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Comment by nilkn | Hacker News Reader

Even if I agree with the decision, this is incredibly hard to read. I hate to see someone lose their job over something like this. Yet I can't disagree with anything he wrote.

I personally hope she will learn from this and another company will give her a new chance. The odds of that are slim given how big this has become--it's front-paging repeatedly on HN and /r/programming. But I'd hate to see her whole career ruined over a mistake she could learn from. (Though, to be fair, she has not seemed too eager to admit to any mistakes online so far.)

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According to this article[1] this was not a single mistake, but a pattern of how she handles things.

[1] https://amandablumwords.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/3/

That blog post is the single most reasonable thing I've read on the entire subject. Good on the author.

That added some much needed back story to this very sad chapter.

Wow! What a well-written post. I had no idea that this was a pattern of behavior. It kind of makes sense now. She seems to be extremely touchy and looks for issues where there are none, or simply creates issues out of thin air. Thank you for that link.

I'll say this adds a very different dimension to story. Interesting!

An established pattern of action, indeed! That Adria would object publicly[1] to a fun little talk by Danielle Morrill on Getting the Money Shot[2] is what we need to know to understand this case.

[1]http://butyoureagirl.com/5004/wordcamp-boston%E2%80%99s-igni...

[1 cached]http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qahkOwf...

[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0V6vNEDMzgw#t=3m5s

You live by the sword, you die by the sword.

Social media is an incredibly powerful tool - especially when you are good at "it" and you wield influence. Trip up on your own shoelaces and you run tremendous risk of social media backfiring on you.

Yah. One common factor in everybody involved is that they're incredibly human. Pride, self-righteousness, and immaturity are a few of the qualities on display, but since they're human I accept that a few of these qualities are tolerable, as should we all.

No one committed any action that was overtly horrible on it's own.

In a vacuum: Two guys were making childish jokes, and a woman was offended and told her friends about it, with a picture of who.

The only reason this is on anyone's radar at all is that people made a fuss of the message due to the issues of gender segregation of women, and the feelings of oppression from men. Combined with rash action on the part of one company.

this was a non-event, turned fiasco, turned tragedy.

No one committed any action that was overtly horrible on its own

That's the remarkable thing about this whole mess. Lots of people are making what appear to be bad choices, but only mildly bad choices. Nobody needed to be crucified here.

Until you get into the whole DDOS and threats of violence business, those are truly bad choices.

I think there was a significant bad choice - Playhaven firing the guy instead of retraining him. It says 'make the slightest misstep and we will abandon you'. If they were interested in maintaining developers, the response would instead be 'please do some sensitivity training; we can grow together' - showing the company's interest in developing the developer. Unless of course he was already on notice and this was the last straw, although reading his apologies he seems like he is receptive and willing to respond to constructive criticism.

Besides, without Playhaven's overly-strong response, the hackles of the antifeminists wouldn't have been raised, and we wouldn't be talking about this right now. The keystone of this story is actually Playhaven's response, not Richards'.

I have the pleasure of knowing Adria and she's an awesome person, so sure, in a vacuum these events are super silly. However, in this instance, she is a public figure and used her public forum to promote an issue that was personal to her.

Developers who make business decisions who rely on SendGrid follow her on Twitter and need to work with her.

It's no different than a reporter for the NY Times who covers White House news, and supposed to be unbiased starts, bad mouthing Obama on Twitter. Would you want read NY Times anymore?

I like your example.

Obama makes a bone-headed move, lets say he: "didn't veto a bill that allows companies to enforce locking in cellphones and tablets. It's going to be illegal to jailbreak now."

A reporter from the NY time goes on twitter and badmouths The Obama administration for messing up.

Well, this is the first Hacker News hears about it and goes crazy. Those JERKS! Inexplicably support is catalyzed and Obama gets impeached! Later it comes to light that there was some logistical and communication errors, turns out the administration just ignored it because it couldn't become law anyway on some technicality.

Every democrat on twitter raises a huge fuss about the massively inappropriate and biased slander this reporter has made. It's not her job to make tweets like that. Look at what she's done! The administration didn't really do anything wrong in the first place!

Within a day or two, that reporter gets canned due to the fallout, she's caught up in the center of a big scandal that will taint the public's perspective on her integrity, even though she always had and still has integrity.

Maybe Obama getting impeached is a bit of a stretch. Otherwise, I like this metaphor. :)

I would not call using the reporters public forum that they most likely grew out of their career built because of the association with NY Times as a fair medium for candid discussion. This reporter's duty is to the editors and to the readers of the paper until this reporter is no longer employed by NY Times.

Ethics clauses are signed at date of hire for exactly reasons like this one. Companies want you to be part of their brand when you join their ranks. For positions that require a public forum, that includes off-hours as well.

NY Post will most likely be calling that reporter for a high-level visible position within the hour of the firing. So not all hope is lost, but depends on what kind of brand you want to speak for.

She was vociferously unapologetic. She firmly believed that she was in the right, and even worse, that she was on some sort of gender-equality "crusade". The hubris is palpable when you see the comments she made in her post, where she said things like "Yesterday the future of programming was on the line and I made myself heard.", and even compared herself to Joan of Arc (http://i.imgur.com/JnZLsju.jpg).

Even worse, she went off the deep-end by claiming that people disagreeing with her were all trolling, or worse, somehow being racist. She also posted comments where she discounted other people's opinions simply because of their race.

There was not an ounce of remorse on her part for what she did. She firmly believed that she was some sort of holy warrior for feminism, and that she was standing up for future women programmers, or something like that. It's also odd considering that she doesn't even have a programming background; her background seems to be in HR and marketing. She basically hangs around programmers, but is not really a part of the programming community.

What was also bad is that she implied that SendGrid supported her in all of this (http://i.imgur.com/eHOC3tA.jpg), thereby dragging them into her personal crusade.

As a tech evangelist it is her job to build goodwill and she did anything but that. She took advantage of her huge listener base and used her platform as an evangelist as a personal soapboax for her own holy war.

Hopefully she learns from her mistakes. The best thing she can do at this point is to issue a public apology. Another company may give her a chance then. The problem is HR issues like these are very touchy and toxic and most companies would sooner not deal with it. This is because people who display this kind of attitude can be extremely toxic. I read many comments from women programmers who completely disagreed with what she did, and they said that she completely overreacted. Does any company really want to have a person who will scream "Sexism!" at the drop of a hat? Sure, the guys may have been immature, but nothing they said or did was even remotely sexist. Most of the people who I've seen defending her are either white knights, or other women who share her "brand" of feminism and who also, unsurprisingly, share her lack of technical background or experience with the programming community.

The irony is that one of the guys shamed on twitter, who lost his job, has had a much easier time finding a new job. I don't think Adria will have a same luxury.

The biggest irony in all of this, of course, is that what she perceived to be a morally-righteous stance has completely backfired and bit her in the ass, causing her to lose her job.

The hubris is palpable.. I think you have expressed the core of the problem here. Her tweets and her comments afterwards seem to be so much more about confirming her self image as a hero than about any constructive effort to promote the welfare of women in technology.

I think her odds of getting a new job quickly are good.

There are thousands out there vehemently supporting her. She only needs to find one to offer her a job.

Thought of another way, her name has become a cause. Many love the cause, many hate it. But that cause has enough support that you could run a profitable business just serving a fraction of her devotees.

And that's probably why this was written: https://amandablumwords.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/3/

I'm sure there are jobs out there for her, though I'd be shocked if her title at her next employer is "developer evangelist."

At the end of the day no one really cares. They could rehire her once everyone is consumed by the next big distraction. A couple people will make noise but the majority of people won't care. People make mistakes everyday and usually learn from them. Now if you had someone habitually doing this kind of thing then it would create a problem.

https://amandablumwords.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/3/

Apparently she does things like this frequently, they just never hit the front pages of news sites before.

Ah then that's a problem. Looks like it caught up with her this time :)

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