Results of the GitHub Investigation | Hacker News Reader

Results of the GitHub Investigation

github.com

739 pointsdanielsju6479 comments

"We didn't do anything illegal, or that would leave us vulnerable to a lawsuit" is about the only content that this blog post contains.

While Horvath characterized much of her woes as being gender-related [1], the investigation could have classified most of them as either unprovable or terrible-but-not-provably-sexist (in particular, the behavior of the Preston-Werners).

I doubt it will ever be clear what actually happened. Theresa Preston-Werner's response [2] spends more time avoiding topics than actually covering them. Tom Preston-Werner likewise [3] makes sure to reinforce the fact that GitHub is immune to lawsuit while providing no real details. I'm sure there are plenty of GitHub employees who have a strong opinion, but enough of them seem to have an ax to grind in one way or another that it's hard to trust that testimony.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/15/julie-ann-horvath-describes...

[2] https://medium.com/p/2fe173c44215

[3] http://tom.preston-werner.com/2014/04/21/farewell-github-hel...

You're right. It will never be clear what actually happened. I think Internet message boards create the perception that outcomes like that are rare. They're not: they're the norm. That's how it's supposed to be. We don't get to know everything and we need to work within the limits of our knowledge.

The only problem for GitHub now is finding a way to attract talent. If your best response to

"You have a hostile work environment."

"We don't have a provably illegal hostile work environment."

then that doesn't inspire great confidence when evaluating it as a place to work.

I can make that same accusation at any company you can think of, and the best response they could hope to give is "no, we aren't a bad place to work."

But does anyone actually think Github has a hostile work environment? There is a difference between misunderstanding and systemic hostility.

I would submit that at least one person thought it was a hostile work environment.

At every company in the world you can find at least one person who hates their job or has problems with their coworkers. I'm not sure they are the person you go to for a fair opinion.

> the investigator did find evidence of mistakes and errors of judgment.

GitHub isn't denying that there were problems and isn't claiming that her story is a complete fabrication. They merely said they don't believe they will lose a lawsuit over it. If anything, they validated that her opinion was fair

If you read Theresa Preston-Werner's post (linked above), she claims that the "mistakes and errors of judgment" were completely unrelated to the harassment story, but were discovered during the harassment investigation.

That's Theresa's claim (if we are going to play he-said-she-said we might as well be consistent). The official response does not suggest that the errors of judgment were unrelated to the subject at hand

What makes Horvath's claim have any more bearing than Theresa's? What happened to "innocent until proven guilty"?

A priori, Horvath's claim has no more bearing than Theresa's. That part is very clear and it takes a very strained interpretation of my words to conclude I automatically assumed Horvath was correct.

My first comment was in response to onewaystreet's comment "At every company in the world you can find at least one person who hates their job or has problems with their coworkers. I'm not sure they are the person you go to for a fair opinion." The statement seems to imply that it was sour grapes and not an actual systemic problem that led to this situation. My response was that Github's official response admitted that there were problems (explicitly, mind you) but they believed they would win a legal case if it came to it.

My second comment was in response to kelnos's comment 'If you read Theresa Preston-Werner's post (linked above), she claims that the "mistakes and errors of judgment" were completely unrelated to the harassment story, but were discovered during the harassment investigation.' That comment gave Theresa's story much more credibility than Horvath's. Now, this would be a standard he-said-she-said were it not for the fact that Github's reply doesn't refute Horvath's allegations. In fact, Github's reply implicitly refutes Theresa's claim: after all, if what she were saying is true, the official response would have made it clear that the investigation uncovered issues unrelated to the situation at hand.

> if what she were saying is true, the official response would have made it clear that the investigation uncovered issues unrelated to the situation at hand.

That is not obvious, and I think it is impossible for us to figure out why the PR agency/HR/management/investors/lawyers that crafted this statement was not more specific and what it means that they did not say something. Only reading the report itself or getting a full summary of it can help with that.

They also don't say anything about the Preston-Werner's suppression of the truth about the moon landings.

The official response doesn't say anything about the errors of judgment being related or unrelated.

That's a good point, though: from our perspective it is still just he-said/she-said (er, she-said/she-said), and I guess it will always be. I guess it just depends on who we (individually) feel is more credible.

Based on Hovarth's public behavior, I'm not feeling too great about her story...

Because tech companies have never followed any significant rules regarding employment, most tech companies are de facto hostile work environments, even if they try not to, because of the behavior of individuals toward each other. There's a culture that is changing, if slowly, but this is basically always the case.

IMO what it means is that people should work extra hard not to contribute to a hostile work environment, or expect to be perceived as contributing to a hostile work environment at randomly unpredictable points in their lifetime.

I think a lot of people do.

I believe they hired HR and put new policies in place. Chances are this incident will make it a better place to work than before.

True. Chances are also that our collective estimate of how great a place it is to work at are now more accurate.

That probably says more about the mythological status they had before than about the reality now, but it of course will have an impact on their ability to hire though.

It also should have, and it's normal, and it's how startups turn into big-corps, and that's just the way things are.

The sad truth about culture is that a sustainable culture will feel much more like your parents home than your college dorm; and that will never change... because it's a good thing.

"The sad truth about culture is that a sustainable culture will feel much more like your parents home than your college dorm; and that will never change... because it's a good thing."

That is the single best line I've read about work culture in software companies in......ever.

This does depend on how dysfunctional your parents' marriage was. Though, I suppose a marriage in which both partners feel trapped is sustainably dysfunctional in that it won't end.

And this speaks, in many ways, to the purpose of HR. It's not good enough to say "We don't think we have a hostile work environment", or "Asking around seems to show that we don't have a hostile work environment". You need to be able to say: "Here's why there is no way we can have a hostile work environment, and how we're taking action to ensure we don't". Part of it is policies, part of it documentation of events, part of it is ensuring that employees feel they have a way to resolve situations.

I read Github's statement as: "We don't really have any evidence of anything, so we're not going to say anything because we might get sued by one of the involved parties." That situation isn't a good one to be in (and letting an organization get into that situation is serious negligence on the part of leadership).

> You need to be able to say: "Here's why there is no way we can have a hostile work environment, and how we're taking action to ensure we don't". Part of it is policies, part of it documentation of events, part of it is ensuring that employees feel they have a way to resolve situations.

I'm skeptical. The fact that there is a documented procedure isn't nothing, but it's not that much more than that. I suspect if I went back and counted, a strong plurality of the "I worked in a hostile male environment" accounts I've read occurred in companies with HR departments and explicit sexual harassment policies- GitHub was pretty unique. I've worked in ten-person companies with an HR person.

What an HR department does is make sure management doesn't get sued. The culture of the company isn't something they can control by fiat.

HR is a dangerous force like that, you bring it in to prevent discrimination, and before long it exists only to hold open the door and collect signatures for anyone who registers a complaint.

news flash: 80% off work environments are hostile.

Followup: that statistic is 75% made-up.

The best talent probably won't be so quick/shallow/naive to pass judgment so quickly.

It probably will challenge their recruitment of women though.

So "women" and "best talent" are mutually exclusive? Classy.

That was absolutely not my implication - that is an incredibly dishonest commentary on my post.

It's probably not what you meant to say, but it is a plausible reading of the actual text - it's just a slightly awkward phrasing that appears to say 'the best talent won't care, but women might' which casts them as disjoint groups.

I cannot believe the over-sensitive linguistically challenged group that must be downvoting that. Boy, doesn't it suck to know that sometimes words join together to have meanings and occasionally it includes one you weren't thinking of? Best approach is to say 'oh oops, I didn't mean that' and learn to construct your sentences better for next time. Worst approach is to deny that it could have meant that and learn nothing.

The "best talent" would probably rather work at a company without these kinds of allegations than at one with them. They might be unfounded, but why take the risk? If you're the "best talent," you've got a lot of other options.

This definitely does weigh into many people's consideration I think.

However, determining how people will decide when put to such a situation is difficult. Speaking personally, I would certainly be wary, but I'm not going to dismiss a potential employer outright over something I don't have the complete facts about over one story.

The best talent would rather work on interesting problems and products. The fact that there may be some wrongdoing happening in some far corner of the company that is almost personal between the parties involved should be so down the list of reasons to work at a company.

The answers to these questions are still true today:

* does github make a great product? yes. * does their product make software development and open-source better? yes * are there interesting problems to work on there? yes. * would I be working with very talented people there? yes. * based on what we know as facts or admitted to as facts, would taking a job at github subject me or people I care about to these injustices? AFAICT that's no more likely than at any other company comparable to github in terms of the benefits of working there. Anyone working at github is there at will. If they feel wronged, they can leave, which means I don't have to worry about people I care about being wronged.

The only way my mind would change on this is if I see a voluntary exodus of talent from github over what happened. Absent talent leaving in the current hiring market, we can only come to the conclusion that these wrongdoings were isolated and personal.

Let's keep an eye out for who has left since March 15th, 2014 or so and leaves over the next 3 months. Of that cohort, discount TPW, JAH and anyone who leaves to join TPW's new venture. With the remaining figures, then check if that churn rate for github is any higher than it would have been had this event never happened. If it is not, then this whole issue is pretty much irrelevant.

The problem is that every (large enough) company really does have issues like these, no matter where you go. And it's not that they should be ignored but what should be looked at is the infrastructure to resolve them.

They're hiring new HR people, GOOD. They're adding training for employees (probably much to the annoyance of those employees), good.

These means that it'll be easier to make the places safer and better for everyone. That's what I'd look at.

Interestingly enough, I'd say that smaller startups suffer from larger biases. Basically if the founders don't like you for some reason or another, you're in for shit. If a "CTO" who worked at the company since the beginning doesn't like you, you're fucked as well. And there's no HR to turn to.

I think it's not so much the allegations of a hostile work environment that would keep people away, it's the idea of working a company with ridiculous drama that looks like it came out of a bad high school movie. It indicates an unhealthy number of non-grown ups in positions of responsibility.

I'd say the fact the offending party no longer works at GitHub is reason enough to give them the benefit of the doubt. Of course if this happens again, I'm willing to revisit that opinion.

Shit does happen, regardless of the majority of one's coworkers best intentions.

If you want to know if GitHub is a hostile work environment according to women who work there, take a poll of current and past female employees, including Horvath.

I did. So far it's working out in GitHub's favour. But maybe I missed something, so do your own research.

That's interesting - want to give your numbers?

I would think, however, that any sort of reasonable minority calling it a "hostile work environment" would indicate a problem.

https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/458342995469688833

https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/458347143086870528

https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/458347574672388096

What a drama queen. Hard to take her seriously with these antics.

I love all the random people piling on as though they're intimate with the parties or facts involved, taking 140 characters as a single data point to pair with their prejudices to draw a line to a foregone conclusion. It's a very strange time in the course of human development.

Yes, this is a common rhetorical tactic used to dismiss the opinions of women when they address issues of sexism publicly. Thank you for demonstrating this disingenuous method of discourse so ably.

No, but denouncing everything as sexism is. Her issue is with another woman. That argument doesn't apply here. Unless you're suggesting that both me and the founder's wife are sexist.

That's not actually a response to my post, which is about polling female employees and not men.

In theory this sounds like a good idea but in the aftermath of such drama, most women will not speak up. They'll lie to protect themselves instead. It makes sense and is totally understandable. Most women are not like Julie, which is why we're hearing so much about it.

I think this can have positive outcomes for GitHub, if they allow it. And if Julie does. Right now we're just in the "public fighting" phase.

The best part is, 15% of GitHub's employees are women, and only 6 of them are developers. So you could actually do a really accurate survey with a small sample size!

Surely other women work there. Time will tell here, won't it? The story is dramatically more powerful if other women come forward. I don't know that it lessens things if others do not but it does create some interesting questions to those brave enough to ask them.

> The story is dramatically more powerful if other women come forward.

This is dangerous logic. The court of public opinion is a feedback loop. If an unconfirmed accusation gets no traction then the most hardcore wrongdoers will escape justice because everyone is too afraid to come forward. At the same time, if a confirmed accusation goes unquestioned then someone who has made a false or exaggerated accusation has a huge incentive to cajole friends into making confirmations that are also false or exaggerated, and the more false accusations are made the easier it is for the original accuser (or the likes of Nancy Grace) to convince others to make further false accusations.

That's why these issues are so contentious. Getting to the real truth is practically impossible because people form an opinion first and then produce evidence that comports with it, and that misleading evidence influences the opinions of others who do the same thing until the truth and the story have no relation to each other.

It's an issue where you have to choose between punishing a lot of innocent people (and increasing the power and thereby occurrence of false accusations) or allowing a lot of guilty people to escape punishment. There isn't a good answer, and that makes people angry -- especially if you're one of the innocent people who was punished or one of the victims of the guilty people who weren't.

If this is a true systemic problem, the next person better be sure to actually collect evidence/proof of what happened and then clearly present facts instead of resorting to histrionics.

If this whole thing were as bad as JAH has made it out to be, I would have imagined we would have already seen damning emails and other written correspondence backing up here allegations. As a company that doesn't most of its work asynchronously through written prose, it's not like github doesn't have oodles and oodles of written correspondence that would support her position better. There's email, pull requests, chat, etc. Given the duration of employment, she must have plenty of things to point at. If she didn't she should have made sure that some of the offending interactions were captured in written form at least once.

Can you show me a work environment that is not hostile to anyone?

Every work environment has hostilities. The only way they each differ is in who is the recipient of the hostilities, the degree of hostility present and if that hostility is illegal or not.

In that sense, the statement "We don't have a provably illegal hostile work environment" means exactly nothing, making Github no different than all the other workplaces you are evaluating.

There are three sides to every side of a story... TPW's side, JAH's side and the facts. Given that all we really know are TPW's side and JAH's side and that we have no real facts beyond admitted errors in judgement, we really have no more information upon which to base judgement than before. I know of no company in the world provably immune from errors in judgement, do you?

In other words, you and everyone else should evaluate github based on everything else you know about github and completely discount this entire debacle, since it has not shed light on anything that isn't as equally possible at every other company you may be considering.

> Can you show me a work environment that is not hostile to anyone?

That strikes me like saying that all sex is rape, it's just a matter of how violent or unwilling.

Thank you for contribution. I'm trying to figure out which of the common relevance fallacies it falls under if anyone can help? Here are the possible options as I see it.

* reductio ad absurdam

* red herring

* strawman

* non sequiter

Reductio ad absurdum is actually a completely legitimate method of argument. There is nothing fallacious about it whatsoever.

Thanks for that. Went ahead and googled "reductio ad absurdam vs strawman" to learn how the two differ and realized I erred including it in the list. Since the person I replied to either meant to replace my premise with one I do not hold or change the subject slightly, so it's either a strawman or a red herring.

RAA is actually viewed with some skepticism in some branches of logic (not so much because it is invalid but because it can be more easily misused in arguments where the underlying assumptions are not apparent). RAA is kind of analogous to the Axiom of Choice if you like — some logicians go out of their way to avoid it.

Not disagreeing with you, just raising a point.

Here's a relevant link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuitionistic_logic

Incidentally (a further parallel to the Axiom of Choice) Intuitionist Logic is also referred to as Constructive Logic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivist_mathematics

One branch of constructivist mathematics eschews the axiom of choice, and all do not allow proof of existence by RAA on non-existence.

I agree, with the exception of "that's how it's supposed to be." As defined by who? Knowing what happened and understanding why makes deciding on a resolution possible. The suggestion that keeping those things vague is somehow desirable is hard to fathom, unless your perspective is that of an abusive employer who doesn't want to have to change his or her practices.

Human interaction is not black and white (don't read into that). While this situation will never be totally transparent to the vast majority of us, the necessity of working within our limited knowledge does not imply our knowledge should necessarily be limited.

I like to call this outcome a "non-answer answer". Very common in the corporate world.

As a lawyer friend once told me regarding lawsuits: "People who hunger for the truth will go to bed hungry."

I think it's more "We didn't do anything illegal, but we're still firing one of our founders, so clearly something was wrong."

A loud public witch-hunt also counts as a Wrong Thing, so this doesn't really tell us much about what happened one way or the other.

TBH it sounds like nothing serious that was blown up big by certain news channels. Steve Jobs could "fire" employees for "fun" in elevator and people were OK with it. But when it comes to gender/racial issues - there is no coming back even if found free of charge. So the people didnt get along - who cares. The company is great, the work they done is great - why anyone should leave? If Ms Horvath didnt felt good in this company - there were thousands of ways to deal with the issues like talking directly to interested parties. And the last one was going to press with them.

For people to settle their differences like reasonable adults really isn't on the menu in the United States lately.

the investigation could have classified most of them as either unprovable or terrible-but-not-provably-sexist (in particular, the behavior of the Preston-Werners).

What would it benefit Github or the P-W husband/wife for the investigation report to have published such a thing? Why air your dirty laundry in public?

It's most likely that the company and its co-founder are on the same page, if only for damage control purposes. (Why break ranks and threaten your brand and stock price, after all?)

There may have been awkward and/or angry discussions in camera. Non-insiders are very unlikely to ever hear what went on in said discussions.

makes sure to reinforce the fact that GitHub is immune to lawsuit while providing no real details

Where is this mentioned?

This thing where people think that investigators you hired are "independent" and that their conclusions carry something similar to the weight of a court of law is ridiculous.

Going by the TC account (and taking the account there at face value) it sounds very much like bullying of an individual rather than anything gender-based. What's missing is why they got so paranoid about her as a potential troublemaker in the first place before they (allegedly) started handling it like chumps.

This story (unfortunately now dead on Hacker News) claims to fill in what's missing:

https://medium.com/p/d96f431f4e8e

Money quote:

Around the end of 2012, Julie started dating a close male friend of the cofounder’s wife and didn’t like that they were close. She asked them to stop being friends and when they would not end their relationship, Julie started telling coworkers that the wife had affairs and that the cofounder’s newborn child was not his. She told this to multiple coworkers directly and also to the wife through her boyfriend.

This is where the wife reached out to her and the rest of her story starts. All of Julie’s story involving the cofounder’s wife occurs only after Julie was spreading vicious rumors about him to even new employees.

Pretty obviously there was a second side to this story. Not at all surprised to read something like this, but it is sad.

I think its pretty telling that this an anonymous account and that no one is will to attach their name to the Medium post.

Not really. You'd have to be an idiot to attach your name to this given the shitstorm twitter would unleash upon you for questioning the narrative. No idea if it's true but in this environment anonymity is probably the default.

> the shitstorm twitter would unleash upon you

Not to mention the fact that, assuming the writer is indeed a Github employee, the fact that it would instantly place her at grave risk of losing her job.

If this person has proof (documentary, whatever) that their narrative is correct, they should step out from behind the easy cloak of anonymity and show it. Until then, they're really nothing more than a troll.

First feminists take a man's job. Then they taunt people who criticize them to use their real names. Yeah, I see where this is going.

Wow. Wait, what? How is this not more widely known?

If this were actually the 'truth' then you could be pretty sure some statements would have been made to implicitly discredit Julie-Ann.

It's also fairly meaningless since if you interpret this story as 'Julie-Ann started dating someone close to Theresa Preston-Werner who shared he slept with her and could even be the father of Tom's child and then refused to distance himself from Theresa; a sad state of affairs which Julie-Ann shared with some colleagues,' it immediately paints an entirely different picture.

Not really; even if that were the case, she still had no business sharing that with work colleagues.

Of course, if you doubt Horvath's story, what makes this one any more credible to you?

There is little to suggest to us that one account is more credible than the others. Our main take-away here should be uncertainty. We don't know what happened; we can only know what some people think happened. Considering other viewpoints, even anonymous viewpoints^, serves to highlight the inherently uncertain nature of the truth.

^ Non-anonymous viewpoints could perhaps be considered more trustworthy because there is the threat of a libel/slander lawsuit if they are complete fabrications. However on the other hand, all/most of the non-anonymous viewpoints that we have are the viewpoints of people directly involved in the scandal. We can assume that the anonymous viewpoint, if it is not a fabrication, is not from somebody involved in the scandal. However since they were not involved directly in it, it is also possible that they received an incomplete picture of everything... Everything is uncertain. I am reminded of the closing dialog to "Burn After Reading".

It's much closer to how people actually behave.

I don't think I could ever so narrowly define "how people actually behave," personally. I'm not even sure what you're implying the implausible behaviour in Horvath's account is.

> I don't think I could ever so narrowly define "how people actually behave," personally.

Really? I can. They behave messily and almost always with a keen eye towards advancing their own position, whatever it may be, rational, honest, or otherwise.

> I'm not even sure what you're implying the implausible behaviour in Horvath's account is.

The part where complex, multi-party, interactions are dramatic in the extreme, bad behavior is completely one-sided, and the entire situation ascribed to a simplistic (gender bias) narrative.

That never happens.

Putting the pieces together, what seems to make a more convincing narrative is that Howarth was a bully herself.

> The part where complex, multi-party, interactions are dramatic in the extreme, bad behavior is completely one-sided, and the entire situation ascribed to a simplistic (gender bias) narrative

I am incredibly curious how this doesn't describe the anon account much better than Horvath's, only changing 'gender bias' to 'relationship insanity.' Who has bad behaviour other than Horvath in that account? How is it not incredibly dramatic?

It reads like an episode of Jerry Springer.

Honestly, I found Horvath's account to be fairly implausible from the first time I read it. The kinds of things she alleged don't happen in a vacuum: if what she was saying was true, there should have been a lot of other instances of that sort of harassment, or at least indicators that something like that could happen. Horvath described some very extreme behaviors that just don't appear out of the blue.

The anonymous account just makes the whole store make a lot more sense.

The new Hacker News moderation team is more politically correct than it used to be. You can bet stories questioning tech-feminist narratives will be dead-ed as "non-constructive"

Pretty sure we haven't touched any of the several posts of that article. Users flagged them.

Edit: I checked. It was posted three times. First was deleted by the poster. Second was flag-killed by users. Third is still up but heavily flagged. No moderator touched any of them.

so the hn crowd is mostly pc. no surprises.

Actually the HN community is politically deeply divided. Complaints about its bias thus tend to contradict one another. For example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7630388 says much the opposite.

Many flags on political stories and flamewars come not from users with opposing politics but from users who, regardless of their politics, don't think HN is the place for them. It's a "pox on both their houses" thing.

There was a great report on BBC World Service about folks wrongly accused and/or convicted of crimes they didn't commit (in one case, a man was on death row for a couple years). A false accusation is as damaging as authorities not paying attention. The sad truth of the human experience is that without direct evidence (video, audio recordings), only the people close to it know how they saw what happened. It's then more important to redouble efforts to preserve justice by investigating thoroughly to attempt to uncover what happened, to not revictimize the wrong party.

I seem to recall another big fight between Github employees and Zed Shaw of Learn Python the Hard Way fame...perhaps that was a warning sign that HR policies needed to be brought up to snuff or even created in the 1st place...

This. Both Zed and JAH are difficult personalities, but a professional structure should be in place to handle matters which can distract people from work.

GitHub should have implemented a blocking mechanism to stop people inviting Zed to 'dick' projects, and if the rumour mongering story is true, HR should have stepped in and disciplined Horvath.

> GitHub should have implemented a blocking mechanism to stop people inviting Zed to 'dick' projects

They did: https://github.com/blog/862-block-the-bullies

They never admitted to it being a response to the incident with Zed, but the timing was too convenient. That blog post was dated 05/31/2011. Zed's commits to the repo in question happened on 05/28/2011: https://github.com/moron5/dongml/commit/f4b8df910e4048202768...

I'm still trying to figure out exactly what the sequence of events was there.

As best I've been able to work out, whatever juvenile oaf created the "dongml" repo added Shaw to it in order to harass him somehow, and Shaw responded by writing a script to constantly commit changes to the repo which essentially rendered it empty, which seems reasonable both as retaliation in that specific case, and for general reasons of good taste. Then, in response, Github added a feature so that the "dongml" infant could block Shaw.

Would anyone with closer to firsthand knowledge of the incident care to let me know whether I'm on the warm side or the cold?

You're close. Someone added Zed to the dongml repo just to be annoying, and Zed removed himself. But the inviter just added him again, and Zed complained that there isn't any sort of confirmation to indicate, "yes, I'd like to be part of this project," so people can add you against your will, which happened repeatedly to Zed with dongml. Eventually, Zed retaliated with his commit bot, and github apparently looked at that situation and decided that it would be best if they added a feature that let you block other users. However, the idea wasn't that dongml would block Zed's malicious commits, it was that Zed would be able to block the person that kept adding him to dongml. In other words, the github feature wasn't to prevent Zed's malicious checkins directly, but rather block the behavior that annoyed him into making them in the first place.

Zed wrote up a long blog post telling the whole story but I think it's been deleted since.

> Zed wrote up a long blog post telling the whole story but I think it's been deleted since.

The internet has a way of unshutting the whole thing up: https://web.archive.org/web/20130117043748/http://sheddingbi...

and the followup https://web.archive.org/web/20120619005253/http://sheddingbi...

Ah. Judging from the followup, and Zed seemed to be satisfied, I think I was wrong about GutHub: they handled this very well.

Ah. I think I read about it before they'd done that. Thanks for the update.

I don't think a fight between zed shaw and anybody signifies anything. Zed likes to fight.

Zed will standup to anyone being a fuckwit - big difference. Has naught to do with liking conflict.

well, a co-founder was pressured or embarrassed into resigning, no? that's not a lawsuit, sure, or even a firing, but it's certainly a big deal.

Certainly, if it was a case of the guy getting pressured to leave, one could make the case that the company recognized that they had a problem and tried to get rid of said problem in the way that was least likely to get them sued, by asking someone to resign. And really, if you are an executive, and are asked to resign, what are you gonna do? You're gonna resign, and try to make it seem like a voluntary thing. Even if everyone knows you actually got your ass fired, it shows that you are the sort of executive who will play the game and not take down the rest of the company if you get in trouble.

Don't forget this link, the anonymous GitHub employee response to Horvath's claims: "Facts Conveniently Withheld".

https://medium.com/p/d96f431f4e8e

And here's Theresa Preston-Werners side of the story:

What every founder fears - https://medium.com/p/2fe173c44215

Despite, being found not guilty of the harassment accusations, questions popped up regarding Tom’s judgment in a separate area. We learned that unnamed employees felt pressured by Tom and me to work pro-bono for my nonprofit.

The whole issue wasn't merely (the alleged) harassment as much as it was the appearance of 'undue influence'. The admission that GitHub forced out the co-founder for this very reason--all the while stepping clear of the topic of sexual harassment--is basically the crux of the matter.

To be honest, the entire problem IMO was always with the wife, Theresa Preston-Werner. She should have known better and I think it comes from her lack of professional experience in the workforce.

FULL explanation: It comes down to the unrestricted access that was granted. It introduces a person with extreme power but carries no responsibility with regards to work or culture. The end result is what we have today. This type of culture is actually very prevalent in asian companies (where families have unrestricted access) and have been demonstrated to be extremely detrimental. Theresa Preston-Werner blog post is extremely telling where she says "I have many close friends at GitHub, and I certainly had reached out to them when I began to build my company". My wife made the same mistake at her first job (trying too hard to be friends), except that she was an individual contributor and not the wife of the CEO. Her co-workers could just tell her off and she quickly learned the balances that were necessary. It's obvious that Theresa had no experience of this kind and had too much power for people to say "no".

I want to add, I think there was an overfocus on gender issues by all parties (victims, plantiffs, media & company) in the first place. When I read the original article, I felt that regardless of the incident, Julie Ann Horvath was just pulling out the gender card. This was a mistake since it gave Github an easy way out to simply deny the gender-based accusations without any wrong doing.

Let's not go there. Incorporating random anonymous posts will only make things worse.

For all we know Julie-Ann started dating someone close to Theresa Preston-Werner who shared that he, and several others, slept with her and could even be the father of Tom's child and then refused to distance himself from Theresa. When she shared this sad state of affairs in her private love life with some colleagues she was suddenly requested to meet with Theresa and....

See how that's both consistent and perfectly plausible yet still went from bad to worse pretty quickly? These things are messy enough as they are; let's not make them any messier than they need to be.

>if Julie wants to share this story so publicly then everyone should at least have all of the story

the whole thing is crass and distasteful to my british sensibilities, but if this the future of how conflict in internet corporations is represented, then we shouldn't be surprised to see allegations from all sides. The key skills that we as audience have to develop is critical thinking, impartiality and a good sense of decency.

we shouldn't be surprised to see allegations from all sides.

The line is drawn at "anonymous internet sources". At least in the sense of euclidean geometry, that is not a "side" of the argument as much as it is a literary device to create an infinite attack surface.

We shouldn't be surprised, still, but we should be more on our guard when looking at the sources from any angle.

Since you don't have a means of contact in your profile, I'm just going to tell you directly. That was an incredible turn of phrase. Really nicely said.

Anyone speaking against Horvath would be publicly attacked, and GitHub employees aren't allowed to speak of the matter. Unfortunately anonymity is the only option.

Is a source any more reputable just because it's not anonymous?

Yes.

A named or pseudonymous source necessarily has an associated reputation, but an anonymous source has no reputation at all.

A reputation for lying is stronger evidence that the information might be false than is no reputation at all.

Not really...

Even taking all emotion out of it, a story from a source that is probably a lie convey s more emotion than a story from a completely unknown source.

I disagree. We must treat every anonymous source as if it has that reputation for lying, as otherwise a source can simply become anonymous to improve the credibility of their lies.

Until, of course, a source presents evidence, at which point we evaluate the credibility of the evidence instead of the source.

Maybe not by definition, but it's almost irrelevant because a not anonymous source is so much easier to verify / disprove. Sure, in theory an anonymous source could be 100% accurate, but since they are very tricky to back up, they almost always have the effect of stirring the pot without resolving anything, and thus quite often appear as nothing more than attempts to do just that. And after a while, people unsurprisingly start to treat them as such.

Well, certainly it's significantly more credible if it's an actual Github employee putting their name on it and standing behind that sort of statement. At least in that case you would hope that the possible repercussions of making such a bold lie would prevent most people from lying about something like that.

How about it being true? You still want to ignore that? Or are you too biased?

Have there been any confirmation this is actually a Github employee? Because as far as we know, this could just as well be a troll.

I sort of feel that if this anonymous posting was 100% accurate, then the cofounder wouldn't have resigned. Better if the people involved came out and told the truth.

If his statement is to be believed then his resignation did actually have nothing to do with JAH's allegations. I'm not saying that anyone is lying here, just that the anon posting is plausible. I agree with you that it would be better if everyone just told the truth.

I agree with you that it would be better if everyone just told the truth.

Out of the mouths of babes...

Not necessarily. Even if Horvath was the original bully, inappropriate retaliation can still get you fired.

Also, it may have come out in the investigation that the founder gave his non-employee wife way too much inappropriate latitude inside the company. She's conceded that she went too far with her activism around her startup. But especially if she crossed boundaries and had inappropriate access to private company information (as Horvath said she claimed), the founder could take the fall for enabling that.

She's conceded that she went too far with her activism around her startup.

That's a nice way of putting it.

I doubt there will ever be any clear explanation on what happened. Two sides of the story basically tell two different stories. As someone mentioned in the post, Julie posted some tweets in response to Github's announcement today. (https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore)

1. Bullying someone into quitting: Illegal.

2. Asking an employee to relay private conversations between her and her partner: Illegal.

3. Justifying the harassment of an employee because of her personal relationships: Pathetic.

4. How does it feel to make money for liars and cowards?

5. Pushing women with strong opinions out of your company because they disagree with you is wrong.

6. What number am I on? Oh yea, how do you sleep at night?

7. Leaving GitHub was the best decision of my life.

8. There was no investigation.

9. There was a series of conversations with a "mediator" who sought to relieve GitHub of any legal responsibility.

10. Whose reasoning included "would it surprise you to hear that [your harasser] was well-liked?"

11. No, no it would not.

12. Women at GitHub who sprang forward to defend the men who harassed me, it is naive to think the same thing cannot and will not happen to you.

13. Best of luck rolling the dice.

14. A company can never own you. They can't tell you who to fuck or not fuck. And they can't take away your voice.

15. Unless you let them.

16. Hmmm still no mention of the man who bullied me out of our code base because I wouldn't fuck him. Too popular to be accountable, I guess.

Yeah...sometimes Twitter just isn't the best place to make a cogent argument:

> 1. Bullying someone into quitting: Illegal.

If that bullying falls under the legal definition of harassment, then yes, it is illegal. But that's kind of begging the question a bit (e.g. Bullying someone is illegal because it is harassment). The thing is, some/much what Horvath described was assuredly captured in electronic records. If she believes something is illegal, and she is not afraid of speaking out, she should take the next step and file a lawsuit.

> 2. Asking an employee to relay private conversations between her and her partner: Illegal.

OK not sure what that refers to. Again, Twitter is not great for these things.

> 3. Justifying the harassment of an employee because of her personal relationships: Pathetic.

Who justified what?

> 4. How does it feel to make money for liars and cowards?

OK and then the rest of this seems like free association. I agree that a third-party investigation instigated by the accused is not automatically the truth, but neither are accusations. The word illegal has real meaning and if Horvath has the proof, then let's see it, rather than have a TechCrunch retelling be the canonical source of facts.

Some of it is contradictory [7,5 vs 1], and some sounds like outright crazy emotional, attention-seeking drivel [16]. Definitely not helping make her case.

You can never know which side of the story is true, but it's worth noting that one side of the story looks crazy and the other does not.

It's hard to quantify the smell of crazy, but we can start with an overwhelming interest in insulting the other party, and the claims stretch credibility. For example, consider the claim that a man "bullied [her] out of our code base because I wouldn't fuck him". This is a very strong statement and it seems unrealistic that investigators, lawyers, and other people within Github would come forward with "no evidence" of such things happening. On the other hand, it's the sort of thing you would say to appeal to the Internet social-justice-warrior crowd. Even the phrasing smells like something you'd read on Tumblr or a r/shitredditsays comment thread.

I don't think I can make a strong inference about what actually happened, but I would not treat this whole kerfuffle as a useful source of information about gender issues in technology--except that this is another example how powerful accusations concerning touchy issues can be, even when there is "no evidence" for them.

She isn't helping her case with this ranting list. I'm certainly not saying that she's acting out some kind of "hysterical female" trope, but she is kind of acting in a kind of stereotypically "hysterical female" way. Legal counsel would probably suggest she stick a cork in it rather than make herself look bad.

Men are also capable of angry twitter explosions with the properties I'm talking about. I don't see why you felt the need to bring up the "hysterical female" stereotype. It doesn't add anything to the conversation.

Being labeled as a "hysterical female" or "that girl" is an often stated concern of women who speak out against workplace harassment.

(I am speaking in general and totally not referring to any specifics of the situation here.)

A lot of internet feminists and others have pointed to the gender dimensions of the issue. I figured it made sense to address it straight off. Since she is kind of ranting.

I would rant if I had to deal with shit like that, too, assuming that her account is accurate.

When bullying or harassment occurs in any environment unless there is intervention it will not stop. There is ample opportunity to collect evidence beyond hearsay. What proof has either side provided?

Ah yes; you know exactly how you would react if everything you've worked for for several years vanishes into thin air just because your CEO's wife has boundary issues and your company doesn't know how to deal with shit like that.

Indeed.

Her responses also failed to address the fact that one of the co-founders resigned.

So at the end of the day we have someone spewing vitriol; and someone stepping down from a prestigious position as a show of good faith. That's the only evidence I have and it doesn't reflect well on Julie at all; I can only imagine what it's like to work with a person who spits out expletives at that cadence.

That actually sounds extremely plausible to me. I mean, I don't think the guy literally said to himself "she won't fuck me, revert!"

What I imagine happened is some guy at work had a crush on her and made an awkward pass at her. Maybe he tried to smell her hair or something, I don't know. She shot him down, then he got all butthurt and started undoing her commits on the projects they worked on together. Because they were painful reminders of her.

From his perspective, he's a sensitive guy who just got rejected and isn't coping well. But to her, he's the guy deleting her code because she wouldn't fuck him.

That doesn't seem crazy at all to me. It seems totally possible, and just the kind of situation competent HR departments are supposed to prevent and mitigate.

    "Pushing [people] with strong opinions out of your company 
    because they disagree with you is wrong."

FTFY. This may or may not be a truism. Circumstances matter. If you are trying to steer a ship of several hundred people in one direction and you have one loud naysayer with poor tact, you are justified in pushing them out of the company. Should you listen to their opinions and give them adequate consideration? Certainly. But if they are being disruptive and toxic, pushing them out is acceptable. Allowing someone acting in a visibly toxic way to remain at the company is poor leadership. I say this as someone who was once that toxic person and also as someone who has raised concerns about the deleterious effects of toxic colleagues.

How you say something matters as much if not more than what you are saying. Given the tweets and posts I've seen from JAH, it's pretty easy to imagine prior behavior that others would have considered toxic.

From her blog post:

> We learned that unnamed employees felt pressured by Tom and me to work pro-bono for my nonprofit

It's really hard to take seriously the claims that "my husband did nothing wrong" when

1. He resigned. 2. She's now being accused of shady practices in her own company as well.

    "While Horvath characterized much of her woes as being 
    gender-related [1], the investigation could have 
    classified most of them as either unprovable or terrible-
    but-not-provably-sexist."

One of JAH's claims of gender bias involved a:

    "man who bullied [her] out of [github's] code base because 
    [she] wouldn't fuck him. Too popular to be accountable, 
    [she] guess[es]."

After reading that I figured it's worth browsing through JAH's github account for recent code involving HTML/CSS (since the reverted commit involved CSS IIRC), and what I found would suggest that it's more likely that she made a poor/careless commit. I posted these findings in a comment way at the end of this thread that people are unlikely to see because the parent comment isn't being voted up on. Here's the link to the comment with links to broken or poor commits by JAH:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7625258

In light of this other recent commits (by a longtime githubber who would be expected to exhibit much better git hygiene and committing habits), and lacking the content of the actual reverted commit, I would say that the claims of gender bias in this specific case appear dubious at best.

If this other githubber did in fact make such vulgar comments, we still wouldn't have enough information without also knowing if that comment was completely unsolicited and out-of-the-blue, or if it was reactionary to whatever JAH may have said to this person just prior to the comment being made. Context matters. It could have been verbal self defense in response to a verbal attack, which is still unprofessional, but far more excusable especially if the original attack was equally unprofessional and sexually-charged. Given JAH's tact thus far, her character suggests someone who would have started a verbal fight.

This anonymous post from an alleged GitHub employee adds some interesting perspective.[1] It alleges Julie Ann Horvath was actually spreading rumors of a personal nature about the founder's wife before any of this. In other words, Horvath was the bully, and she really didn't like having the tables turned on her.

If true, this would be a very difficult employee to keep at the company. She should have been fired for inappropriate behavior rather than given an elevated role (which she can now use to bolster her case). Very poor handling and it does suggest a degree of naivety on the part of management.

Having said that, the founder's wife also admits that her actions were a role in his departure.[2] It sounds like she had way too much free reign at the company and was making people uncomfortable with her activism around her startup. The fact that she presented herself to Horvath as having a lot of influence and power within the company reflects that. Plus it's a fertile ground for more serious transgressions into company privacy and so forth. Also should've been nipped in the bud early on.

[1] https://medium.com/p/d96f431f4e8e

[2] https://medium.com/p/2fe173c44215

It does sound like ineffectual people management. By the sound of it there were potentially a number of employee problems at the company, which they basically just ignored.

The fact is that if someone is a bullying douchebag, they're probably going to continue with the same behaviour. (I'm not making any comments as to exactly who was the bully here, as it depends who you believe).

This anonymous post is no better than the unsupported claims by Julie. Unsupported claims on top of unsupported claims.

Popcorn time! Seriously.

So, she thinks someone undid her commits because… something. Is it possible that her code was… inadequate? Obsolete? Had bugs? Because, guess what, no line of code could ever be changed without someone calling names. Consider this:

- OMG I am Mexican and this Asian guy undid my commits. He did it because he is racist! Call Techcrunch.

- OMG I am 23 and this 45-year old guy undid my changes. Guess I should call the papers and complain!!!

- OMG I am 45 and this 23-year old guy undid my changes. Guess I should call the papers and complain!!!

- OMG I am gay and this coworker undid my changes. He did it because I am gay and he is straight and he is intolerant!!!

- So I am Armenian and this Turkish guy undid my changes. WHAT THE HELL he did it just because I am Armenian! He hates me!

- OMG I am a woman and this guy undid my changes. He did it because he hates women! Call the police!!!

- OMG I am a man and this woman undid my changes. She did it just to because she is feminist bi0tch!!!

- OMG I prefer functional programming, but this imperative-programming guy undid my changes! WTF what a horrible workplace can I sue someone about this?

Guess what. On a large project, any piece of code may be changed by any number of people. Usually because someone found a bug, or improvement is needed. If you claim that someone changed your code _because_ you belong to some minority or whatever group, you better have some proof. In this case, if I was Ms Horvat’s employer, I would ask her to either prove her allegations, beyond reasonable doubt, in a court of law, or shut up and apologize. Maybe I would sue her for libel, too.

There appear to have been weirdnesses around the investigation, such as Julie Ann Horvath (and other ex-employees) remaining uncontacted until it was wrapping up: https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/453298152569720832

So I don't know how much stock you can place behind the idea that the investigators GH hired, who did not contact ex-employees competently, found them blameless. The resignation probably speaks for more than the investigation does.

Theresa Preston-Werner's response https://medium.com/p/2fe173c44215

This is all conjecture, but this series of events got me thinking about what to learn from this.

I have a feeling Ms. Horvath and Mrs. Preston-Werner completely believe their own interpretations of what happened.

This is a good reminder of how subtle and ambiguous our and others views of the same reality is. In her post Theresa mentions having a blind spot for the obligations that github employees felt for helping her charity, but she didn't see it, she saw friends.

I think this is a good lesson to us all about not only making clear HR polices, but also always giving intentional consideration to how those around us see what we say and do. A kind of intellectual empathy.

And if people point out your blind spot: stop, listen and then reevaluate.

how subtle and ambiguous our and others views of the same reality is

Rashomon.

Everyone thinks the message of that movie is "all truth is subjective", but it's not. It's more like "the stories we tell ourselves and others are distorted by our self-image and our interests".

At the end, the movie even explicitly rejects the theory that truth is unobtainable, and that everyone is corrupt. In the movie at least, disinterested third parties who have good intentions can reveal the truth.

You may believe in subjectivity, but Rashomon doesn't.

i'm not sure where you're getting this. the parent referenced a movie, after posting a quote marveling at the different ways people interpret the same reality.

grandparent post was talking about the need for intellectual empathy. i've seen that work wonders in my life. it's like this thread of comments shows the need for intellectual empathy in microcosm.

I agree with your parent that the reference gave the impression of having misunderstood the film

It's like someone is raving about the military, and someone quotes appending Dulce et decorum est below. Not a big deal, but big enough to write a small comment making a correction, just in case.

I don't see it. The quote replied to was "how subtle and ambiguous our and others views of the same reality is".

In my mind this is the key sentence in her response:

"I was the wife of the CEO, but that never entered my mind when I hung out with any GitHubbers."

That is just not acceptable; it's the equivalent of walking around with a machine gun in your hands and saying that you never considered it might have any impact.

As much as she might have liked it to, you can't wield considerable power over people's lives and have them treat you as though you don't. It just doesn't work that way.

Your comment about ignoring the considerable power you wield over other people and expecting them to hits home for me.

I'm not sure exactly how to phrase it, but I think there's something there in general applicable to the current round of companies which have 'flat' organizational structures, but still aren't hardly employee-owned democratically-managed enterprises. [1] There are owners and bosses, there are people with ultimate decision-making powers (including hiring and firing) and those without, some who have a heck of a lot more salary/equity than others -- but at the same time, the 'flat structure' somehow seems as if everyone's expected to ignore that and act like it's not true.

It's of course not a coincidence that Github is one of the most famous examples of such a 'flat structured' (not not actually democratically-managed) companies.

And I think it's a shame that people will use this as an example of why hieararchy and authority is neccessary. I think it's more about the dangers of trying to make hieararchy and authority invisible when it actually still exists.

Thanks for your comment which helped me start thinking about this, sorry my response is much less coherent. :)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative

> I think it's more about the dangers of trying to make hieararchy and authority invisible when it actually still exists.

I want to emphasize this, because it is absolutely a thing that tends to happen even with the best of intentions from all parties. You can't eliminate hierarchy by hiding it.

The difficulty in this for founders is that when you start the company, you need your employees way more than they need you. They have more power than you do at the beginning. And while this slowly changes, it changes even more slowly in a founder's mind.

Don't get sucked into thinking you're peers with your employees when you decide how much they get paid, what work they do all day, and whether or not they keep their job. They don't see you as a peer.

Theresa is full of it. I have no idea what happened at Github but she's been telling people in New York she started Omakase because she's "angry with the tech industry." With that kind of attitude it's no surprise Github employees felt pressured into volunteering for her. She has admitted that she's not just someone excited about her new venture, she is beginning conversations with the idea that she knows what's best for the other person and that's working for her/contributing to her charity.

Not to mention that it seems like the tech industry has done a lot for her family's life so it seems strange and ungrateful to respond with anger that other people in positions of less influence than her family has, are not doing enough for the world in some vague sense.

Not to mention the massive hypocrisy that she is raising money from institutional investors as donors to cover operations costs for her non-profit which is ultimately a shakedown on salaried employees. There are things I agree with Theresa about, but asking the ultra-rich for money to support her venture to pressure regular people to give more to charity is nuts.

That does sound like a little more than the boss bringing around the Girl Scout Cookies signup sheet.

So, remember that what Julie says about them not contacting her is itself, and allegation.

Her picture proves nothing, after all.

Your conclusion about "how much stock to place" does not follow, since this allegation has not been proven true.

Having been involved in this sort of thing before, both on the "asked to investigate" and "asked to play witness for an employee side", i'd say the truth always lies somewhere in between, and both employers and employees tend to behave badly.

So how much stock we can expect to put into such investigations?

> the truth always lies somewhere in between

In my experience, the truth usually lies very strongly to one side of the spectrum, and sometimes beyond an extreme (as reasonable people often bend over backwards in giving their version of events, while unreasonable people do not), but you'll never find out for sure.

E.g. in the Techcrunch piece Horvath says that the founder's wife spoke of having spies, and influencing HR decisions, and so on. I can easily imagine the conversation taking place over drinks, and it could be horribly sinister or it could be someone's not-very-well-judged attempt at humor. But this doesn't mean that "the truth is in-between".

You appear to have had very different experiences than me.

Horvath said the founder spoke of having spies, etc.

The founder says she did nothing of the sort, and blah blah blah I would thus expect the truth is "the founder said she kept in touch with goings-on in the company through friends" or something similarly in-between.

Not "The founder has hired spies that prepare detailed daily reports" (which would be very strongly to one side) or "the founder has no idea what goes on in the company, and knows nobody" (which would be to the other).

IMHO, of course. Maybe you have a different view of what it would mean to lean strongly to one side of the spectrum in that situation?

You demand a higher standard of evidence than you yourself meet. Especially when you say "always", with zero evidence or plausibility. (And in fact, it's a standard of evidence HN rarely meets, on any subject.) The other poster was ironically much more careful.

First, I demanded nothing. I pointed out one should not assume something is true because someone, particularly someone with a clear interest in the outcome and process, said it.

Second, This is somewhat pedantic. The OP simply assumed what whatever Jane said was true, and then went from there.

Your complaint is essentially that i did not add the words "in every case i have been part of, and every one i know about in sufficient independent detail" in front of "always". All told, that's about 43 cases.

Feel free to pretend i did write that, if it suffices.

If not, feel free to disbelieve me!

Nonsense. Her picture probably opens her up to suit, where she lying about the company. At the bare minimum, any lawyer would tell her to not post demonstrable lies about the company, for many reasons. Not least of which is regardless of the whole truth, in any lawsuit (filed by her, or github, or Tom, or Tom's wife, or other parties), opposition counsel will attempt to discredit your whole testimony by finding small lies and tainting you in the eyes of the jury.

    while there may have been no legal wrongdoing, the investigator did find evidence of 
    mistakes and errors of judgment

'found them blameless'?

An anonymous post on medium by github insiders: https://medium.com/p/d96f431f4e8e

Unfortunate that it is anonymous, but it is still worth reading in my opinion.

This is probably the most relevant article of the 6 or so I've read in the comments. It shows both sides as human and lacking good social management constructs for the situation.

Reading several weeks of Horvath's twitter feed and several articles where she's quoted, it's apparent to me that regardless of what happened at Github, she is a bitter and dramatic individual. That's NOT the kind of person that backs down to the adult-talk at the table.

Again, I don't know what happened at github, and I honestly don't care. What I do know is that I would never hire Horvath regardless of what she could do for the company. Far too much risk, and exemplified with a terribly immature response even if everything she says is true.

Those details completely change the story. Why not make them public when the scandal erupted instead of a month afterwards? Now that the subject is dead and buried there will probably be no journalistic investigation.

Wow, this actually makes the rest of the story more clear.

It's telling that nobody would attach their name to the article. Horvath's already publicly laughed it off.

What was her alternate version of the missing events? It's hard to believe the techCrunch story when it starts so late in the game.

If I was in a similar position I'd take it to court, but if for some reason I wanted to do trial by media, I'd be gushing with detail.

It's not telling. Whether what you say is true or not, in either case it would be risky to attach your name to something like this.

obvious that it's z holman.

Based on what evidence?

"Recently promoted to lead the engineering team", which I believed was ZH.

This whole episode has reminded me that when I start my next company we will have a non-fraternization clause.

Anonymous allegations are worthless unless other Githubbers can confirm this.

Why? You'd still have the same sense of doubt as to whether or not the non-anonymous person is telling the truth. The only extra information you'd have is a) you'd know it was coming from another GitHubber who could conceivably know these details, and b) if you know the person, you can weigh the words against his/her reputation and past action.

Not saying those two things aren't useful, but I would certainly not characterize this anon blog post as "worthless" by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, it makes the whole situation make a lot more sense. The original one-sided account from Ms. Horvath always sounded a bit implausible to me, at least without more information to frame it.

> Why? You'd still have the same sense of doubt as to whether or not the non-anonymous person is telling the truth.

The senses of doubt will only be ~the same if your prior for the probability of "someone out of ~200 github employees would lie about this and attach their name to it" is about the same as your prior for "someone out of the other ~3,000,000,000 people on the internet would pretend to be a github employee and make this up".

The larger someone's prior is for the latter relative to the former, the more worthless an anonymous blogpost is to them.

Adding to what SEMW said: for all we know, this story could be pure fiction, written by the Preston-Warners themselves, or someone else with a strong incentive to do so.

The fact that this story helps everything "make sense" is not a useful heuristic. Anybody can craft this kind of tale, and it might also be playing on our prejudices - the spurned, jealous, bitchy lover narrative.

But, as for myself, I don't have to make any judgment, nor do I want to. I don't want to do is pick a side based on my prejudices and a few blog posts.

By now we all should know that women are routinely harassed in tech companies to a preposterous degree. On the other hand, I've seen cases where mentally disturbed people invent (or self-delude) incredibly detailed narratives of persecution. We could be dealing with a situation where one, the other, both, or neither is happening. If you have evidence that settles the case, by all means please post it.

Something that is clear is that Github's investigation was flawed. And if Horvath really wasn't contacted until late in the process, it certainly makes it look like Github was more interested in a coverup than the truth.

Very good points.

The thing that irks me about all this is that murky incidents like this, where the alleged victim is (to many) not a very sympathetic character, and possibly acted improperly herself and instigated the whole situation (if the anon blog post is to be believed), does little to help set an example for why the real instances of harassment are so wrong and terrible.

After this, I'm left with a very poor taste in my mouth. GH's investigation was likely somewhat flawed, though it's unclear to what degree. Horvath almost certainly wasn't telling the full story about what happened, and may even have instigated the entire thing, and is using the prevalence of sexism in tech (and the expected knee-jerk community outcry) to attack someone she's (unjustifiably?) angry with. Or maybe everything she's said is true, and the Preston-Werners are terrible people, and GH has/had a serious discrimination problem coming from the top. We'll probably never know.

The whole situation just stinks.

> the alleged victim is ... not a very sympathetic character

> does little to help set an example for why the real instances of harassment are so wrong and terrible.

Ah, but this is why most victims don't go public. Very few of us would look good under intense scrutiny. And I think this whole process has demonstrated how tilted the playing field is, against those who do go public.

Some people say that this is why people claiming to be victims deserve a kind of automatic support. I struggle with that, but only because I've personally witnessed a couple of the rare cases where that empowered someone who was slightly deranged.

Sounds plausible, but without a name to back it up it is nothing but hearsay.

Even with a name to back it up, it's still hearsay. I agree that it seems plausible, though, and does make a bit of sense given the rest of what we've all heard.

Hiring outsiders to investigate your management team for wrongdoing is like hiring outsiders to evaluate your environmental performance or to make recommendations on executive pay - possibly useful if you genuinely want to act on their findings, but equally often used to add a sheen of 'independent' legitimacy to whatever result you want.

Outsiders know what answer you want, and know it's unprofitable to have a reputation for biting the hand that feeds them.

To take a british example, back in 2006 the news of the world hired harbottle & lewis to do an internal investigation of phone hacking. Guess what, they didn't find anything.

Edit: Clarified that if the person paying for the investigation doesn't have a conflict of interest or plans to act on the recommendations, independent (or even non-independent) investigations can produce results.

Or hiring an outsider to perform a security audit. It never works. Right.

How is that even remotely similar in terms of conflict of interest on the part of the buyer?

You know a company hire another companies to perform a check. They usually expect everything ok. Audit comes, it turns out there is a security hole in the software, or your books are off or you threat employees badly. Nobody wants these, yet everybody hires external companies. You think that you can bribe a legal firm to give you a green flag on harassing employees and they gonna risk their reputation on 50K USD? I don't think so...

Accounting firms provide a pretty good counter-example here. Everyone thinks of Andersen, who actually had to close as a result of their "customer-focused" service at Enron, but actually all the "big" firms were implicated to varying degrees in the subsequent unpleasant business with CDOs. Any service business will hesitate to piss off the guy who hires them every year.

This is an exception and a single case does not prove that all of the companies are like that. There is enough money to bribe anybody. As i said, 50K (or so) is not enough for that.

Another example from the financial crisis is the fact that many credit rating agencies gave triple-A ratings to CDOs that were later downgraded to junk status. Guess who selects and pays the credit rating agency? As it happens, the very financial firms who originated the CDOs and want them triple-A rated to sell.

See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_rating_agencies_and_the...

Does two prove it? Here's another fine example: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/06/how-to-choose-a...

It's a well-known problem with auditor/audited relationships. What the customer wants is a clean bill of health after an easy audit. The auditor needs to be tough enough to maintain a good reputation, but beyond that they are looking to maximize volume. The Economist mentions this every year or two [1], and they're especially concerned when auditing firms do a lot of financial consulting for the audited firms. Then there's an even stronger incentive to make the audit generous.

Another good analogy is medical marijuana cards in states where marijuana is supposedly only for medical purposes. In theory, doctors are careful gatekeepers. In practice, the doctors doing those certifications have a strong financial incentive to certify as many people as quickly as possible. I've lived in San Francisco, and I've never heard of anybody getting turned down for one of those cards.

[1] e.g.: http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2014/03/dewey-lebo... or http://www.economist.com/node/954033

Oh, it doesn't have to be anything so brazen as them finding a problem then covering it up. It's simply that you agree to a certain number of hours at a certain price, and they run out of hours before finding any evidence of wrongdoing.

Legal firms have lawyer-client confidentiality rules, so if they do find anything, with a bit of care you can bury or lie about their findings with impunity.

It is widely-believed in the investment banking industry that you can find a firm that will provide a fairness opinion for virtually any transaction. They are a little bit more costly than $50K, but not more than an order of magnitude for small transactions. Mergers and Inquisitions says, "As you might guess, banks never say a deal is 'unfair' – the Opinion is just a rubber stamp to justify the deal to investors."[1]

(For the record, I never saw any unethical fairness opinions while I was in investment banking)

The consulting industry has similar dynamics. They are mainly there to provide evidence in favor of a plan proposed by whomever is their primary contact. See, for example, the article by the BCG consultant at [2]: "What I could not get my head around was having to force-fit analysis to a conclusion. In one case, the question I was tasked with solving had a clear and unambiguous answer: By my estimate, the client’s plan of action had a net present discounted value of negative one billion dollars. Even after accounting for some degree of error in my reckoning, I could still be sure that theirs was a losing proposition. But the client did not want analysis that contradicted their own, and my manager told me plainly that it was not our place to question what the client wanted."

1: http://www.mergersandinquisitions.com/investment-banking-fai...

2: http://tech.mit.edu/V130/N18/dubai.html

Ugh. It is precisely the contractor's place to question the client. "Not my problem" or "just following orders" is the worst thing about consulting. I have, on several occasions, refused to force analysis into expected results. And look at me! I'm still alive! I made more money this year than the previous two combined. Ethics must always be forefront. And if you slip, get back on it, mistakes in the past do not excuse more mistakes.

Someone hired to do a security audit has a huge incentive to find security flaws- frankly, they'll get a better reputation for alerting the company to them.

Finding bad news when you're a security auditor is good.

Someone hired to do an investigation like this has an incentive to downplay any results. If they agreed with the accusations, GitHub would either have to hide the results, or publicly say "Yeah, we think we were likely legally liable for a hostile and sexually abusive work environment". They would not be taking those auditors out for celebratory drinks.

If the consultant says "Yep, you're in the clear", GitHub can announce publicly how great everything is.

Finding bad news when you're investigating a PR disaster is bad.

I wonder if Tom know this.

More weirdness than the whole entire thing?

I don't think you can read much in to anything here, GH painted themselves in to a corner and either had to deny the allegations or their seriousness or someone had to get punished.

If she reported something to HR and it backfired, I think she should sue them, I really don't care about the co-founder's wife lurking around too much or who was friends with whom or who was sleeping with whom. That's pretty serious to me, so sue them.

It sounds like Mrs. Preston-Werner was a regular presence at the GitHub office and, according to Horvath, had extensive access to private information throughout GitHub's systems despite the fact that she wasn't an employee. If true, that should certainly be a privacy and security concern to any GitHub customer or user.

I was hoping Github would address this. But the whole post is about HR issues and having an inclusive work environment.

There was never much chance that they were going to be completely open about their findings. It would only made an eventual lawsuit against them more likely to succeed, while likely not doing anything to make people feel better about what happened. The removal of TPW is a pretty huge move either way.

This is incredibly troubling. How can anyone trust GitHub, knowing that non-employees regularly had access to private information?

Well, we don't know that. It's an allegation by one person which hasn't been confirmed as being true by GitHub. And presumably after this incident, if it is true, they'll have better security policies going forward.

In my experience it is pretty common for people who bring work home with them not to be super-meticulous about preventing access to the content of the work by their families. How many people do you know who sound-proof their home office so their wife can't eavesdrop on their business calls?

I think that people that can and do bring work home are employed in fields where one does not need to be super meticulous about preventing access to the work.

You would think wrong.

Very wrong.

You know a lot of people that bring work home because the living room has better reading light than the SCIF?

No, people bring work home because they need to put in some extra hours, but do not wish to stay at the office until 9PM.

So you know a lot of people that take things out of the SCIF because they do not want to stay late?

Depends on what you mean by SCIF. Coworkers bring confidential paperwork/documents home, and remote access over remote desktop software is blessed. However you might get a phonecall from security if you started downloading lots of confidential data directly to your home computer.

I think I should point out this is a fireable offense in a number of companies. I work with sensitive information every day. I'm pretty sure if allowed someone outside the company to use my machine for anything, I would be fired.

My dad works for IBM doing mainframe repair and installation. He's seen his coworkers fired for allowing unauthorized individuals to use their company laptops. They've gone even further in the last few years in making unauthorized software a fireable offense.

Granted, two data points isn't a lot but there are companies that have enforced policies to prevent sensitive information from leaking.

I should also point out both my dad and I do significant amounts of work from home and we are both required by our companies to use full disk encryption.

Without going to the extreme of secret+ classifications -- in which case you cannot take things home without a secure home office, and move things between them in secure containers -- I don't think employees are fired for failing to lock their home office against their spouse or soundproofing their office against their spouse.

Which is different from saying that the company would fire them if the spouse used their inside-access to harm the company in any way.

My girlfriend works on disclosure projects at a company you've heard of and who regularly has highly-anticipated announcements. I have no idea what she works on, even when she's working from home in the same room as me[1].

1. http://www.officedepot.com/a/browse/laptop-privacy-filters/N...

There's a pretty big difference between sound proofing your office and giving your wife unfettered access to the corporate network.

Why does anyone trust _______, knowing that employees regularly have access to your private information?

That's the $BB++ cloud question, isn't it?

In short, many vendors go to great expense to vet, audit, and limit the number of employees who could potentially access customer data. Some will geo-locate physically separate systems under separate administration according to regional necessity.

Disclosure: works for such a vendor.

Sure, but this can only be appreciated if the relationship is large enough to have an explicit non-changeable contract and routine auditing. From any lone consumer's point of view, "cloud" providers are black boxes that will probably try to limit the damage a rogue employee can do, but any methods or promises can change overnight based on business needs.

i don't trust them. I simply have no choice.

Especially knowing that x% of those employees will have left the company in 5 years, and y% of those will have taken private copies of customer data with them.

How can you "trust" GitHub knowing that employees regularly have access to private information?

What about de-facto board members? Tom was on GitHub's board, it was/is a small company, I don't get how "founder's wife" is not a suitably trusted position. I mean, clearly a bad call in this case, but hindsight is 20/20, and in my small business the husbands of my co-founders are de-facto employees (And in fact board members with significant proxy voting power, simply by state law of common property).

Edit: I looked it up; California, too, is a community property state. Theresa was absolutely an effective board member.

You should really get a better lawyer.

Most corporate startup lawyers have founder's spouses sign release forms for to clearly indicate that they do not have some claim to ownership or equity.

This.

I just drafted a stock purchase agreement for my business partner and I on our new startup and one of the basic boilerplate additions to the stock purchase / vesting agreement is a spousal agreement to the terms of the purchase.

The communal property law only relates during a divorce were the shares are split up between the couple by the courts. Any decently written stock purchase agreement has a first right of refusal for the company to purchase back those shares in the event of an involuntary transfer.

That's not how community property works. Teresa effectively owned an indivisible half of Tom's Github stock via the community property laws, but this does not make her a board member. Board members are selected by the company pursuant to various legal mechanisms not subject to community property laws because a board position is not a "property."

This is incredibly troubling. How can anyone trust ${CLOUD_OR_HOSTING_COMPANY}, knowing that ${PERSONS_OR_SOFTWARE} regularly had access to private information?

Be paranoid. Encrypt it if you don't want people to snoop.

Yeah I'm curious about this myself. Doesn't this create a pretty serious security situation? GitHub isn't a small startup anymore, I would assume they'd have some pretty serious security precautions in place.

They also handle plenty of trade secrets, I'd bet. They have private repos.

With so many self-hosted Github alternatives, and even Github Enterprise (self-hosted Github), I don't feel sorry for anyone having trade secrets stolen if they were hosting via private repos on Github.com.

I thought the allegation was she had access to internal chat, not customer data.

Access to internal chat may have given her access to much of GitHub through HuBot. https://hubot.github.com/

Access to emails is one thing. Access to the internal public banter and coordination of work hardly strikes me as worrying based on all the discussions I've seen at my current place of work and past places of work. Any information sensitive enough to keep from your significant other is probably too sensitive for a shared internal conversation system available to all employees. Yeah, there's stuff that you wouldn't want your competitors to know, but for most everyone else with no skin in the business/industry is fairly irrelevant information.

HuBot let's githubbers deploy code to production, amongst lots of other things. In other words, access to internal chat is a much bigger deal at GitHub than it is at your workplace.

I would certainly hope that you can only tell hubot to do something like that if you have the correct permissions. Hubot should not be accepting deploy code commands from anyone except those with the sufficient privileges. If that isn't the case, that needs to be fixed asap.

> If true, that should certainly be a privacy and security concern to any GitHub customer or user.

We left github private repo hosting when they got VC funding. Because of such a scenario where we could be competing with a company that was funded by the same VC that gave GH money.

Now in a perfect world that shouldn't be a problem because the VC should never access private user data. But well ... as you see it's not a perfect world and if a wife of an employee can browse through customer data than why shouldn't this be true for the guy who gave GH a few million dollars?

Wouldn't that rule out any corporation, too? Not much difference between VCs and large shareholders.

You moved into a direct competitor or you rolled up your own infrastructure?

I'm curious because if the company is not large, doesn't seem like much of a hassle having your own depository server.

Not the person you replied to, but we're a large company and we're using Gitlab internally, it even hooks up to LDAP which is fantastic. We still use some private Github projects too.

Gitlab is a FOSS self hosted alternative to github.

We rolled our own. Git hosting is pretty straight forward. And Gitlab makes it even simpler.

She apparently had access to employee data, not customer data. In my experience, businesses will often play a little fast-and-loose with employee data - far more so than customer data.

Though I agree it presents a bad image of GitHub's access control in general.

These memos are often more about what isn't said:

> The investigation found no evidence...

This doesn't mean there isn't any evidence--it just means that their internal investigation didn't find any. If read carefully, this statement tells us nothing about the universe of evidence that exists, but only about what GitHub didn't find. A different investigator might come to a completely different conclusion, or find other evidence (this is where the comment about the investigators possibly not contacting key people could become important).

> ...found no evidence to support the claims against Tom and his wife of sexual or gender-based harassment or retaliation

So their internal investigation didn't find sexual or gender-based harassment or retaliation. But did that investigation find other types of harassment or retaliation?

> However, while there may have been no legal wrongdoing

"May have been none" or "there definitely wasn't any"? And then legal wrongdoing vs. just plain wrongdoing? Disclaimers/"wiggle words" everywhere.

> As to the remaining allegations, the investigation found no evidence of gender-based discrimination, harassment, retaliation, or abuse.

Again, we're seeing the term "gender-based" used as a modifier (also done in P-W's response). This makes it appear as if their attorneys primarily want to remove this controversy from the ambit of gender-based discrimination claims.

I'm not saying this memo is worse than any other corporate public statement. But reading carefully, you often find that the statements don't tell you very much, if anything.

But reading carefully, you often find that the statements don't tell you very much, if anything.

It sounds like the lawyers earned their $600/hr then.

> the investigator did find evidence of mistakes and errors of judgment.

Seems conclusive enough enough to me.

From what I see, it was an investigation into gender-based discrimination/harassment claims, and the result of the investigation was that, well, no evidence of gender-based discrimination was found. Does that not provide very useful information to the reader? It would be irresponsible for the report to claim that no harassment of any form exists at GitHub, and irresponsible of us to accuse (or "wonder", which is just a wiggly way of accusing) the worst given its omission.

> This doesn't mean there isn't any evidence--it just means that their internal investigation didn't find any.

Of course the results of the investigation tells us nothing about things outside the investigation. Is that not assumed? How many 3rd parties does it take before this is not true?

Apologies if I sound irate, it's just disappointing that accusations that seem to have little basis (huge disclaimer, purely based on news coverage and this published report) can cause a founder to leave his company.

I didn't take offense to your comment.

My primary point was that we can't assume things that the memo doesn't say. From your comment:

> "From what I see, it was an investigation into gender-based discrimination/harassment claims"

I think you are making some assumptions, and my guess is that whoever wrote the GitHub statement wanted you to come to that exact conclusion.

This is why they kept repeating the phrase "gender-based"--they want the reader to focus on the gender claims and then GitHub can try to render those claims invalid with their investigation results.

In fact, the precise scope of the investigation was not provided in the statement--we don't know what they investigated. There are many possibilities, including the one you suggested. Another is that they might have looked into a range of issues, found a few problems, and then decided to focus their public statements on the gender-based claims because they knew they could win those.

Mostly, I'm saying that this GitHub post doesn't tell us much (not saying it should, just saying it doesn't).

"This doesn't mean there isn't any evidence--it just means that their internal investigation didn't find any."

How could you ever claim anything else, though? You can only make a claim about the things you did find (including absence of things), not about things you didn't find, because you can not know about them.

This is just another example of human communication depending on goodwill. If some involved parties want to misinterpret everything they hear, there is no way to stop them.

I think the emphasis on "gender based" stuff is because that was the gist of Horvath's accusations.

I think it's more that the "gender-based" stuff was the legally actionable part of Horvath's accusations. Her accusations also included things that do not appear to be related to gender (in particular, nothing about Theresa Preston-Warner's alleged harassment seems to be related to gender).

Again, in my comment I mention that this memo is no different than other corporate statements. My point is that some comments on here say "there is no evidence", which is not what the memo says. Saying you didn't find something isn't the same as saying that something doesn't exist.

I'm not sure I agree. Of course, very strictly speaking you are probably right. So we can never know or prove anything. We can not prove that god doesn't exist, or that the flying spaghetti monster doesn't exist, or that invisible dragons don't exist. That doesn't seem a very useful attitude, though. I think not finding evidence is some evidence, at least in a bayesian sense. And OK, we can know some things - I know there is no visible dragon sitting on my keyboard right now.

Right, but there is no actual way that you can say that something doesn't exist; you can't prove a negative. There is absolutely no other wording you can ever use. Pointing that out as some sort of indicator that it's possible that there is some evidence is a little silly, because... well, duh.

Ultimately it depends on whether or not you trust the investigator to be thorough, and to be able to ferret out the truth where people lie and omit details.

The investigator in this case is not about uncovering the truth of everything - it's about investigating this specific case. They do not have an obligation, for example, to mention that they found taxation irregularities during their work.

... what does that have to do with anything? We're not talking about that.

> These memos are often more about what isn't said:

> > The investigation found no evidence...

> This doesn't mean there isn't any evidence--it just means that their internal investigation didn't find any. If read carefully, this statement tells us nothing about the universe of evidence that exists, but only about what GitHub didn't find.

You seem to be including this as part of a narrative where this statement is phrased to disguise the truth, but the sort of "loophole" you're pointing to here is not at all revelatory. The same is true of every investigation ever — the fact that an investigation didn't find something doesn't mean it necessarily doesn't exist. This falls out of the fact that you can't prove a universal negative.

An investigation can never positively prove things. It can only establish a reasonable confidence in proportion with your confidence in the investigators.

No, I don't think my comment is revelatory. Just adding my opinion to the boards like everybody else.

"The investigation found no evidence..."

That's the only thing you can say. Moving this to another, more objectively verifiable domain: let's suppose you want to buy a house, and you ask the seller whether asbestos was used in its construction. A seller would be stupid to go further than "to the best of my knowledge…". Problem is: if you buy the house and ten years later find asbestos behind some wall, and the seller said it wasn't there, he hangs, even if he couldn't know of the problem. Of course, you can refuse to buy unless you get a 100% definite answer, but that would raise the price because the seller would have to do better inspection (possible destructive) and/or find insurance and/or would want money for the risk he takes.

The same applies to this outside firm: if they categorically state that there are no problems, but it later turns out that there are, they are target for litigation both from employees of the company and from the company itself ("you told us we didn't have problems! but now our stock tanked")

The best you likely can get is a detailed description of what they did in their research. That limits the risk for that company. If they claim they read every e-mail message, and it later turns out that they could have spotted a problem from there, they are liable, but if it turns out they could have spotted a problem from the phone records, they are off the hook.

So yes, it would be nice to learn what exactly this outside firm did, so that we can gauge how hard they tried to find something, but I don't blame them for saying they found no evidence.

This is a great example of the type of critical looking at the evidence. The words that are used should be examined closely - especially official / legal words. There should be no reading between the lines if written properly.

Here we have "no gender based..." of Tom and his wife. Nothing mentioned about whether there was other people who did were involved in that type of activity, nor whether the two individuals were involved in other types of activity.

Basically, legal speak only addresses a specific thing. The objective is not to uncover the whole truth about an event, but to reveal only as much as necessary.

In short, the report on the investigation should not if done properly comment on anything outside of it - even if evidence of those things are found.

Thus, looking at it - it gives no evidence of other things.

> Here we have "no gender based..." of Tom and his wife. Nothing mentioned about whether there was other people who did were involved in that type of activity, nor whether the two individuals were involved in other types of activity.

Great point. I didn't notice that phrase, but now that I think about it, you're right.

When these things conclude, as this one has, it is useful to check your own response emotion (happiness? sadness? outrage? bitterness?). One of the harder things for me to learn has been to critically evaluate my own judgement. Generally I'm a very rational guy and can give you my reasoning from first principles right up to the claim in question, when its wrong (the claim), I find my tendency is not to listen. My rational brain is invested in learning, my emotional brain is invested in being "right."

At the end of the day, neither Tom or Julie work at GitHub any more and what ever they brought to the mix has been lost. They have both made statements of pain and hurt, and their pain has been a burden on their friends as well. Will GitHub be stronger or weaker after this event? Will Julie and Tom? Only time will tell. Perhaps the best that can be said of this affair is that its publicity might help others to recognize the dangers of their behavior earlier before it becomes a problem.

This has to be an incredibly difficult moment in Tom Preston-Werner's life. Regardless of what may have happened. To build a company from the ground up and then have to walk away from it. I'm sure we all remember GitHub during its infancy and the enthusiasm with which founders worked on it. A hugely successful bootstrapped company.

exactly, this is really tragic.

> The investigation found no evidence to support the claims [...] of a sexist or hostile work environment.

So, are they saying that Horvath was lying? I mean, there was a lot of specific stuff she mentioned that seemed inappropriate. I don't want to get into whether the behavior was "sexist" or not, but I think we can all agree that if what she said was true, the work environment was hostile and unprofessional.

Note that the denial is couched in the terminology "there was no legal wrongdoing". Not that there was no wrongdoing, just nothing blatant enough (or which left evidence) that it broke laws.

No, the denial says "no evidence exists to support the claim". That's a direct and testable assertion, not weasel words.

Actually, that specific denial is limited to two items: gender based discrimination by Tom Preston-Werner and his wife, and the existence of a discriminatory/hostile workspace. Not coincidentally, these are the two claims which would have been against the law, and also the least of the claims brought forth by Horvath (though it's the angle latched onto by the media) - she instead claimed personal harassment from Horvath's wife, and the non-responsiveness of HR to these issues.

The only real gender based problems she had were related to male co-worker's responses to female co-workers hula-hooping, as I remember it.

There wouldn't be much evidence of personal harassment, particularly the kind described by Horvath.

I'd like to see how you (or anyone here) propose to test it. This isn't science; it's a corporate press release.

Do we know the name of the "full, independent, third-party" investigator(s)? Do we know who paid for them, their methodology, and whether they reported to Horvath, giving her oversight?

Or are investigators the same, like software contractors?

You and I or 'tptacek probably cannot test it, but Horvath's lawyer may be able to sue to test it.

It would be very dumb of GitHub to state that there is no evidence if there is evidence that Horvath could turn up. (Granted, sometimes companies are dumb.)

"[D]irect and testable assertion" sounds scientific, certainly. It would be interesting to hear how you would flesh that out, though. For example, when they say "no evidence exists," don't we immediately run into the question of whether the claims of Ms. Horvath don't actually constitute evidence? What does constitutes "evidence"? Is that question testable? If Ms. Horvath's claims don't count as evidence, then why does Github's claim that "no evidence exists" count? What test or tests do you propose?

Criminal and civil investigations are not scientific investigations. They may make use of science, but they are not scientific. To import the language of science--actually neo-Popperian pop-cultural language about science--into a discussion of an internal investigation into harassment claims is highly suspect.

Your claim aside, these are weasel words. The way to discover the fact that they are is to appropriately apply language akin to that of jurisprudence, rather than inappropriately apply that of science.

No, the blog post says: "The investigation found no evidence".

Failure to find is distinct from a negative result.

You can't test for failure to find, just as you cannot test for statistical insignificance.

Maybe this hostile and unprofessional environment are the "mistakes and errors" from the article. I was curious about this, myself.

There was a lot of specific stuff she mentioned that seemed inappropriate.

Such as?

I was wondering as well since this is the first time that I learn about the issue: http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/15/julie-ann-horvath-describes...

Thanks.

Downvoters: Would you mind explaining yourselves? It was a perfectly reasonable question to ask.

I didn't downvote you, but this is a hot-button issue right now. A lot of people are familiar with what happened, and (perhaps wrongly) assume that everyone else is as well. Assuming that context, your post can be interpreted as "I don't think that the things said Horvath brought up were a big deal", where you might have meant "I'm not familiar with this subject, what did she bring up that was so bad?"

That's about what I thought. But as it happens, no, I wasn't doubting the claims -- I just wasn't following the story obsessively and wasn't aware of the details.

They are definitely not saying Horvath was lying, they are saying they found no evidence of a sexist or hostile work environment - the investigation was lead by a third party, and best behaviour would have been in place at and before the moment they arrived following the claims, it's likely that many, if not most of the company hadn't experienced the same treatment that Horvath allegedly received, and they would have explained that to the investigators.

I think it's possible that Horvath was right about the poor actions of management, and at the same time, very little of what she alleged seemed to fall into the bounds of gender-based discrimination. A colleague who reverts your commits because you wouldn't date him...that's not gender-based, that's office-romance strife (though obviously, such strife can be exacerbated with a gender imbalance at the company). I'm kind of interested in what happened to that engineer.

edit:

FYI: her detailed complaint to TechCrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/15/julie-ann-horvath-describes...

re: The co-worker who couldn't handle being rejected by her:

> The rejection of the other employee led to something of an internal battle at GitHub. According to Horvath, the engineer, “hurt from my rejection, started passive-aggressively ripping out my code from projects we had worked on together without so much as a ping or a comment. I even had to have a few of his commits reverted. I would work on something, go to bed, and wake up to find my work gone without any explanation.” The employee in question, according to Horvath, is both “well-liked at GitHub” and “popular in the community.”

His “behavior towards female employees,” according to Horvath, “especially those he sees as opportunities is disgusting.”

And there was one more incident that would purportedly fall under sexism:

> Two women, one of whom I work with and adore, and a friend of hers were hula hooping to some music. I didn’t have a problem with this. What I did have a problem with is the line of men sitting on one bench facing the hoopers and gawking at them. It looked like something out of a strip club. When I brought this up to male coworkers, they didn’t see a problem with it. But for me it felt unsafe and to be honest, really embarrassing. That was the moment I decided to finally leave GitHub.

The first one, of course, is bad. And there's possibly a case to be made that if management knew about this engineer and let it slide, well, that does create a hostile environment. Yet I don't think Horvath points out where she complained about this guy's commit-reverting behavior to management.

The second thing, about hula-hooping, without context, it doesn't really mean anything beyond what Horvath claims she was able to grok just by stumbling upon the scene. I think during the original HN discussion, a Githubber said that the hula-hooping happened during an in-office party. Either way, hula-hooping and watching said-hula-hooping is hard to claim, on its face, as being gender-discrimination.

The other stuff though, about the co-founder unfairly pressuring her partner to resign, and the co-founder's wife claiming to have access to Github employees' private data...Those could be things that the company frowns upon enough to merit a resignation.

How is a woman who refuses to date another employee considered an "office-romance?" Retaliation as a result of unwanted advances is considered harassment.

sexual harassment definition: http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/sexual_harassment.cfm

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that there was an actual romance. I meant that this immature (and shitty) behavior was based in that domain of "romance" (the existence or lack thereof, in this case) and not, from the face of Horvath's description, automatically based on gender-discrimination.

From your link:

> Although the law doesn’t prohibit simple teasing, offhand comments, or isolated incidents that are not very serious, harassment is illegal when it is so frequent or severe that it creates a hostile or offensive work environment or when it results in an adverse employment decision (such as the victim being fired or demoted).

1. Did Horvath provide proof that this immature behavior was more-than-isolated and unpunished? It would be easy for her to, as it would exist in the git logs. But we don't know if it happened dozens of times, or just more than one time.

2. Reverting commits is still part of an engineer's job. She alleges that the commits were unfair...again, this evidence would exist in the logs. But what if the commits were justifiable, and the engineer was being snippy about it? That doesn't really count as harassment.

3. Was Horvath retaliated against by management (e.g. fired or demoted) for being angry at her colleague? Her account doesn't claim that.

The link you posted says that harassment, and sexual harassment, is illegal...But what Horvath describes is not harassment by the legal definition, because the other engineer could claim that the reverts were part of his job. Again, the commit logs, or even a description of them, are needed to decide whether this constituted harassment beyond a coworker criticizing another.

> I meant that this immature (and shitty) behavior was based in that domain of "romance" (the existence or lack thereof, in this case) and not, from the face of Horvath's description, automatically based on gender-discrimination.

Don't make up soft weasel words to describe it. It's sexual harassment plain and simple. Also, this bit about classifying it as gender-discrimination seems like pointless hair-splitting. Horvath felt wronged by many things, and she probably felt those things would not have happened if she were a man, and I think that's a fair assumption on her part. I'll leave it to the courts to get into the technical classification of precisely if and how she was wronged.

Sorry, reverting someone's commits out of spite because they rejected you is not sexual harassment "plain and simple." Words have meanings. Furthermore it is not "pointless hair-splitting" to say it is not gender discrimination. You clearly have no understanding of what these terms mean and why it's important to not let this type of drama bleed into the wider discussion about systemic gender discrimination in tech.

http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/sexual_harassment.cfm

"Harassment can include “sexual harassment” or unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical harassment of a sexual nature. Harassment does not have to be of a sexual nature, however, and can include offensive remarks about a person’s sex. For example, it is illegal to harass a woman by making offensive comments about women in general."

Harassment of someone who happens to be of the opposite gender does not make it sexual harassment. Harassment of someone for rejecting you romantically does not make it sexual harassment. If someone "feels" they would not have been harassed the same way if they were a man does not make it sexual harassment. (This is clearly false in this case, obviously, because the same thing could have happened if it were an advancement by someone of the same gender.)

Reverting someone's commit is not harassment of a "sexual nature" nor does it include commentary on the person's sex or women in general. It has nothing to do with gender or sexual comments, it has to do with an emotional reaction to rejection and an immature pathetic response.

Okay, good point, I stand corrected.

major props, a response like this doesn't happen often on the internet

There is a claim that the engineer in question was an ex-boyfriend, which would put this under office romance.

https://medium.com/p/d96f431f4e8e

> The first one, of course, is bad. And there's possibly a case to be made that if management knew about this engineer and let it slide, well, that does create a hostile environment. Yet I don't think Horvath points out where she complained about this guy's commit-reverting behavior to management.

It is only bad if she complains to management?

No...but it would bolster her claim that a hostile work environment was knowingly perpetuated, which is a component of harassment. I'm not saying that talking to management is a trivial thing, especially in cases of reporting harassment. But it's also unfair to argue "they should've stopped it" if they weren't appraised of the situation. Again, maybe Horvath did say so, but her account to TechCrunch doesn't mention it explicitly. In any case, such a thing would likely be an electronic record, and so if she feels that the record was not thoroughly examined, now's her chance to assert that.

If those women felt safe enough to be hula-hooping in front of these heterosexual men, then why was Horvath feeling so unsafe?

The key word in there would be “evidence”: take the example of “oogling” female employees hulla-ooping. You can prove that they did hulla-oop, but not that the way others watched them was sexist.

Proof is a huge issue with sexism in general: anecdotal, or separate cases for discrimination; expression of consent when it comes to rape, etc. I wished organisation handling such issues focused on provability in court, rather than awareness.

So, are they saying that Horvath was lying?

Neither party has to be lying. She might honestly believe she was treated in a specific way because of her sex, while others may have treated her in a specific way because of, for instance, her competence. Both may be 100% honest in their assessment of the relationship, yet be completely at odds.

The workplace absolutely sounded unprofessional, which often means the entire gradient of behaviour from welcoming to hostile (versus the normal corporate realm of gray areas in between). Indeed, unprofessional workplaces are generally celebrated in the tech community, often for good reason.

> She might honestly believe she was treated in a specific way because of her sex

Yes, but the investigation said there was no evidence for a hostile work environment. That's a claim above and beyond sexism: it's quantifying over all of the various ways a work environment could be hostile (of which sexism is one way). If what Horvath says about Preston's wife is true, then that sounds like a hostile work environment to me, regardless of whether the treatment was due to her sex.

> Yes, but the investigation said there was no evidence for a hostile work environment. That's a claim above and beyond sexism

No, its not. "Hostile work environment" is mentioned as one of the legal violations it found to be unsupported, and "hostile work environment" is a legal term of art in sexual harassment law. In context, then, it is not a claim "above and beyond sexism", its is a claim about the absence of a particular form of sexual harassment.

> it's quantifying over all of the various ways a work environment could be hostile (of which sexism is one way).

You are reading it backwards: the finding of no legal wrongdoing, in the context of the allegations made of sexual harassment, is quantifying over all the various ways in which sexual harassment law could be violated, and the "hostile work environment" statement is one specific example of areas where sexual harassment was not found.

> unprofessional workplaces are generally celebrated in the tech community, often for good reason

Why for good reason? Do you have any specific examples in mind?

Not the OP but here's an example.

And yet conventional ideas of professionalism have such an iron grip on our minds that even startup founders are affected by them. In our startup, when outsiders came to visit we tried hard to seem "professional." We'd clean up our offices, wear better clothes, try to arrange that a lot of people were there during conventional office hours. In fact, programming didn't get done by well-dressed people at clean desks during office hours. It got done by badly dressed people (I was notorious for programmming wearing just a towel) in offices strewn with junk at 2 in the morning. But no visitor would understand that. Not even investors, who are supposed to be able to recognize real productivity when they see it. Even we were affected by the conventional wisdom.

http://www.paulgraham.com/foundersatwork.html

The idea being, in that ultra-early-stage, 2-3 founding members only, state, trying too hard to be "professional" is counterproductive. Obviously, at the scale that we're talking about with Github, the game changes.

Ah, ok, I agree there's a big difference between an ultra-early-stage startup and a company the size of Github. But the latter criterion is what seems relevant to me for this thread, since it's about what happened at Github.

Unprofessional workplaces-

Limited or no dress code No set hours Limited involvement of HR Wide degree of responsibility -- limited written work descriptions Amorphous groups of collaboration that develop and disband

And on and on. Most technology companies, even once they are larger, try to hold onto those "unprofessional" traits. A strong HR group with heavy controls limit or eradicate the ability for some of the less pleasant behaviours, but they also can completely undermine self-motivation and creativity. It's a delicate balance.

I think there's a key distinction here between "unprofessional" traits that can enhance productivity, vs. unprofessional traits that kill productivity.

I agree that the former are good things and should be preserved where possible. (And not just in technology companies; some time ago I remember reading about a study that looked at various heavy industrial companies--auto manufacturers were one type--and found that the most productive ones were the ones that had many of the things you cite: limited or no dress code, limited HR involvement, limited written work descriptions and a lot of autonomy given to workers.)

However, the Github case appears to be an example of the latter. I don't think that's something to be celebrated.

They're saying that the investigative team brought in to determine if there was anything they could be sued over found no evidence/email trail for the specific things that they could get sued over.

"We didn't find an email trail that could lead to a lawsuit, and the co-founder in question immediately resigned" is a very far cry from "Everything she said was a lie."

A comment by her colleagues here https://medium.com/p/d96f431f4e8e might be relevant to this.

I have a question/observation that may be offensive, and it is not meant to be - so pardon my ignorance if this is a misguided perception:

When this story first ran and I was reading JA Horvaths tweets in the surrounding days - and reading whatever other articles related to this story were - I got the impression that she didn't necessarily seem like the most easy-going-innocent victim, and I wondered; what if she was actually a difficult to work-with person?

This is in no way a defense of any actions of any party, it was just a perception of the language, tone and content of the messages that Mrs. Horvath used gave me the perception that she wouldn't be the most desirable co-worker....

Now, I have nothing to substantiate such an opinion other than the tweets and stories I read just left me with this impression....

So, could it be that while her allegations are true, she is also a participant in the situation whereby she could have been acting poorly/using poor judgement?

Finally, I recognize that the actions of the wife of the founder are the most insidious, and a clear cause of concern, assuming they are in fact true...

It certainly could be, but in general what she's accusing them of would be wrong regardless of what a terrible person she could be. If someone is a bad employee/co-worker you can fire them, but you can't bully/harass them out of the place.

True. The weirdest accusation is that toward the wife... That just sounds.... strange.

This statement is pretty terrible.

The line "sexual or gender-based harassment" looks like it's been specifically written to exclude other kinds of harassment, especially given that term is used multiple times.

Employee harassment of any kind is unacceptable and if they're not willing to admit that it's a problem and act as if it's something that should be brushed under the carpet then it will continue to be a problem.

I appreciate that this might turn into a legal case so they're acting to protect themselves, but it would be better if they hadn't put out any statement rather than this weasel worded one.

Those were a big part of the accusations, though.

> Employee harassment of any kind is unacceptable

But generally not illegal except as a form of discrimination on an illegal basis (as in, e.g., sexual harassment.) The line about sexual or gender-based harassment is part of the detail leading up to the general statement of no legal wrongdoing, which is followed by the statement about errors of judgement, etc., that do not rise to the level of legal wrongdoing.

Harassment that does not constitute legally-prohibited discrimination would fall into the category of error that they have expressly stated did occur.

We have a process for all this. It's called the legal system.

It's not perfect but it mostly gets the job done.

Has Julie Ann Horvath formally sued Github? It's not clear to me that she has.

It seems that she may have grounds for some kind of lawsuit. Why hasn't she sued the company (if in fact there is no lawsuit)?

This to me is the most important question. At the moment, it seems this is becoming a matter of public opinion.

I would rather it be moved over to the legal system where the rules of engagement are much less malleable.

Quite so, and in most legal cases, both sides tend not to speak openly or publicly until the case has finished.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't really think speculating on fights like this from the outside without full and complete information is beneficial, or even sane and rational. Can we just all agree that we don't know the full story here, and that any and all players might be misleading or not telling the whole story publicly? This is an internal issue. The only opinions I am interested in are internal opinions of other github co-workers, and that only if I was interviewing for a position at the company.

This is the internet. There is no place here for your logic and reason.

I literally cringe whenever someone posts this hackneyed response.

I think it has merit, essentially a form of play. Kittens will act out various attacks on each other, even though there is no real threat. It allows them to work through various solutions to problems in advance, so that when they are in real danger they have already practiced, and will be able to learn more quickly.

You are right that we don't, can't know the truth. So what we do is we map out a space of possible realities and talk through as many of them as we feel inclined to. We try to figure out where the line is that a founder's wife mustn't cross. We try to understand how common sexual harassment is, and what the probabilities are that any given accusation is truthful. These discussions aren't oriented towards reaching any sort of verdict. That is for the courts, and the coworkers. Instead what we need to do is a kind of cartography. Is there a mountain there? How big is it? What are the routes across it?

I think these issues are supremely important, because I think sexism in tech is like a giant hole in our rowboat that we are constantly having to bail out, and I think our organizations will be much more efficient if we can get better representation of diverse skills and viewpoints. And I also believe that rare events can make an outsized impact on a project. And that with such issues you rarely get second chances. And I believe that some of the traps that exist are on a hair trigger, and are very difficult to see. So I think putting energy into "play" ahead of time is very important.

You don't want to be going for the jugular only to realize you've never tried out your claws.

Tom Preston-Werner's response: http://tom.preston-werner.com/2014/04/21/farewell-github-hel...

It would be nice to not see the harassment word prefaced with "gender-based." This parsing, by Tom, without fuller disclosure of what mistakes were made leads to the conclusion that there was some form of harassment, but that it wasn't put forth in a manner which legally falls into "gender-based," which would make github and Tom (& family) liable for those actions.

I still want to see the dramatization where the guy coder comes in professing his love, gets spurned, then spitefully removes code.

Terms like hostile, gender-based, and discrimination all have pretty specific requirements for proof.

At least HN an move forward unhappily and pull out the "tragic" word describe everything. I'm not sure we all experienced catharsis, but "tragic" will have to do.

Can anyone tell what exact discrimination Horvath faced? I went through her long interview and I can only read how she "felt" to be in "boys club" as opposed to specific events that can be qualified as discrimination. For example, she says her code was reverted and was apparently blaming that event on her being a women. I can't imagine someone throwing good code away because it was written by a women rather it seems much more likely that her code had issues. Then there is series of rambling for founders wife sitting in front of her every day. That doesn't feel like discrimination either but rather feels like she was not looked upon as desirable employee there at higher level. Overall I got an impression that she was turning whatever bad performance on her part in to case of discrimination. May be I'm missing details but it is very hard to identify events that can actually be qualified as "discrimination" in her long rambling interview.

You're missing details. I'd list them, but it'd be easier for you to just read her interview again, this time without skimming.

It would be fascinating to see the commit in question.

If the commit has technical merit and should not have been reverted, why would you not focus on demonstrating why the technical merit of the commit in question? Claiming that a commit was reverted for personal reasons instead of defending the technical merits of the commit strikes me as naïve.

A highly competent person who has produced some work product that was challenged would typically either defend it on merit or assume they might have produced a lesser work and seek to understand why.

My experience in all areas of competence I'm familiar with is that histrionics like those observed thus far are often comorbid with demonstration of the Dunning-Kruger effect in inexperienced individuals.

Zed Shaw is one of the few people I can think of that would be a counterpoint to this observation, demonstrating high competence when acting histrionically. You can just look at his contributions to open-source to see how good he is at what he does.

JAH's github profile (for an engineer that worked there for a long time) seems conspicuously sparse to me. There really aren't many projects there to demonstrate superior mastery of HTML, CSS or git.

https://github.com/nrrrdcore?tab=repositories

Looking further, like at her blog repo. There are .DS_Store files committed (which would normally be in a local .gitignore or in your home folder .gitignore file) and the first file I clicked on the in CSS folder has Jekyll ruby errors printed to it:

https://github.com/nrrrdcore/nrrrdcore.github.com/tree/maste... (DS_Store file from 2 years ago still there)

https://github.com/nrrrdcore/nrrrdcore.github.com/blob/maste... (broken blog post is 6 months old)

Assuming this is representative of the quality of her commits, Occam's Razor suggest competence may be the reason for reverting the that css commit.

Exactly! I had the curiosity to check JAH's github profile too, and it raised more suspicious towards her than I had previously imagined. For a fair comparison, let's see a couple of female github repos (both frontend and backend):

https://github.com/pamelafox?tab=repositories

https://github.com/kellabyte?tab=repositories

https://github.com/gwenshap?tab=repositories

See? Any of those smart women above has much more quality code in their repos with regular activity, even though not any of them works at github, that is, they push code on their free time.

Finally, let's see a repo by another harassed geek girl: https://github.com/adriarichards?tab=repositories

Um... I definitely see a pattern here screaming too loud not to take notice.

http://www.theverge.com/2014/3/19/5526574/github-sexism-scan... for a bit of backstory.

His wife says she didn't realize that soliciting contributions from her husband's employees may not be appropriate.

She pretty plainly states that it never even entered her mind. That tells me more about the atmosphere there than anything.

Yes, I agree, but I'm sympathetic: GH has always pushed the flat-hierarchy, we-are-all-peers attitude. And I think that's cool in theory, but has potentially bad side-effects like this one, where people feel pressured in situations where they viscerally know they are not peers, even if the atmosphere tries to push that idea.

I have not followed this case. However, this just rolled across my FB feed :

http://www.businessinsider.com/julie-ann-horvath-github-hara...

Maybe I'm being uncharitable, but based on her [JAH] public statements I have a hard time taking her version of events 100% at face value. The drama to fact ratio feels high.

> "Company perks : witch hunts, snow cones and silencing"

> "I am not a victim. I'm someone that a company's negligence pushed too far, for too long. I am living, breathing consequence"

> "Leaving GitHub was the best decision of my life"

> "Hmm still no mention of the man who bullied me out of our code base because I _wouldn't_ fuck him. Too popular to be accountable, I guess"

Is Github that awful? I'm not seeing it.

There's a strong current of spitefulness in those Twitter posts. While I understand that Horvath is clearly livid, and obviously not without some reason, that kind of public vitriol would make me question anyone's rationality.

I wonder why his wife had to be at Github at all. I've worked at half a dozen startups now. Never would a spouse of either gender be in the office, and if they happened to maybe communicate with anyone, it was only a quick introduction and then they got out of your way.

I would consider it highly inappropriate.

His wife's twitter bio reads:

"Obsessed with inspiring the tech community to support underfunded nonprofits."

It's so much easier to pressure, oops I meant "inspire," people when you're the wife of the CEO.

I've been in a couple Midwestern start-ups, and founder's spouses (wives, in both cases) often did come into the office. Generally they were going somewhere together, or whatever. Chatted several times, and it was no big thing.

When they did ask how things were going business-wise, I got the nod from their husband. Turns out, they were also on the hook (co-signatories) for much of the start-up capital vehicles/loans/lines of credit.

Their money on the line, they own the company, IMHO.

Julie Ann Horvath has posted a bunch of interesting tweets about it starting here https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/458340919721197568

Somehow, I don't think she's doing what is in her best interest right now. The guy has resigned and the tech media is totally on this story right now. Any small _preceived_ misstep and she could end up being labeled another "Adria Richards".

Also, the question[1] in her current github background appears to represent a suggestive joke that I would have never guessed she'd be comfortable with. Not saying this is any kind of evidence of anything; just interesting that apparently there is a side to her that finds jokes like that funny.

http://i.imgur.com/X8Wdgg0.png

Why, because she's supposed to be sexless before she can be credible in a claim of sexual harassment?

I wouldn't have a joke like that on any of my social profiles. If anything, this is in her defense since it's one data-point indicating she's not a stereotypical hyper-feminist-drama-queen(do these even exist?) looking to be offended by the slightest incident. She's easy-going enough to have something like that on her public profile and she _knows_ what people will think of first when they read that.

All of these tweets I see from her account from the last ~45 minutes or so don't help her case at all.

Taking these types of things public especially before any formal investigation occurs (which kicked off this whole scenario) usually does more harm than good.

Did you not read the article? They claim to have finished a formal, third party lead, investigation.

I did and understand everything that is going on, but reading her Twitter feed the last hour shitting on everyone and everything at Github (since they didn't find any criminal wrongdoing) doesn't make you look good or more believable, it actually does the opposite.

Yep, we should all just shut the fuck up if we feel we're wronged.

Yes. A lawyer would advise that yes, please do not say anything until we get to court.

100% correct. If you are serious, you don't use Twitter or social media to advocate your case.

There are good and bad ways to respond to the results of an investigation. I would argue that her response falls under the latter. She's doing herself a disservice by posting stuff like this.

The background is from the following scenario: DJ asks girl being interviewed what favourite position is, she responds 'CEO'.

IIRC it was 'sway in the morning'.

Hmmm, I thought it was a caller that asked that question, not the DJ.

Both correct: DJ speaks on behalf of caller who suggested it.

For what it's worth, I want to point out that many of us don't even think Adria Richards is an "Adria Richards".

Mrs. Preston-Werner says here (https://medium.com/p/2fe173c44215 ) that the accusation and reason is that: "We learned that unnamed employees felt pressured by Tom and me to work pro-bono for my nonprofit."

I don't even know what to make of this. They say there was no evidence but he is still resigning.

They say there was no evidence of gender-based harassment, but I don't see them claiming "there was no evidence of harassment" either. Don't know enough to pass judgement.

It says there's no evidence of gender-based $BAD_THING, but not that no $BAD_THINGs happened.

One could argue that allowing a non-employee so much access to a private company is an 'error of judgement.' (Referring to Horvath's comments about Tom's wife)

Dude's probably incredibly rich, he can spend the rest of his life on a beach. Why bother dragging through this? Just go buy a boat or something.

boat's keep a man poor. Get a caravan ;-)

They say no evidence of illegality, but there is evidence of poor judgement. Without commenting on the specifics of this incident that's a valid reason to fire a CEO/co-founder/exec. I have no particular knowledge of what happened but if GitHub thinks he showed poor judgement then it is reasonable to ask him to resign.

For example, if you didn't actually do anything legally wrong, but made it look an awful lot like you did by screwing up and being a dick about it, and you're a company executive, then you can resign or get fired.

I suspect that this is not a million miles from what happened here: not actual discrimination, but enough of a blunder to look like it.

No _legal_ wrongdoing.

This reads to me as "Tom royally fucked up, but not enough to break any laws."

well, even if he did nothing wrong his position was probably untenable. He'll have lost his credibility and more will be said about this incident than any other. i.e. anything else gitbhub would do/release, would most probably be clouded by this incident Irrespective of which scenario occurred, he made the most appropriate, and honourable decision.

The post is PR-speak for:

> "We found lots of ugly stuff but would rather not mention any of it in public, so move along, nothing to see"

Is the expectation that the public should be privy to that ugly stuff?

(Asking because I'm curious of other's opinions on the matter, not because I'm questioning your statement)

Speaking for myself, I couldn't care less. But then I wasn't following the story at all to begin with.

The truth though is that this isn't the kind of stuff we continental Europeans care much about. Heck, we elect notorious pussy hounds as presidents around here, so I imagine that whatever the guy did is benign compared to Berlusconi's sex orgies with barely legal (or not legal at all) prostitutes. (Not saying it's any good, mind you. Just try to picture the yardsticks we have.)

"the investigator did find evidence of mistakes and errors of judgment."

They're trying to discourage employees and ex-employees from filing a class action lawsuit.

TOTALLY MADE-UP EXAMPLE:

1. Employee makes sexual harassment claim.

2. Outside HR consultant brought in.

3. Consultant asks "where is your anti-sexual harassment training course?"

4. CEO says o_o.

5. HR consultant establishes a policy for the company.

6. Board asks CEO to resign for not having the thing asked for in #3.

Not having a training course isn't illegal -- it's not even evidence that anyone was sexually harassed -- but the board can ask the CEO to move on because they feel he was not sufficiently protecting the company.

(PS: Post-college I've never worked at a place large enough to have required a harassment training course. This is just an example of "something the CEO should have done to protect the company but didn't, and we got away with it this time but might not next time.")

In California once your company goes over a certain size (which github has), they must have a sexual harassment course presented to the employees every one or two years.

In my company that was a mandatory all company meeting where a lawyer made a powerpoint presentation for a couple of hours. Then there was some sort quiz and us signing something as far as I can remember.

I believe the state requirement is for managers, not regular employees.

Every 2 years I have to spend a couple hours taking a traffic-school-style online training.

I am not a lawyer, but http://www.dfeh.ca.gov/Publications_StatLaws_SexHarrass.htm

All employees must receive info, companies > 50 need to offer two hours of classroom time within six months and then every two years.

It's a distraction.

Only if it was true or partially true. If it was completely off-base and false, they'd be going after the person making the allegations like there was no tomorrow.

No evidence of legal wrongdoing, which is a pretty high bar. Many companies will expect better of their president than "did not actually act illegally".

It doesn't really matter what actually happened. The well has been poisoned so just fire someone and get it over with.

Now Github can get back to business.

> It doesn't really matter what actually happened.

That's the annoying part of the story.

http://tom.preston-werner.com/2014/04/21/farewell-github-hel...

What a crock of shit. People don't typically quit companies they built from the ground up when they have "done nothing wrong".

:( this sucks. Github would not even exist without Tom Preston-Werner and I am really scared to see how it will exist without him. Tragic for all his users.

> I am really scared to see how it will exist without him

Isn't that a little bit extreme? Do all the good things that happen at Github stem directly from Tom Preston-Werner?

I can't claim intimate knowledge of Github the company, but I somehow doubt that this is a "Steve Jobs" type situation.

Come to think, I somehow doubt Steve Jobs was a "Steve Jobs" type situation.

To me this is lawyer speak for, yes it is true but if we admit, we would be liable. I would expect something like this from Bank of America or some other mega-corp, not github.

Only good thing about this is that it is not happening on the front pages of TechCrunch and whatever else blog might be following events like this.

And this is why you need strong/clear HR policies.

Sure, at their size now. Not before, as policy beyond "use good judgement" at a small company is basically pointless.

Your first dozen hires must all be good enough to write such policies...

FWIW, Github hasn't been a "small company" for quite some time. github.com/about/team says they are currently at 237 employees.

"Don't give non-employees admin privileges on your system" doesn't really sound like an HR policy. It would have been a good policy, though.

>>the investigator did find evidence of mistakes and errors of judgment

Isn't that like saying, well the hard proof isn't there but its clear you did do something wrong?

Which is an important distinction to make, especially considering the original allegations were specific.

I get the distinction, but I guess I'm just skeptical about the attempt at face saving here.

If you haven't read already, check this: https://medium.com/p/d96f431f4e8e She did a lot of wrong things: - Dating a coworker is not one of the best practise. - gossiping around about your co-workers/founders character is the also not the best thing to do. - If you write shit code, your code will be removed. She is definitely not known for her coding abilities. She is just a melodrama queen who is bad at heart, opportunist, blackmailed founder to poison the company atmosphere. - You can create a healthy workspace shouting "Women Women" every time. We work with women too. Our behaviour and respect is based on compassion and professionalism. They are just like any other person in the company. - The real story must have been that she is a bad/mediocre developer who was being reviewed which didn't turned out pretty well (Obv since she was busy bitching against coworkers). The only good way she had to abuse and insult the company publically , get sympathy and then a Job. She seems to have good PR skills. (Pun intended) Again, here are some of her recent tweets: https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/458347574672388096 https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/458345005866696704

This is turning into a Soap-Opera-via-Social-Media... What happened to the good old days of people suing for damages in a court of law and moving on?

Public name-and-shame has its place in the grand picture of such incidents, but the longer it stretches, relative to time on social media, the more sudsy it turns.

This fucking sucks, man. Tom's always seemed like an awesome guy.

As always, absolutely overblown PR messes like this are a result of faulty communication.

Without proper context or research done about it by Internet warriors frothing at the mouth, a one-off donation ruins Brendan Eich's once rich and successful career. Partly because Internet warriors tend to make emotional judgments before they properly study the evidence and contex and before they think through things, but also because Eich ... never responded. He never let the facts through, never let out an, "Oh, sorry guys. This donation was done because of X and Y and Z (don't support marriage as a whole/don't want government getting it's hands in things/etc.,etc.) and it doesn't reflect my current views on sexual orientation or that people with certain sexual orientations deserve less opportunities.", he never gave proper context and evidence to suggest that he wasn't a bad character.

Similarly with this. People are (conveniently?) keeping facts back, giving very vague stories, saying very little with a lot of words, etc., etc. If we are to believe that this thing was a huge misunderstanding and GitHub doesn't employ a bunch of mysognisitic, immature people, why hasn't Tom spoke up? I'm sure that GitHub is internally a lot better than it's image on the Internet right now is -- why doesn't anyone speak up?

Or is it really as bad as the Internet's image of it is?

we have one side of the story, for fuck's sake. the other side--the github side? it's lawyer-speak and completely devoid of anything that addresses the specific accusations.

how so many ostensibly smart people can simultaneously lose their ability to think critically is incredible. add the word "gender" to anything and people lose their minds.

To me it sounds more like...

We dont have enough evidence to take legal action in this case, but our investigation found out something worse so we would like Tom to resign before it comes out publicly.

Slightly off topic:

Is there anywhere that offers(for lack of a better term) open source HR policy for small companies to copy? Seems to me writing something like this can be fairly onerous for a small company, especially in terms of legal overhead, but is clearly important. Having a starting point would be very helpful...

To me it seems Github fired him but allow him to "save face" with the resignation story.

This is pretty much standard procedure. Depending on his contract, it saves github from paying severance.

It feels unconvincing, and unapologetic.

I can't think of much else they could reasonably do in response to these allegations. Tom was a founder, President, and former CEO of GitHub. They effectively fired him. They apologized profusely and laid out specific ways in which they're trying to fix the problem. They hired a new HR head. They're starting to train and educate employees.

What else would you have GitHub do?

Agreed. everything is right rationally, in fact I said it "feels". It feels cold. It lacks human touch, in my opinion of course.

Why should they have to be apologetic?

They owe you nothing, especially a detailed series of events. He's resigning, they posted a note, the situation is over. What more do you want?

Horvath essentially ruined this mans life through e-mobbing.

Just look @ her tweets: http://recode.net/2014/04/21/julie-ann-horvath-on-github-inv...

I really don't care about how it's published in the media, I mean, this last episode at least. It was clear since the very beginning when it broke out that it would be dirty, really dirty. It's a shame not only for the people involved but more specially for Github as an ecosystem. Such incredible company bleeding in the media... sad times... and when I say incredible company I don't mean incredibly owned or well run company, you know what I mean. I lost a bit of faith in them today anyway. Sad times...

It is shortsighted to think there is nothing we can learn from this. There are certainly things we can learn.

1) A good lawyer is worth a 1000 tweets.

2) Getting deeply romantically involved with coworkers carries serious risks, whether or not you believe a company has the right to restrict office romances or not.

3) The fetishization of "we don't have any process!" is a mark of immaturity, not Zen. One would think engineers of all people would understand the importance of formalized process.

I don't think anyone walks away a winner here.

"This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper"

I think with the amount of coverage this story has gotten, everyone wanted something big to happen. Instead, we just get something mundane in some carefully crafted words that seem designed to give no information whatsoever, while still ensuring nobody can be sued any further. I kind of get the feeling that they are all trying to say "Nothing to see here....move along....cows turn themselves inside out all the time".

Best of luck to everyone involved. Before casting judgement, please remember that everybody makes mistakes. The process of healing involves accepting this reality and recognizing everybody's humanity.

In light of this, I would personally be honored to work with someone of Tom Preston-Werner's caliber.

I hope he & his wife learn from this experience & grow as people.

So what happens when a founder leaves like this, do they give up their % ownership and the other founders gain what was lost?

I suppose it depends on how the articles of incorporation are written up, but I really doubt it would work that way. It's more likely that the leaving founder will become a sort of silent partner, retaining equity but not managerial input.

Also, can they get rid of Gravatar now?

They kind of did. You just start with a Gravatar, but can upload your own image.

https://github.com/blog/1803-switch-your-picture-with-ease

"The investigation found no evidence to support the claims against Tom and his wife of sexual or gender-based harassment or retaliation, or of a sexist or hostile work environment."

"We still have work to do"

Which is it? A non acknowledgement acknowledgement?

The best thing about this article is that it hopefully signals that we will no longer have to here about this anymore. As much as I love using GitHub, I hate hearing about the internal politics of their executives and engineers.

This is a misleading title and not the actual title on the page.

Think this might make those "Fork me on GitHub" badges a little less popular? I sincerely hope so.

it's not idea Sunday but: a wearable video recording device that documents everything.

It may sound crazy but it would be interesting to me to find out how much of my rather boring life is actionable / illegal or distasteful

Devices like this exist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifelog http://getnarrative.com/

Im over using anything with this much drama, I want features, not headline news.

Weird that just a few months ago, Tom became the first President of Github.

What a load. Good luck with your hiring goals for 2014...

Hope that Julie publishes a detailed account. Sources I've read so far are vague and subjective as to what actually happened.

github is not seeing another penny of my money.

Because Tom didn't demand they go balls-to-the-wall fighting what may be an inevitably losing battle to disprove something that isn't disprovable?

I don't know what happened, but this outcome might be very much in Tom's well-considered best interests. You are making a no-win situation.

EDIT: Heck, I don't even know if you are mad at GitHub for insufficiently defending Tom or insufficiently crucifying him

gjvc is using their small slice of economic leverage to weigh in; the motivations are no one else's business unless gjvc volunteers this. Given the baiting questions you pose, what incentive does gjvc have to address your curiosity?

It's not really "weighing in" to send up a confusing signal, despite (especially?) if it's very emphatic.

https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/459358875213238272

"Because I would hear ‘We should hire more women!’ on almost a daily basis from the same people who kind of refused to respect me as a peer."

I don't know what went on here, but I have heard these words before. And most of the time it has nothing to do with gender.

(As to hn deleting comments--I don't understand the moderators. I posted something earlier about the divide between the rich/poor--and claimed something about the lack of modern Horatio Algiers. I guess it really bothers some of the fancy boys? I come back to this site and comments are magically removed. I commented in the article on Lenin. Yes--this is off topic; I'm just curious why whenever I bring up money, and how many rich boys fathers helped them out graetly; I am edited?)

"We should hire more women", when said to a person of the female sex, does not necessarily or automatically mean, "we should hire you".

Kicked out of his own company - ouch. Taking VC and giving control to outsiders is Russian roulette.

Writing and adhering to HR/conflict-of-interest policy is a no-brainer. A board who cared for the interests of its founder would not leave this as a trap for the founder to step in.

I note with interest that the other accused was given a promotion.

"There was no investigation." - Julie Ann Horvath

https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/458342995469688833

Theresa Preston-Werner's twitter bio reads:

"Obsessed with inspiring the tech community to support underfunded nonprofits."

Mostly, her own nonprofit, I imagine.

3 recent tweets from the wife that indicate that she might be batshit crazy:

TheresaPrestonWerner ‏@tpdubs2 Apr 10 Best meal I've ever had. @ The Meatball Shop http://instagram.com/p/moWCO4njNA/

TheresaPrestonWerner ‏@tpdubs2 Apr 10 Building out a team and getting to work with insanely great people makes me the happiest founder ever.

TheresaPrestonWerner ‏@tpdubs2 Mar 27 First time in 2 weeks that I feel like I'm not just performing being excited, but I really am insanely excited to change the world!

(people who express themselves with such extreme language, usually are batshit crazy. not taking sides here, the Horvath lady also seems to be batshit crazy from a reading of her tweet stream.)

> people who express themselves with such extreme language, usually are batshit crazy

Quick question: Would you consider "batshit crazy" extreme language?

Best, ever, happiest founder ever, changing the WORLD

The meatball show is legendary, can't blame her for that one.

Many people talk about their coworkers as insanely great, I think that is common tech language.

I don't think this is extreme language.

What a surprise. Who thought that there is zero legal ground for her accusations...

github raped me! now lets start the misandric shitstorm.

This is what happens when you hire people for their gender (Horvath) or race. Injudiciously applied 'Liberalism' is the core problem here.

Are we still on this?

GitHub did the right thing and it turns out that Ms. Horvath accusations were without any basis. She not just damaged the gender equality efforts harder for everybody but raised visibility about how hiring females can damage your company's reputation. This is not the right way of fighting for the good case. A good example how to challenge the status quo: http://qz.com/192071/how-one-college-went-from-10-female-com...

I hope more people realize that we need more results and less artificially buffed scandals.

How do you suggest she should have responded, rather than calling them out publicly?

First of all, if you have problem with your employment you sit down with your manager or your peers and talk about it. If you can resolve the case right there great if not, escalate. If you still think that they mistreat you, get a lawyer. Going public with accusations that you can't prove is certainly not the way. Look at her now, you think that there is any company on this planet which is going to risk the same process that was done to Github on a maximum mediocre engineer? I don't think so. This pretty much a lose lose situation as I can see it. Not to mention the post from that anonymous employee who states that in fact Ms. Horvath was starting this entire scandal due to jealousy and trying to undermine other people's reputation. You really think that this is they way to go?

When it's the CEO who you have a problem with, how do you escalate beyond him?

> Look at her now, you think that there is any company on this planet which is going to risk the same process that was done to Github on a maximum mediocre engineer? I don't think so.

She already has another job with &yet. I'm curious though, what makes you think she's a "maximum mediocre engineer"?

Well beyond the CEO is my lawyer and you get gather proof and build a case. She just exploded and left, making accusations nobody can prove. Again, that anonymous post just made it clear that she did not tell half of the story.

Just by going through her public gh profile.

"it turns out"?

Are you f'ing serious? You read that legalistic statement and take that to be the whole truth and final word a priori? This is just too naive for words.

Alright, so I guess her accusations are true. We can't prove it, the auditor says it is not the case, anonymous post says that too. Yet, we need to take her words against many. Simply because she said so.

No, that's not what I said.

We're all probably going to have to get comfortable with a basic level of uncertainty about this.

Silly thing these gender based politics and acts of political correctness. I can guarandamntee you that if I was Tom and was innocent, mistakes in judgment aside, I would not be resigning from MY COMPANY.

Is this the result of new board members coming in post-investment? If so, it's more reason to stay bootstrapped and free. If not, who is there to pressure him other than Chris?

Edit: 4 downvotes without a single comment. Tech is really becoming a soup sandwich of misplaced frustration and angst.

in regards to misplaced frustration and angst, pretty much, tech is mostly filled with frustrated, unattractive (physical and personality wise) middle aged men, who believe that the only way to find a mate is to swallow this liberal agenda so as to make themselves appear as more of a 'nice guy', and thus in their twisted little heads, becoming more attractive to members of the opposite sex. Typical beta mentality.

edit: actually, I should say that tech is not actually like this, its mainly the illusion that reddit and HN present.

Agree 100%. There are a couple of Betas tweeting her offering to employ her.

Or maybe there are some men who are aware that things aren't always as easy in the tech industry for women as they are for men.

Because they, you know, listen to the majority of women in tech, who say this is in fact the case.

So, guy who wrote GitHub and a ton of open source stuff is ousted from his own company and sacrificed for a person whos biggest accomplishment in open source is JavaScript for Cats? https://github.com/nrrrdcore/javascript-for-cats

What an embarrassment if you ask me. Why should he leave if he's been found of no legal wrong-doing by a third party? These tumblr-twats warriors only break communities.

> What an embarrassment if you ask me. Why should he leave if he's been found of no legal wrong-doing by a third party?

Because you can do your job badly and be unsuitable to continue in it by exhibiting poor judgement without breaking the law.

You're assuming he did his job badly. All I'm seeing is the investigation showing NO EVIDENCE OF WRONG DOING. You're taking her word over an investigations result.

> You're assuming he did his job badly.

No, I'm not assuming that. I am saying that's exactly what the report of the invstigation plus the actual concrete results suggests that Github determined based on the investigation.

> All I'm seeing is the investigation showing NO EVIDENCE OF WRONG DOING.

The investigation does not show "no evidence of wrong doing", instead, it found "while there may have been no legal wrongdoing, the investigator did find evidence of mistakes and errors of judgment" and that finding is cited as the direct reason for Preston-Werner's resignation.

Why do you consider this relevant?

It would appear to be relevant because she describes herself as an engineer, and because she thought the reverts of her code and bad performance reviews were due to sexism.

Care to explain the downvote?

Another downvote by an anonymous coward for a perfectly reasonable comment? Sometimes I just have to shake my head at HN :)

Are you saying that good engineers can't have a sense of humor?

No.

She didn't write JS for Cats. Which is excellent, BTW.

The guy who wrote Github is responsible for some of the worst coding atrocities in a major piece of F/OSS. (Evidence: the Linguist debacle.)

JS for Cats is, in comparison to Linguist, a work of towering intellect.

More info? I have never heard of anything bad about Linguist (And I don't know that much about it.).

Googling didnt bring up anything obvious,

Parent might be referring to the fact that it can easily give false positives, but I'm not sure.

I think it's the project that does syntax highlighting for the code browser in Github?

It is the software the identifies % of language used in a repository and highlighting etc. https://github.com/github/linguist

I just haven't heard anything bad about it so am curious why OP calls it a "debacle"

It's interesting how many would still remember the incident in question, if it wasn't brought up like this again. My personal attention span must be pretty short, it took a couple of days for me to stop associating Github with that incident.

What an ugly mess!

Somewhat related: I am amazed now much gossiping goes on in an entirely male work group behind other people's backs. Males are definitely worse than females in that regard. I would not be surpised if allegations were true. A bunch if primadonna devs can be nasty to work with. Just stay away and separate work and life.

Eh no, in my personal experience in a workplace where there are majority women you -will- get cliques and you will hear some nasty rumors go around. Women enjoy spreading gossip and harassing each other.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hmlPtRu1SQ

Kicked out of his own company? Reminds me of Apple and SJ... Hopefully Tom will see a great future and make some out of the blue return.

First came across Tom's code in the Grit gem (around 2008 possibly).

Unfortunately people who can write inspirational and innovative code like that are not always the most perceptive to the complexities and risks of HR in a large organisation.

I really hope mojombo gets back to building awesome again ... a VR coding environment - shut up and take my money ...

I doubt they are publishing the real story, there. What is a fact is that Mr. Preston-Werner is resigning. From there, we may only speculate.

If I may speculate, I'd guess that there was some truth to the story told by "the other side", that there was some kind of harassment on the part of this man's wife (who was not employed there). That is all I can really guess. And the only real way to publicly resolve this would be for this man to resign - while he perhaps didn't personally do anything wrong, maybe his wife did, so he was in a sense the fall guy for that.

This makes me sad. My interpretation of these events was that a toxic employee instigated a witch hunt and was successful. By simple observation of numbers here, you probably disagree with this. But for the few of you that do agree with this point of view, take it as a reminder of the crucial role of hiring. You can easily hire the person who ruins your company's culture and causes your downfall.

That is some impressive victim-blaming.

totally correct. disgruntled employees should just keep their mouth shut and quit.

If losing one executive at a 200+ employee company "ruins the company's culture and causes [that company's] downfall", then that company and that executive have been doing it wrong!

Regardless of the facts of the case and whatever damage it may have done to GitHub's culture, if this incident and this individual's departure are enough to cause GitHub's ruin and downfall, then that's evidence of an absurdly fragile company and culture.

Irrationality is sweeping the Tech world. I shudder to think where this will end.

This is scary. I was just checking out Jekyll and stumbled upon his blog. Then I came here and saw this.

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