"You have a hostile work environment."
is
"We don't have a provably illegal hostile work environment."
then that doesn't inspire great confidence when evaluating it as a place to work.
I did. So far it's working out in GitHub's favour. But maybe I missed something, so do your own research.
I would think, however, that any sort of reasonable minority calling it a "hostile work environment" would indicate a problem.
I think this can have positive outcomes for GitHub, if they allow it. And if Julie does. Right now we're just in the "public fighting" phase.
That probably says more about the mythological status they had before than about the reality now, but it of course will have an impact on their ability to hire though.
It also should have, and it's normal, and it's how startups turn into big-corps, and that's just the way things are.
The sad truth about culture is that a sustainable culture will feel much more like your parents home than your college dorm; and that will never change... because it's a good thing.
That is the single best line I've read about work culture in software companies in......ever.
I read Github's statement as: "We don't really have any evidence of anything, so we're not going to say anything because we might get sued by one of the involved parties." That situation isn't a good one to be in (and letting an organization get into that situation is serious negligence on the part of leadership).
I'm skeptical. The fact that there is a documented procedure isn't nothing, but it's not that much more than that. I suspect if I went back and counted, a strong plurality of the "I worked in a hostile male environment" accounts I've read occurred in companies with HR departments and explicit sexual harassment policies- GitHub was pretty unique. I've worked in ten-person companies with an HR person.
What an HR department does is make sure management doesn't get sued. The culture of the company isn't something they can control by fiat.
GitHub isn't denying that there were problems and isn't claiming that her story is a complete fabrication. They merely said they don't believe they will lose a lawsuit over it. If anything, they validated that her opinion was fair
That's a good point, though: from our perspective it is still just he-said/she-said (er, she-said/she-said), and I guess it will always be. I guess it just depends on who we (individually) feel is more credible.
Based on Hovarth's public behavior, I'm not feeling too great about her story...
My first comment was in response to onewaystreet's comment "At every company in the world you can find at least one person who hates their job or has problems with their coworkers. I'm not sure they are the person you go to for a fair opinion." The statement seems to imply that it was sour grapes and not an actual systemic problem that led to this situation. My response was that Github's official response admitted that there were problems (explicitly, mind you) but they believed they would win a legal case if it came to it.
My second comment was in response to kelnos's comment 'If you read Theresa Preston-Werner's post (linked above), she claims that the "mistakes and errors of judgment" were completely unrelated to the harassment story, but were discovered during the harassment investigation.' That comment gave Theresa's story much more credibility than Horvath's. Now, this would be a standard he-said-she-said were it not for the fact that Github's reply doesn't refute Horvath's allegations. In fact, Github's reply implicitly refutes Theresa's claim: after all, if what she were saying is true, the official response would have made it clear that the investigation uncovered issues unrelated to the situation at hand.
That is not obvious, and I think it is impossible for us to figure out why the PR agency/HR/management/investors/lawyers that crafted this statement was not more specific and what it means that they did not say something. Only reading the report itself or getting a full summary of it can help with that.
IMO what it means is that people should work extra hard not to contribute to a hostile work environment, or expect to be perceived as contributing to a hostile work environment at randomly unpredictable points in their lifetime.
Shit does happen, regardless of the majority of one's coworkers best intentions.
Every work environment has hostilities. The only way they each differ is in who is the recipient of the hostilities, the degree of hostility present and if that hostility is illegal or not.
In that sense, the statement "We don't have a provably illegal hostile work environment" means exactly nothing, making Github no different than all the other workplaces you are evaluating.
There are three sides to every side of a story... TPW's side, JAH's side and the facts. Given that all we really know are TPW's side and JAH's side and that we have no real facts beyond admitted errors in judgement, we really have no more information upon which to base judgement than before. I know of no company in the world provably immune from errors in judgement, do you?
In other words, you and everyone else should evaluate github based on everything else you know about github and completely discount this entire debacle, since it has not shed light on anything that isn't as equally possible at every other company you may be considering.
That strikes me like saying that all sex is rape, it's just a matter of how violent or unwilling.
* reductio ad absurdam
* red herring
* strawman
* non sequiter
Not disagreeing with you, just raising a point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuitionistic_logic
Incidentally (a further parallel to the Axiom of Choice) Intuitionist Logic is also referred to as Constructive Logic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivist_mathematics
One branch of constructivist mathematics eschews the axiom of choice, and all do not allow proof of existence by RAA on non-existence.
This is dangerous logic. The court of public opinion is a feedback loop. If an unconfirmed accusation gets no traction then the most hardcore wrongdoers will escape justice because everyone is too afraid to come forward. At the same time, if a confirmed accusation goes unquestioned then someone who has made a false or exaggerated accusation has a huge incentive to cajole friends into making confirmations that are also false or exaggerated, and the more false accusations are made the easier it is for the original accuser (or the likes of Nancy Grace) to convince others to make further false accusations.
That's why these issues are so contentious. Getting to the real truth is practically impossible because people form an opinion first and then produce evidence that comports with it, and that misleading evidence influences the opinions of others who do the same thing until the truth and the story have no relation to each other.
It's an issue where you have to choose between punishing a lot of innocent people (and increasing the power and thereby occurrence of false accusations) or allowing a lot of guilty people to escape punishment. There isn't a good answer, and that makes people angry -- especially if you're one of the innocent people who was punished or one of the victims of the guilty people who weren't.
If this whole thing were as bad as JAH has made it out to be, I would have imagined we would have already seen damning emails and other written correspondence backing up here allegations. As a company that doesn't most of its work asynchronously through written prose, it's not like github doesn't have oodles and oodles of written correspondence that would support her position better. There's email, pull requests, chat, etc. Given the duration of employment, she must have plenty of things to point at. If she didn't she should have made sure that some of the offending interactions were captured in written form at least once.
It probably will challenge their recruitment of women though.
The answers to these questions are still true today:
* does github make a great product? yes. * does their product make software development and open-source better? yes * are there interesting problems to work on there? yes. * would I be working with very talented people there? yes. * based on what we know as facts or admitted to as facts, would taking a job at github subject me or people I care about to these injustices? AFAICT that's no more likely than at any other company comparable to github in terms of the benefits of working there. Anyone working at github is there at will. If they feel wronged, they can leave, which means I don't have to worry about people I care about being wronged.
The only way my mind would change on this is if I see a voluntary exodus of talent from github over what happened. Absent talent leaving in the current hiring market, we can only come to the conclusion that these wrongdoings were isolated and personal.
Let's keep an eye out for who has left since March 15th, 2014 or so and leaves over the next 3 months. Of that cohort, discount TPW, JAH and anyone who leaves to join TPW's new venture. With the remaining figures, then check if that churn rate for github is any higher than it would have been had this event never happened. If it is not, then this whole issue is pretty much irrelevant.
They're hiring new HR people, GOOD. They're adding training for employees (probably much to the annoyance of those employees), good.
These means that it'll be easier to make the places safer and better for everyone. That's what I'd look at.
Interestingly enough, I'd say that smaller startups suffer from larger biases. Basically if the founders don't like you for some reason or another, you're in for shit. If a "CTO" who worked at the company since the beginning doesn't like you, you're fucked as well. And there's no HR to turn to.
However, determining how people will decide when put to such a situation is difficult. Speaking personally, I would certainly be wary, but I'm not going to dismiss a potential employer outright over something I don't have the complete facts about over one story.
Followup: that statistic is 75% made-up.
Human interaction is not black and white (don't read into that). While this situation will never be totally transparent to the vast majority of us, the necessity of working within our limited knowledge does not imply our knowledge should necessarily be limited.
What every founder fears - https://medium.com/p/2fe173c44215
FULL explanation: It comes down to the unrestricted access that was granted. It introduces a person with extreme power but carries no responsibility with regards to work or culture. The end result is what we have today. This type of culture is actually very prevalent in asian companies (where families have unrestricted access) and have been demonstrated to be extremely detrimental. Theresa Preston-Werner blog post is extremely telling where she says "I have many close friends at GitHub, and I certainly had reached out to them when I began to build my company". My wife made the same mistake at her first job (trying too hard to be friends), except that she was an individual contributor and not the wife of the CEO. Her co-workers could just tell her off and she quickly learned the balances that were necessary. It's obvious that Theresa had no experience of this kind and had too much power for people to say "no".
I want to add, I think there was an overfocus on gender issues by all parties (victims, plantiffs, media & company) in the first place. When I read the original article, I felt that regardless of the incident, Julie Ann Horvath was just pulling out the gender card. This was a mistake since it gave Github an easy way out to simply deny the gender-based accusations without any wrong doing.
The whole issue wasn't merely (the alleged) harassment as much as it was the appearance of 'undue influence'. The admission that GitHub forced out the co-founder for this very reason--all the while stepping clear of the topic of sexual harassment--is basically the crux of the matter.
Also, it may have come out in the investigation that the founder gave his non-employee wife way too much inappropriate latitude inside the company. She's conceded that she went too far with her activism around her startup. But especially if she crossed boundaries and had inappropriate access to private company information (as Horvath said she claimed), the founder could take the fall for enabling that.
That's a nice way of putting it.
Out of the mouths of babes...
For all we know Julie-Ann started dating someone close to Theresa Preston-Werner who shared that he, and several others, slept with her and could even be the father of Tom's child and then refused to distance himself from Theresa. When she shared this sad state of affairs in her private love life with some colleagues she was suddenly requested to meet with Theresa and....
See how that's both consistent and perfectly plausible yet still went from bad to worse pretty quickly? These things are messy enough as they are; let's not make them any messier than they need to be.
the whole thing is crass and distasteful to my british sensibilities, but if this the future of how conflict in internet corporations is represented, then we shouldn't be surprised to see allegations from all sides. The key skills that we as audience have to develop is critical thinking, impartiality and a good sense of decency.
The line is drawn at "anonymous internet sources". At least in the sense of euclidean geometry, that is not a "side" of the argument as much as it is a literary device to create an infinite attack surface.
A named or pseudonymous source necessarily has an associated reputation, but an anonymous source has no reputation at all.
Until, of course, a source presents evidence, at which point we evaluate the credibility of the evidence instead of the source.
Even taking all emotion out of it, a story from a source that is probably a lie convey s more emotion than a story from a completely unknown source.
1. Bullying someone into quitting: Illegal.
2. Asking an employee to relay private conversations between her and her partner: Illegal.
3. Justifying the harassment of an employee because of her personal relationships: Pathetic.
4. How does it feel to make money for liars and cowards?
5. Pushing women with strong opinions out of your company because they disagree with you is wrong.
6. What number am I on? Oh yea, how do you sleep at night?
7. Leaving GitHub was the best decision of my life.
8. There was no investigation.
9. There was a series of conversations with a "mediator" who sought to relieve GitHub of any legal responsibility.
10. Whose reasoning included "would it surprise you to hear that [your harasser] was well-liked?"
11. No, no it would not.
12. Women at GitHub who sprang forward to defend the men who harassed me, it is naive to think the same thing cannot and will not happen to you.
13. Best of luck rolling the dice.
14. A company can never own you. They can't tell you who to fuck or not fuck. And they can't take away your voice.
15. Unless you let them.
16. Hmmm still no mention of the man who bullied me out of our code base because I wouldn't fuck him. Too popular to be accountable, I guess.
It's hard to quantify the smell of crazy, but we can start with an overwhelming interest in insulting the other party, and the claims stretch credibility. For example, consider the claim that a man "bullied [her] out of our code base because I wouldn't fuck him". This is a very strong statement and it seems unrealistic that investigators, lawyers, and other people within Github would come forward with "no evidence" of such things happening. On the other hand, it's the sort of thing you would say to appeal to the Internet social-justice-warrior crowd. Even the phrasing smells like something you'd read on Tumblr or a r/shitredditsays comment thread.
I don't think I can make a strong inference about what actually happened, but I would not treat this whole kerfuffle as a useful source of information about gender issues in technology--except that this is another example how powerful accusations concerning touchy issues can be, even when there is "no evidence" for them.
Her responses also failed to address the fact that one of the co-founders resigned.
So at the end of the day we have someone spewing vitriol; and someone stepping down from a prestigious position as a show of good faith. That's the only evidence I have and it doesn't reflect well on Julie at all; I can only imagine what it's like to work with a person who spits out expletives at that cadence.
What I imagine happened is some guy at work had a crush on her and made an awkward pass at her. Maybe he tried to smell her hair or something, I don't know. She shot him down, then he got all butthurt and started undoing her commits on the projects they worked on together. Because they were painful reminders of her.
From his perspective, he's a sensitive guy who just got rejected and isn't coping well. But to her, he's the guy deleting her code because she wouldn't fuck him.
That doesn't seem crazy at all to me. It seems totally possible, and just the kind of situation competent HR departments are supposed to prevent and mitigate.
(I am speaking in general and totally not referring to any specifics of the situation here.)
"Pushing [people] with strong opinions out of your company
because they disagree with you is wrong."
How you say something matters as much if not more than what you are saying. Given the tweets and posts I've seen from JAH, it's pretty easy to imagine prior behavior that others would have considered toxic.
> 1. Bullying someone into quitting: Illegal.
If that bullying falls under the legal definition of harassment, then yes, it is illegal. But that's kind of begging the question a bit (e.g. Bullying someone is illegal because it is harassment). The thing is, some/much what Horvath described was assuredly captured in electronic records. If she believes something is illegal, and she is not afraid of speaking out, she should take the next step and file a lawsuit.
> 2. Asking an employee to relay private conversations between her and her partner: Illegal.
OK not sure what that refers to. Again, Twitter is not great for these things.
> 3. Justifying the harassment of an employee because of her personal relationships: Pathetic.
Who justified what?
> 4. How does it feel to make money for liars and cowards?
OK and then the rest of this seems like free association. I agree that a third-party investigation instigated by the accused is not automatically the truth, but neither are accusations. The word illegal has real meaning and if Horvath has the proof, then let's see it, rather than have a TechCrunch retelling be the canonical source of facts.
https://medium.com/p/d96f431f4e8e
Money quote:
Around the end of 2012, Julie started dating a close male friend of the cofounder’s wife and didn’t like that they were close. She asked them to stop being friends and when they would not end their relationship, Julie started telling coworkers that the wife had affairs and that the cofounder’s newborn child was not his. She told this to multiple coworkers directly and also to the wife through her boyfriend.
This is where the wife reached out to her and the rest of her story starts. All of Julie’s story involving the cofounder’s wife occurs only after Julie was spreading vicious rumors about him to even new employees.
^ Non-anonymous viewpoints could perhaps be considered more trustworthy because there is the threat of a libel/slander lawsuit if they are complete fabrications. However on the other hand, all/most of the non-anonymous viewpoints that we have are the viewpoints of people directly involved in the scandal. We can assume that the anonymous viewpoint, if it is not a fabrication, is not from somebody involved in the scandal. However since they were not involved directly in it, it is also possible that they received an incomplete picture of everything... Everything is uncertain. I am reminded of the closing dialog to "Burn After Reading".
The anonymous account just makes the whole store make a lot more sense.
Really? I can. They behave messily and almost always with a keen eye towards advancing their own position, whatever it may be, rational, honest, or otherwise.
> I'm not even sure what you're implying the implausible behaviour in Horvath's account is.
The part where complex, multi-party, interactions are dramatic in the extreme, bad behavior is completely one-sided, and the entire situation ascribed to a simplistic (gender bias) narrative.
That never happens.
Putting the pieces together, what seems to make a more convincing narrative is that Howarth was a bully herself.
I am incredibly curious how this doesn't describe the anon account much better than Horvath's, only changing 'gender bias' to 'relationship insanity.' Who has bad behaviour other than Horvath in that account? How is it not incredibly dramatic?
It reads like an episode of Jerry Springer.
It's also fairly meaningless since if you interpret this story as 'Julie-Ann started dating someone close to Theresa Preston-Werner who shared he slept with her and could even be the father of Tom's child and then refused to distance himself from Theresa; a sad state of affairs which Julie-Ann shared with some colleagues,' it immediately paints an entirely different picture.
Not to mention the fact that, assuming the writer is indeed a Github employee, the fact that it would instantly place her at grave risk of losing her job.
Edit: I checked. It was posted three times. First was deleted by the poster. Second was flag-killed by users. Third is still up but heavily flagged. No moderator touched any of them.
Many flags on political stories and flamewars come not from users with opposing politics but from users who, regardless of their politics, don't think HN is the place for them. It's a "pox on both their houses" thing.
GitHub should have implemented a blocking mechanism to stop people inviting Zed to 'dick' projects, and if the rumour mongering story is true, HR should have stepped in and disciplined Horvath.
They did: https://github.com/blog/862-block-the-bullies
They never admitted to it being a response to the incident with Zed, but the timing was too convenient. That blog post was dated 05/31/2011. Zed's commits to the repo in question happened on 05/28/2011: https://github.com/moron5/dongml/commit/f4b8df910e4048202768...
As best I've been able to work out, whatever juvenile oaf created the "dongml" repo added Shaw to it in order to harass him somehow, and Shaw responded by writing a script to constantly commit changes to the repo which essentially rendered it empty, which seems reasonable both as retaliation in that specific case, and for general reasons of good taste. Then, in response, Github added a feature so that the "dongml" infant could block Shaw.
Would anyone with closer to firsthand knowledge of the incident care to let me know whether I'm on the warm side or the cold?
Zed wrote up a long blog post telling the whole story but I think it's been deleted since.
The internet has a way of unshutting the whole thing up: https://web.archive.org/web/20130117043748/http://sheddingbi...
and the followup https://web.archive.org/web/20120619005253/http://sheddingbi...
"While Horvath characterized much of her woes as being
gender-related [1], the investigation could have
classified most of them as either unprovable or terrible-
but-not-provably-sexist."
"man who bullied [her] out of [github's] code base because
[she] wouldn't fuck him. Too popular to be accountable,
[she] guess[es]."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7625258
In light of this other recent commits (by a longtime githubber who would be expected to exhibit much better git hygiene and committing habits), and lacking the content of the actual reverted commit, I would say that the claims of gender bias in this specific case appear dubious at best.
If this other githubber did in fact make such vulgar comments, we still wouldn't have enough information without also knowing if that comment was completely unsolicited and out-of-the-blue, or if it was reactionary to whatever JAH may have said to this person just prior to the comment being made. Context matters. It could have been verbal self defense in response to a verbal attack, which is still unprofessional, but far more excusable especially if the original attack was equally unprofessional and sexually-charged. Given JAH's tact thus far, her character suggests someone who would have started a verbal fight.
Certainly, if it was a case of the guy getting pressured to leave, one could make the case that the company recognized that they had a problem and tried to get rid of said problem in the way that was least likely to get them sued, by asking someone to resign. And really, if you are an executive, and are asked to resign, what are you gonna do? You're gonna resign, and try to make it seem like a voluntary thing. Even if everyone knows you actually got your ass fired, it shows that you are the sort of executive who will play the game and not take down the rest of the company if you get in trouble.
What would it benefit Github or the P-W husband/wife for the investigation report to have published such a thing? Why air your dirty laundry in public?
It's most likely that the company and its co-founder are on the same page, if only for damage control purposes. (Why break ranks and threaten your brand and stock price, after all?)
There may have been awkward and/or angry discussions in camera. Non-insiders are very unlikely to ever hear what went on in said discussions.
Where is this mentioned?
This thing where people think that investigators you hired are "independent" and that their conclusions carry something similar to the weight of a court of law is ridiculous.
> We learned that unnamed employees felt pressured by Tom and me to work pro-bono for my nonprofit
It's really hard to take seriously the claims that "my husband did nothing wrong" when
1. He resigned. 2. She's now being accused of shady practices in her own company as well.
While Horvath characterized much of her woes as being gender-related [1], the investigation could have classified most of them as either unprovable or terrible-but-not-provably-sexist (in particular, the behavior of the Preston-Werners).
I doubt it will ever be clear what actually happened. Theresa Preston-Werner's response [2] spends more time avoiding topics than actually covering them. Tom Preston-Werner likewise [3] makes sure to reinforce the fact that GitHub is immune to lawsuit while providing no real details. I'm sure there are plenty of GitHub employees who have a strong opinion, but enough of them seem to have an ax to grind in one way or another that it's hard to trust that testimony.
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/15/julie-ann-horvath-describes...
[2] https://medium.com/p/2fe173c44215
[3] http://tom.preston-werner.com/2014/04/21/farewell-github-hel...