Dude, I work at a fairly liberal software company in SoCal, and if I scrolled down to the bottom-most picture with the hand-drawn fully-naked chick and someone happened to glance at my screen, I would most likely be fired.

As a rule of thumb, suggestive/sexy clothing is "mildly NSFW." Full nudity, regardless of context, is "very NSFW."

(It may be different in Europe.)

> I work at a fairly liberal software company in SoCal, and if I scrolled down to the bottom-most picture with the hand-drawn fully-naked chick and someone happened to glance at my screen, I would most likely be fired.

If that would be grounds for firing, even after describing the context of the article, then you decidedly do not work at a fairly liberal software company.

Definitions of 'liberal' differ.

It seems perfectly consistent to me to be 'liberal' and have a 'no (non work related) naked pictures at work' policy under the auspices of a zero-tolerance sexual harassment policy. No one needs to look at naked pictures at work, and they could plausibly make someone uncomfortable in a sexual way.

Now, you could argue that the modern liberal hippie philosophy is that sex is natural and no one should be offended by it and it is just our Puritanical baggage which makes it otherwise, and maybe I'd agree with you. But you could also argue that in the context of our Puritanical baggage, our slut shaming, our last fifty-plus years of Madmen-esque workplace sexual discrimination, we need a period of overly desexualized workplaces before we can shed our Puritanical baggage.

That depends on what makes it grounds for firing.

Any sufficiently left-wing policy is indistinguishable from a right-wing policy, and the reverse is also true. Anti-pornography movements present one of the clearest modern illustrations of this phenomenon. The right-winger complains of personal morality, while the left-winger complains about demeaning and objectifying the subjects, but they wind up at basically the same conclusions. Alcohol prohibition showed something very similar around the turn of the century.

Something similar - a hand drawn picture of a woman in a fantasy equivalent of a bikini (lots of skin, no nipples, no groin) - has actually gotten me fired from a very large internet company, so...

It's basically considered a fireable offense under the sexual harassment policy.

I doubt that such a firing is defensible as a sexual harassment claim. If you are creating a hostile work environment, someone first has to complain about it and you have to be given a warning and instructions on how to remedy the situation.

However, of course, you can always be fired for demonstrating questionable judgement.

All that it takes is one person to complain that they were offended, irregardless of the work environment, and a company with "zero tolerancy" towards sexual harassment will toss you out on your ass.

Frankly, it would have been easy to remedy - I was browsing a game forum with image signatures, which is where this image appeared.

Of course, at the time, the HR person didn't like me (I mistook her for my bosses personal assistant when I was hired), so that didn't help. Learned a lot of lessons from that situation - the biggest being "make the HR employees like you".

No, you're wrong. A firing on the grounds that sexual harassment took place has to go through a specific sequence of events, and a number of lines have to be crossed. If you were actually told that you are being fired under a sexual harassment claim, and none of these intermediate events took place, then you may have been improperly terminated.

Sexual harassment isn't just "someone did something that made me feel uncomfortable" -- it's a set of specific and defined offenses, with measurable impacts. You have to have done something which created a hostile environment for your peers, they have to report to management that you are making the environment threatening for them, management has to raise this to your attention and instruct you to stop the offending behavior, and you have to have failed to remedy the situation when you were instructed to.

A zero tolerance policy like you describe would just be a reiteration of the nature of your at-will employment agreement, as what they're saying is that they reserve the right to fire you for doing anything that is questionably dumb. But if you were told that there is a sexual harassment claim against you, you have rights too.

At will or not, I was terminated for sexual harassment.

Rights or not, it wasn't realistic to pursue it (an inexperienced 20-something against a multi-million dollar internet giant), and it was enough years ago now that I've gotten something more valuable out of it - experience.

So it took more than "one person to complain" - it took that and the HR person not liking you.

Which, in an ideal world, shouldn't have had any impact. Of course, it's not an ideal world, etc etc.

However, the original point stands - even "liberal software companies" will fire people for less than nudity on your screen.

I don't disagree with you that "mildly" is a somewhat generous judgment call here. Most American workplaces wouldn't look kindly at your being caught with this on your screen. That said, I think we're missing the broader point.

The broader point is that "NSFW" labels carry an implicit caveat emptor warning. Nobody's forcing you to click open a link, and if you believe that you work in an environment with a low tolerance for anything that could be construed as "NSFW," then don't click on a link marked "NSFW" -- even if it's qualified by "mildly," "moderately," "slightly," "possibly," and so forth. If you see the abbreviation "NSFW," you need to take stock of the risks involved in proceeding, and proceed (or not proceed) accordingly.

A corollary: given that one person's definition of NSFW will always differ from another's, it's often best to err on the side of caution.

Personally speaking, I'm thankful I work at the sort of company that wouldn't fire me for viewing this material. And I'm grateful because it's genuinely fascinating material, and the nudity is used for illustrative purposes (and also, conveniently, tucked at the bottom). Of course, if I worked at a bigger or more conservative company, there's no way in hell I would have taken a chance on anything with an NSFW label.

1) You clearly don't work at a fairly liberal company. 2) I disagree with the "regardless of context". Let's say someone did see you reading this. You would say "this is the top ranked item on Hacker News. Didn't realize one of the drawings was naked." And that would be that, at least everywhere I've ever worked.

I work at a fairly staid software company in NorCal, and that would definitively not be grounds for firing.

Wow, are you serious? I knew the US approach to these things is weird but this is shocking. How can you fire someone for briefly looking at something they happened to find on the web? You never know what you can find on the web and not everything is labeled, so you can always find something by accident.

There's a big difference between spending hours at work looking through porn and reading one article which happens to have one nude drawing at the bottom. I find it hard to believe that someone leading a big company in the US can not realize that.

I used to work at a place where part of my job was to find great porn for the boss so he could spend more time doing boss stuff. And I got paid to find, and rate, porn. Win/ win.

I'd still classify it as mildly NSFW. Cartoons and other depictions are less NSFW than images. Or else the following would also be a fireable offense:

    (.|.)

But I don't understand why you need to match periods redundantly in your regex?

That's why it's a fireable offense.

I should be fired too... '.' != '\.'.

I'm put in mind of the old Zawinski quote:

"Some people, when confronted with a problem, think \"I know, I'll use regular expressions.\" Now they have two problems. "

Obviously he meant [.|.], which is redundant on so many levels.

Newsflash: SoCal isn't as liberal as you may think.

Does anyone know of any case where someone has been fired for looking at a hand drawn non-pornographic depiction of a nude in the western world? Really?

I see stories about teachers being fired for working as strippers on the side, or there's a teacher fired for http://www.parentdish.com/2006/10/02/texas-school-teacher-fi... a child to nude pictures in an Art museum (Texas -- ) but I think this is fanciful. And note that the teacher concerned was no, technically, fired over the art.

Prudishness in the US is pretty ridiculous but the only thing which would be job-threatening here is that you're surfing the web on company time AND the thing you're looking at offends someone.

Yes, me. And the hand drawn character was not nude. Fell under the "sexual harassment" clause, because the co-worker who saw it was female and offended.