Monday, March 25, 2013

Donglegate. (No winners here, folks.)

The tech community has been all a-twitter this past week about a couple of firings that were set in motion when a female PyCon attendee got her metaphorical shorts in a knot after overhearing a couple of male PyCon attendees making dongle jokes.

I am quite sure that, over the years, most folks in technology  – M & F alike – have heard and/or made and/or at least thought their share of cracks about the perhaps unfortunately named dongle. Same goes for male-female connectors.  And I did spend a few years working for a company named Wang. (Wang? Wang! Get it? Let the merriment begin!)

I’m sure if I put my mind to it, I could come up with a raft of others. (But I can’t get my thought process passed the fact that I was once the product manager for a data forecasting application called AutoBJ – which was sold to Wall Street quants, so you can imagine the great fun that was had by all, excepting, perhaps, the product manager.)

Anyway, a couple of PyCon-ners – this conference is for users of the programming language Python (a name which, I’m quite sure, provides ample opportunity for sexual innuendo, even if it’s not in the same league as dongle or AutoBJ) – were talking to each other, when the woman in front of them decided to take very public umbrage.

Unfortunately for the guys doing the dongle-speak, this wasn’t just any old woman sitting in front of them. It was Adria Richards.

Now, I had never heard of Adria Richards until l’affaire Donglegate, but she is A Big Deal – a very prominent force in the tech community, with A Big Deal Blog and thousands of Twitter followers.

So Adria decided to play Valkyrie-in-Chief, snapping a pictures of the nerdly donglers, and putting it out there for all the world to see.

Having worked in high tech companies since the mainframe computer days, I well understand that “techies” – a largely male cohort – can be puerile to the max. Putting up with their juvenile behavior can be irritating (even when it’s only occasional, and when their eye-rollingly-boring remarks aren’t directed anywhere at or even near you).

But in outing these jokers, Adria got more than she presumably bargained for.

Once the tweet hit the fan, one of the techies was fired from his company, Play Haven, which – given all the furor that ensued – blogged about it:

PlayHaven had an employee who was identified as making inappropriate comments at PyCon, and as a company that is dedicated to gender equality and values honorable behavior, we conducted a thorough investigation. The result of this investigation led to the unfortunate outcome of having to let this employee go. (Source: PlayHaven.)

The fired techie – as yet unnamed – took to Hacker News to tell his side. After explaining that some of what Adria had been so irritated by – chatter about forking code – had not been sexual in the least, he wrote:

My second comment is this, Adria has an audience and is a successful person of the media. Just check out her web page linked in her twitter account, her hard work and social activism speaks for itself. With that great power and reach comes responsibility. As a result of the picture she took I was let go from my job today. Which sucks because I have 3 kids and I really liked that job.

She gave me no warning, she smiled while she snapped the pic and sealed my fate. (Source: Venture Beat).

Adria did not intend – or want – this guy to be fired, but, as the fellow says, “With that great power and reach comes responsibility.”

It certainly would have been more appropriate if she had chosen a more measured option. Like turning around and saying “would you please just knock it off.” Or tweeting and blogging about how a couple of PyCon attendees were driving her nuts with their stupid, middle-school caliber joking, without sending their pictures out there.

But if Adria’s reaction was disproportionate – and it does strike me as being so: the comments were a private conversation; nothing was directed at her; dongle (and even code-forking) jokes are, on the crude and offensive continuum, pretty mild fare – the anti-reaction to her was even more so.

All of a sudden, she was being inundated with death and rape threats. Nice going, fellows.

Anonymous took it upon “themselves” to launch a denial of service attack against the place where she works, which subsequently/consequently decided that they no longer needed her services as an evangelist. In their post, SendGrid wrote:

We understand that Adria believed the conduct to be inappropriate and support her right to report the incident to PyCon personnel…What we do not support was how she reported the conduct. Her decision to tweet the comments and photographs of the people who made the comments crossed the line. Publicly shaming the offenders – and bystanders – was not the appropriate way to handle the situation…

A SendGrid developer evangelist’s responsibility is to build and strengthen our Developer Community across the globe. In light of the events over the last 48+ hours, it has become obvious that her actions have strongly divided the same community she was supposed to unite. As a result, she can no longer be effective in her role at SendGrid. (Source: SendGrid)

Arm chair quarterbacking, twenty-twenty hindsight, etc.

But, seriously, after Adria’s dunder-headed move, to have PlayHaven – some haven, huh? – fire a developer over this. How’s that for an over-reaction? Maybe there’s something else to it, but other than the guy’s likely being on company time at PyCon (and wearing the company’s name on his badge), what was he doing that was so darned firing-offense awful? It’s not as if he had been giving a public presentation on PlayHaven’s behalf, and made off-color, sexist, racist, whatever remarks. He was having a private conversation and made a joke about a dongle. Maybe a slight slap on the wrist’s in order.

But a dongle joke? That’s worth firing someone over?

SendGrid may have a slightly better story. This incident would no doubt have made it more difficult for Adria to build relationships with (some in) the tech community. Still, it seems to me that they could have used this as a “learning opportunity” (gag: sorry) to talk about both real and perceived problems with sexism in the still male-dominated tech world.

And then there’s the Anonymous brigade. But I guess that inappropriate, flamingly emotional, and downright nasty responses aren’t an unknown weapon in their mighty Anonymous arsenal, to be used against anyone who doesn’t agree with them on something.

No winners here, folks.

At least not so far.

Maybe Adria and the fired guy both get new gigs that are even better.

Hope so.

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