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Comment by adriancooney | Hacker News Reader

> If Ben can’t learn, we’ll fire him.

That statement feels a little to intimate for an outsider to the company. Ben made a mistake but to single out and threaten him like that in public would surely alienate him further.

This entire situation has gotten extremely out of hand. It shows how activists can turn into extremists when faced with an adversary. I'm in no way advocating what Ben did but it's despicable how everyone jumped onto the bandwagon to exacerbate and publicize what should have been a minor event dealt with on employer-employee basis, not a public shaming.

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Thank you for pointing that out. What the fuck is it with these high-levels treating people like some easily replacable, unhuman commodity? Don't ever speculate firing people like that in public, just fucking don't.

> If Ben can’t learn, we’ll fire him.

Wow, Isaac (the post author) has quote the ego.

Isaac (of Nodejs) broke the commit rules by not getting his patch signed off. Ben was quite right in rejecting it and reversing it.

Imagine this was a code patch which sneaks it way through into production. Who would be "fired" then?

This is making both Joyent and Node.js look like a joke. Who the hell wants to work with these reactionary fools?

It's important that everyone knows that violations against political correctness are serious things. Whether a person calls a commit that changes "he" to "they" trivial, or refuses to assert that women are at least as intelligent, if not more, than men, or attributes Africa's problems to something other than racism and exploitation, it is important that that person loses their job.

Otherwise, how will people know who holds the power - straight White non-Jewish men, that is.

I was really taken aback when I read that as well. I don't have the thickest skin and I would have probably just retreated into the forest if someone ever wrote that about me.

I wrote that. I didn't mean it literally. It’s a response to Bryan saying that failure to be sensitive to gender issues would be a firing offense at his company. We take it really seriously, and I’d like to point out that two of our senior leaders are women and we are proud to employ talented women engineers. If this remained an issue, I’d need to find a way to rectify it with Ben, and that could get as serious as firing. But he understands now. In the rest of my post I make the point that jumping to firing him publicly was not giving him a sufficient chance nor crediting him for his efforts elsewhere.

"I wrote that. I didn't mean it literally."

Then you shouldn't have wrote it because most people and every reporter are going to take it literally.

Since pronouns are an issue that you want the node.js community to be correct about, would words with significance in certain cultures also be high on your priority list?

You didn't fire him publicly. You only belittled him in public.

> If Ben can’t learn, we’ll fire him. [Edit: See comment below. This is not meant literally.]

Your correction doesn't make the statement much better. This whole debate is about how words matter, and yet your words put him on notice in a public place. All of Ben's friends now know his employer will fire him if he "can't learn." Is he so stubbornly misogynistic that that should be in question?

You could have conveyed the same message by saying "he was following the commit rules, no offense intended, won't happen again" and left it at that.

Yeah, I'm sorry, but you guys have just proven everyone right in criticizing the node.js community as a bunch of arrogant, immature hotheads. What is it with this discussing of firing someone in public?

And please don't tell me you didn't mean it literally. If you're joking or bluffing about firing someone, it's going to make you look even worse.

Don't you remember how everyone viewed that AOL CEO who fired someone in public a few months back? Well, please understand that people view this public threatening of firing in exactly the same way.

For what it's worth, I completely agree with the pull request. But you all couldn't have possibly handled this any worse.

Issac, I realize that you had the best intentions in this, I see that you were trying to put out stupid fires rather than start another one, and I appreciate your willingness to criticize the crass and inappropriate response from Joyent. All that said, and please take it as friendly criticism: your tone towards the developer came across as unnecessarily belittling, and the phrase about firing, even if not meant literally, crossed the line. Yet another post would probably just add fuel to the fire, but I would seriously consider a private face-to-face apology, if I were you. Thanks for listening.

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