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Comment by SODaniel | Hacker News Reader

Pretty obvious they fired the wrong person here. If someone worked for me and posted inflammatory images/statements about/involving a co-worker they would be the one needing to worry about their job.

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Please clarify if it is in fact the policy of the company you work at that employees should be "worrying about their job" based on the contents of their Twitter accounts.

If so, please let me know so I can ensure that I never work with you.

Presumably the key point is not that it was on Twitter, but rather it was said in public. The medium is unimportant: its the same as if someone posted such things as a blog post, or said it on TV or whatever.

You might like to treat Twitter like a private conversation, but when the posts are completely publicly accessible (and when the person has 1000s of followers) it is certainly not private.

IMO: unless you're in front of a podium with your employers logo on it or representing yourself as speaking for your employer, your words are your own stupid (or hell, maybe sometimes even wise) decisions.

I am not in a position where I hire or fire people, but if so was the case I would consider her reaction to a private conversation where neither of the participants intended any harm very bad judgement.

Tweeting and blogging about this with images in the manner she did clearly steps over the line where it in my opinion is 'ok'.

I can absolutely guarantee that the people involved in the conversation felt absolutely ambushed by the event, and that is not a very enjoyable work environment.

I would generally agree with your point. I wouldn't want my company judging me based on photos they find of me on messing around with friends on Facebook. That would be pretty low.

However, these are two different situations. It's different when she is a public face of SendGrid and her Twitter profile states "Developer Evangelist for @SendGrid". I'm not saying that this post merits her being fired for anything. I'm just saying that, in such a position, her twitter posts should not be immune from judgement and action by her company.

Edit: Off track but her Twitter profile also states "YouTube partner and creator" .. what?

A YouTube "partner" is an actual term in YouTube that basically means you have a special broadcaster account that shares ad revenue with you. Basically, she makes popular YouTube videos.

I think the question is about "creator". I'd take it as 'I created youtube' but maybe it's just me not being a native english speaker.

Native speaker here, and "YouTube partner and creator" definitely comes across as "I created YouTube and sit on the board of directors". Unless of course you know that YouTube has a user type called "partner", which is not common knowledge. Without a doubt, some of her followers are under the impression that she created YouTube if they didn't do any other research about it.

Her job title is "evangelist" and her work is to be the public face for developers and to promote Sendgrid to developers. Any sane developer, male or female, will now keep at least out of earshot from her and won't engage in any private communication with her.

Why risk your career to talk to her about the benefits of using Sendgrid? No thanks I'll talk to the reps from Mailgun/Postmark where I don't run the risk of my face getting blasted all over the internet and my career ruined over a misunderstood joke. She's in PR, by posting their faces she must or at least should have known what she was doing to those developers.

I'd have a very different opinion if she was a 22-year-old developer without much media experience who quickly tweeted the photo. But she essentially works as an evangelist (sales/promotions?) and has been featured in The Rachel Maddow Show, NPR, Computerworld, The Associate Press, Inc.com, Black Enterprise, Pioneer Press [http://www.crunchbase.com/person/adria-richards]. She works in social media and she did what she did at least partly for her own publicity.....well it worked but it cost two people their jobs.

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