LWN: Comments on "Blum: Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost"

Was firing an over-reaction?

smurf — 2013-04-05T08:04:02+00:00

It's entirely factual and therefore not *ist in any way, despite attempts by some idiots to assert otherwise.

Now if you had said "women are …", and thereby refused to hire any female firefighters at all, no matter how strong, now that would be sexist (and actionable).

Was firing an over-reaction?

Baylink — 2013-04-04T18:34:52+00:00

> For example, sexist statements in the workplace would be appropriate to be on the "instant firing" list, IMO.

"Women tend to be smaller, lighter, and less strong than men, and this can negatively impact their ability to pass a firefighter's exam, where the weight of the overcome resident they have to drag out of a burning building will not conveniently change simply because they're female."

That's a sexist statement.

If you fired me for making it, I'd have you in court.

Firing was over-reaction

Baylink — 2013-04-04T18:32:13+00:00

You are stubborn, Rick.

:-)

But you are not alone; I too am on a mission to civilize.

Firing was over-reaction

Baylink — 2013-04-04T18:29:31+00:00

I don't see that drag said it had to be *his* judgement that controlled the issue.

But my overarching reaction to this incident, and others like it, is to quote the Fidonet slogan, now nearly three decades old:

Be ye not overly annoying...
nor *too easily annoyed*.

Certainly there are some people who fail on the first point.

But it's pretty clear that there are also people who are, in my best friend's lyrical phrasing, "spring-loaded to the pissed off position", thus failing rather theatrically at the second.

Just as the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the target for the Internet and the content thereon cannot reasonably be limited to that which is considered Suitable for Children by the Most Conservative Observer, interpersonal behavior cannot reasonably be limited that hard either -- there will *always* be someone who can contrive to be offended by any single thing you or I say. People will always game the system, no matter what the rules are; anyone who's a parent understands this.

Zero tolerance has been proven pretty effectively not to work in education; it's not going to work in public conference rules, either.

If you want to interview NFL players in the locker room, you really do have to take on the possibility that you're gonna see some nudity.

Certainly, there are people who go beyond the pale.

But the pale isn't anywhere near a sotto-voce quip about a "dongle", from a different row, not directed at you. If I were the fired gent from the other row, you can be certain that I'd be investigating civil action against Adria Richards.

Firing was over-reaction

rickmoen — 2013-04-04T16:31:35+00:00

jmorris42 wrote:

Nope. Sorry, sanity lost that argument.

Call me stubborn.

For good or ill, the word 'feminism' is now understood to mean something almost entirely different from what it was originally meant to be.

Like legal rights, useful words do not defend themselves. I'm even a stickler for 'imply' differing from 'infer' and 'enormity' meaning 'great wickedness', which will show you what a no-hoper spokesman for sanity and literacy I remain.

Best Regards,
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

Was firing an over-reaction?

nix — 2013-04-01T22:55:36+00:00

Claiming that diversity of race and sex "don't matter much" is tantamount to that. But perhaps, just maybe, you didn't realize they were a problem? (If so, you're speaking from a privileged position and should probably talk to people more.)

Was firing an over-reaction?

tjc — 2013-04-01T14:16:37+00:00

> Anyone claiming that the effective subjugation and elimination of much of the human race from the pool of equally-treated employees 'does not matter much' is not only an intellectual automaton -- he's a *bad capitalist*.

This is projection -- I didn't say anything about subjugating or eliminating anyone from anything.

Was firing an over-reaction?

dlang — 2013-03-29T20:16:54+00:00

> Here in the US diversity/sensitivity training is a huge industry. Huge.

Large companies have mandatory training for every employee once a year on diversity/sensitivity training.

A couple of years ago, the web-based training module at my company wouldn't let you complete the training in less than an hour. Even if you read everything (instead of watching the videos), if you finished in less than an hour, it forced you to keep interacting with it until an hour of interaction had completed.

Was firing an over-reaction?

jmorris42 — 2013-03-29T17:01:29+00:00

> nor have I heard of it existing in the UK

Here in the US diversity/sensitivity training is a huge industry. Huge.

> there are always more people waiting at the gates.

Why? If wage rates drop people lose interest in training to enter it. There is a bit of a lag but a lot of people entered IT because they heard they pay was good. If pay ever dropped a lot those who came for the money and not because they have a burning desire for it would quickly leave.

Same theory applies in most industries. Here where I live the job most people without a degree lust for is the offshore oil & gas industry. It isn't because they love oil, they love the fact it is the highest paying industry in the area. If they cut the pay back few would line up for a shot at spending weeks at a time on an offshore platform. They pay that good because the job requires a certain sort of person, the sort who won't screw up, blow up a multi-billion dollar oil platform and rack up untold more billions in enviromental and PR damage. In other words, they don't need a degree but they do need clue and stability.

Was firing an over-reaction?

nix — 2013-03-29T15:21:54+00:00

adding women to an existing team of males (especially in this industry) always seems to involve drama, sensitivity/diversity training

If it involves 'drama' the people causing the 'drama' need to grow up and realize that half the human race is female. If sensitivity training is even *needed* to interact with women this is even more true (FWIW I have never had any such training at any point, nor have I heard of it existing in the UK outside organizations in recovery mode from situations where actual sexual harrassment has been going on: this may be a US-specific insanity).

changing the work environment in general to allow maternity leave, no more death marches

Good! Organizations that do not acknowledge that their employees have families and that those families deserve priority at times do not deserve to exist (and there is such a thing as paternity leave in decent organizations and sane countries, too: men have families as well, and expecting them to ignore a new child in favour of the latest deadline is inhuman). Organizations that are so incompetent at planning that frequent death marches are necessary do not deserve to exist (they're harming their employees by doing that, of whichever gender).

That can only happen as a pathological extreme of an imbalance of supply and demand of labor

Yeah. That is a very frequent case in many industries: after all, there are always more people waiting at the gates. Guess why it doesn't happen? Because of, gasp, regulation preventing it from taking hold.

Was firing an over-reaction?

jmorris42 — 2013-03-29T06:46:33+00:00

> Hint: doubling your employment pool by hiring people without
> regard for sex is a good thing for the employer for hopefully
> obvious reasons.

All other things being equal your statement is of course quite correct. But they aren't always like your textbook out in the real world.

Lets push an example to an extreme.. kinda like you do in the next one... and see where it might lead to a different conclusion.

We all know programmers tend to be a) a bit wierd, b) overwhelmingly male and c) tend to be socially inept in general and especially in interactions with MOTOS. We also know (heck, I know well enough from direct experience, know several at least as good at IT things as myself) that women can program but they are even less represented at the extreme high end than they are in general. We also know that those few extreme programmers can often produce more output than a dozen or more normal ones. The "A bit wierd" factor seems to correlate with the high output.

Theory holds that women and men are equal, thus adding women to a team shouldn't matter. But the reality above disagrees, adding women to an existing team of males (especially in this industry) always seems to involve drama, sensitivity/diversity training and changing the work environment in general to allow maternity leave, no more death marches, etc., all of which impact productivity. Btw, if you only apply the new kinder and gentler rules to the females, kiss moral goodbye. And if you figure the odds are non-trivial that one or more of your twitchy but highly productive ones will get sacked in an HR incident to boot, perhaps the wise course for a manager IS to exclude half the talent pool, pulling whatever tricks are required to keep the EEOC in the dark.

Discuss. And try to keep it rational. What proposed changes in social conditions would best work to mitigate/eliminate the perverse incentives in that scenario?

> a race to the bottom where your competitors outcompete you
> by treating some of their employees like slaves

Good grief, that is so epic stupid you must be college educated. That can only happen as a pathological extreme of an imbalance of supply and demand of labor, and guess what; given the condition the result WILL happen. But if labor isn't so abundant that employers can do that labor will always be able to bid up their price with or without unions even. Especially in industries like ours.

Was firing an over-reaction?

jmorris42 — 2013-03-29T06:05:09+00:00

> I still think it might not have been right to fire the
> people in question, even if it was legal.

Firing the guy was a mistake. But once this incident blew up she was toast. She won't ever be employable in any position that involves outside sales or contact with the public, inside the tech industry and likely outside of it. Google never forgets and this story is now everywhere.

Was firing an over-reaction?

jmorris42 — 2013-03-29T06:00:57+00:00

Lemme get this right. You think she should be able to sue to keep her job? A job that under no possible circumstance she will EVER be able to perform, for that or any other employer so long as memory (and Google) exists? And that condition exists entirely because of her own bad judgment and actions.

Whether you agree with whether it SHOULD be thus, the reality is what it is. After her little stunt no sane male of the species would be caught dead in the same convention center or sales presentation with her out of pure abject fear even if they were PC enough not to shun her for moral reasons. So how in the heck do you do Developer Evangelism in an industry that is, again we aren't talking about what should be but about what is, very male dominated when you are so radioactive that pretty much every new and legacy media outlet has now run at least one feature on your antics? And remember, Google never forgets.

For such things was the French Foreign Legion created.

Firing was over-reaction

jmorris42 — 2013-03-29T05:42:40+00:00

"The term properly means...."

Nope. Sorry, sanity lost that argument. Just like "liberal" here in the US no longer means what your dictionary says it means, and what most of the rest of the English speaking world still thinks it means.

For good or ill, the word 'feminism' is now understood to mean something almost entirely different from what it was originally meant to be.

Was firing an over-reaction?

union — 2013-03-28T18:09:08+00:00

No offense, but SEC regulations exist to protect owners (stockholders) and potential buyers of Companies. And the reason they exist is, that said owners went and cried for governments help, when ever they were scammed by some mangers.

If you run your own private businesses there is a lot less regulation.

Was firing an over-reaction?

nix — 2013-03-28T00:01:17+00:00

No, he expected that -- he was writing a short time after the Industrial Revolution had truly gathered steam. Economic growth wouldn't slow the processes he identified -- it would accelerate them, as they're driven by competition. But of course he didn't foresee the labour movement or the modern welfare state, which has pretty much eliminated the race to the bottom he foresaw. (Other things might well have eliminated it too.)

Was firing an over-reaction?

Cyberax — 2013-03-27T15:35:57+00:00

I'd say that Marx also overlooked the explosive economic growth that allowed for quite a bit of time for wages to rise in real value.

Was firing an over-reaction?

nix — 2013-03-27T15:14:14+00:00

My Marxism reference was referring to his fundamental axiom, that capitalism would collapse when the marginal rate of profit was driven to zero and everyone ended up a slave with arbitrarily low wages. This didn't happen because (among other reasons) of the growth of the union movement, which Marx could hardly have predicted.

Was firing an over-reaction?

tjc — 2013-03-27T04:19:56+00:00

> For what it's worth, this problem is not nearly so bad in mathematics.

Part of that is due the nature of mathematics itself -- it is a beautiful thing, a transcendent truth untainted by lesser things. Computer Science is nearly so, but not quite.

Firing was over-reaction

rickmoen — 2013-03-26T17:38:43+00:00

'DOT' wrote:

I suppose this is the result of emerging feminism in the open source community.

In the spirit of attempting to express something novel and evince maximal respect for others: Some do honestly perceive feminism as meaning sundry attempts to annoyingly social-engineer others' lives. However, I hope you can also imagine such a term becoming embroiled in Internet polemics, by anyone with a grudge feeling entitled to claim the term, and by some folks' temptation to label whatever one dislikes feminism.

That is not feminism as I've known (and tried to live) it for the past 50ish years. The term properly means "believing in, supporting, looking fondly on, hoping for, and/or working towards equality of the sexes". Equality of opportunity, in other words -- encouraging the ability of people to achieve without artificial obstacles imposed on them merely on account of their sexes. That is and has always been the core concept.

So, emerging feminism in the open source community? Like modern civilisation, I see it as altogether a fine idea.

Best Regards,
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

Was firing an over-reaction?

Cyberax — 2013-03-26T15:29:05+00:00

That sounds plausible until you actually start digging.

Economic growth in the US was NOT linked to exports. In fact, US exported hardly anything during the first post-war years (hardly anybody in Europe could buy imported stuff).

Ultimately, economic growth is not linked to external expansion - it is also linked to internal expansion. Slashing the cost of a $500 widget to $50 immediately opens up a lot of internal market - and that has been the main engine of US and European economic growth for quite a bit of time.

Conferences may be more trouble than they are worth

pboddie — 2013-03-26T12:14:36+00:00

Did you reply to the wrong post here? No-one was arguing that six-year-old children should work in IT. The encouragement of little girls and boys to become interested in computers (and one day in the future perhaps work in IT) was a theme at PyCon US, especially as they had tutorials for children and gave out Raspberry Pis to everyone. That's the wider context, not what the Internet mob had to say about it afterwards.

Conferences may be more trouble than they are worth

fb — 2013-03-26T10:55:04+00:00

@rgmoore

While the whole thread is somehow depressing and somehow instructive in its arguments, I would like to thank you for the cool headed and rational look at the situation. I mean it.

Kind regards,
FB

Was firing an over-reaction?

khim — 2013-03-26T10:28:47+00:00

Legislation like this is a large part of the reason why Marx was wrong

It funny: Marx said many different things yet you somehow talk without ever clarifying what exactly you mean as if everything he said was wrong.

Well, that and the fact that some enlightened employers, like Ford, realised that they had to pay their employees enough that they could afford to buy things: that economic slavery was bad

Actually it was not Ford's altruism but creation of FED which made it possible to expand markets which, in turn, made continuation of capitalist possible. Ford employees can only buy Fords because someone somewhere digs the ore for the food and shelter. As long as it was possible to expand markets capitalism ruled, when it struggled to do so (Germany and Japan in XX century) it become violent, when nukes made hot resolution impossible it stagnated and surged when new markets become available (it's easy to see things like the opening up of the country to foreign investment and collapse of USSR and other, smaller expansions on a graph), and of course when it finally covered the world it started disintegrating as expected (again on the same graph: extreme efforts by FED, ECB, PBOC and others were just enough to stop this collapse for a time and it's clear that these programs have limited lifetime).

Now, if you talk about the next stage (utopia which will be achieved after capitalism collapse) then I agree that here Marx described something based solely on a wishful thinking - but it was well over hundred years ago, it's hard to blame him.

P.S. And of course the fact that it's still one of the best available descriptions of the capitalism's collapse is just sad: we had a century to prepare to the event, did nothing and instead gave awards to people who just ten years ago explained how capitalism can go on expanding forever on a finite planet. Gosh. Pathetic.

Blum: Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost

marcH — 2013-03-26T08:19:28+00:00

> If I'm reading the research correctly...

If that's not literally begging for a:

[citation required]

... then I don't know what is!

Was firing an over-reaction?

nhippi — 2013-03-26T07:32:43+00:00

SEC regulations used to be a much more lightweight than they are these days (post-enron). Also many other countries (such as UK) have much less regulation on public companies than what SEC imposes. And I'm not saying that these regulations are bad - I'm just saying that the are heavy - and that US is certainly not "unregulated capitalism".

Now we have of course deviated far from the original article.

Back to the topic, workers rights - it is correct that the US At-will employment is harsh for workers. But here at the "civilized side of pond", we have seen the rise of temporary employment agencies, and the end result is not any better for worker than being employed at will...

Blum: Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost

raven667 — 2013-03-26T04:02:22+00:00

If I'm reading the research correctly there isn't any evidence that one source of stress is different than another, stress is stress and it doesn't matter if it is because of a life and death issue or a trivial one, it has the same effects and feels the same.

I'm sorry that you've internalized your difficulty with stress and don't think your feelings are legitimate because IT work isn't "important" enough, it's not a bad reflection on you to have stress. It reminds me of something I once read about ESPNs web operations, they remind themselves that he stakes are ultimately low, "We are not doctors, if we screw up no one dies, worst case is someone doesn't get their sports scores for a little while."

Conferences may be more trouble than they are worth

marcH — 2013-03-26T00:51:40+00:00

> Do you really think anyone is arguing that six-year-old children of any gender should work in IT?!

http://www.google.com/search?q=adria+richards+little+girl

(I wonder where you got the "six-year-old" part from)

Blum: Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost

marcH — 2013-03-26T00:46:22+00:00

> (the equivalent of the run-of-the-mill IT staff, or auto mechanics, construction worker, etc)

Even though run-of-the-mill nurses don't often deal with open chests they still have to deal with things quite heavier than "equivalent" jobs. It does not need to be covered in blood.

Firing was over-reaction

nix — 2013-03-26T00:29:26+00:00

Twitter's not taking a beating because this sort of thing doesn't just happen on Twitter. Alas. :((

Blum: Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost

dlang — 2013-03-26T00:28:26+00:00

I wasn't talking about cardiac nurses or ER nurses or any subset that is under especially high stress.

I'm talking about your run-of-the-mill nursing staff (the equivalent of the run-of-the-mill IT staff, or auto mechanics, construction worker, etc)

Blum: Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost

nix — 2013-03-26T00:28:13+00:00

Quite. This sort of self-organizing misogynist travelling death-and-rape threat-fest has been going for years (it's forced a number of women in the skeptical community out of the community entirely and into self-imposed internet silence, because every comment they make, on any subject, elicits hundreds of appalling threats from the same crowd). I wish there was a way to identify the people who do this and silently erase them from the space-time continuum, but unfortunately there is not.

Blum: Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost

nix — 2013-03-26T00:24:54+00:00

Quite. And, to be honest, I think cardiac nurses or neurosurgeons have more justification for gallows humour than do computer people (those working in non-safety-critical environments, anyway). When you've reached into someone's open chest on short notice in the middle of the working day you likely *need* to blow off steam afterwards. Dealing with idiotic IT support requests or random passing bugs is just not stressful to the same degree, at all. There isn't as much riding on it. (And I say this as someone who finds most computing jobs too stressful -- but I know this is a reflection on me, and not an indication that computing jobs are in some way super-stressful. They're not.)

Conferences may be more trouble than they are worth

nix — 2013-03-26T00:19:32+00:00

I dunno. Adria *is* a plausibly Latinate name, heck very close to that of at least one notable emperor. (I can't help noticing the social context of names here. The whole personality of said emperor seems to shift if you modernize his name by removing the first letter: Emperor Adrian...)

Conferences may be more trouble than they are worth

nix — 2013-03-26T00:16:54+00:00

Curious. I read precisely the opposite from context than do you. Do you really think anyone is arguing that six-year-old children of any gender should work in IT?! Talk about straw women...

Conferences may be more trouble than they are worth

nix — 2013-03-26T00:14:08+00:00

There is no right not to have your picture taken and publicized when you are in a public area.

A quote seems relevant here. As usual, he hits it out of the park:

"You know, when I was in Paris, seeing Linter for the first time, I was standing at the top of some steps in the courtyard where Linter's place was, and I looked across it and there was a little notice on the wall saying it was forbidden to take photographs of the courtyard without the man's permission. [...] They want to own the light!"

-- Iain M. Banks, The State of the Art, chapter 6.3 Halation Effect

But, of course, Iain is one of those Scottish socialists...

Was firing an over-reaction?

nix — 2013-03-25T23:59:20+00:00

Anyone claiming that the effective subjugation and elimination of much of the human race from the pool of equally-treated employees 'does not matter much' is not only an intellectual automaton -- he's a *bad capitalist*.

Hint: doubling your employment pool by hiring people without regard for sex is a good thing for the employer for hopefully obvious reasons. Being forbidden from treating some of your employees like slaves (or, indeed, actually *as* slaves) is a good thing for the employer, because it prevents a race to the bottom where your competitors outcompete you by treating some of their employees like slaves and beating you on price, forcing you to do the same even if you don't want to.

This is the sort of thing regulation (and anti-discrimination legislation) is *for*. It's *why* unbridled capitalism doesn't work: without legislation to suppress perverse incentives like this, it contains the seeds of its own destruction. Legislation like this is a large part of the reason why Marx was wrong (well, that and the fact that some enlightened employers, like Ford, realised that they had to pay their employees enough that they could afford to buy things: that economic slavery was bad).

is it really?

marcH — 2013-03-25T23:31:55+00:00

> The idea that "bad behaviour is its own punishment" just isn't very realistic over the short term in which we mostly care.

Extreme laissez-faire / free trade theories are all failing to see that most feedback loops are imperfect and most importantly: slooow. Yeah sure: there will always be some kind of punishment... in long run. But "in the long run, we're all dead". Can we please get a half-decent life some time before that? Thanks.

No extreme and simplistic theory will ever good enough for the real world (and none is ever actually applied for real if you look closer)

Blum: Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost

marcH — 2013-03-25T23:16:01+00:00

The internet stopped being different from the real world some time ago now.

Firing was over-reaction

Nelson — 2013-03-25T20:45:31+00:00

What I find disturbing was the two firings. Maybe the people in question behaved badly, but who among us hasn't overreacted occasionally or done something stupid in public? I don't think people deserve to lose their jobs over something like this.

I'm struggling with this one.

It seems to me, when you have 12,000 twitter followers and rather than addressing the guys directly or asking the conference to do it for you if you're not comfortable with it (let's not forget, there were at least 2 non-public ways to address this) shaming them is more than an overreaction. I'm not sure where the line lies, but at 12,000 followers, that's akin to putting it on the news. Referring to it as an overreaction just seems a little disingenuous. This is clearly a person that has done tons of self-promotion, has cultivated a following and has some idea how media works and knows the value of it.

Firing a person that is supposed to represent your company and does that seems like a fairly sensible thing. Unless of course they want to go even more public and say what it was exactly that was said which was so offensive and make the case for what they did... That blows my mind too, I know I'll sound like I'm sexist or something but what exactly was this joke that was so offensive to just over hear?

Likewise, if you're at a conference with your company name on your pass and you're telling some off color jokes and your company has a policy about that, what happens happens. Seems a little extreme but that's not exactly bringing good press to your company. An overreaction? Sure but we're talking about Playhaven and I had never even heard of them before this. Again, hearing the actual offending jokes or comments might sway one's opinion one way or the other, policy is policy though. And with this much attention, I don't see how they can't enforce policy.

I'll say something else that a lot of the geeks and nerds will dislike. Why isn't twitter taking a beating for allowing all the anonymous sniping? There is something to be said for some anonymity and the ability to tweet with a pseudonym or something but rape threats?!? Seems like twitter could shut that down pretty easily or at least provide some mechanisms for tracking the offenders down.