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.
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.
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".
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?
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!
Unfortunate that it is anonymous, but it is still worth reading in my opinion.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_rating_agencies_and_the...
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
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.
(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...
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 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.
Rashomon.
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.
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.
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 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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
while there may have been no legal wrongdoing, the investigator did find evidence of
mistakes and errors of judgment
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.