[ijroth]

I wrote that. I didn't mean it literally. It’s a response to Bryan saying that failure to be sensitive to gender issues would be a firing offense at his company. We take it really seriously, and I’d like to point out that two of our senior leaders are women and we are proud to employ talented women engineers. If this remained an issue, I’d need to find a way to rectify it with Ben, and that could get as serious as firing. But he understands now. In the rest of my post I make the point that jumping to firing him publicly was not giving him a sufficient chance nor crediting him for his efforts elsewhere.

[paulrademacher]

You didn't fire him publicly. You only belittled him in public.

> If Ben can’t learn, we’ll fire him. [Edit: See comment below. This is not meant literally.]

Your correction doesn't make the statement much better. This whole debate is about how words matter, and yet your words put him on notice in a public place. All of Ben's friends now know his employer will fire him if he "can't learn." Is he so stubbornly misogynistic that that should be in question?

You could have conveyed the same message by saying "he was following the commit rules, no offense intended, won't happen again" and left it at that.

[jnbiche]

Yeah, I'm sorry, but you guys have just proven everyone right in criticizing the node.js community as a bunch of arrogant, immature hotheads. What is it with this discussing of firing someone in public?

And please don't tell me you didn't mean it literally. If you're joking or bluffing about firing someone, it's going to make you look even worse.

Don't you remember how everyone viewed that AOL CEO who fired someone in public a few months back? Well, please understand that people view this public threatening of firing in exactly the same way.

For what it's worth, I completely agree with the pull request. But you all couldn't have possibly handled this any worse.

[protomyth]

"I wrote that. I didn't mean it literally."

Then you shouldn't have wrote it because most people and every reporter are going to take it literally.

Since pronouns are an issue that you want the node.js community to be correct about, would words with significance in certain cultures also be high on your priority list?

[anatoly]

Issac, I realize that you had the best intentions in this, I see that you were trying to put out stupid fires rather than start another one, and I appreciate your willingness to criticize the crass and inappropriate response from Joyent. All that said, and please take it as friendly criticism: your tone towards the developer came across as unnecessarily belittling, and the phrase about firing, even if not meant literally, crossed the line. Yet another post would probably just add fuel to the fire, but I would seriously consider a private face-to-face apology, if I were you. Thanks for listening.