[sammyd56]

"Because of my experiences growing up, I have triggers. This means that I’m always scanning for danger; for situations that seem like something from the past that could hurt me. When I recognize something that matches, I can overreact and feel intense fear, anger or anxiety. This is something I’ve worked on a lot. It’s much better now than 10 years ago but there are some things that send me over the edge."

http://butyoureagirl.com/13871/success-against-the-odds-fill...

(site is currently down, may need to view cache)

I'm surprised nobody has picked up on this yet.

[pyre]

I've tried to keep a pretty neutral opinion of her. It just seemed like she made a misjudgement. This is the first post (Amanda Blum post) to reasonably say something that makes me question that a bit.

Now, combine Amanda's post with this info and it's just possible that Adria hasn't suffered enough of a negative response to her past actions (and maybe even benefited from them a bit in blog traffic, etc), so she didn't really 'learn her lesson'[1] on the way she should approach these situations. Unfortunately this time the negative reaction was extreme.

[1] This doesn't imply that her reactions were malicious or self-serving. Just that there was never a reaction that caused her to question her way of responding to these things.

[azov]

She is a PR person.

When the dust settles, SendGrid, PlayHaven, affected developers, women in tech as a group, and our industry as a whole will end up with some reputation damage and setbacks in the struggles on equality front.

But Adria personally will probably benefit from her newfound celebrity status in one way or another. There's no such thing as bad publicity, that's the most likely lesson to be learned [again].

[pyre]

  | no such thing as bad publicity

If someone follows through with death/rape threats, I wouldn't peg that as 'good' or 'coming out on top.'

[aangjie]

> Just that there was never a reaction that caused her to question her way of responding to these things.

If only human minds worked that way.. sigh..

Edit1: Oops just realized out of context "reaction" is pretty neutral, but along with the rest of the passage it reads "strongly negative enough reaction" i was replying with that in mind.

In my experience, some of these triggers are impossible to eliminate in one's lifetime and usually one just develops strategies around it. perhaps one of those strategies failed in her case at this event. Granted, it failed and affected one developer personally, and created some strong* opinions among the rest of the tech/developer community, but am not sure a stronger negative reaction is going to help future incidents. infact i believe it will just exacerbate such reactions.

*-- Am deferring judgement on the effects on these..

[obviouslygreen]

I'm not sure what direction you're going with it, but it seems to me this actually makes it worse as far as how she handled the situation.

This is a person who knows she's prone to overreacting, but not only does she apply to and accept a job that puts her in overwhelmingly male-dominated situations, she continues to both overreact and fail to recognize or address it.

For someone who claims to have gone through truly traumatic things (and I certainly don't doubt that), she's done an unbelievably poor job of restraining herself. If this is better, I imagine she must have been totally unemployable (not to mention incapable of normal human interaction) for a long time.

[unreal37]

That would require reading her blog, which I am not inclined to do. You might be the first to actually read back.

[return0]

No cached version is available. (On iPad)

[b0sk]

Great catch.