Comment by dbloom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dbloom | Hacker News Reader

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If you were so hurt by constant harassment at your workplace that you decided to quit, how would you feel about publicly describing those experiences?

What if you want to remain friends with some of your former co-workers? What if those former co-worker friends work on the same team as former co-worker harassers? Are you willing to put those friendships in jeopardy? Are you willing to make it harder for those friends to do their jobs? If they are forced to choose sides, how would you feel about affecting their working relationship with their coworkers? Sure, it's not your fault. But it's not their fault either!

What if you misremember who was involved in a particular incident? (Do you take detailed notes every time you're harassed? Even if it's a lot of little things that all added up in the end?) What if you name the wrong person? What if the hacker community focuses on that and uses it to discredit you and destroy your reputation you spent years working to build?

Would you enjoy remembering and reliving all of the experiences that hurt you over the past few years so that you can write a blog post about it? Would that actually make you feel better?

Would you enjoy feeling like you had to write that blog post just so that people would believe you?

If you were that hurt, I don't think posting a string of accusatory but unspecific tweets would help your cause better. You'd best be served by writing a thoughtful, accurate summary of the events that occurred, and let the reader decide for themselves how to respond.

I understand if she's just angry in response to other comments like the "Queen" one -- that's actually totally understandable. I don't blame her for reacting on Twitter like this. All that I said was if she did that, that would be one example of how I could understand what this kind of harassment is like and why it's harmful.

"You'd best be served by writing a thoughtful, accurate summary of the events that occurred, and let the reader decide for themselves how to respond."

Maybe she doesn't want the story to be about the specific events in her specific case. She wants it to be about the industry as a whole. Going into the details would distract from that message. The problems here are not specific to GitHub and certainly are not specific to her.

> The problems here are not specific to GitHub and certainly are not specific to her.

The problem here is that nobody has yet given a concrete example of such a problem. In this particular case, there are a bunch of vague tweets, in others, people looked at user-submitted content etc. Just saying ‘there is a problem’ neither makes it clear that there is a problem, nor what that problem is nor how to fix that problem.

According to Julie, GitHub's HR department is aware of the problems, and has been for a while: https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/444887201935945729 .

GitHub knows about the problems. I hope GitHub makes an honest effort to fix them. And I hope they blog about what they fixed and why they fixed it. Hopefully when that happens, there will be some good lessons there.

But we don't have to collectively relive what Julie went through. This story is about a real, systemic problem. It shouldn't turn into a "true crime" infotainment story about one person's experience.

"According to Julie"

GitHub went through tons of PR issues, if she had a valid complaint do you think HR would ignore it? Let's use common sense here for a minute.

If she had issue with the company and went public with this, she can say what it was. There is no need to post tweets and beating around the bush on this issue.

This is not helpful. Either there is a problem at Github, or there isn't. Couching it in terms of a general problem across the industry is not helpful.

Is the leadership at Github sexist? You can't just handwave that question away and say "Of course it is, it's a well-known industry problem.", when a specific event has caused that allegation to be made very public. Talking about the event in question gives rise to understanding, generalities and vague tweets do not.

I don't want to attack the messenger here, but all we have to go on are a series of tweets which do not, by themselves, present a very clear message. She claims to be harassed by the leadership for two years... whilst defending them to feminists for the same time? And then in the next tweet, it's only the events of one day which have caused a problem.

It's very hard to get a consistent story out of the information at hand, which is why people are asking for a better explanation. Since Horvath has made this public in the first place, I don't think that's an unreasonable expectation.

Only sensible comment I've seen so far. Nicely put @dbloom.

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