One of twitter's engineers has been accused of attempting to rape a female speaker at ApacheConf. That's the reason two friends of mine have quit Twitter last year. Their culture is incredibly broken.
By not firing him on the spot they sent a message to their employees that this is acceptable behavior and have created a hostile, fearful work environment for their female employees. They have also allowed Florian to attend other conferences and represent Twitter, which discourages other women from wanting to attend these conferences, and from wanting to interact with brogrammers from Twitter. Their lack of action is wrong in so many ways that if you don't understand it, I feel really sorry for you, because you were clearly raised without a father, or at least without a father who knew how to teach you to be a man.
And for some reason, it's always germans. A german from VW violently raped one of my father's engineers at a conference 20 years ago, and VW tried pretty hard to cover it up. Since dad is now dead, I don't feel sorry to say that he beat this man to within an inch of his life, and then had him arrested.
This is a very serious accusation that implies a lot about how the company handled it, and after a handful of searches I've found no other references to it.
I assume goodweeds refers to this http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Noirin_Shirley_ApacheCon_... . That page classifies the incident as sexual assault instead of attempted rape, but I have to admit that I don't know the precise distinction between the two.
That would be Noirin Plunkett. Her account [1] and the discussion that went about the same way all posts on HN that touch on sexual assault or misogyny do... [2].
Fun orthogonal fact. I only first heard about the ApacheCon incident this summer after a guy on that huffingtonpost thread started stalking a friend and co-worker of mine at a conference. It blew my mind to see him there so strongly defending the jerk at Twitter. I did some research (asking his co-workers) and discovered this was a known problem with him embarrassing them at several conferences, but his boss wouldn't fire him because he had a wife and a new baby. I bitched about the guy on facebook and found out two friends who had just quit Twitter said, "that guy was the final straw, we were just waiting for our vesting to finish".
Sadly, they put more priority on their greed than their own moral compass.
Moral of the story: Women at conferences are there to work, not to get hit on by some pimply-faced nerd with no game. Especially married ones with rings who say "NO".
Consider conferences like your office. Sure you can hit on a woman, free speech is a right, but you're also a dick for doing so, and should be ejected from the conference, or the office when your employer finds out.
I think you and I have different meanings in mind for the phrase "hit on". If I'm at a conference and meet a woman I'm attracted to (and likely has similar interests since she's there too), why would it be bad to try to get her phone number? I may never see her ever again.
Below you talk about "not taking no for an answer". I don't call that "hitting on", I call that pestering and, yes, that would make someone a dick. But in my opinion that makes you a dick no matter where you do it, not just in business scenarios.
Why can't you expand both your professional AND personal networks at a conference? Hitting on someone doesn't necessarily make you a sleazebag-- there are respectful ways to do it.
When you do it repeatedly and refuse to take no for an answer (like the jerk in my anecdote) that's the problem. Also realize that every woman at a conference gets hit on by about 20% of the men she talks with. At the last conference I attended our marketing coordinator decided to draw a penis on every business card given to her by a guy who hit on her. Out of something like 200 cards, 39 were sorted out into the penis pile.
When you hit on a woman while she's working, you're not going to get laid, you're just going to be the latest in a long string of men making her life hell that day.
I've just read the girl's story on her blog, and I know I may sound as a rapist-apologist or something, but frankly I don't care: she was just plain stupid by getting drunk in front of all those guys, performing dances wearing a short skirt and "sitting on laps". I didn't say "she asked for it", I'm just saying "she was stupid". Of course that Twitter guy is in all honesty a jerk (as was Bill Clinton or Dominique Strauss-Kahn and lots of other very bright men, intellectually speaking), but if this girl cares about her "safety" and all that she shouldn't play the role of Little Red Riding Hood in the land of horny, drunk and sexual deprived techies.
Actually I just read it too and I have to say you're off base here. I don't like girls who "tease" and I think getting drunk, having sex and then decided after the fact that they didn't want to and it was, therefor, rape should be a crime itself. But that's not what happened here. She was dancing, so what? She flirted with some guys. She sat in laps when there was no space to sit. That doesn't give guys the right to assault her, ffs.
You seem to be saying that a girl has to behave in a very restricted manner if there are socially retarded people around. If that's the case, why aren't such people put under mental health care? That's what we usually do with people who have mental issues that render them unable to deal with normal human interactions.
For it to be 'stupid', you imply there's not a reasonable assumption on her part that she can't get a bit drunk around people without being assaulted.
If you were at a party where you didn't know everyone, and had had a couple of beers, and someone beat the living shit out of you in the toilet and stole your wallet, have you been stupid?
I'm assuming you don't think you've been stupid in that situation, so what's the difference?
The discussion if already OT :), but anyway, I'll put it more like "me getting ass-drunk at a party and leaving for home on foot through a very bad neighborhood", then I would certainly expect to be assaulted for my wallet.
And yes, I do think there's no difference between a bunch of drunk, sexually-deprived "strangers" partying in a hotel-room at 3 AM at a tech-conference and a couple of thugs looking for your wallet. Lots of people assume (like this girl does) that if you've got more of an education then suddenly you're inner instincts (good or bad) suddenly change also, but this is not the truth.
So I think in there is the crux of this, which is that she (and I, and apparently lots of other commentators) don't equate a bit of flirting and a short skirt while slightly inebriated with getting yourself "ass-drunk at a party and leaving for home on foot through a very bad neighborhood" in terms of inherent risk. And if tech conferences really do consistently provide that sort of risk profile, there is something deeply wrong going on.
I really don't know what Twitter's next move is. They've done a great job of building a successful platform. But the product is very simple (by design), and it seems they've largely exhausted the obvious extensions to it. How are they going to stay relevant for the next 5-10 years?
The new web interface appears very ad driven (sidebar left, for instance). And all Twitter did with Tweetdeck / Chromedeck is destroy it. It's near unusable.
Contemptible. This emphasis on "culture" is fatuous horse excrement. Whenever you hear that word, reach for your resume. It means that a cohort of smug self-satisfied untalented didactic mansplainers is about to institute a policy of competent mediocrity. I used to think that anyone who presumed that the rest of the world was as intellectually limited as themselves was merely mistaken. I was wrong: if they have any power at all, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy as they kick anyone with ability out. The new twitter is a dreary testament to the deceased neurons of the new management. Color me unemployable for saying so.
The expressive language actually makes his point clearer. An inexpressive comment is when someone makes short insults and doesn't explain themselves. He explained himself in detail.
Good English communicates the ideas and feelings of the writer, which he did with aplomb! Since he is a primary source for his particular polemic, his rhetoric is a valuable contribution to the discussion.
What's not said in the article is that those insiders (even those who left) must still have company stock. What else are they going to say?
The article sounds too favorable, I wouldn't be surprised if a PR agency had a hand in it.