Yahoo Hack Day: Let there be Lap Dances!
Hack days are de rigueur among Web companies — a standard way to foster innovation and to burnish a company’s street cred among techies. So videos of Yahoo’s recent hack day in Taiwan that surfaced on the Internet should have been good PR.
The problem: The coders at the Yahoo event appeared less interested in creating the next killer app than in enjoying the lap dances being generously doled out by the scantily-clad dancers in attendance.
Yahoo apologized for the event in a blog post Monday evening, calling the incident “regrettable” and promising that it would not happen again.
“Our hack events are designed to give developers an opportunity to learn about our APIs and technologies. As many folks have rightly pointed out, the “Hack Girls” aspect of our Taiwan Hack Day is not reflective of that spirit or purpose,” wrote Chris Yeh, head of Yahoo Developer Network in the post.
A Yahoo spokeswoman emailed a statement that repeated some of the comments on the blog apology and said that Yahoo would implement controls to eliminate inappropriate elements at future Hack Day and Yahoo sponsored events.
Some blogs noted that the presence of go-go dancers is actually quite commonplace in Taiwan.
But the online fury was already in motion, with many posters lambasting the Internet company for promoting such a practice in an industry still struggling to diversify its ranks with more women.
Sniper-blogger grills Taiwan reporters
“Even Reuters’ Ralph Jennings — of whom I’ve been extremely critical for getting the story very wrong when it comes to Taiwan — tells us that ‘half a million’ attended the protest,” a blogger wrote in October after seeing the Reuters’s write-up of an opposition-led demonstration in Taipei against President Ma Ying-jeou.
China claims sovereignty over self-ruled Taiwan. Ma, Taiwan’s president, likes China. The opposition and the blogger don’t like either.
I poured a beer to celebrate because I had it right, up from a score of “lies” that the same blogger gave me on a story earlier that year.
Not all of us get off so easy. The blogger would write up a former Taipei-based BBC correspondent for “vague and inaccurate descriptions,” one of the friendlier grades given to the British TV network’s Taiwan coverage. The same commentator gave the China Post, a local English-language paper, a score of “Nazism.”
“The facts that are always ignored when AP sells its mendacious stories about Taiwan,” the blogger added. And a one-time Taipei bureau chief with Bloomberg was labeled “China-centric,” with the word “China” in red type.
Getting blog-flogged is as much a part of being a 21st-century reporter as interviewing and writing. But none of the numerous transparency-wary reporters I know here can name the blogger who names us. Maybe it is one of us, someone quipped at a foreign correspondents club meeting. Maybe it’s you, I said. Maybe it’s you, he replied. Another correspondent said she once got into a debate with the blogger about her low grades, but still never learned the other party’s identity.
The blogs that offer Taiwan-based reporters this free publicity identify our sniper only as Tim Maddog, a member of the “education industry” in the central Taiwan city of Taichung. One website lists Michael Turton, a fellow Taiwan blogger, who some correspondents know personally, as a collaborator. But Turton says he doesn’t know who’s mad-dogging us.
It may not make life easier – but aren’t the sniper’s objections justified?
Very funny. Maybe some of the online fury came from women, and possibly gay men, who were just shown in a very graphic fashion that they’re not really welcome as techies at Yahoo. Because to fit in as a techie at Yahoo, you have to be the kind of person who would get a charge out of a scantily-clad woman giving you a lap dance. Message received.
What is this? The 21st century, or a rerun of “Mad Men”?