[carlcoryell]

There are many places in our society where kids can do stupid and immature things but I don't think the adults in our engineering profession need to support or sponsor them. I respect Heroku etc for pulling their sponsorship dollars. I'm a huge fan of supporting adult standards of behavior to participate in adult society and I have no patience for sexism in our field.

[DanielBMarkham]

Perhaps I should have been clearer. You are correct. We can and should encourage adult behavior. Heroku and the rest did the right thing -- from an adult, socially-responsible position. There is nothing new about this, it's the way professional groups have conducted themselves since forever.

From a longer-term view, this incident will still be around 50 years from now when these guys are grandfathers. This is completely new and has never existed before in the history of humanity.

I don't think it's an either-or situation. The immediate response could be exactly correct and the long-term impact could be entirely out-of-whack.

[anthuswilliams]

This story won't be around in 50 years. We think it will because when we grew up, our social flubs simply disappeared. Now they're around forever, but the important thing is they don't exist in isolation.

This story, like all the embarrassing comments I have personally published in forums across the internet, can for all intents and purposes be just as lost to time in a deluge of data as it can in a drought.

A year from now, when one searches the names of one of these founders, or the name of their company, this episode will not even appear in the first few pages of Google search results. Perhaps for a person with a sufficiently strong memory that he/she was specifically searching for this exact story, the incident could be dredged up. But for the vast majority of humanity, probably even those looking for some vague form of dirt on sqoot, the episode will have vanished.