Their boss finding out what they said got them fired. Because what they said wasn't appropriate in the opinion of their employer. Period. Full stop.
| what they said wasn't appropriate in the
| opinion of their employer
I don't think that she set out to get the guy fired, and it wasn't through direct action, but she did up the stakes.
Just because someone in that crowd can be offended by something we say doesn't mean jack shit, unless it is directed directly at them I don't see how it applies to them.
Everyone says things in private they wouldn't want their employer to hear. People curse outside of work. People drink and smoke. People break the law. They don't get fired for it because there's no one taking pictures of it and blasting it across the Internet. What we have here is irresponsible disclosure. You might not be able to forecast the full effect of such an action, but you have to know it's not going to be good for anyone involved.
That's the difference in this case. The men in question were not in the personal life having a private discussion, they were attending a conference that their employer was a sponsor of and they were marked as being representatives of that sponsor company via their badges. They are already damaging their own and their company's reputation by making dumb sexist jokes at a professional-for-them event.
Okay, then in this case the sexism isn't a bad thing. That's called protecting myself. As this fiasco has demonstrated, you might get me fired for it.
Also, do you think if there wasn't as much drama going around that these men still would have been fired?
There is much more to this situation then an employer finding out that one of their employees make a dongle joke at a conference, and decided that was grounds for them to be fired. It is much more likely that the employer doesn't want to be associated with the debate taking place online, rather than being appealed by their employees actions.
And if the tweet had still somehow garnered a lot of attention and gotten someone fired, he would have been condemned much more strongly for lacking the basic human decency not to out someone publicly, lacking the empathy to express regret over a man with a wife and three kids losing their job, and not manning up to admit they didn't handle the situation appropriately.
In other words, if a man had posted that tweet, he would have received much worse treatment, because this has everything to do with the tweet being an inappropriate reaction to a silly joke, and nothing to do with discrimination against women.
They robbed the butcher's cash. It is his fault for leaving it in the counter. Sorry: it was the robber's fault and the butcher's imprudence, nothing more.
Making the crude remark might be rude, but it hurts no one. There was no real damage from the joke. Public shaming is rude and hurts everyone involved. It can now be measured in real dollar amounts. That's not a consequence of the joke, that's a consequence of irresponsible journalism.
I can't even begin to explain how fallacious this argument is.
The idea is to point out that his private conversation would never have been made public without Adria, and Adria as a media figure should be able to see the negative consequences of her actions. There are better ways of handling the taking of offense.
The pattern is that firms will react, and overreact, to what they perceive as a scandal involving hot-button issues. The firing was a mistake but maybe the people involved were afraid of what might happen if they didn't do it. Or maybe they were acting on the same social outrage that Adria was acting on.
The point is there's a whole social anti-pattern behind the firing and it's incorrect to pin it on any one actor to the exclusion of others.
Never heard of PlayHeaven before. Now it is on my black list. I will make sure to remember it. Unless I read a public apology with an offer to hire him back, I will make sure to go out of my way to let everyone know about them.
PyCon -- making off color jokes is reason to take statements and escort people out in front of everyone, but posting insulting face pictures on attendees (sponsors none the less) is ok? Nope. It is not 'OK'. There should be a public apology. Guess which one makes PyCon a hostile environment? Imagine someone saying "I refuse to attend PyCon if the person who posted a picture of naked woman in one of the slides comes too". Everyone understands that, sympathy flows on twitter etc. Now what if I say I refuse to attend if Adria attends. I don't feel safe and don't feel welcome when my face could easily end up twitter with an insult underneath. Isn't that the same issue?
It's related, but not equivalent.
Initially it was probably done more to companies. It is probably the most efficient way to get a large corporation to listen to a customer -- fear of public shaming.
Adria applied it a personal level and in the context of a tech conference. That was the "new" twist here.
From an external point of view a scared manager, a small pyramid of scared managers, or a single owner doesn't matter. I see it as a corporate response. That is what makes manager's job hard -- making such decisions. He made a bad decision, the company or higher ups haven't responded yet, or apologized.
Both are tough choices - but its obvious which one is the most (to the employer).
You can't just lay the blame on the company which has to operate in reality, and has to protect their brand. That said, part of the blame is also with the company.
You know, we don't actually know what they said. We also don't know for sure why the guy was fired.
It might help to keep these things in mind before yelling "off with their heads" or "off with her head".
For the record, I'm neither defending them nor saying Adria handled it right. I could go on, but I already blogged about it [1] and I'm tired of repeating myself.
[1]: http://beardseye.blogspot.com/2013/03/off-with-their-heads-p...
And that's the single most astonishingly under-emphasized fact about this whole ridiculous "discussion."
Ha. Hardly.
The guy was fired because the company didn't want to deal with the wrath of angry internet armies following along with Adria Richards.
EDIT: I'm not saying he's a misogynist, in fact I think otherwise. What I'm saying is if she implies he is with a photo attached, he can easily be seen as one.
Please explain how that applies to someone making a joke about "forking and dongles"
Jeez.
Do you have the raw text of the "dongle" joke available? If not, then on what basis are you labeling this person as a misogynist?
Really now -- you're making a specific, and highly charged accusation about this person. If you can't provide substantiation, then you should step back and apologize.
The employer OTOH, made a very stupid decision based on an opinion someone expressed on the internet. They are the ones to blame, not Adria.
Not. There are also issues of fabricated evidence and due process involved.
I also know that had I posted that picture which resulted in someone losing their job, I would feel great remorse and WANT to make amends. Especially given the relatively minor infraction (private, but overheard, joke).
No. What he said was:
> I do not believe it would have been out of line for Adria to have said something like "I heard one of the guys in the photo I posted on Twitter yesterday was fired. I just wanted to say that I'm terribly sorry to hear that and my intent was never to cause harm! I'm very sorry!"
Not that she should have done it, but basically that he thinks it would have been a good idea and could have been a solution to the entire fiasco.
For someone who is so publicly concerned with professionalism, I feel Adria should/could have either:
1. Not taken a semi-secret photo of the guys with the intent of publicly outing them. If she was really offended by the comments she should have gotten up and contacted the event staff. The unprofessional thing to do would be to take a conversation out of context, pair it with a picture of the guys, and tweet it to thousands of people. What's the end game there?
2. Assuming she did tweet as she did, the professional response would be to apologize to the guy that got fired. Saying that she's sorry that he got fired (not even that she's sorry for getting him fired, which is obviously debatable) would have, as the above poster noted, nipped the whole thing in the bud.
The other factor here is that Adria was obviously villainized and attacked seemingly from all angles. I understand that this would be a hard thing to deal with, but I can't exactly empathize with her. Tweeting about the incident is one thing, but taking a picture of them is taking it to another level entirely - and not a very professional level at that...
Making that explicit might have been a good thing to do at the time; I don't see that such a statement would've needed to be in the form of an apology though, merely a clear dissocation from the stupid choices made by an HR department she has no control over.