A conference attendee overheard another conference attendee making dick jokes in a public space at a conference, violating the terms of the CoC that he'd agreed to before attending. She reported him and posted it on her Twitter feed, complaining about it. He was reprimanded by the conference organizers, and apologized
When he returned to his work, he was fired—and he immediately posted to HN that she'd gotten him fired. He found a new job, while she was subjected to two years of personal threats, identity theft, employer-targeted DDoS attacks, and chan grief. She still is to this day.
If you think that reporting someone for violating an conference code of conduct is the 'most hostile, weird, and hateful' way you've ever seen someone behave, you aren't watching very closely.
1. The words were never meant for her
2. She didn't contact him, maybe she misheard?
3. She was, in fact, way more powerful than him (privilege)
4. She has a history of being a professional victim
5. -and a history of making similarly bad jokes herself, publiclyIt's also an odd definition of professional victim, where publicly being a 'victim' results in you getting booted out of the profession.
I don't want to comment on the event itself here -- but I think that the aftermath, and the continued reaction to it, say a lot of sad things about the tech community.
Which is most privileged:
* Developer evangelist vs developer-on-the-floor
* 10 000 twitter followers vs nothing
Why she was booted from her profession was because she misused her position, -in a way that caused significant harm to the employer.
No company wants to be perceived as "the place that employs the most-hated sexist in the world" if they depend on selling to regular people. An Internet lynch mob can ruin SE rankings, launch DDoS attacks, etc. Anything that attracts one is a liability.
He was already fired by the time the "East side of Internet" reacted.
As for this being brought up again and again: it is a very good example and I can't recall the person in question ever coming up with a real apology.
I asked Hank if he found himself behaving differently since the incident. Had it altered how he lived his life?
“I distance myself from female developers a little bit now,” he replied. “I’m not as friendly. There’s humour, but it’s very mundane. You just don’t know. I can’t afford another Donglegate.”
So I guess it poisons his view of the entire gender.
It's pleasing to think that ineffective activism is zero-sum. In reality a lot of people have been turned off to ideas that fit their principles and ideals. Getting them back is going to take much more work than it would have taken to appeal to their principles before they got burned.
It's a perfect example of counter-productive, oppressive behavior that was outlined in this article. Do you think getting that guy fired is going to suddenly change his sense of humor? Not likely. If anything, it's going to poison his view of feminists in the field by coloring them all as psychopaths willing to do anything to push an agenda rather than focus on the actual technology the community was originally built around.