Yahoo "Sorry" For Offering Lap Dances at Developers Event

[Statistical]

Yahoo's latest embarrassment seems like a sign that the company is just trying too hard to be cool

...

Now an embarrassing debacle is earning the company some additional publicity. After Yahoo hosted Taiwan Open Hack Day, a special event for engineers and developers that was held last weekend, a series of photos found there way onto the internet -- as ill-thought out decisions often do.

It turns out that Yahoo hired scantily clad women to spice up the event a little bit and give the guest lap dances. They attended what Yahoo described as a "brainstorming" session, clad in bras and miniskirts. The pictures made their way onto Flickr and soon lit up the blogosphere, prompting headlines like "Honest, honey, she was just showing me her social networking APIs."

...

Somehow it never crossed the mind of Yahoo's events coordinators that hiring lap dancers yet again might not be a wise decision. Ultimately, it was the provocative pictures that truly launched the story.



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http://www.dailytech.com/Yahoo+Sorry+For+Offering+Lap+Dances+at+Developers+Event/article16570.htm

How low the mighty have fallen. Pre-Google, Yahoo was THE internet, new media company. When you think hiring lap dancers won't damage your brand then you likely can't fall much lower.

[nebenaube]

1. Cheap Systems Engineer available...

Will work for such perks... Is Yahoo hiring?

[Ian David]

2. Hiring lap dancers and allowing photos and videos to be taken is what REALLY did them in.

Would be funnier if the story was about the folks at YouTube doing this, and not realizing it would get posted on YouTube.

[Stevenmarc]

3. YAHOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

[FormerDittoHead]

4. What a slide. How low could they go? Almost as bad as church, government or business.

Trouble with a capital "T" and that rhymes with "P" and that stands for POOL!

[louis-t]

7. Ah, the Music Man............

[geek tragedy]

5. Has Yahoo! heard about this thing called

"the Internet?"

[JBoy]

6. There's a "facebook" joke in there somewhere.

[Berry Cool]

8. The fact that they had lap dancers says a lot about how they hire engineers and developers,

does it not?

They obviously expect to hire only engineers and developers who are a) male and b) heterosexual.

Funny how all the controversy over this seems to be aimed at the propriety of hiring lap dancers at entertainment at a corporate event, rather than also on what it says about the kind of engineers they hire.

Seems to me that if you want to be an engineer or developer for Yahoo, you are expected to be someone who would be entertained by receiving a lap dance from a scantily clad woman. This tells me a lot about their hiring policies as well as their idea of entertainment.

And the fact that we have men here cracking jokes about now wanting to work for Yahoo also tells me just how far male progressives haven't come in regarding women as anything other than sex objects.

[redqueen]

9. Ah, but it's all just fun and games, right?

Right?