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Comment by bcantrill | Hacker News Reader

(Disclosure: I wrote the linked blog entry.)

Just to be clear, the use of the gendered pronoun isn't the issue -- it was the insistence on it, to the point of attempting to revert @izs's commit fixing the issue. To me, that transcends from rational position to unacceptably inappropriate, and it speaks well beyond a pronoun. You might say that reaction is extreme, but I would be willing to bet that you've fired people for less: I bet you have (or would) fire people for merely being an asshole. Firing someone for being such an asshole on such a small issue that in fact has broader consequences for the hostility of a work environment is actually a no-brainer.

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I say this fully aware that it risks inviting a backlash, but as a female developer I applaud this move.

Misogynist assholes are insidious in that they are often hard to uncover, but brutal to any women in the office. All developers are not misogynist assholes; quite the opposite, the vast majority I've worked with have been pleasant and awesome. But when that one asshole sneaks in, and nobody sees his assholery but you, it becomes an office environment of "me or him, and he has more experience and I don't want to seem to be rocking the boat... nobody else has a problem with him, maybe it's me?", then eventually I left.

I could ramble about this for a while, but it may just not be one of those things which can be easily communicated. Now, as a manager, I look for examples like this which demonstrate a person's biases, and if they don't self-correct (with prodding) I have zero compunctions with letting them go. It keeps the family healthy.

The problem I have is calling someone a "misogynist asshole" on the basis of just one thing. It doesn't look like there's been any dialogue with this person, the blog post doesn't touch on past behaviour. What if the person in question was reverting to reasons other than the content? What if English isn't his first language and he didn't fully understand the implications? From here it just looks like "he's a witch burn him".

There is no question that people with negative attitudes can have a deeply destructive effect on a team and an industry in general, or that you and others have suffered because of them. But this seems to have kicked off on a real hair trigger.

How would you react to someone that writes a blog post at a moment's notice calling someone an "asshole" and saying "he should be fired", whatever the issue is?

In this particular case I notice he not only rejected the pull request, but then (after having the issue explained to him) [re-submitted](https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d...) the change to revert.

That's where he (potentially) stepped over the line. If he were in the office it would at the very least precipitate a serious discussion. It's the refusal to acknowledge the feedback or policy which really screams out "asshole".

Again, I would need to have a relationship with him to be sure of it, but the OP did have that relationship. Assuming this wasn't the first issue, it would be even more inappropriate for him to go blabbing about that history on a random pull request, don't you think? That would just be character assassination.

To anyone who hasn't followed the link to the reversal, this seems to be a case of a normal power struggle:

"@isaacs may have his commit bit but that does not mean he is at liberty to land patches at will. All patches have to be signed off by either me or Bert. Isaac, consider yourself chided."

As others have said, this might still have been the result of confusion. bnoordhuis clearly didn't realise that bert had signed off on the change already. There are apparently other issues, such as people making minor changes and sneaking into the contributor list, which maintainers have to deal with day to day. I don't know much of this, but it's detailed in other posts.

I think this isn't clear cut. Certainly not clear enough cut for all this uproar.

Since he's just a contributor, and has not been fired (nor could he be), in this case OP is describing a hypothetical situation in which someone in his office might exhibit similar behaviour and how that would be handled.

The situations are different enough that I consider his post one which uses the opportunity to make a hypothetical point rather than one which describes a real situation. (For instance, in an office setting a first step would be to talk to the person in question. The second step would be to consider their holistic reputation in the office. Etc.)

I went back and read the article. Weasel words. Yes it's hypothetical situation but he is explicitly linking Ben and this hypothetical situation. He didn't have to use Ben's name and the word 'asshole' in adjacent sentences. It looks pretty deliberate to me.

I think a lot of people (Bryan, commenters in this thread, and the people abusing and bullying noorhuis on twitter) got hot under the collar and are retroactively trying to rationalise and explain their behaviour rather than apologising and saying "sorry we got caught up in the lynch mob". I've not seen a single answer to the question of "why are you ignoring the fact that he was following the procedure had no option".

Anyway, this has been talked to death. I'm interested in this because I empathise with the injustice of it, can't stand a witchhunt, and don't think that bullying should happen, in any of its forms. Everyone's drawn a slightly different conclusion about the people involved, we can all learn something about humanity and move on.

I suppose it depends on the prevailing culture (I'm guessing American). As a European, I would say firing someone over the above would be a deeply intolerant act, and possibly illegal.

In a lot of cases (at least in the UK), it could fall under gross misconduct, for which your employer is allowed to terminate you on the spot. Of course, you can then take them to an employment tribunal who will then deliberate on if this was appropriate.

Yes, gross misconduct is a valid cause for termination. I think an employer would have a very tough time justifying behaviour like this.

Agreed, the revert paints things in a whole new light: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d...

I think the concern is that there is no provided evidence of Ben behaving as a bad project leader before now. If he's been an ass two to three times, that's a problem. If he's having an off day and makes a small mistake, there are better ways to solve the problem than publicly blogging about how you would have fired him.

Did he insist on using a masculine pronoun or was he guilty of being insinsitive to the importance of the commit? those are two very different things. Reasoned discussion could have fixed the latter, which I suspect is the case here.

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