SendGrid has terminated the employment of Adria Richards

Let's look at this with level heads. A PR manager went to a conference and decided she didn't like the content of a joke she overheard, indirectly, in a seminar room. Instead of addressing the "offenders", she decided to snap photos of them, without their knowledge, and shame them preemptively on Twitter.

Her Twitter account is the platform from which she "evangelizes" for developers; that is, performs her PR duties for her employer. She consciously made the decision to (ab)use her professional platform and status to more effectively carry out a personal crusade. Then when called out on it, she explicitly stated that her employer condoned her actions. Meaning, the PR manager stated that she was speaking on behalf of her employer. About dongles, and forking repos, and public shaming.

This leaves the employer vulnerable, because they are now complicit in her actions. In the extreme case, they could be sued. In the least extreme case, they've got a renegade PR manager projecting an image that doesn't actually represent the company.

I don't see a possible scenario where the employer could have kept the PR manager on. She showed a complete lack of judgement and forethought, not to mention a total disregard for the best interests of the brand.

And this is all _completely_exclusive_ from any of the sexism, misogyny, whatever allegations. Irrelevant for the purposes of discussing the firing. It's a chain-of-thought, judgment, and competency thing. The PR manager showed she did not have the right temperament or skillset for the job. The employer took action.

Neither her nor the other person should have been fired for this. People calling for them to be fired have been acting irresponsibly.

The facebook announcement was already on the front page, but then magically vanished, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5416021

Reading through some of the comments over on the facebook it appears there is a polarized view about this (as echoed generally over this episode).

It is so hard to draw the line as to what is right vs wrong, but I guess the take away is, there has to be a better way to deal with reporting such instances.

I am sure the horror stories that come out of def con, are mostly true, but a process for appropriate reporting is needed and should be mandatory for every conference to have in place.

This has officially been blown entirely and utterly out of proportion, not a single soul should've been fired over this.

As a result of a tweet, two people are now without a job. Incredible how technology is changing everything. The bad tweet is now the equivalent of saying "fuck" on the air in your local news broadcast, except a bad tweet can happen at any time.

Well, that escalated quickly. This could have been a situation that everyone could have forgotten about in 10 minutes if people only spoke, listened and tried to understand each other.

(n.b. I don't condone anyone's firing in this situation)