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Comment by sgentle | Hacker News Reader

Ouch. What a terrible situation. I'm holding out for the other side of the story, but unless you're willing to assume the entire thing is invented this is a major fuckup for GitHub.

I think this is a classic problem with companies making the transition from small startup to regular business. Break down the barriers! Flat management! Kill bureaucracy and embrace no-politics DIY organisation!

The article reads like an HR air crash investigation. Nebulous semi-employee with unspecified responsibilities related to a founder? Check. Unclear or absent grievance chain? Check. HR alternately over- and under-involved in disputes with no clear policy? Check. Off-the-record disciplinary meetings? Check. Founder adjudicates his own grievances? Check.

And it seems like every single one of these problems could have been solved by a halfway competent manager. I mean, someone reverting your code because of a personal vendetta? Is that not like, a 5 minute conversation? "Hey, Jo, Dave's being an asshole and reverting my commits for no reason." "Oh, okay, I'll talk to him and make sure it stops."

I read a great article a while back that I unfortunately can't find now, but it talked about a CEO who thought he was having a casual "hey, I'm interested in developing my skills, can you mentor me a bit?" conversation with another exec. A week later the office was ablaze with "so-and-so being groomed as successor" rumours. At a certain point you stop being able to just act like a regular person and have everything turn out fine. Red tape isn't always a straitjacket. Sometimes it's a crash harness.

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> Nebulous semi-employee with unspecified responsibilities related to a founder?

This is the point that stands out for me. That the wife is not an employee of Github but claims to be able to access private company chat records, and also is able to "work" from within the office and interact with the staff.

Even with allowances that company property remains company property and private chat rooms are in fact non-private to the company... there is no scenario in which a non-employee should have access to those chat rooms.

The wife, and the husband (founder), have displayed an incredible lack of professionalism here. There may even be a question about whether those acts are illegal if they are substantiated.

And for companies that use Github to host private repositories, the question should be asked very loud and clear... "Who can access private company data, why, and for what reason?".

If a non-employee can access information that is presumed (even by their own employees) to be private, then our (external companies) assumptions about what is private and secure at Github are weakened and demand very clear statements backed up with clear processes to reassure.

"Who can access private company data, why, and for what reason?"

This seems to me to be the major takeaway for organisations outside github from this sorry affair. I'm sort of surprised you are the only person to raise this so far.

In the UK, the employee who resigned could have a successful day in an employment tribunal. And one aspect of the hearing would be privacy and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act provisions.

But you live in the UK, which is still part of Europe, where people are still people that have rights. Your only right in the USA is the right to leave.

The fact that you were able to post this means that your statement is false. Using hyperbole to make a point only serves to invalidate your point, unless your audience is composed of complete idiots (not hyperbole, that's actually what I mean). I would hope that the HN readership isn't a bunch of idiots, although you obviously think they are.

you live in the UK where people are still people that have rights

The right to be sued for libel whenever they write something that someone else doesn't like?

Actually, we have no written Constitution, and very little in the way of actual rights in the sense that if a Constable asks us to move or go home or to search our bags, we have to let them.

Employment rights however are slightly better. The employee interviewed in the OA would have recourse to an employment tribunal for what used to be called 'constructive dismissal' - the terminology may have changed recently. The monetary compensation would be quite basic by Valley standards, but the public exposure of the employers, subject to cross-examination, would be most satisfying I imagine.

You do have certain rights for stop and search: https://www.gov.uk/police-powers-to-stop-and-search-your-rig...

Get all their details, and complain if you think you were treated unfairly.

And the right to win in court: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCA_v._Singh

Unfortunately, this doesn't invalidate the fact that you're correct in a way. If Simon Singh hadn't been able to afford the time and money to defend this case, the libel suit would probably have stood.

Still, it's a step in the right direction, and an important legal precedent.

It seems to me she has made a pretty good case for sex discrimination, harassment, and hostile work environment.

If this happened in my company, lawyers would be crafting a settlement right now.

I am not a Lawyer, but I'm pretty sure in the US, she could sue as well.

One could sue for pretty much anything in the US.

So spot on. Considering recent privacy issues, Github needs to be careful to respond on this. It has potential to explode into an entirely separate shitstorm.

It's as easy as the wife grabbing the husbands laptop and scanning the Hipchat logs.

GitHub uses campfire, but HipChat does not give any way for a account owners/admins to read personal 1-1 chat logs.

Hipchat user/admin; agreed. I don't have access to 1 on 1 chat logs and I prefer it that way.

Same exact situation for me, definitely don't want to be reading anyone else's chats or for there to be any concern that someone might be listening in.

The article claims GitHub said that the wife would "work from home". Why would a company say that a non-employee would "work from home". Why would a company allow a non-employee to get into the office that much?

This sounds a lot worse and blatant than just shoulder surfing at home.

I love github, but toxic cultures can happen anywhere. Github employees have been involved in commit abuse since the beginning https://web.archive.org/web/20130117043748/http://sheddingbi...

Yet people wonder, mouth agape, why I prefer staying up in Seattle.

Location really has little to do with. While SF is a bit of a hipster enclave, so are a lot of places with plenty of tech companies.

Wow...I hope that toxic github employee was fired for that.

I believe it was just a user of Github and not an employee that did that nonsense.

This quote suggests more than one GitHub employee was in on it at the least:

'They purposefully allow this glaringly obvious mechanism for insulting and annoying their members and are actually involved in the joke. Until I broke their server they were all laughing at my "testing", then they were pissed when they had to fix the bug I found. If you don't believe me, look at the HackerNewsTips twitter account, which I know is astroturfed by a github employee.'

In one of the first few paragraphs, there's this block:

"The other piece of information you need to understand is that there's a sort of running hidden gag among the Ruby Iluminati (aka Rubynati) within San Francisco. Employees from Engine Yard, PowerSet, and ... github love this joke where they create code that generates ASCII art penis pictures and then force other people onto their project without permission. Here's another one called dicks by Martin Emde."

It's a shame that companies doing some useful things have to encourage a culture of brutish behavior.

I think it was just a user of Github and not an employee that did that nonsense

You've gotta love Zed A. Shaw, he is an entertaining truth cannon (and a great programmer).

Somehow I cannot find a single part of him I could love.

How about these books: http://programming-motherfucker.com/become.html

> the question should be asked very loud and clear... "Who can access private company data, why, and for what reason?"

I am against using private github repos simply because: it's safe to assume that the NSA can access them via hardware backdoors on github's premises (as per many US ISPs), or by compromising crypto keys that github holds (as per lavabit).

It's also safe to assume that github will be legally compelled to either remain silent on this topic or lie and deny it.

Doesn't that apply equally to any shared hosting?

It applies to any shared hosting with servers in in the US that operates above a certain scale; yes. What that certain scale is who knows, but github the most visible hosting service so is certain to be above it.

Github is great for my open source work. Everyone's allowed to see that code, even the NSA. However you can find source to LOIC on github. I'm sure that who put that there and who worked on it when would be of interest to them and form a suitable pretext for a dragnet.

Yeah, because the NSA can't do anything about the service run by 2 guys in Germany. </s>

It's not a question of "can't", it's a question of economics.

People keep confusing targeted attacks with bulk data collection. Nobody doubts the NSA can successfully launch a targeted attack against nearly any organization.

But that's not economical to do against everyone all the time. Whereas bulk collection of unencrypted or poorly-encrypted data from the handful of biggest cloud providers and network operators is cheap and easy.

So yes -- leaving the big providers in favor of competently-managed small-scale, lesser-known providers is probably a step up in privacy.

Quite right. Even better is hosting your git yourself so that the data never leaves the premises. it is more work; but from a security point of view it's even better.

Except that legally speaking bulk collection is even easier for NSA overseas where the Fourth Amendment doesn't apply. Given the way cloud computing works all they'd have to do is "target" the top 3 or 4 cloud-based source code hosts and get everything, and there'd be no legal defense against it.

For U.S.-based cloud infrastructure it's at least possible to take it to court (as Levison did).

So it's a pick your poison thing unfortunately. If you think you can outwit targeted surveillance then by all means use an overseas hosting provider but if they would be targeting you either way then it might actually be safer doing what The Guardian does, and using U.S. law as a shield.

> Except that legally speaking bulk collection is even easier for NSA overseas where the Fourth Amendment doesn't apply

Treating notionally allied countries as free-fire zones is a curious definition of "easy". You run this kind of risk: http://en.alalam.ir/news/1528560

And for that reason, anyone with regard to the long term would deploy that kind of thing cautiously, if at all. But I have no idea if that applies to the NSA.

It's curious, I have seen this kind of comment on HN before, essentialy saying "US law doesn't apply in other countries therefore the NSA can do anything that they want there" ignoring that other countries have their own laws, often stricter in terms of privacy. My suspicion is that this is a particularly USAian myopia, which does not bode well for the NSA. Clearly they have gotten away with for a decade or more; but it relies on goodwill and secrecy; and those reservoirs are looking very low lately.

> My suspicion is that this is a particularly USAian myopia, which does not bode well for the NSA.

I am telling you literally like it is. Whether or not you want the Fourth Amendment to apply outside of the U.S. (keeping in mind that amendment is the only part of U.S. constitutional law restricting electronic surveillance by the U.S. government anywhere in the world), the fact is that legally speaking it doesn't. I'm not telling you how the world should be here, I'm telling you how it actually is.

This is not specific to the U.S. though. Does Germany have constitutional laws forbidding them to collect intelligence from networks in France?

> Whether or not you want the Fourth Amendment to apply outside

Now you have changed the subject. The original assertion was that it was "easier" for the NSA to collect bulk data outside of the USA. If the 4th amendment was the only factor then it might be so. My point was that the 4th is not the only factor.

For another example of this, how seriously would someone like Lavabit take a US court order to hand over keys and shut up if they were based in Reykjavík?

> Except that legally speaking bulk collection is even easier

Did you miss the "legally speaking" in my original sentence before you accused me of changing the subject?

I did actually miss that, and the purely legal aspect of it is not the whole and interesting picture. But I don't think that it makes a difference.

TAO (I.e computer network exploitation) may be easier if you possess a legal/ethical framework whereby allied counties are free-fire zones; at least up to the point when they're no longer allied.

But bulk data collection is not TAO. As far as I can see, it relies on firstly on physical access to network infrastructure, so you can put a secret room at the Phone company or copy off the network traffic off the undersea cable as it lands. This is legally easier in your own country.

Secondly it relies on legal authority over companies. US agents arrived at lavabit with a US court order to hand over the crypto keys and tell no-one. How would that play for a company based in Reykjavik? I expect that after the laughter and blog posts, a bit like this: http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/view/30559/iceland-expe...

> But bulk data collection is not TAO.

Except, of course, when TAO allows you access to data in bulk. That was my whole point, and if you guys keep conflating legal jurisdiction, technical capabilities, and scope of effect with each other then you'll have only yourself to blame when you get outwitted and your data ends up in a database with ALLCAPS naming conventions. :P

> when TAO allows you access to data in bulk

You should write an article about that, I do like to learn more. So long as it doesn't consist of "lol you got outwitted :P" style taunting.

Interesting how your loyalties are expressed in that comment. BTW, based on your other comments, what exactly do you do "in the military" ?

That's why evil github exists, GitTor where all your low orbit ion cannon dev trees can be uploaded without metadata.

You can also use Tor to sync small github projects through ssh. Employee internal communications should all be done away from Github and encrypted if you're working on something like p2p software and worried your flippant piracy jokes might be held up in a court room one day as "proof" your project is criminal. I would always assume all comms are stored forever and available to anybody who requests them, like lawyers looking to sue you and would like all your HipChat logs.

What is "evil github" ?

https://wzrtr6gpencksu3d.tor2web.org/

It's just a .onion github clone to pseudoanon share booters/LOIC and other "evil" code. It was called GitTor but I guess they recently changed the name.

Actually, it applies equally to private hosting too.

But no so much to on-premises self-hosting. I am talking about the danger of bulk data collection here, as per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7410794

Eh, any US based hosting is potentially vulnerble to that. Even non-US based hosting is vulnerble to you being hacked by the NSA. But a company allowing non-employees access is a very different situtation.

"Who can access private company data, why, and for what reason?".

But the cloud. The cloud!

> This is the point that stands out for me. That the wife is not an employee of Github but claims to be able to access private company chat records, and also is able to "work" from within the office and interact with the staff.

Completely ridiculous and unprofessional.

But, not sexist. Just terrible.

Agreed. There's some (alleged) sexism in the full story though.

However, the guy who declared his love for her despite knowing that she had a boyfriend, and then started sabotaging all her code when she shot him down, is very much sexist bullshit.

That's not sexism; he was acting maliciously because she turned down his advances, not because she was a woman.

I've worked with brilliant engineers that lack a lot of real world social skills and this doesn't surprise me one bit. A pretty girl really can mess with the logical types of people that have little experience with the opposite sex.

your comment is also dripping with stereotypes unfortunately

well I've witnessed this phenomenon in the real world, so I can't discount the existence of this, stereotype label aside.

I've met the opposite as well, charming, well dressed, and physically fit engineer types who can hold a conversation with the opposite sex without any awkward vibes at all.

The awkward types seem to lack some dating experience and thus cannot discern positive/negative social cues or read body language as well.

I think everyone has witnessed that phenomenon, regardless of what industry they work in.

> I've met the opposite as well, charming, well dressed, and physically fit engineer types who can hold a conversation with the opposite sex without any awkward vibes at all.

> The awkward types seem to lack some dating experience and thus cannot discern positive/negative social cues or read body language as well.

I hate replying to this, but here it goes: have you even given positive social cues to guys who weren't "charming, well dressed and physically fit engineer types"? Also, if you're only getting "awkward vibes" from unattractive guys, that might not be a problem with their social skills (at least not in the way you're putting it; charm is a social skill).

Not to mention, what does "well dressed and physically fit" even have to do with "awkward"?

Dressing well and taking care of your body are social cues, that you meet the dress 'standards' of the group (whatever they are) and that you are capable of managing your own body.

The fact he expected to get away with it and thought it was a reasonable thing to do has, alas, quite a lot to do with both his gender and her gender.

No, it has to do with his clear immaturity. His behavior merely justifies why he was turned down.

Again, we should remember that it's how she perceives situation. Removing somebody's code is completely normal if you rewrite something for reason (changing interfaces, fixing properly something in other place so that piece of code becomes unused, implementing some complex mechanism which doesn't play well with that feature so that's easier to rewrite it — there are many such situations). We all like our code, but caring about it too much is unprofessional. I removed my colleagues' code hundreds of times, they removed mine. Solution seemed nice few months ago turns out to be horrible in today's light. It's just how the life goes.

So if she perceives she is victimized because of her sex that qualifies it as sexism? On whose part?

It's de-facto sexist not to be aware that sexual harassment is wrong.

...The advances that he would not have made if she were not a woman. So you're saying a man sexually harassing a woman isn't sexist?

Seeing as we don't know his sexual orientation, you don't know whether he would have made those advances if she were not a woman.

And no, a man sexually harassing a woman isn't always sexist (even though I'd imagine that in the large majority of cases sexism plays a role).

Sexual harassment ≠ Sexism

What's important to discern is the reason behind the harassment. If a man is harassing a woman because he views his gender as superior to hers, or that she's nothing more than a sexual object, then that's a pretty clear-cut case of sexism. But if a man acts inappropriately towards someone because he lacks self control/tact, has poor social skills, etc. and is only targeting that person because he's attracted to them, then it's sexual harassment.

That is the sort of thing that you should be able to fire people on the spot for, no severance, just get out you misogynistic entitled scum you deserve nothing from anyone.

That's not sexist. Sexism is when you act out the belief that the person of other gender is inferior to yours. Singling her out for rejecting his advances is not sexist.

The idea that she's obligated to respond favorably to his advances or be punished is most definitely sexist.

But that is not what happened here.

> The wife, and the husband (founder), have displayed an incredible lack of professionalism here.

That assumes that the story, as told in the accusation, is completely accurate. One could envision a scenario where the founder felt his wife may be able to relate to the situation better and could actually assist the accuser. However, in spite of best intentions, its possible that the wife's actions were misinterpreted by the accuser. Until Github or the wife gives their side of the story, perhaps withholding judgement is the optimal strategy.

I don't pretend to have any info on what truly happened. But the story doesn't have to be 'completely accurate' for it to be disturbing. A company can't have family members browse around company offices and imposing themselves on employees with whom they have no professional or personal relationship. I find it very hard to understand how the wife's repeated presence can be favorably interpreted if it did indeed upset Horvath.

it could have been well intentioned. bringing in an pseudo-outsider may not be the smartest move but its also not necessarily evil at all. the founder may have felt that his wife could relate in some way. until more evidence is given, we should withhold judgement.

In what scenario is having an undocumented employee ok?

In these types of situations, it's usually pretty difficult to come to solid conclusions about the chain of events this early. My initial take?

It's not uncommon for business owners to rely heavily on non-employees for advice, even in the day-to-day operations. Spouses are especially common. What confuses me is that the wife, as portrayed, seems a bit irrational--if not delusional. There's a big difference between even vocal trusted advisors, and the sort of power the wife described herself as having.

So much so that I think there's a third possible interpretation: the quotes are accurate, given by a wife that genuinely believes her statements even though they have no basis in reality. This sort of delusion, in varying degrees, is quite common across the population. We convince ourselves of something--in this case, the wife that she has power in the Github organization--and then attempt to reduce the cognitive dissonance that arrises from the belief and the evidence to the contrary. As time goes on, we try harder and harder to justify those irrational beliefs.

It's entirely possible that there's no truth whatsoever to the wife's words, but that the wife genuinely believed them in spite of it. And that Julie Horvath is entirely accurate in detailing the conversation and the implied hostility she felt from the founder and his wife. So now, not only do you have to determine whether the conversation took place, but also whether the power the wife alleged existed in the first place. Unfortunately for Github, even if the wife never had that power, the wife was still able to contribute to a hostile work environment and that can have significant legal ramifications even though she wasn't an employee.

Friends you go out for drinks with to talk about life and work slowly transform into "spies" who keep you informed of what's happening in the office under the guise of gossip. Curiously taking a peek at an open chat tab on the husband's laptop becomes "access." Commenting on whether you liked a potential hire you met earlier becomes "responsibility over hires." Love for your husband and concern for his work becomes an overprotective desire to shield him from harm.

Given how rapidly Github has grown, the idea that any trusted non-employee, wife or not, would have that sort of power and influence described seems absurd. Hell, for a while it seemed as though they announced a new hire daily. Far too many for one non-employee, no matter how often she went into the office, to have that sort of power. Especially when most were technical positions.

Time will tell, but for now, more information is needed. Anyhow, I suppose I took issue with the phrase "undocumented employee" and ran off on a tangent :). The wife needn't have been an employee at all to have helped cause a shitstorm.

So common business owners need day-to-day advice from people outside the company to run their business? I somehow doubt that.

If someone was not on payroll and interacting with my employees on a personal level and on a daily or weekly basis I would have reasons to be concerned.

Being a "start-up" doesn't make you impervious to these problems. It simply means you haven't run into them... yet.

Things like this should be formalised though. Its very unusual for a spouse to prance around any organisation handing out directives/advice. Maybe its a sign that the founder in question doesn't have the people skills to handle her possibly dominant personality.

> should be

Yes, but its the difference between malice and an innocent error in judgement.

from reading the article, I got the vibe that the wife may have felt innately (territorially?) threatened by the thought of a (pretty) female in the company getting close with her founder husband in a more intimate, rather than professional, type of way. Thoughts?

That raising "threatened wife" motif is actually quite sexist. Its entirely possible that the founder may have felt that his wife could relate better to the accuser but that their meeting may not have went well and the wife felt that the accuser was behaving as inappropriately as the accuser felt about the wife. Furthermore, accusing someone of "sitting near me to intimidate me" is quite vague and bizarre.

Professionalism would dictate that the wife not be involved even if this is the case. I don't go tell my husband's nurses that ... well, anything!

What business do I have with my husband's colleagues other than being polite at the summer barbecue and the holiday party?

It may be arguable, but for me non-company member being somehow related to company business is not only acceptable, but actually very nice. Being family member of the founder is reason enough to care about company, and I'd prefer informal atmosphere where people can help with business just because they care to that formal bureaucratic atmosphere that is common in banks. That's were wives come to pretty boring holidays parties and politely chuckle about boring jokes. Ugh.

Of course that doesn't include "accessing private chats of company members", but for that reason the more I read about that story the less I believe "the victim".

Combining work and marriage structures is fraught with all sorts of problematic outcomes. Consider even the differing processes to enter each institution. Or the differing standards for being successful at each.

No it does not. Management 101 is that you fire all 3 ASAP.

Also looking at her github account, she is a designer, not a developer A bit different education.

> I mean, someone reverting your code because of a personal vendetta?

I laughed out loud when I read this and several other specific details in the story. It sounded very familiar.

I have several friends and many acquaintances who work at Valve. One very senior engineer initially worked on Source 2 about three years ago but had to quickly switch projects because another, more tenured engineer was expressing his disagreements by silently reverting some of my friend's check-ins.

The founder's wife story also reminds me of episodes I've heard involving the wife cabal. It's nothing as sinister as the GitHub story, but I see a lot of the same structural issues reflected in these telling anecdotes. The lack of an overt chain of command means that power asserts itself covertly. If you are unhappy, you have little recourse but to express your own power by indirect passive-aggressive means. That's bad enough when it happens in any corporate structure, but here it is almost the only possible course of action.

Valve might have been a lot like GitHub if it had hired inexperienced, smart, cocky web programmers in their early twenties. In both cases the companies also boast a level of success that makes it hard for them to evaluate whether elements of their company culture is detrimental to their continued development at this stage of their existence. It's probably hardest for Valve because of the inexhaustible money faucet that is Steam. There is so much squandered potential at that company, which is a weird thing to say considering how much they've done and are still doing.

I'm waiting for a hip rebranding of the term 'management' once these no-management companies realize they have issues that cannot be resolved by hiring supposedly perfect people.

It really surprises me that somebody can get away with such destructive behaviour as reverting someone else's commits without reasonable cause. What justification is there for not firing on the spot anybody who puts their own personal vendettas over the good of the project?

I once quit a senior dev role as the tech architect at the company had veto power on all code and blocked my work because I'd spelled the word dialog the US way, rather than the UK way (dialogue).

This was not in a public interface, this was in variable names.

Ignoring that every word in programming is in US English: color, gray, program.

We were deadlocked for weeks, with him refusing to ship working code that fulfilled the business goals over this single issue. Quitting resolved the deadlock, and I learned afterwards that he really did go through the work and change it all to "dialogue".

What did senior management think of this? I can't imagine them taking kindly to the architect delaying shipping for weeks over such a trivial thing.

At the time he was viewed as critical to the project. They indulged him. A very steady stream of very good devs leaving the company occurred because of such invented rules and irrational behaviour. He was a truly great dev, but a fairly insane architect and gatekeeper.

I wonder if they financial benefit they gained from keeping him around was greater than the financial loss due to continuously losing good devs...

Why was it so critical to spell it "dialog", rather than "dialogue", as the higher-ups in the project apparently preferred?

It wasn't, there was no business justification for it at all. He just invented a rule "all names and variables must be in UK English".

GP asked the converse.

Good spot (I missed it).

I spelled it in consistency with everything else in the source code at that time... US English. It was a British company, and I understood that the UI should be UK English, but did not comprehend/believe that variables should be too. Especially as one can't force CSS to stop calling it color.

I still don't think that's actually the question that was being asked. It's not, "why do you think your spelling was preferred?" but rather "given that the complaint is how inflexible the senior tech was on the issue, why were you just as inflexible?"

Particularly given that it's a UK company, the request may be arguably wrong, but it's at least semi-reasonable. Why make such a huge deal over it from either side?

given that the complaint is how inflexible the senior tech was on the issue, why were you just as inflexible?"

Software engineers are a stubborn bunch. It's kind of necessary given the nature of programming. However, if promoted to an architect, stubbornness is a real problem, with little to no upside.

Architects will usually stick mostly to design and not do a lot of debugging. So that stubbornness is not useful. But it sure can rear its ugly head when it comes to pointless conflicts like this one. And the problem is, all the junior developers are also stubborn.

Welcome to software development. What you want in in a software architect is primarily a diplomat. Not someone who is stubborn.

I disagree. Before I went back to academia, I had both job titles at various times. The whole point of having someone in one of these "architect" roles is that they're supposed to be there to exercise judgment they have demonstrated to you as a company to be reliable.

If there's a disagreement that can't be resolved between the two of them, the architect is the one whose stubbornness I value more. You have managers to be diplomats. You have technical leadership to say, "they pay me more than you because they trust my judgment more than yours. I've heard your argument; I found it not compelling enough to overrule my own experience and judgment, and the decision has been made."

Ideally you have more than one such person to help surface the cases where the architect was wrong, but if you're routinely treating them as though they're no more reliable than junior developers, why are you paying them so much?

As an architect myself, I'm sure that some of the decisions I make look like bikeshedding - and maybe they are, but they're born out of a desire to make our services easier to implement and manage at scale. I do try to avoid arguments over trivia, but it's a fine line to walk. When you have a small system, the kinds of convention, indirection, and abstraction you'd see in large ones don't make a lot of sense, except when it comes time to scale out.

Maybe he figured the work was done and wanted to move on to something else. It should have been a trivial issue, either way, and he wasn't the one making it a non-trivial issue. But the architect's propensity for blowing it out of proportion was a good signal that his working relationship with that architect was never going to be good, if something as simple as that was a problem.

I would have done the same thing. If someone is hanging your job over your head over spelling in source code, then the issue is no longer about spelling in source code. It's about dick wagging.

> Especially as one can't force CSS to stop calling it color.

Actually... It's (jokingly) possible :)

http://spiffingcss.com/

Strange, their 'Download it, Sire!' button isn't clickable, despite it being a link. They also have 4 h1s on the page.

Heh, you've basically avoided fully answering this question twice, possibly because it wasn't properly phrased. Let me give it one more shot.

What was _your_ reasoning for losing a job over a completely semantic argument?

Did the illogicality of it all really irk you so much that you couldn't stand to change it? What do you mean by saying that you couldn't 'comprehend' why variables should be written in UK English? It seems pretty clear that they should be in UK English because that's what you were told to write them in... at your job...

If this happened as described then I would have loved to be a coworker watching this hilariously petty feud unfold.

> What was _your_ reasoning for losing a job over a completely semantic argument?

I wanted a reasonable work environment that was delivering product to the customers, for the business.

The work in question was 20k lines and involved the whole stack. As it bled into web page stuff that actually had calls to browser open "dialog" commands, no find and replace was going to safely work to now make it comply with the clarification on the coding standards (UK English var names). We would spend weeks changing it and re-testing, weeks in which we were not delivering it.

I felt we were no longer working for either the customer or business, when we were willing to hold back an improvement that would immediately create revenue, for a petty argument.

It wasn't the first time I'd seen this architect do that to others, but I never thought it would happen to me so long as the product was good, the code was good, deadlines were met.

I was no longer convinced it was possible to create work that wouldn't fall foul of some rule or other. And the architect had managed to position himself on the org structure outside of a chain of command, so there was no-one to appeal to.

There are too many good jobs, and good companies, that want to ship product to their customers and build a great business to even consider staying somewhere that doesn't.

It was a very easy decision.

Wow, yeah, seems like it was.

I still would like to see someone that ridiculous operate... Sounds like the most incompetent architect/engineer I have ever heard of.

Sorry for the snark fellow human.

> Especially as one can't force CSS to stop calling it color.

You can get pretty close :)

http://spiffingcss.com/

Was it that way before you worked on the code? If so" that's perfectly reasonable.

What's the business justification for using "dialog" when the project leader(s) have requested "dialogue", however?

Let's assume that the debate was legitimate, doesn't that still put us one "replace all" away from fixing the problem?

I don't understand how these guys were "deadlocked" for weeks.

Because the spelling wasn't the root cause it was a symptom of a culture that had gone so badly wrong that people engaged in petty arguments just as a way to score points.

To be fair, a search and replace for "dialog" would also match patterns like, y'know, "dialogue" too, at least in all the naive replace-all algos I've seen in IDEs.

So, the traditional CTRL+F, or :%s/dialog/dialogue/g would have resulted in at least some instances of 'dialoguegue' as a result. Yeah, the obvious remedy there is :%s/guegue/gue/g, but that too could lead to unintended results, etc.

Not that I don't agree with the intent of your statement, search and replace across 20k lines of code, over however many files, is likely a more involved process than it sounds like.

Maybe some thing like s/dialog$[^u]|$$/dialogue\1/g

Or use variable renaming in an IDE that actually parses the code.

To match dialog but not dialogue in vim:

    dialog\>

...in other regex systems:

    dialog\b

"dialog" as part of a variable name with underscores:

    :%s/dialog_/dialogue_/g

"dialog" as part of a variable name with CamelCase:

    :%s/\([dD]\)ialog\([A-Z][A-z]*\)/\1ialogue\2/g

You don't need to capture every case in a single regex substitution, you can use a handful to cover pretty much every case though. This sort of change should not take more than a few minutes max of developer time.

I don't have experience with them, but I imagine an IDE with refactoring support should make these sort of changes trivial.

You can always replace dialoguegue with dialogue again afterwards.

Or use an AST and do a structural replace, rather than use text.

did you know about rule before start writing piece of code in question ? If yes, I really don't see how you can say in good faith that it wasn't your mistake to be fixed.

It's completely OK to have such a rule, your behavior is much more disturbing. It doesn't really matter if you use UK or US english, but you should use one and that must be pressured from above. If project standard is UK you use UK, not what you like.

Quitting because of that is just stupid. In my company CS rules are almost opposite to my preferences (and to common style for that language community of course). I use every opportunity to grumble about it, but it would be much worse if everybody (me included) shaped the code based on personal preferences, not style guide.

I once worked at a company that made code to be owned by the gov't of Canada. I'm not sure if the government imposed the rules, but we did have strict rules to use Canadian word versions. Though this was like 1999 so I'd be shocked if that's still the case.

Edit: not to imply a reason for the noted situation, just an example to lend some credence/reasoning elsewhere

Sounds like two stubborn people. Unless you were taking a "stand" to make a point about a larger issue I don't see that you did anything better to fulfill the business goals.

It's a good thing for hackers/programmers/engineers to be stubborn.... up to a point, but the one thing an architect should not be is stubborn.

And yet architects usually originate from promoted engineers. And that means they are stubborn, and the result is all kinds pointless conflicts with all the other developers.

The fact that the tech architect spent any time at all contemplating this issue is a massive red flag to me.

Technical Architecture should be about making the right set of trade offs given the business goals of the system being developed. That involves spending a lot of time talking to people both inside and outside of dev team about what the goals are and how the decisions that devs are making are impacting everyone else in the company. That stuff is time consuming, but if there's any time left you should really be keeping up with the latest frameworks and tools.

If you're spending your time reviewing commits and enforcing coding standards, you're doing it wrong.

"Ignoring that every word in programming is in US English: color, gray, program."

The parochialism of the wannabe "hacker" (entreprenerd) here used to be cute.

Since these were variable names they didn't have to be real words. So you should have explained that your "dialog" was not the American spelling of "dialogue", but a nonsense non-word that you made up (that happened to be spelled the same way as the American version of "dialogue").

If Evil Coder sends an email to Noble Coder describing the vendetta-motivated reversions, then sure, something might happen. When would it ever be so obvious, however? If this is done quietly, and Noble happens to work in different parts of the codebase every cycle, she might not even realize the reversions have occurred for a few cycles. Even then, many people would assume there was some fair-minded rationale the first few times. After it is clear that something is going on, Noble can make a stink, but she might also just want to cut her losses and make a lateral move.

Hmm. I suppose that's a disadvantage of having a less formal code-review process, compared to one in which the reverter would have to specify a reason for each reversion, making it easier to detect spurious reversions.

You'd think that a site like GitHub would have mandated code review for all commits by now. Especially after that time a few years ago when they managed to accidentally delete all the pull requests in the entire site, or something like that!

Wait, they're a ruby shop, they don't even believe in letting the compiler help you avoid making basic mistakes. dons flame-retardant suit

It should be obvious that that's a false equality.

> It really surprises me that somebody can get away with such destructive behaviour as reverting someone else's commits without reasonable cause. What justification is there for not firing on the spot anybody who puts their own personal vendettas over the good of the project?

And yet it happens everywhere. The question is what narratives can be told about it more than what actually happened.

I've never been anywhere where this sort of behavior happened. If management can't nip things like that in the bud, they aren't doing their jobs.

I have seen vendettas handled in crazy ways in a few different places. People figure out what they can get away with.

At Sun, where there was a structured management chain, there was a time when one of the folks in my group reverted a big chunk of changes I had committed, and I went to our common manager and demanded satisfaction. The response was 'if we left them in he threatened to quit, there isn't anything we can do', and the only conclusion from that statement was that if one of us quit, the manager would rather it were me than this other person. Needless to say it was really annoying.

And thus "threatening to quit" becomes the way for the crazy dudes to get whatever they want.

They're not crazy, and it only works if they have more political capital than you do. If I was forced to accept substandard work, and had no other choice but either maintain that bad code, or quit, I'd threaten to quit too.

No, they are crazy. Reverting someone else's changes without explaining why is crazy. No one is telling these people they can't explain their actions.

If any of these people has a disagreement with a co-worker over the co-worker's changes, it's their duty as a fellow employee to explain to the co-worker why they disagree, or at least explain to the manager why they disagree with the change, so that the manager can explain it to the co-worker. But just making the change and then threatening to quit... that is most definitely crazy.

Just want to clarify that my response here is not related to the GitHub story. I have no knowledge of the circumstances that aren't in the story.

> No, they are crazy.

That may be.

> Reverting someone else's changes without explaining why is crazy.

Not necessarily. There are times when you are so wrong you aren't even wrong.

> If any of these people has a disagreement with a co-worker over the co-worker's changes, it's their duty as a fellow employee to explain to the co-worker why they disagree, or at least explain to the manager why they disagree with the change, so that the manager can explain it to the co-worker.

Let's imagine a scenario where they had done this, and yet nothing had corrected the problem. At that point, it would be quite reasonable to revert someone's changes without explaining why, and threatening to quit if one wasn't allowed to.

You're right, we don't know enough from the original story to say for sure. It's not productive to argue over incomplete stories.

Well, why was someone willing to quit over changes you made? And why was the manager willing to side with him over you?

Those are pretty big flags that you screwed up.

Well in this particular case it was pretty much all politics. Had it been about the code it would have had a different outcome.

The person making the threat felt they were immune from backlash, but they were threatened by where I was working in the code base because they lacked the expertise to compete on a technical level. What I found even more interesting was that our mutual manager felt that his position was an even more tenuous political position so he wasn't going to do anything he wasn't told to do by someone above him in the chain of command.

If someone working for me threatens to quit, I first ask them if their issue can be resolved rationally, and if it can't I ask them when will their last day be. But that is because even if my boss then comes to me and says "You told this guy who is friends with <important person> to quit? Your fired!" I am totally ok with that. Not everyone is.

To look at the flip side though as to whether I screwed up or not, I'm reasonably self aware enough to know when I do. And prior to this incident going 'nuclear', as it did, I had come at it from several different directions to try to eliminate bias. Every third party consulted felt my reasoning was pretty sound. But we all know that being "right" doesn't mean you get what you want in a politicized environment. Just ask the Ukrainians living in Crimea, life is what it is. We move past it.

> Well in this particular case it was pretty much all politics.

I had assumed as much. Sun seemed to be very political except for a very few areas; I avoided it for that exact reason.

It's always a hard lesson for a junior person to realize that politics exists. I had my introduction to that at a very big company in a very hard way.

> The founder's wife story also reminds me of episodes I've heard involving the wife cabal. It's nothing as sinister as the GitHub story, but I see a lot of the same structural issues reflected in these telling anecdotes.

If you are male and a founder, one of your most valuable business resources is your wife. People will call me sexist for saying this, I expect, but women think socially with a level of complexity that I think most men never approach. If you are a man, chances are your wife does more to build the business than you ever do.

I see nothing wrong with the involvement of founders' wives in the business.

> The lack of an overt chain of command means that power asserts itself covertly.

Thats the whole point of bossless environments and both their greatest strength and their greatest weakness.

> In both cases the companies also boast a level of success that makes it hard for them to evaluate whether elements of their company culture is detrimental to their continued development at this stage of their existence.

I don't think any company can evaluate that. Culture arises from the grass roots and that means that the floor employees are the ones who ultimately decide company culture.

> I'm waiting for a hip rebranding of the term 'management' once these no-management companies realize they have issues that cannot be resolved by hiring supposedly perfect people.

What do you think of WL Gore and Associates?

This post really bothers me somehow.

Edit: Figured out why.

I don't understand why saying, "people will call me sexist for this" immediately validates your statement as "not intended to be sexist".

>"If you are male and a founder, one of your most valuable business resources is your wife. People will call me sexist for saying this, I expect, but women think socially with a level of complexity that I think most men never approach."

It's pretty clearly a sexist statement is it not? Am I confused about what makes a statement sexist?

Does that entire paragraph not just objectify the wife and establish differences between the sexes based on anecdotal experience?

>"If you are a man, chances are your wife does more to build the business than you ever do."

And this one doesn't even really make sense(as in where are you pulling this random ass statement from), not to mention stating it as, "If you are a founder, chances are your spouse does more to build the business than you ever do." feels literally 10x better to me(even if it still sounds false). Even the punctuation in that sentence makes the word man stand out when it could have easily been written without said punctuation.(well without the comma at least :-p ).

I realize this is super overly sensitive by the way. I normally wouldn't comment, I had already posted "this post really bothers me somehow" though, and felt an explanation was warranted. Definitely curious if anyone else felt the same.

Lastly, I'm a 21 year old white male; the only adversity I've ever faced is being called a ginger, so don't think this is coming from a longstanding feminist, just a human.

> Does that entire paragraph not just objectify the wife and establish differences between the sexes based on anecdotal experience?

Re objectification: couples get advice from their life partners. That doesn't mean this is their life partners only goal.

Re: 'establish differences between the sexes based on anecdotal experience' is there anything ethically wrong with this? Would you prefer a citation be added, eg, 'newborn female infants stare at faces more often than male newborn infants'?

Or do you find the mere existence of differences between the sexes to be 'offensive'? In which case, you're more than welcome to be offended.

>Re objectification: couples get advice from their life partners. That doesn't mean this is their life partners only goal.

Completely true, valid point.

>Re: 'establish differences between the sexes based on anecdotal experience' is there anything ethically wrong with this?

I would argue that there is something ethically wrong with this. Take this statement:

>" women think socially with a level of complexity that I think most men never approach."

Yeah, on it's face it's a compliment(I guess?), but all it really serves to do, in this context,(for me, might read totally different to you) is illustrate the differences between the two sexes. Where's any evidence that his assertion is true?

Anecdotal evidence is by definition flawed. I don't really understand where you're failing to see the potential for harm in this.

> Would you prefer a citation be added, eg, 'newborn female infants stare at faces more often than male newborn infants'?

Do you have a source stating that females raised in the same environment as males exhibited a higher level of social complexity? Because, yes, I would like to see that before changing my worldview based upon this persons statement.

>Or do you find the mere existence of differences between the sexes to be 'offensive'? In which case, you're more than welcome to be offended.

Not at all; what I find offensive is when people try to extrapolate meaning and form social constructs based upon differences that often aren't conclusively proven or even relevant. When I'm talking about these differences I don't mean boy-penis girl-vagina, I mean boy-brave/courageous/smart girl-cute/supportive/geeky.

In my opinion these social constructs are already so ingrained in our society that this will be just as long and drawn out a problem as racism. I mean just define Masculine and Feminine in your head.

I'm not trying to make a point here, or to white-knight, my original response was just how that post genuinely made me feel, I didn't like it.

>> Would you prefer a citation be added, eg, 'newborn female infants stare at faces more often than male newborn infants'?

> Do you have a source stating that females raised in the same environment as males exhibited a higher level of social complexity? '?

Yes, I have a source stating precisely that newborn female infants stare at faces more often than male newborn infants (Baron Cohen at Cambridge):

http://www.dailymotion.com/playlist/x1xv47_BrainwashingInNor...

This study is so flawed as to be scientifically worthless.

The experimenter who was interacting with the babies and measuring the time they spent staring at faces knew the gender of each baby - in other words, it wasn't double blind. This is a well known recipe for allowing the experimenter's bias to influence their recording of the results. This is just one of several basic flaws in the study; see the analysis starting on page 113 of Cordelia Fine's "Delusions of Gender."

"Delusions of Gender" has lots of similar analyses of the research "proving" innate gender differences. The takedown of Louann Brizendine's references starting on page 158 and the one about the frozen salmon MRIs on page 150 are particularly hilarious. One example:

"Casually, Brizendine notes, 'All of the therapists who showed these responses happened to be women.' For some reason, she fails to mention that this is because only female therapists, selected from phone directories, happened to be recruited for the study."

Not being double blind doesn't make it scientifically worthless.

Not does it invalidate male/female roles being consistent across over 200 cultures.

If you accept that men build muscle different from women, and have different hormones, could you not also accept that the differences in gray/white matter proportions, size etc are not 'cultural'?

Laughable.

> Re objectification: couples get advice from their life partners. That doesn't mean this is their life partners only goal.

Women objectification is about treating a woman like an object, a belonging, a resource.

As it turns out, the person writing the parent comment defined a founder's wife as "one of your most valuable business resources". That person should have said, "some of your most valuable business insights will come from your wife". It wouldn't be objectification, but it would still establish differences between the sexes based on anecdotal experience.

Assuming unproven differences between the sexes to be true has always been ethically borderline from a scientific perspective. From a social perspective, it artificially deters persons of each sex from doing something which is then implicitly considered "unnatural" for them.

Let's put the shoe on the other foot:

> The person writing the parent comment defined a founder's husband as "one of your most valuable business resources".

Nope, not offended. The husband is valuable, in no way does it state this is the only value of the husband.

Things look different removed from context. In this case, the relevant context is the history of marriage as a property agreement arranged between the husband and the father of the bride.

> As it turns out, the person writing the parent comment defined a founder's wife as "one of your most valuable business resources"

To be fair, in a world (the world of business) where employees are referred to as "human resources", everyone involved has already been objectified.

I agree with you completely. It belies an inappropriate attitude for the 21st century.

There are plenty of scientifically well-documented cognitive differences between men and women, though the OP doesn't sound informed on them, and yes it is considered impolite to know about them if you're not working in a psychological research lab.

I think it might bother you because the author assumes that's his own inability to navigate complex social relationships is innate to his maleness. In fact, many men are adept at understanding social and emotional subtexts very well. There's no magnitude-order difference in innate ability as described, or if there is, it's not a permanent, unlearnable gulf.

This comment bothered me because OP is fetishizing and tokenizing women in a way that purports to be admiring and supportive of them. In fact, he simply has weak social skills; for example, this post.

Yes I think you nailed it. "I don't suck at this and can't improve at it because it's a male thing and I'm a male"

See, the problem is that the people who complain about this are also the ones who say it's valuable to add women to a group of men (or indeed the reverse), because it results in more balanced decision making.

It can't be both. Either men or women are (as groups, i.e. averages) innately differ on the social vs analytical axis, and diversity is a net plus, or gender is entirely socially constructed, and adding women to a group shouldn't do anything in aggregate.

Studies point to the former rather than the latter.

You have a weird definition of 'innate'. Socially constructed effects are still effects. You still want a mix of people that have different traits and skills, even if they have nothing to do with biology.

So your demand of advocates of inclusiveness is to either a) concede that their support for female participation stems from a belief in the existence of a sensory mode or organ which only females have; or b) concede that women have nothing to offer which cannot be replicated by men and therefore there is no need to include them?

You can't see a third possibility in between those two?

What about simply having different experiences?

Stupid analogy: I hate it that only tall people seem to design store displays of pants. Remarkably, tall people don't seem to notice that putting the small sizes on the top shelves and the larger sizes lower does not make sense. It's because they have a different experience of reaching for things on shelves. Height diversity, though, makes for a better user experience.

It is true in my stupid analogy that tall people and short people do have genetic differences, as on average they innately differ in height. But it is not their innate genetic traits that makes these tall people ignorant both on the social and analytical axes when designing store displays.

Or is it? Hm....

There's a big difference between "on average, women are more socially adept while men are more mathematically adept" and "women socially understand things at a level most men will never achieve". The former is a statement about averages; the latter is a statement about absolutes.

It's okay to make generalizations based on imperfect correlates - like gender - as long as you understand they're generalizations, and are open to revising your judgment if new, more specific information appears. The comment that sparked this thread didn't evidence any of that understanding.

> Does that entire paragraph not just objectify the wife

Objectify is a really overused term that has lost all relevant meaning. How can saying that someone is better than you at something possibly objectify that person? Maybe I'm overly sensible as well, but it's really sad that this is where PC has led us.

"...one of your most valuable business resources is your wife."

That's the objectifying part imo.... Would you disagree?

"...one of your most valuable business resources is your accountant"

Do you consider that statement equally objectifying? If not, why?

Yes, I do.

I think it's perfectly fine to objectify a role though... An accountant is an object after all.

Is "wife" not a role as well?

In that case, isn't "Human Resources" a department whose entire reason for existence is to objectify everyone equally?

To be honest, I am living in a very different culture now from the US culture where social gender roles are more significant but also somewhat flexible. I do expect the post to bother Americans because it goes against what I call the myth of interchangeability, the idea that gender equality necessarily reduces to the idea that the sexes are interchangeable. I don't believe this and I think that equality has to be more substantive than this because interchangeability tends to mean that a male-normative model gives you hidden sexism. Exhibit A is Marissa Mayer's maternity leave duration. There is nothing equal about that.

The point is that when you look cross-culturally and cross-historically, where you don't have women certain things like rule of law don't happen (you see this develop in the American West for example as gender rates stopped being so lopsided).

I would suggest that recognizing that the genders do have differences in terms of social aptitudes and needs, and different positions relative to life choices is the first step in reducing the male-normative view on our economic model (i.e. "if you work like a man, and wait to have kids like a man, you will get paid like a man").

> the myth of interchangeability, the idea that gender equality necessarily reduces to the idea that the sexes are interchangeable.

This always drove me insane - people seem to confuse value equality/congruence and strict identicality. The latter seems to either try to create a female default and punish men for not living up to it, or create some weird fuzzy default that nobody really fits comfortably.

What we want is to say that women are as valuable as men, and then let individuals figure out who they want to be.

The answer isn't to change the (currently relatively male-normative) norm, it's to defenstrate the idea that having a norm in the first place is a remotely good idea.

> This always drove me insane - people seem to confuse value equality/congruence and strict identicality. The latter seems to either try to create a female default and punish men for not living up to it, or create some weird fuzzy default that nobody really fits comfortably.

It creates a female default and punishes men for not living up to it in some areas (like public school in the US), but it creates a male default and punishes women for not living up to it in other areas (academic careers in life sciences, the job market, etc).

> The answer isn't to change the (currently relatively male-normative) norm, it's to defenstrate the idea that having a norm in the first place is a remotely good idea.

Agreed.

> What we want is to say that women are as valuable as men, and then let individuals figure out who they want to be.

Agreed here too. The question then is, how we address this.

> If you are male and a founder, one of your most valuable business resources is your wife.

Um, I'd say that your spouse (of whichever gender) is one of your most valuable business resources, period - if they're someone who can hear your side of the story who aren't actually involved in the situation and someone who knows you better than you know yourself.

But that person should never proceed to involve themselves in your business situation, unless your colleagues approve of their involvement. That appears to be the issue here.

If your spouse is helping contribute to the business on that level, you should hire them. Otherwise you're really doing a disservice to everyone by having your spouse work without compensation or recognition.

This is important. Uncertain why it would be downvoted. Please people, at least state your reasoning.

> without compensation or recognition.

Or, as this story demonstrates, accountability.

I've definitely seen this in the past. At startups where I've worked or friends have worked, the founder's wives have played important support roles in ways that are easy to observe but hard to quantify.

When one spouse is a startup founder, then it's a true "family effort" whether the other spouse likes it or not. And if it's "or not" ... well, then, that substantially hinders the chances of success.

I guess I'm too jaded, but I question getting married. If you hit the lottery and you become a successful Founder, your wife will own 1/2 of all those aching hours sitting in front of that screen. If she's the type of chick that will stick with you when you loose everything and work the paint booth at HD, by all means marry her, but those women just don't exist anymore. Women look at men so differently than we judge them--it's not worth taking a chance.

You couldn't be more wrong. If you don't know any women who treat their spouses as other people, who have ups and downs, women who can't take "for richer or for poorer" seriously, then you're in the wrong social circles.

Hell, my wife has offered to let me quit my job, where I make nearly twice as much as her (her electrical engineering salary would be enough to get us by), just so I can work on art full time, because she knows it will make me happier. I haven't, yet, because I also want her to be happy and I'm not so unhappy with my work yet that I can't earn us some more savings and hopefully make an exit for both of us.

I seriously hope you consider rethinking this position. There are a tremendous number of incredible women in the world, and most of them are not looking for a sugar daddy. Many women also work hard for their careers, passions, or some combination of both, and understand that both success and failure happen.

I will also say that in many instances, if you have this opinion about women (or any group of persons), it's probably somewhat evident in your interactions with them, and you may not be treated quite as well as you would be otherwise. This can be self-reinforcing, but unfortunately the responsibility lies with you to pull yourself out of it and get some perspective.

If you don't, well, get a strong pre-nup, I guess, or stay single forever.

What advantages would marriage provide over a non-legal partnership? The latter seems to carry all of the benefits of marriage without any of the risks.

That's a fair question. I think the biggest benefit would be the recognition of commitment, both by the partners, their families, coworkers, etc., zooming out ad infinitum. It can make a lot of things easier, from a practical perspective--for example, in my line of work there are a lot of couples (shared drive and passion, assortative mating), and employers will often create a second job for the spouse of a person they really want to hire. I think that sort of similar things can apply in other situations. If you, say, want to see your partner in the hospital or have certain other rights it's easier if you're legally bound to said partner.

See the recent arguments about same-sex marriage for a fulsome discussion...

I chose marriage, because I was really f'ing excited about calling my partner my wife. Now, I am really proud to call her that. Note that financially, she is far more well-off than me, but we have similar lifetime earnings potential. YMMV.

Edited: grammar.

If one person is drawing a paycheck and another is supporting them in that role, then the supporter is putting in a ton of resources, but if the marriage ends, the breadwinner owns the entire "career". So the breadwinner reaps the long term benefits of the career, and the supporter loses everything but whatever skills they gained.

For the supporter, the advantage of legal marriage—where the supporter owns half the assets plus some rights to future earnings—is obvious. Smart, capable supporters know this, and won't make that investment without legal protections. Anything else would be reckless.

The advantage to the breadwinner is that this is a way to get a smart, capable supporter. If you're not willing to provide the legal protections, you're just going to get someone who doesn't really understand the situation and doesn't understand the risks. There's some chance you could find someone who was generally capable, but who was naïve on this point, but that's a smaller dating pool. And I'd argue it's ethically wrong, and the unfairness will eventually degrade the quality of the relationship.

People think alimony is just someone sucking someone dry while doing no work, but it's really just a dividend being paid out from a shared venture that you were both equal partners in.

If someone believed that they could attain a smart, capable supporter without offering those legal protections, however, then you agree that it would be rational for them not to provide those protections, right?

Not to mention the sizable portion of men who don't care about the intelligence/capability of their partner, or those who don't believe that wanting a legal upper hand correlates positively with the type of intelligence/capability that they desire.

To name a few: Joint filing of tax returns, Medicare, Social Security, immigration and residency for partners from other countries, sick leave to care for partner.

You can find more here:

http://lesbianlife.about.com/od/wedding/f/MarriageBenefit.ht...

It provides a different social perception too.

In your 20s its fine, put off getting married, but the 40 something guy who introduces you to his girlfriend sends a totally different signal than someone who introduces you to his wife (and vice versa if the genders are swapped). It says you're noncommittal, bad at relationships, maybe previously divorced, constantly shopping around, maybe breached partners trust repeatedly, whatever, take your pick. What it never says when someone is judging your book by its cover though is "this is just some guy who's been hedging against marital risk for a couple decades", any other snap judgement requires the person know you better.

Or, just maybe, you're happiest living in a way that's really no one else's business.

Do you ask to see a copy of their marriage license whenever someone introduces you to their wife?

For tens of thousands of years, it was possible to marry someone without recognition from the US government. I suspect it still is.

The US government will help them take half your property after a breakup even without a marriage license, if they determine you were "acting married" so to speak.

It certainly is. We're never required to consult any of the colonies when we decide to marry.

Jesus, it sounds so 1960s

I seriously hope, for the sake of those "types of chicks", he doesn't.

>> The lack of an overt chain of command means that power asserts itself covertly.

> Thats the whole point of bossless environments and both their greatest strength and their greatest weakness.

What, their point is to encourage death-match power struggles? And that's their strength?

In nature, the fittest survive, but that's because nature is cruel (indifferent, actually). But a business must nurture its employees and make them feel safe – not send them into a battlefield.

Getting outside counsel on your business decisions is one thing, but either dispatching an outsider to internal business affairs as your hatchetperson or having them take it upon themselves to do so is not good business. As seen in Exhibit A, the original article.

"I see nothing wrong with the involvement of founders' wives in the business"

This is nuts.

If person A works at a company then obviously their significant other (male or female) will likely talk with them about work situations and that may be more or less helpful to A and the company. But the idea that as a general rule a female significant other's contribution will be so significant just by virtue of the "level of complexity" of the "social thinking" is just absurd.

therom reading the article, I got the vibe that the wife may have felt innatelyterritoriallyly?) threatened by the thought of a (pretty) female in the company getting close with her founder husband in a more intimate, rather than professional, typofof way. Thoughts?

If you are male and a founder, one of your most valuable business resources is your wife.

If you are a male founder, you might not be married and you might not be straight. Also, one way to kill romance is to tell your significant other that they are your most valuable business resource.

Someone was asleep on HR ethics training day.

So you should hire your wife and make her the CEO

The essay "The Tyranny of Stucturelessness" is an excellent analysis of this problem: http://www.bopsecrets.org/CF/structurelessness.htm

Wow. Thanks! Submitting this as a story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7409611

"I'm waiting for a hip rebranding of the term 'management'..."

Easy, just start calling managers "people hackers" and launch a people hacking tips blog next week.

I used to think managers were worthless ... And then I had a bad one, and figured out the hard way how much bullshit a good manager insulates his developers from.

In corporate environments I use the term 'Outlook resource'

> One very senior engineer initially worked on Source 2 about three years ago but had to quickly switch projects because another, more tenured engineer was expressing his disagreements by silently reverting some of my friend's check-ins.

Wow. Just wow. This pisses me off especially, because to make it as a freelancer I've had to work damn hard to develop self-discipline, maturity, and reverse a path of self-destructive behaviour.

To see people in senior positions act like complete fucking children irritates me to no end, and I will do everything in my power to stop this when I run a company.

Does anyone know, with regards to employment law, whether it's ok to include provisions that allow us to fire or at least demote, for people acting like nasty, immature human beings?

It may well be that the greatest damage to GitHub here is not on the issue of sexism so much as their advocacy of lean management and organizational "freedom".

Although it may have sounded like the "cool teacher" way to address things by having your wife take an employee out for drinks to discuss grievances, clearly this should have been handled in a professional setting according to a clear grievance process. That could have led directly to policy changes (e.g. keep pull request comments professional, have management review reverts) and nipped the problem in the bud instead of getting Really Fucking Weird. That goes for any grievances against her as well, instead of being vented on Secret.

Even GitHub's VC backer (A16Z) has blogged about the need to have clear process when it comes to HR stuff.

Apparently, organizational freedom for a bunch of young guys tends to breed sexism and abuse. I've always thought there's trouble ahead for a company whose blog is mostly a drinking journal (although this appears to no longer be the case).

I've seen similar fallouts in a strictly hierarchical organization when one of the leading managers started having an affair with one of the lower rank project management trainees. HR was powerless, since the manager outranked them. Project management was powerless since the now-de-facto promoted trainee was backed by their superior. In the end, the developers revolted and threatened to quit, so the owner personally had to resolve the conflict. [1]

To me, the story sounds of a critical failure in some decision making positions, something that happens over and over and over again every day, we just don't get to hear it.

[1] The trainee was forced to leave, for all that are curious.

The manager was allowed to stay?

Yes. Atmosphere in the company was pretty toxic after that event.

Why did the developers 'revolt'? People shouldn't date at the workplace but it seems like there's something missing here.

Valid question, so I'll elaborate a little: Imagine a trainee project manager without formal CS education that is immune to professional criticism by other managers, because she gets told by the boss (and lover) that she's doing perfectly fine and all other are just jealous for the de-facto promotion. This, flanked by threats to everybody that would voice criticism towards her makes for a very bad situation. She received responsibility for a team with a task that would be enough for a seasoned manager and she failed hard - not because she was stupid, but because she never had a chance. All blame for any failure was directed to the developers, so at some point they revolted.

That makes perfect sense. I guess when I imagine a realtionship I assume the couple is smart enough to know that discipline etc is outside the bounds of their relationship, eg, the senior partner won't help the junior partner because they know it will ultimately fuck up both the the company and the relationship.

Thinking about it, assuming everyone knows that is naive. Point conceded.

"HR was powerless, since the manager outranked them."

That right there is a scary sentence. Sure, HR shouldn't dictate everything (hiring developers, for example) but No one should be exempt from rules about how to treat other employees.

An organisation without management basically relies on having people who all act rationally all the time and in the best interest of the company as a whole.

The problem is that not many people like that exist and can be recruited. For a sufficiently small organisation peer pressure and a clear-cut common goal may help smooth over the imperfections of the individuals involved. But once the organisation grows to a certain level, those forces will start losing their effectiveness and you require a substitute to ensure reasonably smooth operations.

I think the key take away is that there is no perfect organisational structure. All you can do is to find a structure that works best for the current situation, but you need to be prepared to make changes if your organisation's current stage of development requires it.

> keep pull request comments professional

Actually, this struck me as purely a "remember who you're talking to" problem - the team were used to a more aggressive level of language than the new hire was, so what should've happened is that the team should've learned to make the same strength of point with less aggressive words and the new hire should've worked to take aggressive words less to heart. Being as I'm a blunt bastard, I've been through this a fair few times with employees and contributors.

This is not a gendered problem, this is a 'loud brash people' versus 'quieter nicer people' problem. The reason people try and make it gendered is because, at least on average from the people I've worked with, women are more likely to be 'quieter nicer people' - but the truth, honestly, is that rather than anti-women this is a 'no structured group exists to stand up for the quieter nicer men so they go unnoticed' situation.

I've had to unpick these issues with all combinations of people.

> have management review reverts

Actually, just having a manager take him aside and say "dude, you're being a dick and either you stop it right fucking now or there will be consequences that you're really not going to enjoy" should be sufficient. Shadowcat is a relatively flat org but we have just enough hierarchy that there are people who can absolutely do that.

Sadly, the article goes back to the founder's wife problem (which, omgwtf, but that's been analyzed to death upthread) so we don't know whether it was reported (of course, dependending on who she'd've needed to report it to, that may've been difficult ...)

I don't think it matters whether it was reported. Unless the founder gives his wife an explicit role and tells employees where he ends and she beings, it's fair to assume that low-level employees are going to assume he is fully aware of her interactions, and she is acting as his right hand.

I realize that's a lot of assumptions, but that's why the founder needs to get out in front of these things and make them explicit.

I was addressing everything except the founder's wife problem; you're in the wrong thread.

The above was early morning crankiness but I really wasn't talking about that, I was talking about the other failures.

The point is, in the lean management organization you don't really have someone to take you aside and tell you to stop being a dick.

This is especially problematic when trying to overcome culturally calcified gender discrimination. What you're describing as being a "blunt bastard" could very well come off as male-privileged locker room talk. In the sports world there have been numerous attempts to contort locker room talk as somehow gender neutral, just a function of personality, some women talk that way, not all men do, and so forth. These arguments miss the forest for the trees: there does exist a culture of male privilege that is overwhelmingly less welcoming to women.

But how do we distinguish between this possibility, and the possibility that we are treating women as delicate flowers who can't deal with 'bad words' or blunt criticism?

In the Victorian era, until relatively recent times, men were expected to refrain from swearing or discussing 'serious' subjects such as war or politics when 'ladies were present'.

The usage (or not) of blunt words of criticism or profanity in informal company documents (e.g. code comments, pull requests) isn't necessarily a gendered thing. It speaks to the company's culture, but it nevertheless feels like a step backward to suggest the corporate equivalent of "gentlemen need to mind their language when ladies are around".

theorique, it's like asking whether complimenting someone passing on the street is a nice sweet thing to do or outrageously sexist. You could come up with rationalizations either way. But it's ultimately about the environment that it creates and how women (or minorities) feel in it. And that's up to the women, not the dudes rationalizing the status quo.

> These arguments miss the forest for the trees: there does exist a culture of male privilege that is overwhelmingly less welcoming to women.

Where there are problems that affect both genders, they should be tackled as that - treating a 'loud people' versus 'quiet people' problem as a male privilege problem is unbelievably problematic since it plays into the 'women just can't cope with men being honest' bullshit, and ignores the fact that men can be quiet and women can be loud. This devalues women's contributions and effectively silences discourse about how to deal with quiet men and loud women (and in this tale the latter was a big part of the problem), and basically is a net negative for everybody except the loud men, thereby reinforcing gender role designations and privilege structures.

> What you're describing as being a "blunt bastard" could very well come off as male-privileged locker room talk.

And in that case, once again, I've failed at "remember who you're talking to". The manner in which I LART somebody if it's necessary is tailored to the person, because people are all different.

> The point is, in the lean management organization you don't really have someone to take you aside and tell you to stop being a dick.

Given that Shadowcat has next to no hierarchy and yet we do have somebody - me - I'm not entirely sure how to respond to that except perhaps to say 'oh, bother' and disappear in a puff of logic.

You're bending over backwards to avoid admitting sexism exists in tech. That's like saying both men and women engage in locker room talk, so there's no sexism in professional sports and in fact it's sexist to imply that women can't handle locker room talk. We've heard that one before.

> You're bending over backwards to avoid admitting sexism exists in tech.

I'm saying that sometimes the answer is to remember that people are different full stop rather than jump straight to gender as the key difference, which may give you a mistaken analysis of the problem. If you have a situation that disadvantages quiet nice people and most of your quiet nice people are women, this results in negative outcomes for women but the best path to a solution is to figure out how to fix it for -all- quiet nice people.

I've made no claim either way in this thread so far as to whether sexism exists in tech - what I've done is to point out certain things that were cultural/management fuckups in general rather than specifically sexist, and to suggest that calling them what they are will make them easier to fix. It seems reasonably likely to be true that the origin of the bias against 'quiet nice people' comes out of gender roles, but that which is sanely classifiable as structural sexism at an institutional and cultural level by the time it manifests at the ground level is hurting everybody holding those personality traits and is therefore best dealt with as it is.

Or: Patriarchy theory is a useful analysis tool but I'm damned if I'm going to try and teach it to everybody if I can get results at least as effective much more quickly by making them realise they're being an asshole to nice people.

Honestly, I would rate the probability as pretty high that the culture also has a sexism problem, and that there will be plenty of issues that are best addressed in those terms, but that's orthogonal to the point I was trying to make.

This is not a gendered problem, this is a 'loud brash people' versus 'quieter nicer people' problem

It's my hope that having a more diverse workplace will help the "quiet nice people" with and without Y chromosomes.

Diversity exists on many axis, and personality types are an important form of it just as much as gender is.

I find your use of 'more diverse' to mean 'more gender balanced' distasteful, because privileging gender roles as important like that is a huge part of the problem.

You misinterpret what I mean and find it distasteful? I am overcome with apathy.

If that wasn't what you meant then your original comment could've been reduced to "I agree".

I think the article you mention is Ben Horowitz's blog on 'How to Minimize Politics in Your Company'[1]. It's a great read and also has advice for CEOs dealing with disputes between executives.

[1] http://www.bhorowitz.com/how_to_minimize_politics_in_your_co...

I've always been broadly under the impression that the HR department was a waste of air, but I suppose conflict resolution is perhaps something they'd be useful for.

...maybe.

HR, legal, finance and IT are all unpopular for the same reason: it's part of their job to stop you doing things that may get the company in trouble later.

Of course, this means they may be at times too conservative in the interests of having an easy life. Doesn't mean they're not useful at all.

I find myself almost perpetually annoyed by the bureaucratic arms of big organisations, HR and IT in particular, but what you've written is, in my view, a (terrible ;-)) truth.

I think a balance of conservative and progressive opinion is required for almost any organisation to operate effectively: (genunie) progressives drive us forward, and (genuine) conservatives stop us going over the cliff - it is pretty much as simple as that. Unfortunately, finding the appropriate balance for any particular situation can be extremely tricky, so largely we get it wrong, and just stumble along, grumbling to ourselves about how stupid and ineffective everything is.

On the assumption that there are genuine problems within Github, hopefully this situation will at least give them a chance to engage in a bit of rebalancing, and find a more sustainable path for their future. This is, of course, the problem of solving problems by trial and error - you have to deal with the errors, and in cases like this the errors can be quite painful for the people involved.

My takeaway is that the most important aspect is process. Conservative or progressive may be less important (although it is probably easier to come up with a conservative process that is workable, simply because that's where the hive-mind will be). But if you don't even have documented process, you won't even be able to know where the problems really are when they arise.

IT isn't unpopular when done right. IT exists to help people get shit done, and they need to explain clearly when they can't why they can't. And can't better have a business reason (higher priorities, funding channeled elsewhere, etc.).

The problem with legal is that the safe position is always "no". So, finding legal who understands that businesses sometimes have to take a risk, and we need to know if this is "illegal" as opposed to "inadvisable, because it's going to cost money" as opposed to "inadvisable, because it might cost money but might be worth the payoff" is not easy.

HR is simply useless. It's only useful tasks are all effectively part of "legal". It can't make useful decisions on hiring and actually gets in the way. Any employee with a genuine grievance knows that HR is the companies rep, not yours. Oh, and they generally have access to a whole bunch of things that stir up hideous amounts of politics (salaries, reviews, promotions, etc.) So, what's left that's useful? Nothing.

At my previous job I thought the same thing. They didn't stop people being bullied by superiors and basically did nothing but exit interviews and layoffs. The entire company was really dysfunctional. At my current job HR is _supremely_ competent. The entire organization is more functional and a joy to work for. I think there are subtle but significant effects when people know that it is not okay to behave in a bullying or discriminatory manner because HR takes those things seriously.

The main job of HR is prevent the company from entering lawsuits with (former) employees. Anything else is just window dressing. Most HR organizations like to act like they are an impartial judge in conflict situations, but they're on the company payroll after all.

So while for a single employee HR might seem like a waste of air, it's elementary for any business with a reasonable number of employees.

Well there is also a whole bunch of really boring mundane tasks that take a lot of time, such as setting up and supporting health insurance plans, getting people into various directories, organizing the interviews, etc etc. I may look down on HR at times but boy am I glad we have them to do these things.

While you are right to note that the person signing your checks holds many of the strings, it is also true that each employee is an autonomous unit with values that they live by and advocate for, resources that they control and steward, and a contract for value exchanged.

An HR department absolutely works to protect the company, but a good HR department will also work to protect the employees, because in the long view that is also beneficial to the company. And many HR people who I've talked to specifically enjoy their jobs because they like working to make employees lives better. Where their directives conflict with that they will try to fight the directives.

Certainly in some cases where there is a unresolvable conflict between employee and employer, HR will work against the employee. But for a good HR department those situations should be very few. A good HR department will be able to project forward into a long enough view that they can find ways to move forward amicably that protect both the employee and the employer, to everyone's benefit.

Past a certain size, it's nice to have an HR professional managing the company's treatment of its employees. It's also nice to have a third party/person available for conflict management.

HR is worthless until the day they become invaluable.

> "Oh, okay, I'll talk to him and make sure it stops."

Can I come live in your world where everything is solved by a quick talk.

Lots of problems can be stopped from escalating by a quick chat before. The goal is to stop the small problems before they become big ones.

No, you're not going to solve completely toxic situations, but you could slow them down so they could be managed. You want to know about issues before they hit the front page of Techcrunch. Regardless of what happened, it is clear that GitHub didn't manage this situation well.

Seems straight forward to me: "stop this shit or you're fired".

You should first ask for an explanation and justification of the so far alledged misbehavior. You could accuse and threat someone on false claims. If the person fails to provide a valid explanation and justification the demonstration of the existance of a problem will have been made by itself. No need the explicitly threat anyone. Threatening should be done only in phase 2 after the problem as been acertained by both parties and the person has failed to correct what could have been a simple misunderstanding or an accident.

A lot of problems can be solved (or prevented) by a talk at the right moment.

It's supposed to be part the of the skill set of those people called "managers". You know, the people we don't need. Until we do.

When a line manager decides to make sure an employee stops doing something, it's actually several conversations:

1. A friendly conversation in which the manager points out the problem, establishes that they expect it to stop, but that if it stops immediately it'll all be forgotten.

2. A less friendly conversation in which the manager says I thought we were clear that you aren't supposed to do it. You're still doing it, WTF? Depending on the problem maybe the employee has some reason/excuse and you need to do something to help them with it/remove it as an excuse.

If the employee is the cynical type, the aim is to establish that while you have an incentive to keep him (because you want good employees on your team), now you've taken a stance on his behaviour, letting him walk all over you would harm your reputation as a competent manager, so the incentive to keep him isn't the only one.

3. A conversation where you tell them you've started the ball rolling on getting rid of them. It's nothing personal, but the employee's actions mean your hands are tied. You've already cleared it with political allies they have at the company who could stop it. Here are the numbers of some recruiters if they'd prefer to jump before they're pushed.

4. A conversation where they are fired.

Most of what you say is good, but...

You've already cleared it with political allies they have at the company who could stop it.

If I found out that a manager was undermining me in this way, I'd strike back and it probably wouldn't be good for me or him. Trying to turn my friends against me? That's war. I'd fuck him up and I'd keep fucking him up after the end of that job.

Letting an employee go isn't personal. Reaching out to his "political allies" to undermine him is personal. If you want me off your team, I'll leave. If you try to stop a transfer by corrupting people who like me, then I'm going to fuck up your shit, and it's totally personal.

All that said, no organization should be in a state where a truly toxic person can be protected by having a political power base. If you can't fire someone who's genuinely causing problems (e.g. harassment) without bringing that person's political power base into the equation, you have a dysfunctional organization.

This sort of thing is why companies should fire fast and be generous with severance instead of writing dishonest "performance improvement plans" that essentially mean an already-fired employee gets a month to come in to the office and still wreak havoc. It's better to err on the side of a bad employee getting an "undeserved" severance package than to have "walking dead" employees pissing all over morale. Once it's clear that the only move is to fire someone, it's best to do it quickly. Severance (enough to cover a typical job search) is actually very cheap when you consider the risk and misery (for the manager and team) involved in a PIP or paper trail.

  If I found out that a manager was undermining me in this 
  way, I'd strike back and it probably wouldn't be good for 
  me or him.

Allow me to clarify: Before you make a threat (such as to fire someone) you need to make sure the threat is credible.

This is for exactly the reason you say: If you openly try but fail to get rid of someone, they may take it personally and try to "fuck up your shit".

If there's someone who can stop your threat (e.g. the employee is buddies with your boss) you go to that someone, lay out the problem and what you see as the options for solving it, and ask them for their advice. This advice will either be "go ahead" or "I'll take care of it"; in the latter case you should allow some time for them to take care of it.

My point is that you should never threaten to fire someone. Once the decision is made, you should do it.

Yes, this means you'll have to pay a severance because there is no paper trail. A typical severance (enough to cover the expected length of a job search) is a small cost, considering what you're getting in the deal: non-litigation, non-disparagement, minimal drama, and the employee moved out the same day.

Yes, if your legislative environment and HR department will let you fire someone without going through written warnings and improvement plans, I agree that sounds easier than inviting them to start looking for another job.

I think you're likely speaking from different societal/legal models of employment. Here in the states, when you're ready to fire someone, you fire them. Unless you're dealing with a union. Then there are 10 additional steps.

That's not necessarily true if you want to minimize your exposure to an employment discrimination suit - often, you would want to have evidence that you gave the employee in question ample opportunity to improve. E.g. it helps the employer's position if they have regular performance reviews and those reviews reflect inadequate performance.

it's not a threat, it's a progression

as a manager, the conversations go like this:

1 - please (do/don't do) X. Hopefully this takes care of things.

2 - I said (do/don't do) X. why the fuck are you (not doing / doing) X. Now I'm unhappy, but again, hopefully this is the end of things and the employee starts doing / not doing X.

3 - (and this is what parent was talking about; I now have an employee refusing to do what I said and not providing good reasons for said refusal.) Now the conversation is: do / don't do X again and you're fired.

it isn't a decision, it's laying out consequences. Now, between steps 2 and 3, when I become aware of the doing or not doing X, I'm now moving on to the point where I have to give pretty blunt orders. I'm going to make sure my boss and potentially a peer or two, depending on which teams this employee works for, are aware of the situation and are ok with what will happen; I think that's what michaelt is talking about. There's also, obviously, a query for extenuating circumstances that they are but I am not aware of.

Regarding conversation number 3. Why give a hostile employee time to retaliate? Just give them the choice of resigning or being fired, but make both effective immediately.

GOT fans will remember Ned Stark made a similar mistake.

A) If you push people to make a choice immediately, they may out of emotion make a choice (firing) that is more costly for you.

B) The whole point of conversation 3 is that it's true; by this point, you need to know for sure that the political situation is under your control. To go even more GOT on this - Ned bargained as if he were in a position of strength, when his position was in fact very shaky.

Ben Horowitz "How to Minimize Politics in Your Company"

http://www.bhorowitz.com/how_to_minimize_politics_in_your_co...

Great article and very relevant here.

Regarding that article, it's a few entries down on HN's front page (March 16th): http://www.bhorowitz.com/how_to_minimize_politics_in_your_co... lol

I think, realistically, a spouse of a founder might be very involved in a company and decision making. Depending on the exact nature of the relationship, this is probably inevitable, very common, and not necessarily undesirable. There is a reason we give the president's wife a special title even though technically no one voted for her, many married couples are a team in the professional arena as well.

Oh no, no no no. Your life partner is there to support you, personally, through the difficulty of starting and growing a business (if you're lucky.) They should listen to you and maybe even give you some gentle advice. But when they show up at work and start meddling, there's no way that will go well.

Why would you even want that? It can't be good for the organization--because they are outside the normal chain of command and thus not really accountable for their actions, and because they have power not earned through an objective process--and it can't be good for your relationship. Just don't do it.

Depending upon corporate structure and legal jurisdiction, certain funding streams (loans, lines of credit, guarantees) WILL require both the founder and their spouse to sign on the dotted line. This places the spouse on the financial hook as much as the founder, preventing the squirreling away of assets out of reach of creditors. It also makes the spouse a "silent" investor in the company.

I have only seen this a couple times. In both cases, the corporate structures were LLCs, and the amounts were over a million.

Those last two sentences are great.

This is a really weird issue. Why is she making a big public splash without naming names?

> "And it seems like every single one of these problems could have been solved by a halfway competent manager."

One of the hazards of un-management

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