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Results of the GitHub Investigation

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Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation

#101

Post by nymph »

chrismonsanto wrote: post #87
nymph wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Downvoters: Would you mind explaining yourselves? It was a perfectly reasonable question to ask.

I didn't downvote you, but this is a hot-button issue right now. A lot of people are familiar with what happened, and (perhaps wrongly) assume that everyone else is as well. Assuming that context, your post can be interpreted as "I don't think that the things said Horvath brought up were a big deal", where you might have meant "I'm not familiar with this subject, what did she bring up that was so bad?"

That's about what I thought. But as it happens, no, I wasn't doubting the claims -- I just wasn't following the story obsessively and wasn't aware of the details.

Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation

#103

Post by sergiotapia »

vpv wrote: post #47

So, guy who wrote GitHub and a ton of open source stuff is ousted from his own company and sacrificed for a person whos biggest accomplishment in open source is JavaScript for Cats? https://github.com/nrrrdcore/javascript-for-cats

What an embarrassment if you ask me. Why should he leave if he's been found of no legal wrong-doing by a third party? These tumblr-twats warriors only break communities.

Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation

#105

Post by dfc »

onotarti wrote: post #89
awnird wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incredibly troubling. How can anyone trust GitHub, knowing that non-employees regularly had access to private information?

In my experience it is pretty common for people who bring work home with them not to be super-meticulous about preventing access to the content of the work by their families. How many people do you know who sound-proof their home office so their wife can't eavesdrop on their business calls?

I think that people that can and do bring work home are employed in fields where one does not need to be super meticulous about preventing access to the work.

Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation

#106

Post by throwaway1991 »

mef wrote: post #34
cjbprime wrote: post #14

There appear to have been weirdnesses around the investigation, such as Julie Ann Horvath (and other ex-employees) remaining uncontacted until it was wrapping up: https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/453298152569720832 So I don't know how much stock you can place behind the idea that the investigators GH hired, who did not contact ex-employees competently, found them blameless. The resignation probably speaks for mor…

Theresa Preston-Werner's response https://medium.com/p/2fe173c44215

Theresa is full of it. I have no idea what happened at Github but she's been telling people in New York she started Omakase because she's "angry with the tech industry." With that kind of attitude it's no surprise Github employees felt pressured into volunteering for her. She has admitted that she's not just someone excited about her new venture, she is beginning conversations with the idea that she knows what's best for the other person and that's working for her/contributing to her charity.

Not to mention that it seems like the tech industry has done a lot for her family's life so it seems strange and ungrateful to respond with anger that other people in positions of less influence than her family has, are not doing enough for the world in some vague sense.

Not to mention the massive hypocrisy that she is raising money from institutional investors as donors to cover operations costs for her non-profit which is ultimately a shakedown on salaried employees. There are things I agree with Theresa about, but asking the ultra-rich for money to support her venture to pressure regular people to give more to charity is nuts.

Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation

#109

Post by danso »

comrh wrote: post #95
danso wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's possible that Horvath was right about the poor actions of management, and at the same time, very little of what she alleged seemed to fall into the bounds of gender-based discrimination. A colleague who reverts your commits because you wouldn't date him...that's not gender-based, that's office-romance strife (though obviously, such strife can be exacerbated with a gender imbalance at the company). I'm ki…

> The first one, of course, is bad. And there's possibly a case to be made that if management knew about this engineer and let it slide, well, that does create a hostile environment. Yet I don't think Horvath points out where she complained about this guy's commit-reverting behavior to management. It is only bad if she complains to management?

No...but it would bolster her claim that a hostile work environment was knowingly perpetuated, which is a component of harassment. I'm not saying that talking to management is a trivial thing, especially in cases of reporting harassment. But it's also unfair to argue "they should've stopped it" if they weren't appraised of the situation. Again, maybe Horvath did say so, but her account to TechCrunch doesn't mention it explicitly. In any case, such a thing would likely be an electronic record, and so if she feels that the record was not thoroughly examined, now's her chance to assert that.

Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation

#110

Post by dragonwriter »

chrismonsanto wrote: post #68
personZ wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, are they saying that Horvath was lying? Neither party has to be lying. She might honestly believe she was treated in a specific way because of her sex, while others may have treated her in a specific way because of, for instance, her competence. Both may be 100% honest in their assessment of the relationship, yet be completely at odds. The workplace absolutely sounded unprofessional, which often means the entire…

> She might honestly believe she was treated in a specific way because of her sex Yes, but the investigation said there was no evidence for a hostile work environment. That's a claim above and beyond sexism: it's quantifying over all of the various ways a work environment could be hostile (of which sexism is one way). If what Horvath says about Preston's wife is true, then that sounds like a hostile work environment…

> Yes, but the investigation said there was no evidence for a hostile work environment. That's a claim above and beyond sexism

No, its not. "Hostile work environment" is mentioned as one of the legal violations it found to be unsupported, and "hostile work environment" is a legal term of art in sexual harassment law. In context, then, it is not a claim "above and beyond sexism", its is a claim about the absence of a particular form of sexual harassment.

> it's quantifying over all of the various ways a work environment could be hostile (of which sexism is one way).

You are reading it backwards: the finding of no legal wrongdoing, in the context of the allegations made of sexual harassment, is quantifying over all the various ways in which sexual harassment law could be violated, and the "hostile work environment" statement is one specific example of areas where sexual harassment was not found.

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