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Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit

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Re: Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit

#641

Post by acjohnson55 »

einhverfr wrote: post #510
logicchains wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really surprises me that somebody can get away with such destructive behaviour as reverting someone else's commits without reasonable cause. What justification is there for not firing on the spot anybody who puts their own personal vendettas over the good of the project?

> It really surprises me that somebody can get away with such destructive behaviour as reverting someone else's commits without reasonable cause. What justification is there for not firing on the spot anybody who puts their own personal vendettas over the good of the project? And yet it happens everywhere. The question is what narratives can be told about it more than what actually happened.

I've never been anywhere where this sort of behavior happened. If management can't nip things like that in the bud, they aren't doing their jobs.

Re: Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit

#642

Post by Dylan16807 »

jsmthrowaway wrote: post #320
Dylan16807 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please, just delete this comment. Yeah oh my god that sentence could be interpreted wrong. We don't need a tangent about it. The real meaning has absolutely nothing to do with subordination. It's a simple matter of keeping your friends/relatives/partners out of your job. They don't work there, they shouldn't be interfering. Also, shame on anyone that upvotes such a derail just because they agree with the words.

Considering the context, I think it is perfectly reasonable to lament the choice of wording and no, I will not be deleting my comment because you don't like it. It has a rather higher score than I anticipated, so I didn't react to that wording in a vacuum, now did I? For someone who hates tangents you're sure good at them.

Sometimes people complain about comments getting downvoted out of disagreement, even though they contribute to the discussion. But I am far more bothered by the inverse problem: comments that get upvoted out of shallow agreement even though they serve no purpose, focusing on some negligibly relevant detail in a haughty way. These comments make it harder to participate in the conversation for fear of people latching on to completely irrelevant details and drowning out the message.

In short: Upvotes correlate with good comments, but they also correlate with certain types of poisonous comment.

As to continuing tangents, I would have been quite happy to see both of our comments dug into invisible gray together. But even if that fails I'm happy to provide a bright warning against being reactionary, and to hope that any wasted space is meta at worst.

Re: Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit

#643

Post by a3n »

yeukhon wrote: post #183

There seems to be several problems. Not entirely sexism. 1. Founder's wife asked Horvath out and gave her a lecture about who is the boss. Probably out of jealousy. 2. Founder's wife physically inanimate Horvath, making her unwelcome and scared. 3. Founder did not stop the wife and protect his wife. 4. Horvath was approached by a male co-worker and according to her her rejection had caused tension between her and tha…

> The founder accused Horvath for bringing love affair into the company because she was/is dating an employee. The founder has a good point: try to avoid dating someone working with you. It's a beautiful story; but you can cause all sorts of mess.

That's between the two people. Period. If they become problem employees, then they are problem employees, not two people who date. The problem behavior that happens on the clock is HR's only legitimate concern.

Prohibiting dating is like firing women who get pregnant.

Counter example, where I work there are so many married or dating couples within the company that it's almost a thing.

Re: Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit

#644

Post by Eliezer »

Ooh! The media! We're supposed to blindly trust their reporting even though they get wrong everything we know about personally, right?

Clarification from Julie Ann Horvath describing everything TechCrunch misrepresented in 3... 2... 1...

(The real situation may be better or worse. TechCrunch may have left out info that helps or damns GitHub. But you're naive if you think a journalist would report on a story like this accurately.)

Re: Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit

#645

Post by cunac »

buro9 wrote: post #443
Pacabel wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why was it so critical to spell it "dialog", rather than "dialogue", as the higher-ups in the project apparently preferred?

It wasn't, there was no business justification for it at all. He just invented a rule "all names and variables must be in UK English".

did you know about rule before start writing piece of code in question ? If yes, I really don't see how you can say in good faith that it wasn't your mistake to be fixed.

Re: Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit

#646

Post by ebfe »

gruntmaster9000 wrote: post #617
ebfe wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love this line of reasoning. X isn't perfectly Y, so let's get rid of it in favor of something that's even farther from Y!

It’s not “get rid of meritocracy” but rather “recognize that it isn’t really meritocracy and it’s preserving problems”.

"X isn't perfectly Y, so let's stop working towards it in favor of working towards something that's even farther from Y!" is equally absurd.

Re: Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit

#647

Post by a3n »

shadowmint wrote: post #371
sgentle wrote: post #235

Ouch. What a terrible situation. I'm holding out for the other side of the story, but unless you're willing to assume the entire thing is invented this is a major fuckup for GitHub. I think this is a classic problem with companies making the transition from small startup to regular business. Break down the barriers! Flat management! Kill bureaucracy and embrace no-politics DIY organisation! The article reads like an…

I've always been broadly under the impression that the HR department was a waste of air, but I suppose conflict resolution is perhaps something they'd be useful for. ...maybe.

Past a certain size, it's nice to have an HR professional managing the company's treatment of its employees. It's also nice to have a third party/person available for conflict management.

Re: Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit

#648

Post by acjohnson55 »

einhverfr wrote: post #504
psykotic wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean, someone reverting your code because of a personal vendetta? I laughed out loud when I read this and several other specific details in the story. It sounded very familiar. I have several friends and many acquaintances who work at Valve. One very senior engineer initially worked on Source 2 about three years ago but had to quickly switch projects because another, more tenured engineer was expressing his disag…

> The founder's wife story also reminds me of episodes I've heard involving the wife cabal. It's nothing as sinister as the GitHub story, but I see a lot of the same structural issues reflected in these telling anecdotes. If you are male and a founder, one of your most valuable business resources is your wife. People will call me sexist for saying this, I expect, but women think socially with a level of complexity th…

Getting outside counsel on your business decisions is one thing, but either dispatching an outsider to internal business affairs as your hatchetperson or having them take it upon themselves to do so is not good business. As seen in Exhibit A, the original article.

Re: Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit

#649

Post by philwelch »

moron4hire wrote: post #579
parennoob wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The hula hooping moment was important because it visibly demonstrated her male coworkers lack of respect for women as people. They were unabashedly staring at their female coworkers as "eyecandy" in that moment and even defended their doing so. Totally disagree. If someone is hula hooping in a company that usually builds software to host version control repositories, they are doing something quite out of the ordina…

Your only source on this story is Horvath's recounting of it, and she says it was inappropriate. By what means do we have to question her assessment of the events? In questioning her, with no other information, you're saying "I don't believe you, you've irrationally overreacted". And that can only based not on the facts of the situation, but on your personal opinions of what "women" in aggregate are like. In other wo…

When someone tells a story and there's a gap between the events they relate to you and the conclusion they draw from it, it's natural to criticize their conclusions.

Re: Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit

#650

Post by acjohnson55 »

tomp wrote: post #608
gphilip wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Imagine that black person says: "I am proud to be black!". >Now imagine that the white person says "I am proud to be white". >Now throw away you knee-jercky reaction and think about it. I thought about it, and here's what I found: The different reactions which those two assertions may elicit depend crucially on different shades of meaning of the word "proud" which come into play, depending on the colour of the perso…

But that's exactly what the parent was saying - if you perceive the meaning of the words slightly differently based on the skin color of the speaker, it's textbook racism. Some people might call it positive racism/discrimination, but it's still racism.

(in reply to gphillip)

There's a whole bunch of literature on the topic beyond what's contained in a dictionary definition.

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