Twitter-shaming can cost you your job
Found on Infoworld on Friday, 22 March 2013
Hoping to strike a blow against sexism in the tech industry, developer and tech evangelist Adria Richards took to Twitter to complain about two male developers swapping purportedly offensive jokes at PyCon.
One of the developers and Richards have since lost their jobs, and even the chair of PyCon has been harassed for his minor role in the incident.
At PyCon 2013 last week, Richards -- who has upward of 9,400 Twitter followers -- overheard a couple of unnamed developers in the row behind her engaged in a private conversation. One made an anatomical joke about "dongles," and the other made a comment about "forking." Richards found their comments offensive, so she turned around, took their picture, and posted it to Twitter.
This is idiotic. First you chat with a friend, then you are suddenly unemployed because a totally unrelated person had nothing better to do than to listen to your private conversation and feels offended. What adds a little spice is the fact that Adria Richards (who started all this) has no problem making sexist jokes herself, suggesting that you should put something in your pants next time. What makes it even worse is that Richards is fighting for an equal treatment of women, but at the same visitors are not allowed to access her site without going through the extra step of solving a captcha, because "your IP address based on the country, region or network has been flagged by the website owner". Some are obviously more equal than others.