Well, there's tons of commentary on the issue, and I think you are getting down-voted (I didn't DV you, FWIW), because you could've read or searched through them to figure out whether the other guy was fired.
The answers are: if you had seen the photo in question, you'd see that the two engineers are actually wearing PlayHaven T-Shirts, which strongly implies that if one of them works for PlayHaven, then the other does too (which was corroborated in another thread).
The other person wasn't fired because he was the recipient of the joke, rather than the producer.
As far as Playhaven is concerned, I'm nearly certain that the person in question wasn't simply fired for making a sexual joke (I could be wrong on this, but that would typically be a pretty strong reaction).
They were forced into making a strong, public response by having one of their employees, wearing their shirt, being called out as a sexist. Think of it from the perspective of the company - the potential downside if you choose to protect this employee is huge, and it's far safer to err on the side of political correctness and quickly eliminating any hint that your company supports and protects sexist employees.
Once pictures are posted to Twitter clearly associating your company with sexism and harrassment, it ceases to be an HR problem, and becomes a PR problem.
"Shortly thereafter, one of the men was fired by his employer, who hinted at multiple contributing factors beyond the jokes"
Isn't this completely wrong? Wasn't the engineer fired long before Adria was fired? Wasn't the vitriol towards Adria not caused by the fact that the engineer was fired?
Not that the vitriol was right. Just getting the facts straight before getting to conclusions.
Playhaven did the cowardly thing by destroying the guy's career as a preemptive measure for any bad PR they may receive over this. It would take a very sure minded employer to hire him now, considering the nasty ways this can be spun by the blogs/media ("Notorious PyCon Attendee Lands A Job With X, Where Sexual Jokes Are Apparently OK").
Sorry but I don't like it one bit. If PH's CEO had any balls at all he'd make this guy publicly apologize. Firing someone like this is the easiest solution.
I'm sure Playhaven employees take note of how one of their own has been had a summary execution. And for the rest of us, Playhaven is now "the company that fired that guy over a joke".
It's hard to know which company acted in a less respectable way: PlayHaven, which fired the accused dongle-joker after a 1-2 day "thorough investigation" (http://blog.playhaven.com/addressing-pycon/). Or SendGrid, which fired someone only after they suffered a huge DDOS.
If you can ignore the actual content of the fired employees' speech, they were both fired for speech that was only tangentially connected to their official duties. Both the joke and the accusation was made on company time (as representatives at PyCon), but not in a direct manner (i.e. not "At PlayHaven, we all have huge dongles").
It's a little disturbing that a firing over he-said/she-said in such an expedited manner, during a time when the facts and intent are still in dispute (arguably moreso, given the fog and noise created by the outburst of discussion and tweets).
It is quite possible that both companies acted in a respectable way.
PlayHaven chose to fire one of the two, and publicly states that the other is a valued employee. None of us know what went into that decision, and there may well be a back story. My guess is that the PyCon incident was more likely a final straw than the full cause. But none of us know.
SendGrid had little choice about firing her. Clearly she is unable to effectively do her job at this point, and is drawing huge negative attention. No matter how well she's done her job until now, or how much the company might believe her side of the story, she's a huge liability.
All of that said, I would bet money that he'll get hired by someone before she does.
For the life of me cannot fathom why PlayHaven went to the extreme step of firing the dev in question.
They had 2 devs involved that incident. One they fired. One they publicly said was a valued employee.
We will never know why they did what they did, why those devs were treated differently, and whether they had cause for their action. I personally find it hard to believe that this event would be enough cause by itself for a reasonable employer to fire an employee in good standing. Which means that some combination of these three are wrong: my belief, the claim that the employer is reasonable, the claim that the employee was in good standing.
Guess whatever combination you want - we are unlikely to ever know the truth. (Though your comment is perfectly in line with my belief.)
>I hope mr-hank gets a huge severance out of PlayHaven
It's interesting that the story is about Adria and mr-hank when, in fact, it should be about their respective companies. There are probably thousands of tweets posted everyday by people who got offended with inappropriate jokes - many of them at work. The real story is about the decisions of the respective HR / management to fire them. Aria didn't overreact more than PlayHaven HR, and she was less affected by mr-hank than by the SendGrid CEO laying her off. These people took the real decisions and they're hardly in the public eye.
everything else seems to be a mix of stupidity, confusion, frustration, anger and poor communication (some of those on both sides). the kind of thing better worked out with some serious discussion rather than firing people.
"They could have paid for his PyCon expenses (therefore he was there representing the company), and they felt that he did a poor job representing the company."
Doesn't explain why one person is still an employee while the other gentleman was canned.
"It's possible there were other reasons they wanted to fire him before PyCon, but this became a good excuse to act on them."
I strongly suspect this happened, given the comment in the PlayHaven response: "we will not comment on all the factors that contributed to our parting ways."
If the joke teller was not fired by Playhaven, Anon would likely not have attacked SendGrid, Ms. Richards would likely not have been fired either, and there would be far, far less controversy overall to discuss.
So the incident that leveraged the situation into such a huge controversy was the firing by Playhaven.
And Playhaven has stated "we will not comment on all the factors that contributed to our parting ways," strongly implying there were factors in addition to the joke telling that led to the firing.
This also implies that without those additional, unnamed factors, the individual may not have been fired.
So the catalyst that caused a situation that seemingly did not need to spiral out of control were those hidden factors, that no one is commenting much about, because no one knows what they are.
(a) mr-hank did or said something sexually inappropriate. (He lost ground by admitting some degree of guilt on HN. Otherwise, it'd all be hearsay and he could say he was just talking about a literal dongle.)
(b) mr-hank's conduct was so bad that there was no choice other than to fire him: "having to let this employee go". It wasn't we decided to fire him. It was we had to fire him. Important distinction, and quite likely, technically false. They probably fired him to save face, not because of an objective violation of any law or ethical principle that left them no other option.
It's not a clear-cut case, and it's less so in the light of his HN admission, but he can certainly argue that the press release (a) misrepresents his behavior, (b) in a way that will damage his reputation and future employability.
He has a lot of options here. He may settle for an amazing reference and introductions to investors. Or he might get a six-figure sum out of it. Or he might walk away. Depends what he wants.
PlayHaven fucked up big time. These companies (especially PlayHaven; SendGrid has more of a case) should be more embarrassed than the people involved.
I think Adria should have responded in a different manner first (by just turning around and saying "Please stop."), but neither of them deserve to lose their jobs over this. Most of the blame lies on PlayHaven for firing the guy anyway.
"Donglegate" happened at a professional conference. The PlayHaven employee represented his employer. Adria Richards didn't even contact PlayHaven. The article points out PlayHaven implied the PyCon incident wasn't the only reason they decided to fire the employee. Richards was also fired and 10 months later was still unemployed.[1] People in the community criticized how everyone handled the incident. PyCon changed its code of conduct to discourage "public shaming".[2]
"Opalgate" went nowhere. Elia Schito kept his position and still mentions it in his Twitter profile.[3]
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