Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
obvious that it's z holman.
Based on what evidence?
Results of the GitHub Investigation
391–400 of 514 posts
Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anonymous allegations are worthless unless other Githubbers can confirm this.
Why? You'd still have the same sense of doubt as to whether or not the non-anonymous person is telling the truth. The only extra information you'd have is a) you'd know it was coming from another GitHubber who could conceivably know these details, and b) if you know the person, you can weigh the words against his/her reputation and past action. Not saying those two things aren't useful, but I would certainly not char…
> Why? You'd still have the same sense of doubt as to whether or not the non-anonymous person is telling the truth.
The senses of doubt will only be ~the same if your prior for the probability of "someone out of ~200 github employees would lie about this and attach their name to it" is about the same as your prior for "someone out of the other ~3,000,000,000 people on the internet would pretend to be a github employee and make this up".
The larger someone's prior is for the latter relative to the former, the more worthless an anonymous blogpost is to them.
Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Surely other women work there. Time will tell here, won't it? The story is dramatically more powerful if other women come forward. I don't know that it lessens things if others do not but it does create some interesting questions to those brave enough to ask them.
> The story is dramatically more powerful if other women come forward.
This is dangerous logic. The court of public opinion is a feedback loop. If an unconfirmed accusation gets no traction then the most hardcore wrongdoers will escape justice because everyone is too afraid to come forward. At the same time, if a confirmed accusation goes unquestioned then someone who has made a false or exaggerated accusation has a huge incentive to cajole friends into making confirmations that are also false or exaggerated, and the more false accusations are made the easier it is for the original accuser (or the likes of Nancy Grace) to convince others to make further false accusations.
That's why these issues are so contentious. Getting to the real truth is practically impossible because people form an opinion first and then produce evidence that comports with it, and that misleading evidence influences the opinions of others who do the same thing until the truth and the story have no relation to each other.
It's an issue where you have to choose between punishing a lot of innocent people (and increasing the power and thereby occurrence of false accusations) or allowing a lot of guilty people to escape punishment. There isn't a good answer, and that makes people angry -- especially if you're one of the innocent people who was punished or one of the victims of the guilty people who weren't.
Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation
#394Think this might make those "Fork me on GitHub" badges a little less popular? I sincerely hope so.
Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Can you show me a work environment that is not hostile to anyone? Every work environment has hostilities. The only way they each differ is in who is the recipient of the hostilities, the degree of hostility present and if that hostility is illegal or not. In that sense, the statement "We don't have a provably illegal hostile work environment" means exactly nothing, making Github no different than all the other workpl…
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Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation
#396Earlier 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.
The best talent would rather work on interesting problems and products. The fact that there may be some wrongdoing happening in some far corner of the company that is almost personal between the parties involved should be so down the list of reasons to work at a company.
The answers to these questions are still true today:
* does github make a great product? yes. * does their product make software development and open-source better? yes * are there interesting problems to work on there? yes. * would I be working with very talented people there? yes. * based on what we know as facts or admitted to as facts, would taking a job at github subject me or people I care about to these injustices? AFAICT that's no more likely than at any other company comparable to github in terms of the benefits of working there. Anyone working at github is there at will. If they feel wronged, they can leave, which means I don't have to worry about people I care about being wronged.
The only way my mind would change on this is if I see a voluntary exodus of talent from github over what happened. Absent talent leaving in the current hiring market, we can only come to the conclusion that these wrongdoings were isolated and personal.
Let's keep an eye out for who has left since March 15th, 2014 or so and leaves over the next 3 months. Of that cohort, discount TPW, JAH and anyone who leaves to join TPW's new venture. With the remaining figures, then check if that churn rate for github is any higher than it would have been had this event never happened. If it is not, then this whole issue is pretty much irrelevant.
Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's not go there. Incorporating random anonymous posts will only make things worse. For all we know Julie-Ann started dating someone close to Theresa Preston-Werner who shared that he, and several others, slept with her and could even be the father of Tom's child and then refused to distance himself from Theresa. When she shared this sad state of affairs in her private love life with some colleagues she was suddenl…
Is a source any more reputable just because it's not anonymous?
Yes.
A named or pseudonymous source necessarily has an associated reputation, but an anonymous source has no reputation at all.
Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's not go there. Incorporating random anonymous posts will only make things worse. For all we know Julie-Ann started dating someone close to Theresa Preston-Werner who shared that he, and several others, slept with her and could even be the father of Tom's child and then refused to distance himself from Theresa. When she shared this sad state of affairs in her private love life with some colleagues she was suddenl…
Is a source any more reputable just because it's not anonymous?
Maybe not by definition, but it's almost irrelevant because a not anonymous source is so much easier to verify / disprove. Sure, in theory an anonymous source could be 100% accurate, but since they are very tricky to back up, they almost always have the effect of stirring the pot without resolving anything, and thus quite often appear as nothing more than attempts to do just that. And after a while, people unsurprisingly start to treat them as such.
Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's not go there. Incorporating random anonymous posts will only make things worse. For all we know Julie-Ann started dating someone close to Theresa Preston-Werner who shared that he, and several others, slept with her and could even be the father of Tom's child and then refused to distance himself from Theresa. When she shared this sad state of affairs in her private love life with some colleagues she was suddenl…
Is a source any more reputable just because it's not anonymous?
Well, certainly it's significantly more credible if it's an actual Github employee putting their name on it and standing behind that sort of statement. At least in that case you would hope that the possible repercussions of making such a bold lie would prevent most people from lying about something like that.
Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation
#4003 recent tweets from the wife that indicate that she might be batshit crazy: TheresaPrestonWerner @tpdubs2 Apr 10 Best meal I've ever had. @ The Meatball Shop http://instagram.com/p/moWCO4njNA/ TheresaPrestonWerner @tpdubs2 Apr 10 Building out a team and getting to work with insanely great people makes me the happiest founder ever. TheresaPrestonWerner @tpdubs2 Mar 27 First time in 2 weeks that I feel like I'm not…
> people who express themselves with such extreme language, usually are batshit crazy Quick question: Would you consider "batshit crazy" extreme language?
Best, ever, happiest founder ever, changing the WORLD