
He’s fired. Who’s next? - jhack
http://www.macleans.ca/work/jobs/hes-fired-whos-next/
======
petea
> But critics accused the company of abandoning an employee who had stood for
> what’s right,

Adria Richards was the one who tried to start a witch hunt by talking photos
of the two individuals who were just minding their own business joking around.

Just imagine this. Think of all the jokes you share with your close ones in
your private time, off the record. Say one day, a random person suddenly takes
photo of you and declare you a racist, sexist, rapist etc for overhearing
what's supposed offensive to them. No matter how harmless the joke is, the
damage is done. You'll be branded as whatever the person says you are.

Is this the type of behavior we want to promote by saying this is just action?
Think really carefully before you defend such action. It can really ruin
lives.

~~~
BrainInAJar
> Adria Richards was the one who tried to start a witch hunt by talking photos
> of the two individuals who were just minding their own business joking
> around.

Adria was complaining on twitter about some sexist jerks. Those jerks are back
to work and fine, and Adria is still unhireable for daring to complain about
shitty behaviour.

~~~
pyre
> sexist jerks

As I recall it was a joke between two men about "forking" a male speaker's
repo and the size of said speaker's "dongle." I'm not sure how that's sexist.
Crass, yes. Sexist? Please inform me.

> Adria is still unhireable for daring to complain about shitty behaviour

Her job was basically a public relations role ("developer evangelist"), such
an incident does a couple of things:

\- Destroys any goodwill she had in the developer community.

\- Shows that she's ineffective in dealing with public relations.

Also, in the middle of the incident she started using her employer's name to
back her actions (e.g. she said that SendGrid "stands behind her)" and I'm
pretty sure no one at the company gave her any approval to make such
statements. That's another public relations no-no.

Also,

> Adria was complaining on twitter

This isn't exactly true.

1\. One of the big reasons it blew up is that she turned it into a blog post
on her personal blog.

2\. She signed her blog post with "Yesterday the future of programming was on
the line and I made myself heard" (though she later removed this from the
post). (This Ars Technica article quotes the line[1]).

3\. Several times she likened herself to Joan of Arc for making the Twitter
post.

I'm not saying that she deserved to have her life ruined, but she had an
active role in the initial push that gave this incident greater publicity.

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/how-dongle-
jokes-...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/how-dongle-jokes-got-
two-people-fired-and-led-to-ddos-attacks/)

------
jessaustin
ISTM Shauna Hunt, the reporter, handled the situation very well. Unlike other
aggrieved parties who have responded to perceived insult with innuendo,
passive aggression, etc., she just asked the dude what was up, and let him
hang himself. Had she done otherwise, the story we'd be hearing would be about
the "backlash" against her, but even internet morons can't fault her behavior
here.

Friends don't let friends drink and talk to reporters.

------
tomp
> But critics accused the company of abandoning an employee who had stood for
> what’s right, and the case has come to symbolize the conu

That is some disingenuous and biased reporting. Many would say that Adria
Richards wasn't fired because she stood up for what's right, but rather
because she was defending what was wrong - her interpretation of the guys'
joke, that is. (Not to mention the creepshot she took of the developers behind
her and the public shaming she engaged in.)

~~~
lotharbot
Here's the HN thread on the subject:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5391667](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5391667)

I think the thing that made people side with mr-hank over Adria Richards was
that he came across as someone who would have responded well if she'd turned
around and said "hey, can you guys tone down the innuendo?" whereas she came
across as defending a mentality of rapid escalation. As one comment said, _"
It really is unfortunate that Adria didn't just reach out to you... you didn't
intend harm; alas, it seems she did"_ (marden928)

There were also minor things -- Adria Richards had previously made a twitter
joke about freaking out TSA agents by stuffing socks down one's pants, her
playing Cards Against Humanity at the same event, her defending her decision
[0] "based on the PyCon code of conduct" when PyCon's code of conduct would
have had her privately approach PyCon officials and let them try to resolve
the issue, and not publicly post a picture of the individuals in question.
[EDIT] Not to mention her trying to use back channels to remove mr-hank's
comment that he'd been fired. [/EDIT]

mr-hank being fired for being overheard saying something privately would be a
great example for this article. Adria Richards' firing is an anti-example [1].
She sought the attention and continued to defend her overreactions, including
a non-apology-apology -- and, furthermore, she was in a very public-facing
position ("developer evangelist"). mr-hank was a run-of-the-mill employee
saying something off the record that got back to the employer; Adria Richards
was the opposite.

[0] subthread at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5399047](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5399047)

[1] SendGrid's explanation: [http://sendgrid.com/blog/a-difficult-
situation/](http://sendgrid.com/blog/a-difficult-situation/)

~~~
pyre
Adria Richards as a character seems like she had a rough past and that has
painted the adult she has become[1]:

    
    
      > Have you ever had an altercation at school and you could feel the hairs rise
      > up on your back?” she asked me.
    
      > “You felt fear?” I asked.
    
      > “Danger,” she said. “Clearly my body was telling me, ‘You are unsafe.’”
    
      > Which was why, she said, she “slowly stood up, rotated from my hips, and took
      > three photos.” She tweeted one, “with a very brief summary of what they said.
      > Then I sent another tweet describing my location. Right? And then the third
      > tweet was the [conference's] code of conduct.”
    
      > “You talked about danger," I said. "What were you imagining might...?"
    
      > “Have you ever heard that thing, men are afraid that women will laugh at them
      > and women are afraid that men will kill them?” she said.
    
      > I told Adria that people might consider that an overblown thing to say. She
      > had, after all, been in the middle of a tech conference with 800 bystanders.
    
      > “Sure,” Adria replied. “And those people would probably be white and they
      > would probably be male.”
    

While she might think that it's reasonable to feel that her life is in danger
because she overheard a crass/sexist joke (not directed at her) in a room
filled with 800 people that happened to mostly be white/male, I think that
most people don't feel that way.

[1] [http://www.esquire.co.uk/culture/books/7933/exclusive-
extrac...](http://www.esquire.co.uk/culture/books/7933/exclusive-extract-from-
jon-ronson-book-so-youve-been-publicly-shamed/)

~~~
HanyouHottie

      > “Sure,” Adria replied. “And those people would probably be white and they
      > would probably be male.”
    

I'd like to point out how hypocritically racist and sexist she's being here,
as well as the hypocrisy of the hyper-politically-correct society in the US.
Imagine if she had said black males. Oh, the outrage that would ensue. White
men are people too.

~~~
pyre
The class "in power" can't make denigrating comments of the class not "in
power." A good example of this would be a rich person making fun of poor
people vs. a poor person making fun of rich people.

------
mc32
This is sad in many ways.

It's sad that people think being vulgar is funny.

It's sad that people get carried away with what's funny and feel they need to
be cool.

It's sad that people are rearing to jump on anyone who is but a symbol of
something the masses disprove of, again, mainly not out of being a good
citizen, but out of trying to be cool. The defender of the faith.

It's sad that people's alcohol fueled idiocy -not crime,but idiocy, becomes
public and has repercussions in real life.

It's sad these vigilantes one day will also make fools of themselves, this is
inevitable, one can hope the pitchforks will not come out for them, but they
probably will.

It's sad people and companies don't have the wherewithal to separate private
from public lives. If I were to become an employer one day, what you say on
your time is your province, not mine. When you're representing the company,
that's different.

~~~
kohanz
> It's sad that people's alcohol fueled idiocy -not crime,but idiocy, becomes
> public and has repercussions in real life.

Maybe not a "crime" by the definition of the law, but a lot of things that
aren't crimes, such as sexual harassment, are grounds for losing your job. If
you display such behavior in public, you should be willing to face the
consequences, especially if you work as a government (publicly-funded)
employee.

> It's sad these vigilantes one day will also make fools of themselves, this
> is inevitable, one can hope the pitchforks will not come out for them, but
> they probably will.

I've heard this argument before. Despite what some people think, not everyone
harbors racist, sexist, or otherwise wholly objectionable thoughts in the
recesses of their mind and of those who do, certainly most of them know better
than to spout such things to a public audience.

~~~
darklajid
So my brother sent me a youtube link yesterday. It was a show by Luis CK,
containing gems like

    
    
       I'm waiting to see their kid. They're so beautiful, maybe I want to fuck their kid, I don't know. I'm not saying I would kill a kid and fuck him, … (continued for another moment or two)
    

Now.. That's a stand-up comedian of course. The setting is clear. We obviously
KNOW that he's trying to provoke and that he isn't serious. This isn't exactly
my type of humor, but let's pretend I'd say something like that to a friend
and someone overhears that. Or just quote it.

Why would that change anything? I assume these things would fall below the
'objectionable thoughts' umbrella in your list. Would I deserve to be attacked
for that? Fired for that?

followed by

    
    
       I wouldn't fuck a kid. I wouldn't do that. Maybe a dead kid. Who are you hurting? He's _dead_. Who are you hurting?

~~~
kohanz
That's not really a comparable scenario. Being overheard in a private
conversation is not what's being discussed in the FHRITP case.

What if you said a similar type comment, but on camera to a television
reporter who decided to ask you a question to clarify the "joke" (remember
that the general public does not consider this a joke, nor does it consider it
funny), and you involved the reporter or their child in the joke (e.g. similar
to the "vibrator" comment)?

~~~
darklajid
Agreed. If we're talking about the drunken guys in front of the camera and the
FHRITP thing (I .. didn't even know about that), that's plain insulting.
That's the point, I guess: Insult/provoke in a direct manner.

But this thread and the article talk about other cases as well and I'd argue
that the PyCon case was merely a private conversation that someone overheard.
I'd expect to be able to say the lines above to a friend and bystanders have
nothing to do with it.

~~~
kohanz
Yes, the Pycon and FHRITP scenarios are on completely different planets as far
as I'm concerned. I guess I'm focusing more on the latter because of recency
bias and because it's in my backyard, geographically.

------
protomyth
"To short-circuit those scenarios, she notes, many major institutions and
companies have introduced annual code-of-conduct courses—mandatory refreshers
that include explicit warnings that employees represent the company at all
times, and that failure to abide could result in dismissal. A few firms try to
head off trouble by performing social media background checks on prospective
employees."

This is the scary part. Basically Big Brother is your source of income. Most
employees are not compensated to be on-guard 24x7 and video edits, twitter
size limits, and misreporting make matters worse.

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I
will find something in them which will hang him." \- source disputed but very
true these days.

~~~
groby_b
Or maybe the scary part is that so many people lack even the most basic ideas
of civility, creating the need for those classes.

~~~
protomyth
and I'm sure if someone monitored you 24x7 they could find a clip or snippet
of your life to turn into the next "that person" moment.

~~~
kefka
And with some of the dynamic entry of 3d pictures, I could add you in to an
arbitrary scene with your voice saying vulgar things.

Is the Twitter hate army going to fact check it? Hardly!

So again, I ask, how do you defend against these kinds of attacks?

~~~
protomyth
You don't. Its pretty much that simple. Even if you have the best defense in
the world, no one will hear the follow-up because people have moved on and
google will always stain your name. Hell, people don't even wait to hear your
side these days. Its all "getting my comment in while the plane lands on the
Hudson River" time scales. Its not confined to the internet either. Look at
all the stories that aren't true and had to be "clarified" on CNN, Fox, MSNBC,
NYT, etc. Didn't fix some of them before the riots broke out. Its all reality
tv and your pain is worth a couple of bucks in soda ads.

------
FlannelPancake
In many cases, it's not even about the content of their messages. It's about a
total lack of awareness, especially concerning their medium of speech. To me
that's far more damning than an off-kilter joke or a moment of drunken
stupidity.

Why would you say something really stupid like "FHRITP" to a reporter with a
microphone? Or defend someone else saying that? Especially to a NEWS reporter?

Sure, blah blah blah, alcohol. If you're out of college and can't be drunk
without saying some really monumentally stupid shit in a very public manner,
that's worrisome. Are you going to act that way in front of a client or
business partner if you go out drinking with them one night? Are you also
going to say stupid shit like that at the company holiday party?

Admittedly some of these are out-of-context tweets or photos. That sucks to
have your inside jokes taken out of context, for sure. At first, I think many
of us internalize things like Twitter as "public-but-not-really", until things
like this happen that remind us: If you don't intentionally make it private,
social media like Twitter is VERY public. You probably wouldn't make that joke
while giving a public speech - probably shouldn't make it on Twitter, unless
you're extremely careful about the context.

~~~
forgottenpass
_Why would you say something really stupid like "FHRITP" to a reporter with a
microphone? Or defend someone else saying that? Especially to a NEWS
reporter?_

For the same reason people yell or minimize the yelling of "baba booey baba
booey howard stern's penis."

It injects vulgar childish nonsense into a framework that presents itself as
straitlaced uptight and self-serious. The primary offense dealt is not sexist,
it's narcissistic injury.

~~~
FlannelPancake
Idk, that seems kinda specious to me (though I realize you're not necessarily
defending the reasoning). If I yelled something racist into the microphone
instead of "baba booey", very few people would shrug it off as "oh hah hah
he's just being fun with the uptight reporter."

Which I guess proves my point even further - if you can't see the difference
between the two and then decide to go on and vocalize this ignorance in front
of a television reporter (rather than just keeping it contained to your social
circle), maybe you shouldn't be in charge of anything important.

~~~
forgottenpass
_If I yelled something racist into the microphone instead of "baba booey",
very few people would shrug it off as "oh hah hah he's just being fun with the
uptight reporter"_

Well, that depends. There is a chance it could get laughed off (are you black
and joking about athleticism, or did you roll up wearing a hood?). It rests on
if the audience chooses to see what was said as racial or racist? Just like my
previous post was largely about who interpreted FHRITP as sexist, vs just
sexual.

 _if you can 't see the difference between the two [...]_

Of course you don't want someone that disagrees with you over X making
decisions on Y and Z. They don't share your value system and perspective.

Everyone is going to draw their interpretations from different value systems,
and place their boundaries on sexist/sexual and acceptable/unacceptable
boundaries at different points. The conversations that result over these
topics are largely rote and boring. Where someone finds their personal lines
is going to correlated to the set of cable networks they watch.

~~~
FlannelPancake
> Well, that depends.

I don't know if it really does in this case, because...

> are you black and joking about athleticism

To extend our metaphor, the guy in the article is not black. He's very white
and making a joke about segregation. To a public audience. While drunk. Then
he decides to slip in a little slavery joke (i.e. the "you're lucky he didn't
put a vibrator in your ear" part).

Again, if an adult is unable to see why it's a dumb decision to make that joke
to a public, anonymous audience, then that person probably shouldn't be
allowed to make any important decisions. They're clearly severely lacking in
situational awareness.

> Of course you don't want someone that disagrees with you over X making
> decisions on Y and Z... Everyone is going to draw their interpretations from
> different value systems...

Ah, the old moral relativism argument. I think we're done here if that's what
it's coming down to. You're right: That is a boring conversation to have.

------
Canada
Could Gillis, the author of the article, be afraid of the outrage mob himself?

Simoes was fired for acting rudely on his personal time in a venue where such
behavior is common.

Richards was fired for launching an unprovoked public attack against software
developers. SendGrid was paying her to be there representing the company.

Both of the did act like assholes. He apologized, she refuses to do so.

Yet Gillis makes Richards out to be the victim.

------
shalmanese
Incidentally, whoever is doing PR for Jon Ronson's book is a fucking wizard at
their job. I don't think I've ever seen a book promoted so ubiquitously,
through so many different channels, hitting so many different audiences over
such a sustained period of time.

Reading all the different articles, it's possible to see hints of how
orchestrated the entire process was and how the same stories get pushed into
different contexts to provide relevancy to different audiences.

Execution wise, all this took a fuckton of work by absolute professionals and
I'd love to read a behind the scenes post-mortem of the work once it's
completed. There's sure to be lessons from this campaign that would be
valuable to anyone working in or needing PR.

PS: Please don't post a link to Paul Graham's submarine piece yet again. It's
not a bad piece of writing but it's become the de facto piece on understanding
PR which is all kinds of tragic. If the submarine piece is the best piece of
writing you know of on PR, then it's likely you know almost nothing about the
field and should refrain from commenting as if you do.

------
kohanz
The lesson: don't be an idiot.

~~~
bryanlarsen
No, the lesson is to never say anything on the Internet.

Justine Sacco wrote a remark criticizing racism, and got fired for appearing
to be a racist.

As Cardinal Richelieu said: "If one would give me six lines written by the
hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him
hanged."

~~~
kohanz
The majority of the cases cited in the article are not possibly intelligent
thoughts being misinterpreted, they're mostly just bad attempts to be funny
that end up being offensive and dumb. I don't think Justine Sacco would
appreciate being grouped with these people.

------
jgmmo
Seriously what kind of place do people work at that you can't have jokes about
fork'ing and dongles?

------
ExpiredLink
I'm not on Facebook and Twitter. Privacy is a precious property I don't want
to sell off.

------
fennecfoxen
Engaging the Internet for the two minutes' hate will solve everything.

------
comrade1
The tagline for the article is ridiculous.

"Sexist buffoonery cost Shawn Simoes his job. But you could lose yours for a
lot less. Welcome to the creeping corporate takeover of our private lives."

It's not corporate takeover of our private lives. It's people choosing to make
public what should never be public. That woman, Justine Saccos, said something
stupid that might have been considered funny amongst a small group of friends.
But to the whole world it made her look like a buffoon. (subsequent interviews
she comes across as a reasonable person)

(the article is all over the place)

When I've tried to hire people I've been given summaries of their social media
and I think it's a completely valid part of the hiring process. In my
experience using things like facebook, twitter, (g+, orkut, friendster, etc),
has more potential negatives than positives. People are always looking for
negative things about other people on social media, whether it's stalking,
hiring, or dating.

That said, I have used Facebook in the past as a corporate promotional tool,
having interns take care of my personal Facebook page and the company's. I've
never actually used Facebook myself though.

~~~
dozzie
> That woman, Shawn Simoes, said something stupid [...] it made her look like
> a buffoon

"That man" and "him".

~~~
comrade1
Fixed it - I actually meant Justine Sacco. The AIDS woman.

------
BrainInAJar
Maybe just don't be a sexist asshole and catcall women at all, and there's no
problem

~~~
mbrameld
There's always one who doesn't read the article.

------
dozzie
I have little against wicked humour, but the audience should be carefully
chosen. If some people are stupid enough to make it public on social media --
well, they deserve their fates.

~~~
JTon
> I have little against wicked humour, but the audience should be carefully
> chosen.

Agreed entirely

> If some people are stupid enough to make it public on social media -- well,
> they deserve their fates.

I disagree. I think we'd save a lot of collective energy if we stepped back
for a second and asked if the stupidity displayed contained any actual hate.
If the answer is "no" it's time slap a wrist, and move along.

