They say there was no evidence of gender-based harassment, but I don't see them claiming "there was no evidence of harassment" either. Don't know enough to pass judgement.
It says there's no evidence of gender-based $BAD_THING, but not that no $BAD_THINGs happened.
One could argue that allowing a non-employee so much access to a private company is an 'error of judgement.' (Referring to Horvath's comments about Tom's wife)
They say no evidence of illegality, but there is evidence of poor judgement. Without commenting on the specifics of this incident that's a valid reason to fire a CEO/co-founder/exec. I have no particular knowledge of what happened but if GitHub thinks he showed poor judgement then it is reasonable to ask him to resign.
For example, if you didn't actually do anything legally wrong, but made it look an awful lot like you did by screwing up and being a dick about it, and you're a company executive, then you can resign or get fired.
I suspect that this is not a million miles from what happened here: not actual discrimination, but enough of a blunder to look like it.
Have you read this? https://medium.com/p/d96f431f4e8e How are you making baseless assumptions alllllll over the thread? Absolutely ridiculous, mud-raking behavior you should be ashamed
well, even if he did nothing wrong his position was probably untenable. He'll have lost his credibility and more will be said about this incident than any other. i.e. anything else gitbhub would do/release, would most probably be clouded by this incident
Irrespective of which scenario occurred, he made the most appropriate, and honourable decision.
Speaking for myself, I couldn't care less. But then I wasn't following the story at all to begin with.
The truth though is that this isn't the kind of stuff we continental Europeans care much about. Heck, we elect notorious pussy hounds as presidents around here, so I imagine that whatever the guy did is benign compared to Berlusconi's sex orgies with barely legal (or not legal at all) prostitutes. (Not saying it's any good, mind you. Just try to picture the yardsticks we have.)
3. Consultant asks "where is your anti-sexual harassment training course?"
4. CEO says o_o.
5. HR consultant establishes a policy for the company.
6. Board asks CEO to resign for not having the thing asked for in #3.
Not having a training course isn't illegal -- it's not even evidence that anyone was sexually harassed -- but the board can ask the CEO to move on because they feel he was not sufficiently protecting the company.
(PS: Post-college I've never worked at a place large enough to have required a harassment training course. This is just an example of "something the CEO should have done to protect the company but didn't, and we got away with it this time but might not next time.")
In California once your company goes over a certain size (which github has), they must have a sexual harassment course presented to the employees every one or two years.
In my company that was a mandatory all company meeting where a lawyer made a powerpoint presentation for a couple of hours. Then there was some sort quiz and us signing something as far as I can remember.
Only if it was true or partially true. If it was completely off-base and false, they'd be going after the person making the allegations like there was no tomorrow.
No evidence of legal wrongdoing, which is a pretty high bar. Many companies will expect better of their president than "did not actually act illegally".
> The investigation found no evidence to support the claims [...] of a sexist or hostile work environment.
So, are they saying that Horvath was lying? I mean, there was a lot of specific stuff she mentioned that seemed inappropriate. I don't want to get into whether the behavior was "sexist" or not, but I think we can all agree that if what she said was true, the work environment was hostile and unprofessional.
Note that the denial is couched in the terminology "there was no legal wrongdoing". Not that there was no wrongdoing, just nothing blatant enough (or which left evidence) that it broke laws.
Actually, that specific denial is limited to two items: gender based discrimination by Tom Preston-Werner and his wife, and the existence of a discriminatory/hostile workspace. Not coincidentally, these are the two claims which would have been against the law, and also the least of the claims brought forth by Horvath (though it's the angle latched onto by the media) - she instead claimed personal harassment from Horvath's wife, and the non-responsiveness of HR to these issues.
The only real gender based problems she had were related to male co-worker's responses to female co-workers hula-hooping, as I remember it.
There wouldn't be much evidence of personal harassment, particularly the kind described by Horvath.
I'd like to see how you (or anyone here) propose to test it. This isn't science; it's a corporate press release.
Do we know the name of the "full, independent, third-party" investigator(s)? Do we know who paid for them, their methodology, and whether they reported to Horvath, giving her oversight?
Or are investigators the same, like software contractors?
You and I or 'tptacek probably cannot test it, but Horvath's lawyer may be able to sue to test it.
It would be very dumb of GitHub to state that there is no evidence if there is evidence that Horvath could turn up. (Granted, sometimes companies are dumb.)
"[D]irect and testable assertion" sounds scientific, certainly. It would be interesting to hear how you would flesh that out, though. For example, when they say "no evidence exists," don't we immediately run into the question of whether the claims of Ms. Horvath don't actually constitute evidence? What does constitutes "evidence"? Is that question testable? If Ms. Horvath's claims don't count as evidence, then why does Github's claim that "no evidence exists" count? What test or tests do you propose?
Criminal and civil investigations are not scientific investigations. They may make use of science, but they are not scientific. To import the language of science--actually neo-Popperian pop-cultural language about science--into a discussion of an internal investigation into harassment claims is highly suspect.
Your claim aside, these are weasel words. The way to discover the fact that they are is to appropriately apply language akin to that of jurisprudence, rather than inappropriately apply that of science.
I didn't downvote you, but this is a hot-button issue right now. A lot of people are familiar with what happened, and (perhaps wrongly) assume that everyone else is as well. Assuming that context, your post can be interpreted as "I don't think that the things said Horvath brought up were a big deal", where you might have meant "I'm not familiar with this subject, what did she bring up that was so bad?"
That's about what I thought. But as it happens, no, I wasn't doubting the claims -- I just wasn't following the story obsessively and wasn't aware of the details.
They are definitely not saying Horvath was lying, they are saying they found no evidence of a sexist or hostile work environment - the investigation was lead by a third party, and best behaviour would have been in place at and before the moment they arrived following the claims, it's likely that many, if not most of the company hadn't experienced the same treatment that Horvath allegedly received, and they would have explained that to the investigators.
I think it's possible that Horvath was right about the poor actions of management, and at the same time, very little of what she alleged seemed to fall into the bounds of gender-based discrimination. A colleague who reverts your commits because you wouldn't date him...that's not gender-based, that's office-romance strife (though obviously, such strife can be exacerbated with a gender imbalance at the company). I'm kind of interested in what happened to that engineer.
re: The co-worker who couldn't handle being rejected by her:
> The rejection of the other employee led to something of an internal battle at GitHub. According to Horvath, the engineer, “hurt from my rejection, started passive-aggressively ripping out my code from projects we had worked on together without so much as a ping or a comment. I even had to have a few of his commits reverted. I would work on something, go to bed, and wake up to find my work gone without any explanation.” The employee in question, according to Horvath, is both “well-liked at GitHub” and “popular in the community.”
His “behavior towards female employees,” according to Horvath, “especially those he sees as opportunities is disgusting.”
And there was one more incident that would purportedly fall under sexism:
> Two women, one of whom I work with and adore, and a friend of hers were hula hooping to some music. I didn’t have a problem with this. What I did have a problem with is the line of men sitting on one bench facing the hoopers and gawking at them. It looked like something out of a strip club. When I brought this up to male coworkers, they didn’t see a problem with it. But for me it felt unsafe and to be honest, really embarrassing. That was the moment I decided to finally leave GitHub.
The first one, of course, is bad. And there's possibly a case to be made that if management knew about this engineer and let it slide, well, that does create a hostile environment. Yet I don't think Horvath points out where she complained about this guy's commit-reverting behavior to management.
The second thing, about hula-hooping, without context, it doesn't really mean anything beyond what Horvath claims she was able to grok just by stumbling upon the scene. I think during the original HN discussion, a Githubber said that the hula-hooping happened during an in-office party. Either way, hula-hooping and watching said-hula-hooping is hard to claim, on its face, as being gender-discrimination.
The other stuff though, about the co-founder unfairly pressuring her partner to resign, and the co-founder's wife claiming to have access to Github employees' private data...Those could be things that the company frowns upon enough to merit a resignation.
How is a woman who refuses to date another employee considered an "office-romance?" Retaliation as a result of unwanted advances is considered harassment.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that there was an actual romance. I meant that this immature (and shitty) behavior was based in that domain of "romance" (the existence or lack thereof, in this case) and not, from the face of Horvath's description, automatically based on gender-discrimination.
From your link:
> Although the law doesn’t prohibit simple teasing, offhand comments, or isolated incidents that are not very serious, harassment is illegal when it is so frequent or severe that it creates a hostile or offensive work environment or when it results in an adverse employment decision (such as the victim being fired or demoted).
1. Did Horvath provide proof that this immature behavior was more-than-isolated and unpunished? It would be easy for her to, as it would exist in the git logs. But we don't know if it happened dozens of times, or just more than one time.
2. Reverting commits is still part of an engineer's job. She alleges that the commits were unfair...again, this evidence would exist in the logs. But what if the commits were justifiable, and the engineer was being snippy about it? That doesn't really count as harassment.
3. Was Horvath retaliated against by management (e.g. fired or demoted) for being angry at her colleague? Her account doesn't claim that.
The link you posted says that harassment, and sexual harassment, is illegal...But what Horvath describes is not harassment by the legal definition, because the other engineer could claim that the reverts were part of his job. Again, the commit logs, or even a description of them, are needed to decide whether this constituted harassment beyond a coworker criticizing another.
> I meant that this immature (and shitty) behavior was based in that domain of "romance" (the existence or lack thereof, in this case) and not, from the face of Horvath's description, automatically based on gender-discrimination.
Don't make up soft weasel words to describe it. It's sexual harassment plain and simple. Also, this bit about classifying it as gender-discrimination seems like pointless hair-splitting. Horvath felt wronged by many things, and she probably felt those things would not have happened if she were a man, and I think that's a fair assumption on her part. I'll leave it to the courts to get into the technical classification of precisely if and how she was wronged.
Sorry, reverting someone's commits out of spite because they rejected you is not sexual harassment "plain and simple." Words have meanings. Furthermore it is not "pointless hair-splitting" to say it is not gender discrimination. You clearly have no understanding of what these terms mean and why it's important to not let this type of drama bleed into the wider discussion about systemic gender discrimination in tech.
"Harassment can include “sexual harassment” or unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical harassment of a sexual nature. Harassment does not have to be of a sexual nature, however, and can include offensive remarks about a person’s sex. For example, it is illegal to harass a woman by making offensive comments about women in general."
Harassment of someone who happens to be of the opposite gender does not make it sexual harassment. Harassment of someone for rejecting you romantically does not make it sexual harassment. If someone "feels" they would not have been harassed the same way if they were a man does not make it sexual harassment. (This is clearly false in this case, obviously, because the same thing could have happened if it were an advancement by someone of the same gender.)
Reverting someone's commit is not harassment of a "sexual nature" nor does it include commentary on the person's sex or women in general. It has nothing to do with gender or sexual comments, it has to do with an emotional reaction to rejection and an immature pathetic response.
> The first one, of course, is bad. And there's possibly a case to be made that if management knew about this engineer and let it slide, well, that does create a hostile environment. Yet I don't think Horvath points out where she complained about this guy's commit-reverting behavior to management.
No...but it would bolster her claim that a hostile work environment was knowingly perpetuated, which is a component of harassment. I'm not saying that talking to management is a trivial thing, especially in cases of reporting harassment. But it's also unfair to argue "they should've stopped it" if they weren't appraised of the situation. Again, maybe Horvath did say so, but her account to TechCrunch doesn't mention it explicitly. In any case, such a thing would likely be an electronic record, and so if she feels that the record was not thoroughly examined, now's her chance to assert that.
The key word in there would be “evidence”: take the example of “oogling” female employees hulla-ooping. You can prove that they did hulla-oop, but not that the way others watched them was sexist.
Proof is a huge issue with sexism in general: anecdotal, or separate cases for discrimination; expression of consent when it comes to rape, etc. I wished organisation handling such issues focused on provability in court, rather than awareness.
Neither party has to be lying. She might honestly believe she was treated in a specific way because of her sex, while others may have treated her in a specific way because of, for instance, her competence. Both may be 100% honest in their assessment of the relationship, yet be completely at odds.
The workplace absolutely sounded unprofessional, which often means the entire gradient of behaviour from welcoming to hostile (versus the normal corporate realm of gray areas in between). Indeed, unprofessional workplaces are generally celebrated in the tech community, often for good reason.
> She might honestly believe she was treated in a specific way because of her sex
Yes, but the investigation said there was no evidence for a hostile work environment. That's a claim above and beyond sexism: it's quantifying over all of the various ways a work environment could be hostile (of which sexism is one way). If what Horvath says about Preston's wife is true, then that sounds like a hostile work environment to me, regardless of whether the treatment was due to her sex.
> Yes, but the investigation said there was no evidence for a hostile work environment. That's a claim above and beyond sexism
No, its not. "Hostile work environment" is mentioned as one of the legal violations it found to be unsupported, and "hostile work environment" is a legal term of art in sexual harassment law. In context, then, it is not a claim "above and beyond sexism", its is a claim about the absence of a particular form of sexual harassment.
> it's quantifying over all of the various ways a work environment could be hostile (of which sexism is one way).
You are reading it backwards: the finding of no legal wrongdoing, in the context of the allegations made of sexual harassment, is quantifying over all the various ways in which sexual harassment law could be violated, and the "hostile work environment" statement is one specific example of areas where sexual harassment was not found.
And yet conventional ideas of professionalism have such an iron grip on our minds that even startup founders are affected by them. In our startup, when outsiders came to visit we tried hard to seem "professional." We'd clean up our offices, wear better clothes, try to arrange that a lot of people were there during conventional office hours. In fact, programming didn't get done by well-dressed people at clean desks during office hours. It got done by badly dressed people (I was notorious for programmming wearing just a towel) in offices strewn with junk at 2 in the morning. But no visitor would understand that. Not even investors, who are supposed to be able to recognize real productivity when they see it. Even we were affected by the conventional wisdom.
The idea being, in that ultra-early-stage, 2-3 founding members only, state, trying too hard to be "professional" is counterproductive. Obviously, at the scale that we're talking about with Github, the game changes.
Ah, ok, I agree there's a big difference between an ultra-early-stage startup and a company the size of Github. But the latter criterion is what seems relevant to me for this thread, since it's about what happened at Github.
Limited or no dress code
No set hours
Limited involvement of HR
Wide degree of responsibility -- limited written work descriptions
Amorphous groups of collaboration that develop and disband
And on and on. Most technology companies, even once they are larger, try to hold onto those "unprofessional" traits. A strong HR group with heavy controls limit or eradicate the ability for some of the less pleasant behaviours, but they also can completely undermine self-motivation and creativity. It's a delicate balance.
I think there's a key distinction here between "unprofessional" traits that can enhance productivity, vs. unprofessional traits that kill productivity.
I agree that the former are good things and should be preserved where possible. (And not just in technology companies; some time ago I remember reading about a study that looked at various heavy industrial companies--auto manufacturers were one type--and found that the most productive ones were the ones that had many of the things you cite: limited or no dress code, limited HR involvement, limited written work descriptions and a lot of autonomy given to workers.)
However, the Github case appears to be an example of the latter. I don't think that's something to be celebrated.
They're saying that the investigative team brought in to determine if there was anything they could be sued over found no evidence/email trail for the specific things that they could get sued over.
"We didn't find an email trail that could lead to a lawsuit, and the co-founder in question immediately resigned" is a very far cry from "Everything she said was a lie."
So I don't know how much stock you can place behind the idea that the investigators GH hired, who did not contact ex-employees competently, found them blameless. The resignation probably speaks for more than the investigation does.
No, that's saying that Tom Preston-Werner was exonerated, and that a different problem surfaced during the investigation. It is not necessary for Horvath to have lied for that to be the conclusion reached. Misunderstandings happen.
>The investigation found no evidence to support the claims against Tom and his wife of sexual or gender-based harassment or retaliation, or of a sexist or hostile work environment. However, while there may have been no legal wrongdoing, the investigator did find evidence of mistakes and errors of judgment.
Using the word "exonerated" outright ignores the conclusion of the report. The github hired investigator reported no evidence of legal wrong-doing. Then the company fired/accepted the resignation of Preston-Werner for his "other" mistakes.
I think it's safe to say Github would not admit to legal wrong doing publicly as that just opens them up to legal liability. But to then say "no legal wrongdoing" translates into Preston-Werner being exonerated has to be some sort of joke.
I apologize if I missed it, but what mistakes did Tom Preston-Werner or GitHub publicly admit to? I just re-skimmed his blog and the github press release and only see denials of very specific terms regarding illegal sexual harassment.
So, just to clarify, you mean the mistake that he made was allowing Theresa to speak to employees of github and make them feel pressured to contribute to her start-up? or was there something else I'm missing?
This is all conjecture, but this series of events got me thinking about what to learn from this.
I have a feeling Ms. Horvath and Mrs. Preston-Werner completely believe their own interpretations of what happened.
This is a good reminder of how subtle and ambiguous our and others views of the same reality is. In her post Theresa mentions having a blind spot for the obligations that github employees felt for helping her charity, but she didn't see it, she saw friends.
I think this is a good lesson to us all about not only making clear HR polices, but also always giving intentional consideration to how those around us see what we say and do. A kind of intellectual empathy.
Everyone thinks the message of that movie is "all truth is subjective", but it's not. It's more like "the stories we tell ourselves and others are distorted by our self-image and our interests".
At the end, the movie even explicitly rejects the theory that truth is unobtainable, and that everyone is corrupt. In the movie at least, disinterested third parties who have good intentions can reveal the truth.
You may believe in subjectivity, but Rashomon doesn't.
i'm not sure where you're getting this. the parent referenced a movie, after posting a quote marveling at the different ways people interpret the same reality.
grandparent post was talking about the need for intellectual empathy. i've seen that work wonders in my life. it's like this thread of comments shows the need for intellectual empathy in microcosm.
I agree with your parent that the reference gave the impression of having misunderstood the film
It's like someone is raving about the military, and someone quotes appending Dulce et decorum est below. Not a big deal, but big enough to write a small comment making a correction, just in case.
In my mind this is the key sentence in her response:
"I was the wife of the CEO, but that never entered my mind when I hung out with any GitHubbers."
That is just not acceptable; it's the equivalent of walking around with a machine gun in your hands and saying that you never considered it might have any impact.
As much as she might have liked it to, you can't wield considerable power over people's lives and have them treat you as though you don't. It just doesn't work that way.
Your comment about ignoring the considerable power you wield over other people and expecting them to hits home for me.
I'm not sure exactly how to phrase it, but I think there's something there in general applicable to the current round of companies which have 'flat' organizational structures, but still aren't hardly employee-owned democratically-managed enterprises. [1] There are owners and bosses, there are people with ultimate decision-making powers (including hiring and firing) and those without, some who have a heck of a lot more salary/equity than others -- but at the same time, the 'flat structure' somehow seems as if everyone's expected to ignore that and act like it's not true.
It's of course not a coincidence that Github is one of the most famous examples of such a 'flat structured' (not not actually democratically-managed) companies.
And I think it's a shame that people will use this as an example of why hieararchy and authority is neccessary. I think it's more about the dangers of trying to make hieararchy and authority invisible when it actually still exists.
Thanks for your comment which helped me start thinking about this, sorry my response is much less coherent. :)
> I think it's more about the dangers of trying to make hieararchy and authority invisible when it actually still exists.
I want to emphasize this, because it is absolutely a thing that tends to happen even with the best of intentions from all parties. You can't eliminate hierarchy by hiding it.
The difficulty in this for founders is that when you start the company, you need your employees way more than they need you. They have more power than you do at the beginning. And while this slowly changes, it changes even more slowly in a founder's mind.
Don't get sucked into thinking you're peers with your employees when you decide how much they get paid, what work they do all day, and whether or not they keep their job. They don't see you as a peer.
Theresa is full of it. I have no idea what happened at Github but she's been telling people in New York she started Omakase because she's "angry with the tech industry." With that kind of attitude it's no surprise Github employees felt pressured into volunteering for her. She has admitted that she's not just someone excited about her new venture, she is beginning conversations with the idea that she knows what's best for the other person and that's working for her/contributing to her charity.
Not to mention that it seems like the tech industry has done a lot for her family's life so it seems strange and ungrateful to respond with anger that other people in positions of less influence than her family has, are not doing enough for the world in some vague sense.
Not to mention the massive hypocrisy that she is raising money from institutional investors as donors to cover operations costs for her non-profit which is ultimately a shakedown on salaried employees. There are things I agree with Theresa about, but asking the ultra-rich for money to support her venture to pressure regular people to give more to charity is nuts.
So, remember that what Julie says about them not contacting her is itself, and allegation.
Her picture proves nothing, after all.
Your conclusion about "how much stock to place" does not follow, since this allegation has not been proven true.
Having been involved in this sort of thing before, both on the "asked to investigate" and "asked to play witness for an employee side", i'd say the truth always lies somewhere in between, and both employers and employees tend to behave badly.
In my experience, the truth usually lies very strongly to one side of the spectrum, and sometimes beyond an extreme (as reasonable people often bend over backwards in giving their version of events, while unreasonable people do not), but you'll never find out for sure.
E.g. in the Techcrunch piece Horvath says that the founder's wife spoke of having spies, and influencing HR decisions, and so on. I can easily imagine the conversation taking place over drinks, and it could be horribly sinister or it could be someone's not-very-well-judged attempt at humor. But this doesn't mean that "the truth is in-between".
You appear to have had very different experiences than me.
Horvath said the founder spoke of having spies, etc.
The founder says she did nothing of the sort, and blah blah blah
I would thus expect the truth is "the founder said she kept in touch with goings-on in the company through friends" or something similarly in-between.
Not "The founder has hired spies that prepare detailed daily reports" (which would be very strongly to one side) or "the founder has no idea what goes on in the company, and knows nobody" (which would be to the other).
IMHO, of course. Maybe you have a different view of what it would mean to lean strongly to one side of the spectrum in that situation?
You demand a higher standard of evidence than you yourself meet. Especially when you say "always", with zero evidence or plausibility. (And in fact, it's a standard of evidence HN rarely meets, on any subject.) The other poster was ironically much more careful.
First, I demanded nothing.
I pointed out one should not assume something is true because someone, particularly someone with a clear interest in the outcome and process, said it.
Second, This is somewhat pedantic.
The OP simply assumed what whatever Jane said was true, and then went from there.
Your complaint is essentially that i did not add the words "in every case i have been part of, and every one i know about in sufficient independent detail" in front of "always". All told, that's about 43 cases.
Feel free to pretend i did write that, if it suffices.
Nonsense. Her picture probably opens her up to suit, where she lying about the company. At the bare minimum, any lawyer would tell her to not post demonstrable lies about the company, for many reasons. Not least of which is regardless of the whole truth, in any lawsuit (filed by her, or github, or Tom, or Tom's wife, or other parties), opposition counsel will attempt to discredit your whole testimony by finding small lies and tainting you in the eyes of the jury.
This is probably the most relevant article of the 6 or so I've read in the comments. It shows both sides as human and lacking good social management constructs for the situation.
Reading several weeks of Horvath's twitter feed and several articles where she's quoted, it's apparent to me that regardless of what happened at Github, she is a bitter and dramatic individual. That's NOT the kind of person that backs down to the adult-talk at the table.
Again, I don't know what happened at github, and I honestly don't care. What I do know is that I would never hire Horvath regardless of what she could do for the company. Far too much risk, and exemplified with a terribly immature response even if everything she says is true.
Those details completely change the story. Why not make them public when the scandal erupted instead of a month afterwards? Now that the subject is dead and buried there will probably be no journalistic investigation.
Why? You'd still have the same sense of doubt as to whether or not the non-anonymous person is telling the truth. The only extra information you'd have is a) you'd know it was coming from another GitHubber who could conceivably know these details, and b) if you know the person, you can weigh the words against his/her reputation and past action.
Not saying those two things aren't useful, but I would certainly not characterize this anon blog post as "worthless" by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, it makes the whole situation make a lot more sense. The original one-sided account from Ms. Horvath always sounded a bit implausible to me, at least without more information to frame it.
> Why? You'd still have the same sense of doubt as to whether or not the non-anonymous person is telling the truth.
The senses of doubt will only be ~the same if your prior for the probability of "someone out of ~200 github employees would lie about this and attach their name to it" is about the same as your prior for "someone out of the other ~3,000,000,000 people on the internet would pretend to be a github employee and make this up".
The larger someone's prior is for the latter relative to the former, the more worthless an anonymous blogpost is to them.
Adding to what SEMW said: for all we know, this story could be pure fiction, written by the Preston-Warners themselves, or someone else with a strong incentive to do so.
The fact that this story helps everything "make sense" is not a useful heuristic. Anybody can craft this kind of tale, and it might also be playing on our prejudices - the spurned, jealous, bitchy lover narrative.
But, as for myself, I don't have to make any judgment, nor do I want to. I don't want to do is pick a side based on my prejudices and a few blog posts.
By now we all should know that women are routinely harassed in tech companies to a preposterous degree. On the other hand, I've seen cases where mentally disturbed people invent (or self-delude) incredibly detailed narratives of persecution. We could be dealing with a situation where one, the other, both, or neither is happening. If you have evidence that settles the case, by all means please post it.
Something that is clear is that Github's investigation was flawed. And if Horvath really wasn't contacted until late in the process, it certainly makes it look like Github was more interested in a coverup than the truth.
By now we all should know that women are routinely harassed in tech companies to a preposterous degree. On the other hand, I've seen cases where mentally disturbed people invent (or self-delude) incredibly detailed narratives of persecution. We could be dealing with a situation where one, the other, both, or neither is happening.
The thing that irks me about all this is that murky incidents like this, where the alleged victim is (to many) not a very sympathetic character, and possibly acted improperly herself and instigated the whole situation (if the anon blog post is to be believed), does little to help set an example for why the real instances of harassment are so wrong and terrible.
After this, I'm left with a very poor taste in my mouth. GH's investigation was likely somewhat flawed, though it's unclear to what degree. Horvath almost certainly wasn't telling the full story about what happened, and may even have instigated the entire thing, and is using the prevalence of sexism in tech (and the expected knee-jerk community outcry) to attack someone she's (unjustifiably?) angry with. Or maybe everything she's said is true, and the Preston-Werners are terrible people, and GH has/had a serious discrimination problem coming from the top. We'll probably never know.
> the alleged victim is ... not a very sympathetic character
> does little to help set an example for why the real instances of harassment are so wrong and terrible.
Ah, but this is why most victims don't go public. Very few of us would look good under intense scrutiny. And I think this whole process has demonstrated how tilted the playing field is, against those who do go public.
Some people say that this is why people claiming to be victims deserve a kind of automatic support. I struggle with that, but only because I've personally witnessed a couple of the rare cases where that empowered someone who was slightly deranged.
Even with a name to back it up, it's still hearsay. I agree that it seems plausible, though, and does make a bit of sense given the rest of what we've all heard.
Hiring outsiders to investigate your management team for wrongdoing is like hiring outsiders to evaluate your environmental performance or to make recommendations on executive pay - possibly useful if you genuinely want to act on their findings, but equally often used to add a sheen of 'independent' legitimacy to whatever result you want.
Outsiders know what answer you want, and know it's unprofitable to have a reputation for biting the hand that feeds them.
To take a british example, back in 2006 the news of the world hired harbottle & lewis to do an internal investigation of phone hacking. Guess what, they didn't find anything.
Edit: Clarified that if the person paying for the investigation doesn't have a conflict of interest or plans to act on the recommendations, independent (or even non-independent) investigations can produce results.
You know a company hire another companies to perform a check. They usually expect everything ok. Audit comes, it turns out there is a security hole in the software, or your books are off or you threat employees badly. Nobody wants these, yet everybody hires external companies. You think that you can bribe a legal firm to give you a green flag on harassing employees and they gonna risk their reputation on 50K USD? I don't think so...
Accounting firms provide a pretty good counter-example here. Everyone thinks of Andersen, who actually had to close as a result of their "customer-focused" service at Enron, but actually all the "big" firms were implicated to varying degrees in the subsequent unpleasant business with CDOs. Any service business will hesitate to piss off the guy who hires them every year.
This is an exception and a single case does not prove that all of the companies are like that. There is enough money to bribe anybody. As i said, 50K (or so) is not enough for that.
Another example from the financial crisis is the fact that many credit rating agencies gave triple-A ratings to CDOs that were later downgraded to junk status. Guess who selects and pays the credit rating agency? As it happens, the very financial firms who originated the CDOs and want them triple-A rated to sell.
It's a well-known problem with auditor/audited relationships. What the customer wants is a clean bill of health after an easy audit. The auditor needs to be tough enough to maintain a good reputation, but beyond that they are looking to maximize volume. The Economist mentions this every year or two [1], and they're especially concerned when auditing firms do a lot of financial consulting for the audited firms. Then there's an even stronger incentive to make the audit generous.
Another good analogy is medical marijuana cards in states where marijuana is supposedly only for medical purposes. In theory, doctors are careful gatekeepers. In practice, the doctors doing those certifications have a strong financial incentive to certify as many people as quickly as possible. I've lived in San Francisco, and I've never heard of anybody getting turned down for one of those cards.
Oh, it doesn't have to be anything so brazen as them finding a problem then covering it up. It's simply that you agree to a certain number of hours at a certain price, and they run out of hours before finding any evidence of wrongdoing.
Legal firms have lawyer-client confidentiality rules, so if they do find anything, with a bit of care you can bury or lie about their findings with impunity.
It is widely-believed in the investment banking industry that you can find a firm that will provide a fairness opinion for virtually any transaction. They are a little bit more costly than $50K, but not more than an order of magnitude for small transactions. Mergers and Inquisitions says, "As you might guess, banks never say a deal is 'unfair' – the Opinion is just a rubber stamp to justify the deal to investors."[1]
(For the record, I never saw any unethical fairness opinions while I was in investment banking)
The consulting industry has similar dynamics. They are mainly there to provide evidence in favor of a plan proposed by whomever is their primary contact. See, for example, the article by the BCG consultant at [2]: "What I could not get my head around was having to force-fit analysis to a conclusion. In one case, the question I was tasked with solving had a clear and unambiguous answer: By my estimate, the client’s plan of action had a net present discounted value of negative one billion dollars. Even after accounting for some degree of error in my reckoning, I could still be sure that theirs was a losing proposition. But the client did not want analysis that contradicted their own, and my manager told me plainly that it was not our place to question what the client wanted."
Ugh. It is precisely the contractor's place to question the client. "Not my problem" or "just following orders" is the worst thing about consulting. I have, on several occasions, refused to force analysis into expected results. And look at me! I'm still alive! I made more money this year than the previous two combined. Ethics must always be forefront. And if you slip, get back on it, mistakes in the past do not excuse more mistakes.
Someone hired to do a security audit has a huge incentive to find security flaws- frankly, they'll get a better reputation for alerting the company to them.
Finding bad news when you're a security auditor is good.
Someone hired to do an investigation like this has an incentive to downplay any results. If they agreed with the accusations, GitHub would either have to hide the results, or publicly say "Yeah, we think we were likely legally liable for a hostile and sexually abusive work environment". They would not be taking those auditors out for celebratory drinks.
If the consultant says "Yep, you're in the clear", GitHub can announce publicly how great everything is.
Finding bad news when you're investigating a PR disaster is bad.
I don't think you can read much in to anything here, GH painted themselves in to a corner and either had to deny the allegations or their seriousness or someone had to get punished.
If she reported something to HR and it backfired, I think she should sue them, I really don't care about the co-founder's wife lurking around too much or who was friends with whom or who was sleeping with whom. That's pretty serious to me, so sue them.
I doubt they are publishing the real story, there. What is a fact is that Mr. Preston-Werner is resigning. From there, we may only speculate.
If I may speculate, I'd guess that there was some truth to the story told by "the other side", that there was some kind of harassment on the part of this man's wife (who was not employed there). That is all I can really guess. And the only real way to publicly resolve this would be for this man to resign - while he perhaps didn't personally do anything wrong, maybe his wife did, so he was in a sense the fall guy for that.
It sounds like Mrs. Preston-Werner was a regular presence at the GitHub office and, according to Horvath, had extensive access to private information throughout GitHub's systems despite the fact that she wasn't an employee. If true, that should certainly be a privacy and security concern to any GitHub customer or user.
There was never much chance that they were going to be completely open about their findings. It would only made an eventual lawsuit against them more likely to succeed, while likely not doing anything to make people feel better about what happened. The removal of TPW is a pretty huge move either way.
Well, we don't know that. It's an allegation by one person which hasn't been confirmed as being true by GitHub. And presumably after this incident, if it is true, they'll have better security policies going forward.
In my experience it is pretty common for people who bring work home with them not to be super-meticulous about preventing access to the content of the work by their families. How many people do you know who sound-proof their home office so their wife can't eavesdrop on their business calls?
I think that people that can and do bring work home are employed in fields where one does not need to be super meticulous about preventing access to the work.
Depends on what you mean by SCIF. Coworkers bring confidential paperwork/documents home, and remote access over remote desktop software is blessed. However you might get a phonecall from security if you started downloading lots of confidential data directly to your home computer.
I think I should point out this is a fireable offense in a number of companies. I work with sensitive information every day. I'm pretty sure if allowed someone outside the company to use my machine for anything, I would be fired.
My dad works for IBM doing mainframe repair and installation. He's seen his coworkers fired for allowing unauthorized individuals to use their company laptops. They've gone even further in the last few years in making unauthorized software a fireable offense.
Granted, two data points isn't a lot but there are companies that have enforced policies to prevent sensitive information from leaking.
I should also point out both my dad and I do significant amounts of work from home and we are both required by our companies to use full disk encryption.
Without going to the extreme of secret+ classifications -- in which case you cannot take things home without a secure home office, and move things between them in secure containers -- I don't think employees are fired for failing to lock their home office against their spouse or soundproofing their office against their spouse.
Which is different from saying that the company would fire them if the spouse used their inside-access to harm the company in any way.
My girlfriend works on disclosure projects at a company you've heard of and who regularly has highly-anticipated announcements. I have no idea what she works on, even when she's working from home in the same room as me[1].
In short, many vendors go to great expense to vet, audit, and limit the number of employees who could potentially access customer data. Some will geo-locate physically separate systems under separate administration according to regional necessity.
Sure, but this can only be appreciated if the relationship is large enough to have an explicit non-changeable contract and routine auditing. From any lone consumer's point of view, "cloud" providers are black boxes that will probably try to limit the damage a rogue employee can do, but any methods or promises can change overnight based on business needs.
Especially knowing that x% of those employees will have left the company in 5 years, and y% of those will have taken private copies of customer data with them.
What about de-facto board members? Tom was on GitHub's board, it was/is a small company, I don't get how "founder's wife" is not a suitably trusted position. I mean, clearly a bad call in this case, but hindsight is 20/20, and in my small business the husbands of my co-founders are de-facto employees (And in fact board members with significant proxy voting power, simply by state law of common property).
Edit: I looked it up; California, too, is a community property state. Theresa was absolutely an effective board member.
Most corporate startup lawyers have founder's spouses sign release forms for to clearly indicate that they do not have some claim to ownership or equity.
I just drafted a stock purchase agreement for my business partner and I on our new startup and one of the basic boilerplate additions to the stock purchase / vesting agreement is a spousal agreement to the terms of the purchase.
The communal property law only relates during a divorce were the shares are split up between the couple by the courts. Any decently written stock purchase agreement has a first right of refusal for the company to purchase back those shares in the event of an involuntary transfer.
That's not how community property works. Teresa effectively owned an indivisible half of Tom's Github stock via the community property laws, but this does not make her a board member. Board members are selected by the company pursuant to various legal mechanisms not subject to community property laws because a board position is not a "property."
This is incredibly troubling. How can anyone trust ${CLOUD_OR_HOSTING_COMPANY}, knowing that ${PERSONS_OR_SOFTWARE} regularly had access to private information?
Be paranoid. Encrypt it if you don't want people to snoop.
Yeah I'm curious about this myself. Doesn't this create a pretty serious security situation? GitHub isn't a small startup anymore, I would assume they'd have some pretty serious security precautions in place.
With so many self-hosted Github alternatives, and even Github Enterprise (self-hosted Github), I don't feel sorry for anyone having trade secrets stolen if they were hosting via private repos on Github.com.
Access to emails is one thing. Access to the internal public banter and coordination of work hardly strikes me as worrying based on all the discussions I've seen at my current place of work and past places of work. Any information sensitive enough to keep from your significant other is probably too sensitive for a shared internal conversation system available to all employees. Yeah, there's stuff that you wouldn't want your competitors to know, but for most everyone else with no skin in the business/industry is fairly irrelevant information.
HuBot let's githubbers deploy code to production, amongst lots of other things. In other words, access to internal chat is a much bigger deal at GitHub than it is at your workplace.
I would certainly hope that you can only tell hubot to do something like that if you have the correct permissions. Hubot should not be accepting deploy code commands from anyone except those with the sufficient privileges. If that isn't the case, that needs to be fixed asap.
> If true, that should certainly be a privacy and security concern to any GitHub customer or user.
We left github private repo hosting when they got VC funding. Because of such a scenario where we could be competing with a company that was funded by the same VC that gave GH money.
Now in a perfect world that shouldn't be a problem because the VC should never access private user data. But well ... as you see it's not a perfect world and if a wife of an employee can browse through customer data than why shouldn't this be true for the guy who gave GH a few million dollars?
Not the person you replied to, but we're a large company and we're using Gitlab internally, it even hooks up to LDAP which is fantastic. We still use some private Github projects too.
She apparently had access to employee data, not customer data. In my experience, businesses will often play a little fast-and-loose with employee data - far more so than customer data.
Though I agree it presents a bad image of GitHub's access control in general.
We dont have enough evidence to take legal action in this case, but our investigation found out something worse so we would like Tom to resign before it comes out publicly.
I can't think of much else they could reasonably do in response to these allegations. Tom was a founder, President, and former CEO of GitHub. They effectively fired him. They apologized profusely and laid out specific ways in which they're trying to fix the problem. They hired a new HR head. They're starting to train and educate employees.
This has to be an incredibly difficult moment in Tom Preston-Werner's life. Regardless of what may have happened. To build a company from the ground up and then have to walk away from it. I'm sure we all remember GitHub during its infancy and the enthusiasm with which founders worked on it. A hugely successful bootstrapped company.
It would be nice to not see the harassment word prefaced with "gender-based." This parsing, by Tom, without fuller disclosure of what mistakes were made leads to the conclusion that there was some form of harassment, but that it wasn't put forth in a manner which legally falls into "gender-based," which would make github and Tom (& family) liable for those actions.
I still want to see the dramatization where the guy coder comes in professing his love, gets spurned, then spitefully removes code.
Terms like hostile, gender-based, and discrimination all have pretty specific requirements for proof.
At least HN an move forward unhappily and pull out the "tragic" word describe everything. I'm not sure we all experienced catharsis, but "tragic" will have to do.
I have a question/observation that may be offensive, and it is not meant to be - so pardon my ignorance if this is a misguided perception:
When this story first ran and I was reading JA Horvaths tweets in the surrounding days - and reading whatever other articles related to this story were - I got the impression that she didn't necessarily seem like the most easy-going-innocent victim, and I wondered; what if she was actually a difficult to work-with person?
This is in no way a defense of any actions of any party, it was just a perception of the language, tone and content of the messages that Mrs. Horvath used gave me the perception that she wouldn't be the most desirable co-worker....
Now, I have nothing to substantiate such an opinion other than the tweets and stories I read just left me with this impression....
So, could it be that while her allegations are true, she is also a participant in the situation whereby she could have been acting poorly/using poor judgement?
Finally, I recognize that the actions of the wife of the founder are the most insidious, and a clear cause of concern, assuming they are in fact true...
It certainly could be, but in general what she's accusing them of would be wrong regardless of what a terrible person she could be. If someone is a bad employee/co-worker you can fire them, but you can't bully/harass them out of the place.
:( this sucks. Github would not even exist without Tom Preston-Werner and I am really scared to see how it will exist without him. Tragic for all his users.
So, guy who wrote GitHub and a ton of open source stuff is ousted from his own company and sacrificed for a person whos biggest accomplishment in open source is JavaScript for Cats? https://github.com/nrrrdcore/javascript-for-cats
What an embarrassment if you ask me. Why should he leave if he's been found of no legal wrong-doing by a third party? These tumblr-twats warriors only break communities.
You're assuming he did his job badly. All I'm seeing is the investigation showing NO EVIDENCE OF WRONG DOING. You're taking her word over an investigations result.
No, I'm not assuming that. I am saying that's exactly what the report of the invstigation plus the actual concrete results suggests that Github determined based on the investigation.
> All I'm seeing is the investigation showing NO EVIDENCE OF WRONG DOING.
The investigation does not show "no evidence of wrong doing", instead, it found "while there may have been no legal wrongdoing, the investigator did find evidence of mistakes and errors of judgment" and that finding is cited as the direct reason for Preston-Werner's resignation.
It would appear to be relevant because she describes herself as an engineer, and because she thought the reverts of her code and bad performance reviews were due to sexism.
Silly thing these gender based politics and acts of political correctness. I can guarandamntee you that if I was Tom and was innocent, mistakes in judgment aside, I would not be resigning from MY COMPANY.
Is this the result of new board members coming in post-investment? If so, it's more reason to stay bootstrapped and free. If not, who is there to pressure him other than Chris?
Edit: 4 downvotes without a single comment. Tech is really becoming a soup sandwich of misplaced frustration and angst.
in regards to misplaced frustration and angst, pretty much, tech is mostly filled with frustrated, unattractive (physical and personality wise) middle aged men, who believe that the only way to find a mate is to swallow this liberal agenda so as to make themselves appear as more of a 'nice guy', and thus in their twisted little heads, becoming more attractive to members of the opposite sex. Typical beta mentality.
edit: actually, I should say that tech is not actually like this, its mainly the illusion that reddit and HN present.
Mrs. Preston-Werner says here (https://medium.com/p/2fe173c44215 ) that the accusation and reason is that: "We learned that unnamed employees felt pressured by Tom and me to work pro-bono for my nonprofit."
To me this is lawyer speak for, yes it is true but if we admit, we would be liable. I would expect something like this from Bank of America or some other mega-corp, not github.
Only good thing about this is that it is not happening on the front pages of TechCrunch and whatever else blog might be following events like this.
First came across Tom's code in the Grit gem (around 2008 possibly).
Unfortunately people who can write inspirational and innovative code like that are not always the most perceptive to the complexities and risks of HR in a large organisation.
I really hope mojombo gets back to building awesome again ... a VR coding environment - shut up and take my money ...
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 196 ms ] threadOne could argue that allowing a non-employee so much access to a private company is an 'error of judgement.' (Referring to Horvath's comments about Tom's wife)
I suspect that this is not a million miles from what happened here: not actual discrimination, but enough of a blunder to look like it.
This reads to me as "Tom royally fucked up, but not enough to break any laws."
> "We found lots of ugly stuff but would rather not mention any of it in public, so move along, nothing to see"
(Asking because I'm curious of other's opinions on the matter, not because I'm questioning your statement)
The truth though is that this isn't the kind of stuff we continental Europeans care much about. Heck, we elect notorious pussy hounds as presidents around here, so I imagine that whatever the guy did is benign compared to Berlusconi's sex orgies with barely legal (or not legal at all) prostitutes. (Not saying it's any good, mind you. Just try to picture the yardsticks we have.)
1. Employee makes sexual harassment claim.
2. Outside HR consultant brought in.
3. Consultant asks "where is your anti-sexual harassment training course?"
4. CEO says o_o.
5. HR consultant establishes a policy for the company.
6. Board asks CEO to resign for not having the thing asked for in #3.
Not having a training course isn't illegal -- it's not even evidence that anyone was sexually harassed -- but the board can ask the CEO to move on because they feel he was not sufficiently protecting the company.
(PS: Post-college I've never worked at a place large enough to have required a harassment training course. This is just an example of "something the CEO should have done to protect the company but didn't, and we got away with it this time but might not next time.")
In my company that was a mandatory all company meeting where a lawyer made a powerpoint presentation for a couple of hours. Then there was some sort quiz and us signing something as far as I can remember.
Every 2 years I have to spend a couple hours taking a traffic-school-style online training.
All employees must receive info, companies > 50 need to offer two hours of classroom time within six months and then every two years.
Isn't that like saying, well the hard proof isn't there but its clear you did do something wrong?
So, are they saying that Horvath was lying? I mean, there was a lot of specific stuff she mentioned that seemed inappropriate. I don't want to get into whether the behavior was "sexist" or not, but I think we can all agree that if what she said was true, the work environment was hostile and unprofessional.
The only real gender based problems she had were related to male co-worker's responses to female co-workers hula-hooping, as I remember it.
There wouldn't be much evidence of personal harassment, particularly the kind described by Horvath.
Do we know the name of the "full, independent, third-party" investigator(s)? Do we know who paid for them, their methodology, and whether they reported to Horvath, giving her oversight?
Or are investigators the same, like software contractors?
It would be very dumb of GitHub to state that there is no evidence if there is evidence that Horvath could turn up. (Granted, sometimes companies are dumb.)
Criminal and civil investigations are not scientific investigations. They may make use of science, but they are not scientific. To import the language of science--actually neo-Popperian pop-cultural language about science--into a discussion of an internal investigation into harassment claims is highly suspect.
Your claim aside, these are weasel words. The way to discover the fact that they are is to appropriately apply language akin to that of jurisprudence, rather than inappropriately apply that of science.
Failure to find is distinct from a negative result.
You can't test for failure to find, just as you cannot test for statistical insignificance.
Such as?
edit:
FYI: her detailed complaint to TechCrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/15/julie-ann-horvath-describes...
re: The co-worker who couldn't handle being rejected by her:
> The rejection of the other employee led to something of an internal battle at GitHub. According to Horvath, the engineer, “hurt from my rejection, started passive-aggressively ripping out my code from projects we had worked on together without so much as a ping or a comment. I even had to have a few of his commits reverted. I would work on something, go to bed, and wake up to find my work gone without any explanation.” The employee in question, according to Horvath, is both “well-liked at GitHub” and “popular in the community.”
His “behavior towards female employees,” according to Horvath, “especially those he sees as opportunities is disgusting.”
And there was one more incident that would purportedly fall under sexism:
> Two women, one of whom I work with and adore, and a friend of hers were hula hooping to some music. I didn’t have a problem with this. What I did have a problem with is the line of men sitting on one bench facing the hoopers and gawking at them. It looked like something out of a strip club. When I brought this up to male coworkers, they didn’t see a problem with it. But for me it felt unsafe and to be honest, really embarrassing. That was the moment I decided to finally leave GitHub.
The first one, of course, is bad. And there's possibly a case to be made that if management knew about this engineer and let it slide, well, that does create a hostile environment. Yet I don't think Horvath points out where she complained about this guy's commit-reverting behavior to management.
The second thing, about hula-hooping, without context, it doesn't really mean anything beyond what Horvath claims she was able to grok just by stumbling upon the scene. I think during the original HN discussion, a Githubber said that the hula-hooping happened during an in-office party. Either way, hula-hooping and watching said-hula-hooping is hard to claim, on its face, as being gender-discrimination.
The other stuff though, about the co-founder unfairly pressuring her partner to resign, and the co-founder's wife claiming to have access to Github employees' private data...Those could be things that the company frowns upon enough to merit a resignation.
sexual harassment definition: http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/sexual_harassment.cfm
From your link:
> Although the law doesn’t prohibit simple teasing, offhand comments, or isolated incidents that are not very serious, harassment is illegal when it is so frequent or severe that it creates a hostile or offensive work environment or when it results in an adverse employment decision (such as the victim being fired or demoted).
1. Did Horvath provide proof that this immature behavior was more-than-isolated and unpunished? It would be easy for her to, as it would exist in the git logs. But we don't know if it happened dozens of times, or just more than one time.
2. Reverting commits is still part of an engineer's job. She alleges that the commits were unfair...again, this evidence would exist in the logs. But what if the commits were justifiable, and the engineer was being snippy about it? That doesn't really count as harassment.
3. Was Horvath retaliated against by management (e.g. fired or demoted) for being angry at her colleague? Her account doesn't claim that.
The link you posted says that harassment, and sexual harassment, is illegal...But what Horvath describes is not harassment by the legal definition, because the other engineer could claim that the reverts were part of his job. Again, the commit logs, or even a description of them, are needed to decide whether this constituted harassment beyond a coworker criticizing another.
Don't make up soft weasel words to describe it. It's sexual harassment plain and simple. Also, this bit about classifying it as gender-discrimination seems like pointless hair-splitting. Horvath felt wronged by many things, and she probably felt those things would not have happened if she were a man, and I think that's a fair assumption on her part. I'll leave it to the courts to get into the technical classification of precisely if and how she was wronged.
http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/sexual_harassment.cfm
"Harassment can include “sexual harassment” or unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical harassment of a sexual nature. Harassment does not have to be of a sexual nature, however, and can include offensive remarks about a person’s sex. For example, it is illegal to harass a woman by making offensive comments about women in general."
Harassment of someone who happens to be of the opposite gender does not make it sexual harassment. Harassment of someone for rejecting you romantically does not make it sexual harassment. If someone "feels" they would not have been harassed the same way if they were a man does not make it sexual harassment. (This is clearly false in this case, obviously, because the same thing could have happened if it were an advancement by someone of the same gender.)
Reverting someone's commit is not harassment of a "sexual nature" nor does it include commentary on the person's sex or women in general. It has nothing to do with gender or sexual comments, it has to do with an emotional reaction to rejection and an immature pathetic response.
https://medium.com/p/d96f431f4e8e
It is only bad if she complains to management?
Proof is a huge issue with sexism in general: anecdotal, or separate cases for discrimination; expression of consent when it comes to rape, etc. I wished organisation handling such issues focused on provability in court, rather than awareness.
Neither party has to be lying. She might honestly believe she was treated in a specific way because of her sex, while others may have treated her in a specific way because of, for instance, her competence. Both may be 100% honest in their assessment of the relationship, yet be completely at odds.
The workplace absolutely sounded unprofessional, which often means the entire gradient of behaviour from welcoming to hostile (versus the normal corporate realm of gray areas in between). Indeed, unprofessional workplaces are generally celebrated in the tech community, often for good reason.
Yes, but the investigation said there was no evidence for a hostile work environment. That's a claim above and beyond sexism: it's quantifying over all of the various ways a work environment could be hostile (of which sexism is one way). If what Horvath says about Preston's wife is true, then that sounds like a hostile work environment to me, regardless of whether the treatment was due to her sex.
No, its not. "Hostile work environment" is mentioned as one of the legal violations it found to be unsupported, and "hostile work environment" is a legal term of art in sexual harassment law. In context, then, it is not a claim "above and beyond sexism", its is a claim about the absence of a particular form of sexual harassment.
> it's quantifying over all of the various ways a work environment could be hostile (of which sexism is one way).
You are reading it backwards: the finding of no legal wrongdoing, in the context of the allegations made of sexual harassment, is quantifying over all the various ways in which sexual harassment law could be violated, and the "hostile work environment" statement is one specific example of areas where sexual harassment was not found.
Why for good reason? Do you have any specific examples in mind?
And yet conventional ideas of professionalism have such an iron grip on our minds that even startup founders are affected by them. In our startup, when outsiders came to visit we tried hard to seem "professional." We'd clean up our offices, wear better clothes, try to arrange that a lot of people were there during conventional office hours. In fact, programming didn't get done by well-dressed people at clean desks during office hours. It got done by badly dressed people (I was notorious for programmming wearing just a towel) in offices strewn with junk at 2 in the morning. But no visitor would understand that. Not even investors, who are supposed to be able to recognize real productivity when they see it. Even we were affected by the conventional wisdom.
http://www.paulgraham.com/foundersatwork.html
The idea being, in that ultra-early-stage, 2-3 founding members only, state, trying too hard to be "professional" is counterproductive. Obviously, at the scale that we're talking about with Github, the game changes.
Limited or no dress code No set hours Limited involvement of HR Wide degree of responsibility -- limited written work descriptions Amorphous groups of collaboration that develop and disband
And on and on. Most technology companies, even once they are larger, try to hold onto those "unprofessional" traits. A strong HR group with heavy controls limit or eradicate the ability for some of the less pleasant behaviours, but they also can completely undermine self-motivation and creativity. It's a delicate balance.
I agree that the former are good things and should be preserved where possible. (And not just in technology companies; some time ago I remember reading about a study that looked at various heavy industrial companies--auto manufacturers were one type--and found that the most productive ones were the ones that had many of the things you cite: limited or no dress code, limited HR involvement, limited written work descriptions and a lot of autonomy given to workers.)
However, the Github case appears to be an example of the latter. I don't think that's something to be celebrated.
"We didn't find an email trail that could lead to a lawsuit, and the co-founder in question immediately resigned" is a very far cry from "Everything she said was a lie."
Your first dozen hires must all be good enough to write such policies...
So I don't know how much stock you can place behind the idea that the investigators GH hired, who did not contact ex-employees competently, found them blameless. The resignation probably speaks for more than the investigation does.
Using the word "exonerated" outright ignores the conclusion of the report. The github hired investigator reported no evidence of legal wrong-doing. Then the company fired/accepted the resignation of Preston-Werner for his "other" mistakes.
I think it's safe to say Github would not admit to legal wrong doing publicly as that just opens them up to legal liability. But to then say "no legal wrongdoing" translates into Preston-Werner being exonerated has to be some sort of joke.
I have a feeling Ms. Horvath and Mrs. Preston-Werner completely believe their own interpretations of what happened.
This is a good reminder of how subtle and ambiguous our and others views of the same reality is. In her post Theresa mentions having a blind spot for the obligations that github employees felt for helping her charity, but she didn't see it, she saw friends.
I think this is a good lesson to us all about not only making clear HR polices, but also always giving intentional consideration to how those around us see what we say and do. A kind of intellectual empathy.
Rashomon.
At the end, the movie even explicitly rejects the theory that truth is unobtainable, and that everyone is corrupt. In the movie at least, disinterested third parties who have good intentions can reveal the truth.
You may believe in subjectivity, but Rashomon doesn't.
grandparent post was talking about the need for intellectual empathy. i've seen that work wonders in my life. it's like this thread of comments shows the need for intellectual empathy in microcosm.
It's like someone is raving about the military, and someone quotes appending Dulce et decorum est below. Not a big deal, but big enough to write a small comment making a correction, just in case.
"I was the wife of the CEO, but that never entered my mind when I hung out with any GitHubbers."
That is just not acceptable; it's the equivalent of walking around with a machine gun in your hands and saying that you never considered it might have any impact.
As much as she might have liked it to, you can't wield considerable power over people's lives and have them treat you as though you don't. It just doesn't work that way.
I'm not sure exactly how to phrase it, but I think there's something there in general applicable to the current round of companies which have 'flat' organizational structures, but still aren't hardly employee-owned democratically-managed enterprises. [1] There are owners and bosses, there are people with ultimate decision-making powers (including hiring and firing) and those without, some who have a heck of a lot more salary/equity than others -- but at the same time, the 'flat structure' somehow seems as if everyone's expected to ignore that and act like it's not true.
It's of course not a coincidence that Github is one of the most famous examples of such a 'flat structured' (not not actually democratically-managed) companies.
And I think it's a shame that people will use this as an example of why hieararchy and authority is neccessary. I think it's more about the dangers of trying to make hieararchy and authority invisible when it actually still exists.
Thanks for your comment which helped me start thinking about this, sorry my response is much less coherent. :)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative
I want to emphasize this, because it is absolutely a thing that tends to happen even with the best of intentions from all parties. You can't eliminate hierarchy by hiding it.
Don't get sucked into thinking you're peers with your employees when you decide how much they get paid, what work they do all day, and whether or not they keep their job. They don't see you as a peer.
Not to mention that it seems like the tech industry has done a lot for her family's life so it seems strange and ungrateful to respond with anger that other people in positions of less influence than her family has, are not doing enough for the world in some vague sense.
Not to mention the massive hypocrisy that she is raising money from institutional investors as donors to cover operations costs for her non-profit which is ultimately a shakedown on salaried employees. There are things I agree with Theresa about, but asking the ultra-rich for money to support her venture to pressure regular people to give more to charity is nuts.
Her picture proves nothing, after all.
Your conclusion about "how much stock to place" does not follow, since this allegation has not been proven true.
Having been involved in this sort of thing before, both on the "asked to investigate" and "asked to play witness for an employee side", i'd say the truth always lies somewhere in between, and both employers and employees tend to behave badly.
In my experience, the truth usually lies very strongly to one side of the spectrum, and sometimes beyond an extreme (as reasonable people often bend over backwards in giving their version of events, while unreasonable people do not), but you'll never find out for sure.
E.g. in the Techcrunch piece Horvath says that the founder's wife spoke of having spies, and influencing HR decisions, and so on. I can easily imagine the conversation taking place over drinks, and it could be horribly sinister or it could be someone's not-very-well-judged attempt at humor. But this doesn't mean that "the truth is in-between".
Horvath said the founder spoke of having spies, etc.
The founder says she did nothing of the sort, and blah blah blah I would thus expect the truth is "the founder said she kept in touch with goings-on in the company through friends" or something similarly in-between.
Not "The founder has hired spies that prepare detailed daily reports" (which would be very strongly to one side) or "the founder has no idea what goes on in the company, and knows nobody" (which would be to the other).
IMHO, of course. Maybe you have a different view of what it would mean to lean strongly to one side of the spectrum in that situation?
Second, This is somewhat pedantic. The OP simply assumed what whatever Jane said was true, and then went from there.
Your complaint is essentially that i did not add the words "in every case i have been part of, and every one i know about in sufficient independent detail" in front of "always". All told, that's about 43 cases.
Feel free to pretend i did write that, if it suffices.
If not, feel free to disbelieve me!
Unfortunate that it is anonymous, but it is still worth reading in my opinion.
Reading several weeks of Horvath's twitter feed and several articles where she's quoted, it's apparent to me that regardless of what happened at Github, she is a bitter and dramatic individual. That's NOT the kind of person that backs down to the adult-talk at the table.
Again, I don't know what happened at github, and I honestly don't care. What I do know is that I would never hire Horvath regardless of what she could do for the company. Far too much risk, and exemplified with a terribly immature response even if everything she says is true.
If I was in a similar position I'd take it to court, but if for some reason I wanted to do trial by media, I'd be gushing with detail.
Not saying those two things aren't useful, but I would certainly not characterize this anon blog post as "worthless" by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, it makes the whole situation make a lot more sense. The original one-sided account from Ms. Horvath always sounded a bit implausible to me, at least without more information to frame it.
The senses of doubt will only be ~the same if your prior for the probability of "someone out of ~200 github employees would lie about this and attach their name to it" is about the same as your prior for "someone out of the other ~3,000,000,000 people on the internet would pretend to be a github employee and make this up".
The larger someone's prior is for the latter relative to the former, the more worthless an anonymous blogpost is to them.
The fact that this story helps everything "make sense" is not a useful heuristic. Anybody can craft this kind of tale, and it might also be playing on our prejudices - the spurned, jealous, bitchy lover narrative.
But, as for myself, I don't have to make any judgment, nor do I want to. I don't want to do is pick a side based on my prejudices and a few blog posts.
By now we all should know that women are routinely harassed in tech companies to a preposterous degree. On the other hand, I've seen cases where mentally disturbed people invent (or self-delude) incredibly detailed narratives of persecution. We could be dealing with a situation where one, the other, both, or neither is happening. If you have evidence that settles the case, by all means please post it.
Something that is clear is that Github's investigation was flawed. And if Horvath really wasn't contacted until late in the process, it certainly makes it look like Github was more interested in a coverup than the truth.
By now we all should know that women are routinely harassed in tech companies to a preposterous degree. On the other hand, I've seen cases where mentally disturbed people invent (or self-delude) incredibly detailed narratives of persecution. We could be dealing with a situation where one, the other, both, or neither is happening.
The thing that irks me about all this is that murky incidents like this, where the alleged victim is (to many) not a very sympathetic character, and possibly acted improperly herself and instigated the whole situation (if the anon blog post is to be believed), does little to help set an example for why the real instances of harassment are so wrong and terrible.
After this, I'm left with a very poor taste in my mouth. GH's investigation was likely somewhat flawed, though it's unclear to what degree. Horvath almost certainly wasn't telling the full story about what happened, and may even have instigated the entire thing, and is using the prevalence of sexism in tech (and the expected knee-jerk community outcry) to attack someone she's (unjustifiably?) angry with. Or maybe everything she's said is true, and the Preston-Werners are terrible people, and GH has/had a serious discrimination problem coming from the top. We'll probably never know.
The whole situation just stinks.
> does little to help set an example for why the real instances of harassment are so wrong and terrible.
Ah, but this is why most victims don't go public. Very few of us would look good under intense scrutiny. And I think this whole process has demonstrated how tilted the playing field is, against those who do go public.
Some people say that this is why people claiming to be victims deserve a kind of automatic support. I struggle with that, but only because I've personally witnessed a couple of the rare cases where that empowered someone who was slightly deranged.
Outsiders know what answer you want, and know it's unprofitable to have a reputation for biting the hand that feeds them.
To take a british example, back in 2006 the news of the world hired harbottle & lewis to do an internal investigation of phone hacking. Guess what, they didn't find anything.
Edit: Clarified that if the person paying for the investigation doesn't have a conflict of interest or plans to act on the recommendations, independent (or even non-independent) investigations can produce results.
See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_rating_agencies_and_the...
It's a well-known problem with auditor/audited relationships. What the customer wants is a clean bill of health after an easy audit. The auditor needs to be tough enough to maintain a good reputation, but beyond that they are looking to maximize volume. The Economist mentions this every year or two [1], and they're especially concerned when auditing firms do a lot of financial consulting for the audited firms. Then there's an even stronger incentive to make the audit generous.
Another good analogy is medical marijuana cards in states where marijuana is supposedly only for medical purposes. In theory, doctors are careful gatekeepers. In practice, the doctors doing those certifications have a strong financial incentive to certify as many people as quickly as possible. I've lived in San Francisco, and I've never heard of anybody getting turned down for one of those cards.
[1] e.g.: http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2014/03/dewey-lebo... or http://www.economist.com/node/954033
Legal firms have lawyer-client confidentiality rules, so if they do find anything, with a bit of care you can bury or lie about their findings with impunity.
(For the record, I never saw any unethical fairness opinions while I was in investment banking)
The consulting industry has similar dynamics. They are mainly there to provide evidence in favor of a plan proposed by whomever is their primary contact. See, for example, the article by the BCG consultant at [2]: "What I could not get my head around was having to force-fit analysis to a conclusion. In one case, the question I was tasked with solving had a clear and unambiguous answer: By my estimate, the client’s plan of action had a net present discounted value of negative one billion dollars. Even after accounting for some degree of error in my reckoning, I could still be sure that theirs was a losing proposition. But the client did not want analysis that contradicted their own, and my manager told me plainly that it was not our place to question what the client wanted."
1: http://www.mergersandinquisitions.com/investment-banking-fai...
2: http://tech.mit.edu/V130/N18/dubai.html
Finding bad news when you're a security auditor is good.
Someone hired to do an investigation like this has an incentive to downplay any results. If they agreed with the accusations, GitHub would either have to hide the results, or publicly say "Yeah, we think we were likely legally liable for a hostile and sexually abusive work environment". They would not be taking those auditors out for celebratory drinks.
If the consultant says "Yep, you're in the clear", GitHub can announce publicly how great everything is.
Finding bad news when you're investigating a PR disaster is bad.
I don't think you can read much in to anything here, GH painted themselves in to a corner and either had to deny the allegations or their seriousness or someone had to get punished.
If she reported something to HR and it backfired, I think she should sue them, I really don't care about the co-founder's wife lurking around too much or who was friends with whom or who was sleeping with whom. That's pretty serious to me, so sue them.
If I may speculate, I'd guess that there was some truth to the story told by "the other side", that there was some kind of harassment on the part of this man's wife (who was not employed there). That is all I can really guess. And the only real way to publicly resolve this would be for this man to resign - while he perhaps didn't personally do anything wrong, maybe his wife did, so he was in a sense the fall guy for that.
Very wrong.
My dad works for IBM doing mainframe repair and installation. He's seen his coworkers fired for allowing unauthorized individuals to use their company laptops. They've gone even further in the last few years in making unauthorized software a fireable offense.
Granted, two data points isn't a lot but there are companies that have enforced policies to prevent sensitive information from leaking.
I should also point out both my dad and I do significant amounts of work from home and we are both required by our companies to use full disk encryption.
Which is different from saying that the company would fire them if the spouse used their inside-access to harm the company in any way.
1. http://www.officedepot.com/a/browse/laptop-privacy-filters/N...
In short, many vendors go to great expense to vet, audit, and limit the number of employees who could potentially access customer data. Some will geo-locate physically separate systems under separate administration according to regional necessity.
Disclosure: works for such a vendor.
Edit: I looked it up; California, too, is a community property state. Theresa was absolutely an effective board member.
I just drafted a stock purchase agreement for my business partner and I on our new startup and one of the basic boilerplate additions to the stock purchase / vesting agreement is a spousal agreement to the terms of the purchase.
The communal property law only relates during a divorce were the shares are split up between the couple by the courts. Any decently written stock purchase agreement has a first right of refusal for the company to purchase back those shares in the event of an involuntary transfer.
Be paranoid. Encrypt it if you don't want people to snoop.
We left github private repo hosting when they got VC funding. Because of such a scenario where we could be competing with a company that was funded by the same VC that gave GH money.
Now in a perfect world that shouldn't be a problem because the VC should never access private user data. But well ... as you see it's not a perfect world and if a wife of an employee can browse through customer data than why shouldn't this be true for the guy who gave GH a few million dollars?
I'm curious because if the company is not large, doesn't seem like much of a hassle having your own depository server.
Though I agree it presents a bad image of GitHub's access control in general.
We dont have enough evidence to take legal action in this case, but our investigation found out something worse so we would like Tom to resign before it comes out publicly.
What else would you have GitHub do?
Horvath essentially ruined this mans life through e-mobbing.
Just look @ her tweets: http://recode.net/2014/04/21/julie-ann-horvath-on-github-inv...
I still want to see the dramatization where the guy coder comes in professing his love, gets spurned, then spitefully removes code.
Terms like hostile, gender-based, and discrimination all have pretty specific requirements for proof.
At least HN an move forward unhappily and pull out the "tragic" word describe everything. I'm not sure we all experienced catharsis, but "tragic" will have to do.
When this story first ran and I was reading JA Horvaths tweets in the surrounding days - and reading whatever other articles related to this story were - I got the impression that she didn't necessarily seem like the most easy-going-innocent victim, and I wondered; what if she was actually a difficult to work-with person?
This is in no way a defense of any actions of any party, it was just a perception of the language, tone and content of the messages that Mrs. Horvath used gave me the perception that she wouldn't be the most desirable co-worker....
Now, I have nothing to substantiate such an opinion other than the tweets and stories I read just left me with this impression....
So, could it be that while her allegations are true, she is also a participant in the situation whereby she could have been acting poorly/using poor judgement?
Finally, I recognize that the actions of the wife of the founder are the most insidious, and a clear cause of concern, assuming they are in fact true...
Now Github can get back to business.
That's the annoying part of the story.
Isn't that a little bit extreme? Do all the good things that happen at Github stem directly from Tom Preston-Werner?
I can't claim intimate knowledge of Github the company, but I somehow doubt that this is a "Steve Jobs" type situation.
Because you can do your job badly and be unsuitable to continue in it by exhibiting poor judgement without breaking the law.
No, I'm not assuming that. I am saying that's exactly what the report of the invstigation plus the actual concrete results suggests that Github determined based on the investigation.
> All I'm seeing is the investigation showing NO EVIDENCE OF WRONG DOING.
The investigation does not show "no evidence of wrong doing", instead, it found "while there may have been no legal wrongdoing, the investigator did find evidence of mistakes and errors of judgment" and that finding is cited as the direct reason for Preston-Werner's resignation.
JS for Cats is, in comparison to Linguist, a work of towering intellect.
Googling didnt bring up anything obvious,
I just haven't heard anything bad about it so am curious why OP calls it a "debacle"
Is this the result of new board members coming in post-investment? If so, it's more reason to stay bootstrapped and free. If not, who is there to pressure him other than Chris?
Edit: 4 downvotes without a single comment. Tech is really becoming a soup sandwich of misplaced frustration and angst.
edit: actually, I should say that tech is not actually like this, its mainly the illusion that reddit and HN present.
Because they, you know, listen to the majority of women in tech, who say this is in fact the case.
Only good thing about this is that it is not happening on the front pages of TechCrunch and whatever else blog might be following events like this.
Unfortunately people who can write inspirational and innovative code like that are not always the most perceptive to the complexities and risks of HR in a large organisation.
I really hope mojombo gets back to building awesome again ... a VR coding environment - shut up and take my money ...