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Update on Julie Horvath's Departure

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Re: Update on Julie Horvath's Departure

#261

Post by ciupicri »

guiambros wrote: post #220
allochthon wrote: post #205

I do not consider the article in TechCrunch to have presented a balanced description of the matter. I will withhold any judgment until Github have carried out an investigation. I will not presume the founder in question, his wife or the other employee to be guilty of the allegations against them until we have more information. I hope Github will be fair and impartial in their investigation.

Just the fact that the wife of an employee was consistently allowed in the building, is already a serious matter. GitHub is not a scrappy startup anymore; it's a 1 billion dollar company. You do not allow strangers to walk around the office, and much less let them invite employees to dinners to discuss internal matters. Having said that, seems that GitHub recognizes that they screwed up. The tone of their response se…

> GitHub is not a scrappy startup anymore; it's a 1 billion dollar company

Yeah, let's kill all the fun.

> You do not allow strangers to walk around the office

Except that she wasn't a stranger, she was the wife of a founder. Most old employees probably know her.

Re: Update on Julie Horvath's Departure

#262

Post by sockgrant »

curiousgeorgio wrote: post #208

Of course we may never know for sure exactly what was said (unless everything was secretly recorded somehow... NSA - data, please), but my initial reaction is that this story sounds a bit... exaggerated. Were things said that shouldn't have been said? Probably so. But here's the way I read it from TC: Let's look at what Horvath claims: > character started being discussed in inappropriate places like on pull requests…

This is how I also felt when I read the claims: things are far from certain. The claims were so vague, it's impossible to know what's going on. And her vagueness itself could mean anything. It could mean she's lying/exaggerating, or it could mean she's being conscientious of the people involved and trying not to ruin their lives or trash github.

It's surprising to me that a lot of comments here are jumping to conclusions that can't be drawn from the lack of facts.

Re: Update on Julie Horvath's Departure

#263

Post by dekz »

wcummings wrote: post #228
hueving wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a good thing you aren't a manager. Which half is it that's good enough for termination? Reverting a commit, or what?

A coworker showing up uninvited to her house and making an awkward and uninvited advance, or systematically reverting commits as vengeance. I made a vague statement, but I think "reverting a commit" is definitely minimizing what she claims happened

The only real issue GitHub can address here is harassment during work.

I don't recall reading about an uninvited advance, so if this is something new you know about could you dump a citation here. I do recall a home visit which was 'awkward' and the offending party 'hesitated' to leave. That stuff happens, in and outside of work. Remember the parties here are emotionally invested and biased. We should not consider such details trivial, but they are considerably emotionally invested in this. The way it was phrased in the original article was he hesitated to leave. That's obviously up to the reader to interpret. Let's not dramatize that into an 'univited advance'.

Re: Update on Julie Horvath's Departure

#264

Post by flylib »

laureny wrote: post #21

> We know we have to take action and have begun a full investigation. While that’s ongoing, and effective immediately, the relevant founder has been put on leave, as has the referenced GitHub engineer. Pretty much a full admission that everything that Julie said is true. This is great news, but putting these people on leave seems to be too nice. It's clear that these two people obey ethics that are in direct oppposit…

> This narrows down the choices: the "founder" who is the cause for all this drama is either PJ Hyett or Tom Preston-Werner.

why is TechCrunch claiming Scott Chacon is a co-founder? He is married also but his wife is friends with Julie on Facebook so I doubt him

I doubt it was PJ's wife - https://twitter.com/kldub

which narrows it down to Theresa Preston-Werner and just for kicks

https://twitter.com/tpdubs2/status/415224900782014464

Re: Update on Julie Horvath's Departure

#265

Post by SolarNet »

balls187 wrote: post #245
SolarNet wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually of all of these the last one is the only one I think your counter is flat out wrong (all the others seem plausible enough). Why? Because gawking at other co-workers (regardless of genders) in a casual environment is not ok. In a casual work environment people often do light exercise, and they need to feel comfortable to do that without being turned into sex objects. I would hope the men in question have enou…

What if they weren't gawking, but instead watching? If you are hula hooping out in the open, I don't think it's fair to expect people to look away, no more than it is to expect people to look away if you were playing the hula hoop minigame in Wii Fit. Gawking and making people feel uncomfortable = bad. Watching coworkers make fools of themselves = priceless. > You are basically advocating the position of countries th…

Your first point is valid. It depends on what actually happened.

But the OP's comment: "As for the hula hooping... you're telling me that two women hula hooping to music in the workplace is perfectly appropriate, but when the other people nearby (who are going to be mostly males if the majority of employees are male - go figure) suddenly notice, that's the inappropriate part? Really?".

Is the part that bothered me, they are implying that the inappropriate part is the women hoola hooping. The logic there that I have a problem with is that it's the women's fault for being attractive, and that the man isn't at as much fault for being attracted to it because the women are doing something attractive.

Which is the same logic used to enforce burqa laws. I'm not saying the OP's thinking will lead to burqas or anything, merely that it's the same axiomatic view of the world. Basically, I never invoked a slippery slope, I was drawing a parallel in axioms.

As an example on an actual slippery slope, to argue against gay marriage and say then people will marry dogs! It's implying that because we are going to change marriages definition it will just change to anything. When in actuality we have a specific argument based off of axioms of equality that lead us to the conclusion that marriage should be between two consenting adults. An argument similar to the one I made would be: "The same logic that lets different races marry also means we should let similar genders marry".

Re: Update on Julie Horvath's Departure

#266

Post by SolarNet »

Karn wrote: post #257
SolarNet wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually of all of these the last one is the only one I think your counter is flat out wrong (all the others seem plausible enough). Why? Because gawking at other co-workers (regardless of genders) in a casual environment is not ok. In a casual work environment people often do light exercise, and they need to feel comfortable to do that without being turned into sex objects. I would hope the men in question have enou…

Hula hooping in a non-private space is equivalent to screaming "LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME!" If people are hula hooping, regardless of whether they are male or female, people are going to look. If the women were working on a laptop, or having a quiet conversation, and THEN men were gawping, that would be unacceptable. Want to hula hoop without being looked at? Do it in a private space. > You are basically using the same…

It's not that people were looking, it was that they were gawking. It's not that they glanced at it, or watched for a few seconds. It's that they spent a prolonged time watching it.

Re: Update on Julie Horvath's Departure

#267

Post by yuhong »

laureny wrote: post #21

> We know we have to take action and have begun a full investigation. While that’s ongoing, and effective immediately, the relevant founder has been put on leave, as has the referenced GitHub engineer. Pretty much a full admission that everything that Julie said is true. This is great news, but putting these people on leave seems to be too nice. It's clear that these two people obey ethics that are in direct oppposit…

PJ Hyett seems to be the COO at GitHub.

Re: Update on Julie Horvath's Departure

#269

Post by ciupicri »

avoutthere wrote: post #176

Ms. Horvath's act of taking this directly to the press was obviously intended to inflict the maximum possible harm on Github and is, in itself, unprofessional and harms her credibility. The right way for her to have handled this would have been to document everything , and then resign and sue them without fanfare. Nobody wins when dirty laundry is aired.

Why sue and not just leave? This risk of lawsuits created this whole mess of rules and paperwork that kills all the joy.

Re: Update on Julie Horvath's Departure

#270

Post by achompas »

leccine wrote: post #13

Well Julie's story stinks. Let me just quote the last thigs she wrote and work backwards from that. "Two women, one of whom I work with and adore, and a friend of hers were hula hooping to some music. I didn’t have a problem with this. What I did have a problem with is the line of men sitting on one bench facing the hoopers and gawking at them. It looked like something out of a strip club. When I brought this up to m…

This is a hell of a response.

You take a quote from the end of the original article, some 200 words, and use it as a basis to tear down Julie's character ("seems like..." and "sounds like..."). I mean, seriously, it's marvelous: you jump from hula-hooping to identifying social angst in Julie's life in two sentences. Bravo!

We do not know Julie. Pretending otherwise, and using that as grounds for tearing down her claims, devalues their significance. I'm surprised, given that you understand what oppression means at a workplace, that you readily dismiss her serious claims on such flimsy grounds.

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