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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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...

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.

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 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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

news flash: 80% off work environments are hostile.

Followup: that statistic is 75% made-up.

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

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.

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