Results of the GitHub Investigation • Hacker News Board

Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation

#231

Post by dsl » Mon, Apr 21, 2014, 9:43 PM UTC

GauntletWizard wrote: post #173

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?

What about de-facto board members? Tom was on GitHub's board, it was/is a small company, I don't get how "founder's wife" is not a suitably trusted position. I mean, clearly a bad call in this case, but hindsight is 20/20, and in my small business the husbands of my co-founders are de-facto employees (And in fact board members with significant proxy voting power, simply by state law of common property). Edit: I looke…

You should really get a better lawyer.

Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation

#232

Post by leccine » Mon, Apr 21, 2014, 9:45 PM UTC

jessaustin wrote: post #218

leccine wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know a company hire another companies to perform a check. They usually expect everything ok. Audit comes, it turns out there is a security hole in the software, or your books are off or you threat employees badly. Nobody wants these, yet everybody hires external companies. You think that you can bribe a legal firm to give you a green flag on harassing employees and they gonna risk their reputation on 50K USD? I d…

Accounting firms provide a pretty good counter-example here. Everyone thinks of Andersen, who actually had to close as a result of their "customer-focused" service at Enron, but actually all the "big" firms were implicated to varying degrees in the subsequent unpleasant business with CDOs. Any service business will hesitate to piss off the guy who hires them every year.

This is an exception and a single case does not prove that all of the companies are like that. There is enough money to bribe anybody. As i said, 50K (or so) is not enough for that.

Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation

#233

Post by kogf04 » Mon, Apr 21, 2014, 9:45 PM UTC

astrodust wrote: post #176

Bahamut wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best talent probably won't be so quick/shallow/naive to pass judgment so quickly. It probably will challenge their recruitment of women though.

So "women" and "best talent" are mutually exclusive? Classy.

Well the most followed projects on Github are led and created by men, so....

Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation

#234

Post by opendais » Mon, Apr 21, 2014, 9:47 PM UTC

ender7 wrote: post #112

tptacek wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right. It will never be clear what actually happened. I think Internet message boards create the perception that outcomes like that are rare. They're not: they're the norm. That's how it's supposed to be. We don't get to know everything and we need to work within the limits of our knowledge.

The only problem for GitHub now is finding a way to attract talent. If your best response to "You have a hostile work environment." is "We don't have a provably illegal hostile work environment." then that doesn't inspire great confidence when evaluating it as a place to work.

I'd say the fact the offending party no longer works at GitHub is reason enough to give them the benefit of the doubt. Of course if this happens again, I'm willing to revisit that opinion.

Shit does happen, regardless of the majority of one's coworkers best intentions.

Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation

#235

Post by Bahamut » Mon, Apr 21, 2014, 9:47 PM UTC

GregorStocks wrote: post #201

Bahamut wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best talent probably won't be so quick/shallow/naive to pass judgment so quickly. It probably will challenge their recruitment of women though.

The "best talent" would probably rather work at a company without these kinds of allegations than at one with them. They might be unfounded, but why take the risk? If you're the "best talent," you've got a lot of other options.

This definitely does weigh into many people's consideration I think.

However, determining how people will decide when put to such a situation is difficult. Speaking personally, I would certainly be wary, but I'm not going to dismiss a potential employer outright over something I don't have the complete facts about over one story.

Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation

#236

Post by matdes » Mon, Apr 21, 2014, 9:48 PM UTC

atmosx wrote: post #207

kybernetyk wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If true, that should certainly be a privacy and security concern to any GitHub customer or user. We left github private repo hosting when they got VC funding. Because of such a scenario where we could be competing with a company that was funded by the same VC that gave GH money. Now in a perfect world that shouldn't be a problem because the VC should never access private user data. But well ... as you see it's not…

You moved into a direct competitor or you rolled up your own infrastructure? I'm curious because if the company is not large , doesn't seem like much of a hassle having your own depository server.

Gitlab is a FOSS self hosted alternative to github.

Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation

#237

Post by caycep » Mon, Apr 21, 2014, 9:49 PM UTC

ender7 wrote: post #81

"We didn't do anything illegal, or that would leave us vulnerable to a lawsuit" is about the only content that this blog post contains. While Horvath characterized much of her woes as being gender-related [1], the investigation could have classified most of them as either unprovable or terrible-but-not-provably-sexist (in particular, the behavior of the Preston-Werners). I doubt it will ever be clear what actually ha…

I seem to recall another big fight between Github employees and Zed Shaw of Learn Python the Hard Way fame...perhaps that was a warning sign that HR policies needed to be brought up to snuff or even created in the 1st place...

Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation

#238

Post by endeavor » Mon, Apr 21, 2014, 9:49 PM UTC

mahyarm wrote: post #116

danielweber wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TOTALLY MADE-UP EXAMPLE: 1. Employee makes sexual harassment claim. 2. Outside HR consultant brought in. 3. Consultant asks "where is your anti-sexual harassment training course?" 4. CEO says o_o. 5. HR consultant establishes a policy for the company. 6. Board asks CEO to resign for not having the thing asked for in #3. Not having a training course isn't illegal -- it's not even evidence that anyone was sexually hara…

In California once your company goes over a certain size (which github has), they must have a sexual harassment course presented to the employees every one or two years. In my company that was a mandatory all company meeting where a lawyer made a powerpoint presentation for a couple of hours. Then there was some sort quiz and us signing something as far as I can remember.

I believe the state requirement is for managers, not regular employees.

Every 2 years I have to spend a couple hours taking a traffic-school-style online training.

Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation

#239

Post by chc » Mon, Apr 21, 2014, 9:51 PM UTC

facepalm wrote: post #214

jfc wrote: post #165

These memos are often more about what isn't said: > The investigation found no evidence... This doesn't mean there isn't any evidence--it just means that their internal investigation didn't find any. If read carefully, this statement tells us nothing about the universe of evidence that exists, but only about what GitHub didn't find. A different investigator might come to a completely different conclusion, or find oth…

"This doesn't mean there isn't any evidence--it just means that their internal investigation didn't find any." How could you ever claim anything else, though? You can only make a claim about the things you did find (including absence of things), not about things you didn't find, because you can not know about them. This is just another example of human communication depending on goodwill. If some involved parties wan…

I think it's more that the "gender-based" stuff was the legally actionable part of Horvath's accusations. Her accusations also included things that do not appear to be related to gender (in particular, nothing about Theresa Preston-Warner's alleged harassment seems to be related to gender).

Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation

#240

Post by icelancer » Mon, Apr 21, 2014, 9:51 PM UTC

lexcorvus wrote: post #225

dreamfactory2 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going by the TC account (and taking the account there at face value) it sounds very much like bullying of an individual rather than anything gender-based. What's missing is why they got so paranoid about her as a potential troublemaker in the first place before they (allegedly) started handling it like chumps.

This story (unfortunately now dead on Hacker News) claims to fill in what's missing: https://medium.com/p/d96f431f4e8e Money quote: Around the end of 2012, Julie started dating a close male friend of the cofounder’s wife and didn’t like that they were close. She asked them to stop being friends and when they would not end their relationship, Julie started telling coworkers that the wife had affairs and that the cofou…

Pretty obviously there was a second side to this story. Not at all surprised to read something like this, but it is sad.