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If you make posts on Twitter and social media with your personal account, but present yourself as "Employee of so-and-so" and muse about your product and engage people with that persona, you've blended your personal and work personas. Anything you do on your personal account now reflects on the company.

>I am my employer's resource from when I come into the office to when I go home, and for brief moments whilist remote-ing in to handle an issue, and outside of that I should have legal protections to do whatever the hell my heart desires, and that includes talking.

If you separate work and personal life so distinctly, then why talk about work and present your work persona on your personal accounts!

That it's a personal account doesn't even matter, the Internet outrage machine will come for your job, this isn't limited to any specific subculture.

Oh that is such a load. Who on earth goes through twitter accounts or Facebook accounts to evaluate the employees of a company before they decide to do business with them?

I simply can't envision a scenario where Bob's Hot Dogs is going to refuse to use a payment processor like Square because one of Square's marketing people posted to twitter once like 2 years ago that hot dogs suck. And where are we drawing the line here? So you're saying by virtue I'm saying I'm an X at Y Company that I'm now representing that company 24/7 until I quit? That's insane, full bore insane.

> If you separate work and personal life so distinctly, then why talk about work and present your work persona on your personal accounts!

Because who doesn't!? I follow hundreds of people who regularly discuss their careers and what they do at work, most of them being developers and admins.

>And where are we drawing the line here?

Answering most of your questions: Causing controversy. Just faffing about on social media, even negatively, generally won't be a problem until such time as you portray your employer in a bad light (say, by shouting at their customers apropos of nothing) and cause them a PR issue.

>> I follow hundreds of people

and thousands of us post under pseudonyms, take steps to conceal our employers, or if they do speak with their employers publicly and predominately listed they

1. Have their post cleared by the company 2. Ensure they have disclaimers their thoughts are not the opinions of their employers

This new (mostly with millennial's) notion that is a good idea to mix your work life and personal life on social media is a terrible one.

I operate 2 completely separate devices, computers, everything, I NEVER login to a person account on a work system and NEVER login to a work account on a personal system. My Work phone is my work phone, my personal phone is my personal phone...

100% separation from my employment and my personal life.

To an extent, (in the eyes of the business) she was actively acting as a representative of the product (discussing the development of the product) and bashing the users of the product (calling them asshats). If that is harmful to the business it doesn't matter if it's on "your time". I would view this differently if she was fired for a tweet that was political in nature or something like it. If I was in charge I'm not sure I would have done the same thing but I can understand the reasoning.

Your position here seems to be opposed to anyone who works for a company having any kind of free speech. Please consider whether this is a position that is maximally good for society. She didn't say anything offensive or harmful, just expressed frustration with a pattern of communication that she gets.

> She didn't say anything offensive or harmful

Well, this is what she said(during the incident, she's said much worse in other cases), do you still think she didn't say anything offensive or harmful?

https://twitter.com/Delafina777/status/1014554296107483136

https://twitter.com/Delafina777/status/1014581433937981445

https://twitter.com/delafina777/status/1014555719352213504

Yes, I still think she didn't say anything offensive or harmful. All she did is express frustration at the way people interact with her. She didn't call for anyone to be fired, she didn't talk about how such-and-such people are subhuman, she just said she found a pattern of communication frustrating.

> having any kind of free speech

Exaggerate much? Don't speak as a representative of your company. It's not that hard.

You can talk about anything else you like, but don't make people think it's coming from the company.

Free speech doesn't give you the right to put words in other peoples', or companies' mouths.

She wasn't speaking as a representative of the company there. I don't see how you could possibly construe it that way. Here's what she said:

> Today in being a female game dev: "Allow me--a person who does not work with you--explain to you how you do your job."

If you did take that as an official company statement, it would seem to mean that ArenaNet's official position is that ArenaNet is a female developer who is tired of having her job explained to her by men. It's such a tortured and nonsensical interpretation of her comment that I can't see how you'd read it as anything but her personal feelings as a female game developer.

Playing this up so it is a gender issue does harm all who have suffered.

How could you see it as anything but a gender issue? Expressing frustration at the way female devs are treated is what they got fired for. What do you reckon it's actually about if not gender? Checkers? Ethics in gaming journalism?

How was she treated that's specific to female devs? Literally every decision made by Ghostcrawler/Holinka was scrutinized and criticized to oblivion. See this tweet(https://twitter.com/devolore/status/930185729120002048) by Josh Allen "expressing his frustration" at the way all developers are treated.

What Jessica Price did was much more:

- she insulted a polite fan(and big community figure) by indirectly calling them a "rando asshat"(https://twitter.com/delafina777/status/1014555719352213504)

- she insulted all fans trying to engage with her by saying "Don't expect me to pretend to like you here."(https://twitter.com/Delafina777/status/1014581433937981445). ANet has a culture of positive interaction between fans and devs, and devs share their love of the game with the community. This was pointlessly inflammatory and against ANet's image.

Maybe she didn't actually mean these things. Maybe she was just expressing her frustration, as you said. But her actions say otherwise - she did not apologize, she has only gone on further to attack her (now former) employer, the fanbase in general, to claim victimhood after flinging shit at them. Those are not the actions of someone who was just expressing their frustration - to me, it seems like she really has contempt for GW fans.

Why do you hold Jessica Price to such a low standard? I don't recall Ghostcrawler ever calling fans "asshats", and he had plenty more negative attention, including constant death threats. I don't agree that anyone should be subject to this kind of pressure, but I also don't agree that a dev should be supported when they trash the delicate connection between a company and its customers with careless comments like "Don't expect me to pretend to like you here".

This is actually addressed in the OP:

> Male game devs deal with it too. Gamers don’t seem to believe expertise exists. But it’s not the constant deluge it is for women. Which was the point of the tweets that Peter made that got him fired: He was saying, ‘Hey, this is about gender, because I’m out here talking about the same stuff she’s talking about, and this doesn’t happen to me.’

It's worth noting that Peter didn't call anyone an asshat, or use any naughty language at all AFAIK. All he did was say that this is an actual problem women have to deal with. That's what they fired him for.

Interesting - I hadn't caught that another employee was fired for defending her. Without seeing his exact remarks and their context, that strikes me as an overreaction.

> How could you see it as anything but a gender issue?

She is the one who verbally attacked someone in a public forum. She is the one who attempted to make it a gender issue. It is not.

The original issue was her aggressive and rude response to a player. When she responded by implicitly accusing the player of sexism, she injected politics into what was an otherwise nonpolitical event - which in turn incited a far larger group against her.

An employee being rude to their customer.

She called people who'd never worked in her field, who were telling her to do her job, asshats. And I feel that descriptor suits them.

More to the point, as I originally postulated: Are we now in a place where your employer just has free reign to regulate and permit your speech off the clock? Yeah, she talked about her job, like people have since time immemorial. She probably also called her boss a dick occasionally behind his back, and might've even left her desk in a bad mood. Are these all going to be fireable offenses? Are we just never ever allowed to say "you know I like my job and my coworkers, and overall am pleased with my career, but goddamn that guy Joe we sell to is an idiot."?

Freedom of speech means you can't be arrested for saying something, not that a business that employs you can't fire you for saying something the disagree with. When A&E retaliated against the duck dynasty guy for saying gay people are gross I was on their side too.

Her free speech was not regulated, she can say whatever she wants. She didn't break any laws. The state is not prosecuting her. And everybody else has the freedom of (non-)association.

Twitter allows you to signup using whatever name you wish. So does this site. People who choose to represent a company did under a real name with a link to the company can't cry free speach because they choose to represent something.

Yeah, the whole thing is just levels of stupid. The fact that a fellow writer who got involved was fired as well is just gasoline on the fire.

I spent a fair bit of time in that industry and generally the ones running the studios were not the most level-headed people. There's all sorts of abuse that happens because "Hey, it's games! You should be lucky to work in such an industry!".

> And tangent-ally related:

> Today in being a female game dev: ‘Allow me — a person who does not work with you — explain to you how you do your job.’

> That is beautiful, and the essence of my growing rage at my fellow nerds in various fandoms.

Perhaps you should temper your growing rage with the facts. Here is what Deroir actually said - https://twitter.com/DeroirGaming/status/1014280605599748096

He was not himself rude, but that doesn't mean his comment wasn't part of an irritating pattern of comments from lots of different people. For a completely different example of the same phenomenon, every individual person who makes the "People Eating Tasty Animals" joke at vegans is only making a mild jab, but in aggregate it gets very tiresome for the vegan who hears it over and over and over.

So because other men sometimes doubt the intelligence of women in general, I am never allowed to question a woman?

If you know more than her, go right ahead. If she is an experienced professional in a field and you've never done it a day in your life, then yeah, trying to teach her is kind of presumptuous. This isn't just a female thing — it's poor behavior no matter who you're dealing with — but women have to deal with it more often, so it can be more aggravating for them.

The person replying to her creates videos of the game and is quite popular among the playerbase. He even makes videos focusing on the lore of the game. He's qualified to discuss it.

And thinking that you're above the criticism of readers as a writer because those readers dont themselves write is arrogant, speaking as a professional developer who both understands how dumb the audience can be, but also gets irritated by other people in my field who belittle them.

I don't know, I feel like arrogant is using somebody's personal Twitter account to criticize them and expecting them not to have any feelings on the matter. Wanting not to spend all your free time being criticized by the entire peanut gallery is...pretty normal, I think.

If that's how one feels, Twitter is the wrong place to be. Seriously, blame the platform first, because in this sense it is really awful.

> women have to deal with it more often, so it can be more aggravating for them

While that may very well be the case - and I believe it is - that does not justify holding people to a different standard of behavior based upon their gender.

and then

https://twitter.com/DeroirGaming/status/1014564971416518656

It appears it was her personal account.

“The message is very clear, especially to women at the company: if Reddit wants you fired, we’ll fire you,” Price says. “The quality of your work doesn’t matter. Your personal space, your personal social media, is not yours; you are on the clock 100 percent of the time. We own you.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/6/17541318/guild-wars-arenan...

And this is why she got fired. She turned this issue into a "women" thing, which it never was.

She's toxic to any company, and especially other women.

She was talking about her job, the fan was very polite, and after her response, sad when mistreated. You don't mistreat the people who pay for your product, even more when they're polite.

I can't see gender involved in this issue. Anyone treating a paying customer like that on a public forum, on a work-related issue, has high chances to be fired.