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Absolutely incorrect. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

I think what she's trying to say is that while firing the individual is an easy solution, it isn't the best solution. In fact I would say it has a number of negative consequences for the employer beyond the cost of losing the employee.

Firing the individual without an investigation by HR sends a message of zero tolerance to intolerance (an intolerance of intolerance) to every other employee in the company, that any employee faux pas is utterly unacceptable. This would create a guarded work environment and have negative impact on the culture.

The two employees agreed to take the conversation from a work platform (i.e. Slack) to a personal platform (i.e. Whatsapp). To me this is akin to asking someone in the Office break room if they'd like to get coffee at Starbucks, it's asking to broaden a relationship beyond the scope of coworker. At this point the scope of their relationship (i.e. work related vs personal) is nebulous and I would argue broadens the scope of acceptable conversation.

From what little we know, it sounds like it wasn't unreasonable for him to think the bounds had been extended and also the guy grossly overstepped his bounds. In that regard, firing him summarily might be grounds for a lawsuit.

Yes, men can be harassed by women. That doesn't mean that sexism isn't still a major problem, even in 2016.

What is up with this Reddit-like trend towards drama and immature posts on HN? I don't come on here to see this kind of junk, I come on here to find informative posts on topics surrounding tech. I don't care about your beef with patio11. Hell, I don't even care who you two are. Please stop polluting this site with meta posts that reference each other, which encourages less useful information and more clutter on here.

I saw the author's comment on the original thread, I think it's an alright idea in a Fortune 500 company like she mentions, but not so realistic for a startup. How large is the original Ask HN author's company? They might not even have a proper HR department, or person, and nothing set up for sensitivity training.

"Men and women need to learn to interact at work" stuck out to me as well. I think they should learn that... around the age of 12 after getting over their fear of cooties. Not the first few weeks at a new job.

It's fine to be trained on "How to speak to investors during a conference call." or "How to speak to other companies during a sales call or trip.", skills related to the job. But not "How to speak to someone attractive in a professional setting."

If you bring on a new dev, it's expected that you'll have to teach them internal stuff, in-depth details on your current stack. It's a little annoying to have to teach them how to use Git properly, pull, branch, push, but sometimes you pick someone that really doesn't know. But I would certainly want a dev to be fired if they asked me what a for loop was. This feels that elementary to me. I would expect every developer to know what a loop is, and I would expect every single employee to understand at least the basics of human decency.

Also, all the emphasis on gender in the blog post and author's profile. Why is this a gender issue, it's just an etiquette issue. What if it was two men, or two women in this scenario? Why does it matter the gender of the two people involved? And what does it matter the gender of the commenter? For me, everyone on HN is a genderless construct, and I almost never read. I saw the patio11's comment in the other thread and agreed with it most. I had no idea it was patio11 that wrote it.