20 ms·

Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost

1023 points by hexis 14y ago

cooldeal 14y ago
For the life of me I cannot fathom why PlayHaven went to the extreme step of firing the dev in question. What he did was certainly wrong, but certainly not a firable offense. A stern warning from HR would've sufficed. Also, I don't understand the hate and DDoS directed towards SendGrid. I think if any, PlayHaven should've been subject of it and pressured to reinstate the dev in question. SendGrid should've been pressured to warn her, not fire her like it happened. We commit mistakes every once in a while, and losing your job is a big punishment. It's like getting your car seized by the government for speeding 10% over the speed limit. Unfortunately the outcome is that a message is sent that DDoS works to get people that the internet mob doesn't like fired, and that a part of the male tech community is wielding that power. What if parts of the female tech community retaliate with a DDoS against SendGrid now? Looks like the male privilege extends to having the resources to perform DDoS.
- btilly 14y ago
  For the life of me cannot fathom why PlayHaven went to the extreme step of firing the dev in question. They had 2 devs involved that incident. One they fired. One they publicly said was a valued employee. We will never know why they did what they did, why those devs were treated differently, and whether they had cause for their action. I personally find it hard to believe that this event would be enough cause by itself for a reasonable employer to fire an employee in good standing. Which means that some combination of these three are wrong: my belief, the claim that the employer is reasonable, the claim that the employee was in good standing. Guess whatever combination you want - we are unlikely to ever know the truth. (Though your comment is perfectly in line with my belief.)
  - scarmig 14y ago
    But it's a terrible tactical move. They fired one dev out of two, presumably as a value proposition: this was just the one thing to break the camel's back. Which is reasonable, but the issue is that it looks like they fired him entirely for the comment, which obviously has the potential to create a PR fiasco. Lo and behold...
    - jrs235 14y ago
      Perhaps the one that was fired was on probation or already on a performance plan for other issues. This may have been the "not gonna work here" moment.
  - konstruktor 14y ago
    As commenter mr-hank, supposedly the person making the dongle-joke, posted yesterday, the other developer was the one who talked about forking a repo, which was not sexual at all, and only sexualised by Adria Richards.
- corresation 14y ago
  SendGrid should've been pressured to warn her, not fire her like it happened. Their entire business was under assault. They really had no choice in the matter and really are the biggest victims of the whole ridiculous ordeal. This has all turned into farce.
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    That sets a rather worrying precedent though, if someone takes a dislike to me because of some perceived grievance and proceeds to DDOS my employer's website is that justifiable grounds for firing me?
  - WalterSear 14y ago
    She also said that sendgrid supported her actions.
    - manicdee 14y ago
      She was employed by Sendgrid at that time, so since they were paying her salary, it was obvious to her that she was supported by Sendgrid. I suspect the realisation that they were employing a time bomb as their developer evangelist caused them to rethink the value of employing her in that role. This whole incident could have been averted if Adria had followed her own advice: rather than stir up foment on the Internet (the "thermonuclear option") she could simply have turned to the guys and said, "this is not cool." Adria tries to explain that what was going on in her head was an unfortunate sequence of triggers: she's had a traumatic history, so it's to be expected that some things will "get her goat" and trigger her into irrational behaviour. In this case she apparently believed that telling these men that the jokes were not appreciated would have ended up with her being exposed to ridicule on the Internet. So she took the obvious (to her) course of action which was a thermonuclear preemptive strike.
      - WalterSear 14y ago
        I mean, she tweeted that she was specifically supported by Sendmail in this circumstance.
- mhurron 14y ago
  > For the life of me cannot fathom why PlayHaven went to the extreme step of firing the dev in question. The appearance of bringing negative publicity to your employer will often get you fired. Make the complaints sexual in nature and you can probably kiss that job good-bye, this is how society handles these things basically everywhere. She brought negative publicity on her company, so she also risked her position. > Looks like the male privilege extends to having the resources to perform DDoS. Oh pull your head out of your ass. This is by far closer to give a man a hammer and every problem looks like a nail. People acted angrily with the tools they knew best.
  - recoiledsnake 14y ago
    >Oh pull your head out of your ass Do you really need to use abrasive language like this to get your point across? This isn't Reddit. >People acted angrily with the tools they knew best. Yes, the people who were looking to get her fired did so, and succeeded very well. Do you seriously believe the female or feminist tech community has the resources to perform DDoS?
    - bronson 14y ago
      > Do you seriously believe the female or feminist tech community has the resources to perform DDoS? You don't??!
      - mtrimpe 14y ago
        If you consider the willingness of a large group of people to engage in mildly illegal behaviour and the means to orchestrate such an attack on short notice a 'resource' then they indeed probably don't.
    - monkeyspaw 14y ago
      FWIW, I think the colorful and abusive language in this instance did a good job conveying additional information about the poster's mindset, opinion, and how they relate to others. Note that it doesn't reflect well on them. Part of their point is how they say it. To me, this says they're being reactionary and not mindful of others, which undermines their standing. Bad language is a useful signal in communication. In this case, especially, it's a negative signal about the poster.
- zalzane 14y ago
  >What he did was certainly wrong, but certainly not a firable offense. It's probably not his first offense. It's more likely that this was just the straw that broke the camel's back rather than his first infraction. >Also, I don't understand the hate and DDoS directed towards SendGrid. 4chan's politics+/b/ boards are chiefly responsible for the DDOS, as far as I know. Those guys love mob mentality and eye-for-an-eye, so it's likely their motivation was to get Richards fired rather than to redeem the guy who made the jokes.
  - dohertyjf 14y ago
    Also, "wrong"? It was immature to be sure, but "wrong"?? There are no ethics at play here.
  - bigiain 14y ago
    "It's probably not his first offense." Even if that's true (and I've got no clue either way), it's at least in retrospect turned out to be a _spectacularly_ bad PR move for them. If they wanted him gone - they should have fired him "privately", doing something like that as such an obvious response to "internet drama" was _always_ going to be "the wrong thing". (Even it it _was_ "the last straw", they should have waited a week or two - if only just to publicly disconnect their HR processes from being twitter/forum shitstorm driven.)
- pyre 14y ago
  | For the life of me cannot fathom why PlayHaven | went to the extreme step of firing the dev in | question. | | What he did was certainly wrong, but certainly not | a firable offense. A stern warning from HR | would've sufficed. - The ultra-conservative approach is to distance yourself from anything that could be construed as being supportive of a "boys' club" in tech. - According to CrunchBase, PlayHaven only has 50 employees. It's possible that they don't have an HR person that maybe went through some sort of training for issues like this, and instead decided to go for the approach they thought would be least likely to have fall out (e.g. people up in arms because he's not fired and they are "supporting a misogynist" or something similar). - They could have paid for his PyCon expenses (therefore he was there representing the company), and they felt that he did a poor job representing the company. - It's possible there were other reasons they wanted to fire him before PyCon, but this became a good excuse to act on them.
  - niggler 14y ago
    "They could have paid for his PyCon expenses (therefore he was there representing the company), and they felt that he did a poor job representing the company." Doesn't explain why one person is still an employee while the other gentleman was canned. "It's possible there were other reasons they wanted to fire him before PyCon, but this became a good excuse to act on them." I strongly suspect this happened, given the comment in the PlayHaven response: "we will not comment on all the factors that contributed to our parting ways." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5418123 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5418123 EDIT: clarifying that one person was not fired.
    - Semaphor 14y ago
      > Doesn't explain why the other gentleman was canned. Which other gentleman got canned?
      - niggler 14y ago
        Poorly worded. One person, identified as "Andy Reid", was not fired but the other person was. Editing parent to reflect the clarification
- newman314 14y ago
  Just like politicians wanting to appear to be "tough on crime" often leading to horrible decisions, I'm fairly sure this is the same thing at play here. Had the complaint been private, it likely would have resulted in a warning from HR as you said. Unfortunately, because Adria chose a public forum, it demanded a public response, right or wrong regardless. EDIT: Not understanding the down-vote on my post. Someone please elaborate.
- danielweber 14y ago
  My impression is that a lot of people who had nothing to do with this conference decided, on both sides, to make this An Issue without caring about the facts on the ground. I saw the MRAs-vs-feminists going at it in at least two places on the Internet, one of them being HN. This issue was a microcosm of all their old fights and they were going to take us down with them.
- ritchiea 14y ago
  I think firing Adria was appropriate because her actions compromised her ability to function as a developer evangelist. Her irresponsibility in handling the situation has a direct impact on her ability to perform her job. Developer evangelist is largely a PR job, if you are generating incredibly negative PR for your company from that position you should be fired.
- tomd3v 14y ago
  "What he did was certainly wrong" - why, exactly? Telling a joke to your friend is certainly wrong?
obviouslygreen 14y ago
This is a great article from a far more neutral and informed point of view than most of us have managed (or could, given what little has actually been said by first-hand sources). Thanks to the author for treating this issue both critically and realistically, and for attempting to make a difference in SendGrid's reaction, whether it worked or not.
- Terretta 14y ago
  The link to the WordCamp XKCD comic, and Adria's reaction to it, told me more than all the rest of the comments and articles over the past day. I perceived the comic as two women: Allegedly offensive comic: http://jenmylo.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/screen-shot-2011-08-03-at-12-36-47-pm.png http://jenmylo.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/screen-shot-2011-... Deep link to Adria's comment: http://jenmylo.com/2011/08/03/wcsf-shirt/comment-page-1/#comment-326 http://jenmylo.com/2011/08/03/wcsf-shirt/comment-page-1/#com... I would be curious to learn Adria's rationale for the presumption of gender she made. Seems as though she'd find Rorschach tests offensive too.
scarmig 14y ago
Amanda Blum apparently has a history of animosity with Adria Richards, while at the same time she also isn't one of those who would stick their fingers in their ears and say there isn't sexism in tech. That makes this post pretty interesting.
- sergiotapia 14y ago
  I think a lot of people (myself included) spoke out against Adria Richards because of her bullshit - not because she was a woman. One can argue against what she did and not be a "mysoginist man-privelaged pig". (<--- I've seen women write that against people who spoke against Adria Richards)
  - danielweber 14y ago
    Well, some of the people arguing against her were that. But definitely not all. There were and are a lot of people who see this issue through exactly one lens: is the man right or is the woman right? They caught hold of this issue and made it part of their long battle. This issue got reposted to those various blogs and subreddits that represent those armies. (And they each monitor the other so summoning either army summons both.) I suspect that, had those armies never been involved, neither person would be fired today. Not that those armies care. The two people who got fired were acceptable casualties in their war on The Other. Ugh, this comment turned into pop-psychology, sorry.
- bigiain 14y ago
  FWIW, she discloses that in the post - and explains why in ways that are pretty easy to fact-check if anyone wonders if it's justified. I haven't bothered personally to fact-check whether Adria hijacked a newbie talk at a conference to push an anti-porn crusade based solely on another (female) presenter's presentation title, on the grounds that Amanda could get called out on that in an instant if it weren't true. I know which of the two has come out looking fair-and-balanced, and which has come out looking borderline-unhinged here, at least from my point of view.
- vacri 14y ago
  The content of the post makes this post pretty interesting.
anankastic 14y ago
So Adria Richards has pulled shit like this before? Seems like she just does most of this stuff for attention... too bad she took it too far this time and bit off more than she could chew.
- Udo 14y ago
  There is definitely a pattern recognizable from her writing style down to her topic choices and views on these things. Some of these actions also look in no small way hypocritical. However, this discussion is already so extremely loaded with such an insane amount of subtext and misplaced projections done by people who feel reminded of their own traumas, it's hugely unhelpful to launch into a character critique of Richards at this point. It's become an overloaded topic as it is.
  - raganwald 14y ago
    This is exactly how rape trials used to be conducted. The victim would be put on the stand and critiqued about every single relationship she had ever had, with the defence bringing all of her skeletons out in a manner carefully calculated to seem reasonable, fair, and balanced. I'm fifty. I could put together two blog posts about myself, one of which would make me seem like a saint, the other a demon, and both would be factually correct. Which one you read right after I got into some hot water could seriously skew your feelings about my role in events.
    - Udo 14y ago
      This line of rhetorics is exactly the reason why I said that a character critique is unhelpful here, so I'm not sure what your point is but I'm choosing to interpret this as agreeing with me. ;)
      - raganwald 14y ago
        That's how I interpret my remarks too :-)
sergiotapia 14y ago
After reading this article, it really has painted a picture that this person really does belong in the extreme feminist camp. She would fit right in at /r/shitredditsays.
sammyd56 14y ago
"Because of my experiences growing up, I have triggers. This means that I’m always scanning for danger; for situations that seem like something from the past that could hurt me. When I recognize something that matches, I can overreact and feel intense fear, anger or anxiety. This is something I’ve worked on a lot. It’s much better now than 10 years ago but there are some things that send me over the edge." http://butyoureagirl.com/13871/success-against-the-odds-filling-my-technology-knapsack-from-scratch/ http://butyoureagirl.com/13871/success-against-the-odds-fill... (site is currently down, may need to view cache) I'm surprised nobody has picked up on this yet.
- return0 14y ago
  No cached version is available. (On iPad)
- obviouslygreen 14y ago
  I'm not sure what direction you're going with it, but it seems to me this actually makes it worse as far as how she handled the situation. This is a person who knows she's prone to overreacting, but not only does she apply to and accept a job that puts her in overwhelmingly male-dominated situations, she continues to both overreact and fail to recognize or address it. For someone who claims to have gone through truly traumatic things (and I certainly don't doubt that), she's done an unbelievably poor job of restraining herself. If this is better, I imagine she must have been totally unemployable (not to mention incapable of normal human interaction) for a long time.
- pyre 14y ago
  I've tried to keep a pretty neutral opinion of her. It just seemed like she made a misjudgement. This is the first post (Amanda Blum post) to reasonably say something that makes me question that a bit. Now, combine Amanda's post with this info and it's just possible that Adria hasn't suffered enough of a negative response to her past actions (and maybe even benefited from them a bit in blog traffic, etc), so she didn't really 'learn her lesson'[1] on the way she should approach these situations. Unfortunately this time the negative reaction was extreme. [1] This doesn't imply that her reactions were malicious or self-serving. Just that there was never a reaction that caused her to question her way of responding to these things.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- VeejayRampay 14y ago
  I don't think trying to get all analytic and Freudian about her state of mind is either 1) Intellectually honest (since you most likely don't know anything about her) 2) Useful in the scope of this discussion I'm not at all advocating for or against her actions, I'm too remote from the affair to be judge of anything, but please let's not let it slip on a personal terrain, you're simply putting personal theories on the table here, maybe she's better adjusted than all other parties involved for all we know.
  - danielweber 14y ago
    Yeah, if we got rid of everyone from tech that had personal issues, there would be about 2 people left in it. "Having issues" isn't a sin and we should leave that alone.
klrr 14y ago
I know many other communities and industries these actions Adra did would made her banned (forever) for much less things.
HiroProtaganist 14y ago
You guys realize, all this shit (all if it, Adria, the "post-mortem" blog posts, etc), is just a land grab for page views right? http://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator/dp/159184553X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1363902289&sr=8-1&keywords=trust+me+im+lying http://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator...
- monksy 14y ago
  Except this time, like the case with the family run makeup distributor (Turning point in the book), her attempts at creating drama has hurt someone. [Yet she doesn't exhibit remorse for her actions (Unlike Mr. Holiday)]
- jere 14y ago
  Wait, you're saying Adria traded her job for a few page views and death threats?
  - HiroProtaganist 14y ago
    Do I think that was her intention? No, I think that part spiraled out of control. Do I think this spawned from a PR person looking for the page views? Yes.
- return0 14y ago
  So it's just like everybody else?
Zikes 14y ago
> Trolls aside, if you don’t believe there is misogyny in the tech world, this will absolve you of that belief. There was little reasonable chatter, instead she was attacked not as a person or developer but as a female- a bitch. For what it's worth, I've seen and partaken of a great deal of reasonable chatter here on HN. I don't doubt a fair amount of "unreasonable" chatter has taken place elsewhere, but for the life of me I can't find a single example of it coming from any person that could be said to be reasonably representative of the community as a whole. I mean, if all it took was one penis joke for one man to be fired, one would think that there would be industry-wide layoffs every time one of these incidents occur.
dccoolgai 14y ago
I am just gobsmacked...I can't believe I just read something so thoughtful and well-reasoned...this whole thing should end with this article marked "End Of Thread".
- breadbox 14y ago
  Or even better -- I want this to be "Beginning Of Thread". I want to skip over all the rampant speculation and name-calling of the last 24 hours and have the discussion begin here, with this. If only we could, then maybe the next sexism brouhaha might lead to something other than repeating history.
- davidmr 14y ago
  Very much agreed. Whether or not I agree with it, it's very nuanced and avoids the kind of "laying blame for the purpose of laying blame"-type of argument that has dominated any discussion of this absurd series of events. This is a great article with which to start a discussion, not end one. Hopefully the tolerance for less nuanced and more reactionary discussion will abate. I wouldn't put money on it, but I can hope.
  - dccoolgai 14y ago
    I would say it's worth reading even completely outside of this whole circus; "Assume people will be reasonable until they are not." is very wise.
- smrtinsert 14y ago
  Absolutely agree. I'm glad there are finally people out there who are bringing the level on this incident back down to earth.
Nursie 14y ago
Good article. I agree there is rampant sexism in tech, and in society in general. I've seen it, lots. I'm not convinced a couple of guys chuckling at "Big Dongles" is sexism, though it is inappropriate for a professional event. But now we get the picture of Adria Richards and it does seem to be one of someone looking out for ways to be offended and publicise herself with them. And then there's the DDoS and the threats. Utterly un-fucking-acceptable. There's not really anyone that comes out of this looking good.
- takluyver 14y ago
  > There's not really anyone that comes out of this looking good. In my opinion, the PyCon organisers handled things well. They acted on the complaint, explained to the jokers why it was inappropriate, got an apology, and left it there, without publishing names. Unfortunately for them, popular perception of PyCon is probably somewhat tainted by this whole messy incident anyway.
  - Nursie 14y ago
    Yes, actually, of all the actors in this weird online play they did seem to behave reasonably and decently throughout.
redthrowaway 14y ago
I think the most interesting part of this post was a simple observation that I, for one, hadn't seen elsewhere: We don't know why PlayHaven fired the dev in the first place. Sure, the controversy undoubtedly played a role. But we don't know if the dev was on the ropes, if he wasn't pulling his weight, or if his boss simply didn't like him. This may have been a gross overreaction, or it may have been the straw that broke the camel's back. As story-driven creatures, we constantly seek to form narratives around events. As sensation-seekers, we inherently care more about emotional impact than veracity when we craft the mental stories that tie events together and give them meaning. This is not to say that we are incapable of detached, rational thought, but rather that our brains don't default to that mode. One of my biggest personal takeaways from this sordid tale is just a reaffirmation of that fact: that even smart, rational people, who get paid to be smart and rational, will blindly abandon reason in pursuit of a good story. This incident blew up into a tabloid-like frenzy because smart people abandoned reason in favour of sensation. Moreover, this is not due to some personal flaw on their parts: it's simply how we, as human beings, are built. If anything positive comes from this, I hope it's simply a greater recognition on the parts of all concerned of our propensity to engage in this kind of behaviour, and the mental processes that lead to it. Maybe we can be a little more measured in our appraisal of future incidents like this.
- niggler 14y ago
  "We don't know why PlayHaven fired the dev in the first place." Many, including myself, have raised the question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5418714 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5418714 1 hour ago
  - monksy 14y ago
    The lack of transparency is not indicative of further "guilt". Anything more than what was said is speculation.
    - niggler 14y ago
      Given that one employee was retained and the other was let go, the firing could not have stemmed 100% from the issue at hand. One person was clearly not a " valued employee," unlike the other person from playhaven.
niggler 14y ago
I for one am very glad that this happened. It's unfortunate that two people were fired, but I haven't seen such fervent discussion of gender issues, social media, and social norms in a very long time.
return0 14y ago
There's a lesson to be learned here, that a gender war leads nowhere. While sensational, this event has little substance. It's all about conferences (shows) and appearances. None of the two was fired because of their work. There's barely anything useful that can be taken away from this story and added to a company's moral code. The real gender issues have little to do with these high profile tech soap operas.
ramblerman 14y ago
Without tumbling deep into a flame war, I'd like to ask a sincere question. I have trouble understanding the sexism behind the remarks, and why the instigator needs to apologize (for sexism). People get offended for all kinds of things, nobody can claim a monopoloy on that. (http://imgur.com/EX5v4 http://imgur.com/EX5v4 stephen fry quote) - If they would both have been gay and talking about a homosexual topic, someone in that room would be offended. - If they were creationists dismissing darwin, someone would be offended - 2 women discussing ‘shades of grey’, someone would be offended. - A dongle and forking, and Adria is offended. To me it seems she is offended by the sexual overtones. A pruder man might be offended by that too, or many a religious man. I just don’t see the link to sexism. I get it's lowbrow humor. It's not professional. It's probably not suited for a public event like that. The dongle joke was men comparing their 'dongles' and the suggesting they wanted to "fork" the male speaker. How are women being put down or belittled at all here. How is it sexist?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- johnward 14y ago
  It's not sexist. It was just a childish joke. Probably inappropriate in the setting, but it got blown way out of proportion.
- cglee 14y ago
  Discussions like this seem to always come back to a sense of "fairness". It's not about being fair, but about how situations make people feel. Majority-group members tend to brush away the sensitivities of minority-group members. If you're straight, you can walk hand-in-hand with your spouse without issue. You may even be able to embrace publicly, and kiss, hug and display all kinds of PDA. Gay couples can't do that without fear of reprisal, sometimes violently. Minority-group members are only "safe" in certain places. At a tech conference, women are in the minority, and so crass comments about/towards women are not perceived in a safe way. It's not your buddy making a funny joke, it's the majority-group members expressing oppression. Whether you personally agree with that is not the point; it's how minority-group members feel. Be aware of that.
shirro 14y ago
Extremists play a role. Where do you draw the line on sexualisation at a tech conference? Perhaps we need unpopular people like Adria to create debate on what is acceptable and what isn't. I don't always agree with RMS but I think the world is a better place for having him around influencing opinion one way or another. At least these people aren't flying planes into buildings though shaming people with photos is clearly heading towards the dark side. The bigger issue is the unfair dismissals that resulted.
- niggler 14y ago
  "Where do you draw the line on sexualisation at a tech conference?" I hope that this discussion helps us get closer to a good answer to that question.
  - ghaff 14y ago
    For example, take this pic from LinuxCon last year: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bitmason/7987595846/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bitmason/7987595846/ (To be clear, I took this pic because I found it funny, not offensive. I suspect some might find it offensive.)
    - niggler 14y ago
      I don't understand that ad TBH. If they are trying to get males to purchase tee-shirts, wouldnt you want to show a male wearing the tee-shirt? I understand the idea of selling for sexuality, but most retail companies advertise men's clothes with men.
steven2012 14y ago
This is the most intelligently written and most insightful article on this topic, and I hope we can close the entire thing up and move on.
str8gk 14y ago
Shut up, another hole trying to tell us how to think.
biot 14y ago
Well said. The last paragraph sums it all up perfectly: "I imagine in an alternate future, Adria just turned around, smiled and whispered, “Hey. No offense, but I’m not all that interested in hearing about your dongle, you know?’. The men would have become momentarily embarrassed, and then reflexively defensive before letting their rational neurons fire in that crowded room and say, “yeah, dude, no problem”. Maybe one of them would have approached Adria later in the day and pulled her aside to say “hey, I really didn’t mean to offend you, I’m sorry. Hope there’s no hard feelings.” In this alternate future, at a future conference that developer quietly steers a conversation amongst friends away from this territory, without making a big deal of it."
michaelochurch 14y ago
Let's simplify the rules to basic decency. Don't Be a Dick. Oh wait, I guess I can't say that now. Well, fuck me. Whoops, can't say that either. I hope mr-hank gets a huge severance out of PlayHaven. (At-will employment is not as simple as employers like to say it is.) At this point, he has position for something substantial, given that they discussed the termination in the public (disclosing an opinion that he is guilty) when he is a non-public employee. He should not just focus on termination (long odds) but also defamation of character and, unless they give the best of references, tortious interference. He ought to play hardball. Oh, whoops. Not sure I can say that either. This nonsense about "offensive jokes" is ridiculous and distracts people away from the real sexism. I think we should care more about women earning 77 cents on the dollar and having an unfairly hard time recovering their career progress after maternity than about an occasional dongle joke. There are real problems and whatever Adria just tripped on is not one of them.
- niggler 14y ago
  Keep in mind that PlayHaven probably sponsored his participation in PyCon and he would have been treated as a representative of the company. If they have standards of conduct (probably codified in some employee manual) there are probably contingencies for this exact circumstance which allow them to fire him.
  - michaelochurch 14y ago
    Actually, sexual harassment laws that actually exist are reasonable and conservative. There are a few women who try to sue over dick jokes, and "men's rights" characters who make a big deal out of it when that happens-- just like people blow the McDonalds case out of proportion (short synopsis: McD was in the wrong for bad cup design and serving over 160F/70C, the court assigned her partial blame, and she originally only wanted her medical bills paid, not "legal lottery" nonsense)-- but the stuff that's actually covered by sexual harassment law in most jurisdiction is leagues beyond mere dick jokes. No court would consider him guilty of anything for a joke about a dongle. I doubt his company had a sexual harassment policy that was substantially more aggressive than what the law provides. If she asked him to stop, and he kept going, then I'd say that he did something wrong. If he made a dick joke, then no. People make dick jokes in semi-private conversations. Women do, men do, because dicks can be funny. If she says "I wish you wouldn't make jokes like that around me", then he should have stopped and would be in the wrong, but I've seen no evidence of that. The termination suit is uncertain. It's far from a slam dunk, obviously, especially since he admitted making comments that he considered wrong and embarrassing. Bad move to discuss this in the public so soon. He should be able to get defamation, at least with good enough odds to get a settlement that'll cover him till he gets his next job, given what PlayHaven's management said about the termination and about him.
nilved 14y ago
"In attempting to unveil casual misogyny in the tech field, Adria has accidentally revealed the actual misogyny that lies in our industry, and there's nothing casual about it."
- LargeWu 14y ago
  I think even "casual misogyny" is hyperbole, given the original comment that sparked this whole mess. I think the worst you can say about it is that it was crude and unprofessional. The hateful aftermath, though, clearly should not be tolerated.
WalterSear 14y ago
That this kind of blog post is a response to the situation is a small glimmer of how eventually we can all 'win' from this.
lignuist 14y ago
Two people fired. Wow. what happened to just saying sorry to each other and accepting it?
- escaped_hn 14y ago
  Nah. That would be to logical a conclusion.
  - lopatin 14y ago
    Exactly. If I've learned anything from my time using templating libraries, it's that logic-less is the answer!
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
WayneDB 14y ago
Hey, sex jokes are not always about women. Big dongles and forking could totally describe male-male sex! Also, why get so upset about sex jokes? Is there something wrong with sex? You wouldn't even be here without it! I think that people who complain or argue quickly have some unresolved problem. I think this because I am one of those people and I KNOW that I have unresolved mento-emotional issues :) I know that I should be cool and appear to be agreeable all the time, but sometimes (more frequently, mornings or certain topics) it's very challenging. The payoff is so much better than bickering though. The important thing is to realize you're being a righteous asshole. Then you can start changing.
nawitus 14y ago
"But at the Boston conference, great strides were made to have a strong female presence. Almost 40% of attendees at Boston were female, almost 40% of speakers (at the time these numbers were VERY high)," That's not gender equality though, that's positive discrimination. I think conferences should try to get the best speakers available regardless of their gender. "She didn’t get the developer in question fired" She is clearly partly responsive for the company's reaction to the "incident". "How it Could Have Gone" The best alternative future is of course clear: act like an adult in a conference. If you think an overheard joke about "dongles" is not to your liking, then too bad. It's rude trying to control other people.
crapshoot101 14y ago
This is a truly well-written piece. Props to Amanda.
qaz_plm 14y ago
At the end of the day, they both did it to themselves and they only have themselves to blame.
mercurial 14y ago
This was a great post. And I think it does a pretty good job at illustrating the absurdity of the situation: one sex joke and three people are out of a job, with one potentially unemployable in the same capacity. Now, guys will feel compelled to check themselves every time they are in public. When being victim of actual harassment, girls will think twice about denouncing it. And the worst part is that all the actually sexist guys will be able to point to this incident as a justification for why sexism in the tech industry is "not a problem". Thanks, Adria. Thanks, Internet. You all did a terrific job.
SeanLuke 14y ago
I'm interested in a different aspect here than the discussion of sexism and who fired whom at this point. If you're running a blog as a public evangelist for a company, and twitter is part of that public presence, and you emit a tweet which includes a picture of people and criticism of them without their permission, surely this constitutes a violation of commercial use-of-likeness laws in most states, doesn't it?
onemorepassword 14y ago
So what we know now is that Adria Richards' issues are not just with sexism, offensive behavior in general or gender equality, but that she has an ideological agenda that goes well beyond that. Her issues with pornography are ideological, in that they aren't shared by many men and women who would take issue with sexist behavior or gender based discrimination. However, like many ideologues, she doesn't make that distinction herself. And what is also typical for ideologues, she doesn't have any issues with saying or doing things that disproportionately harm people who disagree with her, because they are "the enemy". They're not interested in change, they are interested in winning. These kind of people will do more harm than good when it comes to fighting sexism in tech. They will actually alienate a lot of women. (I do however find it inappropriate and borderline sexist to call her a prude. Being against pornography doesn't make you a prude, just like enjoying pornography doesn't make you a sexist pig.)
- manicdee 14y ago
  These kind of people will alienate a lot of men too. "Oh no! There's a woman in this conference room! I better just shut up and not say anything just in case she takes offense at my talking about my dislike for DRM dongles. Too bad that this means we'll be shipping a DRM-encumbered product, but my job and reputation are more important to risk being fired over perceived sexist comments, even if it saves the company from financial ruin in the long run." When every perceived slight ends up triggering thermonuclear war, people will stop interacting with each other.
  - tadfisher 14y ago
    While you do have a point, the hyperbole isn't helpful.
- rplnt 14y ago
  This was the first article I read about this "case" and what I found amusing was the name (or at least url - haven't clicked) of her blog. She seems to be (just from these few paragraphs I read) the stereotype of a feminist (stereotype in a bad way). People like her just hold the progress of gender equality back.
Havoc 14y ago
Some people are just surrounded by constant drama...mostly drama created out of thin air. Its a useful trait to have if your surname is "Kardashian".
ceol 14y ago
Aside from the personal stuff between her and Adria, I think she has a good grasp of the situation. (i.e. I agree with her) However, I find one thing troubling: > Adria reinforced the idea of us as threats to men, as unreasonable, as hard to work with… as bitches. (From here addressed to Amanda, should she be unlucky enough to stumble upon this thread) I don't believe you should be worrying about whether what you do reinforces someone else's preconceived notion of your gender. Do you really think someone who already sees women as uppity b-tches would suddenly change their tone just because you don't adhere to their stereotype? No, they're going to write you off as an exception. "No no, you're not like them! You're one of the good ones!" But as soon as you do something they don't like? "What a fucking b-tch. This just proves women don't belong in tech. etc etc" However, I'm a guy. I don't really have the right to tell you how you should think about your own oppression, much like how no one has the right to tell Adria how she should have handled calling those two guys out— aside from doing something illegal, which posting a photo on Twitter most certainly is not. I guess what I'm saying is that I agree everyone lost, but one person lost a hell of a lot more than anyone else. That guy whose name we still don't know? He's gotten job offers. Play Haven, the place that actually fired him? Unscathed. Adria? Constant harassment, rape and death threats, and now presumably fired from her job while her former employer is being DDoS'd. All because she posted a picture of some guys on Twitter. Think about that the next time a thread comes up about the sexism women face in the programming community. You can't write it off as a bunch of trolls this time, because a lot of the backlash was directly from HN.
- belorn 14y ago
  Before you accuse everyone on HN to be sexists, please provide evidence that her gender is the cause of the comments. If a guy would had overheard two women, and found what they said to be offensive and hanged them out on twitter, would people send him roses instead? Say one of the women got fired. Everyone would cheer right? The DDoS and the personal attacks are horrible, wrong, and just plain bad, but I serious doubt to the point of disbelif that all this is because the gender of the twitter user.
  - ceol 14y ago
    I don't have the effort to link every single comment, but please go into any of the major discussions (that have since been removed from the front page) and ctrl+F "feminist". Go and look at the vitriol being directed at her, look at the specific insults used (that Amanda mentions in her post.) If it didn't start because of her gender, it most certainly became about her gender.
smrtinsert 14y ago
I honestly believe we had no social tool to soothe the viral effects of this story. Without a downvote or obscure button in twitter, hacker news, facebook, reddit, the only thing you can do is promote. In this case, the agents of sensationalism completely swept the story out of the publics hands, and we're left with remorse at an unfortunate incident that was made way worse though the internet. both parties have had time to inspect their actions, both appear to be sorry, i believe that adria owes the developer an apology for an internet level attack - because thats what it is. she does not owe an apology for objecting to the comment and mr hank has made it clear he's seen his error. i hope we all learn from this, and move on. our profession might be younger than most white collared professions, but have to be better than this, we all have to be.
tehwalrus 14y ago
A very thoughtful article on a very horrible mess.
ramses 14y ago
"[...] talk to eachother. Assume people are reasonable until they are not." As simple as that.
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mkr-hn 14y ago
This is the most level-headed thing I've seen on the situation.
seivan 14y ago
We got an unstable, hypocritical, oversensitive jaded person out of our way. I think this was a win. I feel sorry for mr-hank though, I hope he does better than a shitty startup like Play Haven.
josephlord 14y ago
If your job is evangelism and you get to the point where you are claiming in a tweet that your employer "supports" you there is a real risk that you are asking them to evangelise you rather than the other way round and then your position is likely to be precarious. When you are employed, particularly in a PR or role or any other where you speak for your employer your speech is not fully free. Even when in your own time on private accounts if you claim views and opinions as your own rather than your employer's it can still have an impact. Anonymity is valuable if you have something that you want to say without bringing your employer into the issue. This is not to deny that there may be sexism or that it may be right to publicly stand against it but when in controversial territory speak for yourself and let PR or the CEO back you publicly if they want to and do consider the affect on ability to fulfil role and then balance the need to make a societal impact against that (or quit and speak freely).
tmsh 14y ago
One thing I will say though, ironically, is that this may be actually a good experience for the million or so male and female technology people reading about this. If programming teaches anything, it's that common sense is not something that actually comes easily. The better term perhaps is 'good sense'. And with changing environments, it's easy to lose sight of what is good sense, in different situations. Anyway, if the net result will be that a lot of people will be talking to people first if they have issues, and being more careful about their conversations, and more sensitive generally, then there might actually be a kind of hidden, but great, good outcome to it all.
Jun8 14y ago
This is by far the best post I read about this whole sordid affair. As suspected, Richards, did indeed exhibit this pattern of overreacting before. The balance of this article was amazing!
nilkn 14y ago
Some of the reactions to her have really gotten way out of hand. Seriously. I was just browsing through her YouTube account and it's now spammed with tons of overtly racial and sexist slurs against her. These aren't "dongle" jokes. They're the real deal. This is really just a tragedy. Adria Richards is not the only one who is showing her sensitive, human side here. I think she made a mistake, a big one, and I agree with the decision of SendGrid. But, oddly enough, I think some of the reactions are showing that maybe she was right all along. Her example of sexism and racism in the developer community was a terrible one, but ironically it has led to lots of legitimate examples.
patrickgzill 14y ago
ForkingDongleClub.com is available for purchase as a domain name, at the time of this writing.
CyberDroiD 14y ago
All I saw was some smart ass jack asses getting busted since everyone has a camera nowadays. Get used to everyone having cameras to capture your jackass behavior. Funny that these trolls are so defensive after they got busted and photographed. They can dish it out, but they sure can't take it.
parad0x1 14y ago
This conversation took place between the two guys. Why the hell does she have the right to be offended on a conversation he overheard? And further, what gives her the right to take pictures of people without telling them anything. You can't even argue the public place rule, because the the guys would be able to talk about whatever they want. If she really was offended, and not in it for personal gain, pseudo-women's rights, and just plain selfishness then she would just go to the conference organizers and told them about the incident. But she decides to be a huge hypocrite, post his picture on Twitter and get attention to herself. She succeeded, but it never turned out the way that she thought it would be. I am pro women's rights, but this isn't an argument of sexism, this is a hypocritical narcissistic feminazi who wants the center of attention. The guy who got fired didn't deserve it, while she really did. She doesn't deserve the attention she is getting.
Nightrider 14y ago
Adria, if you're reading this, I'm proud of you for standing up for morality. Thank you!
martinced 14y ago
Do you people realize that women, when between women, can be just as gross as men? They talk about guys as "food" and "expendable" things. They really do. Also they typically give way more details about their sexual life to their women friends than man do to their men friends. The difference is that in the coding world it's something like 90% men. So of course you won't have enough women "teaming up" to make gravvy jokes about men's short appendages or whatever. What about we stop it? I was playing tennis with a friend the other day: two men. On the court next to our were four women. My friend was making a few jokes during pauses and being "gross". I can tell you that the four women were doing exactly the same: you can't hear it but they look at you and laugh and you know they're talking about you as meat they're going to eat or something. Because that's what women do when they look at men and laugh between them. Just ask them ffs. They can be really gross too. Now I try not to make these jokes and sexual remarks: not because somehow I'd try not to offend the other person (honestly women can laugh as much as they want when talking about me, I don't give a frak). No, the reason I don't do this is because I've got a girlfriend and I don't want to be disrespectful to her by making sexual jokes about "wanting to fork other women's little hidden repo" or something. It would be great if people stopped doing these lame remarks but it would be great too if women stopped playing 16 years old virgins who are never saying anything gravvy about men when between them.
creativityhurts 14y ago
I think nor Adria or PlayHeaven should use Github anymore http://shop.github.com/products/fork-you-shirt-mens-medium http://shop.github.com/products/fork-you-shirt-mens-medium
chris_mahan 14y ago
All I know is that as a python developer I'm fairly disgusted by what happened. My son is 7 and this is the sort of thing that happen in second grade.
frozenport 14y ago
Mentioned this to my 80 year old grandmother, who has a PhD in Aerospace, said the inability to work problems out by talking was a common stereotype for women.
D_Alex 14y ago
Or perhaps... in fact...in the end... we all won?! The situation resolved itself in a way that demonstrated that the community is tolerant of political correctness slip ups, and intolerant of those that blow them up out of proportion. But please, y'all... don't take it as a license to make puerile jokes. A little bit of extra sensitivity may be appropriate for a while.
deleted 14y ago
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jack-r-abbit 14y ago
> There’s a gentleman’s code for privacy Wait... what? is that sexist? or ironic? I can't tell anymore these days. Should I be offended by that?
Shank 14y ago
This is, by far, one of the bests posts I've seen about the Adria situation, because it isn't entirely biased to one side. Amanda (the post author) notes that "[nobody] won," which is the signifying action as to why this is so important. Adria was threatened and hated upon over an overreaction. While she definitely didn't do the right thing initially, the best move would have been to mitigate damage, both from Play Haven & SendGrid. If both companies had apologized, they would both be better off for it, and it wouldn't have resulted in any DDoSing or threats. I'm disappointed at all of the reactions attacking Adria, because they're the exact thing she was trying to prevent in the first place (sexism, hatred), because it wasn't constructive. It does nothing but burn bridges, and undermines the original problem (the dev being fired) in the first place. If the community instead rallied around the dev & asked him to get reinstated, rather than attacked Adria, it would have ended differently.
monksy 14y ago
What I'm not seeing is the amount of flack that Playhaven got from Ms Richard's supporters. I suspect that it was contacted heavily [if the reactions from the SendMail site are any indication].
foohbarbaz 14y ago
I said it once and will say again: these off color jokes between _some_ males tend not to happen when there's not a woman in earshot. So, yes, I suspect strongly there was a good reason for Adria Richards to be offended. The firing by her company and the reaction of the community just left me speechless. Just plain sad. Why the dev in question needed to be fired is also questionable to me. Ashamed to belong to this crowd. Unfortunately.
smsm42 14y ago
I didn't even know "money shot" has a porn meaning until reading this article. I thought it's something to do with dice games or marksmanship or something. You learn something new every day. As for the matter of the loss, I think the article is spot on. I personally would be horrified if I learned that somebody who made a silly joke I didn't like lost his/her job when if I just handled it a bit differently everything could be fine and nobody would be hurt. Now two people are out of jobs and amount of misery and bad feelings in the tech world is clearly increasing. And that's in open source where the thing that brings people together supposed to be helping each other and making the world better together. Everybody lost here, big time.
ghostnappa 14y ago
Now I don't wanna play cards against humanity with any of my co-workers ever...
nigglet 14y ago
The real question is, how does a company hire a "developer evangelist" who doesn't know what the fork forking is!
Shenglong 14y ago
Respectably, I disagree with the OP on this entire subject. Yes, the Adria scandal was not constructive to any party involved - but the way it's being analyzed is dead wrong: When women in this industry are hurt, we’re all hurt. No. No. It's exactly this kind of thinking that got us here in the first place. It's this kind of thinking that perpetuates the very dissonance inherent in stereotypes. There is so much anti-racism/anti-sexism/anti-everything-slightly-inappropriate recently that some days I don't want to get out of bed. I don't want to watch what I say at every turn. I don't want to limit my vocabulary when there are so few English words in the first place. I don't want to change what I find funny because society has all of a sudden deemed it possibly inappropriate under certain situations. So what's the solution? People need to start recognizing others as individuals--people need to start recognizing themselves as individuals. I'll admit it: I make inappropriate jokes all the time around my friends: every sort of inappropriate joke you can imagine. Why? Because the whole concept of shock humor is poking at things that are obviously not true. Why would people laugh if women actually were bad drivers (I am a terrible driver)? Why would they laugh if Asians could actually all do backflips (I broke a finger trying). If forking someone's repo was actually sexual, why would it be funny? "I'm going to fuck her" surely isn't funny. The moment we all recognize that people are individuals, and not just subsets of classes, is the moment where all this ridiculousness will go away. Thinking that a blow to one woman hurts all women is as ridiculous as thinking a blow to one Asian hurts all Asians - or a blow to one person in tech who has large muscles is a blow to all people in tech who have large muscles. The association is ridiculous. I don't know any women in tech. I know people in tech, and some of them just happen to be women.
polarix 14y ago
This is so accurate. Let us mourn.
laichzeit0 14y ago
"No one has the right to spend their life without being offended." - Philip Pullman
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nnq 14y ago
In relatively civilized society, above a certain level of "civilness", these things actually work backwards: 1. Forbidding porn/sex allusions will promote them and also make them more mean - people like breaking stupid rules just for the fun of it and they take revenge for the rule being imposed on them by being meaner to others when they break it! 2. Take too many measures against sexual/national/racial discrimination will increase sexual discrimination - because doing it or even joking about it is considered bad, it starts happening underground, with people smiling and being pro-equality on the surface and busy finding technical reasons to get rid of people of the respective sex/nation/race. 3. Try to much to prevent sexual harassment will also drive things underground and "innocent but distasteful" jokes will turn into actual acts of mean but well disguised discrimination - I bet that a huge number of people will now find "technical reasons" not to invite AR to conferences and that the people whose jokes she considered offensive will make even more offensive jokes behind her back and even try to revengefully harm her career by dirty "underground" maneuvers. ...that's how humans work you know.
brunolazzaro 14y ago
The internet is a weird place. I will never understand why Adria did what she did, from all i read she is an intelligent person yet she chose to do the most childish thing in the world... tattle the kid that said "penis" in class. I'm not saying that what the kid is wrong, but don't tattle on him flat-out... just tell him to stop before you go to the teacher and the whole class finds out and the kid gets expelled. But then, the whole class got mad at her. With reason, or not. It do... But the point is that this feels like kindergarden. JUST BE NICE TO EACH OTHERS. DON'T BE PENISES.
bjeanes 14y ago
Exactly the article I was contemplating writing. Thank you!
likeclockwork 14y ago
I didn't see this drama. I usually try to avoid the dramas, but, wow she took their pictures and posted them on Twitter? She thinks of herself as 'being a hero'? What a cowardly overreaction.
TheCondor 14y ago
So twitter has nothing in this as people create anonymous accounts and threaten users with rape?

1023 points by hexis 14y ago

For the life of me I cannot fathom why PlayHaven went to the extreme step of firing the dev in question. What he did was certainly wrong, but certainly not a firable offense. A stern warning from HR would've sufficed. Also, I don't understand the hate and DDoS directed towards SendGrid. I think if any, PlayHaven should've been subject of it and pressured to reinstate the dev in question. SendGrid should've been pressured to warn her, not fire her like it happened. We commit mistakes every once in a while, and losing your job is a big punishment. It's like getting your car seized by the government for speeding 10% over the speed limit. Unfortunately the outcome is that a message is sent that DDoS works to get people that the internet mob doesn't like fired, and that a part of the male tech community is wielding that power. What if parts of the female tech community retaliate with a DDoS against SendGrid now? Looks like the male privilege extends to having the resources to perform DDoS.

btilly 14y ago
For the life of me cannot fathom why PlayHaven went to the extreme step of firing the dev in question. They had 2 devs involved that incident. One they fired. One they publicly said was a valued employee. We will never know why they did what they did, why those devs were treated differently, and whether they had cause for their action. I personally find it hard to believe that this event would be enough cause by itself for a reasonable employer to fire an employee in good standing. Which means that some combination of these three are wrong: my belief, the claim that the employer is reasonable, the claim that the employee was in good standing. Guess whatever combination you want - we are unlikely to ever know the truth. (Though your comment is perfectly in line with my belief.)
- scarmig 14y ago
  But it's a terrible tactical move. They fired one dev out of two, presumably as a value proposition: this was just the one thing to break the camel's back. Which is reasonable, but the issue is that it looks like they fired him entirely for the comment, which obviously has the potential to create a PR fiasco. Lo and behold...
  - jrs235 14y ago
    Perhaps the one that was fired was on probation or already on a performance plan for other issues. This may have been the "not gonna work here" moment.
- konstruktor 14y ago
  As commenter mr-hank, supposedly the person making the dongle-joke, posted yesterday, the other developer was the one who talked about forking a repo, which was not sexual at all, and only sexualised by Adria Richards.
corresation 14y ago
SendGrid should've been pressured to warn her, not fire her like it happened. Their entire business was under assault. They really had no choice in the matter and really are the biggest victims of the whole ridiculous ordeal. This has all turned into farce.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  That sets a rather worrying precedent though, if someone takes a dislike to me because of some perceived grievance and proceeds to DDOS my employer's website is that justifiable grounds for firing me?
- WalterSear 14y ago
  She also said that sendgrid supported her actions.
  - manicdee 14y ago
    She was employed by Sendgrid at that time, so since they were paying her salary, it was obvious to her that she was supported by Sendgrid. I suspect the realisation that they were employing a time bomb as their developer evangelist caused them to rethink the value of employing her in that role. This whole incident could have been averted if Adria had followed her own advice: rather than stir up foment on the Internet (the "thermonuclear option") she could simply have turned to the guys and said, "this is not cool." Adria tries to explain that what was going on in her head was an unfortunate sequence of triggers: she's had a traumatic history, so it's to be expected that some things will "get her goat" and trigger her into irrational behaviour. In this case she apparently believed that telling these men that the jokes were not appreciated would have ended up with her being exposed to ridicule on the Internet. So she took the obvious (to her) course of action which was a thermonuclear preemptive strike.
    - WalterSear 14y ago
      I mean, she tweeted that she was specifically supported by Sendmail in this circumstance.
mhurron 14y ago
> For the life of me cannot fathom why PlayHaven went to the extreme step of firing the dev in question. The appearance of bringing negative publicity to your employer will often get you fired. Make the complaints sexual in nature and you can probably kiss that job good-bye, this is how society handles these things basically everywhere. She brought negative publicity on her company, so she also risked her position. > Looks like the male privilege extends to having the resources to perform DDoS. Oh pull your head out of your ass. This is by far closer to give a man a hammer and every problem looks like a nail. People acted angrily with the tools they knew best.
- recoiledsnake 14y ago
  >Oh pull your head out of your ass Do you really need to use abrasive language like this to get your point across? This isn't Reddit. >People acted angrily with the tools they knew best. Yes, the people who were looking to get her fired did so, and succeeded very well. Do you seriously believe the female or feminist tech community has the resources to perform DDoS?
  - bronson 14y ago
    > Do you seriously believe the female or feminist tech community has the resources to perform DDoS? You don't??!
    - mtrimpe 14y ago
      If you consider the willingness of a large group of people to engage in mildly illegal behaviour and the means to orchestrate such an attack on short notice a 'resource' then they indeed probably don't.
  - monkeyspaw 14y ago
    FWIW, I think the colorful and abusive language in this instance did a good job conveying additional information about the poster's mindset, opinion, and how they relate to others. Note that it doesn't reflect well on them. Part of their point is how they say it. To me, this says they're being reactionary and not mindful of others, which undermines their standing. Bad language is a useful signal in communication. In this case, especially, it's a negative signal about the poster.
zalzane 14y ago
>What he did was certainly wrong, but certainly not a firable offense. It's probably not his first offense. It's more likely that this was just the straw that broke the camel's back rather than his first infraction. >Also, I don't understand the hate and DDoS directed towards SendGrid. 4chan's politics+/b/ boards are chiefly responsible for the DDOS, as far as I know. Those guys love mob mentality and eye-for-an-eye, so it's likely their motivation was to get Richards fired rather than to redeem the guy who made the jokes.
- dohertyjf 14y ago
  Also, "wrong"? It was immature to be sure, but "wrong"?? There are no ethics at play here.
- bigiain 14y ago
  "It's probably not his first offense." Even if that's true (and I've got no clue either way), it's at least in retrospect turned out to be a _spectacularly_ bad PR move for them. If they wanted him gone - they should have fired him "privately", doing something like that as such an obvious response to "internet drama" was _always_ going to be "the wrong thing". (Even it it _was_ "the last straw", they should have waited a week or two - if only just to publicly disconnect their HR processes from being twitter/forum shitstorm driven.)
pyre 14y ago
| For the life of me cannot fathom why PlayHaven | went to the extreme step of firing the dev in | question. | | What he did was certainly wrong, but certainly not | a firable offense. A stern warning from HR | would've sufficed. - The ultra-conservative approach is to distance yourself from anything that could be construed as being supportive of a "boys' club" in tech. - According to CrunchBase, PlayHaven only has 50 employees. It's possible that they don't have an HR person that maybe went through some sort of training for issues like this, and instead decided to go for the approach they thought would be least likely to have fall out (e.g. people up in arms because he's not fired and they are "supporting a misogynist" or something similar). - They could have paid for his PyCon expenses (therefore he was there representing the company), and they felt that he did a poor job representing the company. - It's possible there were other reasons they wanted to fire him before PyCon, but this became a good excuse to act on them.
- niggler 14y ago
  "They could have paid for his PyCon expenses (therefore he was there representing the company), and they felt that he did a poor job representing the company." Doesn't explain why one person is still an employee while the other gentleman was canned. "It's possible there were other reasons they wanted to fire him before PyCon, but this became a good excuse to act on them." I strongly suspect this happened, given the comment in the PlayHaven response: "we will not comment on all the factors that contributed to our parting ways." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5418123 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5418123 EDIT: clarifying that one person was not fired.
  - Semaphor 14y ago
    > Doesn't explain why the other gentleman was canned. Which other gentleman got canned?
    - niggler 14y ago
      Poorly worded. One person, identified as "Andy Reid", was not fired but the other person was. Editing parent to reflect the clarification
newman314 14y ago
Just like politicians wanting to appear to be "tough on crime" often leading to horrible decisions, I'm fairly sure this is the same thing at play here. Had the complaint been private, it likely would have resulted in a warning from HR as you said. Unfortunately, because Adria chose a public forum, it demanded a public response, right or wrong regardless. EDIT: Not understanding the down-vote on my post. Someone please elaborate.
danielweber 14y ago
My impression is that a lot of people who had nothing to do with this conference decided, on both sides, to make this An Issue without caring about the facts on the ground. I saw the MRAs-vs-feminists going at it in at least two places on the Internet, one of them being HN. This issue was a microcosm of all their old fights and they were going to take us down with them.
ritchiea 14y ago
I think firing Adria was appropriate because her actions compromised her ability to function as a developer evangelist. Her irresponsibility in handling the situation has a direct impact on her ability to perform her job. Developer evangelist is largely a PR job, if you are generating incredibly negative PR for your company from that position you should be fired.
tomd3v 14y ago
"What he did was certainly wrong" - why, exactly? Telling a joke to your friend is certainly wrong?

obviouslygreen 14y ago

This is a great article from a far more neutral and informed point of view than most of us have managed (or could, given what little has actually been said by first-hand sources). Thanks to the author for treating this issue both critically and realistically, and for attempting to make a difference in SendGrid's reaction, whether it worked or not.

Terretta 14y ago
The link to the WordCamp XKCD comic, and Adria's reaction to it, told me more than all the rest of the comments and articles over the past day. I perceived the comic as two women: Allegedly offensive comic: http://jenmylo.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/screen-shot-2011-08-03-at-12-36-47-pm.png http://jenmylo.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/screen-shot-2011-... Deep link to Adria's comment: http://jenmylo.com/2011/08/03/wcsf-shirt/comment-page-1/#comment-326 http://jenmylo.com/2011/08/03/wcsf-shirt/comment-page-1/#com... I would be curious to learn Adria's rationale for the presumption of gender she made. Seems as though she'd find Rorschach tests offensive too.

scarmig 14y ago

Amanda Blum apparently has a history of animosity with Adria Richards, while at the same time she also isn't one of those who would stick their fingers in their ears and say there isn't sexism in tech. That makes this post pretty interesting.

sergiotapia 14y ago
I think a lot of people (myself included) spoke out against Adria Richards because of her bullshit - not because she was a woman. One can argue against what she did and not be a "mysoginist man-privelaged pig". (<--- I've seen women write that against people who spoke against Adria Richards)
- danielweber 14y ago
  Well, some of the people arguing against her were that. But definitely not all. There were and are a lot of people who see this issue through exactly one lens: is the man right or is the woman right? They caught hold of this issue and made it part of their long battle. This issue got reposted to those various blogs and subreddits that represent those armies. (And they each monitor the other so summoning either army summons both.) I suspect that, had those armies never been involved, neither person would be fired today. Not that those armies care. The two people who got fired were acceptable casualties in their war on The Other. Ugh, this comment turned into pop-psychology, sorry.
bigiain 14y ago
FWIW, she discloses that in the post - and explains why in ways that are pretty easy to fact-check if anyone wonders if it's justified. I haven't bothered personally to fact-check whether Adria hijacked a newbie talk at a conference to push an anti-porn crusade based solely on another (female) presenter's presentation title, on the grounds that Amanda could get called out on that in an instant if it weren't true. I know which of the two has come out looking fair-and-balanced, and which has come out looking borderline-unhinged here, at least from my point of view.
vacri 14y ago
The content of the post makes this post pretty interesting.

anankastic 14y ago

So Adria Richards has pulled shit like this before? Seems like she just does most of this stuff for attention... too bad she took it too far this time and bit off more than she could chew.

Udo 14y ago
There is definitely a pattern recognizable from her writing style down to her topic choices and views on these things. Some of these actions also look in no small way hypocritical. However, this discussion is already so extremely loaded with such an insane amount of subtext and misplaced projections done by people who feel reminded of their own traumas, it's hugely unhelpful to launch into a character critique of Richards at this point. It's become an overloaded topic as it is.
- raganwald 14y ago
  This is exactly how rape trials used to be conducted. The victim would be put on the stand and critiqued about every single relationship she had ever had, with the defence bringing all of her skeletons out in a manner carefully calculated to seem reasonable, fair, and balanced. I'm fifty. I could put together two blog posts about myself, one of which would make me seem like a saint, the other a demon, and both would be factually correct. Which one you read right after I got into some hot water could seriously skew your feelings about my role in events.
  - Udo 14y ago
    This line of rhetorics is exactly the reason why I said that a character critique is unhelpful here, so I'm not sure what your point is but I'm choosing to interpret this as agreeing with me. ;)
    - raganwald 14y ago
      That's how I interpret my remarks too :-)

sergiotapia 14y ago

After reading this article, it really has painted a picture that this person really does belong in the extreme feminist camp. She would fit right in at /r/shitredditsays.

sammyd56 14y ago

"Because of my experiences growing up, I have triggers. This means that I’m always scanning for danger; for situations that seem like something from the past that could hurt me. When I recognize something that matches, I can overreact and feel intense fear, anger or anxiety. This is something I’ve worked on a lot. It’s much better now than 10 years ago but there are some things that send me over the edge." http://butyoureagirl.com/13871/success-against-the-odds-filling-my-technology-knapsack-from-scratch/ http://butyoureagirl.com/13871/success-against-the-odds-fill... (site is currently down, may need to view cache) I'm surprised nobody has picked up on this yet.

return0 14y ago
No cached version is available. (On iPad)
obviouslygreen 14y ago
I'm not sure what direction you're going with it, but it seems to me this actually makes it worse as far as how she handled the situation. This is a person who knows she's prone to overreacting, but not only does she apply to and accept a job that puts her in overwhelmingly male-dominated situations, she continues to both overreact and fail to recognize or address it. For someone who claims to have gone through truly traumatic things (and I certainly don't doubt that), she's done an unbelievably poor job of restraining herself. If this is better, I imagine she must have been totally unemployable (not to mention incapable of normal human interaction) for a long time.
pyre 14y ago
I've tried to keep a pretty neutral opinion of her. It just seemed like she made a misjudgement. This is the first post (Amanda Blum post) to reasonably say something that makes me question that a bit. Now, combine Amanda's post with this info and it's just possible that Adria hasn't suffered enough of a negative response to her past actions (and maybe even benefited from them a bit in blog traffic, etc), so she didn't really 'learn her lesson'[1] on the way she should approach these situations. Unfortunately this time the negative reaction was extreme. [1] This doesn't imply that her reactions were malicious or self-serving. Just that there was never a reaction that caused her to question her way of responding to these things.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

VeejayRampay 14y ago
I don't think trying to get all analytic and Freudian about her state of mind is either 1) Intellectually honest (since you most likely don't know anything about her) 2) Useful in the scope of this discussion I'm not at all advocating for or against her actions, I'm too remote from the affair to be judge of anything, but please let's not let it slip on a personal terrain, you're simply putting personal theories on the table here, maybe she's better adjusted than all other parties involved for all we know.
- danielweber 14y ago
  Yeah, if we got rid of everyone from tech that had personal issues, there would be about 2 people left in it. "Having issues" isn't a sin and we should leave that alone.

klrr 14y ago

I know many other communities and industries these actions Adra did would made her banned (forever) for much less things.

HiroProtaganist 14y ago

You guys realize, all this shit (all if it, Adria, the "post-mortem" blog posts, etc), is just a land grab for page views right? http://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator/dp/159184553X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1363902289&sr=8-1&keywords=trust+me+im+lying http://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator...

monksy 14y ago
Except this time, like the case with the family run makeup distributor (Turning point in the book), her attempts at creating drama has hurt someone. [Yet she doesn't exhibit remorse for her actions (Unlike Mr. Holiday)]
jere 14y ago
Wait, you're saying Adria traded her job for a few page views and death threats?
- HiroProtaganist 14y ago
  Do I think that was her intention? No, I think that part spiraled out of control. Do I think this spawned from a PR person looking for the page views? Yes.
return0 14y ago
So it's just like everybody else?

Zikes 14y ago

> Trolls aside, if you don’t believe there is misogyny in the tech world, this will absolve you of that belief. There was little reasonable chatter, instead she was attacked not as a person or developer but as a female- a bitch. For what it's worth, I've seen and partaken of a great deal of reasonable chatter here on HN. I don't doubt a fair amount of "unreasonable" chatter has taken place elsewhere, but for the life of me I can't find a single example of it coming from any person that could be said to be reasonably representative of the community as a whole. I mean, if all it took was one penis joke for one man to be fired, one would think that there would be industry-wide layoffs every time one of these incidents occur.

dccoolgai 14y ago

I am just gobsmacked...I can't believe I just read something so thoughtful and well-reasoned...this whole thing should end with this article marked "End Of Thread".

breadbox 14y ago
Or even better -- I want this to be "Beginning Of Thread". I want to skip over all the rampant speculation and name-calling of the last 24 hours and have the discussion begin here, with this. If only we could, then maybe the next sexism brouhaha might lead to something other than repeating history.
davidmr 14y ago
Very much agreed. Whether or not I agree with it, it's very nuanced and avoids the kind of "laying blame for the purpose of laying blame"-type of argument that has dominated any discussion of this absurd series of events. This is a great article with which to start a discussion, not end one. Hopefully the tolerance for less nuanced and more reactionary discussion will abate. I wouldn't put money on it, but I can hope.
- dccoolgai 14y ago
  I would say it's worth reading even completely outside of this whole circus; "Assume people will be reasonable until they are not." is very wise.
smrtinsert 14y ago
Absolutely agree. I'm glad there are finally people out there who are bringing the level on this incident back down to earth.

Nursie 14y ago

Good article. I agree there is rampant sexism in tech, and in society in general. I've seen it, lots. I'm not convinced a couple of guys chuckling at "Big Dongles" is sexism, though it is inappropriate for a professional event. But now we get the picture of Adria Richards and it does seem to be one of someone looking out for ways to be offended and publicise herself with them. And then there's the DDoS and the threats. Utterly un-fucking-acceptable. There's not really anyone that comes out of this looking good.

takluyver 14y ago
> There's not really anyone that comes out of this looking good. In my opinion, the PyCon organisers handled things well. They acted on the complaint, explained to the jokers why it was inappropriate, got an apology, and left it there, without publishing names. Unfortunately for them, popular perception of PyCon is probably somewhat tainted by this whole messy incident anyway.
- Nursie 14y ago
  Yes, actually, of all the actors in this weird online play they did seem to behave reasonably and decently throughout.

redthrowaway 14y ago

I think the most interesting part of this post was a simple observation that I, for one, hadn't seen elsewhere: We don't know why PlayHaven fired the dev in the first place. Sure, the controversy undoubtedly played a role. But we don't know if the dev was on the ropes, if he wasn't pulling his weight, or if his boss simply didn't like him. This may have been a gross overreaction, or it may have been the straw that broke the camel's back. As story-driven creatures, we constantly seek to form narratives around events. As sensation-seekers, we inherently care more about emotional impact than veracity when we craft the mental stories that tie events together and give them meaning. This is not to say that we are incapable of detached, rational thought, but rather that our brains don't default to that mode. One of my biggest personal takeaways from this sordid tale is just a reaffirmation of that fact: that even smart, rational people, who get paid to be smart and rational, will blindly abandon reason in pursuit of a good story. This incident blew up into a tabloid-like frenzy because smart people abandoned reason in favour of sensation. Moreover, this is not due to some personal flaw on their parts: it's simply how we, as human beings, are built. If anything positive comes from this, I hope it's simply a greater recognition on the parts of all concerned of our propensity to engage in this kind of behaviour, and the mental processes that lead to it. Maybe we can be a little more measured in our appraisal of future incidents like this.

niggler 14y ago
"We don't know why PlayHaven fired the dev in the first place." Many, including myself, have raised the question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5418714 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5418714 1 hour ago
- monksy 14y ago
  The lack of transparency is not indicative of further "guilt". Anything more than what was said is speculation.
  - niggler 14y ago
    Given that one employee was retained and the other was let go, the firing could not have stemmed 100% from the issue at hand. One person was clearly not a " valued employee," unlike the other person from playhaven.

niggler 14y ago

I for one am very glad that this happened. It's unfortunate that two people were fired, but I haven't seen such fervent discussion of gender issues, social media, and social norms in a very long time.

return0 14y ago

There's a lesson to be learned here, that a gender war leads nowhere. While sensational, this event has little substance. It's all about conferences (shows) and appearances. None of the two was fired because of their work. There's barely anything useful that can be taken away from this story and added to a company's moral code. The real gender issues have little to do with these high profile tech soap operas.

ramblerman 14y ago

Without tumbling deep into a flame war, I'd like to ask a sincere question. I have trouble understanding the sexism behind the remarks, and why the instigator needs to apologize (for sexism). People get offended for all kinds of things, nobody can claim a monopoloy on that. (http://imgur.com/EX5v4 http://imgur.com/EX5v4 stephen fry quote) - If they would both have been gay and talking about a homosexual topic, someone in that room would be offended. - If they were creationists dismissing darwin, someone would be offended - 2 women discussing ‘shades of grey’, someone would be offended. - A dongle and forking, and Adria is offended. To me it seems she is offended by the sexual overtones. A pruder man might be offended by that too, or many a religious man. I just don’t see the link to sexism. I get it's lowbrow humor. It's not professional. It's probably not suited for a public event like that. The dongle joke was men comparing their 'dongles' and the suggesting they wanted to "fork" the male speaker. How are women being put down or belittled at all here. How is it sexist?

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
johnward 14y ago
It's not sexist. It was just a childish joke. Probably inappropriate in the setting, but it got blown way out of proportion.
cglee 14y ago
Discussions like this seem to always come back to a sense of "fairness". It's not about being fair, but about how situations make people feel. Majority-group members tend to brush away the sensitivities of minority-group members. If you're straight, you can walk hand-in-hand with your spouse without issue. You may even be able to embrace publicly, and kiss, hug and display all kinds of PDA. Gay couples can't do that without fear of reprisal, sometimes violently. Minority-group members are only "safe" in certain places. At a tech conference, women are in the minority, and so crass comments about/towards women are not perceived in a safe way. It's not your buddy making a funny joke, it's the majority-group members expressing oppression. Whether you personally agree with that is not the point; it's how minority-group members feel. Be aware of that.

shirro 14y ago

Extremists play a role. Where do you draw the line on sexualisation at a tech conference? Perhaps we need unpopular people like Adria to create debate on what is acceptable and what isn't. I don't always agree with RMS but I think the world is a better place for having him around influencing opinion one way or another. At least these people aren't flying planes into buildings though shaming people with photos is clearly heading towards the dark side. The bigger issue is the unfair dismissals that resulted.

niggler 14y ago
"Where do you draw the line on sexualisation at a tech conference?" I hope that this discussion helps us get closer to a good answer to that question.
- ghaff 14y ago
  For example, take this pic from LinuxCon last year: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bitmason/7987595846/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bitmason/7987595846/ (To be clear, I took this pic because I found it funny, not offensive. I suspect some might find it offensive.)
  - niggler 14y ago
    I don't understand that ad TBH. If they are trying to get males to purchase tee-shirts, wouldnt you want to show a male wearing the tee-shirt? I understand the idea of selling for sexuality, but most retail companies advertise men's clothes with men.

steven2012 14y ago

This is the most intelligently written and most insightful article on this topic, and I hope we can close the entire thing up and move on.

str8gk 14y ago

Shut up, another hole trying to tell us how to think.

biot 14y ago

Well said. The last paragraph sums it all up perfectly: "I imagine in an alternate future, Adria just turned around, smiled and whispered, “Hey. No offense, but I’m not all that interested in hearing about your dongle, you know?’. The men would have become momentarily embarrassed, and then reflexively defensive before letting their rational neurons fire in that crowded room and say, “yeah, dude, no problem”. Maybe one of them would have approached Adria later in the day and pulled her aside to say “hey, I really didn’t mean to offend you, I’m sorry. Hope there’s no hard feelings.” In this alternate future, at a future conference that developer quietly steers a conversation amongst friends away from this territory, without making a big deal of it."

michaelochurch 14y ago

Let's simplify the rules to basic decency. Don't Be a Dick. Oh wait, I guess I can't say that now. Well, fuck me. Whoops, can't say that either. I hope mr-hank gets a huge severance out of PlayHaven. (At-will employment is not as simple as employers like to say it is.) At this point, he has position for something substantial, given that they discussed the termination in the public (disclosing an opinion that he is guilty) when he is a non-public employee. He should not just focus on termination (long odds) but also defamation of character and, unless they give the best of references, tortious interference. He ought to play hardball. Oh, whoops. Not sure I can say that either. This nonsense about "offensive jokes" is ridiculous and distracts people away from the real sexism. I think we should care more about women earning 77 cents on the dollar and having an unfairly hard time recovering their career progress after maternity than about an occasional dongle joke. There are real problems and whatever Adria just tripped on is not one of them.

niggler 14y ago
Keep in mind that PlayHaven probably sponsored his participation in PyCon and he would have been treated as a representative of the company. If they have standards of conduct (probably codified in some employee manual) there are probably contingencies for this exact circumstance which allow them to fire him.
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  Actually, sexual harassment laws that actually exist are reasonable and conservative. There are a few women who try to sue over dick jokes, and "men's rights" characters who make a big deal out of it when that happens-- just like people blow the McDonalds case out of proportion (short synopsis: McD was in the wrong for bad cup design and serving over 160F/70C, the court assigned her partial blame, and she originally only wanted her medical bills paid, not "legal lottery" nonsense)-- but the stuff that's actually covered by sexual harassment law in most jurisdiction is leagues beyond mere dick jokes. No court would consider him guilty of anything for a joke about a dongle. I doubt his company had a sexual harassment policy that was substantially more aggressive than what the law provides. If she asked him to stop, and he kept going, then I'd say that he did something wrong. If he made a dick joke, then no. People make dick jokes in semi-private conversations. Women do, men do, because dicks can be funny. If she says "I wish you wouldn't make jokes like that around me", then he should have stopped and would be in the wrong, but I've seen no evidence of that. The termination suit is uncertain. It's far from a slam dunk, obviously, especially since he admitted making comments that he considered wrong and embarrassing. Bad move to discuss this in the public so soon. He should be able to get defamation, at least with good enough odds to get a settlement that'll cover him till he gets his next job, given what PlayHaven's management said about the termination and about him.

nilved 14y ago

"In attempting to unveil casual misogyny in the tech field, Adria has accidentally revealed the actual misogyny that lies in our industry, and there's nothing casual about it."

LargeWu 14y ago
I think even "casual misogyny" is hyperbole, given the original comment that sparked this whole mess. I think the worst you can say about it is that it was crude and unprofessional. The hateful aftermath, though, clearly should not be tolerated.

WalterSear 14y ago

That this kind of blog post is a response to the situation is a small glimmer of how eventually we can all 'win' from this.

lignuist 14y ago

Two people fired. Wow. what happened to just saying sorry to each other and accepting it?

escaped_hn 14y ago
Nah. That would be to logical a conclusion.
- lopatin 14y ago
  Exactly. If I've learned anything from my time using templating libraries, it's that logic-less is the answer!
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

WayneDB 14y ago

Hey, sex jokes are not always about women. Big dongles and forking could totally describe male-male sex! Also, why get so upset about sex jokes? Is there something wrong with sex? You wouldn't even be here without it! I think that people who complain or argue quickly have some unresolved problem. I think this because I am one of those people and I KNOW that I have unresolved mento-emotional issues :) I know that I should be cool and appear to be agreeable all the time, but sometimes (more frequently, mornings or certain topics) it's very challenging. The payoff is so much better than bickering though. The important thing is to realize you're being a righteous asshole. Then you can start changing.

nawitus 14y ago

"But at the Boston conference, great strides were made to have a strong female presence. Almost 40% of attendees at Boston were female, almost 40% of speakers (at the time these numbers were VERY high)," That's not gender equality though, that's positive discrimination. I think conferences should try to get the best speakers available regardless of their gender. "She didn’t get the developer in question fired" She is clearly partly responsive for the company's reaction to the "incident". "How it Could Have Gone" The best alternative future is of course clear: act like an adult in a conference. If you think an overheard joke about "dongles" is not to your liking, then too bad. It's rude trying to control other people.

crapshoot101 14y ago

This is a truly well-written piece. Props to Amanda.

qaz_plm 14y ago

At the end of the day, they both did it to themselves and they only have themselves to blame.

mercurial 14y ago

This was a great post. And I think it does a pretty good job at illustrating the absurdity of the situation: one sex joke and three people are out of a job, with one potentially unemployable in the same capacity. Now, guys will feel compelled to check themselves every time they are in public. When being victim of actual harassment, girls will think twice about denouncing it. And the worst part is that all the actually sexist guys will be able to point to this incident as a justification for why sexism in the tech industry is "not a problem". Thanks, Adria. Thanks, Internet. You all did a terrific job.

SeanLuke 14y ago

I'm interested in a different aspect here than the discussion of sexism and who fired whom at this point. If you're running a blog as a public evangelist for a company, and twitter is part of that public presence, and you emit a tweet which includes a picture of people and criticism of them without their permission, surely this constitutes a violation of commercial use-of-likeness laws in most states, doesn't it?

onemorepassword 14y ago

So what we know now is that Adria Richards' issues are not just with sexism, offensive behavior in general or gender equality, but that she has an ideological agenda that goes well beyond that. Her issues with pornography are ideological, in that they aren't shared by many men and women who would take issue with sexist behavior or gender based discrimination. However, like many ideologues, she doesn't make that distinction herself. And what is also typical for ideologues, she doesn't have any issues with saying or doing things that disproportionately harm people who disagree with her, because they are "the enemy". They're not interested in change, they are interested in winning. These kind of people will do more harm than good when it comes to fighting sexism in tech. They will actually alienate a lot of women. (I do however find it inappropriate and borderline sexist to call her a prude. Being against pornography doesn't make you a prude, just like enjoying pornography doesn't make you a sexist pig.)

manicdee 14y ago
These kind of people will alienate a lot of men too. "Oh no! There's a woman in this conference room! I better just shut up and not say anything just in case she takes offense at my talking about my dislike for DRM dongles. Too bad that this means we'll be shipping a DRM-encumbered product, but my job and reputation are more important to risk being fired over perceived sexist comments, even if it saves the company from financial ruin in the long run." When every perceived slight ends up triggering thermonuclear war, people will stop interacting with each other.
- tadfisher 14y ago
  While you do have a point, the hyperbole isn't helpful.
rplnt 14y ago
This was the first article I read about this "case" and what I found amusing was the name (or at least url - haven't clicked) of her blog. She seems to be (just from these few paragraphs I read) the stereotype of a feminist (stereotype in a bad way). People like her just hold the progress of gender equality back.

Havoc 14y ago

Some people are just surrounded by constant drama...mostly drama created out of thin air. Its a useful trait to have if your surname is "Kardashian".

ceol 14y ago

Aside from the personal stuff between her and Adria, I think she has a good grasp of the situation. (i.e. I agree with her) However, I find one thing troubling: > Adria reinforced the idea of us as threats to men, as unreasonable, as hard to work with… as bitches. (From here addressed to Amanda, should she be unlucky enough to stumble upon this thread) I don't believe you should be worrying about whether what you do reinforces someone else's preconceived notion of your gender. Do you really think someone who already sees women as uppity b-tches would suddenly change their tone just because you don't adhere to their stereotype? No, they're going to write you off as an exception. "No no, you're not like them! You're one of the good ones!" But as soon as you do something they don't like? "What a fucking b-tch. This just proves women don't belong in tech. etc etc" However, I'm a guy. I don't really have the right to tell you how you should think about your own oppression, much like how no one has the right to tell Adria how she should have handled calling those two guys out— aside from doing something illegal, which posting a photo on Twitter most certainly is not. I guess what I'm saying is that I agree everyone lost, but one person lost a hell of a lot more than anyone else. That guy whose name we still don't know? He's gotten job offers. Play Haven, the place that actually fired him? Unscathed. Adria? Constant harassment, rape and death threats, and now presumably fired from her job while her former employer is being DDoS'd. All because she posted a picture of some guys on Twitter. Think about that the next time a thread comes up about the sexism women face in the programming community. You can't write it off as a bunch of trolls this time, because a lot of the backlash was directly from HN.

belorn 14y ago
Before you accuse everyone on HN to be sexists, please provide evidence that her gender is the cause of the comments. If a guy would had overheard two women, and found what they said to be offensive and hanged them out on twitter, would people send him roses instead? Say one of the women got fired. Everyone would cheer right? The DDoS and the personal attacks are horrible, wrong, and just plain bad, but I serious doubt to the point of disbelif that all this is because the gender of the twitter user.
- ceol 14y ago
  I don't have the effort to link every single comment, but please go into any of the major discussions (that have since been removed from the front page) and ctrl+F "feminist". Go and look at the vitriol being directed at her, look at the specific insults used (that Amanda mentions in her post.) If it didn't start because of her gender, it most certainly became about her gender.

smrtinsert 14y ago

I honestly believe we had no social tool to soothe the viral effects of this story. Without a downvote or obscure button in twitter, hacker news, facebook, reddit, the only thing you can do is promote. In this case, the agents of sensationalism completely swept the story out of the publics hands, and we're left with remorse at an unfortunate incident that was made way worse though the internet. both parties have had time to inspect their actions, both appear to be sorry, i believe that adria owes the developer an apology for an internet level attack - because thats what it is. she does not owe an apology for objecting to the comment and mr hank has made it clear he's seen his error. i hope we all learn from this, and move on. our profession might be younger than most white collared professions, but have to be better than this, we all have to be.

tehwalrus 14y ago

A very thoughtful article on a very horrible mess.

ramses 14y ago

"[...] talk to eachother. Assume people are reasonable until they are not." As simple as that.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

mkr-hn 14y ago

This is the most level-headed thing I've seen on the situation.

seivan 14y ago

We got an unstable, hypocritical, oversensitive jaded person out of our way. I think this was a win. I feel sorry for mr-hank though, I hope he does better than a shitty startup like Play Haven.

josephlord 14y ago

If your job is evangelism and you get to the point where you are claiming in a tweet that your employer "supports" you there is a real risk that you are asking them to evangelise you rather than the other way round and then your position is likely to be precarious. When you are employed, particularly in a PR or role or any other where you speak for your employer your speech is not fully free. Even when in your own time on private accounts if you claim views and opinions as your own rather than your employer's it can still have an impact. Anonymity is valuable if you have something that you want to say without bringing your employer into the issue. This is not to deny that there may be sexism or that it may be right to publicly stand against it but when in controversial territory speak for yourself and let PR or the CEO back you publicly if they want to and do consider the affect on ability to fulfil role and then balance the need to make a societal impact against that (or quit and speak freely).

tmsh 14y ago

One thing I will say though, ironically, is that this may be actually a good experience for the million or so male and female technology people reading about this. If programming teaches anything, it's that common sense is not something that actually comes easily. The better term perhaps is 'good sense'. And with changing environments, it's easy to lose sight of what is good sense, in different situations. Anyway, if the net result will be that a lot of people will be talking to people first if they have issues, and being more careful about their conversations, and more sensitive generally, then there might actually be a kind of hidden, but great, good outcome to it all.

Jun8 14y ago

This is by far the best post I read about this whole sordid affair. As suspected, Richards, did indeed exhibit this pattern of overreacting before. The balance of this article was amazing!

nilkn 14y ago

Some of the reactions to her have really gotten way out of hand. Seriously. I was just browsing through her YouTube account and it's now spammed with tons of overtly racial and sexist slurs against her. These aren't "dongle" jokes. They're the real deal. This is really just a tragedy. Adria Richards is not the only one who is showing her sensitive, human side here. I think she made a mistake, a big one, and I agree with the decision of SendGrid. But, oddly enough, I think some of the reactions are showing that maybe she was right all along. Her example of sexism and racism in the developer community was a terrible one, but ironically it has led to lots of legitimate examples.

patrickgzill 14y ago

ForkingDongleClub.com is available for purchase as a domain name, at the time of this writing.

CyberDroiD 14y ago

All I saw was some smart ass jack asses getting busted since everyone has a camera nowadays. Get used to everyone having cameras to capture your jackass behavior. Funny that these trolls are so defensive after they got busted and photographed. They can dish it out, but they sure can't take it.

parad0x1 14y ago

This conversation took place between the two guys. Why the hell does she have the right to be offended on a conversation he overheard? And further, what gives her the right to take pictures of people without telling them anything. You can't even argue the public place rule, because the the guys would be able to talk about whatever they want. If she really was offended, and not in it for personal gain, pseudo-women's rights, and just plain selfishness then she would just go to the conference organizers and told them about the incident. But she decides to be a huge hypocrite, post his picture on Twitter and get attention to herself. She succeeded, but it never turned out the way that she thought it would be. I am pro women's rights, but this isn't an argument of sexism, this is a hypocritical narcissistic feminazi who wants the center of attention. The guy who got fired didn't deserve it, while she really did. She doesn't deserve the attention she is getting.

Nightrider 14y ago

Adria, if you're reading this, I'm proud of you for standing up for morality. Thank you!

martinced 14y ago

Do you people realize that women, when between women, can be just as gross as men? They talk about guys as "food" and "expendable" things. They really do. Also they typically give way more details about their sexual life to their women friends than man do to their men friends. The difference is that in the coding world it's something like 90% men. So of course you won't have enough women "teaming up" to make gravvy jokes about men's short appendages or whatever. What about we stop it? I was playing tennis with a friend the other day: two men. On the court next to our were four women. My friend was making a few jokes during pauses and being "gross". I can tell you that the four women were doing exactly the same: you can't hear it but they look at you and laugh and you know they're talking about you as meat they're going to eat or something. Because that's what women do when they look at men and laugh between them. Just ask them ffs. They can be really gross too. Now I try not to make these jokes and sexual remarks: not because somehow I'd try not to offend the other person (honestly women can laugh as much as they want when talking about me, I don't give a frak). No, the reason I don't do this is because I've got a girlfriend and I don't want to be disrespectful to her by making sexual jokes about "wanting to fork other women's little hidden repo" or something. It would be great if people stopped doing these lame remarks but it would be great too if women stopped playing 16 years old virgins who are never saying anything gravvy about men when between them.

creativityhurts 14y ago

I think nor Adria or PlayHeaven should use Github anymore http://shop.github.com/products/fork-you-shirt-mens-medium http://shop.github.com/products/fork-you-shirt-mens-medium

chris_mahan 14y ago

All I know is that as a python developer I'm fairly disgusted by what happened. My son is 7 and this is the sort of thing that happen in second grade.

frozenport 14y ago

Mentioned this to my 80 year old grandmother, who has a PhD in Aerospace, said the inability to work problems out by talking was a common stereotype for women.

D_Alex 14y ago

Or perhaps... in fact...in the end... we all won?! The situation resolved itself in a way that demonstrated that the community is tolerant of political correctness slip ups, and intolerant of those that blow them up out of proportion. But please, y'all... don't take it as a license to make puerile jokes. A little bit of extra sensitivity may be appropriate for a while.

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jack-r-abbit 14y ago

> There’s a gentleman’s code for privacy Wait... what? is that sexist? or ironic? I can't tell anymore these days. Should I be offended by that?

Shank 14y ago

This is, by far, one of the bests posts I've seen about the Adria situation, because it isn't entirely biased to one side. Amanda (the post author) notes that "[nobody] won," which is the signifying action as to why this is so important. Adria was threatened and hated upon over an overreaction. While she definitely didn't do the right thing initially, the best move would have been to mitigate damage, both from Play Haven & SendGrid. If both companies had apologized, they would both be better off for it, and it wouldn't have resulted in any DDoSing or threats. I'm disappointed at all of the reactions attacking Adria, because they're the exact thing she was trying to prevent in the first place (sexism, hatred), because it wasn't constructive. It does nothing but burn bridges, and undermines the original problem (the dev being fired) in the first place. If the community instead rallied around the dev & asked him to get reinstated, rather than attacked Adria, it would have ended differently.

monksy 14y ago

What I'm not seeing is the amount of flack that Playhaven got from Ms Richard's supporters. I suspect that it was contacted heavily [if the reactions from the SendMail site are any indication].

foohbarbaz 14y ago

I said it once and will say again: these off color jokes between _some_ males tend not to happen when there's not a woman in earshot. So, yes, I suspect strongly there was a good reason for Adria Richards to be offended. The firing by her company and the reaction of the community just left me speechless. Just plain sad. Why the dev in question needed to be fired is also questionable to me. Ashamed to belong to this crowd. Unfortunately.

smsm42 14y ago

I didn't even know "money shot" has a porn meaning until reading this article. I thought it's something to do with dice games or marksmanship or something. You learn something new every day. As for the matter of the loss, I think the article is spot on. I personally would be horrified if I learned that somebody who made a silly joke I didn't like lost his/her job when if I just handled it a bit differently everything could be fine and nobody would be hurt. Now two people are out of jobs and amount of misery and bad feelings in the tech world is clearly increasing. And that's in open source where the thing that brings people together supposed to be helping each other and making the world better together. Everybody lost here, big time.

ghostnappa 14y ago

Now I don't wanna play cards against humanity with any of my co-workers ever...

nigglet 14y ago

The real question is, how does a company hire a "developer evangelist" who doesn't know what the fork forking is!

Shenglong 14y ago

Respectably, I disagree with the OP on this entire subject. Yes, the Adria scandal was not constructive to any party involved - but the way it's being analyzed is dead wrong: When women in this industry are hurt, we’re all hurt. No. No. It's exactly this kind of thinking that got us here in the first place. It's this kind of thinking that perpetuates the very dissonance inherent in stereotypes. There is so much anti-racism/anti-sexism/anti-everything-slightly-inappropriate recently that some days I don't want to get out of bed. I don't want to watch what I say at every turn. I don't want to limit my vocabulary when there are so few English words in the first place. I don't want to change what I find funny because society has all of a sudden deemed it possibly inappropriate under certain situations. So what's the solution? People need to start recognizing others as individuals--people need to start recognizing themselves as individuals. I'll admit it: I make inappropriate jokes all the time around my friends: every sort of inappropriate joke you can imagine. Why? Because the whole concept of shock humor is poking at things that are obviously not true. Why would people laugh if women actually were bad drivers (I am a terrible driver)? Why would they laugh if Asians could actually all do backflips (I broke a finger trying). If forking someone's repo was actually sexual, why would it be funny? "I'm going to fuck her" surely isn't funny. The moment we all recognize that people are individuals, and not just subsets of classes, is the moment where all this ridiculousness will go away. Thinking that a blow to one woman hurts all women is as ridiculous as thinking a blow to one Asian hurts all Asians - or a blow to one person in tech who has large muscles is a blow to all people in tech who have large muscles. The association is ridiculous. I don't know any women in tech. I know people in tech, and some of them just happen to be women.

polarix 14y ago

This is so accurate. Let us mourn.

laichzeit0 14y ago

"No one has the right to spend their life without being offended." - Philip Pullman

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nnq 14y ago

In relatively civilized society, above a certain level of "civilness", these things actually work backwards: 1. Forbidding porn/sex allusions will promote them and also make them more mean - people like breaking stupid rules just for the fun of it and they take revenge for the rule being imposed on them by being meaner to others when they break it! 2. Take too many measures against sexual/national/racial discrimination will increase sexual discrimination - because doing it or even joking about it is considered bad, it starts happening underground, with people smiling and being pro-equality on the surface and busy finding technical reasons to get rid of people of the respective sex/nation/race. 3. Try to much to prevent sexual harassment will also drive things underground and "innocent but distasteful" jokes will turn into actual acts of mean but well disguised discrimination - I bet that a huge number of people will now find "technical reasons" not to invite AR to conferences and that the people whose jokes she considered offensive will make even more offensive jokes behind her back and even try to revengefully harm her career by dirty "underground" maneuvers. ...that's how humans work you know.

brunolazzaro 14y ago

The internet is a weird place. I will never understand why Adria did what she did, from all i read she is an intelligent person yet she chose to do the most childish thing in the world... tattle the kid that said "penis" in class. I'm not saying that what the kid is wrong, but don't tattle on him flat-out... just tell him to stop before you go to the teacher and the whole class finds out and the kid gets expelled. But then, the whole class got mad at her. With reason, or not. It do... But the point is that this feels like kindergarden. JUST BE NICE TO EACH OTHERS. DON'T BE PENISES.

bjeanes 14y ago

Exactly the article I was contemplating writing. Thank you!

likeclockwork 14y ago

I didn't see this drama. I usually try to avoid the dramas, but, wow she took their pictures and posted them on Twitter? She thinks of herself as 'being a hero'? What a cowardly overreaction.

TheCondor 14y ago

So twitter has nothing in this as people create anonymous accounts and threaten users with rape?