And when she pulled SendGrid, her employer, publicly into the fray via her twitter feed, who didn't know it was simply a matter of time?
I mean, what else could SendGrid possibly do? She basically forced them to fire her. Her value to the company is being a public face to developers. She very publicly destroyed that value. Further, she pulled SendGrid in with her tweet about them "supporting" her. Had she not done that, she might have had a fighting chance, but it almost seems like she wanted to get fired.
Not to mention that a company wants to employ people with impeccable judgement, particularly for public facing positions. She showed incredibly horrid judgment in how she initiated the situation and continued to display horrid judgement in her handling of it. Do you want someone with horrible judgement being your public face and voice?
I don't put much stock in the DDoS talk, FYI. No reputable company fires someone b/c they are being blackmailed. Though, perhaps I'm giving too much credit here, I don't know.
Either way, it should not comes as a surprise to anyone that this is the outcome.
At any point before the firing, she had the power to put a halt to a lot of this. She could have gone on Twitter and her blog and posted, "I'm so sorry this has happened. The person in question has apologized. I would like to request that Play Haven rehire him, and institute a policy to avoid incidents like this in the future."
Everything so far has been about punishment/vindictiveness. Nobody is interested in trying to address the problem, move forward, and make the world a better place. I don't see how the outcome could have been worse. Everyone handled this badly except PyCon itself, yet PyCon is who will be remembered as the problem.
She didn't force them to fire her. People are just blowing this way out of proportion. Everybody needs to chill out, especially the corporate management of both companies.
What would you have done in the situation? You're the CEO of a company. You have someone in a glorified PR position. That same person has caused massive blowback by not once, not twice, but multiple times showing extreme poor judgement. This person then makes a public statement saying your company "supports" that person thereby ostensibly pulling the company into the fight. What would you do?
It would take all of five seconds for me to ship that person out.
Even if you are working on a three strike position; all three strikes came in the last few days.
This has nothing to do with the DDoS. This has to do with having someone in a position representing the company to your target audience and not just doing a poor job of it, but doing such a trainwreck of a job that the company's PR needs to spin up to defcon 1.
No, just human. She seems to have been doing her job quite well, overall. She just voiced her dislike over some fork jokes and some people disagreed. That's life.
SG got a terrible wave of backlash. Customers leaving, a PR nightmare all over the tech forums. DDoS attack to bring their service down. This is not Google or Microsoft. They can only sustain that for so long before imploding.
Now they could have thought about it in 2 way. 1) Simple risk analysis even if they think she is totally and 100% right, still dictates she should be dropped like a nuclear hot potato immediately. Or they actually found her actions objectively reprehensible and decided she doesn't represent what the company stands for.
You're right. But it must be pretty terrifying to be caught in a flash-fire internet shitstorm like this - reputation concerns to weigh up on the one hand, and operational concerns on the other.
Of course she didn't. But she greatly devalued herself by showing poor judgement - at this point, unless she was highly influential in the organization or her value (in other projects) was high enough for the company to support her regardless, she had committed a career-limiting move [1]
And when she pulled SendGrid, her employer, publicly into the fray via her twitter feed, who didn't know it was simply a matter of time?
I mean, what else could SendGrid possibly do? She basically forced them to fire her. Her value to the company is being a public face to developers. She very publicly destroyed that value. Further, she pulled SendGrid in with her tweet about them "supporting" her. Had she not done that, she might have had a fighting chance, but it almost seems like she wanted to get fired.
Not to mention that a company wants to employ people with impeccable judgement, particularly for public facing positions. She showed incredibly horrid judgment in how she initiated the situation and continued to display horrid judgement in her handling of it. Do you want someone with horrible judgement being your public face and voice?
I don't put much stock in the DDoS talk, FYI. No reputable company fires someone b/c they are being blackmailed. Though, perhaps I'm giving too much credit here, I don't know.
Either way, it should not comes as a surprise to anyone that this is the outcome.