That was also my first reaction. I don't know enough about crisis-management-style PR to second-guess their response. I often have the suspicion that founders are not taking the best course of action, but this response seems to avoid the obvious pitfalls.
I think the follow up will be more critical, especially the public explanation. That will have the potential to either strengthen GH's credibility or destroy it.
Why should they give a public explanation for something that should've stayed internal in the first place? This should've stayed between the OP, GitHub and GH's HR team.
Exactly. This is what I needed to hear, as a 3rd-party fan of Github's product, who is concerned by Julie's allegations. I don't know who is in the wrong, and I want to know the truth, and I hope Github can solve these problems. This statement doesn't downplay; this statement doesn't evade, and that's what this situation warrants: a serious and sincere investigation.
One thing he could have done better is to praise her contributions as a developer specifically or not call anything out specifically. One of her main complaints is having her pull requests reverted and Chris Wanstrath's post does nothing to support her in this matter.
Awesome response from GitHub. Professional response, apologises and thanks the complainant rather than being defensive ... I think their new HR hire in January is already paying dividends ;)
Indeed, but it takes time to clean up a culture (if it's at all possible). This response suggests that their HR hire is doing his or her job well, at least now.
Disagree. The situtation is highly ambiguous. HR is a game of "the best victories are wars not fought". And so in some regards, its too late.
On the other-hand, if HR was on the right...they were "over-ruled" by more than one of CEO/founders/sr execs. This surely means this person has diminished capacity to act. If not due to competence, than due to "lack of formiddableness".
Because it shouldn't take a public PR nightmare to convince (ie, show some leadership) that following HR101 is a good idea.
It is only the rare edge case that this person was in perfect pitch (and ignored) yesterday and will be held in higher regard tomorrow.
So, this is why things are not clear cut here for anyone.
Absent a time machine, how could a hire in January have been working to clean up this mess "months ago"?
Blame the CEO and the rest of the management team for not hiring a good HR person sooner if you want, but I don't see how you fault the person who just walked into this mess. Unless you're blaming them for not seeing the mess or walking into it with their eyes open. To me, that seems counterproductive. Having people with the appropriate skills take on the difficult work of improving these cultures is part of how things get better.
Sorry, for some reason I was thinking that they were hired in January of 2013.
I wasn't suggesting that HR bring forth radical change, either, merely recognize the problems and work towards finding a solution (even though that would have been extremely difficult in itself, considering how little the executives seemed to help).
They didn't actually apologize for anything in specific. This is very carefully crafted and is being very defensive by not admitting to anything. The only real meat is clarifying that the wife had no hiring/firing power.
Explain to me why you would admit to anything if you haven't got to the bottom of it yourself? As they explained, they're investigating the issue currently.
It's good to see this statement out of Github. The general tone and specifically the mention of the founder's wife in this post gives a huge amount of credence to Julie's claims. I hope Github follows through on this with as much sincerity and determination as this post implies.
I agree that the statement is good. I only wish they'd addressed the concerns that were raised regarding them having access to/messing with private repos.
I didn't quite read the statement as saying the founder's wife had access to private repos. I just read it as saying that the founder's wife claimed to have access to private company communication, specifically chat logs only intended for github employees. But a statement clearing the concerns up would be nice.
You're right - the TechCrunch article didn't mention access to private repos - only private employee chatrooms. But the question was raised here on HN, asking if she did have access to private employee chatrooms what else might she or others have access to? If the security is lax in one area, one might assume it's lax in others as well. But it's just speculation - but it has merit non the less
There's no way to know unless someone comes out and says it explicitly, but it's not out of the realm of possibility that the aforementioned "spies" emailed specific chat logs to her. In a toxic environment, that kind of stuff gets passed around willy-nilly. That's the first conclusion I jumped to after reading the TechCrunch article, anyway.
I personally just read the quote as meaning the wife knew her husband's passwords (and where to find company chat logs). Theoretically, this might give her access to private repositories, but only to the extent the founder in question does. A problem, to be sure, but its not like they were giving away credentials to people.
They use campfire so giving anyone access to the chat logs would be as simple as adding them. They could then look at any logged history (almost all of it, unless the room was locked) and search through it however they liked.
Agreed. Keep this handy for when you have an event such as this. If no attorneys were involved in drafting this, I would be surprised.
It admits no guilt, declares that individuals are the possible cause and that action is being taken to prevent their continued damage, notifies the community that a new HR head started very recently, and attempts to be as graceful as possible in acknowledging the points made by the victim.
If you get a chance, watch 'Wing Chun', an informative documentary on the same topic, and note the effectiveness of 'cotton belly'.
I'm curious if the company itself took this up or if board pressure played a part. It is sad that the events transpired as they did with out management stepping up earlier.
Usually there are two sides of the story, but the fact that a non-employee (wife of co-founder) exercised so much power and meddled in internal office politics in the way that she did, it was hard to see how GitHub could even claim a reasonable stance. They screwed this up big time. This is a good response.
Off topic, but there is not always "two sides". There is a tendency to try to frame and reduce everything to binary questions... but the world is just not binary.
To put it another way, there may be two sides (or N sides), but some sides' perspective are often more worthy than others. Not to Godwin the thread, but, yeah. Both sides' perspectives are not always equally valid. (I dutifully acknowledge that the offenses are not the same magnitude, and all the caveats that go with referencing The Big G.)
Julie made two sets of allegations against Github. The first has to do with her personal dealings with the founder and his wife and the HR department. The second with general harassment of women at Github. Github so colossally screwed up the former, they may have to concede, by default, the latter.
Well Julie's story stinks. Let me just quote the last thigs she wrote and work backwards from that.
"Two women, one of whom I work with and adore, and a friend of hers were hula hooping to some music. I didn’t have a problem with this. What I did have a problem with is the line of men sitting on one bench facing the hoopers and gawking at them. It looked like something out of a strip club. When I brought this up to male coworkers, they didn’t see a problem with it. But for me it felt unsafe and to be honest, really embarrassing. That was the moment I decided to finally leave GitHub."
For me, two adult individual can do whatever the hack they want to do, if it is legal and they are both consent of doing it. Julie seems like really pissed that other people just can have fun the way she does not like. This sounds like a huge frustration in her towards others with different standards. This last event seems like triggered her outrage, and that is also a sign that she might exaggerate what was really going in Github. Don't get me wrong, as part of a small minority I totally understand what oppression means at a workplace, but these accusations seem a bit irrational.
So many words without contributing anything to the discussion. "These accusations seem a bit irrational." What are you even talking about they are factual coupled with her interpretations. This post hints strongly that github is disputing neither. Your read is tortured.
Feminism is a cultural Marxist ideology which tries to explain the world through the lens of class conflict - an overclass (male) which is oppressive and therefore evil and an underclass (female) which is oppressed and therefore good. This is why it is not considered oppression when men die young or go to prison more often than women and it is not a problem when men are underrepresented in higher ed - men can't be oppressed by definition.
In a perfectly fair world, men and women would behave differently due to comparative advantage and specialization based on sexual dimorphism. Feminism, in seeking an equal world, denies reality and quite a bit of science. Also, like most Marx-derived groups, feminists are humorless killjoys
The word "feminism" describes a lot more that just that one ideology. There are lots of feminist movements and "agendas" and the only thing they have in common is advocating equality for women. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism
Oh, I’m so very sorry that you have to do a tiny bit more work and find out specifically what someone stands for before you can coherently argue against them instead of slapping the feminist label on it and being done with it.
First, I would suggest that when you attack feminism in the abstract, you attack views that are actually currently and widely held by feminists. It’s a diverse movement, but there are actual mainstream views. Frequently even that will not be very helpful, so you will have to find out specifically which group of people you are addressing with your criticism.
If feminists can and do frequently criticise feminist views then so can you.
In that regard feminism is kind of like, say, conservatism or liberalism or socialism or nationalism.
Now, I myself do not have a problem with chucking even big and complex concepts like that on the trash heap of history if they actually do have a consistently disastrous history. You won’t find me putting much work into arguing against fascism or royalism or racism or antisemitism. I’m willing to dismiss those wholesale.
Feminism, whatever its faults may be in your view, is about a million miles away from clearing that, however. It’s absurd to even think it could approach that same standard of wholesale dismissal. It has no history of harm at all.
It’s an extremely narrow, extremely small ideology with little diversity. It doesn’t have much history or historical importance and the specific views I’ve encountered were firstly nearly always the same or similar and secondly not very convincing or just blatant untruths. As such to me many proponents of MRM views often felt like a tight knit group with a very specific worldview without much subtlety in their argument.
I.e. if feminism were the concept of atheism, the MRM would be the Westboro Baptist Church and not Christianity or belief in some deity as a whole. (That’s a slightly shitty metaphor since the frequent conflict MRM activists dream up between them and feminism is pretty absurd. Men getting harsher prison sentences? Men being disadvantaged during divorces? That’s often based on strict and old-fashioned gender roles, something many feminists abhor.)
I don't see Horvath, or anyone else in this conversation, using tw268's definition of feminism. That's why it's misleading for this conversation. Horvath is criticizing her own feminist framework, so obviously it's not all good.
You have not the faintest trace of an idea what feminism or Marxism are. This is the most idiotic thing I have read all week. OK, it's Monday morning, but I give it a good chance to stand...
"Cultural Marxism" is an academic offshoot possibly inspired by Marxism. Though I'm not quite sure why it's called "cultural".
As for feminism, what's your definition, and do you think other people are practicing that definition in particular? Look at tumblr posts discussing patriarchy theory sometime; somewhere amidst the paranoid depressed teenagers is a pretty well-defined belief system, and it's not yours anymore.
While technically true, today "Cultural Marxism" is mostly a label that the extreme far right use to try to brush centrist and moderate leftists with associations of Stalinism.
Beware whenever the term is brought up - it's usually used as an ad hominem.
I'm using the phrase cultural Marxism to identify disciplines based on Marxist thought but that don't necessarily include the economic program that classical Marxism is known for. This includes feminism, critical race theory, and gender theory.
> which is oppressive and therefore evil and an underclass (female) which is oppressed and therefore good
If you think Marxism considers classes to be evil and good, you have already demonstrated that you don't know Marxism. Marx was very clear that he saw the members of the different classes as effective slaves of circumstance, who acted out their roles in history out of necessity.
The capitalist, to Marx, not only is not evil, but is seen as a historical necessity that drives progress: Only through the development of advanced capitalist economies does production reach sufficient levels to be able to eradicate common wants, thus making socialism possible.
I'll not disagree with you that there are some feminist groups that follow the same twisted idea of what marxism is that you describe above, but they're by no means the only feminists out there, nor does their views have much of anything to do with marxism.
> If you think Marxism considers classes to be evil and good, you have already demonstrated that you don't know Marxism. Marx was very clear that he saw the members of the different classes as effective slaves of circumstance, who acted out their roles in history out of necessity.
Marx clearly did describe things that way but the movements that called themselves Marxist (particularly Leninism and those Marxist groups influenced by Leninism, which given the influence of the USSR were pretty common among "Marxists") did tend to take the capitalist = evil approach (which fits more in with Leninism than Marxism, since Leninism major point of divergence was adapting Marxism to justify "socialist" revolution in pre-capitalist societies, thus rendering capitalism unnecessary.)
Fun fact: White Nationalists define themselves as a movement to end the genocide of white people. Therefore, if you oppose White Nationalism, you support the genocide of white people. That's how definitions work, right?
> For me, two adult individual can do whatever the hack they want to do, if it is legal and they are both consent of doing it.
Not at all true in a professional environment. And that statement doesn’t even correspond with the story. The specifics of the hula hooping anecdote are all but immaterial anyway. The men failing to acknowledge how it was problematic was just the point at which she saw the GitHub culture had not really changed. It won’t change without action by the leadership, which was questionable given all the other events.
This response from Chris Wanstrath is a step in the right direction, but, as he acknowledges, they still have work to do.
Quite the stretch you've outlined. But maybe "unsafe" could mean the exact things Horvath mentions happened to her like coworkers visiting her at her home to make advances.
Where are you reading that the coworker visited her at home? All I saw is, 'asked himself over to “talk"' in a context which implied to me that it took place at the office.
Is gang rape really only one step removed from hula hooping or is that the only meaning of "unsafe" behaviour you can think of? Having a safe work environment can simply mean being treated professionally and equally. I mean, sexual harassment has a wide scope from "she knew she wanted it," to "it was uncomfortable or rude," and unsafe should cover all of the above. Really, the unsafe refers to a perception that safety features aren't present -- in this case that there was no other avenue to report or discourage this behaviour before it became a cultural norm. Is it wrong or harmful? Maybe not physically, but obviously emotionally, to at least one person. This is why having a neutral second opinion and ... process, can sometimes be a good thing. At the very least, it provides distance to look at things more objectively.
Watching your co-workers playing hula hoop makes you feel unsafe? Even if it does, how would you present this to court? You think this is enough legal ground for sexual harassment? Come on... The world is the way how we shape it and I definitely don't want to live in a world when I can't do something silly with my co-workers without watching out for feminists or other frustrated hatred people around us.
Sure, people can do what they want, but in a workplace there are (or should be) standards and codes of conduct that help inform employees how to behave in a way that doesn't poison the environment for others.
So sure, if people want to watch that at home, then I guess that is their prerogative, but doing so at work doesn't seem productive or healthy for their (or any company's) community and culture.
Sure, but how does hula-hooping poison the environment? As far as we can tell, the women doing the hula-hooping were doing it for fun/exercise with no sexual intent, and the men watching just thought it was entertaining and not sexual. Then Julie comes along and complains that it's like a strip joint!?
Now I wasn't there and I have nothing to do with github, but that is just my take on it. It just sounds like Julie has some very strange ideas about sexual harassment. It seems to be her that is causing sexual harassment in the workplace if anything.
The whole thing is very weird, and neither Julie nor the Github management look very good.
"Sure, but how does hula-hooping poison the environment? As far as we can tell, the women doing the hula-hooping were doing it for fun/exercise with no sexual intent, and the men watching just thought it was entertaining and not sexual."
Exactly. The intension is very important.
Also if the hula hooping girls would of been bothered by the guys watching them I guess they should've let them know.
>What I did have a problem with is the line of men sitting on one bench facing the hoopers and gawking at them.
and what would be an alternative? "A man mustn't look at a hula-hooping woman. " (what would be a punishment for the violation? - something from middle ages Arab world comes to mind, a definite cure for the desire to watch hula-hooping women :)
> For me, two adult individual can do whatever the hack they want to do, if it is legal and they are both consent of doing it.
You may think so, but people are not allowed to have 'fun' however they please in an office environment, nor is 'Is this illegal' the end-all, be-all of being an incredibly toxic work environment.
It's possible for Julie to be oversensitive about such matters, and still have the abuse and sexism claimed to be rampant at Github be absolutely true.
The fact that she might not be perfect does not therefore invalidate her story about everything else.
It's pretty odd for women to be hula hooping, I've never seen that, but Julia's reaction to is is bananas. How does that make her feel threatened? Can't she just ignore it, of course men are going to look, did the women think nobody would notice? To me this belittles any legitimate claim she might have, if she's this irrational about this event, then it clouds my view of other things she says.
She also sounds confused, unless the women doing hula hooping were also taking off their clothes then I fail to see how she thinks this looks like anything at a strip club. If the hula women were stripping then she has a legitimate claim that this is inappropriate in the workplace, otherwise I don't see how this is any different to table tennis or air hockey etc.
So, if you hula hoop in public you are asking to be ogled?
Was she asking for it?
Was she asking nice?
Yeah, she was asking for it
Did she ask you twice?
- "Asking For It" Courtney Love and Eric Erlandson
"We had just gotten off tour with Mudhoney, and I decided to stage-dive. I was wearing a dress and I didn't realize what I was engendering in the audience. It was a huge audience and they were kind of going ape-shit. So I just dove off the stage, and suddenly, it was like my dress was being torn off of me, my underwear was being torn off of me, people were putting their fingers inside of me and grabbing my breasts really hard, screaming things in my ears like "pussy-whore-cunt". When I got back onstage I was naked. I felt like Karen Finley. But the worst thing of all was that I saw a photograph of it later. Someone took a picture of me right when this was happening, and I had this big smile on my face like I was pretending it wasn't happening. So later I wrote a song called "Asking For It" based on the whole experience. I can't compare it to rape because it's not the same. But in a way it was. I was raped by an audience, figuratively, literally, and yet, was I asking for it?" - Courtney Love
What does a semi-gangrape at a metal concert has to do with an innocent silly act in a SF office? Nobody forced anything on anybody... If you are so much hatred just move your desk to the other side of the building or work from home your just freakin' get a life before start any interaction with other human beings...
If anyone starts hula hooping at my office they will surely attract a lot of attention because it's just not something people do at work (YMMV)
I didn't say she was asking for anything, I said her credibility is weakened by her reaction to this. Try it, get any two people at your workplace to hula hoop and see if people come and watch, gawk or whatever word you want to call it.
And why quote Courtney Love at me, that's about as ridiculous as quoting Germaine Greer in response. What did CL think would happen when she jumped off stage? She of all people understands human sexuality, and was exploiting it. She says the big smile was her pretending it was happening, however, there are a million other interpretations. If I jump into a hungry lion's den do I complain when I get eaten? Ask yourself why CL is says it wasn't rape and then it was, she's a very astute woman and knows exactly how to exploit the attention she garners, because she sure as hell is a lousy singer.
Hula hooping doesn't look like stripping, any which way you want to spin it, so given that she has her normality barometer so poorly calibrated, how can we believe much else she says without applying the same thought process?
Hula hoopers weren't compared to strippers, the gawkers were compared to how "customers" behave at the strip club. I know lots of women who do not enjoy being "gawked" at, including my wife and daughter.
I don't think it was expected for CL to be stripped of her clothing for stage diving, even if it maybe wasn't the best idea. However, if her gender wasn't female, she probably would have had no problems stage diving. I was insinuating that blaming the victim was your viewpoint, which it still seems to be.
I think we shouldn't read too much on her reaction to the hula hooping. As she said, it was the last straw, and in my experience the last straw usually isn't that significant by itself. Maybe, on any other day she would have been annoyed, as it was something that she didn't appreciate, but would have let it go. However, after all the trouble with the founder, his wife and the admirer, she saw the hola hooping as a sign that it was better for her to leave.
It makes a person feel threatened because it implies that your co-workers think of /you/ as eye candy too. And if that's all you are, then you can't trust others to take you and your needs seriously. You can't deal with it by ignoring it, because it's not the staring that's the problem, it's what it indicates about how the gawkers view their female coworkers. (How you're viewed matters because that affects whether anyone will listen and help you when you have a problem, and if they'll expect unreasonable things from you - like the coworker who removed a bunch of Julia's code after she turned him down for a date.)
Or at least, that's how I feel about it, when I try to put myself in the place of someone who saw this happening, and took it as a sexual sort of staring rather than a "what the heck are my silly coworkers doing" kind of staring. It's also possible that Julia misunderstood what was going on, or exaggerated - we don't have enough information to know.
But wasn't she dating someone that worked there? (was she already dating before joining GitHub or did they meet there?) This for me says that she think it is ok for there to be some kind of attraction between co-workers, so I don't see how men gawking to two women hula hooping is the last straw for her.
Of course, if they were screaming 'take it off' or similar, I would agree, but supposedly attractive women doing activities that make their bodies 'jiggle' in a public setting and expect men not to look or stare is ridiculous, and going from that to 'not feeling safe' is too much of a stretch. I understand maybe the previous issues colored her understanding of the situation, but it does leave a bad feeling in my gut that she may just be a drama queen which makes me question her reports on the other issues.
I worked somewhere where a female co-worker hired a "stripper-gram" or something for another male co-worker's birthday in the office. I was single and not even dating at the time, but felt extremely uncomfortable with an actual stripper in the office, myself. So, even though they seemed to be consenting, I didn't appreciate having a stripper in the office, and neither did several of my (also male) coworkers.
I can imagine any amount of ogling would be uncomfortable, regardless of consent of the participants, to an observer.
Completely agree. The outrage over hula hooping triggers a giant warning siren that this is a person who is working very hard to be angered and offended.
I don't know the proper way to watch someone hula hoop, but if anyone in my office decided to hula hoop, I would likely watch. Apparently this means I have a terrible attitude towards women, or something.
What I think you're missing is that we are only 20 or 30 years out of office environments in which women were primarily there to answer phones and to be looked at.
So if I would watch two woman while they play table tennis it would be inappropriate? This is silly :). I don't see any difference between hula hooping and playing table tennis or darts. If someone wants to see how sexy is that they can do it with both.
You take a quote from the end of the original article, some 200 words, and use it as a basis to tear down Julie's character ("seems like..." and "sounds like..."). I mean, seriously, it's marvelous: you jump from hula-hooping to identifying social angst in Julie's life in two sentences. Bravo!
We do not know Julie. Pretending otherwise, and using that as grounds for tearing down her claims, devalues their significance. I'm surprised, given that you understand what oppression means at a workplace, that you readily dismiss her serious claims on such flimsy grounds.
Sounds like you're so desperate to out the guy that you have to make a weird, nonsensical post.
If you really want to out him that badly just man up an post his name rather than trying to weasel around with "Easier to put a president on leave than a CEO".
Company governance is whatever the stockholders say it is. You could give the title "Chief Executive Officer" to the janitor's dead hamster and have everybody report to a teenager with the title Cokehead Principio whose only job is to keep the board of directors appraised exclusively through interpretive dance.
Which is to say, you're fuzzy on it because it's fuzzy. There are no strict rules as to the structure of senior corporate officers.
Github have a very fine line to walk. They don't have traditional shareholders to make happy. At the end of the day, all they have is their brand to protect.
Ask Microsoft how important their brand is after releasing Windows ME. Or Blackberry just after the iPhone came out.
Clearly something has happened, but they have to not only find out what happened, but to also be transparent and show that they are trying to find out what happened.
I think its the best response you can expect given the circumstances.
Bingo!, the lawsuit is coming regardless, Horvath made sure to leave enough of a paper trail for it.
I think this whole situation looks like a misunderstanding snowballing into a tsunami. Founder's wife takes her for drinks, gets drunk, talks of her ass and says inappropriate stuff. I would just chalk it to drunkenness and forget the whole episode. It would've ended right there.
Guaranteed lawyers have already contacted her after hearing about this assuring her she has a big settlement waiting, which she probably does. Github will just want to make this go away and prevent her from shit talking the brand anymore and money is the answer
Damage to their brand is temporary. If they behave themselves in a civilized manner from here on in, the media will soon forget this incident and move on to the next scandal.
On the other hand, if the lawsuit is for enough money, it can bankrupt the company: a huge award to the plaintiff, lawyer fees, executives tied up in court instead of running the company, etc. Their investors may not be interested in covering big losses; they might cut their losses and move on to the next up and coming company.
I don't think we are talking about the same thing. Depending on who you read, Github is a $750m company. What's the payout going to be - $2m? $5m? This isn't going to bankrupt them.
San Diego Sea World and the killer whale or Blackberry & Palm mobile devices are examples of irreparable brand damage.
What's the going price for a Microsoft Zune player?
Github has a value of $750m on paper. That doesn't mean that the company has any significant revenue stream out of which it can pay a $5M settlement. And $5M would be 5% of their recent $100M Series A funding, so it would a large chunk of their working capital. In any case, if that $5M goes to the plaintiff and lawyers, it won't be going to pay the yearly cost of 25 developers.
It means that they still need to agree on what will be the permanent solution - so they do all they can do right now, but settling the matter with a co-founder(=co-owner) can't be that quick. "with pay" is irrelevant there, their main relationship is not the employment contract but the details in shareholder agreement that likely includes all kinds of stipulations about control of company, being forced to leave, and monetary issues much larger than salary.
It means "stay out of here so we can investigate this without you trying to defend yourself or impeding the investigation. When we're done, we'll tell you if we want you back or not."
"the relevant founder has been put on leave... The founder’s wife... will no longer be permitted in the office."
Almost exactly what I expected. As the startup grows larger (200+ employees now for Github?) it's not uncommon to have some cultural setback. +1 for Github trying to fix it asap, but still Chris Wanstrath did not mention how are they exactly going to fix the culture. Putting founder on leave is by no means panacea. The behavior on that one founder is very likely not the cause for the wrong culture, but just the side effect. So more specific plans INSIDE the company, please? (well, actually I think fixing the culture can't be done by any plan, but it must be done by example of founders/high-level executives.)
I am not assuming everything Julie states is right. For statement "the culture of Github needs some fix" to be true, it only needs only some of Julie's statements to be true. And looks like from Chris's statement, that is true (otherwise why did they "punish" founder & his wife).
They did not punish anybody. Not letting a non-employee into their offices does not qualify as punishment. Put on leave for a president also not. It is more to the media and wait to let the dust settle. The culture of Github needs some fix can be interpreted many ways it does not say anything concrete. This is all politics. :)
Him mentioning the cofounder's wife immediately gives credibility to Julie's claims! I hope she get's paid! The workplace should be professional, not a schoolyard.
To respond only after the issue was brought public? No, that is no leadership. It's the best possible response he could give under the present circumstances, but on the flipside, he had no choice but to make this statement. I wouldn't be surprised if it was crafted for him by a PR person or firm.
I'm guessing that at the time (whilst the issue was still internal) they didn't think what was happening was a big enough deal. As a result they're now having to perform damage control.
> We know we have to take action and have begun a full investigation. While that’s ongoing, and effective immediately, the relevant founder has been put on leave, as has the referenced GitHub engineer.
Pretty much a full admission that everything that Julie said is true.
This is great news, but putting these people on leave seems to be too nice. It's clear that these two people obey ethics that are in direct oppposition to the healthy growth of the company. Surely they don't want them back?
> The founder’s wife discussed in the media reports has never had hiring or firing power at GitHub and will no longer be permitted in the office.
Why did it take a Techcrunch article to reach this decision? Didn't anyone at Github see anything wrong with that founder's wife doing what she did, according to Julie's statement?
> GitHub has grown incredibly fast over the past two years, bringing a new set of challenges. Nearly a year ago we began a search for an experienced HR Lead and that person came on board in January 2014
Doesn't appear so. They did get an HR person, but an experienced one? Not a chance. No experienced HR person would have let any of that get as far as it got. That HR person should probably be put on leave or be fired as well.
> Chris Wanstrath
>
> CEO & Co-Founder
This narrows down the choices: the "founder" who is the cause for all this drama is either PJ Hyett or Tom Preston-Werner.
> Doesn't appear so. They did get an HR person, but an experienced one? Not a chance. No experienced HR person would have let any of that get as far as it got. That HR person should probably be put on leave or be fired as well.
> that person came on board in January 2014
most of the things that had happened predated the HR person coming on, but you do have a point, the wife thing should of stopped since January
> > We know we have to take action and have begun a full investigation. While that’s ongoing, and effective immediately, the relevant founder has been put on leave, as has the referenced GitHub engineer.
> Pretty much a full admission that everything that Julie said is true.
> This is great news, but putting on leave seems to be too nice. It's clear that these two people obey ethics that are in direct oppposition to the healthy growth of the company. Surely they don't want them back?
It's pretty standard practice to place employees on paid leave while serious complaints are investigated. You don't want to fire them until you have a pretty solid case as they might sue, but likewise you don't want them in the office.
There is a trick business schools like to play on students, where you are given a test with 10 - 15 scenarios where an employee has allegedly done something wrong and you need to write the proper response from the company.
The correct answer to every single scenario is "suspend pending investigation."
I also have never heard of a founder being put on leave. I wouldn't go quite so far as to say it is an admission that the allegations are true. But it is certainly an admission that they have merit and are not so far from reality as to be easily dismissed. I am pleased that Github is taking this seriously, and very sorry for Julie's experiences. This should never happen to anyone in our industry.
Oh, I don't doubt. Probably he saw the wisdom in stepping back while this is investigated, as any rational person would, guilty or not. Nonetheless, I cannot recall a situation where a founder of a company large enough to make the news has put themselves into a position where it would be necessary.
If you see a CEO/Founder/Chairman focusing on a new, spin-off, company, this is generally the American way of handling a volatile situation when the offender is perceived as irreplaceable.
From a legal standpoint, an employee's status as a founder or owner/shareholder is largely irrelevant. There's no basis for special treatment--in fact, depending on how it's handled, such special treatment would, at a minimum, place the company in a potentially perilous legal situation with future cases.
One of the major ideas behind suspending employees for investigations is to eliminate their ability to influence the investigation. Also, it's a immediate precautionary measure to prevent the behavior from continuing should the complaint be found to be valid. In that sense, it protects the employer by keeping them at a distance in the short-term. They can also point to it in the press and in future legal proceedings (if any) as part of a strategy of showing that they took the complaint seriously from the beginning.
GitHub is known to have a dubstep and IPA culture. If they want to be a standard bearer for feminism in tech, the transition is going to be difficult and they are going to take some hits. The two cultures don't mix well.
It sounds like GitHub is going to have to become more stale and corporate to survive as a larger company, which is inevitable, but hastened by their own choices.
They will have to move to a MDMA/THC based culture fused with early 90's pop + Mid 2000's minimal techno. This is a small step for a dubstep IPA culture. It's like moving from the Midwest to NYC.
> GitHub is known to have a dubstep and IPA culture.
What point are you trying to make here? Are you a classical music and hefeweizen type of employee typically? Or maybe based out of Seattle, in which case you'd prefer a more grunge/PBR culture?
> Pretty much a full admission that everything that Julie said is true.
I have no idea whose side of the story is accurate, but there was really no other way for Github to play this, whether they were in the wrong or Julie was in the wrong.
> This is great news, but putting these people on leave seems to be too nice. It's clear that these two people obey ethics that are in direct oppposition to the healthy growth of the company. Surely they don't want them back?
The individuals, while allegedly shitlords in terms of their behaviour, being gone may eliminate 2 problems, but honestly they're products of an overall culture. In a healthy company you wouldn't have a guy (allegedly) reverting commits or shittalking individuals in comments because they wouldn't fuck him for very long after the first few efforts, because their peers or line manager would have said, "dude, not cool".
And their line manager would have followed up with "if I even hear a rumor of this happening again, you'll be fired for cause". Because such harassment is, per my understanding, illegal, and can create enormous problems for the individual, manager, and company. Not to mention incredibly unethical.
People make mistakes; they seem to get a lot of other things right, so maybe the relationship is salvageable - and all he needs is some time off.
>Doesn't appear so. They did get an HR person, but an experienced one? Not a chance. No experienced HR person would have let any of that get as far as it got. That HR person should probably be put on leave or be fired as well.
Jeez. They hired HR in January; the company has 240 employees many of whom remote. Based on her story, Julie Horvath's relationship was already poisoned by the time they hired this HR person.
The screwups were bad but I doubt GH culture is unfixable.
I would venture to guess Tom. I certainly don't know for sure, but he has a wife (don't know about PJ's marital status) who is herself a founder/CEO and wouldn't raise eyebrows spending time working at the Github offices.
Just last Friday his wife's startup is accepted to Techstars NYC, and she is going to be at NYC. It may be a good timing for Tom to take a leave to be with his wife.
Just guessing here. I could totally be wrong. No offense to Tom; I looked up to him.
> > We know we have to take action and have begun a full investigation. While that’s ongoing, and effective immediately, the relevant founder has been put on leave, as has the referenced GitHub engineer.
> Pretty much a full admission that everything that Julie said is true.
Hardly. It just says they are paying attention to the accusations and taking things seriously. I think they responded in a very positive way, and more transparently than I would have expected. But "we're looking into it" in no way validates or admits any fault on their behalf at this point.
> This is great news, but putting these people on leave seems to be too nice.
So they should just fire them based on one person's complaints? If everything Julie accused them of is true, I think they should be fired, but that doesn't mean they should go off half-cocked, firing everyone involved until they can investigate and determine exactly what happened.
>Pretty much a full admission that everything that Julie said is true.
No, it isn't. It's standard operating procedure pretty much everywhere to put employees on leave while an investigation is conducted. It shouldn't be construed as an admission at all.
Maybe, but it could also be calculated: "If we don't apologize, the mob will cry for our blood even more, and we obviously can't do a non-apology apology, because they'd hate us for that too. Just be humble and supplicate to them so we can keep our IPO--I mean reputation intact."
The apology could be interpreted in a lot of ways. It could be we fucked up and we are sorry. Or it could be, Julie really blew things out of proportion/overreacted/misinterpreted things and we wish we were better able to react to her hysteria, and we apologize for not being able to.
GitHub is a business and they aren't dumb enough to not consult one or more lawyers before releasing their statement. If they are in the wrong, I would have to imagine their best play would be to compensate Julie behind the scene and have her formally come out and say GitHub is doing everything they can to ensure this doesn't happen again.
"I would like to personally apologize to Julie" certainly sounds like an admission that the company wronged her.
And don't lawyers frequently tell their clients not to apologize (even if they feel they ought to), since that may be construed as an admission of wrongdoing in a subsequent legal proceeding?
If a CEO writes on his company's web site, it's usually understood to mean that he is speaking on behalf of the company.
In any case, the company did wrong her by allowing an environment to exist in which these kinds of behaviors were tolerated. The actions that the CEO took today should have been taken a long time ago.
That's the standard advice, but things are changing after recent empirical work found that doctors who apologized for mistakes ended up paying out less in malpractice claims than those who didn't.
The cheapest way to win a lawsuit is for it never to be filed in the first place.
I have to say, I'm really disappointed. Unless the allegations are somehow made up -- which seems incredibly unlikely -- this is an enormous lapse from a company I use and admire. Not only did the founders, at least in public appearances, all seem like decent people, but they had one hell of a success story. I also liked their seeming tolerance for remote work and support for people like Julie who tried to make our industry more welcome to women by doing instead of just talking.
> This is great news, but putting these people on leave seems to be too nice. It's clear that these two people obey ethics that are in direct oppposition to the healthy growth of the company. Surely they don't want them back?
I'm strongly inclined to believe that what Horvath said is true and that these two people should be laid off, but that shouldn't happen before an investigation. If they're not guilty, they should be exonerated; if they are, they should be dismissed with the full weight of evidence, so they can't paint themselves as innocent martyrs.
> Doesn't appear so. They did get an HR person, but an experienced one? Not a chance. No experienced HR person would have let any of that get as far as it got. That HR person should probably be put on leave or be fired as well.
The HR person has been on the job for a minimum of 31 business days and a maximum of 53. Horvath joined two years ago. Unless you are a GitHub insider, you currently are working off knowledge from a single source in which the information was provided by a person with a specific agenda. It is malicious to call for the HR person's job given your almost complete dearth of information.
It looks like HR was involved in this case and the issue with the wife seemed have been raised. That should have been an immediate red flag to this "experienced" individual before they even got down to business of addressing any other concerns. It was a major screw-up.
Precisely, it "looks like" HR was involved. Can you say with certainty this person, hired in Jan. 2014, was involved? And can you say with certainty that this person could have prevented this? Again, unless you're a GitHub insider (are you?), the answer is no. At the moment, no one on HN knows anything. It's entirely possible this was an HR issue, but specifically calling for the HR person to be suspended or fired, given our collective total ignorance, is a spiteful and bizarre declaration directed at someone the original poster does not know. These are real people, and HN comments – particularly top comments – can influence decisions.
> This narrows down the choices: the "founder" who is the cause for all this drama is either PJ Hyett or Tom Preston-Werner.
Julie Horvath follows both Chris Wanstrath and PJ Hyett on Twitter, but not Tom Preston-Werner (at least as shown by Twitter's "Followed by people you follow" banner). Of course, this could just be a coincidence.
Pretty much a full admission that everything that Julie said is true.
This is a terrible assumption to make. This line is basically saying "we're taking this seriously", because if they said anything less, then regardless of the truth of the matter, they'd be skinned alive.
Ironically, it's knee-jerk black and white comments like yours that create this kind of press release. You've already convicted them in your mind and are looking for any excuse to execute them. I mean fuck, you expect an HR person to come on board and within a month "not have let any of that get as far as it got"? Are they supposed to have invented a time-machine?
It's particularly frightening to me because it appears that GitHub is attempting to do the right thing here -- investigate the allegations without the influence of potentially involved parties.
Yet, if such a thing is construed as an admission of guilt in the greater "court of public opinion" then there's an incentive to actively avoid any attempt at transparency.
Fair enough about the HR person (who probably acted in fear for their job), but how often does the co-founder of a very successful start up get put on leave within 24 hours of an article published on Techcrunch?
How? Easily. If you're investigating the matter you want to distance all parties involved from the situation, so that they cannot influence the outcome. If Julie was still employed there, she would have certainly been put on leave as well.
Have you considered the possibility that both parties are in the wrong? That Horvath does have something of a point, but she's massively overblown her experiences and read the wrong meaning into things?
Life is stickier than tabloids lead you to believe, and in such a case as I've suggested, it's not hard to see the founders talking about how 'bob' should take a brief sabbatical while the Internet Hate Machine looks for another target. The other founders might love 'bob' and want to spare him from internet fury. Or they might loathe him and were looking for a way to put him in his place. Or they might be taking a pragmatic PR-smart move. Or 'bob' might have said "I was looking to take leave and go to Europe for a holiday, this would be a good time, eh?". Or a dozen other situations. We just don't know.
And that's just fire-fighting - if you want Github to do a meaningful investigation, then you need to have the investigators being as dispassionate as possible, rather than doing it while fending off the hordes at the gate. And since a founder is involved, the investigators pretty much have to be the other founders. And that meaningful investigation includes talking to staff outside of the bubble of hysteria that's currently going on. And that meaningful investigation may indeed largely exonerate Github.
The thing is that you don't have enough information to pre-convict the way you have.
And, frankly, on a personal note: fuck this automatic calling for the sacking of someone when thing go awry. It's truly fucked up. Re-evaluate? No. Retrain? No. Reassign? No. "Someone has to suffer" for the mob's one-eyed rage. Fuck that shit. Sometimes a sacking is the appropriate course of action, but that's not for the mob to decide, because the mob doesn't have anything like close access to the story.
>because if they said anything less, then regardless of the truth of the matter, they'd be skinned alive.
I am amazed at how many people don't recognize this. Even if the entire thing were completely made up, this would still be the only acceptable response github could give.
A "full investigation" is the law in California when sexual harassment claims are made. It's not an admission of anything, it's just literally the law.
The allegation that a co-worker made a sexual advance and then reverted code and generally created a hostile work environment is most definitely a "sexual harassment" claim.
I think the fact that he went as far as to give a personal shout out to her at the end says that they're doing more than the bare minimum to keep from getting skinned alive, I think they must at least be taking it genuinely seriously.
It can be both true that the situation called for having a co-founder put on leave, and his wife banned from the premises because a first look shows Horvath's claims are likely to be true and that Github's management deserves respect for prompt action, candor, and open communication.
They could have been completely opaque and done nothing but investigate the matter, without any disclosure. It's a brave choice to be open because, even implicitly, admitting a problem can taken as admitting liability.
As many others have said in this comment thread, Github's actions do NOT mean any claims are "likely to be true". It just means Github is taking proper steps to investigate the situation. The investigation may lead to them determining that Horvath, and not other employees, was in the wrong.
At the very least, she seems a bit...attention hungry. Knowing nothing about the situation or people involved I am taking her accusations with a huge grain of salt.
> ... putting these people on leave seems to be too nice. It's clear that these two people obey ethics that are in direct oppposition to the healthy growth of the company. Surely they don't want them back?
Man, talk about CSI justice. Sadly, I think this episode is a two-parter. You'll have to tune in next time, sorry!
> Pretty much a full admission that everything that Julie said is true.
It reads more like an admission that at least some of what Julie said is not immediately known to be untrue and that they have to check it out. Hence the, y'know, investigation.
>> We know we have to take action and have begun a full investigation. While that’s ongoing, and effective immediately, the relevant founder has been put on leave, as has the referenced GitHub engineer.
> Pretty much a full admission that everything that Julie said is true.
Wow - if anyone wants to see an example of an article being overanalyzed and then terrible conclusions being made out of it, this is a model comment for that.
Each of your supposed inferences is critical and harsh. Stop being so cynical - it will help you. The world is still a nice place..
>> We know we have to take action and have begun a full investigation. While that’s ongoing, and effective immediately, the relevant founder has been put on leave, as has the referenced GitHub engineer.
>Pretty much a full admission that everything that Julie said is true.
Then I dub you Sir Bedemir, Knight of the Round Table.
This whole incident is sad. It's incredibly sad for Julie, for everyone at GitHub, for the founders, and for the alleged "crazy" founder wife who was banned from a company she probably sacrificed a lot for
One way or another, an employee has to be part of the workplace - it's their job. An non-employee doesn't have to be there, so access to the workplace is a privilege (and one that not all employers permit). When a non-employee misuses that privilege (e.g. by getting the the way of employees doing their work), it can and should be revoked.
Moreover, making mistakes in the context of misusing a privilege can and should carry greater stigma than making those same mistakes in some other contexts.
I think that the wife's actions would have been even less acceptable if she were male. The stigma is caused by the repeated unprofessional actions she did, and made worse by the fact that she was not even an employee.
I think the stigma is based on alleged bad behaviour. As this behaviour has nothing to do with gender I don't think it's accurate to say this is sexism. I could be wrong.
I don't see the sexism here. If you changed her sex to male, people would be just as negative on him/her. A spouse who is not an employee, swinging their proverbial dick around (no pun intended), meddling with the company's employees, and harassing them?
I think people would hate the spouse just the same if it were a man, so I disagree with you on this.
> I'm surprised nobody sees sexism in the way that the wife has been stigmatized.
Y'know, I hope I'm wrong, but there's a good chance you're surprised because you don't know what sexism is. An awful lot of men seem to have this notion that "sexism" means "something happened to a woman that she didn't like." It doesn't. Sexism is prejudice or discrimination based on a person's sex or gender, if you'll forgive me quoting Wikipedia. Calling out a woman for doing something shitty is not sexist. Saying "well, what can you expect from a woman" would be.
No one cares what her gender is. She doesn't work for GitHub, yet she believed that she had hiring and firing power at GitHub and had the ability to read private chat logs. That is wrong, and she doesn't belong near the company anymore. It would be the same if she were male.
The situation would be equally bad if it were a male founder's gay lover or husband.
Nothing to do with sexism, everything to do with a person making decisions for the company who is (1) personally close to an executive and (2) without a formal role at the company.
If Horvath's characterisations of the founder's wife are correct, then she seems somewhat similar in temperament to Lady McBeth. It's easy to see why his work is considered timeless.
Pretty ridiculous, I'm sure she'll land on her feet but these startup cultures are a disaster. Hula hoops? No clear management of any kind? I'm all for freedom of expression and all that but try and act like an adult for once in your life and put the hula hoops down.
I have (adult) friends who dance for fun, play with hula hoops, play with poi balls and lots of other things. There is nothing wrong with these things.
No clear management of any kind is a big problem, but the rest of what you say is, as you put it, pretty ridiculous.
Nobody has suggested there's anything wrong with playing with hula hoops, even when it's adults doing it. It just doesn't seem like something that should be done at work, or at work-related events.
This place sounds like highschool. People bored so music and hula hoops, coworkers dating, a principals office instead of managers, passive aggressive bullshit. I go to work, code, learn, improve and gtfo. No office parties, no cliques of bros, no boss trying to be my friend, no team events or forced 'fun'. Just professional work and money which is the only reason I'm there.
I really don't know what exactly it is, but there's something about the Ruby community that seems to draw in immaturity, and them amplify it.
This pervasive immaturity does tend to result in things going sour, and for some reason it always tends to happen in a very dramatic and public manner.
as one if the most important corrective actions, Github needs to bring back cubicles or better even offices, so that a lot of the "increased collaboration and communication" between Julie and the founder's wife ( like when the wife would sit near Julie and stare at her) just wouldn't be able to happen.
edit: another thing that would help - it is to have some older, like in the their 40s, people in the workforce. I mean it may be useful to have old farts like us, who've been through sterile no-harassment environment of BigCo's, and who would be able to spot inappropriate behavior even from a couple floors away, and whose mere presence would calm the hormones at least a couple notches down :)
Oh please, I've worked in open office spaces were being harassed by a founders wife could have never happened. The presence or absence of chest-high modular walls has nothing to do with this story.
It's good to see a straight-up apology, not a mealy-mouthed "I'm sorry if our engineer's sexual harrassment offended you" type response.
Of course, it would have been better if Julie had felt like she could have taken this up while she still worked there and got something done at the time.
Re-read it. He was careful not to actually apologize for anything in particular. It's worth noting that they have not admitted to any 'sexism' or whatever other accusations are floating around.
"It’s certain that there were things we could have done differently." heh... this doesn't read like a "straight-up apology" to me. It doesn't acknowledge even a whit of wrongdoing. Note also that Wanstrath says he "would like to personally apologize to Julie," [emphasis added], not that Github is apologizing or that he's apologizing on Github's behalf.
I'm not saying "they should apologize and I know it" because I don't know it, I know practically nothing of the situation, but this is no "straight up apology."
It's never a good idea to pass judgement when you've only heard one side of a dispute. I see what you're saying, but I don't think it's the case here. This is a general rule.
That makes total sense. Somehow I forgot about him, and assumed it was her partner. I was like "OK, i guess they have to boot everyone who was even remotely involved until they can sort it all out and decide on next steps."
I don't think we will know unless this ends in some ugly lawsuit, but they can confirm the story by analysing multiple commit logs from same dude reverting Horvath's work.
The post only states that the founder's wife will no longer be permitted in the office. It neither confirms nor denies anything. This post is cleverly crafted but is not a confirmation of any of Horvath's claims.
The founder’s wife discussed in the media reports has never had hiring or firing power at GitHub and will no longer be permitted in the office.
The fact that she was married to someone who did have hiring or firing power and WAS permitted in the office means she DID have (defacto) hiring or firing power.
I wonder what the ramifications are, legal-wise? Obviously the founder could be sued, especially if he was allowing someone who wasn't an employee to harass. I suspect A16Z will waste no time putting distance between themselves and the (allegedly) guilty founder. In the end, this wife's jealousy could end up costing her family 10s or 100s of millions of dollars.
The largest issue, for myself, really was the lapse in HR policy specifically around the founder and the wife. It is a huge lapse in common sense on behalf of said founder and should not have come to pass.
A smaller family run business, maybe I could see such policies happening (not necessarily right), but a venture backed company with a board and a trio of cofounders? Bad, bad form.
By your logic, hiring managers should not be allowed to be married, lest they give a non-employee "defacto" hiring power.
Before we string up the cofounder's wife, let's actually let her and/or the cofounder defend themselves, OK? It's entirely possible Horvath is completely embellishing things and the cofounder's wife didn't do anything terribly out of line.
The key here is that the founder's wife has a regular presence in the office. Plus, a founder is in a vastly higher position of authority than an employee (be it a manager, or else).
So it's not too far to imagine that she could exert some influence towards her husband's decision at work, e.g. hiring and firing of someone.
Yes, she could exert influence. Just like every other SO of every other hiring manager in the world. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
I hire people, and I talk to my wife all the time about work matters. And if, knowing everything she knows about my team, she told me that I should be looking at cutting someone loose, I would take that advice very seriously. Every good executive has trusted advisors, and for people in serious relationships the partner is very commonly one of those advisors.
The only problem here is the wife's alleged direct meddling with work matters, not that she had a strong influence on her husband's work decisions. For founders, life is totally enmeshed with work and it would actually be weird if his wife DIDN'T have strong opinions on the company he built while she supported him at home.
Errr, I don't follow. I'm a co-founder and in an office of 5 people. My wife stops by to visit me at least once a week. The only defacto power she has is to steal my gummy worms off my desk.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 267 ms ] threadDisagree. The situtation is highly ambiguous. HR is a game of "the best victories are wars not fought". And so in some regards, its too late.
On the other-hand, if HR was on the right...they were "over-ruled" by more than one of CEO/founders/sr execs. This surely means this person has diminished capacity to act. If not due to competence, than due to "lack of formiddableness".
Because it shouldn't take a public PR nightmare to convince (ie, show some leadership) that following HR101 is a good idea.
It is only the rare edge case that this person was in perfect pitch (and ignored) yesterday and will be held in higher regard tomorrow.
So, this is why things are not clear cut here for anyone.
Blame the CEO and the rest of the management team for not hiring a good HR person sooner if you want, but I don't see how you fault the person who just walked into this mess. Unless you're blaming them for not seeing the mess or walking into it with their eyes open. To me, that seems counterproductive. Having people with the appropriate skills take on the difficult work of improving these cultures is part of how things get better.
I wasn't suggesting that HR bring forth radical change, either, merely recognize the problems and work towards finding a solution (even though that would have been extremely difficult in itself, considering how little the executives seemed to help).
It's hard to apologise for something specific before you know what that actually is.
So...doesn't their response then make sense?
[edit: spelling]
[1]: https://twitter.com/holman/status/444642237456998400
> We still use (and love) Campfire.
[1]: http://zachholman.com/posts/github-communication/ (first screenshot)
It admits no guilt, declares that individuals are the possible cause and that action is being taken to prevent their continued damage, notifies the community that a new HR head started very recently, and attempts to be as graceful as possible in acknowledging the points made by the victim.
If you get a chance, watch 'Wing Chun', an informative documentary on the same topic, and note the effectiveness of 'cotton belly'.
I think if he said "should" it would imply fault, which would be a premature stance for him at this point.
* General scientific opinion (it's generally roundish).
* Religious doctrine (it's flat, centre of universe, on the back of a turtle).
* And then this person: http://www.timecube.com/
Point is, only one of these sides is reasonable.
"Two women, one of whom I work with and adore, and a friend of hers were hula hooping to some music. I didn’t have a problem with this. What I did have a problem with is the line of men sitting on one bench facing the hoopers and gawking at them. It looked like something out of a strip club. When I brought this up to male coworkers, they didn’t see a problem with it. But for me it felt unsafe and to be honest, really embarrassing. That was the moment I decided to finally leave GitHub."
For me, two adult individual can do whatever the hack they want to do, if it is legal and they are both consent of doing it. Julie seems like really pissed that other people just can have fun the way she does not like. This sounds like a huge frustration in her towards others with different standards. This last event seems like triggered her outrage, and that is also a sign that she might exaggerate what was really going in Github. Don't get me wrong, as part of a small minority I totally understand what oppression means at a workplace, but these accusations seem a bit irrational.
Exactly - who's she to determine what is 'over the line'? Nobody likes a busybodies .
In a perfectly fair world, men and women would behave differently due to comparative advantage and specialization based on sexual dimorphism. Feminism, in seeking an equal world, denies reality and quite a bit of science. Also, like most Marx-derived groups, feminists are humorless killjoys
First, I would suggest that when you attack feminism in the abstract, you attack views that are actually currently and widely held by feminists. It’s a diverse movement, but there are actual mainstream views. Frequently even that will not be very helpful, so you will have to find out specifically which group of people you are addressing with your criticism.
If feminists can and do frequently criticise feminist views then so can you.
In that regard feminism is kind of like, say, conservatism or liberalism or socialism or nationalism.
Now, I myself do not have a problem with chucking even big and complex concepts like that on the trash heap of history if they actually do have a consistently disastrous history. You won’t find me putting much work into arguing against fascism or royalism or racism or antisemitism. I’m willing to dismiss those wholesale.
Feminism, whatever its faults may be in your view, is about a million miles away from clearing that, however. It’s absurd to even think it could approach that same standard of wholesale dismissal. It has no history of harm at all.
I.e. if feminism were the concept of atheism, the MRM would be the Westboro Baptist Church and not Christianity or belief in some deity as a whole. (That’s a slightly shitty metaphor since the frequent conflict MRM activists dream up between them and feminism is pretty absurd. Men getting harsher prison sentences? Men being disadvantaged during divorces? That’s often based on strict and old-fashioned gender roles, something many feminists abhor.)
As for feminism, what's your definition, and do you think other people are practicing that definition in particular? Look at tumblr posts discussing patriarchy theory sometime; somewhere amidst the paranoid depressed teenagers is a pretty well-defined belief system, and it's not yours anymore.
Beware whenever the term is brought up - it's usually used as an ad hominem.
If you think Marxism considers classes to be evil and good, you have already demonstrated that you don't know Marxism. Marx was very clear that he saw the members of the different classes as effective slaves of circumstance, who acted out their roles in history out of necessity.
The capitalist, to Marx, not only is not evil, but is seen as a historical necessity that drives progress: Only through the development of advanced capitalist economies does production reach sufficient levels to be able to eradicate common wants, thus making socialism possible.
I'll not disagree with you that there are some feminist groups that follow the same twisted idea of what marxism is that you describe above, but they're by no means the only feminists out there, nor does their views have much of anything to do with marxism.
Marx clearly did describe things that way but the movements that called themselves Marxist (particularly Leninism and those Marxist groups influenced by Leninism, which given the influence of the USSR were pretty common among "Marxists") did tend to take the capitalist = evil approach (which fits more in with Leninism than Marxism, since Leninism major point of divergence was adapting Marxism to justify "socialist" revolution in pre-capitalist societies, thus rendering capitalism unnecessary.)
Not at all true in a professional environment. And that statement doesn’t even correspond with the story. The specifics of the hula hooping anecdote are all but immaterial anyway. The men failing to acknowledge how it was problematic was just the point at which she saw the GitHub culture had not really changed. It won’t change without action by the leadership, which was questionable given all the other events.
This response from Chris Wanstrath is a step in the right direction, but, as he acknowledges, they still have work to do.
What is the dangerous thing that Horvath thought would happen?
Do we really consider the suggestion plausible that GitHub's allowance of hula-hooping-watching will result in a gang rape in its offices?
> a coworker hit on you and messed with your work after you shot him down, and
> a founder's wife -- someone with significant power at the company -- attempts to inject herself into your relationship and intimidates you
> you seemingly have nowhere to go to discuss these issues, after speaking with another founder does not change your working atmosphere
Again, as someone who supposedly understands oppression in the workplace, you're not empathizing with someone who claims to have experienced it.
So sure, if people want to watch that at home, then I guess that is their prerogative, but doing so at work doesn't seem productive or healthy for their (or any company's) community and culture.
Now I wasn't there and I have nothing to do with github, but that is just my take on it. It just sounds like Julie has some very strange ideas about sexual harassment. It seems to be her that is causing sexual harassment in the workplace if anything.
The whole thing is very weird, and neither Julie nor the Github management look very good.
Exactly. The intension is very important. Also if the hula hooping girls would of been bothered by the guys watching them I guess they should've let them know.
and what would be an alternative? "A man mustn't look at a hula-hooping woman. " (what would be a punishment for the violation? - something from middle ages Arab world comes to mind, a definite cure for the desire to watch hula-hooping women :)
You may think so, but people are not allowed to have 'fun' however they please in an office environment, nor is 'Is this illegal' the end-all, be-all of being an incredibly toxic work environment.
The fact that she might not be perfect does not therefore invalidate her story about everything else.
She also sounds confused, unless the women doing hula hooping were also taking off their clothes then I fail to see how she thinks this looks like anything at a strip club. If the hula women were stripping then she has a legitimate claim that this is inappropriate in the workplace, otherwise I don't see how this is any different to table tennis or air hockey etc.
Was she asking for it? Was she asking nice? Yeah, she was asking for it Did she ask you twice? - "Asking For It" Courtney Love and Eric Erlandson
"We had just gotten off tour with Mudhoney, and I decided to stage-dive. I was wearing a dress and I didn't realize what I was engendering in the audience. It was a huge audience and they were kind of going ape-shit. So I just dove off the stage, and suddenly, it was like my dress was being torn off of me, my underwear was being torn off of me, people were putting their fingers inside of me and grabbing my breasts really hard, screaming things in my ears like "pussy-whore-cunt". When I got back onstage I was naked. I felt like Karen Finley. But the worst thing of all was that I saw a photograph of it later. Someone took a picture of me right when this was happening, and I had this big smile on my face like I was pretending it wasn't happening. So later I wrote a song called "Asking For It" based on the whole experience. I can't compare it to rape because it's not the same. But in a way it was. I was raped by an audience, figuratively, literally, and yet, was I asking for it?" - Courtney Love
I didn't say she was asking for anything, I said her credibility is weakened by her reaction to this. Try it, get any two people at your workplace to hula hoop and see if people come and watch, gawk or whatever word you want to call it.
And why quote Courtney Love at me, that's about as ridiculous as quoting Germaine Greer in response. What did CL think would happen when she jumped off stage? She of all people understands human sexuality, and was exploiting it. She says the big smile was her pretending it was happening, however, there are a million other interpretations. If I jump into a hungry lion's den do I complain when I get eaten? Ask yourself why CL is says it wasn't rape and then it was, she's a very astute woman and knows exactly how to exploit the attention she garners, because she sure as hell is a lousy singer.
Hula hooping doesn't look like stripping, any which way you want to spin it, so given that she has her normality barometer so poorly calibrated, how can we believe much else she says without applying the same thought process?
I don't think it was expected for CL to be stripped of her clothing for stage diving, even if it maybe wasn't the best idea. However, if her gender wasn't female, she probably would have had no problems stage diving. I was insinuating that blaming the victim was your viewpoint, which it still seems to be.
Or at least, that's how I feel about it, when I try to put myself in the place of someone who saw this happening, and took it as a sexual sort of staring rather than a "what the heck are my silly coworkers doing" kind of staring. It's also possible that Julia misunderstood what was going on, or exaggerated - we don't have enough information to know.
Of course, if they were screaming 'take it off' or similar, I would agree, but supposedly attractive women doing activities that make their bodies 'jiggle' in a public setting and expect men not to look or stare is ridiculous, and going from that to 'not feeling safe' is too much of a stretch. I understand maybe the previous issues colored her understanding of the situation, but it does leave a bad feeling in my gut that she may just be a drama queen which makes me question her reports on the other issues.
I can imagine any amount of ogling would be uncomfortable, regardless of consent of the participants, to an observer.
Not if you want to have an effective workplace. There's a reason this would be called an HR violation at most places.
I don't know the proper way to watch someone hula hoop, but if anyone in my office decided to hula hoop, I would likely watch. Apparently this means I have a terrible attitude towards women, or something.
You take a quote from the end of the original article, some 200 words, and use it as a basis to tear down Julie's character ("seems like..." and "sounds like..."). I mean, seriously, it's marvelous: you jump from hula-hooping to identifying social angst in Julie's life in two sentences. Bravo!
We do not know Julie. Pretending otherwise, and using that as grounds for tearing down her claims, devalues their significance. I'm surprised, given that you understand what oppression means at a workplace, that you readily dismiss her serious claims on such flimsy grounds.
If you really want to out him that badly just man up an post his name rather than trying to weasel around with "Easier to put a president on leave than a CEO".
I wasn't outing anyone, the founder who shall not be named is the only married one as plenty of people pointed out from the start.
Also, for context to the original comment, the founder we are discussing here used to be CEO but switched roles a while back.
https://github.com/blog/1761-new-year-new-ceo-for-github
I'm not terribly clear on US company governance and GitHub is atypical, so mojombo's new role is a bit fuzzy to me.
Which is to say, you're fuzzy on it because it's fuzzy. There are no strict rules as to the structure of senior corporate officers.
Github have a very fine line to walk. They don't have traditional shareholders to make happy. At the end of the day, all they have is their brand to protect.
Ask Microsoft how important their brand is after releasing Windows ME. Or Blackberry just after the iPhone came out.
Clearly something has happened, but they have to not only find out what happened, but to also be transparent and show that they are trying to find out what happened.
I think its the best response you can expect given the circumstances.
They also need to protect their company from a potential lawsuit.
I think this whole situation looks like a misunderstanding snowballing into a tsunami. Founder's wife takes her for drinks, gets drunk, talks of her ass and says inappropriate stuff. I would just chalk it to drunkenness and forget the whole episode. It would've ended right there.
On the other hand, if the lawsuit is for enough money, it can bankrupt the company: a huge award to the plaintiff, lawyer fees, executives tied up in court instead of running the company, etc. Their investors may not be interested in covering big losses; they might cut their losses and move on to the next up and coming company.
San Diego Sea World and the killer whale or Blackberry & Palm mobile devices are examples of irreparable brand damage.
What's the going price for a Microsoft Zune player?
Github has substantial cash in the bank; it's not going to be significantly harmed by an employment suit.
Almost exactly what I expected. As the startup grows larger (200+ employees now for Github?) it's not uncommon to have some cultural setback. +1 for Github trying to fix it asap, but still Chris Wanstrath did not mention how are they exactly going to fix the culture. Putting founder on leave is by no means panacea. The behavior on that one founder is very likely not the cause for the wrong culture, but just the side effect. So more specific plans INSIDE the company, please? (well, actually I think fixing the culture can't be done by any plan, but it must be done by example of founders/high-level executives.)
Pretty much a full admission that everything that Julie said is true.
This is great news, but putting these people on leave seems to be too nice. It's clear that these two people obey ethics that are in direct oppposition to the healthy growth of the company. Surely they don't want them back?
> The founder’s wife discussed in the media reports has never had hiring or firing power at GitHub and will no longer be permitted in the office.
Why did it take a Techcrunch article to reach this decision? Didn't anyone at Github see anything wrong with that founder's wife doing what she did, according to Julie's statement?
> GitHub has grown incredibly fast over the past two years, bringing a new set of challenges. Nearly a year ago we began a search for an experienced HR Lead and that person came on board in January 2014
Doesn't appear so. They did get an HR person, but an experienced one? Not a chance. No experienced HR person would have let any of that get as far as it got. That HR person should probably be put on leave or be fired as well.
> Chris Wanstrath > > CEO & Co-Founder
This narrows down the choices: the "founder" who is the cause for all this drama is either PJ Hyett or Tom Preston-Werner.
> that person came on board in January 2014
most of the things that had happened predated the HR person coming on, but you do have a point, the wife thing should of stopped since January
should have stopped
> Pretty much a full admission that everything that Julie said is true.
> This is great news, but putting on leave seems to be too nice. It's clear that these two people obey ethics that are in direct oppposition to the healthy growth of the company. Surely they don't want them back?
It's pretty standard practice to place employees on paid leave while serious complaints are investigated. You don't want to fire them until you have a pretty solid case as they might sue, but likewise you don't want them in the office.
The correct answer to every single scenario is "suspend pending investigation."
Employees? Sure. Founders? I've not heard of that before.
Gary Friedman is an excellent example (I'm lazy, so HuffPo: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/17/gary-friedman-resto...) of a pro forma separation of a major shareholder/chairman/CEO from the company.
One of the major ideas behind suspending employees for investigations is to eliminate their ability to influence the investigation. Also, it's a immediate precautionary measure to prevent the behavior from continuing should the complaint be found to be valid. In that sense, it protects the employer by keeping them at a distance in the short-term. They can also point to it in the press and in future legal proceedings (if any) as part of a strategy of showing that they took the complaint seriously from the beginning.
It sounds like GitHub is going to have to become more stale and corporate to survive as a larger company, which is inevitable, but hastened by their own choices.
What point are you trying to make here? Are you a classical music and hefeweizen type of employee typically? Or maybe based out of Seattle, in which case you'd prefer a more grunge/PBR culture?
Come on now...
/s
Now we know what the real problems are in this industry: taste in music and beer!
I have no idea whose side of the story is accurate, but there was really no other way for Github to play this, whether they were in the wrong or Julie was in the wrong.
>Pretty much a full admission that everything that Julie said is true.
Lynch! Lynch! Lynch!
The individuals, while allegedly shitlords in terms of their behaviour, being gone may eliminate 2 problems, but honestly they're products of an overall culture. In a healthy company you wouldn't have a guy (allegedly) reverting commits or shittalking individuals in comments because they wouldn't fuck him for very long after the first few efforts, because their peers or line manager would have said, "dude, not cool".
[Edited for clarity]
People make mistakes; they seem to get a lot of other things right, so maybe the relationship is salvageable - and all he needs is some time off.
>Doesn't appear so. They did get an HR person, but an experienced one? Not a chance. No experienced HR person would have let any of that get as far as it got. That HR person should probably be put on leave or be fired as well.
Jeez. They hired HR in January; the company has 240 employees many of whom remote. Based on her story, Julie Horvath's relationship was already poisoned by the time they hired this HR person.
The screwups were bad but I doubt GH culture is unfixable.
Any guess?
Just last Friday his wife's startup is accepted to Techstars NYC, and she is going to be at NYC. It may be a good timing for Tom to take a leave to be with his wife.
Just guessing here. I could totally be wrong. No offense to Tom; I looked up to him.
> Pretty much a full admission that everything that Julie said is true.
Hardly. It just says they are paying attention to the accusations and taking things seriously. I think they responded in a very positive way, and more transparently than I would have expected. But "we're looking into it" in no way validates or admits any fault on their behalf at this point.
> This is great news, but putting these people on leave seems to be too nice.
So they should just fire them based on one person's complaints? If everything Julie accused them of is true, I think they should be fired, but that doesn't mean they should go off half-cocked, firing everyone involved until they can investigate and determine exactly what happened.
And that doesn't happen over night.
No, it isn't. It's standard operating procedure pretty much everywhere to put employees on leave while an investigation is conducted. It shouldn't be construed as an admission at all.
GitHub is a business and they aren't dumb enough to not consult one or more lawyers before releasing their statement. If they are in the wrong, I would have to imagine their best play would be to compensate Julie behind the scene and have her formally come out and say GitHub is doing everything they can to ensure this doesn't happen again.
And don't lawyers frequently tell their clients not to apologize (even if they feel they ought to), since that may be construed as an admission of wrongdoing in a subsequent legal proceeding?
Maybe he's just sorry because she's obviously hurt and things didn't work out for the best?
In any case, the company did wrong her by allowing an environment to exist in which these kinds of behaviors were tolerated. The actions that the CEO took today should have been taken a long time ago.
The cheapest way to win a lawsuit is for it never to be filed in the first place.
All in all, I'm really saddened.
I'm strongly inclined to believe that what Horvath said is true and that these two people should be laid off, but that shouldn't happen before an investigation. If they're not guilty, they should be exonerated; if they are, they should be dismissed with the full weight of evidence, so they can't paint themselves as innocent martyrs.
The HR person has been on the job for a minimum of 31 business days and a maximum of 53. Horvath joined two years ago. Unless you are a GitHub insider, you currently are working off knowledge from a single source in which the information was provided by a person with a specific agenda. It is malicious to call for the HR person's job given your almost complete dearth of information.
Julie Horvath follows both Chris Wanstrath and PJ Hyett on Twitter, but not Tom Preston-Werner (at least as shown by Twitter's "Followed by people you follow" banner). Of course, this could just be a coincidence.
https://twitter.com/pjhyett/status/89064336454201346
This is a terrible assumption to make. This line is basically saying "we're taking this seriously", because if they said anything less, then regardless of the truth of the matter, they'd be skinned alive.
Ironically, it's knee-jerk black and white comments like yours that create this kind of press release. You've already convicted them in your mind and are looking for any excuse to execute them. I mean fuck, you expect an HR person to come on board and within a month "not have let any of that get as far as it got"? Are they supposed to have invented a time-machine?
Yet, if such a thing is construed as an admission of guilt in the greater "court of public opinion" then there's an incentive to actively avoid any attempt at transparency.
Life is stickier than tabloids lead you to believe, and in such a case as I've suggested, it's not hard to see the founders talking about how 'bob' should take a brief sabbatical while the Internet Hate Machine looks for another target. The other founders might love 'bob' and want to spare him from internet fury. Or they might loathe him and were looking for a way to put him in his place. Or they might be taking a pragmatic PR-smart move. Or 'bob' might have said "I was looking to take leave and go to Europe for a holiday, this would be a good time, eh?". Or a dozen other situations. We just don't know.
And that's just fire-fighting - if you want Github to do a meaningful investigation, then you need to have the investigators being as dispassionate as possible, rather than doing it while fending off the hordes at the gate. And since a founder is involved, the investigators pretty much have to be the other founders. And that meaningful investigation includes talking to staff outside of the bubble of hysteria that's currently going on. And that meaningful investigation may indeed largely exonerate Github.
The thing is that you don't have enough information to pre-convict the way you have.
And, frankly, on a personal note: fuck this automatic calling for the sacking of someone when thing go awry. It's truly fucked up. Re-evaluate? No. Retrain? No. Reassign? No. "Someone has to suffer" for the mob's one-eyed rage. Fuck that shit. Sometimes a sacking is the appropriate course of action, but that's not for the mob to decide, because the mob doesn't have anything like close access to the story.
I am amazed at how many people don't recognize this. Even if the entire thing were completely made up, this would still be the only acceptable response github could give.
They could have been completely opaque and done nothing but investigate the matter, without any disclosure. It's a brave choice to be open because, even implicitly, admitting a problem can taken as admitting liability.
At the very least, she seems a bit...attention hungry. Knowing nothing about the situation or people involved I am taking her accusations with a huge grain of salt.
Man, talk about CSI justice. Sadly, I think this episode is a two-parter. You'll have to tune in next time, sorry!
It reads more like an admission that at least some of what Julie said is not immediately known to be untrue and that they have to check it out. Hence the, y'know, investigation.
Wow - if anyone wants to see an example of an article being overanalyzed and then terrible conclusions being made out of it, this is a model comment for that.
Each of your supposed inferences is critical and harsh. Stop being so cynical - it will help you. The world is still a nice place..
https://twitter.com/tpdubs2/status/415224900782014464
> TheresaPrestonWerner @tpdubs2
> Found the best, most comfortable chair at GitHub HQ. Office seems pretty empty today.
Among several other tweets here:
https://twitter.com/search?q=github%20from%3Atpdubs2&src=typ...
The company I work for often has spouses and significant others (including the CEO's) around either for drinks in the evening, or just for fun.
They don't have any power or influence in the company beyond the typical role of adviser that all spouses serve.
Hey, this chair seems to be facing that bitch Julie. Imagine that. Now I can give her the evil eye for 8 hours straight!
>Pretty much a full admission that everything that Julie said is true.
Then I dub you Sir Bedemir, Knight of the Round Table.
Bullshit. It just means that they're looking into it.
why is TechCrunch claiming Scott Chacon is a co-founder? He is married also but his wife is friends with Julie on Facebook so I doubt him
I doubt it was PJ's wife - https://twitter.com/kldub
which narrows it down to Theresa Preston-Werner and just for kicks
https://twitter.com/tpdubs2/status/415224900782014464
Moreover, making mistakes in the context of misusing a privilege can and should carry greater stigma than making those same mistakes in some other contexts.
Allegedly did.
I think people would hate the spouse just the same if it were a man, so I disagree with you on this.
Y'know, I hope I'm wrong, but there's a good chance you're surprised because you don't know what sexism is. An awful lot of men seem to have this notion that "sexism" means "something happened to a woman that she didn't like." It doesn't. Sexism is prejudice or discrimination based on a person's sex or gender, if you'll forgive me quoting Wikipedia. Calling out a woman for doing something shitty is not sexist. Saying "well, what can you expect from a woman" would be.
Do I see any sexism against the wife of the co-founder from GitHub's statement? No
If you'd like to continue the discussion then go ahead and provide something of worth.
This comment is ironic I know, but these kind of posts derail the debate.
Nothing to do with sexism, everything to do with a person making decisions for the company who is (1) personally close to an executive and (2) without a formal role at the company.
I have (adult) friends who dance for fun, play with hula hoops, play with poi balls and lots of other things. There is nothing wrong with these things.
No clear management of any kind is a big problem, but the rest of what you say is, as you put it, pretty ridiculous.
This pervasive immaturity does tend to result in things going sour, and for some reason it always tends to happen in a very dramatic and public manner.
edit: another thing that would help - it is to have some older, like in the their 40s, people in the workforce. I mean it may be useful to have old farts like us, who've been through sterile no-harassment environment of BigCo's, and who would be able to spot inappropriate behavior even from a couple floors away, and whose mere presence would calm the hormones at least a couple notches down :)
Of course, it would have been better if Julie had felt like she could have taken this up while she still worked there and got something done at the time.
I'm not saying "they should apologize and I know it" because I don't know it, I know practically nothing of the situation, but this is no "straight up apology."
if he had been silent or refuted the statements (maybe on advice from their lawyers), would that undermine Julie's credibility?
if so, why?
But no, your guess makes a lot more sense.
Except for anything regarding any sort of sexism.
The post only states that the founder's wife will no longer be permitted in the office. It neither confirms nor denies anything. This post is cleverly crafted but is not a confirmation of any of Horvath's claims.
[1] http://readwrite.com/2014/01/24/github-meritocracy-rug
The fact that she was married to someone who did have hiring or firing power and WAS permitted in the office means she DID have (defacto) hiring or firing power.
I wonder what the ramifications are, legal-wise? Obviously the founder could be sued, especially if he was allowing someone who wasn't an employee to harass. I suspect A16Z will waste no time putting distance between themselves and the (allegedly) guilty founder. In the end, this wife's jealousy could end up costing her family 10s or 100s of millions of dollars.
Plenty of founder's spouses are allowed in and have been allowed in our offices. None of them had any hiring or firing power.
A smaller family run business, maybe I could see such policies happening (not necessarily right), but a venture backed company with a board and a trio of cofounders? Bad, bad form.
Before we string up the cofounder's wife, let's actually let her and/or the cofounder defend themselves, OK? It's entirely possible Horvath is completely embellishing things and the cofounder's wife didn't do anything terribly out of line.
The key here is that the founder's wife has a regular presence in the office. Plus, a founder is in a vastly higher position of authority than an employee (be it a manager, or else).
So it's not too far to imagine that she could exert some influence towards her husband's decision at work, e.g. hiring and firing of someone.
I hire people, and I talk to my wife all the time about work matters. And if, knowing everything she knows about my team, she told me that I should be looking at cutting someone loose, I would take that advice very seriously. Every good executive has trusted advisors, and for people in serious relationships the partner is very commonly one of those advisors.
The only problem here is the wife's alleged direct meddling with work matters, not that she had a strong influence on her husband's work decisions. For founders, life is totally enmeshed with work and it would actually be weird if his wife DIDN'T have strong opinions on the company he built while she supported him at home.