Ouch. What a terrible situation. I'm holding out for the other side of the story, but unless you're willing to assume the entire thing is invented this is a major fuckup for GitHub.
I think this is a classic problem with companies making the transition from small startup to regular business. Break down the barriers! Flat management! Kill bureaucracy and embrace no-politics DIY organisation!
The article reads like an HR air crash investigation. Nebulous semi-employee with unspecified responsibilities related to a founder? Check. Unclear or absent grievance chain? Check. HR alternately over- and under-involved in disputes with no clear policy? Check. Off-the-record disciplinary meetings? Check. Founder adjudicates his own grievances? Check.
And it seems like every single one of these problems could have been solved by a halfway competent manager. I mean, someone reverting your code because of a personal vendetta? Is that not like, a 5 minute conversation? "Hey, Jo, Dave's being an asshole and reverting my commits for no reason." "Oh, okay, I'll talk to him and make sure it stops."
I read a great article a while back that I unfortunately can't find now, but it talked about a CEO who thought he was having a casual "hey, I'm interested in developing my skills, can you mentor me a bit?" conversation with another exec. A week later the office was ablaze with "so-and-so being groomed as successor" rumours. At a certain point you stop being able to just act like a regular person and have everything turn out fine. Red tape isn't always a straitjacket. Sometimes it's a crash harness.
> Nebulous semi-employee with unspecified responsibilities related to a founder?
This is the point that stands out for me. That the wife is not an employee of Github but claims to be able to access private company chat records, and also is able to "work" from within the office and interact with the staff.
Even with allowances that company property remains company property and private chat rooms are in fact non-private to the company... there is no scenario in which a non-employee should have access to those chat rooms.
The wife, and the husband (founder), have displayed an incredible lack of professionalism here. There may even be a question about whether those acts are illegal if they are substantiated.
And for companies that use Github to host private repositories, the question should be asked very loud and clear... "Who can access private company data, why, and for what reason?".
If a non-employee can access information that is presumed (even by their own employees) to be private, then our (external companies) assumptions about what is private and secure at Github are weakened and demand very clear statements backed up with clear processes to reassure.
"Who can access private company data, why, and for what reason?"
This seems to me to be the major takeaway for organisations outside github from this sorry affair. I'm sort of surprised you are the only person to raise this so far.
In the UK, the employee who resigned could have a successful day in an employment tribunal. And one aspect of the hearing would be privacy and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act provisions.
So spot on. Considering recent privacy issues, Github needs to be careful to respond on this. It has potential to explode into an entirely separate shitstorm.
But you live in the UK, which is still part of Europe, where people are still people that have rights. Your only right in the USA is the right to leave.
The fact that you were able to post this means that your statement is false. Using hyperbole to make a point only serves to invalidate your point, unless your audience is composed of complete idiots (not hyperbole, that's actually what I mean). I would hope that the HN readership isn't a bunch of idiots, although you obviously think they are.
Actually, we have no written Constitution, and very little in the way of actual rights in the sense that if a Constable asks us to move or go home or to search our bags, we have to let them.
Employment rights however are slightly better. The employee interviewed in the OA would have recourse to an employment tribunal for what used to be called 'constructive dismissal' - the terminology may have changed recently. The monetary compensation would be quite basic by Valley standards, but the public exposure of the employers, subject to cross-examination, would be most satisfying I imagine.
Unfortunately, this doesn't invalidate the fact that you're correct in a way. If Simon Singh hadn't been able to afford the time and money to defend this case, the libel suit would probably have stood.
Still, it's a step in the right direction, and an important legal precedent.
This quote suggests more than one GitHub employee was in on it at the least:
'They purposefully allow this glaringly obvious mechanism for insulting and annoying their members and are actually involved in the joke. Until I broke their server they were all laughing at my "testing", then they were pissed when they had to fix the bug I found. If you don't believe me, look at the HackerNewsTips twitter account, which I know is astroturfed by a github employee.'
In one of the first few paragraphs, there's this block:
"The other piece of information you need to understand is that there's a sort of running hidden gag among the Ruby Iluminati (aka Rubynati) within San Francisco. Employees from Engine Yard, PowerSet, and ... github love this joke where they create code that generates ASCII art penis pictures and then force other people onto their project without permission. Here's another one called dicks by Martin Emde."
It's a shame that companies doing some useful things have to encourage a culture of brutish behavior.
> The wife, and the husband (founder), have displayed an incredible lack of professionalism here.
That assumes that the story, as told in the accusation, is completely accurate. One could envision a scenario where the founder felt his wife may be able to relate to the situation better and could actually assist the accuser. However, in spite of best intentions, its possible that the wife's actions were misinterpreted by the accuser. Until Github or the wife gives their side of the story, perhaps withholding judgement is the optimal strategy.
I don't pretend to have any info on what truly happened. But the story doesn't have to be 'completely accurate' for it to be disturbing. A company can't have family members browse around company offices and imposing themselves on employees with whom they have no professional or personal relationship. I find it very hard to understand how the wife's repeated presence can be favorably interpreted if it did indeed upset Horvath.
it could have been well intentioned. bringing in an pseudo-outsider may not be the smartest move but its also not necessarily evil at all. the founder may have felt that his wife could relate in some way. until more evidence is given, we should withhold judgement.
Things like this should be formalised though. Its very unusual for a spouse to prance around any organisation handing out directives/advice.
Maybe its a sign that the founder in question doesn't have the people skills to handle her possibly dominant personality.
In these types of situations, it's usually pretty difficult to come to solid conclusions about the chain of events this early. My initial take?
It's not uncommon for business owners to rely heavily on non-employees for advice, even in the day-to-day operations. Spouses are especially common. What confuses me is that the wife, as portrayed, seems a bit irrational--if not delusional. There's a big difference between even vocal trusted advisors, and the sort of power the wife described herself as having.
So much so that I think there's a third possible interpretation: the quotes are accurate, given by a wife that genuinely believes her statements even though they have no basis in reality. This sort of delusion, in varying degrees, is quite common across the population. We convince ourselves of something--in this case, the wife that she has power in the Github organization--and then attempt to reduce the cognitive dissonance that arrises from the belief and the evidence to the contrary. As time goes on, we try harder and harder to justify those irrational beliefs.
It's entirely possible that there's no truth whatsoever to the wife's words, but that the wife genuinely believed them in spite of it. And that Julie Horvath is entirely accurate in detailing the conversation and the implied hostility she felt from the founder and his wife. So now, not only do you have to determine whether the conversation took place, but also whether the power the wife alleged existed in the first place. Unfortunately for Github, even if the wife never had that power, the wife was still able to contribute to a hostile work environment and that can have significant legal ramifications even though she wasn't an employee.
Friends you go out for drinks with to talk about life and work slowly transform into "spies" who keep you informed of what's happening in the office under the guise of gossip. Curiously taking a peek at an open chat tab on the husband's laptop becomes "access." Commenting on whether you liked a potential hire you met earlier becomes "responsibility over hires." Love for your husband and concern for his work becomes an overprotective desire to shield him from harm.
Given how rapidly Github has grown, the idea that any trusted non-employee, wife or not, would have that sort of power and influence described seems absurd. Hell, for a while it seemed as though they announced a new hire daily. Far too many for one non-employee, no matter how often she went into the office, to have that sort of power. Especially when most were technical positions.
Time will tell, but for now, more information is needed. Anyhow, I suppose I took issue with the phrase "undocumented employee" and ran off on a tangent :). The wife needn't have been an employee at all to have helped cause a shitstorm.
So common business owners need day-to-day advice from people outside the company to run their business? I somehow doubt that.
If someone was not on payroll and interacting with my employees on a personal level and on a daily or weekly basis I would have reasons to be concerned.
Being a "start-up" doesn't make you impervious to these problems. It simply means you haven't run into them... yet.
It may be arguable, but for me non-company member being somehow related to company business is not only acceptable, but actually very nice. Being family member of the founder is reason enough to care about company, and I'd prefer informal atmosphere where people can help with business just because they care to that formal bureaucratic atmosphere that is common in banks. That's were wives come to pretty boring holidays parties and politely chuckle about boring jokes. Ugh.
Of course that doesn't include "accessing private chats of company members", but for that reason the more I read about that story the less I believe "the victim".
Combining work and marriage structures is fraught with all sorts of problematic outcomes. Consider even the differing processes to enter each institution. Or the differing standards for being successful at each.
from reading the article, I got the vibe that the wife may have felt innately (territorially?) threatened by the thought of a (pretty) female in the company getting close with her founder husband in a more intimate, rather than professional, type of way. Thoughts?
That raising "threatened wife" motif is actually quite sexist. Its entirely possible that the founder may have felt that his wife could relate better to the accuser but that their meeting may not have went well and the wife felt that the accuser was behaving as inappropriately as the accuser felt about the wife. Furthermore, accusing someone of "sitting near me to intimidate me" is quite vague and bizarre.
> This is the point that stands out for me. That the wife is not an employee of Github but claims to be able to access private company chat records, and also is able to "work" from within the office and interact with the staff.
However, the guy who declared his love for her despite knowing that she had a boyfriend, and then started sabotaging all her code when she shot him down, is very much sexist bullshit.
Again, we should remember that it's how she perceives situation. Removing somebody's code is completely normal if you rewrite something for reason (changing interfaces, fixing properly something in other place so that piece of code becomes unused, implementing some complex mechanism which doesn't play well with that feature so that's easier to rewrite it — there are many such situations). We all like our code, but caring about it too much is unprofessional. I removed my colleagues' code hundreds of times, they removed mine. Solution seemed nice few months ago turns out to be horrible in today's light. It's just how the life goes.
I've worked with brilliant engineers that lack a lot of real world social skills and this doesn't surprise me one bit. A pretty girl really can mess with the logical types of people that have little experience with the opposite sex.
well I've witnessed this phenomenon in the real world, so I can't discount the existence of this, stereotype label aside.
I've met the opposite as well, charming, well dressed, and physically fit engineer types who can hold a conversation with the opposite sex without any awkward vibes at all.
The awkward types seem to lack some dating experience and thus cannot discern positive/negative social cues or read body language as well.
> I've met the opposite as well, charming, well dressed, and physically fit engineer types who can hold a conversation with the opposite sex without any awkward vibes at all.
> The awkward types seem to lack some dating experience and thus cannot discern positive/negative social cues or read body language as well.
I hate replying to this, but here it goes: have you even given positive social cues to guys who weren't "charming, well dressed and physically fit engineer types"? Also, if you're only getting "awkward vibes" from unattractive guys, that might not be a problem with their social skills (at least not in the way you're putting it; charm is a social skill).
Not to mention, what does "well dressed and physically fit" even have to do with "awkward"?
Dressing well and taking care of your body are social cues, that you meet the dress 'standards' of the group (whatever they are) and that you are capable of managing your own body.
Seeing as we don't know his sexual orientation, you don't know whether he would have made those advances if she were not a woman.
And no, a man sexually harassing a woman isn't always sexist (even though I'd imagine that in the large majority of cases sexism plays a role).
Sexual harassment ≠ Sexism
What's important to discern is the reason behind the harassment. If a man is harassing a woman because he views his gender as superior to hers, or that she's nothing more than a sexual object, then that's a pretty clear-cut case of sexism. But if a man acts inappropriately towards someone because he lacks self control/tact, has poor social skills, etc. and is only targeting that person because he's attracted to them, then it's sexual harassment.
That's not sexist. Sexism is when you act out the belief that the person of other gender is inferior to yours. Singling her out for rejecting his advances is not sexist.
That is the sort of thing that you should be able to fire people on the spot for, no severance, just get out you misogynistic entitled scum you deserve nothing from anyone.
> the question should be asked very loud and clear... "Who can access private company data, why, and for what reason?"
I am against using private github repos simply because: it's safe to assume that the NSA can access them via hardware backdoors on github's premises (as per many US ISPs), or by compromising crypto keys that github holds (as per lavabit).
It's also safe to assume that github will be legally compelled to either remain silent on this topic or lie and deny it.
It applies to any shared hosting with servers in in the US that operates above a certain scale; yes. What that certain scale is who knows, but github the most visible hosting service so is certain to be above it.
Github is great for my open source work. Everyone's allowed to see that code, even the NSA. However you can find source to LOIC on github. I'm sure that who put that there and who worked on it when would be of interest to them and form a suitable pretext for a dragnet.
That's why evil github exists, GitTor where all your low orbit ion cannon dev trees can be uploaded without metadata.
You can also use Tor to sync small github projects through ssh. Employee internal communications should all be done away from Github and encrypted if you're working on something like p2p software and worried your flippant piracy jokes might be held up in a court room one day as "proof" your project is criminal. I would always assume all comms are stored forever and available to anybody who requests them, like lawyers looking to sue you and would like all your HipChat logs.
It's just a .onion github clone to pseudoanon share booters/LOIC and other "evil" code. It was called GitTor but I guess they recently changed the name.
It's not a question of "can't", it's a question of economics.
People keep confusing targeted attacks with bulk data collection. Nobody doubts the NSA can successfully launch a targeted attack against nearly any organization.
But that's not economical to do against everyone all the time. Whereas bulk collection of unencrypted or poorly-encrypted data from the handful of biggest cloud providers and network operators is cheap and easy.
So yes -- leaving the big providers in favor of competently-managed small-scale, lesser-known providers is probably a step up in privacy.
Except that legally speaking bulk collection is even easier for NSA overseas where the Fourth Amendment doesn't apply. Given the way cloud computing works all they'd have to do is "target" the top 3 or 4 cloud-based source code hosts and get everything, and there'd be no legal defense against it.
For U.S.-based cloud infrastructure it's at least possible to take it to court (as Levison did).
So it's a pick your poison thing unfortunately. If you think you can outwit targeted surveillance then by all means use an overseas hosting provider but if they would be targeting you either way then it might actually be safer doing what The Guardian does, and using U.S. law as a shield.
> Except that legally speaking bulk collection is even easier for NSA overseas where the Fourth Amendment doesn't apply
Treating notionally allied countries as free-fire zones is a curious definition of "easy". You run this kind of risk: http://en.alalam.ir/news/1528560
And for that reason, anyone with regard to the long term would deploy that kind of thing cautiously, if at all. But I have no idea if that applies to the NSA.
It's curious, I have seen this kind of comment on HN before, essentialy saying "US law doesn't apply in other countries therefore the NSA can do anything that they want there" ignoring that other countries have their own laws, often stricter in terms of privacy. My suspicion is that this is a particularly USAian myopia, which does not bode well for the NSA. Clearly they have gotten away with for a decade or more; but it relies on goodwill and secrecy; and those reservoirs are looking very low lately.
> My suspicion is that this is a particularly USAian myopia, which does not bode well for the NSA.
I am telling you literally like it is. Whether or not you want the Fourth Amendment to apply outside of the U.S. (keeping in mind that amendment is the only part of U.S. constitutional law restricting electronic surveillance by the U.S. government anywhere in the world), the fact is that legally speaking it doesn't. I'm not telling you how the world should be here, I'm telling you how it actually is.
This is not specific to the U.S. though. Does Germany have constitutional laws forbidding them to collect intelligence from networks in France?
> Whether or not you want the Fourth Amendment to apply outside
Now you have changed the subject. The original assertion was that it was "easier" for the NSA to collect bulk data outside of the USA. If the 4th amendment was the only factor then it might be so. My point was that the 4th is not the only factor.
For another example of this, how seriously would someone like Lavabit take a US court order to hand over keys and shut up if they were based in Reykjavík?
I did actually miss that, and the purely legal aspect of it is not the whole and interesting picture. But I don't think that it makes a difference.
TAO (I.e computer network exploitation) may be easier if you possess a legal/ethical framework whereby allied counties are free-fire zones; at least up to the point when they're no longer allied.
But bulk data collection is not TAO. As far as I can see, it relies on firstly on physical access to network infrastructure, so you can put a secret room at the Phone company or copy off the network traffic off the undersea cable as it lands. This is legally easier in your own country.
Secondly it relies on legal authority over companies. US agents arrived at lavabit with a US court order to hand over the crypto keys and tell no-one. How would that play for a company based in Reykjavik? I expect that after the laughter and blog posts, a bit like this: http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/view/30559/iceland-expe...
Except, of course, when TAO allows you access to data in bulk. That was my whole point, and if you guys keep conflating legal jurisdiction, technical capabilities, and scope of effect with each other then you'll have only yourself to blame when you get outwitted and your data ends up in a database with ALLCAPS naming conventions. :P
Quite right. Even better is hosting your git yourself so that the data never leaves the premises. it is more work; but from a security point of view it's even better.
Eh, any US based hosting is potentially vulnerble to that. Even non-US based hosting is vulnerble to you being hacked by the NSA. But a company allowing non-employees access is a very different situtation.
The article claims GitHub said that the wife would "work from home". Why would a company say that a non-employee would "work from home". Why would a company allow a non-employee to get into the office that much?
This sounds a lot worse and blatant than just shoulder surfing at home.
Same exact situation for me, definitely don't want to be reading anyone else's chats or for there to be any concern that someone might be listening in.
> I mean, someone reverting your code because of a personal vendetta?
I laughed out loud when I read this and several other specific details in the story. It sounded very familiar.
I have several friends and many acquaintances who work at Valve. One very senior engineer initially worked on Source 2 about three years ago but had to quickly switch projects because another, more tenured engineer was expressing his disagreements by silently reverting some of my friend's check-ins.
The founder's wife story also reminds me of episodes I've heard involving the wife cabal. It's nothing as sinister as the GitHub story, but I see a lot of the same structural issues reflected in these telling anecdotes. The lack of an overt chain of command means that power asserts itself covertly. If you are unhappy, you have little recourse but to express your own power by indirect passive-aggressive means. That's bad enough when it happens in any corporate structure, but here it is almost the only possible course of action.
Valve might have been a lot like GitHub if it had hired inexperienced, smart, cocky web programmers in their early twenties. In both cases the companies also boast a level of success that makes it hard for them to evaluate whether elements of their company culture is detrimental to their continued development at this stage of their existence. It's probably hardest for Valve because of the inexhaustible money faucet that is Steam. There is so much squandered potential at that company, which is a weird thing to say considering how much they've done and are still doing.
I'm waiting for a hip rebranding of the term 'management' once these no-management companies realize they have issues that cannot be resolved by hiring supposedly perfect people.
It really surprises me that somebody can get away with such destructive behaviour as reverting someone else's commits without reasonable cause. What justification is there for not firing on the spot anybody who puts their own personal vendettas over the good of the project?
I once quit a senior dev role as the tech architect at the company had veto power on all code and blocked my work because I'd spelled the word dialog the US way, rather than the UK way (dialogue).
This was not in a public interface, this was in variable names.
Ignoring that every word in programming is in US English: color, gray, program.
We were deadlocked for weeks, with him refusing to ship working code that fulfilled the business goals over this single issue. Quitting resolved the deadlock, and I learned afterwards that he really did go through the work and change it all to "dialogue".
It's a good thing for hackers/programmers/engineers to be stubborn.... up to a point, but the one thing an architect should not be is stubborn.
And yet architects usually originate from promoted engineers. And that means they are stubborn, and the result is all kinds pointless conflicts with all the other developers.
The fact that the tech architect spent any time at all contemplating this issue is a massive red flag to me.
Technical Architecture should be about making the right set of trade offs given the business goals of the system being developed. That involves spending a lot of time talking to people both inside and outside of dev team about what the goals are and how the decisions that devs are making are impacting everyone else in the company. That stuff is time consuming, but if there's any time left you should really be keeping up with the latest frameworks and tools.
If you're spending your time reviewing commits and enforcing coding standards, you're doing it wrong.
It's completely OK to have such a rule, your behavior is much more disturbing. It doesn't really matter if you use UK or US english, but you should use one and that must be pressured from above. If project standard is UK you use UK, not what you like.
Quitting because of that is just stupid. In my company CS rules are almost opposite to my preferences (and to common style for that language community of course). I use every opportunity to grumble about it, but it would be much worse if everybody (me included) shaped the code based on personal preferences, not style guide.
Because the spelling wasn't the root cause it was a symptom of a culture that had gone so badly wrong that people engaged in petty arguments just as a way to score points.
To be fair, a search and replace for "dialog" would also match patterns like, y'know, "dialogue" too, at least in all the naive replace-all algos I've seen in IDEs.
So, the traditional CTRL+F, or :%s/dialog/dialogue/g would have resulted in at least some instances of 'dialoguegue' as a result. Yeah, the obvious remedy there is :%s/guegue/gue/g, but that too could lead to unintended results, etc.
Not that I don't agree with the intent of your statement, search and replace across 20k lines of code, over however many files, is likely a more involved process than it sounds like.
"dialog" as part of a variable name with underscores:
:%s/dialog_/dialogue_/g
"dialog" as part of a variable name with CamelCase:
:%s/\([dD]\)ialog\([A-Z][A-z]*\)/\1ialogue\2/g
You don't need to capture every case in a single regex substitution, you can use a handful to cover pretty much every case though. This sort of change should not take more than a few minutes max of developer time.
I don't have experience with them, but I imagine an IDE with refactoring support should make these sort of changes trivial.
I spelled it in consistency with everything else in the source code at that time... US English. It was a British company, and I understood that the UI should be UK English, but did not comprehend/believe that variables should be too. Especially as one can't force CSS to stop calling it color.
Heh, you've basically avoided fully answering this question twice, possibly because it wasn't properly phrased. Let me give it one more shot.
What was _your_ reasoning for losing a job over a completely semantic argument?
Did the illogicality of it all really irk you so much that you couldn't stand to change it? What do you mean by saying that you couldn't 'comprehend' why variables should be written in UK English? It seems pretty clear that they should be in UK English because that's what you were told to write them in... at your job...
If this happened as described then I would have loved to be a coworker watching this hilariously petty feud unfold.
> What was _your_ reasoning for losing a job over a completely semantic argument?
I wanted a reasonable work environment that was delivering product to the customers, for the business.
The work in question was 20k lines and involved the whole stack. As it bled into web page stuff that actually had calls to browser open "dialog" commands, no find and replace was going to safely work to now make it comply with the clarification on the coding standards (UK English var names). We would spend weeks changing it and re-testing, weeks in which we were not delivering it.
I felt we were no longer working for either the customer or business, when we were willing to hold back an improvement that would immediately create revenue, for a petty argument.
It wasn't the first time I'd seen this architect do that to others, but I never thought it would happen to me so long as the product was good, the code was good, deadlines were met.
I was no longer convinced it was possible to create work that wouldn't fall foul of some rule or other. And the architect had managed to position himself on the org structure outside of a chain of command, so there was no-one to appeal to.
There are too many good jobs, and good companies, that want to ship product to their customers and build a great business to even consider staying somewhere that doesn't.
I still don't think that's actually the question that was being asked. It's not, "why do you think your spelling was preferred?" but rather "given that the complaint is how inflexible the senior tech was on the issue, why were you just as inflexible?"
Particularly given that it's a UK company, the request may be arguably wrong, but it's at least semi-reasonable. Why make such a huge deal over it from either side?
Maybe he figured the work was done and wanted to move on to something else. It should have been a trivial issue, either way, and he wasn't the one making it a non-trivial issue. But the architect's propensity for blowing it out of proportion was a good signal that his working relationship with that architect was never going to be good, if something as simple as that was a problem.
I would have done the same thing. If someone is hanging your job over your head over spelling in source code, then the issue is no longer about spelling in source code. It's about dick wagging.
given that the complaint is how inflexible the senior tech was on the issue, why were you just as inflexible?"
Software engineers are a stubborn bunch. It's kind of necessary given the nature of programming. However, if promoted to an architect, stubbornness is a real problem, with little to no upside.
Architects will usually stick mostly to design and not do a lot of debugging. So that stubbornness is not useful. But it sure can rear its ugly head when it comes to pointless conflicts like this one. And the problem is, all the junior developers are also stubborn.
Welcome to software development. What you want in in a software architect is primarily a diplomat. Not someone who is stubborn.
I disagree. Before I went back to academia, I had both job titles at various times. The whole point of having someone in one of these "architect" roles is that they're supposed to be there to exercise judgment they have demonstrated to you as a company to be reliable.
If there's a disagreement that can't be resolved between the two of them, the architect is the one whose stubbornness I value more. You have managers to be diplomats. You have technical leadership to say, "they pay me more than you because they trust my judgment more than yours. I've heard your argument; I found it not compelling enough to overrule my own experience and judgment, and the decision has been made."
Ideally you have more than one such person to help surface the cases where the architect was wrong, but if you're routinely treating them as though they're no more reliable than junior developers, why are you paying them so much?
As an architect myself, I'm sure that some of the decisions I make look like bikeshedding - and maybe they are, but they're born out of a desire to make our services easier to implement and manage at scale. I do try to avoid arguments over trivia, but it's a fine line to walk. When you have a small system, the kinds of convention, indirection, and abstraction you'd see in large ones don't make a lot of sense, except when it comes time to scale out.
did you know about rule before start writing piece of code in question ? If yes, I really don't see how you can say in good faith that it wasn't your mistake to be fixed.
I once worked at a company that made code to be owned by the gov't of Canada. I'm not sure if the government imposed the rules, but we did have strict rules to use Canadian word versions. Though this was like 1999 so I'd be shocked if that's still the case.
Edit: not to imply a reason for the noted situation, just an example to lend some credence/reasoning elsewhere
Sounds like two stubborn people. Unless you were taking a "stand" to make a point about a larger issue I don't see that you did anything better to fulfill the business goals.
At the time he was viewed as critical to the project. They indulged him. A very steady stream of very good devs leaving the company occurred because of such invented rules and irrational behaviour. He was a truly great dev, but a fairly insane architect and gatekeeper.
Since these were variable names they didn't have to be real words. So you should have explained that your "dialog" was not the American spelling of "dialogue", but a nonsense non-word that you made up (that happened to be spelled the same way as the American version of "dialogue").
At Sun, where there was a structured management chain, there was a time when one of the folks in my group reverted a big chunk of changes I had committed, and I went to our common manager and demanded satisfaction. The response was 'if we left them in he threatened to quit, there isn't anything we can do', and the only conclusion from that statement was that if one of us quit, the manager would rather it were me than this other person. Needless to say it was really annoying.
They're not crazy, and it only works if they have more political capital than you do. If I was forced to accept substandard work, and had no other choice but either maintain that bad code, or quit, I'd threaten to quit too.
No, they are crazy. Reverting someone else's changes without explaining why is crazy. No one is telling these people they can't explain their actions.
If any of these people has a disagreement with a co-worker over the co-worker's changes, it's their duty as a fellow employee to explain to the co-worker why they disagree, or at least explain to the manager why they disagree with the change, so that the manager can explain it to the co-worker. But just making the change and then threatening to quit... that is most definitely crazy.
Just want to clarify that my response here is not related to the GitHub story. I have no knowledge of the circumstances that aren't in the story.
> No, they are crazy.
That may be.
> Reverting someone else's changes without explaining why is crazy.
Not necessarily. There are times when you are so wrong you aren't even wrong.
> If any of these people has a disagreement with a co-worker over the co-worker's changes, it's their duty as a fellow employee to explain to the co-worker why they disagree, or at least explain to the manager why they disagree with the change, so that the manager can explain it to the co-worker.
Let's imagine a scenario where they had done this, and yet nothing had corrected the problem. At that point, it would be quite reasonable to revert someone's changes without explaining why, and threatening to quit if one wasn't allowed to.
> If you are so wrong you aren't even wrong, there are bigger problems at play and you probably shouldn't be working in that position in the first place.
Which is precisely why it would be eminently reasonable to quit, and therefore reasonable to threaten to quit.
> But in that scenario, whether or not you quit should not be contingent upon whether or not the change is kept, it should be whether or not you have to continue to work with that person.
Right, but anything less than reverting the change means you have to put up with the person, which again... is why one might threaten to quit.
Well in this particular case it was pretty much all politics. Had it been about the code it would have had a different outcome.
The person making the threat felt they were immune from backlash, but they were threatened by where I was working in the code base because they lacked the expertise to compete on a technical level. What I found even more interesting was that our mutual manager felt that his position was an even more tenuous political position so he wasn't going to do anything he wasn't told to do by someone above him in the chain of command.
If someone working for me threatens to quit, I first ask them if their issue can be resolved rationally, and if it can't I ask them when will their last day be. But that is because even if my boss then comes to me and says "You told this guy who is friends with <important person> to quit? Your fired!" I am totally ok with that. Not everyone is.
To look at the flip side though as to whether I screwed up or not, I'm reasonably self aware enough to know when I do. And prior to this incident going 'nuclear', as it did, I had come at it from several different directions to try to eliminate bias. Every third party consulted felt my reasoning was pretty sound. But we all know that being "right" doesn't mean you get what you want in a politicized environment. Just ask the Ukrainians living in Crimea, life is what it is. We move past it.
> It really surprises me that somebody can get away with such destructive behaviour as reverting someone else's commits without reasonable cause. What justification is there for not firing on the spot anybody who puts their own personal vendettas over the good of the project?
And yet it happens everywhere. The question is what narratives can be told about it more than what actually happened.
If Evil Coder sends an email to Noble Coder describing the vendetta-motivated reversions, then sure, something might happen. When would it ever be so obvious, however? If this is done quietly, and Noble happens to work in different parts of the codebase every cycle, she might not even realize the reversions have occurred for a few cycles. Even then, many people would assume there was some fair-minded rationale the first few times. After it is clear that something is going on, Noble can make a stink, but she might also just want to cut her losses and make a lateral move.
Hmm. I suppose that's a disadvantage of having a less formal code-review process, compared to one in which the reverter would have to specify a reason for each reversion, making it easier to detect spurious reversions.
You'd think that a site like GitHub would have mandated code review for all commits by now. Especially after that time a few years ago when they managed to accidentally delete all the pull requests in the entire site, or something like that!
Wait, they're a ruby shop, they don't even believe in letting the compiler help you avoid making basic mistakes. dons flame-retardant suit
I used to think managers were worthless ... And then I had a bad one, and figured out the hard way how much bullshit a good manager insulates his developers from.
> The founder's wife story also reminds me of episodes I've heard involving the wife cabal. It's nothing as sinister as the GitHub story, but I see a lot of the same structural issues reflected in these telling anecdotes.
If you are male and a founder, one of your most valuable business resources is your wife. People will call me sexist for saying this, I expect, but women think socially with a level of complexity that I think most men never approach. If you are a man, chances are your wife does more to build the business than you ever do.
I see nothing wrong with the involvement of founders' wives in the business.
> The lack of an overt chain of command means that power asserts itself covertly.
Thats the whole point of bossless environments and both their greatest strength and their greatest weakness.
> In both cases the companies also boast a level of success that makes it hard for them to evaluate whether elements of their company culture is detrimental to their continued development at this stage of their existence.
I don't think any company can evaluate that. Culture arises from the grass roots and that means that the floor employees are the ones who ultimately decide company culture.
> I'm waiting for a hip rebranding of the term 'management' once these no-management companies realize they have issues that cannot be resolved by hiring supposedly perfect people.
I don't understand why saying, "people will call me sexist for this" immediately validates your statement as "not intended to be sexist".
>"If you are male and a founder, one of your most valuable business resources is your wife. People will call me sexist for saying this, I expect, but women think socially with a level of complexity that I think most men never approach."
It's pretty clearly a sexist statement is it not? Am I confused about what makes a statement sexist?
Does that entire paragraph not just objectify the wife and establish differences between the sexes based on anecdotal experience?
>"If you are a man, chances are your wife does more to build the business than you ever do."
And this one doesn't even really make sense(as in where are you pulling this random ass statement from), not to mention stating it as, "If you are a founder, chances are your spouse does more to build the business than you ever do." feels literally 10x better to me(even if it still sounds false). Even the punctuation in that sentence makes the word man stand out when it could have easily been written without said punctuation.(well without the comma at least :-p ).
I realize this is super overly sensitive by the way. I normally wouldn't comment, I had already posted "this post really bothers me somehow" though, and felt an explanation was warranted. Definitely curious if anyone else felt the same.
Lastly, I'm a 21 year old white male; the only adversity I've ever faced is being called a ginger, so don't think this is coming from a longstanding feminist, just a human.
To be honest, I am living in a very different culture now from the US culture where social gender roles are more significant but also somewhat flexible. I do expect the post to bother Americans because it goes against what I call the myth of interchangeability, the idea that gender equality necessarily reduces to the idea that the sexes are interchangeable. I don't believe this and I think that equality has to be more substantive than this because interchangeability tends to mean that a male-normative model gives you hidden sexism. Exhibit A is Marissa Mayer's maternity leave duration. There is nothing equal about that.
The point is that when you look cross-culturally and cross-historically, where you don't have women certain things like rule of law don't happen (you see this develop in the American West for example as gender rates stopped being so lopsided).
I would suggest that recognizing that the genders do have differences in terms of social aptitudes and needs, and different positions relative to life choices is the first step in reducing the male-normative view on our economic model (i.e. "if you work like a man, and wait to have kids like a man, you will get paid like a man").
> the myth of interchangeability, the idea that gender equality necessarily reduces to the idea that the sexes are interchangeable.
This always drove me insane - people seem to confuse value equality/congruence and strict identicality. The latter seems to either try to create a female default and punish men for not living up to it, or create some weird fuzzy default that nobody really fits comfortably.
What we want is to say that women are as valuable as men, and then let individuals figure out who they want to be.
The answer isn't to change the (currently relatively male-normative) norm, it's to defenstrate the idea that having a norm in the first place is a remotely good idea.
> This always drove me insane - people seem to confuse value equality/congruence and strict identicality. The latter seems to either try to create a female default and punish men for not living up to it, or create some weird fuzzy default that nobody really fits comfortably.
It creates a female default and punishes men for not living up to it in some areas (like public school in the US), but it creates a male default and punishes women for not living up to it in other areas (academic careers in life sciences, the job market, etc).
> The answer isn't to change the (currently relatively male-normative) norm, it's to defenstrate the idea that having a norm in the first place is a remotely good idea.
Agreed.
> What we want is to say that women are as valuable as men, and then let individuals figure out who they want to be.
Agreed here too. The question then is, how we address this.
> Does that entire paragraph not just objectify the wife
Objectify is a really overused term that has lost all relevant meaning. How can saying that someone is better than you at something possibly objectify that person? Maybe I'm overly sensible as well, but it's really sad that this is where PC has led us.
I think it might bother you because the author assumes that's his own inability to navigate complex social relationships is innate to his maleness. In fact, many men are adept at understanding social and emotional subtexts very well. There's no magnitude-order difference in innate ability as described, or if there is, it's not a permanent, unlearnable gulf.
This comment bothered me because OP is fetishizing and tokenizing women in a way that purports to be admiring and supportive of them. In fact, he simply has weak social skills; for example, this post.
See, the problem is that the people who complain about this are also the ones who say it's valuable to add women to a group of men (or indeed the reverse), because it results in more balanced decision making.
It can't be both. Either men or women are (as groups, i.e. averages) innately differ on the social vs analytical axis, and diversity is a net plus, or gender is entirely socially constructed, and adding women to a group shouldn't do anything in aggregate.
Studies point to the former rather than the latter.
Stupid analogy: I hate it that only tall people seem to design store displays of pants. Remarkably, tall people don't seem to notice that putting the small sizes on the top shelves and the larger sizes lower does not make sense. It's because they have a different experience of reaching for things on shelves. Height diversity, though, makes for a better user experience.
It is true in my stupid analogy that tall people and short people do have genetic differences, as on average they innately differ in height. But it is not their innate genetic traits that makes these tall people ignorant both on the social and analytical axes when designing store displays.
There's a big difference between "on average, women are more socially adept while men are more mathematically adept" and "women socially understand things at a level most men will never achieve". The former is a statement about averages; the latter is a statement about absolutes.
It's okay to make generalizations based on imperfect correlates - like gender - as long as you understand they're generalizations, and are open to revising your judgment if new, more specific information appears. The comment that sparked this thread didn't evidence any of that understanding.
You have a weird definition of 'innate'. Socially constructed effects are still effects. You still want a mix of people that have different traits and skills, even if they have nothing to do with biology.
So your demand of advocates of inclusiveness is to either a) concede that their support for female participation stems from a belief in the existence of a sensory mode or organ which only females have; or b) concede that women have nothing to offer which cannot be replicated by men and therefore there is no need to include them?
You can't see a third possibility in between those two?
> Does that entire paragraph not just objectify the wife and establish differences between the sexes based on anecdotal experience?
Re objectification: couples get advice from their life partners. That doesn't mean this is their life partners only goal.
Re: 'establish differences between the sexes based on anecdotal experience' is there anything ethically wrong with this? Would you prefer a citation be added, eg, 'newborn female infants stare at faces more often than male newborn infants'?
Or do you find the mere existence of differences between the sexes to be 'offensive'? In which case, you're more than welcome to be offended.
>Re objectification: couples get advice from their life partners. That doesn't mean this is their life partners only goal.
Completely true, valid point.
>Re: 'establish differences between the sexes based on anecdotal experience' is there anything ethically wrong with this?
I would argue that there is something ethically wrong with this. Take this statement:
>" women think socially with a level of complexity that I think most men never approach."
Yeah, on it's face it's a compliment(I guess?), but all it really serves to do, in this context,(for me, might read totally different to you) is illustrate the differences between the two sexes. Where's any evidence that his assertion is true?
Anecdotal evidence is by definition flawed. I don't really understand where you're failing to see the potential for harm in this.
> Would you prefer a citation be added, eg, 'newborn female infants stare at faces more often than male newborn infants'?
Do you have a source stating that females raised in the same environment as males exhibited a higher level of social complexity? Because, yes, I would like to see that before changing my worldview based upon this persons statement.
>Or do you find the mere existence of differences between the sexes to be 'offensive'? In which case, you're more than welcome to be offended.
Not at all; what I find offensive is when people try to extrapolate meaning and form social constructs based upon differences that often aren't conclusively proven or even relevant.
When I'm talking about these differences I don't mean boy-penis girl-vagina, I mean boy-brave/courageous/smart girl-cute/supportive/geeky.
In my opinion these social constructs are already so ingrained in our society that this will be just as long and drawn out a problem as racism. I mean just define Masculine and Feminine in your head.
I'm not trying to make a point here, or to white-knight, my original response was just how that post genuinely made me feel, I didn't like it.
This study is so flawed as to be scientifically worthless.
The experimenter who was interacting with the babies and measuring the time they spent staring at faces knew the gender of each baby - in other words, it wasn't double blind. This is a well known recipe for allowing the experimenter's bias to influence their recording of the results. This is just one of several basic flaws in the study; see the analysis starting on page 113 of Cordelia Fine's "Delusions of Gender."
"Delusions of Gender" has lots of similar analyses of the research "proving" innate gender differences. The takedown of Louann Brizendine's references starting on page 158 and the one about the frozen salmon MRIs on page 150 are particularly hilarious. One example:
"Casually, Brizendine notes, 'All of the therapists who showed these responses happened to be women.' For some reason, she fails to mention that this is because only female therapists, selected from phone directories, happened to be recruited for the study."
Not being double blind doesn't make it scientifically worthless.
Not does it invalidate male/female roles being consistent across over 200 cultures.
If you accept that men build muscle different from women, and have different hormones, could you not also accept that the differences in gray/white matter proportions, size etc are not 'cultural'?
> Re objectification: couples get advice from their life partners. That doesn't mean this is their life partners only goal.
Women objectification is about treating a woman like an object, a belonging, a resource.
As it turns out, the person writing the parent comment defined a founder's wife as "one of your most valuable business resources". That person should have said, "some of your most valuable business insights will come from your wife". It wouldn't be objectification, but it would still establish differences between the sexes based on anecdotal experience.
Assuming unproven differences between the sexes to be true has always been ethically borderline from a scientific perspective. From a social perspective, it artificially deters persons of each sex from doing something which is then implicitly considered "unnatural" for them.
Things look different removed from context. In this case, the relevant context is the history of marriage as a property agreement arranged between the husband and the father of the bride.
There are plenty of scientifically well-documented cognitive differences between men and women, though the OP doesn't sound informed on them, and yes it is considered impolite to know about them if you're not working in a psychological research lab.
> If you are male and a founder, one of your most valuable business resources is your wife.
Um, I'd say that your spouse (of whichever gender) is one of your most valuable business resources, period - if they're someone who can hear your side of the story who aren't actually involved in the situation and someone who knows you better than you know yourself.
But that person should never proceed to involve themselves in your business situation, unless your colleagues approve of their involvement. That appears to be the issue here.
If your spouse is helping contribute to the business on that level, you should hire them. Otherwise you're really doing a disservice to everyone by having your spouse work without compensation or recognition.
"I see nothing wrong with the involvement of founders' wives in the business"
This is nuts.
If person A works at a company then obviously their significant other (male or female) will likely talk with them about work situations and that may be more or less helpful to A and the company. But the idea that as a general rule a female significant other's contribution will be so significant just by virtue of the "level of complexity" of the "social thinking" is just absurd.
therom reading the article, I got the vibe that the wife may have felt innatelyterritoriallyly?) threatened by the thought of a (pretty) female in the company getting close with her founder husband in a more intimate, rather than professional, typofof way. Thoughts?
If you are male and a founder, one of your most valuable business resources is your wife.
If you are a male founder, you might not be married and you might not be straight. Also, one way to kill romance is to tell your significant other that they are your most valuable business resource.
>> The lack of an overt chain of command means that power asserts itself covertly.
> Thats the whole point of bossless environments and both their greatest strength and their greatest weakness.
What, their point is to encourage death-match power struggles? And that's their strength?
In nature, the fittest survive, but that's because nature is cruel (indifferent, actually). But a business must nurture its employees and make them feel safe – not send them into a battlefield.
If you are male and a founder, one of your most valuable business resources is your wife. People will call me sexist for saying this, I expect, but women think socially with a level of complexity that I think most men never approach. If you are a man, chances are your wife does more to build the business than you ever do.
I've definitely seen this in the past. At startups where I've worked or friends have worked, the founder's wives have played important support roles in ways that are easy to observe but hard to quantify.
When one spouse is a startup founder, then it's a true "family effort" whether the other spouse likes it or not. And if it's "or not" ... well, then, that substantially hinders the chances of success.
Getting outside counsel on your business decisions is one thing, but either dispatching an outsider to internal business affairs as your hatchetperson or having them take it upon themselves to do so is not good business. As seen in Exhibit A, the original article.
I guess I'm too jaded, but I question getting married. If
you hit the lottery and you become a successful Founder, your wife will own 1/2 of all those aching hours sitting
in front of that screen. If she's the type of chick that
will stick with you when you loose everything and work
the paint booth at HD, by all means marry her, but those
women just don't exist anymore. Women look at men so
differently than we judge them--it's not worth taking a chance.
I seriously hope you consider rethinking this position. There are a tremendous number of incredible women in the world, and most of them are not looking for a sugar daddy. Many women also work hard for their careers, passions, or some combination of both, and understand that both success and failure happen.
I will also say that in many instances, if you have this opinion about women (or any group of persons), it's probably somewhat evident in your interactions with them, and you may not be treated quite as well as you would be otherwise. This can be self-reinforcing, but unfortunately the responsibility lies with you to pull yourself out of it and get some perspective.
If you don't, well, get a strong pre-nup, I guess, or stay single forever.
What advantages would marriage provide over a non-legal partnership? The latter seems to carry all of the benefits of marriage without any of the risks.
If one person is drawing a paycheck and another is supporting them in that role, then the supporter is putting in a ton of resources, but if the marriage ends, the breadwinner owns the entire "career". So the breadwinner reaps the long term benefits of the career, and the supporter loses everything but whatever skills they gained.
For the supporter, the advantage of legal marriage—where the supporter owns half the assets plus some rights to future earnings—is obvious. Smart, capable supporters know this, and won't make that investment without legal protections. Anything else would be reckless.
The advantage to the breadwinner is that this is a way to get a smart, capable supporter. If you're not willing to provide the legal protections, you're just going to get someone who doesn't really understand the situation and doesn't understand the risks. There's some chance you could find someone who was generally capable, but who was naïve on this point, but that's a smaller dating pool. And I'd argue it's ethically wrong, and the unfairness will eventually degrade the quality of the relationship.
People think alimony is just someone sucking someone dry while doing no work, but it's really just a dividend being paid out from a shared venture that you were both equal partners in.
If someone believed that they could attain a smart, capable supporter without offering those legal protections, however, then you agree that it would be rational for them not to provide those protections, right?
Not to mention the sizable portion of men who don't care about the intelligence/capability of their partner, or those who don't believe that wanting a legal upper hand correlates positively with the type of intelligence/capability that they desire.
To name a few: Joint filing of tax returns, Medicare, Social Security, immigration and residency for partners from other countries, sick leave to care for partner.
In your 20s its fine, put off getting married, but the 40 something guy who introduces you to his girlfriend sends a totally different signal than someone who introduces you to his wife (and vice versa if the genders are swapped). It says you're noncommittal, bad at relationships, maybe previously divorced, constantly shopping around, maybe breached partners trust repeatedly, whatever, take your pick. What it never says when someone is judging your book by its cover though is "this is just some guy who's been hedging against marital risk for a couple decades", any other snap judgement requires the person know you better.
The US government will help them take half your property after a breakup even without a marriage license, if they determine you were "acting married" so to speak.
That's a fair question. I think the biggest benefit would be the recognition of commitment, both by the partners, their families, coworkers, etc., zooming out ad infinitum. It can make a lot of things easier, from a practical perspective--for example, in my line of work there are a lot of couples (shared drive and passion, assortative mating), and employers will often create a second job for the spouse of a person they really want to hire. I think that sort of similar things can apply in other situations. If you, say, want to see your partner in the hospital or have certain other rights it's easier if you're legally bound to said partner.
See the recent arguments about same-sex marriage for a fulsome discussion...
I chose marriage, because I was really f'ing excited about calling my partner my wife. Now, I am really proud to call her that. Note that financially, she is far more well-off than me, but we have similar lifetime earnings potential. YMMV.
You couldn't be more wrong. If you don't know any women who treat their spouses as other people, who have ups and downs, women who can't take "for richer or for poorer" seriously, then you're in the wrong social circles.
Hell, my wife has offered to let me quit my job, where I make nearly twice as much as her (her electrical engineering salary would be enough to get us by), just so I can work on art full time, because she knows it will make me happier. I haven't, yet, because I also want her to be happy and I'm not so unhappy with my work yet that I can't earn us some more savings and hopefully make an exit for both of us.
> One very senior engineer initially worked on Source 2 about three years ago but had to quickly switch projects because another, more tenured engineer was expressing his disagreements by silently reverting some of my friend's check-ins.
Wow. Just wow. This pisses me off especially, because to make it as a freelancer I've had to work damn hard to develop self-discipline, maturity, and reverse a path of self-destructive behaviour.
To see people in senior positions act like complete fucking children irritates me to no end, and I will do everything in my power to stop this when I run a company.
Does anyone know, with regards to employment law, whether it's ok to include provisions that allow us to fire or at least demote, for people acting like nasty, immature human beings?
It may well be that the greatest damage to GitHub here is not on the issue of sexism so much as their advocacy of lean management and organizational "freedom".
Although it may have sounded like the "cool teacher" way to address things by having your wife take an employee out for drinks to discuss grievances, clearly this should have been handled in a professional setting according to a clear grievance process. That could have led directly to policy changes (e.g. keep pull request comments professional, have management review reverts) and nipped the problem in the bud instead of getting Really Fucking Weird. That goes for any grievances against her as well, instead of being vented on Secret.
Even GitHub's VC backer (A16Z) has blogged about the need to have clear process when it comes to HR stuff.
Actually, this struck me as purely a "remember who you're talking to" problem - the team were used to a more aggressive level of language than the new hire was, so what should've happened is that the team should've learned to make the same strength of point with less aggressive words and the new hire should've worked to take aggressive words less to heart. Being as I'm a blunt bastard, I've been through this a fair few times with employees and contributors.
This is not a gendered problem, this is a 'loud brash people' versus 'quieter nicer people' problem. The reason people try and make it gendered is because, at least on average from the people I've worked with, women are more likely to be 'quieter nicer people' - but the truth, honestly, is that rather than anti-women this is a 'no structured group exists to stand up for the quieter nicer men so they go unnoticed' situation.
I've had to unpick these issues with all combinations of people.
> have management review reverts
Actually, just having a manager take him aside and say "dude, you're being a dick and either you stop it right fucking now or there will be consequences that you're really not going to enjoy" should be sufficient. Shadowcat is a relatively flat org but we have just enough hierarchy that there are people who can absolutely do that.
Sadly, the article goes back to the founder's wife problem (which, omgwtf, but that's been analyzed to death upthread) so we don't know whether it was reported (of course, dependending on who she'd've needed to report it to, that may've been difficult ...)
I don't think it matters whether it was reported. Unless the founder gives his wife an explicit role and tells employees where he ends and she beings, it's fair to assume that low-level employees are going to assume he is fully aware of her interactions, and she is acting as his right hand.
I realize that's a lot of assumptions, but that's why the founder needs to get out in front of these things and make them explicit.
Diversity exists on many axis, and personality types are an important form of it just as much as gender is.
I find your use of 'more diverse' to mean 'more gender balanced' distasteful, because privileging gender roles as important like that is a huge part of the problem.
The point is, in the lean management organization you don't really have someone to take you aside and tell you to stop being a dick.
This is especially problematic when trying to overcome culturally calcified gender discrimination. What you're describing as being a "blunt bastard" could very well come off as male-privileged locker room talk. In the sports world there have been numerous attempts to contort locker room talk as somehow gender neutral, just a function of personality, some women talk that way, not all men do, and so forth. These arguments miss the forest for the trees: there does exist a culture of male privilege that is overwhelmingly less welcoming to women.
But how do we distinguish between this possibility, and the possibility that we are treating women as delicate flowers who can't deal with 'bad words' or blunt criticism?
In the Victorian era, until relatively recent times, men were expected to refrain from swearing or discussing 'serious' subjects such as war or politics when 'ladies were present'.
The usage (or not) of blunt words of criticism or profanity in informal company documents (e.g. code comments, pull requests) isn't necessarily a gendered thing. It speaks to the company's culture, but it nevertheless feels like a step backward to suggest the corporate equivalent of "gentlemen need to mind their language when ladies are around".
> These arguments miss the forest for the trees: there does exist a culture of male privilege that is overwhelmingly less welcoming to women.
Where there are problems that affect both genders, they should be tackled as that - treating a 'loud people' versus 'quiet people' problem as a male privilege problem is unbelievably problematic since it plays into the 'women just can't cope with men being honest' bullshit, and ignores the fact that men can be quiet and women can be loud. This devalues women's contributions and effectively silences discourse about how to deal with quiet men and loud women (and in this tale the latter was a big part of the problem), and basically is a net negative for everybody except the loud men, thereby reinforcing gender role designations and privilege structures.
> What you're describing as being a "blunt bastard" could very well come off as male-privileged locker room talk.
And in that case, once again, I've failed at "remember who you're talking to". The manner in which I LART somebody if it's necessary is tailored to the person, because people are all different.
> The point is, in the lean management organization you don't really have someone to take you aside and tell you to stop being a dick.
Given that Shadowcat has next to no hierarchy and yet we do have somebody - me - I'm not entirely sure how to respond to that except perhaps to say 'oh, bother' and disappear in a puff of logic.
You're bending over backwards to avoid admitting sexism exists in tech. That's like saying both men and women engage in locker room talk, so there's no sexism in professional sports and in fact it's sexist to imply that women can't handle locker room talk. We've heard that one before.
> You're bending over backwards to avoid admitting sexism exists in tech.
I'm saying that sometimes the answer is to remember that people are different full stop rather than jump straight to gender as the key difference, which may give you a mistaken analysis of the problem. If you have a situation that disadvantages quiet nice people and most of your quiet nice people are women, this results in negative outcomes for women but the best path to a solution is to figure out how to fix it for -all- quiet nice people.
I've made no claim either way in this thread so far as to whether sexism exists in tech - what I've done is to point out certain things that were cultural/management fuckups in general rather than specifically sexist, and to suggest that calling them what they are will make them easier to fix. It seems reasonably likely to be true that the origin of the bias against 'quiet nice people' comes out of gender roles, but that which is sanely classifiable as structural sexism at an institutional and cultural level by the time it manifests at the ground level is hurting everybody holding those personality traits and is therefore best dealt with as it is.
Or: Patriarchy theory is a useful analysis tool but I'm damned if I'm going to try and teach it to everybody if I can get results at least as effective much more quickly by making them realise they're being an asshole to nice people.
Honestly, I would rate the probability as pretty high that the culture also has a sexism problem, and that there will be plenty of issues that are best addressed in those terms, but that's orthogonal to the point I was trying to make.
theorique, it's like asking whether complimenting someone passing on the street is a nice sweet thing to do or outrageously sexist. You could come up with rationalizations either way. But it's ultimately about the environment that it creates and how women (or minorities) feel in it. And that's up to the women, not the dudes rationalizing the status quo.
Apparently, organizational freedom for a bunch of young guys tends to breed sexism and abuse. I've always thought there's trouble ahead for a company whose blog is mostly a drinking journal (although this appears to no longer be the case).
I've seen similar fallouts in a strictly hierarchical organization when one of the leading managers started having an affair with one of the lower rank project management trainees. HR was powerless, since the manager outranked them. Project management was powerless since the now-de-facto promoted trainee was backed by their superior. In the end, the developers revolted and threatened to quit, so the owner personally had to resolve the conflict. [1]
To me, the story sounds of a critical failure in some decision making positions, something that happens over and over and over again every day, we just don't get to hear it.
[1] The trainee was forced to leave, for all that are curious.
"HR was powerless, since the manager outranked them."
That right there is a scary sentence. Sure, HR shouldn't dictate everything (hiring developers, for example) but No one should be exempt from rules about how to treat other employees.
Valid question, so I'll elaborate a little: Imagine a trainee project manager without formal CS education that is immune to professional criticism by other managers, because she gets told by the boss (and lover) that she's doing perfectly fine and all other are just jealous for the de-facto promotion. This, flanked by threats to everybody that would voice criticism towards her makes for a very bad situation. She received responsibility for a team with a task that would be enough for a seasoned manager and she failed hard - not because she was stupid, but because she never had a chance. All blame for any failure was directed to the developers, so at some point they revolted.
That makes perfect sense. I guess when I imagine a realtionship I assume the couple is smart enough to know that discipline etc is outside the bounds of their relationship, eg, the senior partner won't help the junior partner because they know it will ultimately fuck up both the the company and the relationship.
Thinking about it, assuming everyone knows that is naive. Point conceded.
An organisation without management basically relies on having people who all act rationally all the time and in the best interest of the company as a whole.
The problem is that not many people like that exist and can be recruited. For a sufficiently small organisation peer pressure and a clear-cut common goal may help smooth over the imperfections of the individuals involved. But once the organisation grows to a certain level, those forces will start losing their effectiveness and you require a substitute to ensure reasonably smooth operations.
I think the key take away is that there is no perfect organisational structure. All you can do is to find a structure that works best for the current situation, but you need to be prepared to make changes if your organisation's current stage of development requires it.
I think the article you mention is Ben Horowitz's blog on 'How to Minimize Politics in Your Company'[1]. It's a great read and also has advice for CEOs dealing with disputes between executives.
I've always been broadly under the impression that the HR department was a waste of air, but I suppose conflict resolution is perhaps something they'd be useful for.
HR, legal, finance and IT are all unpopular for the same reason: it's part of their job to stop you doing things that may get the company in trouble later.
Of course, this means they may be at times too conservative in the interests of having an easy life. Doesn't mean they're not useful at all.
I find myself almost perpetually annoyed by the bureaucratic arms of big organisations, HR and IT in particular, but what you've written is, in my view, a (terrible ;-)) truth.
I think a balance of conservative and progressive opinion is required for almost any organisation to operate effectively: (genunie) progressives drive us forward, and (genuine) conservatives stop us going over the cliff - it is pretty much as simple as that. Unfortunately, finding the appropriate balance for any particular situation can be extremely tricky, so largely we get it wrong, and just stumble along, grumbling to ourselves about how stupid and ineffective everything is.
On the assumption that there are genuine problems within Github, hopefully this situation will at least give them a chance to engage in a bit of rebalancing, and find a more sustainable path for their future. This is, of course, the problem of solving problems by trial and error - you have to deal with the errors, and in cases like this the errors can be quite painful for the people involved.
My takeaway is that the most important aspect is process. Conservative or progressive may be less important (although it is probably easier to come up with a conservative process that is workable, simply because that's where the hive-mind will be). But if you don't even have documented process, you won't even be able to know where the problems really are when they arise.
IT isn't unpopular when done right. IT exists to help people get shit done, and they need to explain clearly when they can't why they can't. And can't better have a business reason (higher priorities, funding channeled elsewhere, etc.).
The problem with legal is that the safe position is always "no". So, finding legal who understands that businesses sometimes have to take a risk, and we need to know if this is "illegal" as opposed to "inadvisable, because it's going to cost money" as opposed to "inadvisable, because it might cost money but might be worth the payoff" is not easy.
HR is simply useless. It's only useful tasks are all effectively part of "legal". It can't make useful decisions on hiring and actually gets in the way. Any employee with a genuine grievance knows that HR is the companies rep, not yours. Oh, and they generally have access to a whole bunch of things that stir up hideous amounts of politics (salaries, reviews, promotions, etc.) So, what's left that's useful? Nothing.
At my previous job I thought the same thing. They didn't stop people being bullied by superiors and basically did nothing but exit interviews and layoffs. The entire company was really dysfunctional.
At my current job HR is _supremely_ competent. The entire organization is more functional and a joy to work for. I think there are subtle but significant effects when people know that it is not okay to behave in a bullying or discriminatory manner because HR takes those things seriously.
The main job of HR is prevent the company from entering lawsuits with (former) employees. Anything else is just window dressing. Most HR organizations like to act like they are an impartial judge in conflict situations, but they're on the company payroll after all.
So while for a single employee HR might seem like a waste of air, it's elementary for any business with a reasonable number of employees.
While you are right to note that the person signing your checks holds many of the strings, it is also true that each employee is an autonomous unit with values that they live by and advocate for, resources that they control and steward, and a contract for value exchanged.
An HR department absolutely works to protect the company, but a good HR department will also work to protect the employees, because in the long view that is also beneficial to the company. And many HR people who I've talked to specifically enjoy their jobs because they like working to make employees lives better. Where their directives conflict with that they will try to fight the directives.
Certainly in some cases where there is a unresolvable conflict between employee and employer, HR will work against the employee. But for a good HR department those situations should be very few. A good HR department will be able to project forward into a long enough view that they can find ways to move forward amicably that protect both the employee and the employer, to everyone's benefit.
Well there is also a whole bunch of really boring mundane tasks that take a lot of time, such as setting up and supporting health insurance plans, getting people into various directories, organizing the interviews, etc etc. I may look down on HR at times but boy am I glad we have them to do these things.
Past a certain size, it's nice to have an HR professional managing the company's treatment of its employees. It's also nice to have a third party/person available for conflict management.
When a line manager decides to make sure an employee stops doing something, it's actually several conversations:
1. A friendly conversation in which the manager points out the problem, establishes that they expect it to stop, but that if it stops immediately it'll all be forgotten.
2. A less friendly conversation in which the manager says I thought we were clear that you aren't supposed to do it. You're still doing it, WTF? Depending on the problem maybe the employee has some reason/excuse and you need to do something to help them with it/remove it as an excuse.
If the employee is the cynical type, the aim is to establish that while you have an incentive to keep him (because you want good employees on your team), now you've taken a stance on his behaviour, letting him walk all over you would harm your reputation as a competent manager, so the incentive to keep him isn't the only one.
3. A conversation where you tell them you've started the ball rolling on getting rid of them. It's nothing personal, but the employee's actions mean your hands are tied. You've already cleared it with political allies they have at the company who could stop it. Here are the numbers of some recruiters if they'd prefer to jump before they're pushed.
Regarding conversation number 3. Why give a hostile employee time to retaliate? Just give them the choice of resigning or being fired, but make both effective immediately.
GOT fans will remember Ned Stark made a similar mistake.
A) If you push people to make a choice immediately, they may out of emotion make a choice (firing) that is more costly for you.
B) The whole point of conversation 3 is that it's true; by this point, you need to know for sure that the political situation is under your control. To go even more GOT on this - Ned bargained as if he were in a position of strength, when his position was in fact very shaky.
You've already cleared it with political allies they have at the company who could stop it.
If I found out that a manager was undermining me in this way, I'd strike back and it probably wouldn't be good for me or him. Trying to turn my friends against me? That's war. I'd fuck him up and I'd keep fucking him up after the end of that job.
Letting an employee go isn't personal. Reaching out to his "political allies" to undermine him is personal. If you want me off your team, I'll leave. If you try to stop a transfer by corrupting people who like me, then I'm going to fuck up your shit, and it's totally personal.
All that said, no organization should be in a state where a truly toxic person can be protected by having a political power base. If you can't fire someone who's genuinely causing problems (e.g. harassment) without bringing that person's political power base into the equation, you have a dysfunctional organization.
This sort of thing is why companies should fire fast and be generous with severance instead of writing dishonest "performance improvement plans" that essentially mean an already-fired employee gets a month to come in to the office and still wreak havoc. It's better to err on the side of a bad employee getting an "undeserved" severance package than to have "walking dead" employees pissing all over morale. Once it's clear that the only move is to fire someone, it's best to do it quickly. Severance (enough to cover a typical job search) is actually very cheap when you consider the risk and misery (for the manager and team) involved in a PIP or paper trail.
If I found out that a manager was undermining me in this
way, I'd strike back and it probably wouldn't be good for
me or him.
Allow me to clarify: Before you make a threat (such as to fire someone) you need to make sure the threat is credible.
This is for exactly the reason you say: If you openly try but fail to get rid of someone, they may take it personally and try to "fuck up your shit".
If there's someone who can stop your threat (e.g. the employee is buddies with your boss) you go to that someone, lay out the problem and what you see as the options for solving it, and ask them for their advice. This advice will either be "go ahead" or "I'll take care of it"; in the latter case you should allow some time for them to take care of it.
My point is that you should never threaten to fire someone. Once the decision is made, you should do it.
Yes, this means you'll have to pay a severance because there is no paper trail. A typical severance (enough to cover the expected length of a job search) is a small cost, considering what you're getting in the deal: non-litigation, non-disparagement, minimal drama, and the employee moved out the same day.
1 - please (do/don't do) X. Hopefully this takes care of things.
2 - I said (do/don't do) X. why the fuck are you (not doing / doing) X. Now I'm unhappy, but again, hopefully this is the end of things and the employee starts doing / not doing X.
3 - (and this is what parent was talking about; I now have an employee refusing to do what I said and not providing good reasons for said refusal.) Now the conversation is: do / don't do X again and you're fired.
it isn't a decision, it's laying out consequences. Now, between steps 2 and 3, when I become aware of the doing or not doing X, I'm now moving on to the point where I have to give pretty blunt orders. I'm going to make sure my boss and potentially a peer or two, depending on which teams this employee works for, are aware of the situation and are ok with what will happen; I think that's what michaelt is talking about. There's also, obviously, a query for extenuating circumstances that they are but I am not aware of.
Yes, if your legislative environment and HR department will let you fire someone without going through written warnings and improvement plans, I agree that sounds easier than inviting them to start looking for another job.
I think you're likely speaking from different societal/legal models of employment. Here in the states, when you're ready to fire someone, you fire them. Unless you're dealing with a union. Then there are 10 additional steps.
That's not necessarily true if you want to minimize your exposure to an employment discrimination suit - often, you would want to have evidence that you gave the employee in question ample opportunity to improve. E.g. it helps the employer's position if they have regular performance reviews and those reviews reflect inadequate performance.
Lots of problems can be stopped from escalating by a quick chat before. The goal is to stop the small problems before they become big ones.
No, you're not going to solve completely toxic situations, but you could slow them down so they could be managed. You want to know about issues before they hit the front page of Techcrunch. Regardless of what happened, it is clear that GitHub didn't manage this situation well.
You should first ask for an explanation and justification of the so far alledged misbehavior. You could accuse and threat someone on false claims. If the person fails to provide a valid explanation and justification the demonstration of the existance of a problem will have been made by itself. No need the explicitly threat anyone. Threatening should be done only in phase 2 after the problem as been acertained by both parties and the person has failed to correct what could have been a simple misunderstanding or an accident.
I think, realistically, a spouse of a founder might be very involved in a company and decision making. Depending on the exact nature of the relationship, this is probably inevitable, very common, and not necessarily undesirable. There is a reason we give the president's wife a special title even though technically no one voted for her, many married couples are a team in the professional arena as well.
Oh no, no no no. Your life partner is there to support you, personally, through the difficulty of starting and growing a business (if you're lucky.) They should listen to you and maybe even give you some gentle advice. But when they show up at work and start meddling, there's no way that will go well.
Why would you even want that? It can't be good for the organization--because they are outside the normal chain of command and thus not really accountable for their actions, and because they have power not earned through an objective process--and it can't be good for your relationship. Just don't do it.
Depending upon corporate structure and legal jurisdiction, certain funding streams (loans, lines of credit, guarantees) WILL require both the founder and their spouse to sign on the dotted line. This places the spouse on the financial hook as much as the founder, preventing the squirreling away of assets out of reach of creditors. It also makes the spouse a "silent" investor in the company.
I have only seen this a couple times. In both cases, the corporate structures were LLCs, and the amounts were over a million.
The article quotes JAH's email as saying, "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."
Certain people are extremely sensitive to what they perceive as improper or demeaning interaction, even when it doesn't directly involve them. JAH wasn't willing to let those women deal with it themselves, and doesn't mention even talking to them about it to see if they felt objectified. Instead, she talked to male coworkers, not specifically HR or a founder, about the wisdom of allowing women to hula hoop in the office? What's that going to accomplish?
I understand her view that sexual undercurrents in an office makes things uncomfortable for some women, and I understand her wanting that toned down. But other women (including some feminists) have no problem with much stronger displays of sexuality, and feel it's an affront to women to suppress that. Both sides can't win.
I think it's really a huge stretch to go from oogling of hula hoopers to "feeling unsafe". What, after watching some women do hoola hoop men suddenly turn into rapists? That's 100% in her head and sounds slightly crazy to me, to be honest. Not even going to strip clubs turns men into rapists on a regular basis...
I think that accusation is completely unwarranted (from the sounds of it).
If her problem with it was that some random other guy openly finding some random other girl attractive in her workplace "makes her feel unsafe", then that would be highly hypocritical, as she admits she was dating a coworker and that other coworkers knew this, which can only encourage others to think it's OK to make romantic advances to coworkers.
I mean, you can't have it both ways. If you think men and women should always without exception be only cold and businesslike towards each other in your workplace, then don't date a coworker. Isn't that obvious?
I believe the article mentions how she started dating the coworker before joining Github.
Even if she started dating him after she joined, you need to take the whole thing in context. The founder's wife is attempting to inject herself into their relationship, and a guy hits on her and punishes her for rejecting him. In context, the hula hooping episode can easily be a trigger for the allegedly sexist culture at GitHub.
By the way they kept saying partner I was under the impression she was dating a woman. In which case she could theoretically hate males looking at women and still date a woman on the team.
After reading the article, it became pretty clear to me that whatever manner of "culture" github appears to be permeating internally, she was very far from it. This indicates she was a bad hire from the get-go. Hiring isn't just about talent, it's also about cultural fit, and while it's difficult to know with precision who fits a cultural dynamic, 1) such an issue is bound to arise as a company grows and 2) there had to be indications that she was incredibly sensitive early on.
Isn't the point she's making that she didn't fit the culture primarily because of her gender? And that any work culture where one's gender matters is a toxic culture in itself?
A workplace just filled with happy young male developers is not necessarily a healthy environment, or one that necessarily has a good culture.
> Isn't the point she's making that she didn't fit the culture primarily because of her gender?
It is, but the point a lot of people are making here is that maybe she sees the situation in a wrong way, as her perspective is a reflection of her gender, so she cannot really judge if the problems happened primarily because of her gender. Actually, the fact that the other female employees felt secure and relaxed enough that they were hola-hooping in the office suggests otherwise.
> A workplace just filled with happy young male developers is not necessarily a healthy environment, or one that necessarily has a good culture.
It's also not necessarily an unhealthy/toxic environment.
> It's also not necessarily an unhealthy/toxic environment.
Honestly this is very close to gender discrimination, which is clearly illegal. If you created an environment that only young male developers will enjoy how is that much different then explicitly saying you won't hire any female developers?
To me it's in a similar vein of when literacy tests were employed in the South to prevent African Americans from voting. It wasn't saying you couldn't vote if you were black but it had the same effect of denying most blacks suffrage anyway. So you're not saying women can't work here, but we're just going to encourage/promote a culture that isn't one most women would want to be a part of anyway.
A couple hundred mostly-males built a company that was wildly successful where they loved to work. Now it sounds like they have to destroy that, build a culture that is professional and antiseptic, to make feminists feel welcome.
It doesn't have to be "antiseptic" at all - there are plenty of thriving, wildly-successful, mostly-males companies with great cultures where women feel comfortable too.
Also, it wouldn't be changing it "for feminists" - it's changing it to welcome any people, of either sex, who aren't comfortable in that environment. Just because feminists might be the most vocal about it doesn't mean it doesn't affect others too.
They don't even have to change their culture at all; all they need to do is to tone down the more aggressive parts of that culture towards certain people. Which shouldn't be difficult - I'm sure all of them have friends with whom they're more calm and less aggressive, or family members. They just need to transfer a bit of this thoughtfulness to the office.
It's not about changing because feminism, it's just the human decency of being reasonable and respectable to everyone, as far as is possible.
> Actually, the fact that the other female employees felt secure and relaxed enough that they were hola-hooping in the office suggests otherwise.
No it doesn't, really. There can still be a problem, even if it's easier to ignore it than to cause a fuss and risk your career.
> It's also not necessarily an unhealthy/toxic environment
Absolutely agree - but if, when you add a female developer, there is hostility towards her that appears to be motivated in part by her gender, then one should revise one's opinion of the "healthiness" of that environment.
Obviously this is one person's account and, absent a response from GitHub, it will stay that way. Nevertheless, I'm sorry that she felt victimised, and I think her account is a useful vantage point from which to discuss issues of "cultural fit" in all-male teams.
I wanted to make it clear in my writing, but apparently it wasn't: I think their culture is very flawed. Period. However, that's the culture they seem to want, so that said, my judgment was only against such poor hiring decisions, which are apparent in the outcome of this situation.
Define good culture. Why would you assume to know what a good culture is? Why would a workplace filled with happy young males be necessarily a bad culture?
> Despite its generally female-friendly environment, Horvath claims: “I had a really hard time getting used to the culture, the aggressive communication on pull requests and how little the men I worked with respected and valued my opinion.”
What? Um, you're the new hire. Demonstrating your worth is a standard phase that even men go through. If the pull request communication is too aggressive, tough. The company does not owe you a change of culture.
Overall, the environment strikes me as not terribly friendly. Okay. That's a culture misfit. Big time.
But why would you stay? Why would you recommend this to other women when you were having such a hard time yourself?
Jesus, I won't recommend companies or people unless I've got a really clear idea that there is a really good fit. It's like being a personal matchmaker, there's not a lot of upside and there is a lot of downside.
What's the point? Presumably they make similar announcements for many new hires, although I have to wonder if those are illustrated by such pore-stretchingly enormous head photos.
Actually, announcements have since become less cliché - or from another perspective they are now based on a IMHO silly we-are-a-happy-company cliché (including GIFs).
Something that has become clear to me fairly late in life is how sensitive many women are to feeling sexually threatened, and I've noticed this even in my wife, who is an incredibly adventurous person (e.g. she has lead multiple months-long geological expeditions in Tibet where she is both the only woman and the only Westerner). I think it's a brain-stem type reaction, not a rational one, but once people begin to feel deep-seated fear, there's not a lot that can make it go away.
Although I agree that in many cases, such as this one by the sounds of it (limited information, though), there may be a very low degree of physical danger, I think it is best just to realize/accept that women have a deep-seated fear of sexual, physical and emotional aggression that many men do not have, and adjust one's behavior and expectations accordingly to try to make women feel a little safer. It's pretty rare that this causes any actual inconvenience, other than like not sharing a hotel room on a business trip.
If it's actually a conditioned response, from experiencing a lot of unwanted attention from men over time, treating it as a 'brain stem' reaction will only prevent society from resolving the problem.
Women will forever be afraid of men, and men will forever be cast as bad.
I don't think it's a "sexual threat." I think it's more that we're only a couple of decades out (less in some places) from office women mostly being for typing and for looking at. Women being watched hula-hooping just feels regressive.
If someone were to hula-hoop to music in my office, male or female, I am pretty sure there would be a lot of people looking on. Not sure where the line of "looking on" and "gawking" is in that situation.
What is wrong with this culture of suppressing even the most basic sexual ideas to the point of closing eyes when a female starts to hola hoop. This is crazy!
That's why I feel like they should just not allow hula-hooping in the office. As someone who has been to both gay and straight clubs, I know that "grown-ups hula hooping" is a lot less like innocent fun and more like rapid pelvic thrusting with a hoop thrown in.
The problem is that a "no hula-hooping" rule sounds ridiculous, and really even splitting hairs on the topic itself seems tedious. Instead, any disruptive behavior should be off-limits and it should be up to the managers to enforce the rules. There are "fun police" at your place of employment for a reason, because honestly this whole situation could have been avoided if the hula-hoopers had kept their hobbies at home.
The hula hooping event simply took on a symbolic meaning for her, give what she went through. I don't think the act itself was dangerous or so terrible, but through her eyes, at that moment, it was the last straw.
My observation is that it is very easy to misunderstand stories like the hoola hoop example. Imagine 2 scenarios:
a) a company where we stipulate that there is no sexism and women feel respected and valued
b) a company where to stipulate that there is widespread sexism and women detect a myriad of signs of it every day.
In scenario a) the hoola hoop incident is highly unlikely to spark a reaction from a woman but in scenario b) this may be offensive to her.
The problem for the woman in b) is that it isn't really the hoola hoop 'leering'that offends her so much as it is the culmination of a series of attitudes and slights. But of course, if she complains about the hoola hoop behavior she can easily look petty. Each such incident can seem trivial but the pattern isn't. It is a real dilemma for women how to handle this kind of atmosphere gracefully and it is probably impossible for them to do so without some men tarring them as being nutty oversensitive rad fems.
I think you have to consider the story as a whole. If everything else was great, I'd agree with you that getting upset at this little scene might be over-sensitivity. But from the author's perspective, everything else was not great. Far from it.
I don't think this was an instance of institutionalized sexism. Rather, the founder's wife seems like an unbalanced individual, and nobody effectively set any boundaries. The other founders and HR seemed unaware or unable to set the situation to right.
As for her romantically inclined co-worker -- I don't see how his behavior qualifies as sexist or hostile. Merely a bit clueless, but isn't it to be expected that employees of a tech company will be somewhat socially awkward?
EDIT: As multiple commenters have noted, ripping out someone's code commits because they rejected your romantic advances is unacceptable and unprofessional. The ripper-outer should be roasted by the project manager if there's no technical justification. Since the two employees no longer get along, one or both should be re-assigned to different projects if possible. And the offender should be disciplined (up to and including dismissal from the company) if he makes life difficult for her in the future. But his actions reflect on him, not Github as a whole. The article includes no information about whether any of his actions were reported to his supervisor or anyone else, and no information about Github's response to the incident. Without those crucial details, I think it's premature to point a finger at Github.
As for the hula hoop incident -- if the girls doing the hooping and the guys doing the watching were okay with it, and everybody kept their clothes on, that seems pretty innocent to me.
> "but isn't it to be expected that employees of a tech company will be somewhat socially awkward?"
Reverting people's commits and stripping their code out of vengeance isn't social awkwardness, it's completely unacceptable and unprofessional conduct. It doesn't matter what gender anyone is, or that it's being done out of romantic rejection, it's unacceptable. Full stop.
Author's complaint is evidently less about being hit on inappropriately (something that we could charitably attribute to "social awkwardness", maybe) and more about how the rejection was allegedly handled (read: by professional retribution). You don't get to hand-wave the latter allegation as some sort of social incompetence.
This borders on the "boys will be boys" argument. No, we don't get to excuse deplorably unprofessional behavior because someone is awkward. It's an injustice to those of us who are actually socially awkward but still know how to behave like decent fucking humans at work.
That's why I qualified it with "out of vengeance". There are many legitimate reasons why you would revert somebody else's code, but doing so out of interpersonal conflict is not one of them.
Note that I'm not commenting on the authenticity of the accusations laid out in this specific instance. My point is that messing with people's code because you don't get along with them - whether it happened here or elsewhere, and whether the perpetrator is male or female - is entirely unprofessional and unacceptable. It cannot be attributed to social awkwardness.
Beyond the specifics of this complaint, we cannot keep falling back on the "hurr we're all aspies" excuse to explain away our shitty conduct. It is not only inaccurate, it is damaging and infantilizing to tech workers in general.
Sure, but reverting code is something that is highly visible and I can't picture an engineer reverting usable code and other engineers/leads not question it.
I'm willing to bet that it was reverted for other reasons.
I reverted code from master before because the guy wanted to play the 'okay but' game when we noticed issues with it.
Sorry but we can chat about issues later, it's not staying in production to be pushed out by a random engineer. Nothing to do with your race, gender, age, etc.
My normal rule is 'talk then revert', normally making sure that someone knows and agrees with the revert, to avoid a commit war. If everything's on fire and you can't talk, then you can skip talking.
You're missing the point. From this story alone, it seems the company is run by individuals who never mentally developed out of high school. Those incidents you mentioned are merely a red flag of the immaturity of some of these people. Awkwardly hitting on an employee to a point of discomfort, messing with someone's work cause they turned you down to a date, creepily staring at an employee in the gym; you should at least know well into your 20s and 30s that is inappropriate behavior at a workplace.
I would agree in that I wouldn't call this an instance of industry-wide sexism. The root of the problem is the immaturity at the leadership level of this company. If the leadership is as immature as this story is making it out to be, than these sexist incidents wouldn't have happened. Still, I shall reserve my judgment on GitHub until I hear more sides to this story.
> The final straw for Horvath came when she saw men gawking at women who were hula-hooping at the office. [...] Two women, one of whom I work with and adore, and a friend of hers were hula hooping to some music.
Emphasis on at the office. It sounds like they were making some kind of show. While I agree that the rest of the story sounds like a massive clusterfuck, I can't understand what is supposed to be wrong in this episode.
Right. It sounds like Horvath completely misinterpreted it, then. That said, the rest of her points look solid enough that it doesn't detract from the overall issue of mismanagement.
There does seem to be some truth to what you're suggesting.
For whatever reason, there's a propensity for this sort of drama to occur within organizations and at events where Ruby and Ruby on Rails, or users of such technologies, are involved in some way.
Off hand, I can think of that controversial presentation at GoGaRuCo a few years ago, the controversy about the diversity of the presenters at the BritRuby conference a bit later, and this matter here. Then there was that whole "Donglegate" incident, which while it occurred at PyCon, it involved at least one person with some ties to the Ruby community. I'm sure there are other events I'm missing, too.
Maybe it's just the so-called "brogrammer" culture that's so ingrained within the Ruby world that's responsible. Regardless, for a community that's actually quite small, there seems to be a whole lot of this sort of strife.
On the other hand, the ruby community just seems to have more women in it than a lot of other programming communities. Many technical communities simply don't have as many opportunities for these sorts of situations to arise.
Other communities may also have less opportunities for truly great pro-women-in-coding projects to emerge. Last year the 3 people who started Rails Girls were honoured with Ruby Hero awards at Railsconf. There was near-universal support and genuinely excitement that something like this emerged within the community and had made such a strong impact in bringing women into the field.
Exactly my theory. You don't hear many stories about sexism in the Perl community because your standard Perl meetup probably consists of all of the people who also meet up monthly for their LUG meetups.
For those of you who have never been to either, picture a room full of people who remind you of people like Alan Cox, RMS, or ESR.
There's socially awkward and there's openly hitting on a co-worker who is known to date another co-worker. And then not exiting as quickly as humanly possible. That's beyond "a little awkward". Saying this as a guy who is somewhat socially awkward.
He responded poorly (understatement) to the rejection of someone who he knew was in a relationship at the time. This is why I have a rule of never dating anyone who works where I work, not even in other departments. It just creates too much trouble. Once it's known that you date people in the office, others who are interested in you (but you may not be interested in them) may pursue you. Once you start rejecting them you can't give a blanket response of: I don't date people from work. Feelings get hurt, and people do stupid things once that happens.
> As for her romantically inclined co-worker -- I don't see how his behavior qualifies as sexist or hostile. Merely a bit clueless, but isn't it to be expected that employees of a tech company will be somewhat socially awkward?
Oh please, that's about as sexist and as hostile as it gets between programmers.
I agree it should be expected that some employees of a tech company will be somewhat socially awkward --just as much as it should be expected that employees will be told that this kind of behaviour is totally unacceptable, and that companies ensure it doesn't happen.
It's hard to judge without all sides of the story, but the one side does not paint a pretty picture of Github.
What probably needed to happen was whoever was in charge of that project should have recognized these two employees now didn't get along, and reassigned one or both of them away from the project.
If it is true and clear that the developer tampered with the codebase because of a personal issue with another developer, I am not even sure that is an issue to let HR resolve; I would want that developer fired immediately. Intentionally fucking with the product, or any other sort of company property, is inexcusable in my mind. Tanking the reputation of that developer is putting it nicely.
I was trying to be measured in the language because I don't consider the TechCrunch article to be completely unbiased on the man, but yes, in general I agree. Intentionally sabotaging code should have you out the door on your ass.
Retaliation in response to rejected sexual overtures is one of the basic forms of sexual harassment. It's arguably a quid pro quo situation and absolutely qualifies as the kind of conduct that can lead to a hostile work environment.
If I ever saw this happen, I would reprimand the developer in the parking lot while the HR people were bringing his personal belongings down in cardboard boxes so he could go away and never ever come back.
no. what needed to happen was that the guy should have been fired for deleting someone's code over a personal issue. "these two employees now didn't get along" makes it sound like there was fault on both sides, which is emphatically not the case.
That's actually impossible at GitHub (as far as I understand their working practices) because they are not a traditional company. They use Open Allocation, which means that employees decide which projects to work on, and specifically, project leads cannot veto that.
its super hostile. i would hope there are logs for this - but i wouldn't be surprised if there were none.
as said higher it seems highly possible that she has no proof of anything - which means, if she's actually honest, she can't do much (except contacting a bunch of news sites and trying to make a big story out of it)
imagine this "i did all this work but someone deleted it! worked 2 weeks on it!" while in fact you were eating donuts ;-)
the problem is proof, when you have these allegations. if she has proof, then, she should sue them.
How common is it to have your significant other hanging around at your workplace for no apparent reason[1], harmful or not, because you're the founder ? I'm still trying to process that.
[1] IIUC github founder's wife had no role in his company right ?
Why are you making excuses for these people? What purpose does it serve?
I'm especially shocked to see you trivialise the actions of the jilted engineer. Reverting someone else's work without explanation is a blatantly hostile and disrespectful act that should be treated seriously in isolation, and is made more serious still in the context of the inappropriate sexual stuff.
> Why are you making excuses for these people? What purpose does it serve?
Because I think people should question whether they're overreacting to the situation.
> I'm especially shocked to see you trivialise the actions of the jilted engineer
I edited to clarify this. Careful reading shows that:
(1) It is possible that there were legitimate technical reasons for the reverted commits.
(2) It is possible that Github did not respond to this part of the situation because they were unaware of the reversion or the context behind it.
(3) It is possible that Github took some action against the engineer in question.
(4) I'm not entirely sure that confessing romantic feelings for a co-worker is, by itself, inappropriate. Provided everyone stays cool and professional if the feelings aren't mutual (or just avoid each other if the org chart makes that possible).
(5) Reverting commits because someone rejected your romantic advances is unacceptable and unprofessional, and I edited my post to say so.
I think it is difficult to say that Github is at fault from the information given, and I fear that's the conclusion that many were jumping to. If you're such a person, you should think carefully about what the article actually said, what you are assuming, and whether those assumptions might be false.
> I think it is difficult to say that Github is at fault from the information given, and I fear that's the conclusion that many were jumping to.
Don't worry. Read the whole thread on this discussion. The only people who are jumping to conclusions are those assuming there is something wrong with Horvath's story.
> GitHub are perfectly capable of defending themselves. They are the group in power here. Second-guessing the motives and truth of this woman's story does nothing but undermine her, and undermine the confidence of others who may have similar stories (at GitHub or elsewhere).
> Second-guessing the motives and truth of this woman's story does nothing but undermine her, and undermine the confidence of others who may have similar stories (at GitHub or elsewhere).
What the heck are you talking about? The story is hearsay at this point and armchair warriors are jumping to conclusions behind the anonymity of the internet.
Second-guessing the motives and truth? Do you work at Github? Is this person your co-worker?
The story is, by definition, not hearsay, since the woman is alleging that the events took place with her present.
Key point: she alleges that everyone was not calm and cool regarding hitting on a coworker. You miss the part where he didn't leave when asked, and never justified reverting her commits (to the point where she had to revert the revert).
Two things, being in power makes you more vulnerable to these things and secondly, you should second guess everyone, people look after their own interests and no one is completely reliable.
You're being ridiculous. Emergency reverts are normal and expected when production systems are down.
I'm willing to stipulate this person's specific actions were probably hostile and unwarranted, but some sort of blanket "no revert without discussion" rule is just a way to cost your employer customers.
Context is important, and we don't have enough of it to be certain of what happened.
There may be legit reasons, but we have no indication that the reasons were legit. We do have someone involved who says they weren't. We should assume she is being truthful and accurate unless there is a reason to doubt her.
If github says the reverts were legit, then that's different, but you should go with the best information we have, instead of trying to find an excuse not to believe her based on no evidence.
> We should assume she is being truthful and accurate unless there is a reason to doubt her.
I come from a different school of thought. Firstly she only mentions a few people but the entire company and an entire industry are being brought into question.
Generally I have found what has been echoed by TechCrunch to be lacking in details and specifically from one persons point of view which shows a very self indulged narrative.
My response is not to suggest it did not happen, but given what has been said, how it has been said, and whom it is being said about, I suggest that before we tar people in such a way that more evidence should be presented.
I'm quite certain you've either mistaken me for someone else, or are looking for an excuse to argue with me based on a willful misinterpretation of my comment.
I'm even more certain that going through life believing everything you hear is not going to get you the results you want.
Isn't the Secret post screenshotted in the article itself one reason to doubt her character? Of course it may be all lies... it's just an anonymous comment and anyone could have written it, including the guy whose advances she spurned.
This. In one week I had to rip out two different things in the middle of the night. One was a simple revert, one was dropping an entire system which had taken months of work and reverting back to the old system.
In both cases, I wrote a detailed technical explanation of why I had taken the action, and an apology for having to do it so suddenly, and I sent to to the entire group (a requirement anyway - if you make an on-the-fly ops change, you need to write up a full incident report so everyone knows what went wrong)
Reverting always needs to come with a "this is what was wrong".
We are only hearing one side of the story, but it may be interesting to note the comment: " I even had to have a few of his commits reverted. ", it seems that there may have been some legitimacy to the other non-few if we are going to take a black and white view of things.
While the details on this matter seem very clear, the statement " I would work on something, go to bed, and wake up to find my work gone without any explanation." does not imply no discussion it implies that when she got up she had no idea of what was going on. It may be a case of a lazy co-worker, and/or a case that the co-worker discussed the issues with her at a latter stage.
She is very succinct in her description of the actions of others, and then describes her response in an emotional unclear way. In her own way in this example, she has used passive aggressiveness to mask the actual event.
TLDR; We do not know if there was no discussion, and we are only hearing one side.
Any way you look at it you have a bad situation. This sounds like a clash of personalities. While the behavior is not right, the fact is that a lot of companies will 'manage out' people unfairly etc.. Politics and personality clashes are never fair. In a capitalistic society money tends to trump social justice. It sucks, but it would take some pretty large structural changes to the economy to really fix that.
If the founders wife is causing issues with other employees then that could be an issue. The question is would this cause enough of a legal liability for the company to do something? Will edging out the founder be beneficial to the company, the investors and the profit of the company or not?
Be it right or wrong, that is the question that is going to be asked in the board room if that option is even on the table with Github.
While I like to see justice and fairness in these situations something tells me that it is probably not likely to happen any time soon. Similar scenarios to this have been playing out in many different industries and many different countries for years.....and unfortunately will continue to.
Nor in Australia, is HR your friend. I had a very similar situation to this, as a male, in a software development environment. Even down to the bullying and the silently deleted files and commits. The thing I learnt about HR is they are not professionals. They do not exist to perform the professional duties associated with Human Resources. They may tell you and themselves that, but they are the formalised face (at an arms length so a claim of 'separation' can be made) of the power in upper management and their wish to do away with people they don't like.
In fact a lot of this story rings true with my past experience. It sounds to me like a toxic workplace with a bad management culture. And it is also sexist to add insult to injury. I would like to say that these people will reap what they sow, but I've found organisations like this tend to protect the sociopaths who abuse their power. A culture like this normally extends all the way to the top. So I agree nothing is likely to happen. In fact quite the opposite. Those bullies will be protected and promoted. Any claims of bullying will be dismissed by HR. The messenger will be shot. The truth tellers will not be greeted with laurels.
I would say the only thing to do, if you are in a situation to do it, is legal action. It's the only thing people like that understand. Power and money. So take their money if you can. And find a better place to contribute your skills. There are better places to work out there. They may not be as glamorous, but they will be much more enjoyable places of employment, and much more appreciative of what you have to offer.
I do agree that the bullies will be protected and promoted.
Unfortunately the legal action doesn't really solve the problem. Usually the companies just find loopholes around whatever they were sued for an it is business as usual.
For most companies once you get large enough the question is not if you will be sued, but when you will be sued. The incentives need to be changed to change the system.....which would mean a shift away from the winner takes all capitalism that we are in.
In my experience they usually settle pre-trial. They did in my case. Especially if the litigant has a strong case. Better to pay out than to risk a negative judgement.
The point is that questions get asked at a high level and internal changes can be triggered by a pre-trial settlement. As I said, it's the only thing people like that understand. They won't take you seriously unless you take their money.
I would say the only thing to do, if you are in a situation to do it, is legal action. It's the only thing people like that understand. Power and money. So take their money if you can. And find a better place to contribute your skills. There are better places to work out there.
Unfortunately, at least in the US, most employers will not hire someone who sued an ex-employer, even when the suit was clearly justified. It's actually legal (amazingly) to discriminate against people who used legal process.
I don't know who's right and I like Github, but a future employer with moral courage would take a chance on someone like JAH (who hasn't sued to my knowledge, but is still probably blacklisted, to tell the horrible truth) and at least hear her out, and hire her if she seemed well-matched to the role. Unfortunately, moral courage is incredibly thin on the ground. Most people are useless cowards.
Both with regard to stuff like this and whistle-blowers more generally, I kind of wonder why more companies don't hire former whistle-blowers as a signal they've nothing to blow whistles about.
Right or wrong, the story has blown up and the problem actors have to be dealt with. There is too much at stake.
That the wife, a non-employee, was in a position to be a main character in this story seems to be a blunder by the founder. If I'm an employee there, would my wife be able to put herself in that same situation? Probably not.
Would the wife make a good employee? Would she get hired to be in a position of such influence? Probably not.
Yet, there she was and here is our story.
Personally, I have been in relationships which were okay in my personal life, but I would have been horrified if my significant other would have anything to do with my business other than attend outside work functions with me always present. Bull in a china shop.
As a general rule, if you are not paying for their time, they don't have primarily your best interest in mind. The interest of those that they work for could temporarily align with your interests, but don't rely on getting a signal when that changes.
> Be it right or wrong, that is the question that is going to be asked in the board room
I am asking because you have stated this after "..would this cause enough of a legal liability...". So, in the end, does the board room decide what to do with the founder, his wife, and the company, or the court room?
My conjecture is that they (the board) will be trying to determine what the legal, PR and ultimately financial fallout will be from this. These will probably be the things that will drive any decisions on how Github addresses the situation.
The bad actor in this version of the story seems to be the founder's wife. And the founder certainly dropped the ball by not keeping his wife in line.
For whatever reason, the wife acted crazy, intimidating, and creepy toward Horvath. Why? Who knows? Maybe because of jealousy or concern that her husband was interested in this (admittedly reasonably attractive) female employee?
The founder needed to do the professional thing and keep his wife in check, separating business and personal affairs, and not allowing this weird behavior to continue. He needed to act like a leader, taking charge in both his workplace and his home when it looked like things were getting out of hand.
And the romantically inclined co-worker is guilty of two things: (1) slightly clueless behavior toward a person who was already involved in a relationship with someone else (2) extremely bad timing. He's not the worst offender in this whole drama. (Edit: I forgot (3) taking revenge by reverting code commits. That is far worse than (1) or (2) - it is unprofessional behavior and calls for some form of workplace discipline.)
(Disclaimer: everything I wrote assumes that the article is telling the complete truth)
Maybe not technically, but he is a founder and I think he should take some responsibility. The wife's power came from his position in the company, and she was able to get away with that only because she was his wife. If my partner was coming into the office and intimidating employees at my company that is something we'd be having serious conversations about the minute I heard out about it. Of course I also like to think I wouldn't marry a psychopath, but that's neither here nor there, because if I left something like this for HR to deal with I'd feel like an impotent twit.
Within the context of the company, it's his responsibility as an founder and an executive. His wife (AFAIK) has no formal title or role at the company - all her power and influence is derived from his status as a founder/executive.
Yes, as a person with free will, his wife is ultimately responsible and "shouldn't" have done what she is alleged to have done. But in the context of corporate governance and law, he is responsible for allowing her to have privileges and access to the company that are quite unconventional.
If the wife has a formal, executive role at the company, then that's a completely different matter. I'm just speculating based on the usual way of things - I could be completely wrong.
So you're saying that women are better at HR because HR departments are typically dominated by women? Do you also believe that men are better at programming?
You a liar/thief/vagabond/ruffian/scoundrel/bully/shithead/asshole/arsonist/murderer/sexist/racist. If even 10% of that is true, it is a serious allegation against you. You are not to be trusted.
Unlike your comment, this story is so long and has so many points that could be verified later through eyewitness accounts and otherwise that it's hard to imagine all of it being false (I'm inclined to believe this story).
More important than #1 or #2 (and probably easier to verify based on the tendency of version control systems to retain logs/history): he deleted a co-worker's code based on grudge.
From the account, he wasn't just not "taking charge in both his workplace and his home", but he was conspiring with his wife to actually undertake these actions, at least at the beginning. It doesn't even need to have these undertones of "the man needed to keep his woman in line". Github is a business, the office is a place of work. If you're not an employee, or a prospective employee, you don't belong past the lobby.
Thanks, it took two hours to do my brain makeup today.
I don't think it's completely irrelevant - if female competitiveness is a factor (wife jealous of star employee at husband's company) - a big 'if' since we don't know the whole story - it is much more likely to be a factor in the case of an attractive woman versus one who is not.
Uh, I was taking issue with "admittedly reasonably", not with "attractive", but even that is out of place, because, assuming you don't know Horvath personally, you're implying that knowing how a woman looks is enough to determine if she's attractive or not.
Please, just delete this comment. Yeah oh my god that sentence could be interpreted wrong. We don't need a tangent about it. The real meaning has absolutely nothing to do with subordination. It's a simple matter of keeping your friends/relatives/partners out of your job. They don't work there, they shouldn't be interfering.
Also, shame on anyone that upvotes such a derail just because they agree with the words.
The 'line' seems clear to me, the company/not-company boundary.
And I wasn't disparaging words. But if I pick some post and comment 'freedom is good!' I'm not contributing to productive discussion no matter how many people agree.
Considering the context, I think it is perfectly reasonable to lament the choice of wording and no, I will not be deleting my comment because you don't like it. It has a rather higher score than I anticipated, so I didn't react to that wording in a vacuum, now did I?
For someone who hates tangents you're sure good at them.
Sometimes people complain about comments getting downvoted out of disagreement, even though they contribute to the discussion. But I am far more bothered by the inverse problem: comments that get upvoted out of shallow agreement even though they serve no purpose, focusing on some negligibly relevant detail in a haughty way. These comments make it harder to participate in the conversation for fear of people latching on to completely irrelevant details and drowning out the message.
In short: Upvotes correlate with good comments, but they also correlate with certain types of poisonous comment.
As to continuing tangents, I would have been quite happy to see both of our comments dug into invisible gray together. But even if that fails I'm happy to provide a bright warning against being reactionary, and to hope that any wasted space is meta at worst.
Well, not in the offensive sense of "bitch, you better behave or ima smack you", but at least something modern like "honey, when you talk to my employees and act really strange and intimidating around them, it makes things very difficult for me at work".
The wife's behavior seems to be the catalyst for nearly all the drama described here.
In many marriages, there's one spouse who keeps the other in line and then there is the spouse who is kept in line. One does not simply reverse these roles.
That's true, but when that leads to the (hypothetically) more powerful spouse taking on a shadow role at her husband's company, then it can lead to potential abuses, as it may have done in this case.
(Disclaimer: not an insider, wildly speculating, etc)
According the the story we have so far, he should have actually kept his wife in line but failed to do so. You only cringe because you read too much into what he said.
Yes, husbands need to keep their wives in line gasp AND wives need to keep their husbands in line.
If you form a life partnership with someone being able to steer them around icebergs is 1. Good for them, 2. Good for you and optionally 3. Good for your offspring (and mutual assets). If you can't trust your partner to do this for you, and you for them, its not a good partershaft.
I'm not entirely sure the hula-hooping incident - merely observing girls hula hooping is not a crime, is it? - by itself constitutes a hostile atmosphere for women, unless inappropriate comments were being made.
What we have here is some completely inappropriate, cloak and dagger, soap opera shit being perpetrated by the wife of the cofounder, who has no business meddling in the affairs of his employees. (If true, this is completely bizarre behavior.) But I'm not entirely sure this hostility was directed at her simply because she was a woman.
She is absolutely justified in getting the fuck out of dodge, either way.
I don't think it creates a 'hostile' atmosphere per say. Obviously if both parties are alight with the situation then it's fine for them.
I think it's an inappropriate one for a workplace though. This comes down to company culture. The problem isn't the women hula hooping, a casual environment means such things will happen. People will exercise together, work on hobbies, etc.
The problem is that in a work environment everyone who works there has to be treated with respect, and equally, and that means not cat-calling your co-workers. Even if the women were fine with it (and they probably were since they didn't stop), the large group of men treating them like sexual objects in the workplace is not conducive to an environment where women are respected. If this was a strip club there wouldn't be a problem.
To draw a parallel, if 7 out of 10 people at the office were having nerf gun fights, and it was disrupting other peoples work (because they are reflexively duck, etc) to the point where they can't work when there aren’t big nerf gun fights (but still one or two shots every now and then), then it's a problem, and destructive to a good work environment. This is where management needs to step in and say, "ok guys, I know we are pretty lax around here, but seriously cut this shit out". Obviously it isn't a perfect parallel.
It's also a culture fit thing. This was the thing that broke the camels back. This employee suffered discrimination from executives (and startup founder's significant others are likely going to be part of the executive team one way or another. They certainly have the standing of the executive team in many ways. Legally speaking they are almost the same 'person' in many ways), she suffered discrimination from a single employee, and then she suffered it from a group of employees (a group mentality). And all three of these things feed into each other, and in a work environment (especially a casual one), employees need to be able to move their bodies without worrying about a group of other employees demeaning them.
There was no cat-calling in this case, so why bring that up? I suppose you could mention also that it's not okay to rape your co-workers too. Kinda disingenuous though, isn't it? Bringing it up in the context of this story implies that it happened.
> To draw a parallel, if 7 out of 10 people at the office were having nerf gun fights, and it was disrupting other peoples work (because they are reflexively duck, etc) to the point where they can't work when there aren’t big nerf gun fights (but still one or two shots every now and then), then it's a problem, and destructive to a good work environment. This is where management needs to step in and say, "ok guys, I know we are pretty lax around here, but seriously cut this shit out". Obviously it isn't a perfect parallel.
If 7 out of 10 people at the office are having an epic nerf gun fight, who's to say the three outliers are in the right? I'm not sure what you're trying to illustrate with this analogy.
Well I was using it as more of a 30 out of a 100 outliers.
I'm saying (and this is where the parallel breaks down a little) that if people want to have an epic nerf gun fight it should probably be scheduled, and out of the work place/time (like during launch, or after 5pm or something. And this is where it breaks down. Nerf gun fights are fine, but creating an environment that discriminates or (equivalently) encourages discrimination is never ok). They both distract many of the employees trying to work (i.e. the ones not involved in the discrimination/nerf gun fights), and it being able to break out randomly at any time is a massive continual distraction.
To continue the analogy. Consider an employee is doing their own thing to relax (as opposed to nerf gun fights), perhaps they aren’t quite a company culture fit (since they don't like nerf guns) and they choose to do some hoola hooping, but almost every time they go to do that, they get pelted with crossfire from nerf guns, making it difficult to do their own relaxing thing.
Now the other side (with the github environment with hola hooping women): Consider an employee is doing their own thing to relax (as opposed to hoola hooping), perhaps they aren’t quite a company culture fit (since they aren't interested in women. And for that matter, are a woman) and they choose to do some yoga, but almost every time they go to do that, a bunch of guys start gawking at them, making it difficult to do their own relaxing thing.
I don't know what the day-to-day is like at GitHub, but if people were hula-hooping to music at my place of work, I'd probably be pretty interested in watching them too (male or female).
It's not what or whether they were watching, it's how they were watching. It's a judgement call but pretty easy to tell if a group is leering or just watching friends have fun.
Yes, that's what is being implied, and it's certainly something that happens, in degrees. People generally enjoy attention from those they themselves find attractive - obviously up to a limit, but that limit is much different than when you don't find the other person attractive.
And that is why the "making a woman feel uncomfortable constitutes sexual harassment" standard is problematic. And of course it's not entirely wrong either because it certainly can be done on purpose.
Ye, calling this sexism, is either an editorial edit by TC, for reasons I can only assume is high clickbait title, or JAH has some issues herself, which it seems like considering that she thought watching girls hulahoop is sexist.
The article, strangely, begins with JAH already having an unspecified grievance against GitHub and the founder's wife pleading with her not to leave GitHub and blog publicly about it. It's strange that at no time has JAH specified what this grievance was, but my educated guess based on her tweets and her blog post from a year ago would be, previous additional incidents of sexism or perceived sexism.
I suspect the nature of the founder's wife is that the founder and his partner decided that a female was the best person to handle the omitted original issue.
Since the wife may have been there when it was just three guys, the non-employee boundary might not be there as with other staff partners. She probably thought she was helping.
Yeah, I found that to be the oddest part; that after so much bullshit, that was the last straw. It was almost too anti-climatic of an ending to this sexism/crazy-founder/wife tale.
Agreed though, completely 100% justified in getting out of that shit, glad the story got told as well.
If you're already primed, through some other form of hostility, to think that you're surrounded by a bunch of sexists, then innocent watching can look at a lot like gawking.
It is too open to interpretation, and thus not objective.
It might not be a crime, but if I were a woman, I could easily see myself feeling uncomfortable in a situation that were to remind me of our gender-imbalanced culture(s).
Can someone please explain to me why-the-f was a non-employee granted full and free access to other company employees, each and every day, on company premises, without mutual consent?
What were the other co-founders thinking? This was a darn time-bomb waiting to explode. Just because you are a fancy-pants, hotshot startup and not a bigco, does not mean the same laws and liabilities don't apply to you.
Founders, all that blood, sweat and tears will go down the drain if you ignore the stodgy, boring, beuraucratic 'nonsense' that was designed to protect humans from other humans, as soon as you have more than one human in your beloved startup.
Humans will be humans, sooner or later; so you need to cover the proverbial mattress in waterproof covering, for there will be piss, eventually.
That hula hoops bit was a bit... strange. If it were a couple of attractive girls I probably would also find myself staring. I mean, its just not something you see everyday working at an office.
I understand being stared at is uncomfortable too, and they should feel free to do whatever they want of course. It just sounds like how unattractive people "stare creepily" while attractive people "look."
Watching your co-workers as they hula-hoop in the office doesn't sound terribly sexist or out of the ordinary [1]. Hula hooping in the office is offbeat enough that you'd expect people to stop and look And it's certainly not the some kind of 'last straw' sexist incident.
Obviously, what happened is that Horvath was already upset from the weirdness that had transpired thus far - and based on the article, it does sound pretty weird.
Because of this she read a lot of 'meaning' into the hula-hooping that just wasn't there. It's hard to see how this situation could be a last straw otherwise.
[1] i.e. "hula hooping in the office" is out of the ordinary ... watching something out of the ordinary is normal
It could easily have been there. Stop being condescending.
A lot of "normal" interactions between men and women are fraught with creepy weirdness due to the way we're socialized. This is well studied, even if you find the conclusions of those researchers unpalatable.
I think it's a problem if women (or men) start dishing out accusations from projecting something into other people's faces. "They looked leery" - what sort of accusation is that? All bets are off if such a thing is held up as evidence for sexism.
There is a famous early cinema experiment which cuts the same closeup of a face with three different scenes (don't remember, I think a funeral, something to eat, whatever). Each time the viewer interprets a different emotion into the face (sad, or hungry, or yearning, or whatever).
She chose to be upset by falsely matching male co-workers watching (I don't want to use her word, gawking, because it's her subjective conclusion) safe-to-assume attractive female co-workers "hula hooping in the office." Especially none of her business if the girls were aware they had the attention of the gentlemen. Who knows, they may have appreciated the attention.
I can't believe that no one has spotted that she is exactly the same annoying feminist that forced the company to get rid of a rug because it used the term "meritocracy".
http://readwrite.com/2014/01/24/github-meritocracy-rug#awesm...
Tbfh, she sounds like Adria Richards v2.0
I found that episode terribly confused, and I never understood the rationale behind it. Isn't "meritocracy" a value and environment that feminists have told us over and over again is a positive development for women? Don't women want to work in a "meritocracy" precisely because their work will be valued and appreciated not because they are women but because excellence at work knows no sex, colour, or creed?
"Meritocracy is all well and good as a theory. It's all about who decides what merit is. If it's a privileged group of people who decide the merit, then it's going to be biased. Thus championing meritocracy in this organisation means upholding a hierarchy which is unfair, biased and oppressive to those outside of the people at the top".
In other words, meritocracy = an aristocracy of white males, where if you do good according to white male values you progress. Therefore meritocracy is not progression based on good work.
In a less gender explanation - removing the rug equated to a statement of a lack of trust in the employers. The employers agreed to it being removed in an attempt to gather back some of that trust.
What the whole issue ignores is that the rug was about the platform - meritocracy - because all people see is code, where the better projects get the more stars. Now there is a valid argument here that popularity doesn't equal merit - but it does not negate the concept of meritocracy.
Anyhow, I'm just the messenger - I think that there are some serious problems with this reasoning. It's horrible to twist something good to something bad.
When I look for libraries to use on github I don't know or care about the race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religious beliefs of the person who wrote the code...
I'm amazed the company wouldn't respond to her by saying: while the tech industry is a very imperfect meritocracy, and our company is still an imperfect one, the service we provide attempts to be a true meritocracy. The rug is about the goal, not the status quo.
It's so sad to see things like this twisted around by people with too much time and an axe to grind. I don't think anyone expects to put down a mat and claim 'Mission Accomplished' on building a meritocracy. Or any other vision statement from a company or person.
The whole purpose of these statements is to represent an ideal to strive for. Things like this are exactly what give militant feminists and other PC groups a bad name.
In short, it’s a not-really-present ideal that’s often used to mask the existing power relationships that are really responsible for people being promoted/demoted to where they are.
The assumption underlying this analysis is that no merit exists outside of subjective value judgement. Furthermore, subjective value judgments are biased in favor of the existing privileged groups. Do I have that about right?
Sort of. “Merit” is more a measure of those groups’ definitions of success. Calling it a meritocracy overly simplifies the circumstances for that success, often reinforcing the power relationships.
So, how does one tease apart what is meant by the original definition of merit, let's call it 'accomplishment', from these subjective definitions of success? Or is that even possible?
> So, how does one tease apart what is meant by the original definition of merit, let's call it 'accomplishment', from these subjective definitions of success? Or is that even possible?
You can't. Merit -- including "success" or "accomplishment" -- is always a subjective value judgement. Even if there is an objective measure, the evaluation of the measure as something meaningful to measure (i.e., that the measure is one of merit or success) is a subjective value judgement.
We're talking about software development here. Writing code that works, and implementing features that make it to the website/product are easily quantifiable metrics (someone who contributes a lot of good code is judged as more worthy).
Nothing is an achievement or thing of merit outside of the judgement of some individual or set of individuals. Merit/achievement isn't something that exists independently.
And the dominant group in society is, pretty much by definition, the one whose judgement is most influential.
No, it’s “X isn’t really Y, despite what we say, and it’s actually harmful, so let’s stop reinforcing problems by pretending that it is Y”. As being discussed elsewhere in this thread, the problem with meritocracy is that it’s dependent on value judgements by those already in power. Simply, it is a fine ideal, but in practice it is unachievable, utopic. Establishing an organization or community as “meritocratic” means ignoring the role of existing dynamics.
Everything you've said is equally true of any hiring system. It makes sense why employers are drawn to the one that provides them with the most value, while also carrying the added benefit of also being the one that isn't systematically sexist/racist.
Meritocracy as an ideal may not be intrinsically sexist or racist, but declaring an organization a meritocracy doesn’t automatically eliminate existing sexism, racism, etc, and instead masks it. That’s the problem. It’s not unlike the “structureless organization”. It’s not really structureless — there are always informal social dynamics in play — and acting as if it is structureless results in avoiding problems instead of confronting them. Everything was all rainbows and unicorns at GitHub until the informal structure apparently resulted in an institutional inability to deal with certain issues. Valve has seen similar problems.
Are you suggesting that hiring less qualified women for the sake of diversity would help to dispel the notion that women are less qualified, and hired for the sake of diversity?
It's certainly something to aspire to. But think about it this way: if someone is claiming that you are already a meritocracy, but their upper management are almost entirely white and male, what subsidiary claim does that seem to be making?
Essentially, use of the word as a description (rather than an aspiration) packages up a whole bundle of problematic claims of the form "we're not sexist, we would have more women rise to the top if only they {tried harder | were smarter | had the technical ability | ...}" (and similarly for minorities).
So by removing the rug she already told the management what she thinks of them. No wonder that love didn't really grow between them...
I also don't agree the inverse conclusion (upper management must be all male because women don't have merit) really follows. What if the women in upper management simply work elsewhere? Where there even any women who complained that they weren't in upper management at GitHub? Do they even have a better/worse hierarchy for people so that people not in upper management should feel like losers?
I bet that rug really tied together the room too...
</Lebowski>
All joking aside, that rug thing is pretty silly. "Meritocracy" is not code for "Straight White Males only." Nevertheless Horvath being feminist does not invalidate any unfair treatment she may have experienced should her claims be substantiated.
Hadn't even heard of the rug incident until I read about it in this thread, but I'm pretty sure their idea of meritocracy here only applied to GitHub the company, not GitHub the website, and came out of their culture of "Managers and chain-of-command? Not here. You can work on whatever you want at any time and at any location, as long as good work comes out of it."
Either way, this highlights that the founders of GitHub had every intent to run a conducive and inclusive environment. I mean, obviously they failed, but I doubt it was for lack of trying.
Holy shit, that is fucking hilarious!! It's like you know it's going to be her before you open the article, in the back of your mind, "Wasnt there some other sexist nonsense generated by Github a few months back with crazy feminists involved?". Yes mind, yes there was, and it's the same fucking attention whore.
So, as with these outrageous stories there is always a highly commented /g/ thread.
I think the implication is that none of this would have happened, or at least would not have been tolerated, if she was male. And it sound like the basis of her relationship with the founder's wife being "crazy" was that she was a female employee. So I'd say sexism played a significant role here.
Uhm, it was female on female. Is male on male intimidation, sexism? Because men are the primary victims of violence, and their sex being highly relevant to that, is that sexist? I don't think you would say that in this case it is.
Not to say there can't be girl/women on girl/women sexism.
What? The sexist part of this isn't the Founder's Wife's behavior(that sounds standard crazy), it's everyone at Github's behavior.
/*
Let me preface this by saying we have only seen half the story at this point, so I wouldn't make absolute judgements yet and the below is based on the hypothetical situation in which the linked article is 100% factual.
*/
If my founder was female and her husband was coming into work regularly to harass employees(or even at work at all...?)he would be dealt with _fast_. It seems that in this case(if the situation was anything close to as described) the founders wife was sitting next to a programmer for long periods of time and it wasn't dealt with.
So yeah, while this does appear to be more of a, "damn that founder and his wife be crazy" situation, we shouldn't forget that societal perceptions of gender are always influencing how these situations are handled. Creating an environment where situations like this are handled differently between genders is definitely to be avoided.
It's also worth considering that we have no idea if the founder's wife was also doing this to other male employees. She may have been - and gender perceptions being what they are, we're even less likely to hear about it.
There is plenty of woman on woman/girl on girl sexism. Women are socialized into the same world as men and tend to underestimate other women the same way as men do.
If you have been raised to think you can not do x cause you are women, you will assume that other woman are unable too.
It sounds like the male founder initiated the interaction, so the implication would be the cause of the problems was his sexism. I was not actually saying the wife's behavior was sexism.
The term 'girl' refers to a female between birth and when she reaches the age of adulthood. I'm pretty sure both parties in this case are adults, so I assume that's the reason behind the correction.
I mean, while technically true, the interoperability between the gendered nouns isn't complete.
Man / Woman
Boy / Girl
Guy / ???
Some people would say ??? = Gal, but most would find that very informal, especially when writing. The usual female equivalent to guy is girl, which is not referring to a younger age but merely a less formal sex descriptor.
Secondly, I STILL don't see how that changes the point any. If the guy is talking about girls, it makes sense, if he's talking about about women, it doesn't? I'm still lost there.
> I STILL don't see how that changes the point any.
Okay, fair enough. Nest time you see a black man over 20 and under 50 years of age, try calling him "boy". See how he reacts. But before you do, write that last will and testament you've been meaning to finish.
This girl on girl/woman on woman semantics you are calling out is unnecessary and distracting--even an uncharitable reader would have a hard time ferreting out sexism in the parent comment.
And by the way: your insinuation that a black man would automatically kill/cause bodily harm someone who says something racist to him is in and of itself racist and is far more perverse than anything else I've read on this thread by a very, very wide margin.
>Nest time you see a black man over 20 and under 50 years of age, try calling him "boy". See how he reacts. But before you do, write that last will and testament
Still can't see it? Yes you can.
>Next time you see a black man... try calling him "boy"... But before you [see how he reacts] write that last will and testament
Either your English is pretty limited (in which case, avoid getting into semantic arguments like 'woman' vs 'girl'), or you're being disingenuous. There is no universe in which that does not mean "because he will murder you." You say that he will need a last will and testament after the black man reacts. What the fuck else could that possibly mean.
The reason you're being picked on and downvoted in this comment thread, by the way, is because this kind of bullshit is a harmful distraction. There are plenty of serious issues to talk about in this thread. Horvath has revealed some toxic shit going on in a very popular, well-loved SV startup.
Using 'girl' instead of 'woman' for 'young female adult' is NOT one of these serious issues. As a young male in tech I know a lot of young females in tech; of the minority who actually give a shit about this petty nonsense, they all prefer 'girl' and feel uncomfortable with 'woman.'
EDIT: also, equating "fasten your seatbelt before driving" and "write a will before insulting a black man" as "common sense advice" is SUPER FUCKING RACIST
Is the above the "real truth"? No, of course not -- it's just as reliable an indicator of what people think as your view. The problem is that you have no conception that there's any view on this issue apart from your own.
> The reason you're being picked on and downvoted in this comment thread ...
Oh, I know the reason very well. It's well-established that downvoting inevitably follows the posting of a simple truth. The simpler the truth, the greater the number of downvotes.
Historically, in countries such as the U.S. and South Africa, "boy" was not only a 'neutral' term for domestics but also used as a disparaging racist insult towards men of colour (especially of African descent), recalling their subservient status even after the 20th century legal emancipation (from slavery, evolved to race segregation, viz. Apartheid) and alleged infantility, and many still consider it offensive in that context to this day since it denotes that men of colour (especially of African descent) are less than men.
That's easy to answer -- they're all ways to unfairly single out people based on traits that shouldn't be used to distinguish people, ways that are now illegal in some cases -- age, race, gender.
> That's not a strawman, that's a direct implication.
A what? A "direct implication"? Those words are antonyms. You do understand the difference between "direct" and "implication", yes? An implication is by definition indirect.
If we accept the general outline of events thus far recounted, only one of two people has to be crazy, and the others can be merely blind/incompetent/weak. Unfortunately it is impossible at this stage for an outsider to be certain who the crazy party actually is.
The only thing that sounds remotely related to sex or gender is the hula hoop incident, which sounds irrelevant to the main story other than providing a final straw for the woman to leave.
I did read the whole article. You're right, I forgot about the guy who apparently professed love for her then removed her code from production. Although that one isn't particularly related to sex or gender either, other than the fact that the creep was an apparently heterosexual male. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with a pattern of sex or gender related discrimination, and any similar interaction would be inappropriate regardless of the parties involved.
That's how I read it as well. I mean, there's definitely some hints of sexist behavior. Though as I was reading, it felt like I was in the hallways of my high school years ago. Loads of gossip and craziness.
It's sad to see this story come out of GitHub though. Why can't we all just get along?
It isn't directly stated, but my take is that what set the founder's wife off in the first place must have been that she got wind, through her husband, that Horvath was unhappy with the "boys' club" culture. This account doesn't detail what happened early on in Horvath's time there, but makes it sound like there were numerous relatively minor incidents and a general pattern of behavior. Maybe Horvath said something to the founder, or to someone else who passed it on to the founder, he discussed with his wife, and she decided to make sure it wouldn't be a problem.
I think that's why sexism is a key part of this story.
yeah it doesn't sound sexist much, but still batshit crazy. regardless of who's telling the truth at thing point (i doubt github will go with an explanation over this..)
hypothesis: i think shes using the fact that shes a woman to push for what she wants (as in "sexist issues, sensationalistic, lets put that in there"). she's likely to either have little/no proof or be lying - whichever, when you can't prove stuff, you tend to do exactly what shes doing (or, if you're sane, you just shut up)
To me, it seems like this sort of problem occurs more in start-ups because the boundaries between professional and personal lives are blurred.
I've heard similar stories from people working at Facebook as well. This sort of forced camaraderie to fit into the clique isn't healthy at all. When I worked at Microsoft, we had quite a few talented female engineers on our team. I don't think at any point their gender was brought into question or discussion. We'd just solve problems, write code and have the occasional team lunch where we'd talk about the latest software paradigms, competition etc and go home.
I don't have any insights into start up culture (the only one I've actually been involved in is mine, There are two of us.) but I have worked for massive companies where management was pretty evenly divided by gender and have never personally witnessed anything untoward (or actually heard about and that place was a gossip mill).
Does it seem like it's not the whole story? It seems like there's a piece of the story missing from before the wife's chat over beers.
It doesn't seem like the wife of a boss would ask a specific employee to one-on-one beers, unless she had a specific topic in mind. And boasting about pulling strings at Github seems like an unlikely purpose.
To me, it sounds like something happened that was unmentioned. And the wife was asked to talk to her, in order to help settle the aftermath, and make sure she was happy there. (I'm not sure why the wife was deployed instead of HR) Seen another way, it sounds like the wife was trying to help make her happy at work, and not trying to boast.
However, something went awry at the chat, and they seemed to end up not liking each other.
Anyone else feel like the whole story's not being told here?
The article goes back and forth in the chronology, which makes the story hard to parse. It's Horvath's very personal point of view, but the TC interviewer(s) should have tried to clarify it. Multiple incidents/hostility around pull requests are blurred, but there were a few notches of escalation there.
If
a) Horvath had felt for some time that she was in a hostile work environment and that she was being subjected to pressures that a male employee would not have to endure (ie sexist discrimination, and
b) the company senior management / founder(s) felt that there was a risk that she was going to leave and go public with her allegations of sexism, then
c) it makes a twisted kind of sense that the founder would send his wife to go talk to Horvath to try to negotiate some kind of truce, make her happy. The (unfortunate) logic being that a woman to woman communication might be better for defusing Horvath's concerns.
d) unfortunately the wife, whilst female, handled it clumsily and make matters worse...and as the situation deteriorated she played an increasingly crazy and (apparently) unmanaged role. For all we know she had represented to her founder husband that she could handle it and panicked when things started going downhill.
e) etc etc
Your hypothesis was what I was thinking, and that a) was the part of the story that wasn't being told.
Like you, I have no idea what's actually going on, but the way the story was told, either by Horvath or the TC writer, the details didn't quite add up. I guess we wait until Github comes out with a statement.
Obviously it's only one side of a situation that spiraled out of control. Even if that one side comes from a generally reasonable, trustworthy person trying to give a full and balanced account – it will miss the mental states, internal rationales, and significant details that the "other side" experienced.
The problem with the founder's wife sounds like a very one sided account of your standard interpersonal conflict. Everyone who has ever been in one of those has at some point claimed themselves to be a saint and their opponent a demon.
The alleged sexism seems to be primarily imaginary.
The anonymous posting that so upset her and precipitated all of this said:
> has a history of RAGINING against any professional criticism. Leadership has stood idly by while she lied about contributions and threw hardworking coworkers under the bus (again and again)[1]
To be honest, it seems to me that such could very well be true.
A good thumb rule to apply to verify whether something is about sexism is to think whether things would have played out differently if the sex of the victim was different. Do you still think in this case the alleged sexism is imaginary ? Hard to say but I'd lean towards thinking that is Julie was a guy the problem with the founder's wife wouldn't get this bad - so, IMHO, yes, this is about sexism.
Two women are dancing to music at work in a tech company and the author compares this to a scene at a strip club as men are watching this. Unless this was a regular exercise, what was everybody expecting? Nobody taking notice?
Yeah this section really damaged her credibility for me. She says the guys were "gawking", so they were not saying anything inappropriate, just "staring openly and stupidly". I can picture a professional business environment where gawking would be inappropriate, but I have a hard time picturing that environment with women hula hooping to music. Plus is gawking a crime? Yes, those random employees were being unprofessional, but worth writing about in an email to Tech Crunch?
I meant crime in a figurative sense: "an action or activity that, although not illegal, is considered to be evil, shameful, or wrong.". I've quit a lot of jobs, but I've never felt a desire to correspond with the press as to why. My assumption would be that if I ever did want to share my misgivings with the press, I would want to share the substantial ones, not the petty ones. I'm just saying this seems like a petty issue that in my opinion weakens the overall narrative.
> Two women are dancing to music at work in a tech company and the author compares this to a scene at a strip club as men are watching this.
It seems hula hooping is ok, until men start watching. This is the most confusing bit she is saying. It basically equates to saying that strip clubs are not strip clubs until men start watching.
Woman hula hooping are bound to attract attention, for a variety of reasons. Julie, associated that with strippers, she could have associated it with entertainment or fun. The implication is that it is the men's mindset, I personally find that a rather sexiest statement on it's own towards men.
It seems the techcrunch article is very full of hyperbole.
And Dave Chapelle walked out of a $50 million contract because something normal (a couple of white guys laughing at a funny skit) rubbed him the wrong way. Sometimes a seemingly normal occurrence can pierce through one's facade of denial so sharply that the toxicity of the environment becomes inescapably apparent. And then what are you supposed to do? Pretend like nothing matters? Hello existential crisis.
It's fine if she doesn't like men oogling hoola hoopers. That's a personal preference. It's another thing to turn that into a general discussion of sexism and claiming at the same time that all men are rapists waiting to happen (which the "feeling unsafe" bit seems to imply).
It wasn't just people noticing them from their desks (or joining them, for the sake of well-humoured fun). It was, as she says, "line of men sitting on one bench facing the hoopers and gawking at them".
I would find women doing hoola hoop in the office a bit odd. Maybe it really depends on the company culture, but I don't see how either things could be called inherently sexist or threatening.
Probably worth mentioning that the hula hoop dancing happened at a Github party with a lot of people not from Github. It was also super badass hula hooping, not just regular dancing. Everyone was looking, men and women, because it was pretty awesome.
This info makes the last item of the article even more bizarre. I'm starting to think this was reported inaccurately by TC. Maybe she was really referring to a separate incident that happened at the hula dancing event, an incident we don't have any information about. Otherwise, this makes no sense.
It makes all the sense when you consider the possibility that she might be a person that specifically collects even the smallest pieces of evidence to support her theories of sexism and bigotry in the workplace.
Or that the TechCrunch reporter is writing the story at a certain angle, and asked for anything that could fit into that narrative. I think that, in the context of a certain sort of modern journalism, a version of Hanlon's razor is called for: "Never attribute to ideological slant that which is adequately explained as linkbait and sensationalism."
A founders wife felt that a female employee puts the company at risk, so she try to control the employee to avoid harm to the company. This then turned into bullying, stalking, and unhealthy work environment.
This is why affirmative action and other "let treat women specially" crap is bad. It makes for a self-fulfilling prophesy of more sexism. The more we focus on "balancing the scales" rather than eliminating special treatment of women, the faster we can reach a place where everyone is treated the same regardless of gender.
The rest of the story is not about sexism. The guy who got rejected is the prime example why some companies (and government, and armies) have anti-fraternization policies. The positive and negative aspects of office romances are old, well established and equal by both genders. At best, it is gender equal sexism.
The dancing event however sound purely made up in her mind. As a species, we a interested in what others are interested in, and when people laugh or is having fun, it attracts attention. It has nothing to do with sexism.
Two women [...] were hula hooping to some music. [...] 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.
I don't see a problem with it. One does not "hula hoop" in a place of work if one does not want to be looked at.
The wife sounds batshit crazy, but this behaviour is unfortunately pretty normal for some people who feel like they're in some kind of position of power.
She asks a reasonably prolific female developer out to drinks and power trips all over her. It's just disgusting bigoted behaviour, and it happens with males just as often.
I hope that whoever's founders' wife gets smacked in to line here to stay out of company affairs. But in the end, when companies are privately owned, the owners have a certain immunity to this kind of bullshit and get away with it.
The probable outcome is that the wife will get a slap on the wrist while receiving crap-tonnes of likely dividends, which I'm sure will make her feel much better and well vindicated.
This just sounds like plain old drama of the old fashioned sort, and not especially one that relies on sexism, but crazy people.
The difference being that sexism would be something ordinary citizens do naturally that is intolerable and is putting up with a discriminatory past or status quo and they are not being cognizant of what they are doing. This is just straight drama.
While the 'wife' aspect has drawn a lot of attention, it seems that through her marriage she may essentially have a founder's level of equity in the company. I don't know the personalities involved, but she might also have relevant professional experience, and/or have been genuinely helpful in handling thorny issues in the past (even if this case clearly escalated into many kinds of mutual suspicion and recriminations).
So it seems you could replace 'wife' in the retelling with 'early investor and advisor', and be equally accurate, but without the extra (gender-loaded) implication of improper influence being exercised by some meddling consort.
It doesn't matter how much equity she has. Or how much professional experience she has. She is not an employee and hence is not entitled to interfere in the internal affairs of the company without management oversight.
If an appropriately senior office of the company invites someone (equity holder or not) to observe or participate in the internal affairs of the company then it is that officer's responsibility to make the situation clear to the employees which whom he/she will be interacting and to oversee such interactions. Needless to say, if such interactions cause distress or could constitute harassment then it is the officer's job to deal with the problem.
To state the blindingly obvious, I may have shares in IBM and expertise in cloud computing but that does not entitle me to walk into IBM data centers and sit opposite ops staff all day.
Again, try substituting "early investor and trusted advisor of" the founder for "wife of" the founder. Such people play important roles in startups all the time. It's not a matter of "entitlements", startups regularly accept help, and deep involvement from, interested associates of their founders and executives. In some suitably-informal workplaces, any employee could invite a trusted friend in for meetings, offer guest access to internal systems, and then take definitive action on any recommendations received - no employment-relationship or contract or exchange-of-consideration required.
It's not the government. It's not the military. Organizations aren't all titles and reporting-diagrams, and especially not in small/private/fast-moving/crisis-handling enterprises.
I agree, but as I state about, in such circumstances "...it is that officer's responsibility to make the situation clear to the employees which whom he/she will be interacting and to oversee such interactions. Needless to say, if such interactions cause distress or could constitute harassment then it is the officer's job to deal with the problem."
> it seems that through her marriage she may essentially have a founder's level of equity in the company
What about the founder's mom? Or the founder's father? Or the founder's children? Or the founder's dear grandma?
There's a reason why equity and investor/adviser roles should be clear and formalized. Bringing cookies at your spouse's work place doesn't entitle you to anything more than polite greetings.
Depends; the marital union is unique (in law and practice), and you haven't said whether the other hypotheticals I posited (de facto large equity position, industry expertise, or a tradition of being effectively helpful) may also exist.
Mixing business with family is always fraught with danger. But it works for a lot of startups.
It's often better to formalize roles & titles, to help everyone reach similar knowledge about real power/responsibility – rather than relying on tacit knowledge, which varies with tenure, social skills, and (in the extreme) romantic relationships. But lots of startups have done well with, and even earned praise and fame for, their low-formalities, low-titles, low-hierarchy, environment.
Marriage is typically associated with sharing assets and belongings. While some parents can be quite free in helping their children out financially, it doesn't mean you can just go into your parents' house and take their money out of their wallets without asking them.
If allegations of non-employee/founder wife scenario is true, I would hope the board shows said founder the door. Beyond being in bad taste, it's exposing the company to some serious liabilities...
Yeah, it'll be interesting to hear GitHub's response if this aspect of the story is true. Those are some pretty serious allegations - influence over business and personnel decisions, reads Campfire chat logs, has spies within the company to keep an eye on what's happening, and, of course, intimidates employees. Quite damaging things.
What's the big deal? I am not a lawyer and I have no idea of the issues involved here, but surely if she was now made an employee and given a salary of $0, the fact that she was a significant investor (via her husband's shares) would make her relatively high-ranking within the company. So yes legally the fact that she didn't have that piece of paper (an employment contract) might matter, but why should it matter morally?
a) you can't fix the problems of the past by giving her a job now
b) being a significant investor doesn't make you 'relatively high-ranking in the company.' You are either an employee with a high ranking job, or an investor. If you have no executive functions and are just an investor you are not entitled to intervene in day to day affairs unbidden.
c) It matters morally because even if she had the paper that would not entitle her to talk and harass an employee with the tacit support and protection of a senior member of the company.
My gut tells me there was probably sexism at GitHub, drama with founder's wife, AND she was probably not blameless either in this whole mess. It was disheartening to me to see people rally to her on Twitter and immediately cry for the sacking of GitHub before any facts or concrete allegations were made by anyone involved, her especially. That's the stuff angry mobs are made of.
Allegation that a wife of a founder can read private chats at GitHub makes me question GitHub's privacy and security... I would love if we would have a statement of GitHub on this matter since it would be a huge privacy breach (and something that would make us move all of our private repos outside of GitHub). (posted this as a comment on the article as well)
That is largely the stand out of the article for me. I know this story will be forgotten and buried in no more than a week, but until they address this, I'm going to use BitBucket instead.
Until there's a second side to this my GitHub use is not going to continue. Sad to see this happen, but it's not hard to change origins on my repos to BitBucket or Gitlab.
edit: and again, it's two commands to push my repo back. but i have no interest in being with github at this time
But why? Despite it's dubious origins, Github remains an excellent / superior product. One may not agree with the way they do things (and even that seems to be some, not everyone in the organization), but is that really a reason to stop using the product?
Well that doesn't make sense. Unless he's randomly voting without consideration, then of course he evaluated the various options and "judged" them. That's rather the point of voting, isn't it?
I mean, if you accept that the article is true, the company described is horribly dysfunctional, and will likely have difficulty going forward as it grows. You could call it an early warning (assuming you accept the truth of the allegations).
As usual, the people pushing logical fallacies are the ones making the most of it. You do not want to reward people of the origin product because they are mis-behaving, so you are hoping to create negative incentives/tradeoffs for such behavior.
In the cited example on that website, it says
Accused on the 6 o'clock news of corruption and taking bribes, the senator said that we should all be very wary of the things we hear in the media, because we all know how very unreliable the media can be." Except in this one it goes, 6oclockCorp->generality of media. In this one, it is Github->Github, especially cause 'founder' is here.
That said I think leaving github is a pretty dumb idea considering that comparatively they are the good kids overall.
That seems like a knee-jerk reaction. We don't know what has really happened, and we've only heard one side of the story. It seems like these days people are just looking for something to be upset about.
I hope you understand that the truth is not simply a matter of if somebody is lying or not. Recollections can be flawed. Perceptions may be biased. Knowledge of other factors may be limited. Events or circumstances may be unintentionally unconsidered or mentioned. There is always value in hearing the take of other people, even when you are an involved party (and therefore able to be certain that you are not lying).
She don't need to lie, she can talk about her feelings. Most of the situations in the article are pretty much innocent, but feelings provoked in her aren't.
You cannot verify or falsify feelings. They can have different plausible origins. She present one origin, you say she is right. Yes, her side is plausible.
The worst thing here is that some of the origins can be offending to some of participants. You chose side that offends Github team.
Reverting someone's commits "silently" (inasmuch as you can do anything silently in git!) is any of those? That's interesting, because my commits were once "silently" reverted at a previous workplace and then when I queried it, it was explained that I was the one in the wrong.
Because I had made a commit without discussing it first and without understanding what I was doing.
(I would have discussed it first, but the developer concerned was on holiday at the time.)
What I'm saying is, there's a possibility that it wasn't unprofessional.
Some might argue what was unprofessional at both employers (GitHub and my previous one) was not having an iron policy that all commits must be code reviewed by another person. But that's a policy issue.
There's a _possibility_ that it was just that suddenly after the failed come-on, her commits suddenly needed a lot of reverting (though you'd think Github, of all companies, would have decent policies on communicating on changes; silent reversion is not normal and is likely to cause a lot of confusion).
However, it allegedly started happening _after_ the failed come-on, which would make it retaliatory. That's unprofessional, and probably amounts to gross misconduct.
> "However, it allegedly started happening _after_ the failed come-on, which would make it retaliatory."
That would make it possibly retaliatory. It remains possible (although I would not say that I consider it likely) that there were legitimate technical justifications for reverts made after the rejection, and that the sequencing of those two events was entirely coincidental.
If I were management at github, I would grill the employee who reverted those changes for a technical justification for the reverts. If the justification seemed tenuous or strained, I would fire them on the spot. I would however make sure to grill them before firing them, as it is not certain that there was no legitimate technical justification.
The story is confirming my long held prejudice/bias. If a company/organization organizes women only activities, then there is something profoundly wrong in their relationship towards women.
‘Talks From Incredible Women In Tech, Every Month’ does not sound like 50/50. That said, even a 50/50 ratio is lopsided given the ratios of graduating students in the relevant fields.
I'm not the first to mention it but for me the big issue is the wife having access to private company information. That type of thing really does make me start thinking about Bitbucket (any other good alternatives dudes?).
I don't see a ton of sexism here though. A developer removing her code because she didn't want to date him isn't sexism. It's unprofessional as hell and possibly a fireable offense depending on the circumstances, but it's not about a generalized animosity toward women.
The hula hoop thing too seems dumb. Maybe you had to be there? Were the male developers' tongues out? Were they making obscene comments? Two ladies hula hooping in the middle of an office is likely to attract attention. Are men supposed to immediately duck and cover and avert their eyes? Seems like she's over-reacting.
Still, assuming everything stated in the article is true, it does raise questions about the founders' judgment. I really like Github and this situation certainly is disappointing.
I wondered how long it would take for one of these "no management" cults to unravel.
Put people in charge (call them managers or not, whatever), and you may get the wrong people in charge.
Put no one in charge, and the douchebags, manipulators and sociopaths will end up domination the culture.
I prefer box #1, thankyouverymuch. At least those can be easily identified and removed before the whole thing has rotten to the core. And if I was part of a minority in such a company, like women generally are in tech startups, I would avoid #2 like the plague.
Also, this is just begging for a culture were the founders will remain the only authority. And founders are generally not known for being very good at the actual day to day running of a company.
The sexism is a red herring here btw. Could have been any form of bullying and manipulation.
The law is very clear on discriminating against someone by virtue of race, gender and/or age in a work situation.
A lawyer could make a very good case just based on her side of the story for the law being broken.
Against the coder who undid her work because he was rejected by a woman, that is classic retaliation pure and simple. Most cases like this that don't go to court settle in the Valley for $250k. It's a million at a minimum in the Valley if it does go to court.
As far as the wife goes, there was so much innuendo in the article that I wasn't sure what to conclude. Was the wife suggesting she hook up with her husband because a happy husband would make the former employee's situation better? If so, another classic open and shut case.
Absolutely. What she should have done is not resigned, but lawyered up, and started recording everything. When she resigned she lost her power. She did exactly what they wanted her to do. I know it can be the hardest thing to do in a situation like that. But the only thing people like that understand is power and money. And taking $250k from them in a lawsuit is certainly going to be noticed at the board level and by the investors.
Ooh! The media! We're supposed to blindly trust their reporting even though they get wrong everything we know about personally, right?
Clarification from Julie Ann Horvath describing everything TechCrunch misrepresented in 3... 2... 1...
(The real situation may be better or worse. TechCrunch may have left out info that helps or damns GitHub. But you're naive if you think a journalist would report on a story like this accurately.)
It would be enlightening to see case studies of instances where anyone in tech tried leveraging journalists to solve career problems.
Over the long term, I am suspicious that volunteering yourself as a subject in someone else's narrative does not do you any favors. It'd be nice to see an analysis on how this kind of response benefits or hurts the subject personally, professionally or emotionally.
Hmmm..... I read this slowly and I see intimidation, but it is a little short on evidence of sexism. The evidence was a perception of sexism, but very little evidence of it. How much of that was in her mind vs in actual interactions with others (unless aggressive communication regarding pull requests applied evenly to both genders is inherently sexist).
What I do see is something else though. I see a nebulous, bossless organization where the founder's wife is effectively running the political show. Call me old fashioned but that seems totally at odds with allegations of sexism.
Reading between the lines I see something else going on. "I thought I could fix X" (where X is either an organization or a person) is something that never ends well.
I hate to say this but the article did not make me sympathetic to Horvath. I have seen even in myself the tendency to try to fix an organization which was working (just in ways I didn't understand) and causing issues in the process.
I think you have a lot of good points. Let me just point out that aggressiveness in management is present IN EVERY INDUSTRY KNOWN TO MAN. I faced it pretty hard in the news business. Just because your boss is aggressive, and he's a man, AND you're a woman, doesnt mean shit for evidencing sexist behavior. People need to realize that aggressive management != sexism.
I'm curious about the "hula hoop" issue that Julie is referring to. As a male nerd, I will admit that my social skills are a bit lacking. However: I don't see the problem with staring at women who are putting on a show which is clearly unrelated to their work.
If 2 women started making out in the break room, I'm ashamed to say that I might just linger longer than usual.
It helps to focus on empathy in these situations. You may view their activities or two lesbians as making a 'show', but perhaps to them it is a personal matter which they would prefer to enjoy to themselves. Sometimes hula hooping is just embarrassing and it's usually awkward to have a bunch of members of the opposite sex staring at you while you do anything.
I don't blame you at all for having those natural reactions. I do too.
You do have to realize the difference between hula hooping and making out. Hula hooping isn't even a slightly sexual act. Furthermore, objectification is a huge issue in the lesbian community, so in both the hula hooping and making out scenario, gawking is not okay and contributes to an already sexist power structure.
- Github leadership is run by adolescents who behave as one might in high school situations.
- Good luck to whomever says they worked in Github HR at this point in time. Your professional embarrassment is about to go off the charts.
- Andreessen Horowitz gave these guys US $100MM. Yes, it reflects upon them too.
But...I'd like to hear the other side of the story. As a manager for years, I've seen situations like this before (although not this sensational.) While the sexism word has been thrown out here, it's never anything as simple as gender. There are team dynamics at work, and those dynamics matter in context.
I would just like to say that this is not a "women in tech" problem. It's basically that the same dynamics that exist in high school often exist in business, especially small businesses. Replace the location: github with the high school cafeteria and it sounds like not unexpected behavior.
I'm not exactly sure why women in tech think this is about being a woman or being in tech or working at a tech company. The same behavior exists in non tech companies and you can have equally screwed up relationships with coworkers and their spouses as a man.
These problems are basic problems with people interacting with other people.
There seems to be several problems. Not entirely sexism.
1. Founder's wife asked Horvath out and gave her a lecture about who is the boss. Probably out of jealousy.
2. Founder's wife physically inanimate Horvath, making her unwelcome and scared.
3. Founder did not stop the wife and protect his wife.
4. Horvath was approached by a male co-worker and according to her her rejection had caused tension between her and that co-worker.
5. Horvath's partner is also a Github employee.
6. Another founder tried to step in but the situation didn't really resolve.
7. Horvath felt male co-workers gawking/staring/looking at female co-workers hula-hooping while sitting in a couch looked like someone visiting a strip club.
This is more like a failed company management than sexism at work.
A partner can help his or her partner looking after/helping/running a company even as a non-employee. He or she could send employees your homemade cookie or send them birthday card. It's okay to share thoughts with partner how to run a company, how to resolve people-people problem.
But the founder should not let his or her partner to intimate anyone: HR, executives, managers, engineers. This type of behavior, I thought I would only see them in drama (well I guess you can say something about WhiteHouse...)
The founder accused Horvath for bringing love affair into the company because she was/is dating an employee. The founder has a good point: try to avoid dating someone working with you. It's a beautiful story; but you can cause all sorts of mess. See this childish engineer who was rejected by Horvath became angry at her and started ripping her code out. I have read about Github's open culture, but hey, how could anyone do that!? And yet no one seen to care internally at all because he's a popular figure in the company. Well, I can't say everyone in that company is shit because there is also a rank in any organization. I wouldn't go against someone senior or more popular unless I have to. This is also a bystander problem: unless we have to deal with it, let other people and the people in the story deal with the situation.
While the founder is right about avoiding dating someone in your own company, he couldn't see that his wife (effectively meaning his own family problem) was also leaking into the company's daily operation.
The other founder tried to help Horvath. The founder apologized and tried to restrain his wife from sitting across Horvath. But the wife continued to "spy" on her. She was welcomed to do whatever she want to do. Horvath tried to ask other executives to help for the very last time and none worked out. Either the founder was scared of his wife (love her so much he didn't want to yell at her) or none of the executives really care. Someone with management skill should have step in and tell the founder "stop letting your wife to come in!"
Apparently, people fear the founder? and the wife??
Regarding the strip-club comment, I don't know the best way to avoid it. I, as a male, try to avoid staring at another female because I fear someone like Horvath accuses me of sexism. Maybe the guy was just bored or thought that female worker was beautiful. Staring at someone shouldn't be counted as sexism. It's hard. Would a female staring at a beautiful male count as sexism?
I am not saying there is no sexism in work place, but I think Horvath's overall sexist experience might have been influenced/augmented based on her treatment in the company (no one stop the founder and his wife abusing power).
But hey, I am just reading off the article. Her experience could be worse! I do feel bad for all the intimations she had to go through. I felt really bad as I was reading the article.
Final point:
Horvath then told her partner, also a GitHub employee, about what was happening. She warned him against being close to the founder and his wife, and asked him not to relay information to them.
I have a mixed feeling. If I were in his situation, I would try to sort out the problem with the founder myself. But now that I read about it, I guess in the future, if I were in a similar situation, I would not talk it out until situation gets worse.
>While the founder is right about avoiding dating someone in your own company
This is one of my pet peeves. This is a professional setting and the employees are not 13. They should be mature enough to be able to handle their personal lives without bans or frown upons. Someone can't handle rejection? Who says he/she can handle criticism? What about disagreements?
To me this is a personality problem that should be dealt with accordingly. Company-wide bans or silent rules can hide bigger problems.
It's a tough scenario. One of the first big managerial problems I had to face was when I was still a snot-nosed twentysomething working at a Fortune 100. I came back from lunch and was pulled into another director's office, who quietly told me that two of my employees had spent the last hour screaming at each other in the hallways and would I make sure they "stopped scaring the goddamned children." Turned out they had been secretly dating for the past six months, something that I was totally ignorant of. The relationship crashed, then burned, and then I had two senior-level sysadmins (each about 10-15 years my elders) who refused to work with each other. Even though we eventually worked through the professional problems (didn't realize that couples' counseling was going to be part of my ambit), they ended up with a lot of bruised feelings and I (for good reason) permanently lost a lot of political capital.
On the other hand, there are plenty of people who can be in a relationship while working with each other. Hard cases make for bad law, and I'm uncomfortable with blanket proclamations against relationships at work, as long as two people at different levels along the same management line aren't seeing each other.
Relationships breaking down are messy at the best of times, toxic at their worst. More people than not, when faced with the collapse of a relationship, will act like a 13 year old than a rational adult.
If the company is seen to have encouraged or even acknowledged the relationship it can create a huge liability, especially if one of the people involves feels like they got stiffed because of relationship issues (sidelined, transferred, had to resign, etc).
The number of couples who say they met at work suggests that blind eyes are often turned, but a company has those official bans on intra-office dating for good reason.
What you say is true, but I don't believe a contract of employment entitles any company to tell someone who they can or cannot date.
If, for the reasons you describe, they wish to maintain a public position of "we not encourage dating coworkers" that's one thing, so long as they don't actually think they have any say in this matter.
> I don't believe a contract of employment entitles any company to tell someone who they can or cannot date.
Shame that companies believe that just fine. They can and will fire an employee if "no dating coworkers" is a policy that said employee violated. You are welcome to avoid working for these companies, but that's your only recourse unless you have an overwhelmingly string case that discrimination was involved.
Reasonable is "don't date anyone in your line of management". Options in the case that you do start dating including transferring out to a different manager. That's reasonable, because it's a conflict of interest issue rather than a "who you are allowed to date".
In my observation, when opposite-sex dating occurs between coworkers in all but the largest enterprises where contact cannot be avoided after a breakup, one or the other employee will end up leaving -- usually the person with lower status or value. Even if they tie the knot, you may find one or the other partner wanting to work "somewhere else."
As a manager, you should be prepared for this eventuality once you become aware of the activity. It is unreasonable to forbid all dating since many happy marriages were established between people who met in the workplace. It is reasonable to let people know that they may face dismissal if their dating issues enter the workplace and prove a distraction for themselves or others.
On a practical level managers wish to avoid unnecessary turnover or drama in the workplace. Knowing that employee dating will almost inevitably lead to one or both of these things, I understand the "frown upon" aspect. The employees themselves should be adult enough to know that they are gambling with their jobs.
I, as a male, try to avoid staring at another female because I fear someone like Horvath accuses me of sexism.
This is, sadly, the best thing to do because you don't know who is going to take offense.
PS: To avoid looking one-sided and narrow (which I believe I'm not) I really feel bad about this whole situation and the lady who had to go through that. Personally liked a github as a company.
> This is, sadly, the best thing to do because you don't know who is going to take offense.
Then excessive avoidance gets reinterpreted as snobbishness, sexism, not wanting to be inclusive, and so on. "Men actively avoid me and sit father away during meetings, they don't invite me for beers after works, it is a hostile environment". Anyway it is a fine line. And one can interpret a lot of behaviors as stemming from sexism or misogynism even if they are not.
No, it's not a fine line at all. There is a huge chasm between ogling someone undertaking physical activity and excessively avoiding them. You probably behave toward your male colleagues in a way that would fit neatly somewhere between these two extremes. Is it particularly a US issue, this inability to behave like a grown-up at work? In the UK, in my experience, men and women tend to work together, on an equal footing, with no problem whatsoever.
> There is a huge chasm between ogling someone undertaking physical activity
If anyone -- attractive man, unattractive man, attractive woman, unattractive woman -- started hula-hooping in the middle of the office I would expect people to stare. Not because it's sexual, but because it's peculiar. The gap between "stare" and "ogle" is hardly objective, let alone a "chasm."
Julie described the group of men as 'gawking'; as far as I'm aware, this is more or less interchangeable with the term 'ogling', in common use here in the UK. This is significantly different from just staring - it implies a sexual undercurrent, i.e. paying particular attention to someone's physical characteristics. Maybe this is a cultural thing, but the clear implication in the original report was that the staring/ogling was inappropriate, particularly because it was undertaken by a group solely consisting of men.
Ogling is defined as "stare at in a lecherous manner."
The hard part here is defining "lecherous" but it would seem to imply that he is watching in a way that signals sexual intent.
It's worth noting that women are generally much better at interpreting body language than men are, so it's possible that a guy is watching the woman dance and getting some sort of erotic enjoyment from it, tries his best to hide it but some subconscious subtle clue gives him away.
Having said that, hoop dancing would seem like an inappropriate thing to do in most offices to begin with but I would say the same thing about nerf gun fights.
Try getting sternly lectured for 10 minutes because because you held the door open for a stranger to be polite. That's when you know shit gotten real.
For the record, I routinely hold open doors for people that I know are behind me and are leaving/entering a building. It surprised me to know end to get yelled at for it.
I had that happen, so I laughed. Then she got really angry... doesn't stop me, though. I hold the door for everyone, because it's polite, not because someone is whatever gender.
First time I had that happen I quickly shut the door in the young lady’s face. Didn’t hit her, but it fell in place and she had to open it again herself.
She was pretty unhappy about that as well, incidentally.
Wearing regular day clothes. I dont drink. No, my current girlfriend (who identifies as a feminist) thinks the idea of yelling at someone for adhering to the social niceties is strange after I told her about the incident.
> This is, sadly, the best thing to do because you don't know who is going to take offense.
I know you mean well, but your sadness to me belies some ignorance about what it's like to be a woman working in a male dominated field. You'd like to live in a world where you can casually watch beautiful people doing beautiful things. I don't begrudge you that, and I wouldn't accuse you of sexism.
That said, I have zero interest in watching women hula hoop at work. None. Not because I am incapable of enjoying a show like that, but because I desire so deeply to work in an environment where woman can just kick ass at their jobs without having to deal with sexual politics. We're nowhere near that point as a culture, but that's where I want to be.
So I'm not sad that I can't watch women hula hoop at work. I'm really excited to have positive, professional interactions with women at work about their actual jobs.
The part that bothers me about this is that we're talking about a one-sided account of events where the terminology being used, "ogling," is entirely subjective.
At my work, there is a woman who brings hula hoops to company events. When there's music, she likes to dance and do tricks with them and she obviously practices a lot. When she's doing it, people (including me) stare. But, at least for me, it has nothing to do with any sexual aspect of what she's doing...I'm watching it because I like appreciating the skill and practice that's gone into her performance. And similar things happen at other company functions. For example, we have an employee who majored in music and is an amazing pianist. There's a bar we go to with a piano that he's played a few times. Guess what...everyone stares at him while he's playing. Hell, we've even got a couple of people who are amazing beer pong players that gather a crowd whenever the ping pong balls come out at events with a keg.
So when does staring and admiring a skill cross the line to ogling? That depends entirely on the person making the determination and often says more about them and their perspective/past experiences than it does about the people doing the staring.
The bottom line is that for those of us who weren't there, nothing in the account we've been provided gives us any information to judge the appropriateness of what went on. We have only one fact: the author of the account, who, rightly or wrongly, has an axe to grind with the company, felt that it crossed some line. It's bad PR, but it's not proof that anything untoward happened.
You're right, it is subjective. But to me there's no real cost to using the broadest possible definition I ogling. And the upside (making a wider range of people comfortable) is huge.
>What I did have a problem with is the line of men sitting on one bench facing the hoopers and gawking at them
Gawking and looking are not the same thing. There are also times where even the most socially incompetent will realise that some girls doing things that might be nice to look at is not an invitation to check them out doing it (this is, of course, excepting people who go the reductionist route of thinking that feminists invent their own problems).
'Respect' is a pretty loaded word. Are you saying the guys staring at (fellow employee) girls hula-hooping in the same office should just close their eyes? What if the girls were just sitting, drinking coffee? What about juggling 6 balls on the air? What about picking their noses? What about picking each-others noses?
Where does this nonsense end? If (almost) all my co-workers are staring at me as I adjust my belt, standing in the middle of the lunch room, I will do that activity in the confines of a men's room next time. If the same thing happens as I stretch my leg muscles before a run, I will do that activity outside. Why is it my co-workers' fault if they stare at me if I do something that is not the norm?
If being merely 'looked at' troubles you, then you need to look at yourself before closing others' eyes.
"Why are you uncomfortable?", should not be that hard a question to answer, clearly and succinctly, for something that evokes such a strong response from you.
When your office environment involves hula-hooping but doesn't sell hula-hoops, you've already thrown office decorum in the toilet. I say good luck in getting horrible people to restrain their stupid impulses in an environment like that.
I think it's inappropriate to stare at anyone for long, whether male or female. It's normally not considered polite and a bit weird, so I don't get what the issue is?
I get it, you find someone attractive and you want to gawk at them, cool. I learned to control that impulse when when I was hitting puberty. Seriously, there really isn't an excuse and it's inappropriate in most situations.
If someone is rendering a public performance, aren't you supposed to look at it? When does hula hooping in a public space transfer to a public performance? Is it public immediately because it's in plain sight? Does it only become public after an audience gathers and the hula hooper continues to hula hoop? What if someone sees the gathered audience and joins in so that they won't be considered rude for not taking interest in the public hula hooping performance?
It's not really as clear cut as "staring makes you an asshole." I've found that in a workplace people will have wildly variable interpretations of the same event. The only solution is to work with mature adults who can assume good faith and work out their own issues. This almost never happens, so instead companies create hyper-sanitized environments where everything is against the rules.
I agree with your points, and also I really have a hard time believing that the women hula hooping to music in the middle of the office were not aware of the effect they were having.
While personally I think its creepy to just hang out and leer at them, it's not really against societal norms in any way.
It's not like these guys broke into the girls bathroom to watch this or something.
Well maybe something is wrong with societal norms then? Because honestly if the focus was just watch attractive women hula hoop I would think it's creepy too but I wouldn't just say it's alright because of societal norms.
But I think it's impossible to really judge this situation without the context. Did other people decide to participate or was it really just two girls hula hooping the whole time? It boils down to was the mentality from the males perspective "oh hey, cool, people are hula hooping!" or "oh hey, the two attractive girls are hula hooping and I want to gawk at them!" The first one is fine, the second one is not.
Yeah. I think everything up to that point was inexcusable. Horvath wasn't really doing any justice to an already strong case by feeling offense for the sake of others. If it was just basic hula hooping, I'm not quite sure what would be interesting, but both music and movement are distracting. If it wasn't an attempt to perform, it was probably a distracting display. Hell, I'd probably be on the bench too, waiting for my turn! There's no need to assume this was sexual and I think Horvath may have been projecting her horrible experiences onto these new colleagues.
Don't take this the wrong way. I think hula hooping is a fine activity that probably burns a decent amount of calories. However, I've never worked at a job where employees jumps through these kind of hoops. I will probably look. And then look away. Pretty much everyone I know will think hula hooping at work is weird. If people tend to stare at you when you hula hoop, do hand stands, or pick your nose you may just have to stop doing it. Most people do not do these things at work and are happy nonetheless.
So all people who don't confirm to your social norms are fucking assholes? Btw, did you ever travel to countries like Germany or Czech Republic? People there do stare. A lot. Nations of assholes, I guess.
I wonder what do you think about people who don't speak English or who don't eat their food with a forks but with other ustensils.
I've been to both Germany and the Czech Republic. At no point did I think 'Hmm.. people here appear to be staring at things at an above-average rate'. Maybe where I come from (the UK) we also stare at a particularly high rate (whatever that is) but I'm unaware of this being the case.
> See this childish engineer who was rejected by Horvath became angry at her and started ripping her code out.
How does not allowing dating between employees solve this situation? Regardless of whether Horvath was seeing anyone or not she could have rejected this person because she wasn't interested and the same things could have happened. If anything her trying to avoid dating anyone in the office would have led to the same result, so how exactly would a rule like that have helped in this situation?
I think the general mentality of don't date anyone from work is silly, you can't just sweep under the rug any emotions or relationships that might happen to develop with people you work with 5 days out of the week. The important thing is to make sure that no conflict of interest issues develop and make sure these relationships are known so HR can handle them properly.
Of course there are a lot of complicated scenarios that can develop, but like someone else said, we're all adults here. People should be able to handle these things in a professional manner and if they can't then really the company needs to question whether they should be working there in the first place.
> The founder accused Horvath for bringing love affair into the company because she was/is dating an employee. The founder has a good point: try to avoid dating someone working with you. It's a beautiful story; but you can cause all sorts of mess.
That's between the two people. Period. If they become problem employees, then they are problem employees, not two people who date. The problem behavior that happens on the clock is HR's only legitimate concern.
Prohibiting dating is like firing women who get pregnant.
Counter example, where I work there are so many married or dating couples within the company that it's almost a thing.
That's the part I don't get. "Don't date coworkers" is a heuristic/warning for self-guidance, not a dogmatic rule for management to impose. Aside from the typical "chain of command," rule it's none of my business. This heuristic is to help people avoid any actual or apparent nepotism while in a relationship and petty jabs afterwards, both of which Horvath ironically faced from people who didn't respect her relationship.
No. There are places that have non-fraternization clauses in employee contracts. Both parties can be fired if there is a relationship and it is not disclosed. In a larger organization (the one i am thinking of is a large bank) they will offer to transfer one person to a different group so that there will not be contact at work.
It's not "sick". It's that it's rife with problems. I don't think companies should ban dating but I think it's very wise for them to be wary of it happening and educate their employees, before they start, to imagine what happens if that person becomes their boss or subordinate or breaks up with them and they have to see them everyday at work and work together. And/or starts dating someone else. Or is their superior and has the ability to influence their career with their decisions etc. Or how it feels to be on the same team as two lovebirds.
Does "life and humanity" include a bad breakup, tons of drama, and pulling the entire office/company into that drama? (not saying it's always the case, or even a lot, but it's very bad in the few cases when it does happen) If people could truly separate their personal lives from their professional ones, this wouldn't ever be an issue.
Of course it does. That's humanity. I understand entirely why a business would want to avoid this stuff, but I also understand why a business might want to not have to pay employees, or might want to work them 24 hours a day if it could. None of these things is healthy.
It's arguable. While it's completely unreasonable for a business to overwork its employees or not pay them, it seems reasonable to me to expect them to not bring their personal issues to the workplace. Also, I imagine their coworkers feel the same; if you're trying to get work done, and your coworkers are fighting because of their relationship, wouldn't you want them to stop/go away?
If your employees are fighting at work because of their relationship you have bad employees. Attempting to forbid all office relationships is not an appropriate response.
Come let me exploit you and convince the meaningless amount of equity I give you is worth working 80 hours a week.
And, even though you don't have time to meet anyone, you can't form a life bond with the designer that you work with everyday- despite you mutually digg each-other and are best friends.
This again. Every time someone speaks out about sexism there seems to be a need for some to defend the predators (directly or by declaring that "this is not sexism"). Why do you feel obligated to do so?
Its a double standard. Its allowed to assume the worst motives in male behavior, always gets a pass. Its forbidden to call out despicable behavior in females.
And now, it seems its forbidden to explain male behavior as anything but evil. Because they are 'predators' by default.
Resorting to these "PC rules of engagement" ends rational discussion. Reducing this to the choir preaching to one another.
I don't believe this story is on "male behavior" nor an attack on every male in the world. It's an story on predators that happen to be male (and female for that matter).
Your answer is kind of what I expected: You believe sexism is an attack on men, and therefore need to be on the defense.
>> It's an story on predators that happen to be male (and female for that matter).
> Don't you think it's then disingenuous to call it sexism?
Not if each group unfairly characterizes the other based solely on gender traits. Sexism is a two-way street -- if a man says, "All women are dumb", that's very clearly sexist. If a woman says, "All men are rapists," that's equally sexist.
Women can absolutely be sexist towards other women-- as in a jealousy scenario. Sexism is being targeted because of your gender. The fact that this is not obvious explains a lot.
Isn't that a bit reaching, though? Jealousy is a personal feeling, not a reaction based on societal and political frameworks. Anecdote: gay men in long-term relationships are jealous of their partners too, and their reactions to perceived "enemies" are similar to that of people in heterosexual couples.
To be clear, what we're talking about here is not a simple interpersonal issue. It's sexism within a company.
It doesn't matter whether the source of that sexism is the way the men treat women, or whether its the way a high-powered woman treats the other women. (Both are at play in this particular story.) If someone is being discriminated against due to their gender, the company culture has an issue with sexism.
I brought up jealousy as an example, but I didn't mean it to be romantic. It can be an issue of feeling threatened by another woman, as when a woman used to be the only female voice at her company. It's a twisted perspective, but there's data to say it exists.
7. Horvath felt male co-workers gawking/staring/looking at female co-workers hula-hooping while sitting in a couch looked like someone visiting a strip club.
My issue with this is she had no problem with the females doing the hula hooping but had a big problem with the guys who were watching. This is one of the problems with these ongoing debates: Women very often feel it is somehow solely on men to not look (or whatever) while claiming women can do any damn thing they want. Anyone, male or female, who tries to suggest that women bear some responsibility for not shakin it at work get called a victim blamer, rape apologist, etc.
>Regarding the strip-club comment, I don't know the best way to avoid it. I, as a male, try to avoid staring at another female because I fear someone like Horvath accuses me of sexism. Maybe the guy was just bored or thought that female worker was beautiful. Staring at someone shouldn't be counted as sexism. It's hard. Would a female staring at a beautiful male count as sexism?
The problem isn't sexism so much as objectification. It's just shitty to treat someone like meat. It's not going to help people feel like part of a team if they're gawked at. If it's men gawking at women, it's going to alienate the women. Like, seriously, can't people just control themselves and treat other people as people and not sexual objects?
As for the sexism part… historically, you know, men are allowed to stare at women and women aren't really allowed to (their traditional role is to be coy, y'know?). It's an action that is typically masculine, and it's an action that reminds women that they're different. That they don't quite belong. Etc. etc. It's just not positive, it's not helpful, it's just base instinct—and one that should probably be overpowered in the workplace.
It's one of those things that is going to be painfully obvious to someone who has experienced discrimination (eg. sexism, racism, homophobia, whatever) in their life, and not a big deal to those that haven't.
To clarify for many of you, you don't need someone shouting "I HATE WOMEN" for sexism to be occurring. The sexism in this scenario is subtle and persistent, something that likely tainted all of the workplace interactions at github, allowing a female employee's problems at work to be continually ignored. This eventually built up to the issue most people are focusing on, a founders spouse being allowed to harass an employee, which is not so much the main issue but a major symptom of a larger issue at github and in the tech industry as a whole, that issue being the downplaying of women's concerns, opinions and needs.
The hula hooping moment was important because it visibly demonstrated her male coworkers lack of respect for women as people. They were unabashedly staring at their female coworkers as "eyecandy" in that moment and even defended their doing so.
>allowing a female employee's problems at work to be continually ignored.
Who is to say that it was only a female employee's problems? It sounds like the wife is a nut case and she could very well have bothered other employees. There is no evidence here that her requests were being ignored because she is a female.
>The hula hooping moment was important because it visibly demonstrated her male coworkers lack of respect for women as people.
Are you serious? Is it really the case that you have no respect for a person if you watch them performing a sporting activity? If I start juggling and someone watches me, I highly doubt that it's because he/she has a lack of respect for me as a person.
Seriously, read what you just said. It implies that you cannot watch people performing an activity while respecting their autonomy.
You're avoiding what I think is the better point, the first one. Her mistreatment by an estranged wife of a founder, in and of itself, doesn't constitute sexism. If her problems with this were ignored because she was a female, that would be sexism. But I didn't see any evidence of that presented and to me it seems more likely they were ignored quite simply because it was the wife of an important person at the company and HR was ineffective at resolving the situation.
Overall the article focuses very little on sexism and more on this really bizarre and inappropriate relationship with the Founder's wife. The section about someone reverting her commits because of being rejection might be a better example, but I don't really even see that as being gender specific either. If a women was rejected by a male coworker and she started reverting commits is that sexism? Jealousy isn't really gender specific and targeted at someone because they are a man or a women. Finally there were some vague mentions of pull request comments that might be sexist, but it's hard to judge without being able to see the comments and she really didn't expand into what about them were sexist.
Overall what I see is a very strange story about incompetence and inappropriate behavior, but very little talk about sexism except in a few random places and at the very end with the hula hoop story. I feel like there is a lot more to this story that has really been told.
I understand what you mean when you say that it "doesn't constitute sexism", and that's true for a definition of sexism as "acts or speech denigrating women on the basis of their gender."
I think what the prior poster is trying to express is that this is a situation, with the founder's wife, that could only occur to a female employee. The covert power of the wife over the complainant is based on gender, and her success in intimidating the complainant with bizarre behaviour -- to which the complainant had an entirely passive response -- is largely due to the social expectations that the complainant perceives, that as a woman she should not be confrontational nor assertive.
Given that I didn't see the hula-hooping incident myself, and only have the complainant's description of it, I cannot adequately address the question of whether or not the men involved were behaving improperly, or aggressively, or in a fashion such that I am sympathetic to the complainant's feeling that their attitude was demeaning to her female colleagues. Personally, I could happily watch attractive young women exercise for hours. But I would also sympathize completely with a young woman whom felt uncomfortable with that. From the complainant's description, it seems that her colleagues were hula-hooping together for fun, and that there was an abnormal number of male engineers sitting and watching them. The hula-hoopers were presumably aware of this. It spoiled the fun for the complainant, but how the hula-hoopers felt about it is still an open question.
I think you are absolutely right that the focus of discussion should be the founder and his wife. The situation sounds completely inappropriate, the HR response seems powerless and ineffectual, and whatever the other side of the story is, her resignation/dismissal occurred under entirely improper circumstances, and she probably deserves compensation for this.
> The hula hooping moment was important because it visibly demonstrated her male coworkers lack of respect for women as people. They were unabashedly staring at their female coworkers as "eyecandy" in that moment and even defended their doing so.
I have never understood how this argument works, obviously I'm missing something. Because I momentarily focus my attention on someone for their physical attributes, I automatically and necessarily consider them "eyecandy" rather than intelligent people with their own will that are to be respected? Does this work with other attributes - if I appreciate and acknowledge someone for X, does that mean that X is all they ever are to me? If the male employees had put on an impromptu bodybuilding pageant, would that have been the same thing?
Naturally, the fact that the woman in question was actually disturbed by the situation does indicate that there is cause for concern.
You are not alone. I blame PC, overprotective upbringing and "I am offended by that" trend. As soon as some subject becomes taboo to discuss people lose the understanding why something is bad and start to treat everything related as bad and unacceptable. Reminds me of this: http://i.snag.gy/kdu77.jpg (doesn't matter if experiment was real or not). This is very prominent with sexism and racism—these words are losing the meaning really fast. Now merely acknowledging someones race is called racism. Same goes for gender. And god forbid you find someone attractive. I really don't get what kind of society these people want. The one where everybody walks covered in burqas?
You are not allowed to look at attractive person—you will offend them. I wonder how soon a simple glance will accepted as a kind of sexual assault.
You are not allowed to approach the person you like—it will be "unwanted advances". It's "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. If woman will say that it makes her feel good when she senses attention she will be explained, that's just because patriarchal society made her to feel this way. More often than not those explaining will be males, ironically. What a terrible society to live, luckily it will die out soon for the lack of reproduction.
As for this story: it has nothing to do with sexism. Nothing at all. Actually the real sexists are the ones who think all this happened because of the sexism.
Guys (and girls): these issues are much much more complex and deserve to be treated with much more respect instead of rubber stamping like it is common now. Women and non-white people can be assholes too and I would like to retain the right call them as such without being accused of sexism or racism.
Though this right might be long gone.
Quite often it is a fun mental experiment to reverse the genders or races and think how vastly different reactions would be (if there would be any). Imagine that black person says: "I am proud to be black!". Now imagine that the white person says "I am proud to be white". Now throw away you knee-jercky reaction and think about it.
>Imagine that black person says: "I am proud to be black!".
>Now imagine that the white person says "I am proud to be white".
>Now throw away you knee-jercky reaction and think about it.
I thought about it, and here's what I found: The different reactions which those two assertions may elicit depend crucially on different shades of meaning of the word "proud" which come into play, depending on the colour of the person who says it. These different meanings come into play because of the history of oppression associated with these colours; we don't (usually) think in a vacuum. To make this clearer, consider the following, slightly modified thought experiment:
Imagine that a black person says: "I am not ashamed to be black!".
Now imagine that a white person says "I am not ashamed to be white!".
How strong is the knee-jercky reaction now? Think about it.
But that's exactly what the parent was saying - if you perceive the meaning of the words slightly differently based on the skin color of the speaker, it's textbook racism. Some people might call it positive racism/discrimination, but it's still racism.
> if you perceive the meaning of the words slightly differently based on the skin color of the speaker, it's textbook racism.
What textbook would that be? My dictionary defines racism as:
1. the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.
2. prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior.
This does not suggest to me that it is racist to acknowledge that a shared history (of oppression, in this case) may have an influence on the language of a people.
"PC, overprotective upbringing, and I'm offended by that" are not some new horrible plague - they are attempts to let underprivileged voices and opinions survive.
When a black person says that they are proud to be black, they are expressing that they feel a certain pride in their race, which exists in this country thus far as a marginalized and underprivileged set of humanity. Saying you are "Proud to be white" kind of makes you sound like an asshole, because white people have crafted a society to let them have more advantage. True, any given white person might not be some sort of evil society architect, but white people are clearly those who most benefit from this society. Blaming this on political correctness is a cowardly and conservative move that stems from a false sense of equality between people.
As progressive and bottom-up our community can be, we are not a meritocracy, and everyone is not equal.
Judging by your comment history, you do appear to have internalized your ideology very thoroughly.
But, no. First of all, your example is biased towards Western society. Expressing white pride in an Eastern Asian society would be absolutely fine, according to your logic.
Here's the issue, however. Even though black people have been historically marginalized in the USA (as I'm implicitly assuming this is US-centric) and still face disadvantages, despite being largely equal in most facets, this does not make their racial pride any less "asshole"-ish.
Pride is reserved for things once has accomplished, not ones that you're inherently born with. Just by that alone, racial pride is frivolous.
Even further, by setting up this double standard, you are actually contributing to the extension of racism. Why? You're giving people carte blanche to keep focusing more and more on racial characteristics as being essential to them as people.
"It's bad to be racist, but we still must be preoccupied with race and being inoffensive at all costs."
That is only slowing progress down. You go from a society that is maddeningly obsessed with race as a way to persecute people they don't understand to a society that is maddeningly obsessed with a race as a way to kiss ass, idolize and never question those majestic black people who can clearly do no wrong and deserve to have double standards because they have suffered injustices throughout their history.
Yet so have all races and cultures, honestly. Black people do not hold a monopoly on persecution.
People do say they are proud to be white all the time, just in a different way. I hear "I'm proud to be Irish!" all the time. The thing is "white culture" isn't really a thing, "white culture" is simply the dominant culture in our society that we tell other cultures they should adapt to.
No one is saying white people can't be proud of their heritage. They can be proud, and they do celebrate their heritage all the time. Acknowledging someone's race isn't extending racism, it's embracing them and their culture.
To be honest I used to think similarly, I never got why people had to be proud of their race, or why it was part of their identity. Eventually I realized it's because the dominant culture is white, I don't have to ask myself what it means to be white or what it means to be american. It is part of my identity, I just have the luxury of not having to think about it.
Anyway, I would highly recommend watching "The Color of Fear", it changed my mind on a lot of stuff I'd never thought about critically.
Of course there isn't a "white culture" because people are not homogenous in their customs by their skin color alone. Finnish culture is separate from Polish culture is separate from American culture and so on.
Black culture isn't a thing, either. What, you think all people have the same traditions and customs because they have a common skin color? What idiocy. What frivolity. What (inadvertent?) racism.
Being overly attentive to race is not an embracing of their culture. It is a fallacy, a misunderstanding of how the world works under the lens of this Western postmodernist narrative that people as an entire superficial group are responsible for misdeeds of their ancestors, whom they share no relation to whatsoever beyond their whiteness.
You're not embracing culture. You are erasing culture with your narrow, Western-centric guilt narrative where everything works in binaries. That being black dictates a common culture, and that Irish people have no culture, because they're white.
Ummm, I kinda explicitly pointed to the Irish having a distinct culture that people celebrate.
And where did I say people are responsible for the misdeeds of their ancestors? You definitely aren't responsible, but you do benefit disproportionally from a long history of oppression. You shouldn't feel guilty, but you should be aware of it.
Nor was I saying we should be overly attentive to race, I'm simply saying that acknowledging someone's race isn't racist. And I hate to break it to you, but yes people do have a shared experience based on their skin color. Whether you're black and 8th generation American, or you're from Africa, there is a shared experience in the way you are perceived and treated in a society dominated by "white culture."
You sound like every defensive white dude ever who can't handle the fact that just maybe our society is built around us. You are the one who is erasing culture.
Seriously watch that video I linked (better yet, watch the whole movie).
Everyone benefits from the oppression of others in some way. Everyone who participates in consumer culture: white, black, Hispanic, Asian, etc. are benefiting from it. I'm not a special case.
To say there is a "shared experience" between all people of the same skin color is completely ignoring cultural and socioeconomic rifts that are present in the equation. There is common ground between subgroups, but ultimately, what you're speaking about reeks of an ethnic nationalism.
Is our society built around white people? Western society? Yes, most likely. It's hardly surprising when it has a predominantly white racial makeup.
Good to know I'm a defensive culturally erasing white dude for not buying into a narrow and binary white guilt narrative where some 80% of the world's population is under a homogenous yoke, that is inconsistent with how the world works at large. Some history lessons might do you well, I believe.
I saw the video. All I saw was an emotional man yelling out a black nationalist argument, largely as a reaction to how he may have been personally mistreated.
The modern world was invented in a cosmopolitan Europe. I think we should recognize that and preserve the best parts of that legacy, and yes, even be proud of it.
It's not resolved, but it has improved drastically. There's still barriers, primarily in socioeconomic status and tendencies to cluster in ghettos as a result, but it is still far better than one could have ever imagined.
If you want a crippling issue, go for homophobia. Homophobia is still very much rampant in the USA and it is still completely fine for politicians to be openly homophobic for reasons like "preserving family values".
Yet when was the last time you heard a US politician make openly racist and white supremacist statements? When has a white supremacist been elected? David Duke is the most recent example I can name of, and he was reviled.
Racism for US politicians is an instant career killer, no question. Race is a touchy issue and the moment a representative says something unfavorable concerning race, they get annihilated by press and public advocacy. Not the same for homophobia.
It's time people stop with their persecution complexes. The past is the past. No one owes you anything.
Right, because gay people have civil rights but black people and women don't...
Then again "queer" these days often means "straight but wants tumblr oppression points," so your perspective might be different from an actual gay person's.
No, I'm not. You're twisting my words to fit your agenda.
By dividing complex social issues into dichotomies of "oppressor versus oppressed" and allowing double standards as a perverse form of reparation for past injustices that current generations no longer have to suffer from, you are exacerbating the issue of race.
The ultimate goal should be to render race as a non-defining characteristic, one that should not cloud peoples' judgement or fuel their insensitivity. Instead, what's going on is that we're turning race into an emotional circus.
The fact is that being white by itself does not mean your ancestors were involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Mine were too busy being under Ottoman rule. Conversely, being black does not make you exempt. Many tribal warlords traded slaves with the Europeans voluntarily. There were some few thousand or so black slave owners in the USA before abolition.
People are not responsible for what their ancestors perpetrated in the past, and the world does not revolve around the West. Yet these ideologies of white guilt and reparation act like it's exactly that way.
> The ultimate goal should be to render race as a non-defining characteristic
That's a pretty OK goal, although it's unrealistic, because we can only get closer to that by successive approximation.
However your real mistake is trying to use your long term goal (ignoring race) as a short term strategy (ignoring racism). You're correct that racism is a less big deal in many contexts than it used to be. But for the time being, racism is quite a big thing in many other contexts. And ignoring it won't help get us to the place where we can safely ignore it.
I would propose learning what you can about what it's like for people different than you so that you have more opportunities to lend help and compassion.
> because white people have crafted a society to let them have more advantage.
Thinking of 'white' as a single group of people who are always middle class is a fantastically ignorant thing to do.
Does the white kid whose parents are Ukrainian janitors deserves a leg up less than the black kid whose parents are an English professor and a photographer?
>Does the white kid whose parents are Ukrainian janitors deserves a leg up less than the black kid whose parents are an English professor and a photographer?
Nope, but he's going to get one as a white person who lives in America.
It's possible to recognize the attractive features of someone while still being conscious of their humanity. Obviously there are degrees of attention you can give someone based on their looks that goes from socially acceptable to socially unacceptable.
I'm a man so I can't speak for women directly, but what I've gathered from the experiences of others is that women are interacted with on an attraction basis exponentially more than men are, this also constantly ranging from socially acceptable to unacceptable, wanted and unwanted. It manifests in little ways, cat-calling, aggressive or unwanted flirtation, maybe a creepy controlling coworker suddenly confessing his love? My own mom told me about a time when a total stranger grabbed her butt in a store and walked off. It makes sense to me that many women would be extra-sensitive to scenarios like this. Men literally don't have to deal with interactions like this at that level so it's totally different when the gender roles are reversed, and it's rare that they are.
The importance of that scenario was that it was relative to her entire work experience at Github. Even if we assume the intentions of the male workers were totally golden and the hula-hoopers were totally fine with their gawking, to me it makes sense why this scene would be triggering for her.
A description of the hula hooping from someone else at github:
> Probably worth mentioning that the hula hoop dancing happened at a Github party with a lot of people not from Github. It was also super badass hula hooping, not just regular dancing. Everyone was looking, men and women, because it was pretty awesome.
> to me it makes sense why this scene would be triggering for her
It makes sense to me as well, but if I were her boss, I would ask her to take a more professional and less emotional perspective of the workplace (of course, after (hopefully having her problems presented in a clear manner and) solving the other issues that were causing her to feel unwelcome).
This is the core problem, though: it's difficult (impossible?) for someone to be professional when everyone around them is so unprofessional. Worse still when none of their claims are fully addressed by management.
There was no resolution here. I don't blame her for taking these steps to out Github.
That only more reason to be extremely professional - noone can blame anything on you. Or maybe it's just my viewpoint of the world, but I would take the most defensive route possible, and use the experience to my advantage (learn as much as possible, gain relevant & valuable experience, eject into another company as high as possible).
> The hula hooping moment was important because it visibly demonstrated her male coworkers lack of respect for women as people.
Maybe hula-hooping is a common occurrence in Silicon Valley offices, but if my co-workers would be hula-hooping I would be looking as well (regardless whether they are male or female). Probably I would be thinking 'why on earth are you hula-hooping in you workplace instead of working'. I guess there is a fine line between gawking and looking.
Don't get me wrong - the entire situation she describes sound horrible but the hula-hooping did not sound very professional in the first place.
Hula-hooping is an especially complex example because it sounds like a strip-club kind of activity, but is also a kind of reclaimed hipster activity like knitting or roller-derby.
Why are those mutually exclusive? I get that women don't like being ogled upon, but if you are hula-hooping in the workplace, that's bound to attract some attention and not because you are such a smart person (althou you can certainly have fun and be smart). I wasn't there so I can't tell what the tenor was but I suspect that Horvath's state of mind due to the extreme pressure might have exaggerated that incident. I've seen comments throughout the thread saying she should have gotten help on the dick coworker reverting her code. In that environment it's very easy to become unsure of herself. She wasn't getting help with the founder-wife issue, why would HR respond to this? I've been wondering about Atlassian for a while. Maybe I should take a second look.
I think, if anything, the incident that triggered her leaving was an indication of how safe other girls at the company felt at the same time when she was bullied by the founders wife till she broke.
> The hula hooping moment was important because it visibly demonstrated her male coworkers lack of respect for women as people. They were unabashedly staring at their female coworkers as "eyecandy" in that moment and even defended their doing so.
Totally disagree. If someone is hula hooping in a company that usually builds software to host version control repositories, they are doing something quite out of the ordinary, which is going to lead people to gawk. This does not necessarily imply sexual objectification, though it doesn't preclude it.
> They were unabashedly staring at their female coworkers as "eyecandy" in that moment and even defended their doing so.
Why should someone be "abashed" at staring at someone who is hula hooping in the office? This is slowly starting to lean towards 'thoughtcrime', as long as they don't make overtly sexual or lewd comments, they shouldn't be unnecessarily be accused of a "lack of respect for women as people".
Your only source on this story is Horvath's recounting of it, and she says it was inappropriate. By what means do we have to question her assessment of the events? In questioning her, with no other information, you're saying "I don't believe you, you've irrationally overreacted". And that can only based not on the facts of the situation, but on your personal opinions of what "women" in aggregate are like. In other words, you're explicitly marginalizing Horvath's opinion because she is a woman.
> Your only source on this story is Horvath's recounting of it, and she says it was inappropriate. By what means do we have to question her assessment of the events?
You are using "inappropriate" like it's an objective word. Which is false. If she said something like "they were wolf-whistling and throwing dollar bills", that's an objective statement that we can either think is true or false, and form certain opinions about it. The only objective word we have heard so far is "staring". She is saying, "Ah, they were staring at a bunch of women hula-hooping in the middle of the office at a tech company, how inappropriate!", I am not being sexist when I say, "No, that's not inappropriate, stop with your 1800s attitude."
It is just a difference between Horvath's rather prim definition of "inappropriate" and my more liberal one, and I don't see how that is sexist, or marginalizes her opinion. My grandfather would probably agree with Horvath that staring at a bunch of women hula-hooping in the office is "inappropriate", and I would disagree with him too.
When someone tells a story and there's a gap between the events they relate to you and the conclusion they draw from it, it's natural to criticize their conclusions.
Unless you were there, you can't possible know what happened. We are receiving a third-hand accounting--a TechCrunch journalist relating what Horvath told them--of events we didn't experience. For all we know, the journalist editted out a part where the "gawkers" were wolf-whistling and throwing dollar bills. The point is not that they may or many not have done that, the point is that Horvath's (diluted) account is the only one we have to go by, and to dismiss it is literally nothing but marginalizing her opinion just because she's a woman.
She says it was inappropriate, and more importantly, that it made her feel uncomfortable. You have to either accept that, or you have to call her a liar.
If you choose to call her a liar, your basis for calling her a liar is what defines you as sexist. If it's "my vast and varied dealings with the Github staff at all levels never suggested anything unprofessional ever went on there"[0], then you are not sexist. If it's because "women overreact to stuff like this", you're sexist.
And it's one way or the other. You can't say "I am not calling her a liar, but I don't believe her". That's just mealy-mouth calling her a liar. And you can't say, "I didn't experience any of the involved facts for myself, but I'm not basing it on prejudices", because again, that's just speaking out of both sides of your mouth.
[0] which, given how shitty their code is, I can't see how anyone could ever make such a claim.
No one is dismissing Horvath's account as related by TechCrunch. Critically reading that account and then discussing the gaps in the internal logic of the account itself is the opposite of dismissal.
We also have this account of the incident, by somebody who claims they were present, has put their name behind their account, and may or may not be a github employee: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7408466
This particular account isn't even filtered through a journalist!
The sexism in this scenario is subtle and persistent, something that likely tainted all of the workplace interactions at github, allowing a female employee's problems at work to be continually ignored.
Lots of people of both sexes are impotent and disaffected at work, so it's not necessarily proof of anything when someone says "my opinion is not respected" and then finds superficials to explain it. If you can demonstrate a pattern, sure, but simply drawing from personal experience is very close to useless. In this case she is drawing from personal experience.
The hula hooping moment was important because it visibly demonstrated her male coworkers lack of respect for women as people.
What a gigantic jump. I mean, solar system crossing. Two people put on what sounds like a unique, if not artistic demonstration. People watch. It might actually be her own insecurities and hangups that led her to decry this, which is actually a perverse and rather incredible bit of sexism in itself ("women of Github...hide your shame. Don yon burkas and shroud yourself from the lusts of men").
This is not a clear story at all (clearly the founder's wife -- who is a significant owner of the company, fwiw -- got involved for something completely unspoken), and there is no reason for anyone to knee jerk to either side.
Further (and this comment is more general) it is toxic and repressive for the classic "Oh woe am I, look at all of the victim blaming in here! How offensive!". Github, and all of the players involved, are people too. Because one person yells the loudest and earliest doesn't mean that you can grab your torches with legitimacy without being the problem yourself.
This guy may need therapy. That's not her problem.
It's terrible that anyone should experience what he put her through. (Regardless of the founder's wife stuff, he produced an exceptionally hostile work environment by actively undoing her work, plus likely made her fear for her safety when he did not immediately respect her requests to leave after professing his love.) It's problematic that women in tech are much more likely to experience this than men (because of gender ratios and men tending to be more forward), and that the power dynamics and implicit threat of violence will also tend to be worse when women are the recipients of the attention.
Given this, having your first response be to ask her to be empathetic is ridiculous. Do we ask the victims of shootings to empathize with the perpetrators who had mental illness, had absentee parents, grew up poor, etc? Sometimes these issues come up in the wake of tragedies, and they are an important part of understanding the problem.
But the victim is the absolute last person to ask the be empathetic. She has an unquestionable right to feel personally safe and to do her work without others hostilely inhibiting her. When someone infringes on that, she's already being unfairly burdened. It's completely unfair to further burden her with an imperative to be understanding of what lead him to be the kind of person that would do that, rather than take every measure to remedy the situation, and to call out GitHub for failing to adequately do so.
Yes, it would be great if everyone empathized with those who wrong them. But until it becomes commonplace for people to show understanding toward people who mug them on the street because anyone willing to risk their safety and freedom for a few hundred dollars has likely hard a very hard life rather than reporting it to the police and seeking their imprisonment, let's focus on big, clear concerns: What he did to her was completely unacceptable, and if GitHub failed to quickly take action to end it and ensure it would not happen again, they deserve to be publicly shamed.
She didn't give any names, so I don't think it counts as "publicly shaming him".
I don't think that she should have been the one to suggest he seek professional help, either. The guy professed his love to her, refused to leave her house (it sounds like they were alone), and then went on to act passive-aggressively and sabotage her work. I wouldn't blame her one bit if she felt uncomfortable or even unsafe working around him.
The fact that he needs help, doesn't remove the harm done by his actions.
As a manager, I've witnessed a "harmless young man" bullying a young woman. Her manager didn't believe her and said something like you did "come on, you're good looking, he just has a thing for you".
She wasn't on my team so the only thing I could do is talk to my peer and he told me "don't worry, I'm on it".
It ended up with the "harmless young man" going crazy in her office, insulting her, saying she was worthless, that her work was shit, etc. (disciplinary action was taken as a result of this, fortunately).
There's no such thing as "harmless young men" (or women for that instance). There is what is acceptable at work and what is unacceptable and the tolerance policy for unacceptable work behavior must be nothing short of zero.
My take:
The founder leaves, at least for six months, and his wife has no further involvement ever.
The clueless spurned programmer leaves, at very least works from home for six months or more but is preferably publicly fired. His behaviour is unacceptably unprofessional and as good as he might be it's not good enough to destroy a culture.
The entire team (and many commenters here need this too) get coached on why its rude to stare at people, even if they are hula hooping or different.
And of course a public apology (and hurry), financial support for an appropriate cause and make Ms Horvath financially happy.
It will be interesting to see the actual response. The immediate one should be to stand all the protagonists down.
There is always two sides to a story. That said, if what she claims is accurate, then yes. I'm not so worked up with the hulla-hooping. I'd probably "stare" at male coworkers hulla-hooping too - especially if they were doing if for show. As long as there is no suggestive comment/attempt to stuff bills in their underpants, I'm not sure where the problem is.
I also agree with the posts above saying that a change in structure is needed. After a certain size, companies are like mini-states - they need strong institutions and establish a "rule of law" via standard practices in order not to become dystopias.
Everyone says this because it sounds obviously simple.
It's complete BS though. You spend 2/3'rds of your working life at work. The people you socialize, interact with and share common challenges are at work.
Unless you meet your partner in college, or high school or happen to have enough time in a shared extra-curricular (which a lot of us don't) then where exactly are you going to meet people at all.
Moreover, no part of this problem was a result of her relationship with another GitHub employee, except when people wanted some ammunition to use against her.
Totally agree. Plus, the article didn't mention (and it shouldn't), whether she met her partner at Github or not. They may as well be a couple since college.
I'd prefer not to be in a relationship with a co-worker, since I fear, it would be more difficult to keep the job out of our personal life than visa versa.
But, if I'm really attracted to a single co-worker more than physically, I'd just ask her out for a coffee or drink and happily deal with whatever positive or negative things might happen.
Not doing anything, just because you think its unprofessional or inappropriate is way more unreasonable in my opinion.
Exactly. Mature adults form relationships with other adults. There is nothing wrong or icky about it. The more time people spend at work, the more likely they are to find partner there. Note that startups often not only expect long hours of work, they also expect you to spend a lot of time socializing with colleagues.
Expecting her to reject potential stable long term relationship just because the guy has the same employer does not sound reasonable to me. Plus, we do not even know whether they started to be together before she joined the company.
At big paranoid organizations (CIA, NSA, etc.), they actively encourage internal relationships and marriages, as it simplifies security modeling. But not really in the same group.
Those two also actively recruit Mormons for their very-above-average patriotism. Which is neither here nor there, but hey. As good a thread as any to go OT.
It makes a lot of sense in such organizations, as it satisfies the employees' need for close human relationships without compromising the company's paranoid culture.
In this case--and likely in all for-profit companies--it only magnified the problem by adding another employee to the drama.
I was getting really confused by all the uses of "partner". Is she a lesbian is that it? I would they could just say girlfriend so I would know what was going on.
Its not 1995 anymore. "Partner" is a perfectly correct term for any couple in a long-term relationship. I use the term "partner" quite frequently to refer to my relationship—and whether I'm gay or not, or whether Ms Horvath is so, is none of your business. You have no need, nor any inherent right, to "know what is going on."
my confusion is the term "partner" has a completely different meaning in a a business context. I am just saying that it was confusing to me. For much of the article I thought every time they said "partner" they were referring to an employee who worked with her in some sort of group or buddy system. It can also obviously mean a partial owner in the business.
Is it the word "lesbian"? I apologize if that is considered offensive. I spent some time trying to think of what the most appropriate term would be, and I really couldn't think of anything better. What is the politically correct term to use?
No, its not the word "lesbian." Its the implication that a) you have a need to know whether she's lesbian or not; and b) that her status as lesbian or otherwise is relevant to the real issue, which is her status as a target of harassment.
I get that you're not trying to be offensive. What I don't get the sense you understand is that you don't have an inherent right to know things like her sexual orientation, history, background, favorite color, or anything else she doesn't volunteer.
It's a gossipy story involving sexual attraction. How isn't it relevant? If you feel it's none of your business, then the whole story is none of your business either.
Looks to me that the wife of the
founder was doing something that is
common, 'protecting her man'. She
was getting a bit carried away and using
poor judgment and was apparently quite naive
about business, but such things are not
rare.
So, it was two women fighting, very emotionally,
and that's not rare either.
The founder needed to keep his wife 'at home'
or some such, but these days women resent
such 'controls'. So, the wife was
a loose cannon on the deck of GitHub.
Maybe actually the wife was not a big
problem except for the one woman in the
OP. So, the situation was allowed to
continue too far.
And the woman in the story may have been
a bit overly emotional about some parts of the
story.
Did the founder, the rest of management,
HR, etc. do well? Nope. But who other than
the founder was going to apply 'discipline'
to the wife of the founder? Likely no one.
So, there was some office politics, some
clashes of personalities, some social discord,
etc. Expect something else? Usually don't
expect anything that looks, so far, this bad.
But GitHub apparently has decided not to say
anything until they have developed some
good plans and a careful statement, and that
might take a while. And in the meanwhile,
the case will likely leave the headlines.
I expect that the case will 'blow over' with
relatively little long term harm to GitHub.
I honestly hope you are right and she was honestly trying to help however my gut tells me it's all about appearances with this one.
Just the fact that she was told to leave her alone and she completely ignored that request leads me to believe her husband has no control over her and she's just a loose cannon.
Worse still he might actually back her up when people complain which is just encouraging this bad behavior.
I looks to me that she is sabotaging the company and bringing a lot of drama to the office instead of helping him.
"I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.” --Isaac Asimov
There seem to be a lot of "it's not the organization, just some bad apples", but if individuals do shitty things and the organization (HR, the other founders, colleagues) can't do much about it, it's a company culture problem.
The simple fact that a non employee (founder's wife) can boast influence on the decisions, stay at will on the work floor and just gets moved to another floor after proven problematic behavior feels horribly fucked up from an organizational perspective.
And then every other aspects of this story are so shitty, and these happen so much in companies where indivuals wield so much more power that what their job title says.
Of course, it's assuming the fact of the article are true.
It's a shame that crying sexism is beginning to take on the trappings of Salem Witch Trials. Simply implying that what happened was the result of sexism seems to be enough proof that sexism was the cause. This is a nuanced case that probably has much more to do with managerial mistakes. The sexism angle in this story seems very forced and sort of used as a last minute boost to an otherwise boring story of bad management.
How is the current situation like the Salem Witch Trials?
My memory is that in that situation people were burned at the stake for allegedly doing things that are actually physically impossible to do. Like casting spells on children.
In this case, an employee has accused other employees of several fireable, if not illegal, actions. No one has been burned, or is in danger of being burned. Possibly some people will be fired, but no one has even been named yet, and ostensibly it will be left up to Github itself, and the courts.
During the 20th century, references to the Salem witch trials were used extensively to refer to hunts for people accused of doing things that were possible. Namely being a communist.^ Unlike witches, it actually is possible to be a communist, and it actually is plausible that there were communists in the Federal government.
Comparing such communist hunts to witch hunts is not about comparing the nature of the accused crime, but rather about comparing the nature of the so called investigation.
I have seen this explained numerous times on HN in discussions similar to this one. Several times I have explained it myself. I don't know if it is feigned ignorance and purposeful obtuseness/offense seeking, or if people are genuinely unfamiliar with the history of the term "witch hunt", but either way this is getting rather tiring.
^ The most prominent example of this is Arthur Miller's The Crucible.
I would object less to the term "witch hunt" which you're right has become idiomatic. But that's not the term that was used. The term used was "Salem Witch Trials".
Additionally, I still think there is a qualitative difference between "this person is bad because they're a member of a group we don't like" and "this person is bad because they did a real destructive thing."
If the situation with the one founder who is injecting outside people into power is resolved, I would say everyone in the company wins (assuming the picture painted in the article is accurate).
If she is his wife then she co-owns part of the company with him (assuming they do the "everything that is mine is yours" thing). So she is not an uninvolved outsider, she is an investor.
Everybody should just back off and let Julie chill out before she damages herself further. This is not a general complaint against company culture, but a one that libels a lot of individuals.
Before I answer this, let me state that I'm a tactician, not a judge or a god. I don't know who's right and wrong in this mess, nor who's good and who's bad.
Can someone explain how does one gets a job after inflicting so much public damage on his previous workplace?
It's hard. She may need a professional to rework her public image (even if her account is 100% accurate) and she'll want to settle for positive reference (i.e. not sue Github, agree to a non-disparagement contract in which they publicly state that she was an excellent employee, and that they've terminated all responsible parties-- if the truth is that no one did anything wrong, then they don't terminate anyone and that statement's vacuously true). She might want to brand herself as an authority on workplace harassment and on what light-management cultures need to do to protect themselves from bullying, and maybe consult for a little while on how to make tech companies more accepting of women. All the while, she'll have to paint a positive image of Github, even if she dislikes the place (and may have a reason to). It'll probably be 4-5 years before she can get conventional employment at an appropriate professional level.
At this point, she's made some serious tactical mistakes. For example, mentioning the hula nonincident dilutes/weakens her case dramatically. The bit about the founder's wife (if true) is utterly damning. The hula hoop? People stare at anything out of the ordinary. If it were men flying quadcopters, there'd be a group of people hanging to watch. Not sexist. When you take a story of someone (or a company) doing bad and flower it with irrelevant petty insults (they employ guys who stare at women!) it actually undermines the case that one is trying to make.
If she can get Github to come out with a public story that makes her look good but also saves its face, that's what she wants. She shouldn't play for cash IMO. Considering taxes, attorney contingency, and the high risk that she doesn't get anything, she's better off putting her energy into getting her reputation fixed. Reputation repair and lawsuits are both exhausting processes that may conflict and certainly compete for one's time and energy, and so it's hard to do both.
Wow, what an absolute train wreck. I've only worked for medium and large companies with a borderline fantasy of hacking on a startup at some point. Seeing the dark side of what happens when you rip out the bigco controls that people tend to dislike really makes me think twice though. Sounds like you just wind up with an out of control frat house.
Given her history of leaking company matters and trivia in such a detailed way to a public blog like tech crunch, any company hiring her next is taking a big chance.
The things that seem to have happened in this case happen all the time, everywhere.
The coworker should have been disciplined for mucking with the code out of anger, but as far as being super uncomfortable around her I feel like a healthy warning from his boss saying 'Hey, you're being inappropriate around her' would probably be better in the long run than firing him.
Suppose I had a male coworker who had beef with me because his girlfriend broke up with him and started dating me. Suppose he started reverting my commits and interfering with my work in other ways. Essentially, the same situation with the sexes changed around. But the response should be exactly the same.
At that point a manager would need to step in and lay down the law - don't bring your personal conflicts in to work. And if you can't stop, then work somewhere else.
The thing I'm most concerned about is that a non-employee has access to private records. Will GitHub confirm that the founders wife didn't have access to information that is restricted?
This sounds terrible, I'm sorry what happened and I'm sorry it's all out in the open like that. While github may have some bad actors, I'm sure there are some decent hard working folks there and in the leadership team there as well.
At risk of sounding like an a-hole, what has she done and why does she have a gigantic twitter following? Just out of curiosity. As with Adria Richards I can't help but think the social media power of the victim and then the public nature of the story has a radical impact. One or both parties is likely to receive some hate from the wild internet and that just doesn't seem useful or good at all.
Not to condone or downplay or silence a victim, she could have just as well hired a lawyer, spoke with HR and followed the same channels that are followed at the IBM's and MS's and other big companies, all of which have had far more torrid things happening. If there is anything I can take away, it is that I'd be very careful with the kinds of social media I allow at my company.
(Late I know but)
I said "in the same context". "Woman", "women" are very common words, but men revert to "girl", "girls" when they (usually unconsciously) are looking down on the woman in question. It should stop. As a term of endearment used by another woman it is clearly not the same thing.
"The aforementioned wife began a pattern of passive aggressive behavior that included sitting close to Horvath, to, as she told TechCrunch, “make a point of intimidating” her."
Get a freaking life, go sit somewhere else if you see her sitting close to you. And are you a mind-reader? What if she wasn't being "passive aggressive" and just wanted to sit there! Unbelievable how as soon as a woman is involved in tech industry everything blows out of proportion.
Again no one is winning, when a woman "stands for her rights", because when you stand up for your rights that means you have to be standing up against someone, that is a male or a female. If you're standing up against a female well you're not helping the women cause. If it's a male you make the industry look even worse than it is by portraying men as monster bullies who will do and say anything to destroy a "woman". The argument against men can only win if we keep repeating the same fairytales that we keep hearing from the likes of her.
Geeks building an amazing platform like Github are different than the sexy attractive guys that you see on TV. Their passion lies with technology they are not here to gossip or put anyone down intentionally. We simply have better things to focus on than caring about your petty feelings. We're men building shit! Unless what women see men as changes drastically I don't see how men in positions like this would take women as seriously as other men. And by that I mean you can't think the guy must have a six-pack, not be nerdy, talk to you about your feelings when you're down. This is not reality but this is what women are brainwashed to expect from men in order to even truly respect them as human beings. This is mainly the effects of watching TV and other media, etc.
Change your perspective about your enemy (stop calling men your enemies) and see if there is still such huge gender imbalance in tech.
> What if she wasn't being "passive aggressive" and just wanted to sit there!
...day after day, staring at her, after a weird out of office interaction where she was openly aggressive?
The wife was obviously trying to intimidate her and you seem to be the only individual trying to deny it.
> If you're standing up against a female well you're not helping the women cause.
Women can be sexist bigots just like men.
> Geeks [...] are different than the sexy attractive guys that you see on TV.
Geeks can be sexy and attractive too.
Also: unsexy and unattractive guys can be sexist bigots too. Perhaps even more, since they might subconsciously want to backlash for their lack of sexual attention.
> We're men building shit!
You're exactly everything that's wrong with this industry.
We're not men building shit. We're people building shit. You even intentionally left the girls out of the geek category!
How do you think a woman will feel welcome when you tell her to shut up her concerns since "we're men building shit" and she's pretty much disturbing your work? How do you want her to feel she belongs with us? Let me guess that: you don't want to!
You say they keep repeating the same fairy tales, but you seem like no fairy to me.
-
PS: I actually think this whole fiasco is not about sexism and she has disproportionately overblown the issue as gender warfare while it's just corporate politics. I just had to point out you are being sexist.
Why expect people to behave the way you want them to? If you don't like where you're sitting move, other people are not responsible for how you feel. Again are you a mind-reader how do you know what her intention was?
"Geeks might subconsciously want to backlash for their lack of sexual attention" wow, you have it backwards, not seeking sex by geeks does not mean they're secretly seeking it! Reason you're a geek is because you're dedicated to one thing and spend lots of time doing it and ignoring other things, because everything else has a lower priority. Many "outraged" women in tech and people like you don't seem to get that, it's not a reflection on those women it's a reflection on us.
We are men building shit. I am a male I am in tech if I could've make that more specific I would have. You have no right to impose on me what specificity level I wish to use in my speech or writings. You are right I am not a fairy I am real and I will stand up to this non-sense every time I see it. And hope others here are not intimidated by people like you or outraged women in tech or New York Times articles or complete crap pieces on Tech Crunch.
Talk about double standards. Get chastised for relationship with co-worker, When other co-worker impedes company growth (reverting commits) out of spite for rejection, they do nothing? Holy crap.
It's hard to imagine this level of social dysfunction. Doesn't help for the reputation of engineers and technology being socially inept.
Based on this article I see a few things, and some alarming ones that make me question the source. Also, hopefully to prevent me from sounding like too much of an ass, I'll use the following as the definition of sexism: "Sexism or gender discrimination is prejudice or discrimination based on a person's sex or gender."
- The wife situation: Awkward/horrible. Either the wife is crazy with jealousy issues or we're missing a portion of the story. Presuming this is the entirety of the facts, I think it's plain that the woman isn't going around approaching male colleagues of the founder and harassing them. So I guess she's acting this way due to the JAH's sex, but it just sounds like a boundary issue to me rather than rote sexism. I'm surprised policy doesn't exist to prevent this sort of thing inside GH.
- Rebuffed advances being handled poorly. I'm surprised that she's surprised by this, she's dating a coworker, she's introduced the concept of coworkers being viable dating options. Yes I'm sure she was approached because she's female, heterosexual males will do this. Male or female. Of course the person was disrespectful for approaching even if she was in a relationship, people will be clueless/rude, whether they work with you or not. The passive aggressive reverts, and the lack of power to abate them sounds like a lack of leverage on her part, and while she may chalk the entire thing up to her lack of pull due to being female, I see this as a symptom of the cabal syndrome you often see in self managed companies.
- I think it's obvious that she's sensitive to sexist issues, even on the side of seeing it in places where it may not exist. There are even a few cases where she could even be exhibiting the behavior herself ie: Not talking to the hula-hoopers themselves (why are not capable of defending themselves?), claiming the men present were gawking (but not mentioning any other spectators), "always looking to meet women I can look up to." (I'd be seen as an ass by many if I looked for "men to look up to"), "confused and insulted to think that a woman who was not employed by my company was pulling the strings" what does the fact that she's a woman have to do with it? (This is a stretch I know but every time someone is mentioned their sex is brought up, why?)
- The real major theme I see is, "I was treated poorly." Yes this happens, just not always to a highly public, touchy social subject-matter expert in this field, who then releases the story to the press (vendetta much?).
It's a shame that theres dirt in the garden of Github, shockingly it's a real company run by real people. I'd carry on with making great software; always try and make sure I'm not putting up barriers (intentional or otherwise) to the entry of the just as capable minorities in this field; always strive to see the difference between true injustice and someone's poor decisions, their sensitivities, and a really messed up corporate experience.
You are arguing that what happened to her is not sexism, and you really miss the bigger picture, which is that it's a hostile work environment, which is equally bad.
I'm really disappointed at the amount of victim blaming going on. Just so you are aware, what happened to her is more than just "treated poorly". Workers should be (and are) legally protected from that.
Let's not be too quick to make this an indictment of no-management businesses.
Even if you dismiss the hula-hoop stuff, the involvement of the wife, the lack of grievance resolution, & the under-involvement of HR all point to a serious lack of leadership. It doesn't take a management structure to have good leadership at an organization. It takes leaders.
I have seen the "wife wearing the husband's rank" so much in my life. I spent a decade+ in the Marines, it's very common. I extrapolate from that that it's common in the world. The fact this was allowed does point to an environment where HR was either ignorant, complicit or complacent, otherwise they would have stopped this shit cold.
So she and another woman at work develop a bitter feud in which the other woman has the upper hand. Horvath reinterprets it as sexism and takes it to the press to hurt GitHub. If Horvath were a man, there is no way that HN would show this kind of support.
I think that is one benefit remote offices have is there are less chances for events like this to take place.
Being confined to one space everyday with people for years will lead to dust ups, cultural clashes, personality clashes etc. How they are handled is important, it doesn't appear it was handled correctly here.
High school politics are in effect at every office and I see this as more that than sexism. We live free but the office can turn into a strange authoritarian empire with banana republic like alliances. Growth at companies can also cause cultural clashes and problems similar to this with people getting wronged. Disappointed to hear it also goes on in github.
I think that is one benefit remote offices have is there are less chances for events like this to take place.
I take it you've never played WoW? :) I've seen the same high school drama replay over and over, both online and offline. It's more a function of being human, than it is the environment.
I'm so fucking tired of this so-called "more opportunities to succeed" thing i keep hearing about. such a load of crap. you make your own opportunities. Period. That's been true of my life and everyone i know.
God. What an awful situation. WTF is the founder's wife meddling into the company's business? She is not even an employee. Githud is not a mom-and-pop shop. It's an corporation. This is just toxic.
A coworker told me of his nightmare story from his previous job, where he was accused of sexual harassment by a fellow female co-worker. The crazy part was the HR process, where he was not told who made the complaint, or what was specifically said- so he could not defend/explain himself, let alone know if it was a lie. They did an internal investigation, sided with the female and he was fired. Is this a common HR process?!
I don't understand why she didn't see the founder's wife asking her out to a drink and saying she would work to make her very happy not as an opportunity. She could have asked for her own office at that point, or asked to not have to commit code anymore if the pull request feedback was too harsh and just run the pro-women project she was running, etc.. I would have loved that opportunity.
"Julie Ann, Adria Richards and Shanley enter a bar: the bar just explodes because it's a symbol of the patriarchy."
But, seriously, I know various female programmers that I could trust not only my project, but my LIFE to. And as in the case of men, those are usually the low profile, highly productive, people. I doubt any "famous" developer this days in spite of gender/race/whatever. As with any hyped profession, there are a LOT of impostors trying to succeed without basic qualifications in computing. Hint: those are the ones who shout the loudest, have the highest number of followers on Twitter, but have very little, if any, REAL code on Github or any other public repositories. So... when the masks start to fell off they usually bail out their jobs loudly and pointing fingers to preserve their public personas. I doubt this is not the case of Julie Ann.
"You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.", Abraham Lincoln
I alway love Github as a company because Tom Preston-werner's storytelling of how Github is a company that optimize for employees' happniess. I hope Github can state something positive for this issue, otherwise it is a big hit to the company not only because of sexism, but also more importantly the losing of the culture of optimizing for happiness.
I propose to show our sympathy towards the nice people at github by just forgetting this non-story ever existed. Or, it existed, but it was a whole different story, that had nothing to do with sexism and more to do with another woman being in a position of power and maybe using that for a non obvious purpose.
...witch hunts are cool and all, and they are even cooler when they are done "to save"/"for the rights of" women/children/etc., but you're only giving more power to the "troll" that started this in the first place, either her or someone using her, for god knows what agenda (I bet it's just part of power fight inside the company, and somebody tries to redirect some discrimination related anger collected from the interwebs against his/her opponent ...we really shouldn't let ourselves manipulated into joining this fight we know nothing about).
Now that's a lot of drama but it has nothing to do with sexism or any abuse towards women in technology.
For one thing as far as i can tell we're dealing with the wife of a founder that has delusions of grandeur and a founder who is easily manipulated.
The very few allegations of sexism like some employee asking her out and the passive aggressively harassing her will happen in any environment not just in technology it's just the guy not being a man and facing the rejection. All you can say to him is grow up.
I also don't see anything wrong in the guys looking a the girls playing with the hula hoops If the girls minded the wouldn't have done it what right does she have to judge them.
1. HR seems powerless and there seems to be a very immature culture, inapproriate non-employee influence, and communication at Github and given that it is mostly young-males, may have a (perhaps inadvertent) gender bias that they do not see motivated to fix. This is a big problem and I think there can be a balance between not being stuck up and removing the "fun," while also being decent, well-meaning human beings. I admit it's a very hard balance that I think everyone is still trying to figure out in this rebellious stage of the stodgy era.
2. While I believe Julie's basic observations are valid, I agree based solely on her account so far that she was being treated differently and that there were inappropriate behaviors going on, especially with the wife – I do get the sense that Julie was considering a lot of normal societal behavior with gender-specific contexts. "Oogling" people isn't good, but it's a fine line. People are going to find each other attractive. And I don't think it's wrong, either. As mentioned here, finding someone attractive doesn't mean you discard everything else about them as a person. These things can work both ways, she just may see it from a different perspective because she's outnumbered. But this supposedly was at a party and so I'd expect looser rules there as it's not in a professional setting. There's a difference between inappropriate and just being human.
All of this is a fine line and is why being human is hard and trying to manage people and create a positive, but also fun work environment is hard and we still have a lot to learn during these experimental phases. The issue really needs to be helping eliminate different treatment based on gender and sexuality rather than creating a specific type of culture. I do not necessarily believe we need to eliminate all sexuality or all fun or all emotions from a particular work environment. There can be different places and different people with different preferences can gravitate between them. I don't think going back to all stodgy, emotionless, and overtly-bureaucratic environments is a good thing.
Like everything in life it seems, there really is a balance.
The first reaction to sexism and racism in well-educated male circles seems to be "Well, there has to be SOME rational and objective reason for these opinions, so stop complaining!"
The story certainly contains some element of "female politics" (which is neither good nor bad, just different).
My theory is that these problems come from a lack of empathy, and that the use of technical skills does not improve the empathy skill. In order to effortlessly switch between empathy and technical thinking, some effort is required. For example meditation has been shown to increase empathy and improve social behavior in school classes and executives...
Without saying anything about the question of sexism at Github (which I know nothing about), I get the sense that Horvath is a complex character. It is difficult to know what is fact and what is spin.
This is a really important issue to talk about, not so much because of the sexism/female engineers angle, but because it deals with how start-ups are managed.
TL;DR
1. Have legacy documents, guidelines and policies in place
2. GitHub needs to have a look within its management team and decide if they want to continue eating themselves to oblivion.
3. Similar to the hacker code of ethics, we need to work on getting MORE people into technology. We should not be excluding people out of technology!
Indeed the unauthorized access to office sucks. But what strikes me the most is the totally nonsensical(to me) sensational emotional reactions of each person. How can trivial, pointless things be blown out of proportion as to incite "crying"/"shaking" reactions, passive-aggressive behaviors, and even code-deleting? Are they really grown-ups, 30s & 40s, or just 3-year-olds? This is insane.
I hate not understanding the politics of an organization and community I depend on so much. I dislike not knowing how to feel about all this.
I can't help but be exasperated that the concept of an "open company" is not more common for such critical infrastructure as GitHub. I'm frustrated that I can't simply peer into all these private interactions and social exchanges and chat logs and make my own judgment
Awful intimidation, my sympathies if true. But why is sexism even in the headline? As far as I can tell, 1. a coworker made advances outside work and acted weird/hostile when rejected, and 2. impromptu sexy hula hoop revue. Incidents 1. and 2. did warrant correction. If HR/founder wouldn't help when asked then I guess you could win a hostile work env. claim w/ a sexist flavor.
As usual, another HN thread that perfectly exemplifies victim blaming and a collective burying of heads in the sand. There's a few people on here who seem to get it, but most don't. I'm sick of it. Goodbye, Hacker News.
Hackers, in my experience, have more shared experience in being naive enough socially to allow themselves to be baited into making statements which are later used against them, than in actually saying things (or even associating with others who would say things) which are intentionally malicious.
We all understand fixing someone's computer and then being blamed for any problems it has from then on; or for making a software estimate and being held to it as a requirement. In short, hackers are used to being scapegoats, so the first conclusion we jump to when one of us is accused of something is that they're being scapegoated too.
This can look like "victim-blaming", but it's really more-than-anything a yearning for people to keep their standards of evidence high, and to avoid jumping to conclusions. Counterarguments and counterfactuals ("what else could have happened") aren't presented as "this is obviously what happened instead", but just to decrease confidence that the evidence presented thusfar is strong enough to prove anything much. If evidence A fits alleged narrative X, but also random equally-likely stories Y or Z, then X is no longer implied directly by A.
> This can look like "victim-blaming", but it's really more-than-anything a yearning for people to keep their standards of evidence high, and to avoid jumping to conclusions.
That really depends, now, doesn't it, on what the subject is? :) HackerNews seems, in general, to have a very low standard of evidence for things like "the NSA is doing something evil", and tends to be quite credulous on such things. It seems to have a very, very, _very_ high standard of evidence for "bigotry exists" though.
That's certainly one way to frame the reference classes involved. Let me try an alternate one:
> HackerNews seems, in general, to have a very low standard of evidence for "[large organizational structure] is doing something evil", and tends to be quite credulous on such things. It seems to have a very, very, _very_ high standard of evidence for "[individual] is doing something evil" though.
I think this succinctly predicts more of HN's behavior, personally. HN is just generally afraid to condemn individuals for much at all.
That doesn't exclude your conclusion from also being true, though: HN can be both resistant to condemning individuals, while also being biased against believing that bigotry is a thing that exists. But assuming that either one is the "whole cause" of any particular effect, will cause effects to seem weirdly large, because of the confounding effect of the other.
As a generalization this might be true, or not... but likely a lot of people commenting here just have a globally high standard of evidence. Why are they deleted from the picture?
What is sexist is that I think many people have not actually invested the energy in figuring out what the distribution of X, Y, and Z are. I think X is actually much more common in this kind of scenario than Y or Z, and honestly I think anyone who has actually gained the trust of a few women in tech and heard stories about what it is like is pretty likely to see that too.
Anyone who throws their hands up and says "well I guess X, Y, and Z are equally probable" to me clearly has not actually spent time understanding the problem.
You're doing exactly the thing people-who-are-oft-scapegoated are afraid of: equating "extremely probable" with "incontrovertibly proven."
In an actual trial, for a conviction to take place, evidence would have to be presented that leaves no room for reasonable doubt--which is to say, the evidence would have to effectively take Y/Z/etc. out of consideration.
We chose this standard because we, as a society, decided that there was something more important than making sure "justice is served" in all cases: making sure nobody has the power to condemn innocents at a whim by making up an "extremely probable" accusation.
But the court of public opinion has no such strict standard, even though the punishments it hands out can be far worse.
No, probable is probable. I'm happy to talk about unlikely corner cases, in an appropriate sidebar. I think anyone pushing them as a primary talking point has their priorities misaligned and is tilting at windmills.
This can look like "victim-blaming", but it's really more-than-anything a yearning for people to keep their standards of evidence high
I don't buy it. The "hacker type" despite self-professing as a logical bunch falls prey to all of the logical fallacies and cognitive biases that any other opinionated group does. The evidence is already out there, this is one of many incidents following a trend of sexism in this industry that has been going on for decades.
Github does not exist in a vacuum and real life social interaction doesn't use variables beyond a distant abstract analysis.
I know this is going to come across as unfriendly, but I'm always bemused when people make these little plays for attention. It's a massive site, you're not one of the notable commenters, if HN isn't delivering value why not just stop reading it quietly rather than announcing it to the world?
You see it as a play for attention, I see it as an expression of disappointment in a community they otherwise like in the hope that that community will perform a little more introspection.
It seems somewhat dramatic to me too, but I also have found the comments on the stories around this issue somewhat disappointing. That was their way of communicating it, this comment is mine.
Because human beings have a desire to express opinion and emotion?
Your attitude is the same as a lot of the socially inept that roam the valley and this message board. If This Isn't The Most Efficient Logical Course Of Action (according my perspective) Then It Bemuses Me.
But what's wrong with expressing an opinion on someone else's action? You are the one that is socially inept. No, wait, you are just expressing your opinion on someone else expressing their opinion on someone else expressing themselves. Oh, chripes, what was I trying to say again?
You put those words in my mouth, buddy. To clarify, social ineptitude combined with a degree of self-assured narcissism, resulting in a total disregard for the opinions of other people which don't jive with the most "logical" worldview. It's possible to be socially introverted and still considerate to other people.
Not the readership - assuming similar statistics to reddit, the vast majority don't comment, so we can't know - but it's certainly reasonable to draw that conclusion about the commenters from the comments on majority of threads regarding social issues.
Of course, there's a feedback loop in that people won't comment where the majority seem to disagree heavily with their morals, so that doesn't help with what threads like these look like. The sheer amount of personal attacks against people who disagree with victim-blaming views of this in this thread serve as a warning not to speak up.
This is pretty accurate, I would not have commented at all in here until I read this and just wanted to back you up on this point.
I read these type of threads on HN constantly and every time I walk away absolutely disgusted with what I see said in them. I don't have the will to comment myself because it just would not change anyones opinion and they would instantly go into attack mode.
Without trying to start a debate, it's well-established that women talk about personal things more readily than men do, and at greater length, and express emotion more readily than men do. This real difference between men and women is often described as a character flaw in men by women, and in women by men (if that wasn't too hard to unravel).
No examples so you can garner maximum support? What is this umbrella term 'victim blaming', anyways? Is there in this black and white view that you subscribe to no room for dual-guilt in setting up problems/crimes?
Can't you understand that at many times both parties are at fault for escalation? This is one actually useful thing that police manage to understand and accomplish, they understand that "Victims" often play a role. This is why screaming "self-defense" at every violence case does not work.
You will probably jump to rape as your first defense of victim blaming and examples, because that is the one to garner most backing off quickly.
To see what you're pissed off at, let's survey your comment history. I don't see anything particular to this case except getting pissed off, so i'll take your comment towards the website, calm. Hmm, A website towards meditation. Seems peaceful .
Let's not forget the website that was made to be only nice to people and to send encouragement only very recently. Seems like this community is trying.
But one occasion with 2 sides to a story, and it's all said and done it your book? See you later.
No way in hell should it be the top comment. I can't find any victim blaming at all in a quick skim, so if it's here it's not by any means a plurality opinion. bitops is being even worse and reactionary than they claim HN to be.
There was quite a lot of what I would consider to be victim blaming in the previous thread where it was less clear what the allegations were. Or at least, my impression of the thread was that there were a very high proportion of commenters saying we should reserve judgement and at the same time hypothesizing about all the ways that the woman might be at fault.
While this is all true (on the information we had in that thread, it was possible that the woman was the one at fault, and it's good to reserve judgement until more information arrives), it was really weird how many people felt the need to point these things out.
I do agree that this thread seems more balanced, although even in this thread people are surprisingly quick to point out that these problems are not 'sexism' (despite the fact that the situations described would have been an order of magnitude less likely to arise if she were a man).
> (despite the fact that the situations described would have been an order of magnitude less likely to arise if she were a man).
How and why is this a fact? Could really none of this happen to a male employee?
Crazy boss? Check. Workplace relationship? Check. "Enemies" reverting your code? Check. Management non-reactive to complaints? Check. I think a lot of this goes on regularly on many companies, an concerns many employees. In particular, what seems sexist here is trying to make this a women's problem, not an employee's problem.
It could be a top comment on reddit. Here, we (me in particular, and I think several other posters as well) prefer thoughtful discussion over emotional overreaction.
You suffer from egotistical self-righteousness. Someday, perhaps, you will no longer need to assuage your ego with delusional palliatives of moral superiority. Today a child died after a long and painful battle with cancer. Another died suddenly in a car crash after a heated argument, leaving loved ones in agony and self-doubt. Are you sure this is your battle? Perhaps you are only sick of the burden of your own unexamined piety and belief the universe must obey your whims.
>suffer
>irrelevant anecdotes to contrast against OP's "battle"
Why do you think he cares about children dying? Is it really so hard to grasp the notion that we are emotionally compelled by things relevant to our own lives at any given time?
This may be his battle, or maybe it's not a battle at all. Maybe you should stop this hyperbolic nonsense, because you're the one making it a battle.
GitHub employs a handful of women.[1] Have any others ever spoken out about sexism internally? Out of all these women why was Horvath singled out? Maybe I'm missing something but it really seems that this isn't adding up...
Upvoting by itself is handing pitchforks. It's an article in techcrunch whom only care about heating things up just to get as much page views as possible, and they'll write many more articles about the subject until HN and other social outlets stop upvoting and sharing.
When only one side of the story is presented, it leaves everyone to piece it together and look at what was presented critically. If we just take whatever anyone says at face value when they aren't disclosing everything, we are definitely going to make unfair decisions
Sounds like github needs a de facto employee grievance officer like a union shop steward who can sit in on HR meetings and advocate for the employee, or mediate petty personal disputes without involving the heavy and often unfair hand of management and go to the founder about issues with his batshit crazy wife.
I don't really believe that this can all be true, if only because I find it very unlikely that GitHub screwed up that badly from an HR perspective, especially one involving the founder.
There is probably some measure of truth to it, but for it to be totally true would be a massive failure on GitHub's part.
I believe JAH's story. I hope she gets another great job and puts this behind her.
On a related issue, github plays a central role in the software development world, and possible signs of internal problems is troubling. It would be a good idea for the github management to properly address this story.
It sounds like Julie decided to start banging a coworker and then suddenly became surprised when drama arises in the workplace ?! Isn't she the one who obviously crossed the line first ? It would be one thing if she was with the guy before she got hired, but she met him at work.
From reading the article, I got the vibe that the wife may have felt innately (territorially?) threatened by the thought of a (pretty) female in the company getting close with her founder husband in a more intimate, rather than professional, type of way. Thoughts?
If you are one of the people in this thread jumping to defend GitHub in this situation, ask yourself why.
GitHub are perfectly capable of defending themselves. They are the group in power here. Second-guessing the motives and truth of this woman's story does nothing but undermine her, and undermine the confidence of others who may have similar stories (at GitHub or elsewhere).
Of course they can defend themselves in public. Corporations engage PR firms to manage that expertly for them all the time.
And ironically, whether this goes to trial or not, the worse the objective case for Github the more confident you can be that their lawyers will be telling them to say little or nothing.
Expect a very bland statement to appear shortly about how much they love and value their female employees. We may well also have statements from other female employees about how happy they are at Github - these may well be given 'off the record' without attribution as in "A female employee who did not want to be identified told me she has never been happier than she is at Github, surrounded as she is by sensitive colleagues and a supportive management."
:)
Haha. It happened already.
http://www.theverge.com/2014/3/19/5526574/github-sexism-scan...
"Several female GitHub employees, who spoke with The Verge on condition of anonymity, said they’ve never felt gender discrimination at the company. "I don’t feel isolated or alone," one female developer says. "I have never personally experienced anything like that and I’ve never witnessed it.""
A lot of people are saying "we have zero evidence, so we must assume that both outcomes are equally likely" which I think is equivalent. It's saying that her words don't carry any weight as evidence unless there are also words from the other parties that confirm.
That's just common sense, though, to wait until you have heard both sides of a story? I don't think it is the same as implying somebody is lying at all.
Experience shows that probably both parties will think their version is the truth. It's just that they will both have selective memories.
No. If someone runs at me bleeding, saying they were shot, I call 911. I don't particularly need to hear the other side of the story. I would hope the courts listen to both sides, but in day to day life I think it's fine to make judgement calls about when you trust people.
I suspect you trust people all the time, but you don't feel comfortable trusting a person in this specific kind of situation.
>This is going to hurt Horvath more than it hurts GitHub.
Really? You'd rather pay out a $250,000 settlement than incur an increase in the number of negative comments you receive on the internet for a couple weeks?
Apparently her exit from Github was to be a secret, but an anonymous person publicly posted about it to a social network with a nasty comment. So somebody inside Github leaked it. To the mattresses!
Are you aware of how patronising this response is? If you want to make a comment about the nature of power, make it. Don't tell me to think more carefully.
I'm not sure precisely which event you're saying she initiated, but if you're talking about her quitting her job and then speaking out like this: you should think about why someone would put their reputation and livelihood on the line.
Difference is I don't actually know why people are defending GH here, whereas the other commenter has something specific to say to me about power (and they did).
The nature of power is that the person who sets the ball rolling is the one in power. That's why a sculptor is the one with the power, not the chisel. The fact that there's some appearance of backlash doesn't alter that. And as to which chain of events, how could I be any clearer? The chain of events starting with her deciding to go public. The rest of your comment is just shallow moralizing that doesn't tell us anything about who has the power. I suppose you're the one to always side with the crying woman, because that's as deep as your understanding of power goes. It doesn't occur to you that tears themselves have power.
She did set it in motion. And she was clearly - in part - set in motion by others. But she has far more power than the person I was responding to is acknowledging. Tiger Woods has millions in the bank too, and he still had to self-flagellate when he wronged his wife. In summary: you are an idiot.
This kind of comment does not belong here. Please remember, this is not Slashdot or Reddit. We try to keep the level of discourse a little higher here at HN.
The chain of events did not start with 'her deciding to go public.'
In fact neither of us know what started this ugly mess. But one thing we do know is that it started long before she went public. For example, the actions of the founder's wife were long before, as were many other hostile acts that have been alleged.
The chain of events that begins with her going public is part of a larger chain of events, which includes her employment at GitHub and the events she has described. That was not clear for your comment, and has large ramifications about who started what.
My position is simply that defending GitHub and dissecting her story is unnecessary at best and harmful at worst. GitHub will respond, and presumably more information will be brought forward by other parties. I will reserve judgement (not that it's really my place to judge at all!) until more of the story has emerged.
Your characterisation of my position betrays your sexist bias. Of course anyone with a voice has power. But why would someone quit their job and ignite a shitstorm of drama unless something really bad had happened to them? Some benefit of the doubt and empathy for Horvath seems appropriate at this junction.
Hilarious that you run the same tactic of accusing me of being "sexist" to discredit me. Nor does your response address anything other than your own deranged imaginings. I didn't say something bad didn't happen to them. What I said was that the she is not powerless. You tried to cast her as powerless - you were quite clear on this, and you were wrong. And somehow in your deranged, imbecilic mind pointing that out that is "mischaracterizing" your point-of-view, whereas rabbiting on about things I never even said and accusing me of being a "sexist" is not. All I can say is: LOL
Sounds more like a whole bunch of crazy than anything specifically related to gender. I could rewrite this drama with everyone being the same sex and gay and it would read almost identically.
Howsoever superman you are, you are powerless in front of your wife.. :)
I would say that these things are unfortunate and can happen to any startup. Being a founder, you need to take action asap before things starts to go beyond control.
Even if some investigation is done into this matter, I don't think anyone will be found guilty as it's a general behavioral/attitude problem and it won't go in matter of days.
Let's stop this discrimination (howsoever minor) against women; we need to stand up and speak openly about this. And it's all the more important when a company is getting formed as culture of the company is defined in that stage.
Maybe we need a new term for 'unacceptable workplace situation exacerbated by gender issues'. This story is more complex than what I expected from the title.
Every office has "that person" who causes/gets involved in drama, starts pointless arguments, or refuses to cooperate. Let's assume, just for entertainment' sake, that she got bored of working there, and asked herself, what looks better on my resume? Worked at GitHub, got bored/wanted a higher salary/wanted to do less work, left... or worked at GitHub and got bullied out of the marketplace for being a woman in tech, but is an honest and good person nonetheless? This is one of the few fields left in tech where men outnumber / outperform women, and I hope that changes, both because I believe in gender equality, and issues like this will be better handled internally (and someone looking to improve her resume can't pull this sort of act). And, well, after she makes these accusations, what are her former coworkers supposed to say? She's kind of poisoned the well, so to speak.
Again, the way I see it, she's either tired of working there and this is her way of finding new work, or there really was an office full of awful bigoted men who all hated her because she was interrupting their boy's club. It'd actually work against her best interests if the latter were true. If she scared women away from working at GitHub and made them even more of a minority, then the few women remaining may be discriminated against further if gender discrimination's really a big issue. The worst case about the former being true (rather than the latter) is that women who actually are unethical, assuming she isn't, may find themselves able to play the gender card and find success in her same fashion. Either way, she getting big publicity for this is a "win" for her and a "lose-lose" for GitHub and the women who work there, unless they get a female-majority PR staff.
How are we supposed to respond to this sort of problem? How are we supposed to assess the validity of this woman's claims? What are we supposed to do about it? This could serve as a good reminder to companies to have their HR's doors open or something, but for all we know she could be lying out of her teeth. From a philosophical (logical/rational/skeptical) perspective, this article is just editorialized, meaningless garbage. It's kind of sad, really... does anyone share my perspective? I'm just sharing because I hate bandwagons, I hate people jumping to blind conclusions, and I hate people burning witches (in this case, GitHub / anyone who defends GitHub, depending on the crowd). What I do know for certain is that GitHub provides a great service and I'll continue to use it until I can be shown that GitHub systematically and indiscriminately works against its female employees' best interests in an objective manner, and that they choose to ignore the problem in the face of overwhelming evidence and social uproar.
As someone involved academically with philosophy, I am from a field also with notable under-representation / under-performance from women, for whatever reason. Maybe as a member of a "boy's club," I'm speaking out of ignorance or delusion. If I am speaking out of turn, I'd love to hear your rational response so I can correct it, and I'm sure anyone who holds a similar view would appreciate hearing what you have to say as well. (Shouting "Victim blamer!" or "Misogynist!" at me is not a rational response. It only makes you look like a fool. Personally, I'm most interested in seeing how enneff, who is definitely not a sockpuppet of the involved woman, replies.)
"what looks better on my resume? Worked at GitHub, got bored/wanted a higher salary/wanted to do less work, left... or worked at GitHub and got bullied out of the marketplace for being a woman in tech, but is an honest and good person nonetheless?"
Left to pursue new opportunities is better for her. Generally speaking, employers are less likely to hire someone who got into public fights, whether by his own fault or not. And they especially do not want to hire people who talk bad about previous workplaces. They do not want to risk it will happen again.
Leaving company for usual unspecified reasons is normal, everybody do that regularly.
If she is "tired of working there and this is her way of finding new work', then she would be exceptionally dumb.
> How are we supposed to assess the validity of this woman's claims?
One source of information is data available about her past behavior, or reputation, or etc - unbalanced people hardly ever go off the deep end in the blink of an eye or out of the blue (unless they have abrain tumor or something like that, but that situation is rare compared to the majority of cases). As an example, let me explain my story: I got hired to build a website, somehow I turned into quasi-employee #1 / acting CTO. The main reason I was the ONLY employee for this B2B startup for 4 years was that the founders have anti-social personality disorders (the CEO is a full blown sociopath, which I can prove in court as I have the evidence) - the other founder merely has a criminal record for fraud. The wife of the CEO turned out to be a psychotically manipulative bitch...
But I didn't know any of this when the whole company got started and the CEO was an acquaintance of someone I've worked with for over a decade. I made some mistakes, and got sucked up into the work - I finally realized the full nature of the situation when the CEO was caught blatantly lying to customers in order to make the sale (and expecting the customers to have zero recourse when they figured it out... dumbass) - the entire company was nothing but a hobby for a rich man and they were out to exploit everyone they could.
Anyway the point is, my friend FINALLY admitted he knew there was something wrong with this guy and told me stories about his behavior when they worked together. From the stories, it was crystal clear this guy had significant psychological issues aka no ethics and everything fell into place with me realizing he truly is a sociopath. This was 30 YEARS ago... and other data I'd gotten from the CEO about his other business and the shady shit he'd pulled then... If my friend had just told me all this data at the beginning (he didn't want to "spread gossip" even though he knew it was true) I would have never taken the job.
The record of people's behavior doesn't get lost in some black hole. That is one of the purposes of gossip within a community - to spread info that can't be disseminated normally due to social constraints or niceties. I am reminded now as well of that 'developer evangelist' who flipped out at some conference claiming that people behind her were being sexist even though the joke they told amongst themselves wasn't about here and she wasn't even part of the group. She had a history of being a nutcase (aka 'sensitive') as well, so given that, her complaints about sexism were quite unfounded.
But does the woman in this situation have such a history? I don't know. I don't think so otherwise it'd be in this thread. And given my experience with lunatics, her story seems quite plausible - and that fact she tried to leave it all behind by moving on says a lot - if she was the out of control one, she, logically, would have an general attitude of 'entitlement' and entitled people always like to create drama because that is one way to gain and keep control. So her side is far more plausible and internally and externally consistent than anything I think the other side (GitHub) is going to be able to produce.
I would myself be shouting from the rooftops about this sociopath and how this company is a threat to their customers and employees, but I can't figure out how to break the NDA. There is no contract anymore as they deliberately breached that... I realized I was dealing with experienced criminals who have been twisting the law to their advantage for their entire business life... so they undoubtedly will sue me into oblivion given a chance. That is how fundamentally evil they are. So I stay quiet and brood.
But this woman has no constraints like that and I support her fully because shit like this needs to exposed for the good of all - people like this founder's wife who are not stopped only gain more and more experience in being manipulative and entitled and 30 years from now, she will be even more evil. If anyone who dealt with the people I did before me had made an effort to stop them in some way, then I (and everyone after me) wouldn't have had to suffer at their hands. Again, if I had the money for lawyers, I'd risk it, but given the nervous breakdown I had because of these people, I'm not up for it - YET. When the NDA expires, I will be spreading their name across the entire Internet.
> This is one of the few fields left in tech where men outnumber / outperform women
Outnumber, yes, but outperform? You seem to be implying that female developers are worse at their jobs than their male counterparts, which is terribly unfair.
> How are we supposed to respond to this sort of problem?
We shouldn't respond by assuming she made it all up. Yes, we need to give GitHub an opportunity to respond to these allegations, but Julie Ann Horvath is a well-respected member of the tech community, and we need to take her complaints seriously.
Agree with you, although I still think you will get many "shouting responses like "Victim blamer!" or "Misogynist!""
"The aforementioned wife began a pattern of passive aggressive behavior that included sitting close to Horvath, to, as she told TechCrunch, “make a point of intimidating” her."
Get a freaking life, go sit somewhere else if you see her sitting close to you. And are you a mind-reader? What if she wasn't being "passive aggressive" and just wanted to sit there! Unbelievable how as soon as a woman is involved in tech industry everything blows out of proportion.
Again no one is winning, when a woman "stands for her rights", because when you stand up for your rights that means you have to be standing up against someone, that is a male or a female. If you're standing up against a female well you're not helping the women cause. If it's a male you make the industry look even worse than it is by portraying men as monster bullies who will do and say anything to destroy a "woman". The argument against men can only win if we keep repeating the same fairytales that we keep hearing from the likes of her.
Geeks building an amazing platform like Github are different than the sexy attractive guys that you see on TV. Their passion lies with technology they are not here to gossip or put anyone down intentionally. We simply have better things to focus on than caring about your petty feelings. We're men building shit! Unless what women see men as changes drastically I don't see how men in positions like this would take women as seriously as other men. And by that I mean you can't think the guy must have a six-pack, not be nerdy, talk to you about your feelings when you're down. This is not reality but this is what women are brainwashed to expect from men in order to even truly respect them as human beings. This is mainly the effects of watching TV and other media, etc.
Change your perspective about your enemy (stop calling men your enemies) and see if there is still such huge gender imbalance in tech.
Towards the end (of the article), it sounds like she was just going to 'quietly' exit the company, until someone (apparently) rage-posted some disparaging remarks about her leaving the company (prior to it becoming public knowledge). Now she wants to leverage public opinion to get Github to take some action... supposedly.
This seems like a very common way to dismiss complaints of sexism, whether those complaints are valid or invalid. Could someone explain why?
I remember an similar complaint against a woman who said she was groped at a conference. What, is she expected to get a video of him groping her? There's a reason why so much sexism happens behind closed doors, off the record, or just in person when nobody else is nearby.
These things need to be public because that is required before we can discuss them. We are not putting GitHub on trial here.
Maybe she was using the app. Once Secret has access to your contacts, it shows you what's been posted by your friends and friends of friends. So she would have seen what almost everyone at Github was posting.
Crazy how women can turn even canonically geeky/boring things like Github into soap operas like "General Hospital". You've got to wonder what kind of drama occurs in actual hospitals, with alpha-doctors and nurses side-by-side. I've heard stories.
Of course, it's always the women that make things dramatic. Not the power fetish of the founder's wife, the unwanted advances of coworkers, or the reverting of legitimate contributions to the team's project.
Can't you see past the fact that she's a woman? Don't you see how demoralizing any of this would be?
Can I ask a question about phrasing for a minute? What's inherently wrong with an unwanted advance?
Advances have an unknown state until they're responded to. If she had accepted it, it would've been a welcomed advance. There's no way to know that until you walk up to a woman and say "Hey, I think you're pretty cool. Want to go get a drink sometime?"
If she says no, that's unwanted, but I don't see how it's inappropriate.
As she described it, there were at least 4 problems. 1. Its generally polite to only make advances on unattached people. 2. Going to her home to ask makes it awkward to say no. 3. Not leaving immediately compounded 2. 4. Subsequent behaviour was bad, thus showing bad faith all along.
I'm not saying in this specific instance it wasn't inappropriate.
I'm saying as a general concept, the very phrase "unwanted advance" has lots of implications of sexual misconduct, when it really can just be as simple as a guy asking a girl out, and her saying no. I don't see what's inappropriate there.
Unwanted advance is ok in my opinion. Retaliation after rejection is not. To add complexity, proposing to someone in long term relationship does not make you look good.
> What's inherently wrong with an unwanted advance?
I don't want to be hit on at work. It is totally inappropriate and unprofessional. And if I were a minority in my office I would find it very hard to deal with.
From the article, he did not say "Want to get a drink some time?"
> [He] asked himself over to “talk,” and then professed his love, and “hesitated” when asked to leave.
But she did get hit on at work and started dating a co-worker (I'm assuming the guy she's dating initiated contact). If that was acceptable by her, then this logic about it being "totally inappropriate and unprofessional" is moot.
I do not agree with what the co-worker did in terms of reverting commits and all that, but his initial behavior can be chalked up to all these romantic comedies where the protagonist professes his love for the cute girl and it all ends happily ever after.
All I'm saying is that you can't demonize his initial approach.
>If that was acceptable by her, then this logic about it being "totally inappropriate and unprofessional" is moot.
It's inappropriate for your other coworkers to hit on you if they know you are in a relationship, regardless of whether that relationship happens to be with a coworker. Where her and her partner actually hit on each other may not have been at work.
It sounds more the issue that the guy in question has an extreme lack of social skills.
I've successfully done stuff with co-workers before, but it happened in undertones. I did not go to anyone's house to profess my love. That's creepy no matter who's doing it.
It's sort of analogous to a quantum mechanical measurement - you don't know it was unwanted until you try it.
This is why it's better to make an early advance with some plausible deniability, so you can back off if there's no mutual interest (e.g. backing away: "Ha, just kidding ... what, you thought I wanted to date you for real? That's crazy talk ... we're co-workers, and it would never work out, we're so different.")
Women are a lot more orientated towards relationships and the nuances of such. Lots of reasons why, but basically it is due to the basic psychological differences between the sexes, and society's reinforcement of them through imposed social norms. A very general statement of course, and you certainly can find exceptions... And things are changing, and have been changing ever since 1960s and feminism kicked off.
but it still is a difference - males under 40 (in general) are more orientated towards their status aka power aka wealth aka etc - in order to acquire the prime females... So to expect semi-arrogant king of the world 20-something men who are typically hyperlogical and socially inept (yes, lot of generalization) and who are hell bent on making a mark for themselves to really grok the subtle aspects of social behaviors.... I remember when I was 20-something and I was CLUELESS.
So in other words, yet another story about an extremely immature industry too full of themselves and soaked with money.
Is Github even that important in the largest sense of the word? no, it isn't. At this point in my life, I realize how IT sucks so hard and is in some sense a detriment to the future of humanity. I want to go back to school to become an English major, BTW... the humanities are far more important than this uber-hyper-capitalism we've created likes to admit.
I've known (and know) a few doctors in my time and my wife was a nurse for a while and the answer is... lots. However, in most cases it tends to be short lived or contained to specific episodes due to the high levels of turnover in departments and the very well defined hierarchies and processes in place.
Some geeky types will be tempted, upon founding a startup, to thus not have ANY women in significant roles in the company, and to keep it as guys-only as possible; outsourcing as needed and doing the other legal legwork as required to stay under the headcount (is it >50 people?) to avoid the EEOC.
I'd rather just have a "zero fuckwits rule" in hiring. It sounds like Github breached that rule, leading to this problem. You could possibly avoid all sexual harassment by having only men in the workplace, but if they were still fuckwits and assholes, you'd have other employment problems.
Yeah, I've been in a place where one founder's wife was the ex-gf of a second founder, and for no good reason whatsoever she was brought in to do the books, and kept on talking out loud about what the second founder was like in bed.
Some people use companies to work out their interpersonal problems.
I saw similar things happen with male employees. A spouse of a manager/founder (well, anyone really) having power without any official position is a disaster waiting to happen. The situation I experienced was with an all-male team. The result is people leaving, so having a small team really doesn't fix anything. Quite the opposite.
I've been in this position as a co-founder, having to deal with a contractor who was also the spouse of a co-founder, and who managed to drive everybody crazy, including other contractors and employees, other co-founders, and their own spouse.
I'll be more than tempted. To be 100% honest, I have that thought every single time I read any article or blog post about sexism in tech. If programmers with a Y-chromosome are exponentially less likely to either sue us or get us labelled sexist jerks in the press, then that's who we're hiring.
"To be 100% honest, I have that thought every single time I read any article or newspaper report about a shootout or burglary in the community. If people with a white bloodline are statistically less likely to either rob us or get us labelled racists jerks in the press, than that's who we're hirig." -- do you now see what's wrong with this kind of thinking ?
No, because I read 1000x times more of the one than of the other, and I personally see and experience one and not the other. That you'd even bring up the comparison makes me think you're not taking this seriously, as a reality to deal with and not an internet crusade.
Read the statement again. I'm not laying blame on any party. I am only taking the position that whatever the cause is, I don't know any better than anyone else how to avoid it.
I guess the point I was trying to make was lost on you somehow.
I wasn't trying to say this is the exact same thing and that racism is something you'd hear about as frequently as sexism these days ! I was trying to make the parallel that just a few decades ago it would've been a perfectly acceptable thing to play it safe and say ".. than that's who we're hirig." based purely on this kind of skewed reasoning about races.
The reason you hear more about women bringing up these issues is because more women are bringing up these issues, which until recently were either non-existent (because there weren't as many women in tech), or were ignored/hushed or 'dealt with quietly' -- much like race issues ...or for that matter general quality issues between the sexes. The reason you "...personally see and experience one and not the other." is precisely because the other (ie: racism) was brought up ...repeatedly ...dirt was kicked up ...fingers pointed ...positions defended ...often under the guise of 'ah well, this issue isn't about being racists as much as it is about the individuals'. In the end though, most people 'got it'. Hopefully you now see the parallel I was trying to make.
About your statement " That you'd even bring up the comparison makes me think you're not taking this seriously, as a reality to deal with and not an internet crusade." ..well, I personally feel this is a very serious matter and if you got any other impression from what I said, it possibly is due to my inability to get the point across.
About your statement "Read the statement again. I'm not laying blame on any party. I am only taking the position that whatever the cause is, I don't know any better than anyone else how to avoid it." ...I'm sorry, I really don't see how the 'I don't know any better than anyone else how to avoid it.' bit is supposed to be implied by " then that's who we're hiring." bit ...maybe my comprehension skills are lacking although I suspect they aren't and you're just trying to somehow deflect your earlier statement by misdirection.
>If programmers with a Y-chromosome are exponentially less likely to either sue us or get us labelled sexist jerks in the press, then that's who we're hiring.
That you would even think this says to me that you have zero appreciation for the unique capabilities women bring to the workforce. In my mind it's so obviously worth the risk.
To use a metaphor you might understand I think you're programming around the bug instead of debugging.
Maybe, shocking as it is, women are reacting to real injustices in these cases that you read about in "any article or blog post about sexism in tech". If your immediate reaction to someone being called out for sexism is to distance yourself from women, have you ever considered that perhaps your attitude is sexist? You're assuming in all scenarios that the man is right and being attacked unfairly, disregarding evidence.
This is the sort of fucked up attitude that's turning the public increasingly against the tech industry. The attitude seems to be "we can do anything that we want, because we're smart and we know the loopholes"
If you really believe that the public considers watching women hula-hoop or a rug that says "meritocracy" to be sexual harassment, please give some thought to the possibility that you might be living in a bubble.
--- ATTENTION: THERE IS NO SEXISM AT GITHUB!!! ---
Proof #1: Do I read it correctly that a woman got into fights with another woman -- and that is termed as "sexism" now? Give me a break…
Proof @2: how came "sexist" is an organization that is under influence and control of the boss wife? Who doesn't even officially work there!!! Like, really? This is sexism now??? WOW!!! So, again: give me a break with this nonsense!!!
Some old good venting:
And finally, is this a forum for morons now who can't see through once they see a PC piece in the news? Because it seems to me so. HN is full of intelligent people but once PC piece is involved they all act like a band of brainless morons mumbling all marxist buzz-words from "equality" to "social justice". Give me a break again. And go back to coding.
okay so from a quick scan of that article, it appears that
a) she was not made welcome for whatever reasons
b) founder's wife appears to wear the pants in the relationship
c) founder's wife saw her as a potential sexual partner for her husband and wanted to do a preemptive strike.
This incident does damage Github's street cred (if true), it actually sickens me that this engineer was bullied out of her job (if true), and this just is the final cherry on top of Homakov's discoveries of security vulnerabilities in github.
The founder's wife sounds like she was threatened by JAH being an attractive and presumably smart woman being around her husband. The founder sounds like a pussy-whipped loser who doesn't know how to set boundaries for his wife. Most of what JAH describes is unfortunately very believable. I've had resentful coworkers delete/overwrite my work in the past.
That said, complaining about men staring at hula hoop dancers just sounds really odd to me. If someone is hula hooping in a non-private space, of course people are going to stare. Being geeks/nerds/people who generally tend not to have the most highly developed social skills, some of those stares may be awkward. Get over it. She wasn't even the one being stared at.
The sad thing is that this story didn't surprise me. Small to mid size startups are sometimes run by psychopaths. This is because their business scales faster than their fitness for running a business can be tested.
Carried forward, in a court-like environment, or throwing salvos over PR mediums?
I take it as a bad smell someone goes the PR route over a lawyer (perhaps a confidential legal threat?) to discuss things privately and settle thing amicably.
Depends on what the aim is. There are some considerations here:
1. People tend to view going for the lawyers as going for the 'big guns,' and can be reluctant to do so.
2. Companies can become less cooperative very quickly once it's a matter being decided by lawyers and/or in a court.
3. She may not have consulted a lawyer because she doesn't think that anything which transpired qualifies as 'illegal,' rather than unprofessional, rude, mean, etc.
From the story presented to us, it sounds like she wants to leverage bad PR to get Github's HR / board to hold the people she views as having wronged her accountable.
After reading the article I assumed that she didn't go to a lawyer because she believed there was nothing there that would merit a lawsuit. The fact that she didn't mention what her initial grievance was, leads me to believe it wasn't such a big deal as to rise to the level of a lawsuit.
Or possibly she just believes that going public like this is the best way to bring about change.
> We are awaiting comment from GitHub regarding these allegations, and GitHub says it is looking into it.
> We are waiting for comment from GitHub about these allegations.
> GitHub says it is investigating the matter: “We’re looking into this.”
This post might be entirely true, but for now it is an expanded personal blog post posing as news. I will hold judgement on both parties until there is evidence, but I doubt most readers skimming headlines will.
It is unfortunate this was posted before TechCrunch or any other "news" site got corroboration from other parties or evidence of any of it. The post offers no evidence outside what was created by Ms. Horvath herself.
I think this is a classic problem with companies making the transition from small startup to regular business. Break down the barriers! Flat management! Kill bureaucracy and embrace no-politics DIY organisation!
The article reads like an HR air crash investigation. Nebulous semi-employee with unspecified responsibilities related to a founder? Check. Unclear or absent grievance chain? Check. HR alternately over- and under-involved in disputes with no clear policy? Check. Off-the-record disciplinary meetings? Check. Founder adjudicates his own grievances? Check.
And it seems like every single one of these problems could have been solved by a halfway competent manager. I mean, someone reverting your code because of a personal vendetta? Is that not like, a 5 minute conversation? "Hey, Jo, Dave's being an asshole and reverting my commits for no reason." "Oh, okay, I'll talk to him and make sure it stops."
I read a great article a while back that I unfortunately can't find now, but it talked about a CEO who thought he was having a casual "hey, I'm interested in developing my skills, can you mentor me a bit?" conversation with another exec. A week later the office was ablaze with "so-and-so being groomed as successor" rumours. At a certain point you stop being able to just act like a regular person and have everything turn out fine. Red tape isn't always a straitjacket. Sometimes it's a crash harness.