Hacker News Reader

Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

> We have two sexist/innapropriate developers

Inappropriate yes, sexist no (a "dongle" private joke can hardly be construed as sexist, seriously).

> one employer who (apparently, there is STILL no evidence for this fact beyond the anonymous pastebin!) fired one of the first guys on questionable evidence

Apparently? A blog post from their CEO not evidence enough: http://blog.playhaven.com/addressing-pycon/? Also fired developer commented quite extensively on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=mr-hank

> and another employer who fired the evangelist based on said freakout.

Probably less over the freakout and more over the DDOS they've been under since some of the "uncounted hordes" have decided the best response to mob justice was mob justice, SendGrid'd been unavailable for hours.

View on HN

Read your article:

"we will not comment on all the factors that contributed to our parting ways."

I still suspect this was a firing for many reasons, not just this incident.

If they didn't essentially fire him for making a dongle joke, they'd probably have tried harder to make that clear in the announcement

You have to walk a fine line as an employer -- you don't want to be sued for wrongful termination.

> Read your article:

I've read it several times, just in case the text changed between my visits

> I still suspect this was a firing for many reasons, not just this incident.

And yet the post provides no information whatsoever and crucially does not come close to hinting that this was not the reason, you'd think. There may have been other reasons, but the timing is odd, why wait until he gets involved in something at PyCon? And even if it happened to be the straw breaking the camel's back it's not like they had to fire him on the spot.

Unless they wanted to milk some views, after all some say no publicity is bad publicity.

"just in case the text changed between my visits"

I've seen that happen before, so I apologize for my insinuation if the quote was added between your reading and mine.

"the post provides no information whatsoever and crucially does not at any point indicate this was not the reason"

You can't assume that the firing was 100% due to the issue at hand, and I'm saying that I don't think it was 100%. Other people seem to be acting as if that's the only reason he was let go.

> You can't assume that the firing was 100% due to the issue at hand

Of course not (especially as his colleague was not fired) but in a blog post purporting to "provide some clarity" on "a number of inaccuracies being reported", considering the basic assumption that he was fired for it, you'd think that would be part of the clarity.

Instead the post weasels around with no specifics whatsoever, declaring "a thorough investigation" (of a few hours) but that not "all the factors" would be commented on (none whatsoever were commented on). They've also refused to publish (let alone respond) to a single comment so far.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com