Towards the end (of the article), it sounds like she was just going to 'quietly' exit the company, until someone (apparently) rage-posted some disparaging remarks about her leaving the company (prior to it becoming public knowledge). Now she wants to leverage public opinion to get Github to take some action... supposedly.
Maybe she was using the app. Once Secret has access to your contacts, it shows you what's been posted by your friends and friends of friends. So she would have seen what almost everyone at Github was posting.
This seems like a very common way to dismiss complaints of sexism, whether those complaints are valid or invalid. Could someone explain why?
I remember an similar complaint against a woman who said she was groped at a conference. What, is she expected to get a video of him groping her? There's a reason why so much sexism happens behind closed doors, off the record, or just in person when nobody else is nearby.
These things need to be public because that is required before we can discuss them. We are not putting GitHub on trial here.
Actually, yes we are. Since the goings-on at Github are being discussed and people are trying to decide which side is right, and when the people have decided which story is true then the shaming / applauding of Github will be spread to blogs and Twitter and Facebook and what not... this is exactly like a trial.
Until there's a second side to this my GitHub use is not going to continue. Sad to see this happen, but it's not hard to change origins on my repos to BitBucket or Gitlab.
edit: and again, it's two commands to push my repo back. but i have no interest in being with github at this time
I hope you understand that the truth is not simply a matter of if somebody is lying or not. Recollections can be flawed. Perceptions may be biased. Knowledge of other factors may be limited. Events or circumstances may be unintentionally unconsidered or mentioned. There is always value in hearing the take of other people, even when you are an involved party (and therefore able to be certain that you are not lying).
She don't need to lie, she can talk about her feelings. Most of the situations in the article are pretty much innocent, but feelings provoked in her aren't.
You cannot verify or falsify feelings. They can have different plausible origins. She present one origin, you say she is right. Yes, her side is plausible.
The worst thing here is that some of the origins can be offending to some of participants. You chose side that offends Github team.
Reverting someone's commits "silently" (inasmuch as you can do anything silently in git!) is any of those? That's interesting, because my commits were once "silently" reverted at a previous workplace and then when I queried it, it was explained that I was the one in the wrong.
Because I had made a commit without discussing it first and without understanding what I was doing.
(I would have discussed it first, but the developer concerned was on holiday at the time.)
What I'm saying is, there's a possibility that it wasn't unprofessional.
Some might argue what was unprofessional at both employers (GitHub and my previous one) was not having an iron policy that all commits must be code reviewed by another person. But that's a policy issue.
There's a _possibility_ that it was just that suddenly after the failed come-on, her commits suddenly needed a lot of reverting (though you'd think Github, of all companies, would have decent policies on communicating on changes; silent reversion is not normal and is likely to cause a lot of confusion).
However, it allegedly started happening _after_ the failed come-on, which would make it retaliatory. That's unprofessional, and probably amounts to gross misconduct.
> "However, it allegedly started happening _after_ the failed come-on, which would make it retaliatory."
That would make it possibly retaliatory. It remains possible (although I would not say that I consider it likely) that there were legitimate technical justifications for reverts made after the rejection, and that the sequencing of those two events was entirely coincidental.
If I were management at github, I would grill the employee who reverted those changes for a technical justification for the reverts. If the justification seemed tenuous or strained, I would fire them on the spot. I would however make sure to grill them before firing them, as it is not certain that there was no legitimate technical justification.
But why? Despite it's dubious origins, Github remains an excellent / superior product. One may not agree with the way they do things (and even that seems to be some, not everyone in the organization), but is that really a reason to stop using the product?
Well that doesn't make sense. Unless he's randomly voting without consideration, then of course he evaluated the various options and "judged" them. That's rather the point of voting, isn't it?
As usual, the people pushing logical fallacies are the ones making the most of it. You do not want to reward people of the origin product because they are mis-behaving, so you are hoping to create negative incentives/tradeoffs for such behavior.
In the cited example on that website, it says
Accused on the 6 o'clock news of corruption and taking bribes, the senator said that we should all be very wary of the things we hear in the media, because we all know how very unreliable the media can be." Except in this one it goes, 6oclockCorp->generality of media. In this one, it is Github->Github, especially cause 'founder' is here.
That said I think leaving github is a pretty dumb idea considering that comparatively they are the good kids overall.
I mean, if you accept that the article is true, the company described is horribly dysfunctional, and will likely have difficulty going forward as it grows. You could call it an early warning (assuming you accept the truth of the allegations).
That seems like a knee-jerk reaction. We don't know what has really happened, and we've only heard one side of the story. It seems like these days people are just looking for something to be upset about.
If allegations of non-employee/founder wife scenario is true, I would hope the board shows said founder the door. Beyond being in bad taste, it's exposing the company to some serious liabilities...
Yeah, it'll be interesting to hear GitHub's response if this aspect of the story is true. Those are some pretty serious allegations - influence over business and personnel decisions, reads Campfire chat logs, has spies within the company to keep an eye on what's happening, and, of course, intimidates employees. Quite damaging things.
What's the big deal? I am not a lawyer and I have no idea of the issues involved here, but surely if she was now made an employee and given a salary of $0, the fact that she was a significant investor (via her husband's shares) would make her relatively high-ranking within the company. So yes legally the fact that she didn't have that piece of paper (an employment contract) might matter, but why should it matter morally?
a) you can't fix the problems of the past by giving her a job now
b) being a significant investor doesn't make you 'relatively high-ranking in the company.' You are either an employee with a high ranking job, or an investor. If you have no executive functions and are just an investor you are not entitled to intervene in day to day affairs unbidden.
c) It matters morally because even if she had the paper that would not entitle her to talk and harass an employee with the tacit support and protection of a senior member of the company.
My gut tells me there was probably sexism at GitHub, drama with founder's wife, AND she was probably not blameless either in this whole mess. It was disheartening to me to see people rally to her on Twitter and immediately cry for the sacking of GitHub before any facts or concrete allegations were made by anyone involved, her especially. That's the stuff angry mobs are made of.
I feel that these people are nothing more than an entitled group of lazy jerks that use twitter to pressure, blame and get ego boosts. They lean and get the easy way, yet claim they're disenfranchised. I can't help but ramble, but I really worry why people don't scrutinize them more.
I feel they're delusional, entitled, to the point where they think they can be promoted to CTO and programming positions without actually coding.
My issue is, I even see woman this girl knows who are on twitter speaking hate-speach and high-fiving each other over this. They really want to stir up trouble and ruin lives.
I feel they love drama, attention and are cognitively trained by US culture to feel entitled, and use adversity and the crowd sympathy instead of bettering themselves and taking responsibility.
I feel it's boy who cried wolf, they're on twitter, and press the big red misogyny button when things get tough.
The truth is, I don't use twitter, but whenever I see one of these ladies, I associate it to the emotion of a entitled women coasting on the same old trick. It's like a nervous response. That's my honest feeling.
"The boy who cried wolf" can pose a problem one day to minorities who one day learn to actually code, who are honest, and may cause prejudice to them because of these trolls. It also hurts people who have legitimate cases of harassment.
Julia may or may not have been wronged, but the way she handles it on twitter, I feel is childish. I'm disgusted no one calls it out. Sorry for that.
That said, it's never too late to learn to program. No matter who you are. I promise you if you do your job well, the people who matter want your skill and talent and the valley will always be open to you.
Carried forward, in a court-like environment, or throwing salvos over PR mediums?
I take it as a bad smell someone goes the PR route over a lawyer (perhaps a confidential legal threat?) to discuss things privately and settle thing amicably.
Depends on what the aim is. There are some considerations here:
1. People tend to view going for the lawyers as going for the 'big guns,' and can be reluctant to do so.
2. Companies can become less cooperative very quickly once it's a matter being decided by lawyers and/or in a court.
3. She may not have consulted a lawyer because she doesn't think that anything which transpired qualifies as 'illegal,' rather than unprofessional, rude, mean, etc.
From the story presented to us, it sounds like she wants to leverage bad PR to get Github's HR / board to hold the people she views as having wronged her accountable.
After reading the article I assumed that she didn't go to a lawyer because she believed there was nothing there that would merit a lawsuit. The fact that she didn't mention what her initial grievance was, leads me to believe it wasn't such a big deal as to rise to the level of a lawsuit.
Or possibly she just believes that going public like this is the best way to bring about change.
> We are awaiting comment from GitHub regarding these allegations, and GitHub says it is looking into it.
> We are waiting for comment from GitHub about these allegations.
> GitHub says it is investigating the matter: “We’re looking into this.”
This post might be entirely true, but for now it is an expanded personal blog post posing as news. I will hold judgement on both parties until there is evidence, but I doubt most readers skimming headlines will.
It is unfortunate this was posted before TechCrunch or any other "news" site got corroboration from other parties or evidence of any of it. The post offers no evidence outside what was created by Ms. Horvath herself.
At big paranoid organizations (CIA, NSA, etc.), they actively encourage internal relationships and marriages, as it simplifies security modeling. But not really in the same group.
It makes a lot of sense in such organizations, as it satisfies the employees' need for close human relationships without compromising the company's paranoid culture.
In this case--and likely in all for-profit companies--it only magnified the problem by adding another employee to the drama.
Those two also actively recruit Mormons for their very-above-average patriotism. Which is neither here nor there, but hey. As good a thread as any to go OT.
Everyone says this because it sounds obviously simple.
It's complete BS though. You spend 2/3'rds of your working life at work. The people you socialize, interact with and share common challenges are at work.
Unless you meet your partner in college, or high school or happen to have enough time in a shared extra-curricular (which a lot of us don't) then where exactly are you going to meet people at all.
Moreover, no part of this problem was a result of her relationship with another GitHub employee, except when people wanted some ammunition to use against her.
Exactly. Mature adults form relationships with other adults. There is nothing wrong or icky about it. The more time people spend at work, the more likely they are to find partner there. Note that startups often not only expect long hours of work, they also expect you to spend a lot of time socializing with colleagues.
Expecting her to reject potential stable long term relationship just because the guy has the same employer does not sound reasonable to me. Plus, we do not even know whether they started to be together before she joined the company.
Totally agree. Plus, the article didn't mention (and it shouldn't), whether she met her partner at Github or not. They may as well be a couple since college.
I'd prefer not to be in a relationship with a co-worker, since I fear, it would be more difficult to keep the job out of our personal life than visa versa.
But, if I'm really attracted to a single co-worker more than physically, I'd just ask her out for a coffee or drink and happily deal with whatever positive or negative things might happen.
Not doing anything, just because you think its unprofessional or inappropriate is way more unreasonable in my opinion.
I was getting really confused by all the uses of "partner". Is she a lesbian is that it? I would they could just say girlfriend so I would know what was going on.
Its not 1995 anymore. "Partner" is a perfectly correct term for any couple in a long-term relationship. I use the term "partner" quite frequently to refer to my relationship—and whether I'm gay or not, or whether Ms Horvath is so, is none of your business. You have no need, nor any inherent right, to "know what is going on."
my confusion is the term "partner" has a completely different meaning in a a business context. I am just saying that it was confusing to me. For much of the article I thought every time they said "partner" they were referring to an employee who worked with her in some sort of group or buddy system. It can also obviously mean a partial owner in the business.
Is it the word "lesbian"? I apologize if that is considered offensive. I spent some time trying to think of what the most appropriate term would be, and I really couldn't think of anything better. What is the politically correct term to use?
No, its not the word "lesbian." Its the implication that a) you have a need to know whether she's lesbian or not; and b) that her status as lesbian or otherwise is relevant to the real issue, which is her status as a target of harassment.
I get that you're not trying to be offensive. What I don't get the sense you understand is that you don't have an inherent right to know things like her sexual orientation, history, background, favorite color, or anything else she doesn't volunteer.
It's a gossipy story involving sexual attraction. How isn't it relevant? If you feel it's none of your business, then the whole story is none of your business either.
Two women are dancing to music at work in a tech company and the author compares this to a scene at a strip club as men are watching this. Unless this was a regular exercise, what was everybody expecting? Nobody taking notice?
Yeah this section really damaged her credibility for me. She says the guys were "gawking", so they were not saying anything inappropriate, just "staring openly and stupidly". I can picture a professional business environment where gawking would be inappropriate, but I have a hard time picturing that environment with women hula hooping to music. Plus is gawking a crime? Yes, those random employees were being unprofessional, but worth writing about in an email to Tech Crunch?
And Dave Chapelle walked out of a $50 million contract because something normal (a couple of white guys laughing at a funny skit) rubbed him the wrong way. Sometimes a seemingly normal occurrence can pierce through one's facade of denial so sharply that the toxicity of the environment becomes inescapably apparent. And then what are you supposed to do? Pretend like nothing matters? Hello existential crisis.
It's fine if she doesn't like men oogling hoola hoopers. That's a personal preference. It's another thing to turn that into a general discussion of sexism and claiming at the same time that all men are rapists waiting to happen (which the "feeling unsafe" bit seems to imply).
> Two women are dancing to music at work in a tech company and the author compares this to a scene at a strip club as men are watching this.
It seems hula hooping is ok, until men start watching. This is the most confusing bit she is saying. It basically equates to saying that strip clubs are not strip clubs until men start watching.
Woman hula hooping are bound to attract attention, for a variety of reasons. Julie, associated that with strippers, she could have associated it with entertainment or fun. The implication is that it is the men's mindset, I personally find that a rather sexiest statement on it's own towards men.
It seems the techcrunch article is very full of hyperbole.
It wasn't just people noticing them from their desks (or joining them, for the sake of well-humoured fun). It was, as she says, "line of men sitting on one bench facing the hoopers and gawking at them".
I would find women doing hoola hoop in the office a bit odd. Maybe it really depends on the company culture, but I don't see how either things could be called inherently sexist or threatening.
I think the implication is that none of this would have happened, or at least would not have been tolerated, if she was male. And it sound like the basis of her relationship with the founder's wife being "crazy" was that she was a female employee. So I'd say sexism played a significant role here.
If we accept the general outline of events thus far recounted, only one of two people has to be crazy, and the others can be merely blind/incompetent/weak. Unfortunately it is impossible at this stage for an outsider to be certain who the crazy party actually is.
That's how I read it as well. I mean, there's definitely some hints of sexist behavior. Though as I was reading, it felt like I was in the hallways of my high school years ago. Loads of gossip and craziness.
It's sad to see this story come out of GitHub though. Why can't we all just get along?
The only thing that sounds remotely related to sex or gender is the hula hoop incident, which sounds irrelevant to the main story other than providing a final straw for the woman to leave.
I did read the whole article. You're right, I forgot about the guy who apparently professed love for her then removed her code from production. Although that one isn't particularly related to sex or gender either, other than the fact that the creep was an apparently heterosexual male. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with a pattern of sex or gender related discrimination, and any similar interaction would be inappropriate regardless of the parties involved.
It isn't directly stated, but my take is that what set the founder's wife off in the first place must have been that she got wind, through her husband, that Horvath was unhappy with the "boys' club" culture. This account doesn't detail what happened early on in Horvath's time there, but makes it sound like there were numerous relatively minor incidents and a general pattern of behavior. Maybe Horvath said something to the founder, or to someone else who passed it on to the founder, he discussed with his wife, and she decided to make sure it wouldn't be a problem.
I think that's why sexism is a key part of this story.
Some geeky types will be tempted, upon founding a startup, to thus not have ANY women in significant roles in the company, and to keep it as guys-only as possible; outsourcing as needed and doing the other legal legwork as required to stay under the headcount (is it >50 people?) to avoid the EEOC.
I saw similar things happen with male employees. A spouse of a manager/founder (well, anyone really) having power without any official position is a disaster waiting to happen. The situation I experienced was with an all-male team. The result is people leaving, so having a small team really doesn't fix anything. Quite the opposite.
I've been in this position as a co-founder, having to deal with a contractor who was also the spouse of a co-founder, and who managed to drive everybody crazy, including other contractors and employees, other co-founders, and their own spouse.
I'd rather just have a "zero fuckwits rule" in hiring. It sounds like Github breached that rule, leading to this problem. You could possibly avoid all sexual harassment by having only men in the workplace, but if they were still fuckwits and assholes, you'd have other employment problems.
Yeah, I've been in a place where one founder's wife was the ex-gf of a second founder, and for no good reason whatsoever she was brought in to do the books, and kept on talking out loud about what the second founder was like in bed.
Some people use companies to work out their interpersonal problems.
I'll be more than tempted. To be 100% honest, I have that thought every single time I read any article or blog post about sexism in tech. If programmers with a Y-chromosome are exponentially less likely to either sue us or get us labelled sexist jerks in the press, then that's who we're hiring.
To use a metaphor you might understand I think you're programming around the bug instead of debugging.
Maybe, shocking as it is, women are reacting to real injustices in these cases that you read about in "any article or blog post about sexism in tech". If your immediate reaction to someone being called out for sexism is to distance yourself from women, have you ever considered that perhaps your attitude is sexist? You're assuming in all scenarios that the man is right and being attacked unfairly, disregarding evidence.
"To be 100% honest, I have that thought every single time I read any article or newspaper report about a shootout or burglary in the community. If people with a white bloodline are statistically less likely to either rob us or get us labelled racists jerks in the press, than that's who we're hirig." -- do you now see what's wrong with this kind of thinking ?
No, because I read 1000x times more of the one than of the other, and I personally see and experience one and not the other. That you'd even bring up the comparison makes me think you're not taking this seriously, as a reality to deal with and not an internet crusade.
Read the statement again. I'm not laying blame on any party. I am only taking the position that whatever the cause is, I don't know any better than anyone else how to avoid it.
I guess the point I was trying to make was lost on you somehow.
I wasn't trying to say this is the exact same thing and that racism is something you'd hear about as frequently as sexism these days ! I was trying to make the parallel that just a few decades ago it would've been a perfectly acceptable thing to play it safe and say ".. than that's who we're hirig." based purely on this kind of skewed reasoning about races.
The reason you hear more about women bringing up these issues is because more women are bringing up these issues, which until recently were either non-existent (because there weren't as many women in tech), or were ignored/hushed or 'dealt with quietly' -- much like race issues ...or for that matter general quality issues between the sexes. The reason you "...personally see and experience one and not the other." is precisely because the other (ie: racism) was brought up ...repeatedly ...dirt was kicked up ...fingers pointed ...positions defended ...often under the guise of 'ah well, this issue isn't about being racists as much as it is about the individuals'. In the end though, most people 'got it'. Hopefully you now see the parallel I was trying to make.
About your statement " That you'd even bring up the comparison makes me think you're not taking this seriously, as a reality to deal with and not an internet crusade." ..well, I personally feel this is a very serious matter and if you got any other impression from what I said, it possibly is due to my inability to get the point across.
About your statement "Read the statement again. I'm not laying blame on any party. I am only taking the position that whatever the cause is, I don't know any better than anyone else how to avoid it." ...I'm sorry, I really don't see how the 'I don't know any better than anyone else how to avoid it.' bit is supposed to be implied by " then that's who we're hiring." bit ...maybe my comprehension skills are lacking although I suspect they aren't and you're just trying to somehow deflect your earlier statement by misdirection.
>If programmers with a Y-chromosome are exponentially less likely to either sue us or get us labelled sexist jerks in the press, then that's who we're hiring.
That you would even think this says to me that you have zero appreciation for the unique capabilities women bring to the workforce. In my mind it's so obviously worth the risk.
This is the sort of fucked up attitude that's turning the public increasingly against the tech industry. The attitude seems to be "we can do anything that we want, because we're smart and we know the loopholes"
If you really believe that the public considers watching women hula-hoop or a rug that says "meritocracy" to be sexual harassment, please give some thought to the possibility that you might be living in a bubble.
Crazy how women can turn even canonically geeky/boring things like Github into soap operas like "General Hospital". You've got to wonder what kind of drama occurs in actual hospitals, with alpha-doctors and nurses side-by-side. I've heard stories.
Of course, it's always the women that make things dramatic. Not the power fetish of the founder's wife, the unwanted advances of coworkers, or the reverting of legitimate contributions to the team's project.
Can't you see past the fact that she's a woman? Don't you see how demoralizing any of this would be?
Can I ask a question about phrasing for a minute? What's inherently wrong with an unwanted advance?
Advances have an unknown state until they're responded to. If she had accepted it, it would've been a welcomed advance. There's no way to know that until you walk up to a woman and say "Hey, I think you're pretty cool. Want to go get a drink sometime?"
If she says no, that's unwanted, but I don't see how it's inappropriate.
It's sort of analogous to a quantum mechanical measurement - you don't know it was unwanted until you try it.
This is why it's better to make an early advance with some plausible deniability, so you can back off if there's no mutual interest (e.g. backing away: "Ha, just kidding ... what, you thought I wanted to date you for real? That's crazy talk ... we're co-workers, and it would never work out, we're so different.")
As she described it, there were at least 4 problems. 1. Its generally polite to only make advances on unattached people. 2. Going to her home to ask makes it awkward to say no. 3. Not leaving immediately compounded 2. 4. Subsequent behaviour was bad, thus showing bad faith all along.
I'm not saying in this specific instance it wasn't inappropriate.
I'm saying as a general concept, the very phrase "unwanted advance" has lots of implications of sexual misconduct, when it really can just be as simple as a guy asking a girl out, and her saying no. I don't see what's inappropriate there.
Unwanted advance is ok in my opinion. Retaliation after rejection is not. To add complexity, proposing to someone in long term relationship does not make you look good.
> What's inherently wrong with an unwanted advance?
I don't want to be hit on at work. It is totally inappropriate and unprofessional. And if I were a minority in my office I would find it very hard to deal with.
From the article, he did not say "Want to get a drink some time?"
> [He] asked himself over to “talk,” and then professed his love, and “hesitated” when asked to leave.
But she did get hit on at work and started dating a co-worker (I'm assuming the guy she's dating initiated contact). If that was acceptable by her, then this logic about it being "totally inappropriate and unprofessional" is moot.
I do not agree with what the co-worker did in terms of reverting commits and all that, but his initial behavior can be chalked up to all these romantic comedies where the protagonist professes his love for the cute girl and it all ends happily ever after.
All I'm saying is that you can't demonize his initial approach.
>If that was acceptable by her, then this logic about it being "totally inappropriate and unprofessional" is moot.
It's inappropriate for your other coworkers to hit on you if they know you are in a relationship, regardless of whether that relationship happens to be with a coworker. Where her and her partner actually hit on each other may not have been at work.
It sounds more the issue that the guy in question has an extreme lack of social skills.
I've successfully done stuff with co-workers before, but it happened in undertones. I did not go to anyone's house to profess my love. That's creepy no matter who's doing it.
Women are a lot more orientated towards relationships and the nuances of such. Lots of reasons why, but basically it is due to the basic psychological differences between the sexes, and society's reinforcement of them through imposed social norms. A very general statement of course, and you certainly can find exceptions... And things are changing, and have been changing ever since 1960s and feminism kicked off.
but it still is a difference - males under 40 (in general) are more orientated towards their status aka power aka wealth aka etc - in order to acquire the prime females... So to expect semi-arrogant king of the world 20-something men who are typically hyperlogical and socially inept (yes, lot of generalization) and who are hell bent on making a mark for themselves to really grok the subtle aspects of social behaviors.... I remember when I was 20-something and I was CLUELESS.
So in other words, yet another story about an extremely immature industry too full of themselves and soaked with money.
Is Github even that important in the largest sense of the word? no, it isn't. At this point in my life, I realize how IT sucks so hard and is in some sense a detriment to the future of humanity. I want to go back to school to become an English major, BTW... the humanities are far more important than this uber-hyper-capitalism we've created likes to admit.
I've known (and know) a few doctors in my time and my wife was a nurse for a while and the answer is... lots. However, in most cases it tends to be short lived or contained to specific episodes due to the high levels of turnover in departments and the very well defined hierarchies and processes in place.
If the situation with the one founder who is injecting outside people into power is resolved, I would say everyone in the company wins (assuming the picture painted in the article is accurate).
If she is his wife then she co-owns part of the company with him (assuming they do the "everything that is mine is yours" thing). So she is not an uninvolved outsider, she is an investor.
This just sounds like plain old drama of the old fashioned sort, and not especially one that relies on sexism, but crazy people.
The difference being that sexism would be something ordinary citizens do naturally that is intolerable and is putting up with a discriminatory past or status quo and they are not being cognizant of what they are doing. This is just straight drama.
The coworker should have been disciplined for mucking with the code out of anger, but as far as being super uncomfortable around her I feel like a healthy warning from his boss saying 'Hey, you're being inappropriate around her' would probably be better in the long run than firing him.
Suppose I had a male coworker who had beef with me because his girlfriend broke up with him and started dating me. Suppose he started reverting my commits and interfering with my work in other ways. Essentially, the same situation with the sexes changed around. But the response should be exactly the same.
At that point a manager would need to step in and lay down the law - don't bring your personal conflicts in to work. And if you can't stop, then work somewhere else.
That hula hoops bit was a bit... strange. If it were a couple of attractive girls I probably would also find myself staring. I mean, its just not something you see everyday working at an office.
I understand being stared at is uncomfortable too, and they should feel free to do whatever they want of course. It just sounds like how unattractive people "stare creepily" while attractive people "look."
The problem with the founder's wife sounds like a very one sided account of your standard interpersonal conflict. Everyone who has ever been in one of those has at some point claimed themselves to be a saint and their opponent a demon.
The alleged sexism seems to be primarily imaginary.
The anonymous posting that so upset her and precipitated all of this said:
> has a history of RAGINING against any professional criticism. Leadership has stood idly by while she lied about contributions and threw hardworking coworkers under the bus (again and again)[1]
To be honest, it seems to me that such could very well be true.
A good thumb rule to apply to verify whether something is about sexism is to think whether things would have played out differently if the sex of the victim was different. Do you still think in this case the alleged sexism is imaginary ? Hard to say but I'd lean towards thinking that is Julie was a guy the problem with the founder's wife wouldn't get this bad - so, IMHO, yes, this is about sexism.
As usual, another HN thread that perfectly exemplifies victim blaming and a collective burying of heads in the sand. There's a few people on here who seem to get it, but most don't. I'm sick of it. Goodbye, Hacker News.
No way in hell should it be the top comment. I can't find any victim blaming at all in a quick skim, so if it's here it's not by any means a plurality opinion. bitops is being even worse and reactionary than they claim HN to be.
There was quite a lot of what I would consider to be victim blaming in the previous thread where it was less clear what the allegations were. Or at least, my impression of the thread was that there were a very high proportion of commenters saying we should reserve judgement and at the same time hypothesizing about all the ways that the woman might be at fault.
While this is all true (on the information we had in that thread, it was possible that the woman was the one at fault, and it's good to reserve judgement until more information arrives), it was really weird how many people felt the need to point these things out.
I do agree that this thread seems more balanced, although even in this thread people are surprisingly quick to point out that these problems are not 'sexism' (despite the fact that the situations described would have been an order of magnitude less likely to arise if she were a man).
> (despite the fact that the situations described would have been an order of magnitude less likely to arise if she were a man).
How and why is this a fact? Could really none of this happen to a male employee?
Crazy boss? Check. Workplace relationship? Check. "Enemies" reverting your code? Check. Management non-reactive to complaints? Check. I think a lot of this goes on regularly on many companies, an concerns many employees. In particular, what seems sexist here is trying to make this a women's problem, not an employee's problem.
It could be a top comment on reddit. Here, we (me in particular, and I think several other posters as well) prefer thoughtful discussion over emotional overreaction.
No examples so you can garner maximum support? What is this umbrella term 'victim blaming', anyways? Is there in this black and white view that you subscribe to no room for dual-guilt in setting up problems/crimes?
Can't you understand that at many times both parties are at fault for escalation? This is one actually useful thing that police manage to understand and accomplish, they understand that "Victims" often play a role. This is why screaming "self-defense" at every violence case does not work.
You will probably jump to rape as your first defense of victim blaming and examples, because that is the one to garner most backing off quickly.
To see what you're pissed off at, let's survey your comment history. I don't see anything particular to this case except getting pissed off, so i'll take your comment towards the website, calm. Hmm, A website towards meditation. Seems peaceful .
Let's not forget the website that was made to be only nice to people and to send encouragement only very recently. Seems like this community is trying.
But one occasion with 2 sides to a story, and it's all said and done it your book? See you later.
I know this is going to come across as unfriendly, but I'm always bemused when people make these little plays for attention. It's a massive site, you're not one of the notable commenters, if HN isn't delivering value why not just stop reading it quietly rather than announcing it to the world?
Because human beings have a desire to express opinion and emotion?
Your attitude is the same as a lot of the socially inept that roam the valley and this message board. If This Isn't The Most Efficient Logical Course Of Action (according my perspective) Then It Bemuses Me.
Without trying to start a debate, it's well-established that women talk about personal things more readily than men do, and at greater length, and express emotion more readily than men do. This real difference between men and women is often described as a character flaw in men by women, and in women by men (if that wasn't too hard to unravel).
You put those words in my mouth, buddy. To clarify, social ineptitude combined with a degree of self-assured narcissism, resulting in a total disregard for the opinions of other people which don't jive with the most "logical" worldview. It's possible to be socially introverted and still considerate to other people.
Not the readership - assuming similar statistics to reddit, the vast majority don't comment, so we can't know - but it's certainly reasonable to draw that conclusion about the commenters from the comments on majority of threads regarding social issues.
Of course, there's a feedback loop in that people won't comment where the majority seem to disagree heavily with their morals, so that doesn't help with what threads like these look like. The sheer amount of personal attacks against people who disagree with victim-blaming views of this in this thread serve as a warning not to speak up.
This is pretty accurate, I would not have commented at all in here until I read this and just wanted to back you up on this point.
I read these type of threads on HN constantly and every time I walk away absolutely disgusted with what I see said in them. I don't have the will to comment myself because it just would not change anyones opinion and they would instantly go into attack mode.
But what's wrong with expressing an opinion on someone else's action? You are the one that is socially inept. No, wait, you are just expressing your opinion on someone else expressing their opinion on someone else expressing themselves. Oh, chripes, what was I trying to say again?
You see it as a play for attention, I see it as an expression of disappointment in a community they otherwise like in the hope that that community will perform a little more introspection.
It seems somewhat dramatic to me too, but I also have found the comments on the stories around this issue somewhat disappointing. That was their way of communicating it, this comment is mine.
You suffer from egotistical self-righteousness. Someday, perhaps, you will no longer need to assuage your ego with delusional palliatives of moral superiority. Today a child died after a long and painful battle with cancer. Another died suddenly in a car crash after a heated argument, leaving loved ones in agony and self-doubt. Are you sure this is your battle? Perhaps you are only sick of the burden of your own unexamined piety and belief the universe must obey your whims.
>suffer
>irrelevant anecdotes to contrast against OP's "battle"
Why do you think he cares about children dying? Is it really so hard to grasp the notion that we are emotionally compelled by things relevant to our own lives at any given time?
This may be his battle, or maybe it's not a battle at all. Maybe you should stop this hyperbolic nonsense, because you're the one making it a battle.
I don't think this was an instance of institutionalized sexism. Rather, the founder's wife seems like an unbalanced individual, and nobody effectively set any boundaries. The other founders and HR seemed unaware or unable to set the situation to right.
As for her romantically inclined co-worker -- I don't see how his behavior qualifies as sexist or hostile. Merely a bit clueless, but isn't it to be expected that employees of a tech company will be somewhat socially awkward?
EDIT: As multiple commenters have noted, ripping out someone's code commits because they rejected your romantic advances is unacceptable and unprofessional. The ripper-outer should be roasted by the project manager if there's no technical justification. Since the two employees no longer get along, one or both should be re-assigned to different projects if possible. And the offender should be disciplined (up to and including dismissal from the company) if he makes life difficult for her in the future. But his actions reflect on him, not Github as a whole. The article includes no information about whether any of his actions were reported to his supervisor or anyone else, and no information about Github's response to the incident. Without those crucial details, I think it's premature to point a finger at Github.
As for the hula hoop incident -- if the girls doing the hooping and the guys doing the watching were okay with it, and everybody kept their clothes on, that seems pretty innocent to me.
What probably needed to happen was whoever was in charge of that project should have recognized these two employees now didn't get along, and reassigned one or both of them away from the project.
no. what needed to happen was that the guy should have been fired for deleting someone's code over a personal issue. "these two employees now didn't get along" makes it sound like there was fault on both sides, which is emphatically not the case.
That's actually impossible at GitHub (as far as I understand their working practices) because they are not a traditional company. They use Open Allocation, which means that employees decide which projects to work on, and specifically, project leads cannot veto that.
its super hostile. i would hope there are logs for this - but i wouldn't be surprised if there were none.
as said higher it seems highly possible that she has no proof of anything - which means, if she's actually honest, she can't do much (except contacting a bunch of news sites and trying to make a big story out of it)
imagine this "i did all this work but someone deleted it! worked 2 weeks on it!" while in fact you were eating donuts ;-)
the problem is proof, when you have these allegations. if she has proof, then, she should sue them.
There's socially awkward and there's openly hitting on a co-worker who is known to date another co-worker. And then not exiting as quickly as humanly possible. That's beyond "a little awkward". Saying this as a guy who is somewhat socially awkward.
Why are you making excuses for these people? What purpose does it serve?
I'm especially shocked to see you trivialise the actions of the jilted engineer. Reverting someone else's work without explanation is a blatantly hostile and disrespectful act that should be treated seriously in isolation, and is made more serious still in the context of the inappropriate sexual stuff.
You're being ridiculous. Emergency reverts are normal and expected when production systems are down.
I'm willing to stipulate this person's specific actions were probably hostile and unwarranted, but some sort of blanket "no revert without discussion" rule is just a way to cost your employer customers.
Context is important, and we don't have enough of it to be certain of what happened.
This. In one week I had to rip out two different things in the middle of the night. One was a simple revert, one was dropping an entire system which had taken months of work and reverting back to the old system.
In both cases, I wrote a detailed technical explanation of why I had taken the action, and an apology for having to do it so suddenly, and I sent to to the entire group (a requirement anyway - if you make an on-the-fly ops change, you need to write up a full incident report so everyone knows what went wrong)
Reverting always needs to come with a "this is what was wrong".
There may be legit reasons, but we have no indication that the reasons were legit. We do have someone involved who says they weren't. We should assume she is being truthful and accurate unless there is a reason to doubt her.
If github says the reverts were legit, then that's different, but you should go with the best information we have, instead of trying to find an excuse not to believe her based on no evidence.
I'm quite certain you've either mistaken me for someone else, or are looking for an excuse to argue with me based on a willful misinterpretation of my comment.
I'm even more certain that going through life believing everything you hear is not going to get you the results you want.
Isn't the Secret post screenshotted in the article itself one reason to doubt her character? Of course it may be all lies... it's just an anonymous comment and anyone could have written it, including the guy whose advances she spurned.
> We should assume she is being truthful and accurate unless there is a reason to doubt her.
I come from a different school of thought. Firstly she only mentions a few people but the entire company and an entire industry are being brought into question.
Generally I have found what has been echoed by TechCrunch to be lacking in details and specifically from one persons point of view which shows a very self indulged narrative.
My response is not to suggest it did not happen, but given what has been said, how it has been said, and whom it is being said about, I suggest that before we tar people in such a way that more evidence should be presented.
We are only hearing one side of the story, but it may be interesting to note the comment: " I even had to have a few of his commits reverted. ", it seems that there may have been some legitimacy to the other non-few if we are going to take a black and white view of things.
While the details on this matter seem very clear, the statement " I would work on something, go to bed, and wake up to find my work gone without any explanation." does not imply no discussion it implies that when she got up she had no idea of what was going on. It may be a case of a lazy co-worker, and/or a case that the co-worker discussed the issues with her at a latter stage.
She is very succinct in her description of the actions of others, and then describes her response in an emotional unclear way. In her own way in this example, she has used passive aggressiveness to mask the actual event.
TLDR; We do not know if there was no discussion, and we are only hearing one side.
> Why are you making excuses for these people? What purpose does it serve?
Because I think people should question whether they're overreacting to the situation.
> I'm especially shocked to see you trivialise the actions of the jilted engineer
I edited to clarify this. Careful reading shows that:
(1) It is possible that there were legitimate technical reasons for the reverted commits.
(2) It is possible that Github did not respond to this part of the situation because they were unaware of the reversion or the context behind it.
(3) It is possible that Github took some action against the engineer in question.
(4) I'm not entirely sure that confessing romantic feelings for a co-worker is, by itself, inappropriate. Provided everyone stays cool and professional if the feelings aren't mutual (or just avoid each other if the org chart makes that possible).
(5) Reverting commits because someone rejected your romantic advances is unacceptable and unprofessional, and I edited my post to say so.
I think it is difficult to say that Github is at fault from the information given, and I fear that's the conclusion that many were jumping to. If you're such a person, you should think carefully about what the article actually said, what you are assuming, and whether those assumptions might be false.
> I think it is difficult to say that Github is at fault from the information given, and I fear that's the conclusion that many were jumping to.
Don't worry. Read the whole thread on this discussion. The only people who are jumping to conclusions are those assuming there is something wrong with Horvath's story.
> GitHub are perfectly capable of defending themselves. They are the group in power here. Second-guessing the motives and truth of this woman's story does nothing but undermine her, and undermine the confidence of others who may have similar stories (at GitHub or elsewhere).
Two things, being in power makes you more vulnerable to these things and secondly, you should second guess everyone, people look after their own interests and no one is completely reliable.
> Second-guessing the motives and truth of this woman's story does nothing but undermine her, and undermine the confidence of others who may have similar stories (at GitHub or elsewhere).
What the heck are you talking about? The story is hearsay at this point and armchair warriors are jumping to conclusions behind the anonymity of the internet.
Second-guessing the motives and truth? Do you work at Github? Is this person your co-worker?
The story is, by definition, not hearsay, since the woman is alleging that the events took place with her present.
Key point: she alleges that everyone was not calm and cool regarding hitting on a coworker. You miss the part where he didn't leave when asked, and never justified reverting her commits (to the point where she had to revert the revert).
> "but isn't it to be expected that employees of a tech company will be somewhat socially awkward?"
Reverting people's commits and stripping their code out of vengeance isn't social awkwardness, it's completely unacceptable and unprofessional conduct. It doesn't matter what gender anyone is, or that it's being done out of romantic rejection, it's unacceptable. Full stop.
Author's complaint is evidently less about being hit on inappropriately (something that we could charitably attribute to "social awkwardness", maybe) and more about how the rejection was allegedly handled (read: by professional retribution). You don't get to hand-wave the latter allegation as some sort of social incompetence.
This borders on the "boys will be boys" argument. No, we don't get to excuse deplorably unprofessional behavior because someone is awkward. It's an injustice to those of us who are actually socially awkward but still know how to behave like decent fucking humans at work.
That's why I qualified it with "out of vengeance". There are many legitimate reasons why you would revert somebody else's code, but doing so out of interpersonal conflict is not one of them.
Note that I'm not commenting on the authenticity of the accusations laid out in this specific instance. My point is that messing with people's code because you don't get along with them - whether it happened here or elsewhere, and whether the perpetrator is male or female - is entirely unprofessional and unacceptable. It cannot be attributed to social awkwardness.
Beyond the specifics of this complaint, we cannot keep falling back on the "hurr we're all aspies" excuse to explain away our shitty conduct. It is not only inaccurate, it is damaging and infantilizing to tech workers in general.
Sure, but reverting code is something that is highly visible and I can't picture an engineer reverting usable code and other engineers/leads not question it.
I'm willing to bet that it was reverted for other reasons.
I reverted code from master before because the guy wanted to play the 'okay but' game when we noticed issues with it.
Sorry but we can chat about issues later, it's not staying in production to be pushed out by a random engineer. Nothing to do with your race, gender, age, etc.
My normal rule is 'talk then revert', normally making sure that someone knows and agrees with the revert, to avoid a commit war. If everything's on fire and you can't talk, then you can skip talking.
He responded poorly (understatement) to the rejection of someone who he knew was in a relationship at the time. This is why I have a rule of never dating anyone who works where I work, not even in other departments. It just creates too much trouble. Once it's known that you date people in the office, others who are interested in you (but you may not be interested in them) may pursue you. Once you start rejecting them you can't give a blanket response of: I don't date people from work. Feelings get hurt, and people do stupid things once that happens.
You're missing the point. From this story alone, it seems the company is run by individuals who never mentally developed out of high school. Those incidents you mentioned are merely a red flag of the immaturity of some of these people. Awkwardly hitting on an employee to a point of discomfort, messing with someone's work cause they turned you down to a date, creepily staring at an employee in the gym; you should at least know well into your 20s and 30s that is inappropriate behavior at a workplace.
I would agree in that I wouldn't call this an instance of industry-wide sexism. The root of the problem is the immaturity at the leadership level of this company. If the leadership is as immature as this story is making it out to be, than these sexist incidents wouldn't have happened. Still, I shall reserve my judgment on GitHub until I hear more sides to this story.
There does seem to be some truth to what you're suggesting.
For whatever reason, there's a propensity for this sort of drama to occur within organizations and at events where Ruby and Ruby on Rails, or users of such technologies, are involved in some way.
Off hand, I can think of that controversial presentation at GoGaRuCo a few years ago, the controversy about the diversity of the presenters at the BritRuby conference a bit later, and this matter here. Then there was that whole "Donglegate" incident, which while it occurred at PyCon, it involved at least one person with some ties to the Ruby community. I'm sure there are other events I'm missing, too.
Maybe it's just the so-called "brogrammer" culture that's so ingrained within the Ruby world that's responsible. Regardless, for a community that's actually quite small, there seems to be a whole lot of this sort of strife.
On the other hand, the ruby community just seems to have more women in it than a lot of other programming communities. Many technical communities simply don't have as many opportunities for these sorts of situations to arise.
Other communities may also have less opportunities for truly great pro-women-in-coding projects to emerge. Last year the 3 people who started Rails Girls were honoured with Ruby Hero awards at Railsconf. There was near-universal support and genuinely excitement that something like this emerged within the community and had made such a strong impact in bringing women into the field.
Exactly my theory. You don't hear many stories about sexism in the Perl community because your standard Perl meetup probably consists of all of the people who also meet up monthly for their LUG meetups.
For those of you who have never been to either, picture a room full of people who remind you of people like Alan Cox, RMS, or ESR.
> The final straw for Horvath came when she saw men gawking at women who were hula-hooping at the office. [...] Two women, one of whom I work with and adore, and a friend of hers were hula hooping to some music.
Emphasis on at the office. It sounds like they were making some kind of show. While I agree that the rest of the story sounds like a massive clusterfuck, I can't understand what is supposed to be wrong in this episode.
Right. It sounds like Horvath completely misinterpreted it, then. That said, the rest of her points look solid enough that it doesn't detract from the overall issue of mismanagement.
How common is it to have your significant other hanging around at your workplace for no apparent reason[1], harmful or not, because you're the founder ? I'm still trying to process that.
[1] IIUC github founder's wife had no role in his company right ?
> As for her romantically inclined co-worker -- I don't see how his behavior qualifies as sexist or hostile. Merely a bit clueless, but isn't it to be expected that employees of a tech company will be somewhat socially awkward?
Oh please, that's about as sexist and as hostile as it gets between programmers.
I agree it should be expected that some employees of a tech company will be somewhat socially awkward --just as much as it should be expected that employees will be told that this kind of behaviour is totally unacceptable, and that companies ensure it doesn't happen.
It's hard to judge without all sides of the story, but the one side does not paint a pretty picture of Github.
1,119 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 497 ms ] threadI remember an similar complaint against a woman who said she was groped at a conference. What, is she expected to get a video of him groping her? There's a reason why so much sexism happens behind closed doors, off the record, or just in person when nobody else is nearby.
These things need to be public because that is required before we can discuss them. We are not putting GitHub on trial here.
>>This seems like a very common way to dismiss complaints of sexism, whether those complaints are valid or invalid<<
If the person has an invalid complaint, it means she is lying and there is no sexism.
So yes, you do need both sides of the story.
What does this question add to the discussion?
> So yes, you do need both sides of the story.
In particular, one should not dismiss a complaint of sexism before hearing both sides of the story. This is what the GP seems to be saying as well.
edit: and again, it's two commands to push my repo back. but i have no interest in being with github at this time
You cannot verify or falsify feelings. They can have different plausible origins. She present one origin, you say she is right. Yes, her side is plausible.
The worst thing here is that some of the origins can be offending to some of participants. You chose side that offends Github team.
Huh? Pretty much none of them are remotely innocent. They range from unprofessional to gross misconduct to potentially illegal.
Because I had made a commit without discussing it first and without understanding what I was doing.
(I would have discussed it first, but the developer concerned was on holiday at the time.)
What I'm saying is, there's a possibility that it wasn't unprofessional.
Some might argue what was unprofessional at both employers (GitHub and my previous one) was not having an iron policy that all commits must be code reviewed by another person. But that's a policy issue.
However, it allegedly started happening _after_ the failed come-on, which would make it retaliatory. That's unprofessional, and probably amounts to gross misconduct.
That would make it possibly retaliatory. It remains possible (although I would not say that I consider it likely) that there were legitimate technical justifications for reverts made after the rejection, and that the sequencing of those two events was entirely coincidental.
If I were management at github, I would grill the employee who reverted those changes for a technical justification for the reverts. If the justification seemed tenuous or strained, I would fire them on the spot. I would however make sure to grill them before firing them, as it is not certain that there was no legitimate technical justification.
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/genetic
In the cited example on that website, it says
Accused on the 6 o'clock news of corruption and taking bribes, the senator said that we should all be very wary of the things we hear in the media, because we all know how very unreliable the media can be." Except in this one it goes, 6oclockCorp->generality of media. In this one, it is Github->Github, especially cause 'founder' is here.
That said I think leaving github is a pretty dumb idea considering that comparatively they are the good kids overall.
That said, company values matter.
I feel they're delusional, entitled, to the point where they think they can be promoted to CTO and programming positions without actually coding.
My issue is, I even see woman this girl knows who are on twitter speaking hate-speach and high-fiving each other over this. They really want to stir up trouble and ruin lives.
I feel they love drama, attention and are cognitively trained by US culture to feel entitled, and use adversity and the crowd sympathy instead of bettering themselves and taking responsibility.
I feel it's boy who cried wolf, they're on twitter, and press the big red misogyny button when things get tough.
The truth is, I don't use twitter, but whenever I see one of these ladies, I associate it to the emotion of a entitled women coasting on the same old trick. It's like a nervous response. That's my honest feeling.
"The boy who cried wolf" can pose a problem one day to minorities who one day learn to actually code, who are honest, and may cause prejudice to them because of these trolls. It also hurts people who have legitimate cases of harassment.
Julia may or may not have been wronged, but the way she handles it on twitter, I feel is childish. I'm disgusted no one calls it out. Sorry for that.
That said, it's never too late to learn to program. No matter who you are. I promise you if you do your job well, the people who matter want your skill and talent and the valley will always be open to you.
2. Right to confront accusers? This seems extremely one-sided. No one she blames gets to defend themselves, where are the witnesses on either side?
I take it as a bad smell someone goes the PR route over a lawyer (perhaps a confidential legal threat?) to discuss things privately and settle thing amicably.
1. People tend to view going for the lawyers as going for the 'big guns,' and can be reluctant to do so.
2. Companies can become less cooperative very quickly once it's a matter being decided by lawyers and/or in a court.
3. She may not have consulted a lawyer because she doesn't think that anything which transpired qualifies as 'illegal,' rather than unprofessional, rude, mean, etc.
From the story presented to us, it sounds like she wants to leverage bad PR to get Github's HR / board to hold the people she views as having wronged her accountable.
Or possibly she just believes that going public like this is the best way to bring about change.
which.. sounds smart.
> We are waiting for comment from GitHub about these allegations.
> GitHub says it is investigating the matter: “We’re looking into this.”
This post might be entirely true, but for now it is an expanded personal blog post posing as news. I will hold judgement on both parties until there is evidence, but I doubt most readers skimming headlines will.
It is unfortunate this was posted before TechCrunch or any other "news" site got corroboration from other parties or evidence of any of it. The post offers no evidence outside what was created by Ms. Horvath herself.
Protip: don't dip your pen in the company ink.
In this case--and likely in all for-profit companies--it only magnified the problem by adding another employee to the drama.
In a division the size of GitHub (in terms of total employees), a relationship would be frowned upon and one of you would likely be transferred.
It's complete BS though. You spend 2/3'rds of your working life at work. The people you socialize, interact with and share common challenges are at work.
Unless you meet your partner in college, or high school or happen to have enough time in a shared extra-curricular (which a lot of us don't) then where exactly are you going to meet people at all.
Moreover, no part of this problem was a result of her relationship with another GitHub employee, except when people wanted some ammunition to use against her.
Expecting her to reject potential stable long term relationship just because the guy has the same employer does not sound reasonable to me. Plus, we do not even know whether they started to be together before she joined the company.
I'd prefer not to be in a relationship with a co-worker, since I fear, it would be more difficult to keep the job out of our personal life than visa versa. But, if I'm really attracted to a single co-worker more than physically, I'd just ask her out for a coffee or drink and happily deal with whatever positive or negative things might happen.
Not doing anything, just because you think its unprofessional or inappropriate is way more unreasonable in my opinion.
I get that you're not trying to be offensive. What I don't get the sense you understand is that you don't have an inherent right to know things like her sexual orientation, history, background, favorite color, or anything else she doesn't volunteer.
I'd caution against taking any single event in isolation and without context.
It seems hula hooping is ok, until men start watching. This is the most confusing bit she is saying. It basically equates to saying that strip clubs are not strip clubs until men start watching.
Woman hula hooping are bound to attract attention, for a variety of reasons. Julie, associated that with strippers, she could have associated it with entertainment or fun. The implication is that it is the men's mindset, I personally find that a rather sexiest statement on it's own towards men.
It seems the techcrunch article is very full of hyperbole.
I would find that a bit odd.
It's sad to see this story come out of GitHub though. Why can't we all just get along?
I think that's why sexism is a key part of this story.
Some people use companies to work out their interpersonal problems.
Maybe, shocking as it is, women are reacting to real injustices in these cases that you read about in "any article or blog post about sexism in tech". If your immediate reaction to someone being called out for sexism is to distance yourself from women, have you ever considered that perhaps your attitude is sexist? You're assuming in all scenarios that the man is right and being attacked unfairly, disregarding evidence.
Read the statement again. I'm not laying blame on any party. I am only taking the position that whatever the cause is, I don't know any better than anyone else how to avoid it.
I wasn't trying to say this is the exact same thing and that racism is something you'd hear about as frequently as sexism these days ! I was trying to make the parallel that just a few decades ago it would've been a perfectly acceptable thing to play it safe and say ".. than that's who we're hirig." based purely on this kind of skewed reasoning about races.
The reason you hear more about women bringing up these issues is because more women are bringing up these issues, which until recently were either non-existent (because there weren't as many women in tech), or were ignored/hushed or 'dealt with quietly' -- much like race issues ...or for that matter general quality issues between the sexes. The reason you "...personally see and experience one and not the other." is precisely because the other (ie: racism) was brought up ...repeatedly ...dirt was kicked up ...fingers pointed ...positions defended ...often under the guise of 'ah well, this issue isn't about being racists as much as it is about the individuals'. In the end though, most people 'got it'. Hopefully you now see the parallel I was trying to make.
About your statement " That you'd even bring up the comparison makes me think you're not taking this seriously, as a reality to deal with and not an internet crusade." ..well, I personally feel this is a very serious matter and if you got any other impression from what I said, it possibly is due to my inability to get the point across.
About your statement "Read the statement again. I'm not laying blame on any party. I am only taking the position that whatever the cause is, I don't know any better than anyone else how to avoid it." ...I'm sorry, I really don't see how the 'I don't know any better than anyone else how to avoid it.' bit is supposed to be implied by " then that's who we're hiring." bit ...maybe my comprehension skills are lacking although I suspect they aren't and you're just trying to somehow deflect your earlier statement by misdirection.
One for @shit_hn_says
Good luck with that, guys.
Making HN a better place, thanks for your time!
Can't you see past the fact that she's a woman? Don't you see how demoralizing any of this would be?
Advances have an unknown state until they're responded to. If she had accepted it, it would've been a welcomed advance. There's no way to know that until you walk up to a woman and say "Hey, I think you're pretty cool. Want to go get a drink sometime?"
If she says no, that's unwanted, but I don't see how it's inappropriate.
This is why it's better to make an early advance with some plausible deniability, so you can back off if there's no mutual interest (e.g. backing away: "Ha, just kidding ... what, you thought I wanted to date you for real? That's crazy talk ... we're co-workers, and it would never work out, we're so different.")
I'm saying as a general concept, the very phrase "unwanted advance" has lots of implications of sexual misconduct, when it really can just be as simple as a guy asking a girl out, and her saying no. I don't see what's inappropriate there.
I don't want to be hit on at work. It is totally inappropriate and unprofessional. And if I were a minority in my office I would find it very hard to deal with.
From the article, he did not say "Want to get a drink some time?"
> [He] asked himself over to “talk,” and then professed his love, and “hesitated” when asked to leave.
But she did get hit on at work and started dating a co-worker (I'm assuming the guy she's dating initiated contact). If that was acceptable by her, then this logic about it being "totally inappropriate and unprofessional" is moot.
I do not agree with what the co-worker did in terms of reverting commits and all that, but his initial behavior can be chalked up to all these romantic comedies where the protagonist professes his love for the cute girl and it all ends happily ever after.
All I'm saying is that you can't demonize his initial approach.
It's inappropriate for your other coworkers to hit on you if they know you are in a relationship, regardless of whether that relationship happens to be with a coworker. Where her and her partner actually hit on each other may not have been at work.
I've successfully done stuff with co-workers before, but it happened in undertones. I did not go to anyone's house to profess my love. That's creepy no matter who's doing it.
The coworker knew of her relationship, and after the rejection "started passive-aggressively ripping out my code."
That is a terrible thing to happen to anyone.
but it still is a difference - males under 40 (in general) are more orientated towards their status aka power aka wealth aka etc - in order to acquire the prime females... So to expect semi-arrogant king of the world 20-something men who are typically hyperlogical and socially inept (yes, lot of generalization) and who are hell bent on making a mark for themselves to really grok the subtle aspects of social behaviors.... I remember when I was 20-something and I was CLUELESS.
So in other words, yet another story about an extremely immature industry too full of themselves and soaked with money. Is Github even that important in the largest sense of the word? no, it isn't. At this point in my life, I realize how IT sucks so hard and is in some sense a detriment to the future of humanity. I want to go back to school to become an English major, BTW... the humanities are far more important than this uber-hyper-capitalism we've created likes to admit.
Regardless of the truth, just based on allegations, and what they'll stir, this will probably create a big mess.
I can't see who can possibly win in this case.
The difference being that sexism would be something ordinary citizens do naturally that is intolerable and is putting up with a discriminatory past or status quo and they are not being cognizant of what they are doing. This is just straight drama.
So far at least.
otherwise, might as well not think of comment at all, since there would be nothing to say. (that goes for many, many other topics)
Just because someone says "I'm guessing", doesn't mean people wouldn't roll with it.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/19m/privileging_the_hypothesis/
This is not true.
But it looks like sexism was not the number one problem.
Suppose I had a male coworker who had beef with me because his girlfriend broke up with him and started dating me. Suppose he started reverting my commits and interfering with my work in other ways. Essentially, the same situation with the sexes changed around. But the response should be exactly the same.
At that point a manager would need to step in and lay down the law - don't bring your personal conflicts in to work. And if you can't stop, then work somewhere else.
The alleged sexism seems to be primarily imaginary.
The anonymous posting that so upset her and precipitated all of this said:
> has a history of RAGINING against any professional criticism. Leadership has stood idly by while she lied about contributions and threw hardworking coworkers under the bus (again and again)[1]
To be honest, it seems to me that such could very well be true.
[1] https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/444646082857820160/phot...
As long as sexism persists in the tech industry, it's going to drive women out and keep others away.
While this is all true (on the information we had in that thread, it was possible that the woman was the one at fault, and it's good to reserve judgement until more information arrives), it was really weird how many people felt the need to point these things out.
I do agree that this thread seems more balanced, although even in this thread people are surprisingly quick to point out that these problems are not 'sexism' (despite the fact that the situations described would have been an order of magnitude less likely to arise if she were a man).
How and why is this a fact? Could really none of this happen to a male employee?
Crazy boss? Check. Workplace relationship? Check. "Enemies" reverting your code? Check. Management non-reactive to complaints? Check. I think a lot of this goes on regularly on many companies, an concerns many employees. In particular, what seems sexist here is trying to make this a women's problem, not an employee's problem.
Can't you understand that at many times both parties are at fault for escalation? This is one actually useful thing that police manage to understand and accomplish, they understand that "Victims" often play a role. This is why screaming "self-defense" at every violence case does not work.
You will probably jump to rape as your first defense of victim blaming and examples, because that is the one to garner most backing off quickly.
To see what you're pissed off at, let's survey your comment history. I don't see anything particular to this case except getting pissed off, so i'll take your comment towards the website, calm. Hmm, A website towards meditation. Seems peaceful .
Let's not forget the website that was made to be only nice to people and to send encouragement only very recently. Seems like this community is trying. But one occasion with 2 sides to a story, and it's all said and done it your book? See you later.
I know this is going to come across as unfriendly, but I'm always bemused when people make these little plays for attention. It's a massive site, you're not one of the notable commenters, if HN isn't delivering value why not just stop reading it quietly rather than announcing it to the world?
Your attitude is the same as a lot of the socially inept that roam the valley and this message board. If This Isn't The Most Efficient Logical Course Of Action (according my perspective) Then It Bemuses Me.
Well, half of them, anyway.
Good to see we're staying classy. Next time you might like to work in a zinger about autism, neckbeards and/or fedora ownership.
Of course, there's a feedback loop in that people won't comment where the majority seem to disagree heavily with their morals, so that doesn't help with what threads like these look like. The sheer amount of personal attacks against people who disagree with victim-blaming views of this in this thread serve as a warning not to speak up.
I read these type of threads on HN constantly and every time I walk away absolutely disgusted with what I see said in them. I don't have the will to comment myself because it just would not change anyones opinion and they would instantly go into attack mode.
To be fair, just a few comments up you said
"I think you'll like this:" and then posted a link to a comic making fun of 'socially awkward', 'atheist', 'fedora wearers'.
It seems somewhat dramatic to me too, but I also have found the comments on the stories around this issue somewhat disappointing. That was their way of communicating it, this comment is mine.
I think we tend to overestimate the level of idiocy because it resonates much more strongly (in a negative way) in our heads.
lol wtf
Perhaps you are only sick of the burden of your own unexamined piety and belief the universe must obey your whims.
we're getting existential now
>suffer >irrelevant anecdotes to contrast against OP's "battle"
Why do you think he cares about children dying? Is it really so hard to grasp the notion that we are emotionally compelled by things relevant to our own lives at any given time?
This may be his battle, or maybe it's not a battle at all. Maybe you should stop this hyperbolic nonsense, because you're the one making it a battle.
>suffer
cringe
As for her romantically inclined co-worker -- I don't see how his behavior qualifies as sexist or hostile. Merely a bit clueless, but isn't it to be expected that employees of a tech company will be somewhat socially awkward?
EDIT: As multiple commenters have noted, ripping out someone's code commits because they rejected your romantic advances is unacceptable and unprofessional. The ripper-outer should be roasted by the project manager if there's no technical justification. Since the two employees no longer get along, one or both should be re-assigned to different projects if possible. And the offender should be disciplined (up to and including dismissal from the company) if he makes life difficult for her in the future. But his actions reflect on him, not Github as a whole. The article includes no information about whether any of his actions were reported to his supervisor or anyone else, and no information about Github's response to the incident. Without those crucial details, I think it's premature to point a finger at Github.
As for the hula hoop incident -- if the girls doing the hooping and the guys doing the watching were okay with it, and everybody kept their clothes on, that seems pretty innocent to me.
What probably needed to happen was whoever was in charge of that project should have recognized these two employees now didn't get along, and reassigned one or both of them away from the project.
as said higher it seems highly possible that she has no proof of anything - which means, if she's actually honest, she can't do much (except contacting a bunch of news sites and trying to make a big story out of it)
imagine this "i did all this work but someone deleted it! worked 2 weeks on it!" while in fact you were eating donuts ;-)
the problem is proof, when you have these allegations. if she has proof, then, she should sue them.
I'm especially shocked to see you trivialise the actions of the jilted engineer. Reverting someone else's work without explanation is a blatantly hostile and disrespectful act that should be treated seriously in isolation, and is made more serious still in the context of the inappropriate sexual stuff.
Probably because there are ample reasons why someone may revert someone's code for legitimate reasons.
I'm willing to stipulate this person's specific actions were probably hostile and unwarranted, but some sort of blanket "no revert without discussion" rule is just a way to cost your employer customers.
Context is important, and we don't have enough of it to be certain of what happened.
In both cases, I wrote a detailed technical explanation of why I had taken the action, and an apology for having to do it so suddenly, and I sent to to the entire group (a requirement anyway - if you make an on-the-fly ops change, you need to write up a full incident report so everyone knows what went wrong)
Reverting always needs to come with a "this is what was wrong".
If github says the reverts were legit, then that's different, but you should go with the best information we have, instead of trying to find an excuse not to believe her based on no evidence.
I'm even more certain that going through life believing everything you hear is not going to get you the results you want.
I come from a different school of thought. Firstly she only mentions a few people but the entire company and an entire industry are being brought into question.
Generally I have found what has been echoed by TechCrunch to be lacking in details and specifically from one persons point of view which shows a very self indulged narrative.
My response is not to suggest it did not happen, but given what has been said, how it has been said, and whom it is being said about, I suggest that before we tar people in such a way that more evidence should be presented.
While the details on this matter seem very clear, the statement " I would work on something, go to bed, and wake up to find my work gone without any explanation." does not imply no discussion it implies that when she got up she had no idea of what was going on. It may be a case of a lazy co-worker, and/or a case that the co-worker discussed the issues with her at a latter stage.
She is very succinct in her description of the actions of others, and then describes her response in an emotional unclear way. In her own way in this example, she has used passive aggressiveness to mask the actual event.
TLDR; We do not know if there was no discussion, and we are only hearing one side.
Because I think people should question whether they're overreacting to the situation.
> I'm especially shocked to see you trivialise the actions of the jilted engineer
I edited to clarify this. Careful reading shows that:
(1) It is possible that there were legitimate technical reasons for the reverted commits.
(2) It is possible that Github did not respond to this part of the situation because they were unaware of the reversion or the context behind it.
(3) It is possible that Github took some action against the engineer in question.
(4) I'm not entirely sure that confessing romantic feelings for a co-worker is, by itself, inappropriate. Provided everyone stays cool and professional if the feelings aren't mutual (or just avoid each other if the org chart makes that possible).
(5) Reverting commits because someone rejected your romantic advances is unacceptable and unprofessional, and I edited my post to say so.
I think it is difficult to say that Github is at fault from the information given, and I fear that's the conclusion that many were jumping to. If you're such a person, you should think carefully about what the article actually said, what you are assuming, and whether those assumptions might be false.
Don't worry. Read the whole thread on this discussion. The only people who are jumping to conclusions are those assuming there is something wrong with Horvath's story.
I have thought carefully about the article, and this is my conclusion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7408446 Reproduced here:
> GitHub are perfectly capable of defending themselves. They are the group in power here. Second-guessing the motives and truth of this woman's story does nothing but undermine her, and undermine the confidence of others who may have similar stories (at GitHub or elsewhere).
What the heck are you talking about? The story is hearsay at this point and armchair warriors are jumping to conclusions behind the anonymity of the internet.
Second-guessing the motives and truth? Do you work at Github? Is this person your co-worker?
Key point: she alleges that everyone was not calm and cool regarding hitting on a coworker. You miss the part where he didn't leave when asked, and never justified reverting her commits (to the point where she had to revert the revert).
Reverting people's commits and stripping their code out of vengeance isn't social awkwardness, it's completely unacceptable and unprofessional conduct. It doesn't matter what gender anyone is, or that it's being done out of romantic rejection, it's unacceptable. Full stop.
Author's complaint is evidently less about being hit on inappropriately (something that we could charitably attribute to "social awkwardness", maybe) and more about how the rejection was allegedly handled (read: by professional retribution). You don't get to hand-wave the latter allegation as some sort of social incompetence.
This borders on the "boys will be boys" argument. No, we don't get to excuse deplorably unprofessional behavior because someone is awkward. It's an injustice to those of us who are actually socially awkward but still know how to behave like decent fucking humans at work.
Was her code reverted at 12:00 AM because it broke the site? Or was it for something else? If so what?
See how the context changes your opinion? Generic 'they reverted my code!' statement does not tell me anything.
Note that I'm not commenting on the authenticity of the accusations laid out in this specific instance. My point is that messing with people's code because you don't get along with them - whether it happened here or elsewhere, and whether the perpetrator is male or female - is entirely unprofessional and unacceptable. It cannot be attributed to social awkwardness.
Beyond the specifics of this complaint, we cannot keep falling back on the "hurr we're all aspies" excuse to explain away our shitty conduct. It is not only inaccurate, it is damaging and infantilizing to tech workers in general.
I'm willing to bet that it was reverted for other reasons.
I reverted code from master before because the guy wanted to play the 'okay but' game when we noticed issues with it.
Sorry but we can chat about issues later, it's not staying in production to be pushed out by a random engineer. Nothing to do with your race, gender, age, etc.
I would agree in that I wouldn't call this an instance of industry-wide sexism. The root of the problem is the immaturity at the leadership level of this company. If the leadership is as immature as this story is making it out to be, than these sexist incidents wouldn't have happened. Still, I shall reserve my judgment on GitHub until I hear more sides to this story.
Github is developed in Ruby. Enough said.
For whatever reason, there's a propensity for this sort of drama to occur within organizations and at events where Ruby and Ruby on Rails, or users of such technologies, are involved in some way.
Off hand, I can think of that controversial presentation at GoGaRuCo a few years ago, the controversy about the diversity of the presenters at the BritRuby conference a bit later, and this matter here. Then there was that whole "Donglegate" incident, which while it occurred at PyCon, it involved at least one person with some ties to the Ruby community. I'm sure there are other events I'm missing, too.
Maybe it's just the so-called "brogrammer" culture that's so ingrained within the Ruby world that's responsible. Regardless, for a community that's actually quite small, there seems to be a whole lot of this sort of strife.
Other communities may also have less opportunities for truly great pro-women-in-coding projects to emerge. Last year the 3 people who started Rails Girls were honoured with Ruby Hero awards at Railsconf. There was near-universal support and genuinely excitement that something like this emerged within the community and had made such a strong impact in bringing women into the field.
http://railsgirls.com/
I think that manifests itself in both positive and negative ways.
For those of you who have never been to either, picture a room full of people who remind you of people like Alan Cox, RMS, or ESR.
That's not what the article says:
> The final straw for Horvath came when she saw men gawking at women who were hula-hooping at the office. [...] Two women, one of whom I work with and adore, and a friend of hers were hula hooping to some music.
Emphasis on at the office. It sounds like they were making some kind of show. While I agree that the rest of the story sounds like a massive clusterfuck, I can't understand what is supposed to be wrong in this episode.
Then it was not only in the office, but in the office during a party to boot.
Luckily that isn't a crime... (not saying that I agree with that assessment either, just saying).
[1] IIUC github founder's wife had no role in his company right ?
Oh please, that's about as sexist and as hostile as it gets between programmers.
I agree it should be expected that some employees of a tech company will be somewhat socially awkward --just as much as it should be expected that employees will be told that this kind of behaviour is totally unacceptable, and that companies ensure it doesn't happen.
It's hard to judge without all sides of the story, but the one side does not paint a pretty picture of Github.
Also, not so much sexism here as drama, a lot of which, it seemed, Ms Horvath herself participated in :\",