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Comment by canttestthis | Hacker News Reader

The DDOS attack on SendGrid's web and mail servers stopped about an hour and a half after they announced that they were firing Richards. Also the community backlash against Richards was huge, while there weren't many supporting her actions. From SendGrid's point of view, this was a good business decision.

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No, it sure as hell was not a "good business decision".

They got attacked by errant children expressing sad rage at something that while bad, was not deserving of retaliation against the company. So the result: the company ditches one of their employees for very dubious reasons.

Basically they caved to internet bullying and validated every sexist moron on the internet. Well done Sendgrid. Well done.

Every hour let's say they're losing 1% of their customer base. What would you do?

Contact the FBI to report the DDOS attack?

Whats the FBI going to do? Revolutionize a new way of countering DDOS attacks in a few hours?

I want to hang out in your NOC.

How do we know that SendGrid fired her to stop the DDOS, and it wasn't due to her poor conduct on Twitter? (calling herself Joan of Arc, posting email and IP addresses of blog commenters, baiting trolls, etc.)

Agreed.

It seems that she involved them in a battle not of their choosing, one that they apparently don't want to fight, and she has since suffered the consequences.

Maybe not a "good" business decision, but an "understandable" one. If the "errant children" are among the group she was evangelizing to, she clearly could not have been effective in her job, especially since the "errant children's" peers were not coming to her defense - at least not in large numbers, as far as Sendgrid was concerned. I do hate that they caved to bullying/blackmail. I would like to see both fired parties re-hired after the dust settles, but I know that's very unlikely.

Most of the DDOS stuff probably came from teenage 4channers rather than professional python developers. At least I hope so.

No.

She made a big stink about what she overheard in a private conversation between two friends, and posted it on Twitter. Probably would not have been a big deal except that one of them, a father of three, was fired as a result. Not her direct doing, but seemingly a consequence of her actions.

She then was found to be a bit of a hypocrite, based on her own tweets: https://twitter.com/adriarichards/status/312265091791847425 (she makes her own dick joke)

Some more digging found that she's made some strangely bizarre comments about racism, saying "Black people can't be racist". https://twitter.com/adriarichards/statuses/6039856858

She then says that her company stands behind her, bringing them into the mix. https://twitter.com/adriarichards/status/314452708549603328

That was her undoing.

She made a big deal out of something that shouldn't have been, handled it in a totally unprofessional manner, brought a bunch of unwanted attention to her and her employer, and made her association to her employer a problem for her employer.

She was the author of her demise, nobody else.

EDIT: Edited to better reflect the timeline, which I totally mis-tense-ified initially.

> She then makes some strangely bizarre comments about racism

Actually, that was not "then", that was 4 years ago. Doesn't make it any less wrong or racist, just saying that it's not connected to this scandal.

True. My bad, and edited previous comment appropriately.

Seems that she got the attention she sought, but it quickly became a case of "be careful what you wish for". A little bit of digging into her tweet history brought some real gems to the forefront which didn't help her current situation.

I'm more worried about this than I am about the pointless drama that lead up to it. That sort of provocative weakness is going to have externalities on the Internet at large and shouldn't be tolerated.

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