They’re not even technically right.

Leave your edgy fursona (is that how they call it?) to your personal life.

Ponies are kinda their own thing, despite the slight overlap with furries.

No idea what noun the former use for the thing, though there's probably a dozen here who will add that detail…

Wow, this sounds pretty bigot.

> VMware is committed to harnessing the power of human difference by enabling a workplace where we can all be proud to be our authentic selves.

What’s your point?

The pony IS her authentic self. Forcing her to suppress that aspect of her identity is as oppressive as forcing gay or transgender people to suppress their identities.

Tech is queer, trans, furry, plural, and all sorts of other weirdness. If you cannot deal with people bringing their true identities to the job, you are free to choose another industry to work in. I hear plumbing pays well.

> If you cannot deal with people bringing their true identities to the job, you are free to choose another industry to work in.

I don’t know, looks like VMWare found another way to deal with it.

They dealt with problematic tweets, not an "edgy fursona."

Yup. Everyone in the office loves edgy fart-porn childrens-cartoon fursonas who have regular consent-accidents.

It’s dubious whether this person brought their social media personality into the office. Would be interesting to hear accounts from coworkers. And who’s to say that the entire localized team might not share in the same culture?

I don't necessarily disagree with the substance but I think the logic is very sound here. Saying "you are free to choose another industry to work in." if you don't like a specific aspect of an industry is I think a quite exclusionary and condescending view. Nothing ever improves if everyone just leaves everything ranging from jobs or even entire fields when they don't like some of it.

There are many people who want to improve things instead of leaving.

Bringing more bigotry to the industry is not improving it. There was a subtext of "bigots are not welcome here".

Of course, that is not an improvement at all..... god I wish we just left all personal stuff and identity outside work and unrelated hobbies, it would be much easier... I remember when most people only had a username and zero personal information about themselves so everyone was pretty much faceless, so this wasn't as big of a problem.

> There was a subtext of "bigots are not welcome here".

Talk about being inclusive, huh.

> The pony IS her authentic self

As a trans woman, I will pitch in and say this kind of stuff (from fringes of trans/queer community) is why we get hate crimed.

There's medical basis (decades of research and literature) for asserting that one's gender does not match their biological sex. There's not a DSM V criteria for being a pony.

There is also nobody claiming to be a pony. If you're a trans woman you shouldn't be baited so easily.

I assure you they would keep "hate criming" you no matter how many cartoons you like.

> nobody claiming to be a pony

The person above literally said "The pony IS her authentic self", word for word.

I said someone claiming to be a pony, not someone assigned pony by rando.

Lmao! Thanks for this - I love seeing "allies" like you tell the members of the groups they ally with what they're supposed to think IF they are REALLY in said group. Can't wait to see you scold a black person for questioning the democratic party!

"Black people should be able to own slaves" is a hell of a take bro.

Can you explain what you mean by this because I'm genuinely confused

> The pony IS her authentic self. Forcing her to suppress that aspect of her identity is as oppressive as forcing gay or transgender people to suppress their identities.

That gave me a chuckle over my morning coffee. A beautifully absurd paragraph. Please write more of this comedy.

Looks like she ended up very proud of her authentic self, thanks to VMware.

I don't see what one's preference in how to have sex and what implements are being shoved where is relevant to Kubernetes. So I'd rather have my coworkers to not bring that to the job unless I ask them about it. I am not showing anybody my private parts unsolicited, and I expect the same courtesy from others, especially on the job.

VMWare wants your authentic self to work, unless of course your "authentic self" has opinions.

(Anyone thinking this about "the pony" is missing the point, probably disingenuously so.)

Having opinions is one thing, spewing these opinions, unsolicited, in a public rants while being on a job is another. Spewing them in highly offensive form of a personal insult, and telling the HR to shove it when they object is yet another.

I'd probably rather work for a company that requires people to be professional on a job than one that allows them to "authentically" go wild and throw shit around. There are limits to how much "authenticity" I want to see from my coworkers. Everybody has their own opinions, but there's a time when one needs to choose between staying a professional or let oneself loose. And I'd rather work in a place where the former is encouraged.

She's not technically right. Her article is filled with "all my bosses cheerfully agreed that the social media policy was impossible to comply with", which is nonsense. She could have just stopped using Twitter. She's not a shark who will die if she doesn't tweet every few minutes, it's just social media. Yet she seems to be convinced that she found some clever gotcha here and everyone in every meeting bowed to her superior intellect, meaning she has an impressive inability to read her colleagues.

Looks like she treats people giving up on arguing with her as people agreeing with her. No wonder she's so smug and self-righteous - her experience shows her if she argues long enough, everybody is ending up agreeing with her!