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Results of the GitHub Investigation

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Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation

#92
Best of luck to everyone involved. Before casting judgement, please remember that everybody makes mistakes. The process of healing involves accepting this reality and recognizing everybody's humanity.

In light of this, I would personally be honored to work with someone of Tom Preston-Werner's caliber.

I hope he & his wife learn from this experience & grow as people.

Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation

#94
post #66

It sounds like Mrs. Preston-Werner was a regular presence at the GitHub office and, according to Horvath, had extensive access to private information throughout GitHub's systems despite the fact that she wasn't an employee. If true, that should certainly be a privacy and security concern to any GitHub customer or user.

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.

Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation

#95
post #26

> The investigation found no evidence to support the claims [...] of a sexist or hostile work environment. So, are they saying that Horvath was lying? I mean, there was a lot of specific stuff she mentioned that seemed inappropriate. I don't want to get into whether the behavior was "sexist" or not, but I think we can all agree that if what she said was true, the work environment was hostile and unprofessional.

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?

Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation

#96

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.

Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation

#97

It sounds like Mrs. Preston-Werner was a regular presence at the GitHub office and, according to Horvath, had extensive access to private information throughout GitHub's systems despite the fact that she wasn't an employee. If true, that should certainly be a privacy and security concern to any GitHub customer or user.

I was hoping Github would address this. But the whole post is about HR issues and having an inclusive work environment.

There was never much chance that they were going to be completely open about their findings. It would only made an eventual lawsuit against them more likely to succeed, while likely not doing anything to make people feel better about what happened. The removal of TPW is a pretty huge move either way.

Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation

#98
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation

#99

It sounds like Mrs. Preston-Werner was a regular presence at the GitHub office and, according to Horvath, had extensive access to private information throughout GitHub's systems despite the fact that she wasn't an employee. If true, that should certainly be a privacy and security concern to any GitHub customer or user.

I thought the allegation was she had access to internal chat, not customer data.

Access to internal chat may have given her access to much of GitHub through HuBot. https://hubot.github.com/

Re: Results of the GitHub Investigation

#100
post #72

This statement is pretty terrible. The line "sexual or gender-based harassment" looks like it's been specifically written to exclude other kinds of harassment, especially given that term is used multiple times. Employee harassment of any kind is unacceptable and if they're not willing to admit that it's a problem and act as if it's something that should be brushed under the carpet then it will continue to be a proble…

Those were a big part of the accusations, though.
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