically, "I treat everyone the same--I don't see color" (or gender, or sexual orientation, etc.) is a luxury that only exists for some. For people discriminated against, they /have/ to see color, gender, etc., because it's a limiting condition of their social situation.
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> Okay, time to speak up! Hi, I'm a woman in tech Thank you for speaking up. I imagine this is not the easiest time to do so. > This doesn't portray women as badly as it portrays our entire tech culture badly. With such a large audience there will always be extreme responses on either side. There will (and have been) DDoS attacks, personal phone calls etc. I don't think those represent the community as much as it rep…
> She claims jokes were offending, she then posts > racists and penis jokes on her twitter account. > Not only does it smell of hypocrisy it smells of > maliciousness. Wow, so if your mother (or sister, or girlfriend, or wife, or daughter) has ever made an off-color joke in her life, that gives any man in the world the right to discuss penises with her in person? I mean, wow. That's what you're getting at. Twitter ha…
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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?
The point is that women in our society live their entire lives under a constant barrage of related offensive behaviors that men do not. Black people in our society live their entire lives under a constant barrage of related offensive behaviors that white people do not. (Black women get hit by both barrages.) In each case, some of the offensive acts are overt and nasty, but most take the form of countless tiny slights that seem harmless on their own but add up to an intensely oppressive environment.
So yes, everyone is allowed to be offended. But it's really, really unwise to "question the validity of others who are offended" if you aren't subjected to the same continually hostile environment that they are.
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> Okay, time to speak up! Hi, I'm a woman in tech Thank you for speaking up. I imagine this is not the easiest time to do so. > This doesn't portray women as badly as it portrays our entire tech culture badly. With such a large audience there will always be extreme responses on either side. There will (and have been) DDoS attacks, personal phone calls etc. I don't think those represent the community as much as it rep…
> She claims jokes were offending, she then posts > racists and penis jokes on her twitter account. > Not only does it smell of hypocrisy it smells of > maliciousness. Wow, so if your mother (or sister, or girlfriend, or wife, or daughter) has ever made an off-color joke in her life, that gives any man in the world the right to discuss penises with her in person? I mean, wow. That's what you're getting at. Twitter ha…
I'm usually the guy seeing opportunity in every "doomsday" prediction but, I really see no upside for most people in being recorded all the time.
This is going to compound cyber-bullying effects by orders of magnitude.
I find the focus on her gender irrelevant. Is the story any different if it is a man vilifying and excoriating women he overhears? No. She is/was basically incompetent. A tech evangelist is basically a salesperson, her job is to create goodwill. You don't report your customers as offensive even when you think they are. And you especially NEVER bring bad will on your company brand. You deal with it and move on.
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The difference here is that the jokes/comments were not made to her. She overheard them in the context of a semi-private conversation between two people, and took umbrage at them. If they had come up and started making penis jokes to her, then it'd be a very different situation.
It's not as obnoxious as if they'd walked up to her and started telling her penis jokes, but on the other hand a person has to assume that the person sitting in front of them at a conference (seriously, they're what - three or four feet away?) can hear what they're saying. Also, her site is down at the moment, so I can't verify, but didn't she actually converse with them? I might be wrong about that. I wish I could v…
She exchanged a sentence or two, then a couple min later after she had turned away after they continued the semi-private conversation the guy made the penis joke.