Aren't all these Twitter sh*tstorms over within a few days, or in the worst case, weeks? People should just sit them out and not panic / call their lives ruined. Seems to work even for politicians.
People's names become toxic. Note that the Donglegate guy wouldn't let his name be used, and another woman in the article wouldn't do a followup interview.
To be fair, Pax Dickinson wasn't one stupid tweet, it was a pattern of awful shit over years. At some point, it's not a careless lapse anymore, you're just a d-bag. A few examples:
"In The Passion Of The Christ 2, Jesus gets raped by a pack of niggers. It's his own fault for dressing like a whore though."
"aw, you can't feed your family on minimum wage? well who told you to start a fucking family when your skills are only worth minimum wage?"
"Who has more dedication, ambition, and drive? Kobe only raped one girl, Lebron raped an entire city. +1 for Lebron."
And arguably the worst, for a freaking CTO:
"Tech managers spend as much time worrying about how to hire talented female developers as they do worrying about how to hire a unicorn."
Would you hire that guy to represent your company?
The first tweet, which seems to be the one that people reacted most strongly to, is pretty clearly a lampooning of Mel Gibson. I suspect most people missed that, though. It's distasteful, but it's not exactly Dickinson himself expressing racist, victim-blaming sentiments; it's a mockery of them.
The second is a pretty standard libertarian talking-point (which is more "personal responsibility rah rah rah" than "yay, starving poor people!"). The third I don't really get (but I don't really follow basketball), and the fourth I suspect you're misinterpreting as "Tech managers don't want to hire women", when I think it's more "Tech managers don't care about the gender of their developers"; the truth of the statement is debatable, but I do think it takes some willful effort to read that and be offended by it.
I think Dickinson made unwise choices in how he chose to tweet, but I also think the backlash he's suffered has been orders of magnitude worse than the offense. He has been made persona non grata to the point of being unemployable over a handful of ill-considered tweets - he's unemployable now because of the extent to which people have gone to associate him and anyone associated with him with racism, rape, and sexism - regardless of the reality of his actions.
On one hand, he's suffering the consequences of his decisions (see tweet #2 for some schadenfreude). On the other, because the internet loves a shitstorm, it seems that the magnitude of the consequences are way out of line with the original offense.
> the fourth I suspect you're misinterpreting as "Tech managers don't want to hire women", when I think it's more "Tech managers don't care about the gender of their developers"
You're giving that the most contorted, charitable reading possible. In your reading, the reference to a "unicorn" is nonsensical. I would argue the accurate reading is: "Tech managers don't spend time worrying about hiring talented women because [like unicorns] they are mythical and don't exist."
Now, the further implications behind that statement might be:
a) Talented female developers are rare--we need to make serious efforts to improve the educational pipeline and get more young girls interested in programming.
b) Talented female developers are rare, but it's not the tech industry's job to worry or care about that.
c) Talented female developers aren't rare, but [usually male] hiring managers are too blinded by sexism to recognize them.
> regardless of the reality of his actions.
That's the thing. We don't know the reality of his actions. Based only on his tweets (I don't know him personally), he certainly sounds like he might be the kind of guy who would discriminate in his hiring. He might not even do it consciously, he'd just think "Well, I only hire the best" and in his mind, "the best" does not include women.
"You're giving that the most contorted, charitable reading possible."
I don't think he is, but given you only have 140 characters on twitter, everyone should give "the the most contorted, charitable reading possible" unless you follow up with the person and get a clarification of their tweet. Hell, given autocorrect, you should do that even if you think it is plain.
If you take that tweet in isolation and read it as a comparison of female developers to unicorns, then sure, I can see how you arrive at that conclusion. I think it's a faulty conclusion, and I think that its faultiness is further illustrated by his response to the whole drama, in which he explicitly clarified his stance of female developers. My reading of it is based on what I know of him, which does not consist solely of a Valleywag article and four tweets.
You're exemplifying the worst of the Twitter lynchmob problem here; you took a tweet, extrapolated it into a full sum of a person, and then don't bother to establish any further context and have decided that the author is a racist, sexist psychopath based on a context-free reading of a one-sentence statement. That's great for feeling superior to people, but it's pretty awful for useful dialog.
> illustrated by his response to the whole drama, in which he explicitly clarified his stance of female developers.
I mean, obviously he's going to say that. I'm not sure how much stock you want to put into after-the-fact PR damage control. I think actions speak louder than words, and I'd reserve judgment before hearing from some of the women developers who he's hired (he has hired women, right?) about how he was to work under, what he was like as a boss (not as a co-founder).
You accuse me of "exemplifying the worst of the Twitter lynchmob problem" but I'm trying hard to be as neutral and generous as possible. I listed three possible implications of that tweet, only one of which is explicitly negative, and you claim I've "decided that the author is a racist, sexist psychopath". If anyone is guilty of twitter-like hyperbole in this conversation, it's you.
If you didn't think that Dickinson was being a racist, misogynistic, victim-blaming rape apologist, why those tweets in particular? This whole discussion is happening in the implict context of the Valleywag article that touched this whole thing off, where those explicit accusations were made with those tweets as evidence - we aren't discussing this issue in a vacuum here. They're certainly in bad taste, but bad taste doesn't deserve the accusations that he's had thrown at him. You listed multiple implications of the tweet, but then called it "the worst" of a lot that include jokes with racial slurs about rape of a venerated religious figure, so it's pretty safe to infer that you aren't giving it any of the charitable readings; if you were, it wouldn't be anything worth mentioning!
My point in all of this, relevant to the original article, is that these sorts of accusations can have a profound and disproportionate impact on those affected, even if the truth is something else entirely. I think it's unfortunate that Dickinson was fired from BI because they couldn't afford to have the accusations against him associated with their brand (and note that it was the baggage that was the issue, not him actually being a misogynist to his employees or whatnot), but I don't think it's an unreasonable response - he made a bad choice in what he said, and he suffered the consequences of it. I do think it's unreasonable that he remains effectively unemployable because of the bogeyman that has been constructed around his name in which those tweets are trotted out with accusations of racism and sexism every time someone mentions him.
Because those are the tweets that got him fired. Obviously!
Fine, let's say Pax Dickinson is a completely wonderful guy without a bigoted bone in his body.
He still showed monumentally bad judgment. I don't buy your premise that losing your C-level position (and being unable to find another one) after carrying on for years the way he did is such a "profound and disproportionate impact". He demonstrated repeatedly that he's not willing to comport himself in a professional way in public. I also dispute that he is "effectively unemployable". He can certainly go get a job at McDonalds, because he's demonstrated that he's unqualified to be a corporate executive.
Edit: After reading the links you sent, it seems like the women he's worked with don't have a problem with him. So maybe he's not an asshole, he just plays one on twitter.
Still, you've really shot your own argument in the foot here:
> Shevinsky told me just the other day that she was still a bit uncertain about Dickinson after returning to Glimpse. “I was hoping he wouldn’t blow his second chance, because a third chance would be a challenge.” Now he’s co-founder of a company with a strong female CEO and a strong female advisor
Tell me again about how he's "effectively unemployable" and has disproportionately had his career destroyed forever?
Yeah, he showed bad judgement. I'm not sure I agree that it was "monumentally bad". The fact of the matter is that he lost his job and has baggage that follows him around because people continue to perpetuate the Valleywag-constructed outrage, not because of actual behavioral sexism or racism (the accusations of which pretty rapidly evaporate upon closer inspection). It's not something that will blow over in a couple of weeks, because it's an enormous straw man that has taken on a life of its own at this point.
Regarding employability, you'll note that article is from Dec 2013. He's now gone from Glimpse.
> I also knew that I was holding Elissa back. I know my baggage was hurting the company. We were asked to insert clauses that would strip my equity if I “embarrassed” the company and it’s reasonable to assume that my presence as co-founder made other VCs shy away from us, which is heartbreaking to me because Elissa is fucking amazing and deserves better than that.
He further writes:
> My career has been irretrievably damaged. I’ll always have trouble finding a job. It used to be easy for me but even a year later I find that recruiters shy away and applications to jobs I’m well qualified for don’t result in a call back. I’m not worried, I know that with enough time I’ll find someone who doesn’t mind my notoriety given my skills, but I’ll always pay a very real price for this whole incident.
If he says it's still following him around, I'm inclined to believe him, because...well, he'd be the one to know.
I'm saddened that Pax's work at Glimpse didn't help to redeem his reputation. Pax showed excellent judgment on social media for the entire time that he was my cofounder. And we did excellent work together (we consistently had 10 - 18% week over week traction, app had five star reviews, well known security experts pen tested our app and found it was well designed etc.)
For what it's worth, some VCs did want to fund Glimpse. We didn't follow up on that while Pax was on board, for various reasons. A significant A raise would likely have helped Pax rebrand positively in a mainstream way.
Pax is now publicly pro-gamer gate (as you can see on his Twitter feed and with his most recent startup ExposeCorrupt.) I understand why that would have an impact on marketability.
As much as we talk about diversity in technology, there are some ideas and some kind of people that are simply not welcome. I worry about this a bit because I think it hurts a lot of people, not just neo-reactionaries.
Also - Pax apologized and then spent over a year being an excellent citizen of the startup community and on social media. I worry about an ecosystem that is so unforgiving.
I believe that ostracizing people - without the possibility of giving them second chances - is ultimately bad for everyone. It takes folks who have messed up and disenfranchises them so that they no longer have a stake in their reputation and participation in the community.
