After reading her blog post and several tweets, her words seems carefully crafted to achieve a personal agenda, and I would take anything she says with a whole salt shaker worth of grains of salt.
For all I know this could very well be PR and damage control from her. I have a hard time believing she had no idea this was a possible and probable consequence of her posting of this picture. This is not an uncommon outcome.
The tweet itself is arguably going overboard but the accompanying picture is the real issue, this is the element of public exposure which made all this going way way overboard.
It's actually a serious offense and even a crime in other parts of the world, the kind that can send you in jail for quite some time, and on many websites and communities this could get you a ban.
It seems to me it was a threat either of being stabbed with forks or sexually assaulted, neither is acceptable.
This guy has all rights to feel angry about what she did, but this is not a welcome comment and he should probably be reported to the law enforcement authorities.
The police here would be the pycon would acted responsibly and dealt with the issue accordingly.
But the report was not towards the police but towards a potential mob of vigilantes, namely the internet at large and an opinionated group of followers which would probably be outraged by the way the report was crafted.
It would be closer to printing hundreds of tracts and poster and posting them in the neighborhood and distributing them to concerned people hoping someone from law enforcement would see them than reporting to the police.
The employer is all but neutral in this issue, the neutral party is obviously the PyCon staff and they did their part as expected from reasonable and sound responsible people, respecting the privacy of everybody involved.
I wonder how you can not see how her actions lead to his demise.
Definitely not. She's clearly in the abuser position and her reaction was disproportionate and inconsiderate, to the like of baseless sexual harassment lawsuits we've all heard about.
I'd even go an extra step and say IMHO what she did was misplaced sexism as she misinterpreted and misrepresented the situation and would probably not have done anything if women were making the same dongle joke.
She publicly posted without consent a picture and an incriminating comment in an increasingly context of being touchy and wary about gender issues at tech conferences.
Of course this has a significant potential for HR to do PR and distance themselves from their employee in an attempt to save the company image and avoid a potential pro-feminist backlash. Though I agree play haven overreacted, from their despicable business activity it's not that surprising, and past similar experiences points towards this as almost predictable and expected.
But for a dev evangelist, this was highly inconsiderate and irresponsible thing to do, it looks like she didn't care about the consequences of what she did, and got fired over it. Which makes sense too, as explained by sendgrid here: http://blog.sendgrid.com/a-difficult-situation/ she did it all wrong, made her employer look bad, had the opposite effect of what her job position asks for, render herself ineffective at her job in the future, and inadvertently endangered her employer business.
Heck! If I can't crack an innocent dick joke at my friend while attending a conference because others think it is inappropriate, I won't be attending any conference anymore.
Or would it make more sense to use IRC chat to talk to the person sitting next to me ?
It seems the pycon staff acted appropriately, but Adria certainly did not, posting pictures online with this kind of comment is not okay and goes against pycon guidelines.
And to me this report seems arguably abusive in the first place, but taken as a whole it amounts to witch hunting and hurts everybody to the benefit of no one.
Now both PyCon, the python community, women in tech and people working towards a more women friendly tech conference have a bad image that's impossible to restore. All because one single person misinterpreted a comment and found a joke not funny, well done !
You're kinda right here, the twitter analogy is not quite the same, the PyCon incident involved a handful of people and spoken words while the twitter one is much much worse as it is made public to the whole internet and doesn't go away once written.
Apart from this significant difference, both are dick jokes and to me seems to be poking innocent fun but reveals a closed mindedness and double standard from Adria.
To me this looks a lot like sexism against men. Would she have done the same if this joke had came from a group of women ?
Then it is really inconsiderate and irresponsible to post pictures like this online. In other parts of the world taking this picture would send you to court and with the accompanying comment would most probable send you to jail with a hefty fine.
And now PyCon has officially turned into Soviet PyCon where all attendees should self-censor and be very wary of any woman there. Epic fail at creating a welcoming atmosphere for women and gender equality.
Yes sexism and witch hunt are the main issue and going after people who make jokes you don't find funny because they're guys is sexism and a witch hunt.
Would she have done the same if it were women instead of men ? I don't think so. It looks like a personal crusade against men.
1. This is so impractical that I switched to opera as my main browser where it is a press on F12 and a click to enable/disable js
2. When your product does such a bad job that it has to rely on a third party extension to provide functionality to users, maybe you should consider the possibility that you should include these features in your product.
Is it worth alienating web developer and power users because they represent a small fraction of your user base ?
Try alienating your power users and wonder your product suddenly start bleeding regular users along with power users.
Start alienating web developer and wonder why suddenly websites start breaking in your browser.
This article is advocating total removal or rendering as impractical as possible as a mean of protecting ignorant people from their ignorance all in the sake of brand image.
For all I know this could very well be PR and damage control from her. I have a hard time believing she had no idea this was a possible and probable consequence of her posting of this picture. This is not an uncommon outcome.