Yahoo meet: Lap dances for hackers
By Ria Sharma

Technology giant Yahoo hired a female boss Carol Bartz to lead them in their fight against increasingly successful competitors like Google. Carol has restructured Yahoo, engineered an alliance with Microsoft and launched a $100 million advertising blitz.  The last distraction Carol needed was strippers being invited to an official Yahoo function in Taiwan.

Yahoo held its Open Hack Day in Taiwan on Oct 17 at the prestigious National Taiwan University Hospital (NTUH) International Convention Center.  Like all such functions for computer programmers, developers and analysts it was officially to ‘learn about Yahoo's latest APIs and platforms with great instructors. Eat, drink, and hack overnight.’

Technically, it was all what a conference should be. But in their enthusiasm of hosting the first such Yahoo conference in Taiwan, the local Yahoo team invited strippers to add some excitement to the mostly seriously discussions and speeches about how these developers could use the Yahoo software. 

Yes, inviting strippers was a very bad idea. The Head of Yahoo Developer Network has just issued this apology

“
Sorry
All,

I wanted to acknowledge the public reaction generated by the images of female dancers at our Taiwan Open Hack Day this past weekend. 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. And it’s certainly not the message we want to send about our values here at Yahoo!. Hack Days are about making everyone feel welcome, including women coders and technologists.

This incident is regrettable and we apologize to anyone that we have offended. Rest assured, it won’t happen again.

Best,

Chris Yeh
Head of YDN

twitter: @ydn
email: cyeh at yahoo-inc dot com

Posted at October 19, 2009 5:20 PM
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(Photo from Simonwilson.net)