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Update on Julie Horvath's Departure

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Re: Update on Julie Horvath's Departure

#371

Post by epsylon »

sp332 wrote: post #191
tw268 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feminism is a cultural Marxist ideology which tries to explain the world through the lens of class conflict - an overclass (male) which is oppressive and therefore evil and an underclass (female) which is oppressed and therefore good. This is why it is not considered oppression when men die young or go to prison more often than women and it is not a problem when men are underrepresented in higher ed - men can't be op…

The word "feminism" describes a lot more that just that one ideology. There are lots of feminist movements and "agendas" and the only thing they have in common is advocating equality for women. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism

You're such a killjoy; how is tw268 gonna be able to make sweeping generalizations about those damn feminists now?

Re: Update on Julie Horvath's Departure

#372

Post by mcv »

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…

> Just the fact that the wife of an employee was consistently allowed in the building, is already a serious matter

Not necessarily. I've worked at plenty of offices where spouses occasionally showed up, including mine. The problem is that she acts like she hold a position of authority.

Re: Update on Julie Horvath's Departure

#373

Post by epsylon »

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.

> Ms. Horvath's act of taking this directly to the press was obviously intended to inflict the maximum possible harm on Github

If you had read the original article [1] you'd have known that she decided to take action after a "Secret post" was publicly published about her departure. (We could comment all day about the bravery of the anonymous GitHub employees who used Secret as a public mean of ridiculing her)

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/15/julie-ann-horvath-describes...

Re: Update on Julie Horvath's Departure

#374

Post by mcv »

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.

> Nobody wins when dirty laundry is aired.

Not necessarily. It can put pressure on the company to take it seriously and fix it, and make more people aware of these kind of problems. And that seems to be what's happening here. Keeping it under wraps allows the situation to continue as it was.

Re: Update on Julie Horvath's Departure

#375

Post by Intermernet »

ceol wrote: post #305
ssorallen wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Comments on the original TechCrunch article were equally vindicating even though that article offered no actual evidence. It's unfortunate TechCrunch and Valley Wag posted the story without first corroborating at least some piece of it. GitHub's response neither confirms nor denies any part of the story. It does say the founder's wife will no longer be allowed in the office, but that is not an admission of wrong…

> GitHub's response neither confirms nor denies any part of the story. Well, they do say: 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. The founder’s wife discussed in the media reports has never had hiring or firing power at GitHub and will no longer be permitted i…

"We know we have to take action and have begun a full investigation." == "We need to do something about this"

"While that’s ongoing, and effective immediately, the relevant founder has been put on leave, as has the referenced GitHub engineer." == "We don't know what to do yet but we're trying to prevent variables from changing"

"The founder’s wife discussed in the media reports has never had hiring or firing power at GitHub and will no longer be permitted in the office." == "If she said anything along those lines, she had no authority to do so, and misrepresented herself and her role at GitHub"

Yes, it's legalese, but it's not actually saying or admitting anything that anybody didn't already know. It's filling the silence that would otherwise breed directionless slander and conspiracy.

It's manipulative, but arguably well intentioned, and can possibly lead to a more constructive outcome than the free-form slather that would have occurred in a communication vacuum.

Re: Update on Julie Horvath's Departure

#376

Post by theorique »

tw268 wrote: post #30
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…

GitHub is known to have a dubstep and IPA culture. If they want to be a standard bearer for feminism in tech, the transition is going to be difficult and they are going to take some hits. The two cultures don't mix well. It sounds like GitHub is going to have to become more stale and corporate to survive as a larger company, which is inevitable, but hastened by their own choices.

Damn that evil sexist dubstep and IPA ...

Now we know what the real problems are in this industry: taste in music and beer!

Re: Update on Julie Horvath's Departure

#377

Post by Intermernet »

lloeki wrote: post #349
sequoia wrote: post #248

When I arrived at this thread, comment two was 'using the information available in the short techcrunch article, I'm now going to PROVE, point by point, how Horvath's claims are false.' Comment three was 'aha they issued a vague apology, this is basically a FULL ADMISSION that everything Horvath said was true!' People: when did our brains melt and spill out of our ears? There is not enough public information present…

> People: when did our brains melt and spill out of our ears? Classic case of confirmation bias.

Classic case? confirmation bias? I would have called it an opinion, and an emotionally charged appeal to reason, but not any form of confirmation bias.

Would you accuse scientists of confirmation bias if they chose to look for more evidence rather than just publish the results of the first experiment?

Re: Update on Julie Horvath's Departure

#378

Post by hippee-lee »

Karn wrote: post #369
SolarNet wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a source for the "at a party" part? The majority of my comments have been predicated that this was in a work environment. The Horvath techcrunch article states "at the office". More to the point: Yes because women moving their hips means they automatically want to be considered for their sexual characteristics. /sarcasm Admittedly, if this was at a party and they were hula hooping then sure no problem at…

> Do you have a source https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7408466 > Yes because women moving their hips means they automatically want to be considered for their sexual characteristics. /sarcasm Actually, yes, they do. If you don't know this then either you're very inexperienced with women or you're the kind of guy they willingly keep in the dark about what they want.

So women in a yoga class ( at work ) are actively promoting their sexual characteristics at that time?

Your comment reads very, very predatory.

Re: Update on Julie Horvath's Departure

#379

Post by duncan_bayne »

trhway wrote: post #334
duncan_bayne wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and tell the women if they want to hula hoop, do it some place more private. Indeed. And just in case men still gawked at them, she could have brought some free niqab to work for them to wear. http://www.jesusandmo.net/strips/2013-09-18.png

if we reverse the genders, do you think no woman would complain (or just gawk) if she saw this happening in the office http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrA5zL9u5NE&feature=player_de...

Gawk? Quite possibly. Complain? One* ex-colleague of mine was gay, and he'd have been rendered temporarily incapacitated by that, I suspect.

But the point is that hula-hooping, or shirtless weight-lifting, shouldn't be prohibited just because some people gawk and others are made uncomfortable.

If you want to sexualise hula-hooping or weight-lifting, fine, just don't use that point of view as the basis of a complaint.

* many were; it's just he was the guy I was thinking of for this example

Re: Update on Julie Horvath's Departure

#380

Post by arrrg »

ps4fanboy wrote: post #225
sp332 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The word "feminism" describes a lot more that just that one ideology. There are lots of feminist movements and "agendas" and the only thing they have in common is advocating equality for women. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism

This "feminism can be anything" stance is getting really old, is it really everything good and nothing bad?

Oh, I’m so very sorry that you have to do a tiny bit more work and find out specifically what someone stands for before you can coherently argue against them instead of slapping the feminist label on it and being done with it.

First, I would suggest that when you attack feminism in the abstract, you attack views that are actually currently and widely held by feminists. It’s a diverse movement, but there are actual mainstream views. Frequently even that will not be very helpful, so you will have to find out specifically which group of people you are addressing with your criticism.

If feminists can and do frequently criticise feminist views then so can you.

In that regard feminism is kind of like, say, conservatism or liberalism or socialism or nationalism.

Now, I myself do not have a problem with chucking even big and complex concepts like that on the trash heap of history if they actually do have a consistently disastrous history. You won’t find me putting much work into arguing against fascism or royalism or racism or antisemitism. I’m willing to dismiss those wholesale.

Feminism, whatever its faults may be in your view, is about a million miles away from clearing that, however. It’s absurd to even think it could approach that same standard of wholesale dismissal. It has no history of harm at all.

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