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Comment by hrktb | Hacker News Reader

This statement has more meaning that you are willing to concede.

If they are starting now to investigate, it means that when troubles were occuring, or even when Julia H. gave her demission, they didn't care enough to investigate thoroughly (perhaps they have other priorities, that's just a fact).

This in itself is not good looking, and I feel that from there whatever really happened, they won't have the full version anymore (one of the party is already out) and they will have a huge incentive to go into damage control mode instead of genuinely trying to make the situation better for both parties. Especially, the more they do, the worse their image would be on the PR front ( I hope they do whatever is fair anyway, but the balance is tipped).

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Chris took over the role as GitHub's CEO from Tom at the end of January. Given the timeline in the TechCrunch article, these events unfolded under the previous CEO's tenure so it would be appropriate to reinvestigate the claims independently of any previous findings.

Hogwash. Companies always say they will open an investigation. In the least, it buys a little time for the story to die down and the next big stories to hit the media cycle.

The tech industry tends to be a bit more long memory minded than most. I still haven't purchased a Sony product since the CDs with malware incident a long time ago. Though I still work with MS technology, and use their products in the workplace, I've been slowly able to replace their products in my life and this is from decisions they made well over a decade ago.

I admit, I do care about things more than most. My workgroup, and much of the company I work for migrated to github enterprise (and a lot in github public) about a year ago. These kinds of things sour opinion. There are differences between a single bad actor/incident and a systemic problem in a toxic workplace. We don't really know what this is, but it was clearly more than at least one person was willing to put up with.

It's bound to be difficult working in an environment where 4:5 of your peers are the other gender. I worked in a couple of workplaces when I was younger where I was the only male. It was rather eye opening and sometimes uncomfortable to say the least.

Well, there is a lot of praise on cleverness of the statement, but I think people are pretty used to PR talk now. If the best they have now is a promise of an investigation, that's not the same as a "we are fully investigating the issue" (which I think is the most standard way to handle this kind of situation. Even if really nothing is done, stating that the investigation is ongoing is an easier stance.

Also, people might forget about the issue in 6 months, but the bad taste in the mouth we have now will stay attached to the brand. The best move IMO would be to come 'clean' as soon as possible, and let the hype die down from there, provided they are OK with doing the right thing, whatever it might be.

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