Agreed. This has gotten out of hand fast. Two people now have lost their jobs over what is basically a harmless, if somewhat inappropriate, joke. And while I believe that Adria was wrong in how she reacted to that joke, and in refusing to admit fault or apologize afterwards, I'm not sure she should have lost their job over it. This is basically a non-issue that has been blown way out of proportion by social media.

If she was merely a developer or other non-public-facing employee, there would be no reason for her to lose her job. But she was a developer evangelist -- someone who should know that everything she says and does reflects on the company -- and even if you agree with her actions you can't deny that the storm surrounding them would make it nearly impossible for her to effectively work in a job which involves meeting and working with developers.

By that standard, people who make sexist jokes should automatically get fired, because it makes it much more difficult to effectively work in a job which involves working with women and male allies.

If someone makes sexist jokes which offend their co-workers to the point that they're unable to work together, then yes, they should be fired.

Certainly if someone working in public relations posted sexist jokes to their twitter feed I'd expect them to be fired.

I think a lot of American craziness stems from 3 factors:

- America is a geographically enormous country, so it's pretty easy to get away from reality and cling to your views (the rural vs. urban divide).

- A rapidly changing ethnic composition in a country with a history of slavery. Civil rights abuses are in many ways still active and ongoing (see all the gerrymandering).

- Several generations of people were inundated with Cold War propaganda.

This has confused me. As a European the idea that making dongle jokes is specifically sexist or worse harassment seems a bit odd.

Its childish, its in bad taste, and not very funny. Its also against pycon rules so they got their wrists slapped like naughty children which is all fine.

However the idea it was anything more serious is kinda confusing to me.

At the risk of getting into a conversation I really don't want to, I'll see if I can help (I'm British and live in the Bay Area).

I think that there is a different cultural thing in the Valley that you don't find elsewhere due to the gigantic number of people working in just one, male-dominated, industry. I would guess that there is a fixed X% of men and women who are jerks. In a male-dominated industry, the absolute value of that X% is pretty high, so everyone is going to get a dose of them at one time or another.

Everyone in this industry has to rise above those unfortunate encounters, but gender puts a nastier spin on things; what might have been a trollish rebuttal to a male gets gender thrown in as well. And there are women who are not happy about that situation, and the Internet gives them a venue to disseminate their upset, which is all fine. Getting things out in the open gets us to discuss it and try and move things forward.

I don't think that what the guys did was sexual harassment, just silly. But when taken with context of a history of meeting jerks, you can kinda see why Ms Richards may have been sensitive towards it. No-one has the right to not be offended, but PyCon is also not a pub. There's a certain expected level of decency.

I think PyCon pulling them in and saying "hey guys, make the jokes in the bar afterwards" and letting them on their way was a proportional response. I don't think that broadcasting photos on the Internet of people who you don't like is at all proportional. That's vilification, and I think Ms Richards is also very much in the wrong. No-one should have lost their job, everyone should be able to get along better.

Makes perfect sense ta. Yeah it was a conversation I didn't necessarily want to have either but I was interested enough to give it a shot. Thanks again.

I feel like this isn't an "American" vs. "European" thing. There's clearly a lot of controversy over the seriousness of these jokes in America and elsewhere.

You could be right but I'm not sure I've heard it discussed much in a British setting.

In fairness you don't hear many dongle/large feet type jokes but I think that's because they are crude, not really funny, and not really suitable for a professional environment.

Having said that I don't think I've ever heard anyone linking them directly to sexism.

Yep. The only media shitstorms that are crazier than us are from our wonderful colonizers across the pond.

It speaks to the corporate "Human Resources"-ificaiton homogeization currently engulfing the hacker space. Should anyone be surprised that a culture that fires an employee for fairly innocuous jokes is also one that fires an employee for speaking up? I'm going to bet HR departments were behind both firings. They can't "risk" having employees that aren't zombie drones.

The UK is no stranger to similar, ridiculous situations. Remember the BritRuby fiasco?

https://gist.github.com/seanhandley/4106776

No. Nobody outside the tight-knit developer / tech community cares. This hasn't exactly hit the front page of the NYTimes.

We didn't invent sensationalist media.

However trust me that this stress on politically correctness and the way people feel the right to be offended by whatever shit, is really hard to understand from our side of the sea.

I don't really see it living here. There's stories like this that go global, but each one is surrounded by thousands of little instances with people responding with arguments that anyone should be able to say whatever they want because of the first amendment.

There's only five things we do better than everyone else: music, movies, microcode, high-speed pizza delivery, and sensationalist media.

For the ones in the unknown, it's a quote from Snow Crash. Liberal one.

It's been a while since I was last in the US, but I wouldn't agree with the pizza thing. Sure, it's fast, but can't be compared to real Italian pizza. Myself, I prefer the Northern Italian variant, though.

We're catching up in manufacturing too.