She tried, very intentionally, to use the social media "machine" to punish what she deemed deviant behaviour, the fact that that same machine turned on her is both unsurprising if you're paying attention, but also a little deserved.
While the original joke was childish, I cannot think of one adult working in any industry who's never said something in a similar vein (or pointing out someone else's phasing might have a double meaning, and so on). It really has nothing to do with gender politics, she was just on a quest and picked up any small examples she could find.
Nobody should have been fired. That's on the employers. However if anyone was going to be fired she deserved it the most, simply because she started this ball rolling on purpose, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I can't really blame SendGrid for thinking that a tech evangelist who deliberately publicly shamed a couple of developers over an unfunny private joke is maybe not a good fit. This doesn't justify all the abuse that followed, though.
Also, her job at the time was as a developer evangelist. The high-profile name-and-shame she had engaged in would have made any developer within a hundred miles hesitant to deal with her at all, making her far less effective at her job.
She dog-whistled the mob, no doubt that mob gave death threats.
People lose their shit when anonymous trolls send death threats to prominent women, but typically completely ignore the same happening to men. Perhaps women get more because they react more? Perhaps people shouldn't feed the trolls?
Please don't reply to this with a pithy feel-good response like "nobody should send death threats!". It's like saying "there shouldn't be war in the world!". It's an obvious goal that everyone agrees on, but there is no way to achieve without use of totalitarian control over the world/internet - something I'm sure we can agree is unacceptable.
You seem to be confused about what "dog whistle" means. She wasn't using secret SJW shibboleths.
> no doubt that mob gave death threats
"No doubt"! What a convenient way to assert that something happened without having to provide evidence for it.
> typically completely ignore the same happening to men
No doubt you have evidence of this, too. No doubt you have evidence that this happens to as many men as women, and as often, so as to warrant equivalent reactions.
> but there is no way to achieve without use of totalitarian control over the world/internet
You need to have a very limited imagination and near-total ignorance of history to think that positive change only comes about via totalitarian means.
