Blame and offensive jokes are flying in a battle started at PyCon, a Python developers conference, by one programmer and a joke about dongles.
During a panel, a developer from mobile app Playhaven made a joke about big dongles.
“Developer evangelist” and social media activist Adria Richards tweeted a picture of the guy, calling the comment “Not cool” and referring to a joke about “forking repo’s.”
“Women in technology need consistant [sic] messaging from birth through retirement they are welcome, competent and valued in the industry,” Richards explained later.
The programmer was fired.
“As a company that is dedicated to gender equality and values honorable behavior, we conducted a thorough investigation,” Andy Yang, Playhaven CEO, explained. "The result of this investigation led to the unfortunate outcome of having to let this employee go.”
An account claiming to be the programmer, calling himself mr-hank, popped up on social news site Hacker News and apologized, with clarification.
“I really did not mean to offend anyone and I really do regret the comment and how it made Adria feel. She had every right to report me to staff, and I defend her position,” mr-hank wrote. “However, there is another side to this story. While I did make a big dongle joke about a fictional piece hardware that identified as male, no sexual jokes were made about forking. My friends and I had decided forking someone’s repo is a new form of flattery (the highest form being implementation) and we were excited about one of the presenters projects; a friend said ‘I would fork that guys repo’ The sexual context was applied by Adria, and not us.
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. Let this serve as a message to everyone, our actions and words, big or small, can have a serious impact.”
It served as a message to angry coders with misogynist tendencies, who bombarded the website of Richards’ employer, SendGrid, until she too was fired.
“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,” Jim Franklin, SendGrid CEO, said. “As a result, she can no longer be effective in her role at SendGrid.”
So two tech lovers are not out of work, but at least the internet got to be indignant for a while. And that’s what really matters.
