[dos1]

Totally agree. The employer owns absolutely all responsibility for terminating the employee. However, I do not believe it would have been out of line for Adria to have said something like "I heard one of the guys in the photo I posted on Twitter yesterday was fired. I just wanted to say that I'm terribly sorry to hear that and my intent was never to cause harm! I'm very sorry!" I believe contrition on her part would have nipped this whole thing in the bud.

I also know that had I posted that picture which resulted in someone losing their job, I would feel great remorse and WANT to make amends. Especially given the relatively minor infraction (private, but overheard, joke).

[king_jester]

So she should apologize because someone was offensive, got outed for it, and their employer felt that was reason enough to can them? I have to disagree, you do not have a right to remain anonymous while making a space unsafe and if the company you are representing feels that you've made them look horrible, they have a right to discipline you (although I believe a firing was too severe, if you fired everyone who had a problem with keeping things professional you'd have no workers, companies are better off with some kind of sensitivity training for the staff).

[orourkek]

> So she should apologize because someone was offensive, got outed for it, and their employer felt that was reason enough to can them?

No. What he said was:

> I do not believe it would have been out of line for Adria to have said something like "I heard one of the guys in the photo I posted on Twitter yesterday was fired. I just wanted to say that I'm terribly sorry to hear that and my intent was never to cause harm! I'm very sorry!"

Not that she should have done it, but basically that he thinks it would have been a good idea and could have been a solution to the entire fiasco.

For someone who is so publicly concerned with professionalism, I feel Adria should/could have either:

1. Not taken a semi-secret photo of the guys with the intent of publicly outing them. If she was really offended by the comments she should have gotten up and contacted the event staff. The unprofessional thing to do would be to take a conversation out of context, pair it with a picture of the guys, and tweet it to thousands of people. What's the end game there?

2. Assuming she did tweet as she did, the professional response would be to apologize to the guy that got fired. Saying that she's sorry that he got fired (not even that she's sorry for getting him fired, which is obviously debatable) would have, as the above poster noted, nipped the whole thing in the bud.

The other factor here is that Adria was obviously villainized and attacked seemingly from all angles. I understand that this would be a hard thing to deal with, but I can't exactly empathize with her. Tweeting about the incident is one thing, but taking a picture of them is taking it to another level entirely - and not a very professional level at that...

[mst]

Given she tweeted shortly afterwards that pycon staff were dealing with the problem and she was happy with that, I think she implicitly wasn't condoning any action taken by anybody afterwards.

Making that explicit might have been a good thing to do at the time; I don't see that such a statement would've needed to be in the form of an apology though, merely a clear dissocation from the stupid choices made by an HR department she has no control over.

[dos1]

Sure, she didn't need to apologize (and hasn't). Look how good that's worked out for her and SendGrid.