Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Results of the GitHub Investigation

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 514 posts

Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation

#251

Post by sseveran »

hntaway wrote: post #96
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…

An anonymous post on medium by github insiders: https://medium.com/p/d96f431f4e8e Unfortunate that it is anonymous, but it is still worth reading in my opinion.

This whole episode has reminded me that when I start my next company we will have a non-fraternization clause.

Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation

#252

Post by drgath »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #94
debt wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I'm curious about this myself. Doesn't this create a pretty serious security situation? GitHub isn't a small startup anymore, I would assume they'd have some pretty serious security precautions in place.

They also handle plenty of trade secrets, I'd bet. They have private repos.

With so many self-hosted Github alternatives, and even Github Enterprise (self-hosted Github), I don't feel sorry for anyone having trade secrets stolen if they were hosting via private repos on Github.com.

Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation

#253

Post by voidlogic »

parfe wrote: post #160
tptacek wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your scare-quotes around "other" are deceptive, since those other mistakes aren't a mystery.

I apologize if I missed it, but what mistakes did Tom Preston-Werner or GitHub publicly admit to? I just re-skimmed his blog and the github press release and only see denials of very specific terms regarding illegal sexual harassment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7623440

Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation

#254

Post by dasil003 »

leccine wrote: post #202
dasil003 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"it turns out"? Are you f'ing serious? You read that legalistic statement and take that to be the whole truth and final word a priori? This is just too naive for words.

Alright, so I guess her accusations are true. We can't prove it, the auditor says it is not the case, anonymous post says that too. Yet, we need to take her words against many. Simply because she said so.

No, that's not what I said.

We're all probably going to have to get comfortable with a basic level of uncertainty about this.

Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation

#256

Post by neilk »

js2 wrote: post #98
voidlogic wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is all conjecture, but this series of events got me thinking about what to learn from this. I have a feeling Ms. Horvath and Mrs. Preston-Werner completely believe their own interpretations of what happened. This is a good reminder of how subtle and ambiguous our and others views of the same reality is. In her post Theresa mentions having a blind spot for the obligations that github employees felt for helping he…

how subtle and ambiguous our and others views of the same reality is Rashomon.

Everyone thinks the message of that movie is "all truth is subjective", but it's not. It's more like "the stories we tell ourselves and others are distorted by our self-image and our interests".

At the end, the movie even explicitly rejects the theory that truth is unobtainable, and that everyone is corrupt. In the movie at least, disinterested third parties who have good intentions can reveal the truth.

You may believe in subjectivity, but Rashomon doesn't.

Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation

#257

Post by michaelt »

leccine wrote: post #179
johansch wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that even remotely similar in terms of conflict of interest on the part of the buyer?

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…

Oh, it doesn't have to be anything so brazen as them finding a problem then covering it up. It's simply that you agree to a certain number of hours at a certain price, and they run out of hours before finding any evidence of wrongdoing.

Legal firms have lawyer-client confidentiality rules, so if they do find anything, with a bit of care you can bury or lie about their findings with impunity.

Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation

#258

Post by bjterry »

leccine wrote: post #179
johansch wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that even remotely similar in terms of conflict of interest on the part of the buyer?

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…

It is widely-believed in the investment banking industry that you can find a firm that will provide a fairness opinion for virtually any transaction. They are a little bit more costly than $50K, but not more than an order of magnitude for small transactions. Mergers and Inquisitions says, "As you might guess, banks never say a deal is 'unfair' – the Opinion is just a rubber stamp to justify the deal to investors."[1]

(For the record, I never saw any unethical fairness opinions while I was in investment banking)

The consulting industry has similar dynamics. They are mainly there to provide evidence in favor of a plan proposed by whomever is their primary contact. See, for example, the article by the BCG consultant at [2]: "What I could not get my head around was having to force-fit analysis to a conclusion. In one case, the question I was tasked with solving had a clear and unambiguous answer: By my estimate, the client’s plan of action had a net present discounted value of negative one billion dollars. Even after accounting for some degree of error in my reckoning, I could still be sure that theirs was a losing proposition. But the client did not want analysis that contradicted their own, and my manager told me plainly that it was not our place to question what the client wanted."

1: http://www.mergersandinquisitions.com/investment-banking-fai...

2: http://tech.mit.edu/V130/N18/dubai.html

Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation

#259

Post by strlen »

tptacek wrote: post #86
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…

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.

I like to call this outcome a "non-answer answer". Very common in the corporate world.

Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation

#260

Post by jfc »

joshma wrote: post #210
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…

From what I see, it was an investigation into gender-based discrimination/harassment claims, and the result of the investigation was that, well, no evidence of gender-based discrimination was found. Does that not provide very useful information to the reader? It would be irresponsible for the report to claim that no harassment of any form exists at GitHub, and irresponsible of us to accuse (or "wonder", which is just…

I didn't take offense to your comment.

My primary point was that we can't assume things that the memo doesn't say. From your comment:

> "From what I see, it was an investigation into gender-based discrimination/harassment claims"

I think you are making some assumptions, and my guess is that whoever wrote the GitHub statement wanted you to come to that exact conclusion.

This is why they kept repeating the phrase "gender-based"--they want the reader to focus on the gender claims and then GitHub can try to render those claims invalid with their investigation results.

In fact, the precise scope of the investigation was not provided in the statement--we don't know what they investigated. There are many possibilities, including the one you suggested. Another is that they might have looked into a range of issues, found a few problems, and then decided to focus their public statements on the gender-based claims because they knew they could win those.

Mostly, I'm saying that this GitHub post doesn't tell us much (not saying it should, just saying it doesn't).

Post reply on HN