It’s fun to read the tweets under #standwithpax. A few are serious and a lot more are sarcastic. Both sets are funny.
Mike Booth @somegreybloke
I’m going to go
#standwithpax and play the world’s tiniest violin whilst laughing.barefootwriter @bfwriter
if by unpopular you mean ignorant, incorrect, and harmful, then yes, we’re all mad at Pax for expressing unpopular opinions.
#standwithpaxThe New Bard @The NewBard
#standwithpax I don’t want to live in a country where free speech is punished and a man isn’t entitled to an opinion unless it’s popular.
#standwithpax because if you can’t exercise freedom of speech without a lynch mob coming after you, then freedom of speech does not exist.
Lynch mob!
Matthew Forney @realmattforney
#standwithpax because you shouldn’t lose your job because of your completely unrelated political views.
Not completely unrelated at all. Completely related is more like it. Toward the end of his post Ken White quotes one I hadn’t seen:
Pax Dickinson @paxdickinson
Tech managers spend as much time worrying about how to hire talented female developers as they do worrying about how to hire a unicorn.
Yeah. It’s related. Ken glosses it:
Pax Dickinson is apparently an officer within Business Insider, someone who supervises employees, and someone who interviews applicants to jobs at Business Insider. If anyone ever accused Business Insider and Pax Dickinson of sex discrimination in hiring or firing, or of workplace harassment or discrimination, that tweet would be useful evidence for the plaintiff, and might convince the jury of discriminatory intent on the part of a Business Insider officer whose actions are attributable to his employer. He has a First Amendment right to tweet that and cannot be prosecuted for it. Nor is the tweet, itself, a civil violation. But it’s potentially powerful evidence of how Business Insider is run, and it’s a freakishly reckless thing for an officer of a business to say in public.
And now he’s not an officer of that business any more.
The poem that you retweeted earlier this afternoon was hilarious! –:
He has the right to say it. And his company has the right to decide they don’t want that kind of person working for them. So everybody’s happy!
And considering that the first computer language was written by Admiral Grace Hopper, it was a pretty stupid thing for him to say. #lacks_dickinson
#1 MrFancyPants, Hilarious! Thanks for bringing this here since I don’t follow the twitter feeds.
Hell, Ada Lovelace was a programmer — maybe even the first one, since she wrote some ‘code’ for one of Babbage’s Engines. To be sure, the hardware wasn’t all there, but the specs were, and she worked to those specs…
cubist, as a former embedded systems programmer, I can tell you nothing much has changed…
I am a tech manager. I spend a lot more time worrying about how to hire talented female developers than unicorns. The paucity of female applicants depresses me. I had one good sign in my last go-round, a female applicant who looked admirably qualified for the position — but we couldn’t afford her!
At my first serious software engineering job, another manager was hassling my manager about how his team was mostly female, implying we were a girly, wimpy team, and that this reflected badly on our manager (kind of amazing, as we’d save the division’s bacon on a $16-million project and won an award for it). My manager shot back “Why should I hire men when women do a better job for less money?”
Ouch on both counts.
Funny how up until the mention of someone losing their job, nothing in this article dissuaded
me from thinking it was about Penny Arcade eXpo. Oh, the misogynist geeks are legion.
That gives me such an icky feeling.
While I certainly might appreciate having my manager feel I was doing a great job suggesting that it’s okay to pay me less is so wrong, wrong, wrong.
Great American Satan, I thought the same thing! And due to the recent resurfacing of the Dickwolves debacle, the timing made sense as well.
Not trying to derail, but this article about Penny Arcade is well worth reading:
http://alexlifschitz.tumblr.com/post/60720605376/sorry-not-sorry-penny-arcade-and-the-deeper-roots-of
Heh, Lawyers Guns and Money blog had an oblique post about sexism within the tech industry. Without clicking I thought it was about the Techcrunch/Titstare. When I saw “Pax” in the comments, I thought it was the “moar dickwolves” comment at PAX. Then I clicked the link and learned about this sack of ass.
@ysoldeangelique #9 — Yep. Icky, just for starters. I talked to him about it later; he said that it’s his job to get the best people he can for the least money, and if women candidates for jobs priced themselves low, he wasn’t going to make up the difference.
Fortunately, having gotten my foot in the industry in that job, I could use a headhunter for the next jobs, so I didn’t have to do my own negotiating. Next job paid about 15% more than that one, the job after that more than 25% more than the previous one, and by that time, I felt I was up to the market rate. I hadn’t asked enough when I was starting out; I believe that’s common among young women, alas.
From “Matt Ford” @HemlockMartinis
^ HahahahahahahahahahaHAAAAAAAAAAAA