Results of the GitHub Investigation

https://github.com/blog/1823-results-of-the-github-investigation

by danielsju6 • 12 years ago

739 469 12 years ago

gregimba• 12 years ago

I don't even know what to make of this. They say there was no evidence but he is still resigning.

awda• 12 years ago

They say there was no evidence of gender-based harassment, but I don't see them claiming "there was no evidence of harassment" either. Don't know enough to pass judgement.

steveklabnik2• 12 years ago

It says there's no evidence of gender-based $BAD_THING, but not that no $BAD_THINGs happened.

One could argue that allowing a non-employee so much access to a private company is an 'error of judgement.' (Referring to Horvath's comments about Tom's wife)

ljklnfds• 12 years ago

Dude's probably incredibly rich, he can spend the rest of his life on a beach. Why bother dragging through this? Just go buy a boat or something.

egwor2• 12 years ago

boat's keep a man poor. Get a caravan ;-)

SpikeGronim• 12 years ago

They say no evidence of illegality, but there is evidence of poor judgement. Without commenting on the specifics of this incident that's a valid reason to fire a CEO/co-founder/exec. I have no particular knowledge of what happened but if GitHub thinks he showed poor judgement then it is reasonable to ask him to resign.

asuffield• 12 years ago

For example, if you didn't actually do anything legally wrong, but made it look an awful lot like you did by screwing up and being a dick about it, and you're a company executive, then you can resign or get fired.

I suspect that this is not a million miles from what happened here: not actual discrimination, but enough of a blunder to look like it.

falcolas3• 12 years ago

No _legal_ wrongdoing.

This reads to me as "Tom royally fucked up, but not enough to break any laws."

egwor2• 12 years ago

well, even if he did nothing wrong his position was probably untenable. He'll have lost his credibility and more will be said about this incident than any other. i.e. anything else gitbhub would do/release, would most probably be clouded by this incident Irrespective of which scenario occurred, he made the most appropriate, and honourable decision.

ddebernardy2• 12 years ago

The post is PR-speak for:

"We found lots of ugly stuff but would rather not mention any of it in public, so move along, nothing to see"

Mtinie• 12 years ago

Is the expectation that the public should be privy to that ugly stuff?

(Asking because I'm curious of other's opinions on the matter, not because I'm questioning your statement)

ephemeralgomi• 12 years ago

"the investigator did find evidence of mistakes and errors of judgment."

rmrfrmrf• 12 years ago

They're trying to discourage employees and ex-employees from filing a class action lawsuit.

danielweber6• 12 years ago

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 harassed -- but the board can ask the CEO to move on because they feel he was not sufficiently protecting the company.

(PS: Post-college I've never worked at a place large enough to have required a harassment training course. This is just an example of "something the CEO should have done to protect the company but didn't, and we got away with it this time but might not next time.")

mahyarm• 12 years ago

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.

antidaily• 12 years ago

It's a distraction.

weixiyen3• 12 years ago

Only if it was true or partially true. If it was completely off-base and false, they'd be going after the person making the allegations like there was no tomorrow.

rsynnott• 12 years ago

No evidence of legal wrongdoing, which is a pretty high bar. Many companies will expect better of their president than "did not actually act illegally".

danielbraun• 12 years ago

This is scary. I was just checking out Jekyll and stumbled upon his blog. Then I came here and saw this.

ch4s32• 12 years ago

>the investigator did find evidence of mistakes and errors of judgment

Isn't that like saying, well the hard proof isn't there but its clear you did do something wrong?

vezzy-fnord• 12 years ago

Which is an important distinction to make, especially considering the original allegations were specific.

ch4s32• 12 years ago

I get the distinction, but I guess I'm just skeptical about the attempt at face saving here.

fragmede• 12 years ago

http://www.theverge.com/2014/3/19/5526574/github-sexism-scan... for a bit of backstory.

chrismonsanto3• 12 years ago

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.

falcolas3• 12 years ago

Note that the denial is couched in the terminology "there was no legal wrongdoing". Not that there was no wrongdoing, just nothing blatant enough (or which left evidence) that it broke laws.

tptacek3• 12 years ago

No, the denial says "no evidence exists to support the claim". That's a direct and testable assertion, not weasel words.

canadaj• 12 years ago

Maybe this hostile and unprofessional environment are the "mistakes and errors" from the article. I was curious about this, myself.

nymph4• 12 years ago

There was a lot of specific stuff she mentioned that seemed inappropriate.

Such as?

baby• 12 years ago

I was wondering as well since this is the first time that I learn about the issue: http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/15/julie-ann-horvath-describes...

nymph4• 12 years ago

Downvoters: Would you mind explaining yourselves? It was a perfectly reasonable question to ask.

unfunco• 12 years ago

They are definitely not saying Horvath was lying, they are saying they found no evidence of a sexist or hostile work environment - the investigation was lead by a third party, and best behaviour would have been in place at and before the moment they arrived following the claims, it's likely that many, if not most of the company hadn't experienced the same treatment that Horvath allegedly received, and they would have explained that to the investigators.

danso4• 12 years ago

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 kind of interested in what happened to that engineer.

edit:

FYI: her detailed complaint to TechCrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/15/julie-ann-horvath-describes...

re: The co-worker who couldn't handle being rejected by her:

The rejection of the other employee led to something of an internal battle at GitHub. According to Horvath, the engineer, “hurt from my rejection, started passive-aggressively ripping out my code from projects we had worked on together without so much as a ping or a comment. I even had to have a few of his commits reverted. I would work on something, go to bed, and wake up to find my work gone without any explanation.” The employee in question, according to Horvath, is both “well-liked at GitHub” and “popular in the community.”

His “behavior towards female employees,” according to Horvath, “especially those he sees as opportunities is disgusting.”

And there was one more incident that would purportedly fall under sexism:

Two women, one of whom I work with and adore, and a friend of hers were hula hooping to some music. I didn’t have a problem with this. What I did have a problem with is the line of men sitting on one bench facing the hoopers and gawking at them. It looked like something out of a strip club. When I brought this up to male coworkers, they didn’t see a problem with it. But for me it felt unsafe and to be honest, really embarrassing. That was the moment I decided to finally leave GitHub.

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.

The second thing, about hula-hooping, without context, it doesn't really mean anything beyond what Horvath claims she was able to grok just by stumbling upon the scene. I think during the original HN discussion, a Githubber said that the hula-hooping happened during an in-office party. Either way, hula-hooping and watching said-hula-hooping is hard to claim, on its face, as being gender-discrimination.

The other stuff though, about the co-founder unfairly pressuring her partner to resign, and the co-founder's wife claiming to have access to Github employees' private data...Those could be things that the company frowns upon enough to merit a resignation.

courtneypowell• 12 years ago

How is a woman who refuses to date another employee considered an "office-romance?" Retaliation as a result of unwanted advances is considered harassment.

sexual harassment definition: http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/sexual_harassment.cfm

comrh2• 12 years ago

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?

hackaflocka7• 12 years ago

If those women felt safe enough to be hula-hooping in front of these heterosexual men, then why was Horvath feeling so unsafe?

bertil• 12 years ago

The key word in there would be “evidence”: take the example of “oogling” female employees hulla-ooping. You can prove that they did hulla-oop, but not that the way others watched them was sexist.

Proof is a huge issue with sexism in general: anecdotal, or separate cases for discrimination; expression of consent when it comes to rape, etc. I wished organisation handling such issues focused on provability in court, rather than awareness.

personZ2• 12 years ago

So, are they saying that Horvath was lying?

Neither party has to be lying. She might honestly believe she was treated in a specific way because of her sex, while others may have treated her in a specific way because of, for instance, her competence. Both may be 100% honest in their assessment of the relationship, yet be completely at odds.

The workplace absolutely sounded unprofessional, which often means the entire gradient of behaviour from welcoming to hostile (versus the normal corporate realm of gray areas in between). Indeed, unprofessional workplaces are generally celebrated in the tech community, often for good reason.

chrismonsanto3• 12 years ago

She might honestly believe she was treated in a specific way because of her sex

Yes, but the investigation said there was no evidence for a hostile work environment. That's a claim above and beyond sexism: it's quantifying over all of the various ways a work environment could be hostile (of which sexism is one way). If what Horvath says about Preston's wife is true, then that sounds like a hostile work environment to me, regardless of whether the treatment was due to her sex.

pdonis3• 12 years ago

unprofessional workplaces are generally celebrated in the tech community, often for good reason

Why for good reason? Do you have any specific examples in mind?

jmelloy• 12 years ago

They're saying that the investigative team brought in to determine if there was anything they could be sued over found no evidence/email trail for the specific things that they could get sued over.

"We didn't find an email trail that could lead to a lawsuit, and the co-founder in question immediately resigned" is a very far cry from "Everything she said was a lie."

PeterisP• 12 years ago

A comment by her colleagues here https://medium.com/p/d96f431f4e8e might be relevant to this.

calcsam• 12 years ago

And this is why you need strong/clear HR policies.

sneak2• 12 years ago

Sure, at their size now. Not before, as policy beyond "use good judgement" at a small company is basically pointless.

Your first dozen hires must all be good enough to write such policies...

drgath2• 12 years ago

FWIW, Github hasn't been a "small company" for quite some time. github.com/about/team says they are currently at 237 employees.

Agathos• 12 years ago

"Don't give non-employees admin privileges on your system" doesn't really sound like an HR policy. It would have been a good policy, though.

cjbprime• 12 years ago

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 more than the investigation does.

mef• 12 years ago

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

voidlogic• 12 years ago

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 her charity, but she didn't see it, she saw friends.

I think this is a good lesson to us all about not only making clear HR polices, but also always giving intentional consideration to how those around us see what we say and do. A kind of intellectual empathy.

throwaway1991• 12 years ago

Theresa is full of it. I have no idea what happened at Github but she's been telling people in New York she started Omakase because she's "angry with the tech industry." With that kind of attitude it's no surprise Github employees felt pressured into volunteering for her. She has admitted that she's not just someone excited about her new venture, she is beginning conversations with the idea that she knows what's best for the other person and that's working for her/contributing to her charity.

Not to mention that it seems like the tech industry has done a lot for her family's life so it seems strange and ungrateful to respond with anger that other people in positions of less influence than her family has, are not doing enough for the world in some vague sense.

Not to mention the massive hypocrisy that she is raising money from institutional investors as donors to cover operations costs for her non-profit which is ultimately a shakedown on salaried employees. There are things I agree with Theresa about, but asking the ultra-rich for money to support her venture to pressure regular people to give more to charity is nuts.

DannyBee3• 12 years ago

So, remember that what Julie says about them not contacting her is itself, and allegation.

Her picture proves nothing, after all.

Your conclusion about "how much stock to place" does not follow, since this allegation has not been proven true.

Having been involved in this sort of thing before, both on the "asked to investigate" and "asked to play witness for an employee side", i'd say the truth always lies somewhere in between, and both employers and employees tend to behave badly.

weixiyen3• 12 years ago

So how much stock we can expect to put into such investigations?

Tloewald3• 12 years ago

the truth always lies somewhere in between

In my experience, the truth usually lies very strongly to one side of the spectrum, and sometimes beyond an extreme (as reasonable people often bend over backwards in giving their version of events, while unreasonable people do not), but you'll never find out for sure.

E.g. in the Techcrunch piece Horvath says that the founder's wife spoke of having spies, and influencing HR decisions, and so on. I can easily imagine the conversation taking place over drinks, and it could be horribly sinister or it could be someone's not-very-well-judged attempt at humor. But this doesn't mean that "the truth is in-between".

calibraxis2• 12 years ago

You demand a higher standard of evidence than you yourself meet. Especially when you say "always", with zero evidence or plausibility. (And in fact, it's a standard of evidence HN rarely meets, on any subject.) The other poster was ironically much more careful.

x0x0• 12 years ago

Nonsense. Her picture probably opens her up to suit, where she lying about the company. At the bare minimum, any lawyer would tell her to not post demonstrable lies about the company, for many reasons. Not least of which is regardless of the whole truth, in any lawsuit (filed by her, or github, or Tom, or Tom's wife, or other parties), opposition counsel will attempt to discredit your whole testimony by finding small lies and tainting you in the eyes of the jury.

mmanfrin• 12 years ago

    while there may have been no legal wrongdoing, the investigator did find evidence of 
    mistakes and errors of judgment

'found them blameless'?

hntaway2• 12 years ago

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.

TodPunk• 12 years ago

This is probably the most relevant article of the 6 or so I've read in the comments. It shows both sides as human and lacking good social management constructs for the situation.

Reading several weeks of Horvath's twitter feed and several articles where she's quoted, it's apparent to me that regardless of what happened at Github, she is a bitter and dramatic individual. That's NOT the kind of person that backs down to the adult-talk at the table.

Again, I don't know what happened at github, and I honestly don't care. What I do know is that I would never hire Horvath regardless of what she could do for the company. Far too much risk, and exemplified with a terribly immature response even if everything she says is true.

stefantalpalaru• 12 years ago

Those details completely change the story. Why not make them public when the scandal erupted instead of a month afterwards? Now that the subject is dead and buried there will probably be no journalistic investigation.

leccine9• 12 years ago

Wow, this actually makes the rest of the story more clear.

bitlord_2197• 12 years ago

It's telling that nobody would attach their name to the article. Horvath's already publicly laughed it off.

hntaway1• 12 years ago

obvious that it's z holman.

sseveran• 12 years ago

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

neilk4• 12 years ago

Anonymous allegations are worthless unless other Githubbers can confirm this.

LordHumungous• 12 years ago

Sounds plausible, but without a name to back it up it is nothing but hearsay.

michaelt3• 12 years ago

Hiring outsiders to investigate your management team for wrongdoing is like hiring outsiders to evaluate your environmental performance or to make recommendations on executive pay - possibly useful if you genuinely want to act on their findings, but equally often used to add a sheen of 'independent' legitimacy to whatever result you want.

Outsiders know what answer you want, and know it's unprofitable to have a reputation for biting the hand that feeds them.

To take a british example, back in 2006 the news of the world hired harbottle & lewis to do an internal investigation of phone hacking. Guess what, they didn't find anything.

Edit: Clarified that if the person paying for the investigation doesn't have a conflict of interest or plans to act on the recommendations, independent (or even non-independent) investigations can produce results.

leccine9• 12 years ago

Or hiring an outsider to perform a security audit. It never works. Right.

yuhong• 12 years ago

I wonder if Tom know this.

Nelson692• 12 years ago

More weirdness than the whole entire thing?

I don't think you can read much in to anything here, GH painted themselves in to a corner and either had to deny the allegations or their seriousness or someone had to get punished.

If she reported something to HR and it backfired, I think she should sue them, I really don't care about the co-founder's wife lurking around too much or who was friends with whom or who was sleeping with whom. That's pretty serious to me, so sue them.

nakedrobot2• 12 years ago

I doubt they are publishing the real story, there. What is a fact is that Mr. Preston-Werner is resigning. From there, we may only speculate.

If I may speculate, I'd guess that there was some truth to the story told by "the other side", that there was some kind of harassment on the part of this man's wife (who was not employed there). That is all I can really guess. And the only real way to publicly resolve this would be for this man to resign - while he perhaps didn't personally do anything wrong, maybe his wife did, so he was in a sense the fall guy for that.

Randgalt• 12 years ago

Irrationality is sweeping the Tech world. I shudder to think where this will end.

caiob• 12 years ago

Are we still on this?

brandon2723• 12 years ago

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.

jemeshsu• 12 years ago

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

jamesaguilar2• 12 years ago

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.

awnird• 12 years ago

This is incredibly troubling. How can anyone trust GitHub, knowing that non-employees regularly had access to private information?

brandon2723• 12 years ago

Well, we don't know that. It's an allegation by one person which hasn't been confirmed as being true by GitHub. And presumably after this incident, if it is true, they'll have better security policies going forward.

onotarti• 12 years ago

In my experience it is pretty common for people who bring work home with them not to be super-meticulous about preventing access to the content of the work by their families. How many people do you know who sound-proof their home office so their wife can't eavesdrop on their business calls?

mindslight2• 12 years ago

Why does anyone trust _______, knowing that employees regularly have access to your private information?

nfoz• 12 years ago

How can you "trust" GitHub knowing that employees regularly have access to private information?

GauntletWizard• 12 years ago

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 looked it up; California, too, is a community property state. Theresa was absolutely an effective board member.

theorique7• 12 years ago

This is incredibly troubling. How can anyone trust ${CLOUD_OR_HOSTING_COMPANY}, knowing that ${PERSONS_OR_SOFTWARE} regularly had access to private information?

Be paranoid. Encrypt it if you don't want people to snoop.

debt• 12 years ago

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.

TazeTSchnitzel• 12 years ago

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

carlosdp• 12 years ago

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

bryanlarsen2• 12 years ago

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

kybernetyk2• 12 years ago

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 a perfect world and if a wife of an employee can browse through customer data than why shouldn't this be true for the guy who gave GH a few million dollars?

mhd• 12 years ago

Wouldn't that rule out any corporation, too? Not much difference between VCs and large shareholders.

atmosx• 12 years ago

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.

codeka• 12 years ago

She apparently had access to employee data, not customer data. In my experience, businesses will often play a little fast-and-loose with employee data - far more so than customer data.

Though I agree it presents a bad image of GitHub's access control in general.

Ryel• 12 years ago

To me it sounds more like...

We dont have enough evidence to take legal action in this case, but our investigation found out something worse so we would like Tom to resign before it comes out publicly.

gdonelli2• 12 years ago

It feels unconvincing, and unapologetic.

ggreer• 12 years ago

I can't think of much else they could reasonably do in response to these allegations. Tom was a founder, President, and former CEO of GitHub. They effectively fired him. They apologized profusely and laid out specific ways in which they're trying to fix the problem. They hired a new HR head. They're starting to train and educate employees.

What else would you have GitHub do?

gdonelli2• 12 years ago

Agreed. everything is right rationally, in fact I said it "feels". It feels cold. It lacks human touch, in my opinion of course.

facepalm4• 12 years ago

Why should they have to be apologetic?

EC1• 12 years ago

They owe you nothing, especially a detailed series of events. He's resigning, they posted a note, the situation is over. What more do you want?

Horvath essentially ruined this mans life through e-mobbing.

Just look @ her tweets: http://recode.net/2014/04/21/julie-ann-horvath-on-github-inv...

chuhnk• 12 years ago

This has to be an incredibly difficult moment in Tom Preston-Werner's life. Regardless of what may have happened. To build a company from the ground up and then have to walk away from it. I'm sure we all remember GitHub during its infancy and the enthusiasm with which founders worked on it. A hugely successful bootstrapped company.

kategleason2• 12 years ago

exactly, this is really tragic.

joevandyk• 12 years ago

Tom Preston-Werner's response: http://tom.preston-werner.com/2014/04/21/farewell-github-hel...

pistle• 12 years ago

It would be nice to not see the harassment word prefaced with "gender-based." This parsing, by Tom, without fuller disclosure of what mistakes were made leads to the conclusion that there was some form of harassment, but that it wasn't put forth in a manner which legally falls into "gender-based," which would make github and Tom (& family) liable for those actions.

I still want to see the dramatization where the guy coder comes in professing his love, gets spurned, then spitefully removes code.

Terms like hostile, gender-based, and discrimination all have pretty specific requirements for proof.

At least HN an move forward unhappily and pull out the "tragic" word describe everything. I'm not sure we all experienced catharsis, but "tragic" will have to do.

samstave2• 12 years ago

I have a question/observation that may be offensive, and it is not meant to be - so pardon my ignorance if this is a misguided perception:

When this story first ran and I was reading JA Horvaths tweets in the surrounding days - and reading whatever other articles related to this story were - I got the impression that she didn't necessarily seem like the most easy-going-innocent victim, and I wondered; what if she was actually a difficult to work-with person?

This is in no way a defense of any actions of any party, it was just a perception of the language, tone and content of the messages that Mrs. Horvath used gave me the perception that she wouldn't be the most desirable co-worker....

Now, I have nothing to substantiate such an opinion other than the tweets and stories I read just left me with this impression....

So, could it be that while her allegations are true, she is also a participant in the situation whereby she could have been acting poorly/using poor judgement?

Finally, I recognize that the actions of the wife of the founder are the most insidious, and a clear cause of concern, assuming they are in fact true...

jacalata3• 12 years ago

It certainly could be, but in general what she's accusing them of would be wrong regardless of what a terrible person she could be. If someone is a bad employee/co-worker you can fire them, but you can't bully/harass them out of the place.

samstave2• 12 years ago

True. The weirdest accusation is that toward the wife... That just sounds.... strange.

cheez• 12 years ago

It doesn't really matter what actually happened. The well has been poisoned so just fire someone and get it over with.

Now Github can get back to business.

ExpiredLink• 12 years ago

It doesn't really matter what actually happened.

That's the annoying part of the story.

thepumpkin1979• 12 years ago

http://tom.preston-werner.com/2014/04/21/farewell-github-hel...

kategleason2• 12 years ago

:( this sucks. Github would not even exist without Tom Preston-Werner and I am really scared to see how it will exist without him. Tragic for all his users.

pyre• 12 years ago

I am really scared to see how it will exist without him

Isn't that a little bit extreme? Do all the good things that happen at Github stem directly from Tom Preston-Werner?

I can't claim intimate knowledge of Github the company, but I somehow doubt that this is a "Steve Jobs" type situation.

Maxford_Maxford• 12 years ago

Come to think, I somehow doubt Steve Jobs was a "Steve Jobs" type situation.

vpv• 12 years ago

So, guy who wrote GitHub and a ton of open source stuff is ousted from his own company and sacrificed for a person whos biggest accomplishment in open source is JavaScript for Cats? https://github.com/nrrrdcore/javascript-for-cats

sergiotapia3• 12 years ago

What an embarrassment if you ask me. Why should he leave if he's been found of no legal wrong-doing by a third party? These tumblr-twats warriors only break communities.

dragonwriter4• 12 years ago

What an embarrassment if you ask me. Why should he leave if he's been found of no legal wrong-doing by a third party?

Because you can do your job badly and be unsuitable to continue in it by exhibiting poor judgement without breaking the law.

bitlord_2197• 12 years ago

Why do you consider this relevant?

cpncrunch6• 12 years ago

It would appear to be relevant because she describes herself as an engineer, and because she thought the reverts of her code and bad performance reviews were due to sexism.

nailer10• 12 years ago

She didn't write JS for Cats. Which is excellent, BTW.

Allan_Smithee• 12 years ago

The guy who wrote Github is responsible for some of the worst coding atrocities in a major piece of F/OSS. (Evidence: the Linguist debacle.)

JS for Cats is, in comparison to Linguist, a work of towering intellect.

rurounijones2• 12 years ago

More info? I have never heard of anything bad about Linguist (And I don't know that much about it.).

Googling didnt bring up anything obvious,

nhangen• 12 years ago

Silly thing these gender based politics and acts of political correctness. I can guarandamntee you that if I was Tom and was innocent, mistakes in judgment aside, I would not be resigning from MY COMPANY.

Is this the result of new board members coming in post-investment? If so, it's more reason to stay bootstrapped and free. If not, who is there to pressure him other than Chris?

Edit: 4 downvotes without a single comment. Tech is really becoming a soup sandwich of misplaced frustration and angst.

emocakes2• 12 years ago

in regards to misplaced frustration and angst, pretty much, tech is mostly filled with frustrated, unattractive (physical and personality wise) middle aged men, who believe that the only way to find a mate is to swallow this liberal agenda so as to make themselves appear as more of a 'nice guy', and thus in their twisted little heads, becoming more attractive to members of the opposite sex. Typical beta mentality.

edit: actually, I should say that tech is not actually like this, its mainly the illusion that reddit and HN present.

hackaflocka7• 12 years ago

Agree 100%. There are a couple of Betas tweeting her offering to employ her.

Gorkys• 12 years ago

Or maybe there are some men who are aware that things aren't always as easy in the tech industry for women as they are for men.

Because they, you know, listen to the majority of women in tech, who say this is in fact the case.

bratao• 12 years ago

Mrs. Preston-Werner says here (https://medium.com/p/2fe173c44215 ) that the accusation and reason is that: "We learned that unnamed employees felt pressured by Tom and me to work pro-bono for my nonprofit."

desireco42• 12 years ago

To me this is lawyer speak for, yes it is true but if we admit, we would be liable. I would expect something like this from Bank of America or some other mega-corp, not github.

Only good thing about this is that it is not happening on the front pages of TechCrunch and whatever else blog might be following events like this.

roryhughes• 12 years ago

Kicked out of his own company? Reminds me of Apple and SJ... Hopefully Tom will see a great future and make some out of the blue return.

mtkd• 12 years ago

First came across Tom's code in the Grit gem (around 2008 possibly).

Unfortunately people who can write inspirational and innovative code like that are not always the most perceptive to the complexities and risks of HR in a large organisation.

I really hope mojombo gets back to building awesome again ... a VR coding environment - shut up and take my money ...

sytelus• 12 years ago

Can anyone tell what exact discrimination Horvath faced? I went through her long interview and I can only read how she "felt" to be in "boys club" as opposed to specific events that can be qualified as discrimination. For example, she says her code was reverted and was apparently blaming that event on her being a women. I can't imagine someone throwing good code away because it was written by a women rather it seems much more likely that her code had issues. Then there is series of rambling for founders wife sitting in front of her every day. That doesn't feel like discrimination either but rather feels like she was not looked upon as desirable employee there at higher level. Overall I got an impression that she was turning whatever bad performance on her part in to case of discrimination. May be I'm missing details but it is very hard to identify events that can actually be qualified as "discrimination" in her long rambling interview.

bitlord_2197• 12 years ago

You're missing details. I'd list them, but it'd be easier for you to just read her interview again, this time without skimming.

malandrew10• 12 years ago

It would be fascinating to see the commit in question.

If the commit has technical merit and should not have been reverted, why would you not focus on demonstrating why the technical merit of the commit in question? Claiming that a commit was reverted for personal reasons instead of defending the technical merits of the commit strikes me as naïve.

A highly competent person who has produced some work product that was challenged would typically either defend it on merit or assume they might have produced a lesser work and seek to understand why.

My experience in all areas of competence I'm familiar with is that histrionics like those observed thus far are often comorbid with demonstration of the Dunning-Kruger effect in inexperienced individuals.

Zed Shaw is one of the few people I can think of that would be a counterpoint to this observation, demonstrating high competence when acting histrionically. You can just look at his contributions to open-source to see how good he is at what he does.

JAH's github profile (for an engineer that worked there for a long time) seems conspicuously sparse to me. There really aren't many projects there to demonstrate superior mastery of HTML, CSS or git.

https://github.com/nrrrdcore?tab=repositories

Looking further, like at her blog repo. There are .DS_Store files committed (which would normally be in a local .gitignore or in your home folder .gitignore file) and the first file I clicked on the in CSS folder has Jekyll ruby errors printed to it:

https://github.com/nrrrdcore/nrrrdcore.github.com/tree/maste... (DS_Store file from 2 years ago still there)

https://github.com/nrrrdcore/nrrrdcore.github.com/blob/maste... (broken blog post is 6 months old)

Assuming this is representative of the quality of her commits, Occam's Razor suggest competence may be the reason for reverting the that css commit.

jdefarge• 12 years ago

Exactly! I had the curiosity to check JAH's github profile too, and it raised more suspicious towards her than I had previously imagined. For a fair comparison, let's see a couple of female github repos (both frontend and backend):

https://github.com/pamelafox?tab=repositories

https://github.com/kellabyte?tab=repositories

https://github.com/gwenshap?tab=repositories

See? Any of those smart women above has much more quality code in their repos with regular activity, even though not any of them works at github, that is, they push code on their free time.

Finally, let's see a repo by another harassed geek girl: https://github.com/adriarichards?tab=repositories

Um... I definitely see a pattern here screaming too loud not to take notice.

turar• 12 years ago

It's interesting how many would still remember the incident in question, if it wasn't brought up like this again. My personal attention span must be pretty short, it took a couple of days for me to stop associating Github with that incident.

ig1• 12 years ago

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 problem.

I appreciate that this might turn into a legal case so they're acting to protect themselves, but it would be better if they hadn't put out any statement rather than this weasel worded one.

facepalm4• 12 years ago

Those were a big part of the accusations, though.

dragonwriter4• 12 years ago

Employee harassment of any kind is unacceptable

But generally not illegal except as a form of discrimination on an illegal basis (as in, e.g., sexual harassment.) The line about sexual or gender-based harassment is part of the detail leading up to the general statement of no legal wrongdoing, which is followed by the statement about errors of judgement, etc., that do not rise to the level of legal wrongdoing.

Harassment that does not constitute legally-prohibited discrimination would fall into the category of error that they have expressly stated did occur.

marincounty• 12 years ago

"Because I would hear ‘We should hire more women!’ on almost a daily basis from the same people who kind of refused to respect me as a peer."

I don't know what went on here, but I have heard these words before. And most of the time it has nothing to do with gender.

(As to hn deleting comments--I don't understand the moderators. I posted something earlier about the divide between the rich/poor--and claimed something about the lack of modern Horatio Algiers. I guess it really bothers some of the fancy boys? I come back to this site and comments are magically removed. I commented in the article on Lenin. Yes--this is off topic; I'm just curious why whenever I bring up money, and how many rich boys fathers helped them out graetly; I am edited?)

theorique7• 12 years ago

"We should hire more women", when said to a person of the female sex, does not necessarily or automatically mean, "we should hire you".

iandanforth• 12 years ago

This makes me sad. My interpretation of these events was that a toxic employee instigated a witch hunt and was successful. By simple observation of numbers here, you probably disagree with this. But for the few of you that do agree with this point of view, take it as a reminder of the crucial role of hiring. You can easily hire the person who ruins your company's culture and causes your downfall.

bitlord_2197• 12 years ago

That is some impressive victim-blaming.

volune2• 12 years ago

totally correct. disgruntled employees should just keep their mouth shut and quit.

jleader• 12 years ago

If losing one executive at a 200+ employee company "ruins the company's culture and causes [that company's] downfall", then that company and that executive have been doing it wrong!

Regardless of the facts of the case and whatever damage it may have done to GitHub's culture, if this incident and this individual's departure are enough to cause GitHub's ruin and downfall, then that's evidence of an absurdly fragile company and culture.

ender72• 12 years ago

"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 happened. Theresa Preston-Werner's response [2] spends more time avoiding topics than actually covering them. Tom Preston-Werner likewise [3] makes sure to reinforce the fact that GitHub is immune to lawsuit while providing no real details. I'm sure there are plenty of GitHub employees who have a strong opinion, but enough of them seem to have an ax to grind in one way or another that it's hard to trust that testimony.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/15/julie-ann-horvath-describes...

[2] https://medium.com/p/2fe173c44215

[3] http://tom.preston-werner.com/2014/04/21/farewell-github-hel...

tptacek3• 12 years ago

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.

ender72• 12 years ago

The only problem for GitHub now is finding a way to attract talent. If your best response to

"You have a hostile work environment."

"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.

mildtrepidation• 12 years ago

I agree, with the exception of "that's how it's supposed to be." As defined by who? Knowing what happened and understanding why makes deciding on a resolution possible. The suggestion that keeping those things vague is somehow desirable is hard to fathom, unless your perspective is that of an abusive employer who doesn't want to have to change his or her practices.

Human interaction is not black and white (don't read into that). While this situation will never be totally transparent to the vast majority of us, the necessity of working within our limited knowledge does not imply our knowledge should necessarily be limited.

strlen• 12 years ago

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

kfcm3• 12 years ago

As a lawyer friend once told me regarding lawsuits: "People who hunger for the truth will go to bed hungry."

lbarrow• 12 years ago

I think it's more "We didn't do anything illegal, but we're still firing one of our founders, so clearly something was wrong."

pjscott• 12 years ago

A loud public witch-hunt also counts as a Wrong Thing, so this doesn't really tell us much about what happened one way or the other.

funkyy• 12 years ago

TBH it sounds like nothing serious that was blown up big by certain news channels. Steve Jobs could "fire" employees for "fun" in elevator and people were OK with it. But when it comes to gender/racial issues - there is no coming back even if found free of charge. So the people didnt get along - who cares. The company is great, the work they done is great - why anyone should leave? If Ms Horvath didnt felt good in this company - there were thousands of ways to deal with the issues like talking directly to interested parties. And the last one was going to press with them.

aaronem3• 12 years ago

For people to settle their differences like reasonable adults really isn't on the menu in the United States lately.

theorique7• 12 years ago

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).

What would it benefit Github or the P-W husband/wife for the investigation report to have published such a thing? Why air your dirty laundry in public?

It's most likely that the company and its co-founder are on the same page, if only for damage control purposes. (Why break ranks and threaten your brand and stock price, after all?)

There may have been awkward and/or angry discussions in camera. Non-insiders are very unlikely to ever hear what went on in said discussions.

brown9-2• 12 years ago

makes sure to reinforce the fact that GitHub is immune to lawsuit while providing no real details

Where is this mentioned?

This thing where people think that investigators you hired are "independent" and that their conclusions carry something similar to the weight of a court of law is ridiculous.

dreamfactory2• 12 years ago

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.

lexcorvus• 12 years ago

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 cofounder’s newborn child was not his. She told this to multiple coworkers directly and also to the wife through her boyfriend.

This is where the wife reached out to her and the rest of her story starts. All of Julie’s story involving the cofounder’s wife occurs only after Julie was spreading vicious rumors about him to even new employees.

ballard• 12 years ago

There was a great report on BBC World Service about folks wrongly accused and/or convicted of crimes they didn't commit (in one case, a man was on death row for a couple years). A false accusation is as damaging as authorities not paying attention. The sad truth of the human experience is that without direct evidence (video, audio recordings), only the people close to it know how they saw what happened. It's then more important to redouble efforts to preserve justice by investigating thoroughly to attempt to uncover what happened, to not revictimize the wrong party.

caycep• 12 years ago

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...

nailer10• 12 years ago

This. Both Zed and JAH are difficult personalities, but a professional structure should be in place to handle matters which can distract people from work.

GitHub should have implemented a blocking mechanism to stop people inviting Zed to 'dick' projects, and if the rumour mongering story is true, HR should have stepped in and disciplined Horvath.

notatoad• 12 years ago

I don't think a fight between zed shaw and anybody signifies anything. Zed likes to fight.

lsc• 12 years ago

well, a co-founder was pressured or embarrassed into resigning, no? that's not a lawsuit, sure, or even a firing, but it's certainly a big deal.

Certainly, if it was a case of the guy getting pressured to leave, one could make the case that the company recognized that they had a problem and tried to get rid of said problem in the way that was least likely to get them sued, by asking someone to resign. And really, if you are an executive, and are asked to resign, what are you gonna do? You're gonna resign, and try to make it seem like a voluntary thing. Even if everyone knows you actually got your ass fired, it shows that you are the sort of executive who will play the game and not take down the rest of the company if you get in trouble.

abalone3• 12 years ago

Don't forget this link, the anonymous GitHub employee response to Horvath's claims: "Facts Conveniently Withheld".

https://medium.com/p/d96f431f4e8e

evolve2k• 12 years ago

And here's Theresa Preston-Werners side of the story:

What every founder fears - https://medium.com/p/2fe173c44215

mtrimpe5• 12 years ago

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 suddenly requested to meet with Theresa and....

See how that's both consistent and perfectly plausible yet still went from bad to worse pretty quickly? These things are messy enough as they are; let's not make them any messier than they need to be.

ama729• 12 years ago

Have there been any confirmation this is actually a Github employee? Because as far as we know, this could just as well be a troll.

apercu• 12 years ago

I sort of feel that if this anonymous posting was 100% accurate, then the cofounder wouldn't have resigned. Better if the people involved came out and told the truth.

jw2013• 12 years ago

I doubt there will ever be any clear explanation on what happened. Two sides of the story basically tell two different stories. As someone mentioned in the post, Julie posted some tweets in response to Github's announcement today. (https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore)

1. Bullying someone into quitting: Illegal.

2. Asking an employee to relay private conversations between her and her partner: Illegal.

3. Justifying the harassment of an employee because of her personal relationships: Pathetic.

4. How does it feel to make money for liars and cowards?

5. Pushing women with strong opinions out of your company because they disagree with you is wrong.

6. What number am I on? Oh yea, how do you sleep at night?

7. Leaving GitHub was the best decision of my life.

8. There was no investigation.

9. There was a series of conversations with a "mediator" who sought to relieve GitHub of any legal responsibility.

10. Whose reasoning included "would it surprise you to hear that [your harasser] was well-liked?"

11. No, no it would not.

12. Women at GitHub who sprang forward to defend the men who harassed me, it is naive to think the same thing cannot and will not happen to you.

13. Best of luck rolling the dice.

14. A company can never own you. They can't tell you who to fuck or not fuck. And they can't take away your voice.

15. Unless you let them.

16. Hmmm still no mention of the man who bullied me out of our code base because I wouldn't fuck him. Too popular to be accountable, I guess.

danso4• 12 years ago

Yeah...sometimes Twitter just isn't the best place to make a cogent argument:

1. Bullying someone into quitting: Illegal.

If that bullying falls under the legal definition of harassment, then yes, it is illegal. But that's kind of begging the question a bit (e.g. Bullying someone is illegal because it is harassment). The thing is, some/much what Horvath described was assuredly captured in electronic records. If she believes something is illegal, and she is not afraid of speaking out, she should take the next step and file a lawsuit.

2. Asking an employee to relay private conversations between her and her partner: Illegal.

OK not sure what that refers to. Again, Twitter is not great for these things.

3. Justifying the harassment of an employee because of her personal relationships: Pathetic.

Who justified what?

4. How does it feel to make money for liars and cowards?

OK and then the rest of this seems like free association. I agree that a third-party investigation instigated by the accused is not automatically the truth, but neither are accusations. The word illegal has real meaning and if Horvath has the proof, then let's see it, rather than have a TechCrunch retelling be the canonical source of facts.

return0• 12 years ago

Some of it is contradictory [7,5 vs 1], and some sounds like outright crazy emotional, attention-seeking drivel [16]. Definitely not helping make her case.

cynicalkane2• 12 years ago

You can never know which side of the story is true, but it's worth noting that one side of the story looks crazy and the other does not.

It's hard to quantify the smell of crazy, but we can start with an overwhelming interest in insulting the other party, and the claims stretch credibility. For example, consider the claim that a man "bullied [her] out of our code base because I wouldn't fuck him". This is a very strong statement and it seems unrealistic that investigators, lawyers, and other people within Github would come forward with "no evidence" of such things happening. On the other hand, it's the sort of thing you would say to appeal to the Internet social-justice-warrior crowd. Even the phrasing smells like something you'd read on Tumblr or a r/shitredditsays comment thread.

I don't think I can make a strong inference about what actually happened, but I would not treat this whole kerfuffle as a useful source of information about gender issues in technology--except that this is another example how powerful accusations concerning touchy issues can be, even when there is "no evidence" for them.

malandrew10• 12 years ago

    "Pushing [people] with strong opinions out of your company 
    because they disagree with you is wrong."

FTFY. This may or may not be a truism. Circumstances matter. If you are trying to steer a ship of several hundred people in one direction and you have one loud naysayer with poor tact, you are justified in pushing them out of the company. Should you listen to their opinions and give them adequate consideration? Certainly. But if they are being disruptive and toxic, pushing them out is acceptable. Allowing someone acting in a visibly toxic way to remain at the company is poor leadership. I say this as someone who was once that toxic person and also as someone who has raised concerns about the deleterious effects of toxic colleagues.

How you say something matters as much if not more than what you are saying. Given the tweets and posts I've seen from JAH, it's pretty easy to imagine prior behavior that others would have considered toxic.

zak_mc_kracken• 12 years ago

From her blog post:

We learned that unnamed employees felt pressured by Tom and me to work pro-bono for my nonprofit

It's really hard to take seriously the claims that "my husband did nothing wrong" when

1. He resigned. 2. She's now being accused of shady practices in her own company as well.

malandrew10• 12 years ago

    "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."

One of JAH's claims of gender bias involved a:

    "man who bullied [her] out of [github's] code base because 
    [she] wouldn't fuck him. Too popular to be accountable, 
    [she] guess[es]."

After reading that I figured it's worth browsing through JAH's github account for recent code involving HTML/CSS (since the reverted commit involved CSS IIRC), and what I found would suggest that it's more likely that she made a poor/careless commit. I posted these findings in a comment way at the end of this thread that people are unlikely to see because the parent comment isn't being voted up on. Here's the link to the comment with links to broken or poor commits by JAH:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7625258

In light of this other recent commits (by a longtime githubber who would be expected to exhibit much better git hygiene and committing habits), and lacking the content of the actual reverted commit, I would say that the claims of gender bias in this specific case appear dubious at best.

If this other githubber did in fact make such vulgar comments, we still wouldn't have enough information without also knowing if that comment was completely unsolicited and out-of-the-blue, or if it was reactionary to whatever JAH may have said to this person just prior to the comment being made. Context matters. It could have been verbal self defense in response to a verbal attack, which is still unprofessional, but far more excusable especially if the original attack was equally unprofessional and sexually-charged. Given JAH's tact thus far, her character suggests someone who would have started a verbal fight.

jpiasetz• 12 years ago

Julie Ann Horvath has posted a bunch of interesting tweets about it starting here https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/458340919721197568

smtddr2• 12 years ago

Somehow, I don't think she's doing what is in her best interest right now. The guy has resigned and the tech media is totally on this story right now. Any small _preceived_ misstep and she could end up being labeled another "Adria Richards".

Also, the question[1] in her current github background appears to represent a suggestive joke that I would have never guessed she'd be comfortable with. Not saying this is any kind of evidence of anything; just interesting that apparently there is a side to her that finds jokes like that funny.

http://i.imgur.com/X8Wdgg0.png

rhizome4• 12 years ago

Why, because she's supposed to be sexless before she can be credible in a claim of sexual harassment?

res0nat0r3• 12 years ago

All of these tweets I see from her account from the last ~45 minutes or so don't help her case at all.

Taking these types of things public especially before any formal investigation occurs (which kicked off this whole scenario) usually does more harm than good.

nailer10• 12 years ago

The background is from the following scenario: DJ asks girl being interviewed what favourite position is, she responds 'CEO'.

IIRC it was 'sway in the morning'.

erikpukinskis2• 12 years ago

For what it's worth, I want to point out that many of us don't even think Adria Richards is an "Adria Richards".

briantakita• 12 years ago

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.

leccine9• 12 years ago

What a surprise. Who thought that there is zero legal ground for her accusations...

gjvc2• 12 years ago

github is not seeing another penny of my money.

danielweber6• 12 years ago

Because Tom didn't demand they go balls-to-the-wall fighting what may be an inevitably losing battle to disprove something that isn't disprovable?

I don't know what happened, but this outcome might be very much in Tom's well-considered best interests. You are making a no-win situation.

EDIT: Heck, I don't even know if you are mad at GitHub for insufficiently defending Tom or insufficiently crucifying him

steele• 12 years ago

gjvc is using their small slice of economic leverage to weigh in; the motivations are no one else's business unless gjvc volunteers this. Given the baiting questions you pose, what incentive does gjvc have to address your curiosity?

gjvc2• 12 years ago

https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/459358875213238272

ChuckMcM• 12 years ago

When these things conclude, as this one has, it is useful to check your own response emotion (happiness? sadness? outrage? bitterness?). One of the harder things for me to learn has been to critically evaluate my own judgement. Generally I'm a very rational guy and can give you my reasoning from first principles right up to the claim in question, when its wrong (the claim), I find my tendency is not to listen. My rational brain is invested in learning, my emotional brain is invested in being "right."

At the end of the day, neither Tom or Julie work at GitHub any more and what ever they brought to the mix has been lost. They have both made statements of pain and hurt, and their pain has been a burden on their friends as well. Will GitHub be stronger or weaker after this event? Will Julie and Tom? Only time will tell. Perhaps the best that can be said of this affair is that its publicity might help others to recognize the dangers of their behavior earlier before it becomes a problem.

tqi• 12 years ago

Slightly off topic:

Is there anywhere that offers(for lack of a better term) open source HR policy for small companies to copy? Seems to me writing something like this can be fairly onerous for a small company, especially in terms of legal overhead, but is clearly important. Having a starting point would be very helpful...

leccine9• 12 years ago

GitHub did the right thing and it turns out that Ms. Horvath accusations were without any basis. She not just damaged the gender equality efforts harder for everybody but raised visibility about how hiring females can damage your company's reputation. This is not the right way of fighting for the good case. A good example how to challenge the status quo: http://qz.com/192071/how-one-college-went-from-10-female-com...

I hope more people realize that we need more results and less artificially buffed scandals.

bitlord_2197• 12 years ago

How do you suggest she should have responded, rather than calling them out publicly?

leccine9• 12 years ago

First of all, if you have problem with your employment you sit down with your manager or your peers and talk about it. If you can resolve the case right there great if not, escalate. If you still think that they mistreat you, get a lawyer. Going public with accusations that you can't prove is certainly not the way. Look at her now, you think that there is any company on this planet which is going to risk the same process that was done to Github on a maximum mediocre engineer? I don't think so. This pretty much a lose lose situation as I can see it. Not to mention the post from that anonymous employee who states that in fact Ms. Horvath was starting this entire scandal due to jealousy and trying to undermine other people's reputation. You really think that this is they way to go?

dasil0034• 12 years ago

"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.

leccine9• 12 years ago

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.

rinon• 12 years ago

Maybe it's just me, but I don't really think speculating on fights like this from the outside without full and complete information is beneficial, or even sane and rational. Can we just all agree that we don't know the full story here, and that any and all players might be misleading or not telling the whole story publicly? This is an internal issue. The only opinions I am interested in are internal opinions of other github co-workers, and that only if I was interviewing for a position at the company.

kalleth• 12 years ago

This is the internet. There is no place here for your logic and reason.

vectorpush• 12 years ago

I literally cringe whenever someone posts this hackneyed response.

erikpukinskis2• 12 years ago

I think it has merit, essentially a form of play. Kittens will act out various attacks on each other, even though there is no real threat. It allows them to work through various solutions to problems in advance, so that when they are in real danger they have already practiced, and will be able to learn more quickly.

You are right that we don't, can't know the truth. So what we do is we map out a space of possible realities and talk through as many of them as we feel inclined to. We try to figure out where the line is that a founder's wife mustn't cross. We try to understand how common sexual harassment is, and what the probabilities are that any given accusation is truthful. These discussions aren't oriented towards reaching any sort of verdict. That is for the courts, and the coworkers. Instead what we need to do is a kind of cartography. Is there a mountain there? How big is it? What are the routes across it?

I think these issues are supremely important, because I think sexism in tech is like a giant hole in our rowboat that we are constantly having to bail out, and I think our organizations will be much more efficient if we can get better representation of diverse skills and viewpoints. And I also believe that rare events can make an outsized impact on a project. And that with such issues you rarely get second chances. And I believe that some of the traps that exist are on a hair trigger, and are very difficult to see. So I think putting energy into "play" ahead of time is very important.

You don't want to be going for the jugular only to realize you've never tried out your claws.

jfc5• 12 years ago

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 other evidence (this is where the comment about the investigators possibly not contacting key people could become important).

...found no evidence to support the claims against Tom and his wife of sexual or gender-based harassment or retaliation

So their internal investigation didn't find sexual or gender-based harassment or retaliation. But did that investigation find other types of harassment or retaliation?

However, while there may have been no legal wrongdoing

"May have been none" or "there definitely wasn't any"? And then legal wrongdoing vs. just plain wrongdoing? Disclaimers/"wiggle words" everywhere.

As to the remaining allegations, the investigation found no evidence of gender-based discrimination, harassment, retaliation, or abuse.

Again, we're seeing the term "gender-based" used as a modifier (also done in P-W's response). This makes it appear as if their attorneys primarily want to remove this controversy from the ambit of gender-based discrimination claims.

I'm not saying this memo is worse than any other corporate public statement. But reading carefully, you often find that the statements don't tell you very much, if anything.

theorique7• 12 years ago

But reading carefully, you often find that the statements don't tell you very much, if anything.

It sounds like the lawyers earned their $600/hr then.

smrtinsert3• 12 years ago

the investigator did find evidence of mistakes and errors of judgment.

Seems conclusive enough enough to me.

joshma• 12 years ago

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 a wiggly way of accusing) the worst given its omission.

This doesn't mean there isn't any evidence--it just means that their internal investigation didn't find any.

Of course the results of the investigation tells us nothing about things outside the investigation. Is that not assumed? How many 3rd parties does it take before this is not true?

Apologies if I sound irate, it's just disappointing that accusations that seem to have little basis (huge disclaimer, purely based on news coverage and this published report) can cause a founder to leave his company.

jfc5• 12 years ago

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).

facepalm4• 12 years ago

"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 want to misinterpret everything they hear, there is no way to stop them.

I think the emphasis on "gender based" stuff is because that was the gist of Horvath's accusations.

chc2• 12 years ago

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).

jfc5• 12 years ago

Again, in my comment I mention that this memo is no different than other corporate statements. My point is that some comments on here say "there is no evidence", which is not what the memo says. Saying you didn't find something isn't the same as saying that something doesn't exist.

chc2• 12 years ago

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.

You seem to be including this as part of a narrative where this statement is phrased to disguise the truth, but the sort of "loophole" you're pointing to here is not at all revelatory. The same is true of every investigation ever — the fact that an investigation didn't find something doesn't mean it necessarily doesn't exist. This falls out of the fact that you can't prove a universal negative.

An investigation can never positively prove things. It can only establish a reasonable confidence in proportion with your confidence in the investigators.

jfc5• 12 years ago

No, I don't think my comment is revelatory. Just adding my opinion to the boards like everybody else.

Someone• 12 years ago

"The investigation found no evidence..."

That's the only thing you can say. Moving this to another, more objectively verifiable domain: let's suppose you want to buy a house, and you ask the seller whether asbestos was used in its construction. A seller would be stupid to go further than "to the best of my knowledge…". Problem is: if you buy the house and ten years later find asbestos behind some wall, and the seller said it wasn't there, he hangs, even if he couldn't know of the problem. Of course, you can refuse to buy unless you get a 100% definite answer, but that would raise the price because the seller would have to do better inspection (possible destructive) and/or find insurance and/or would want money for the risk he takes.

The same applies to this outside firm: if they categorically state that there are no problems, but it later turns out that there are, they are target for litigation both from employees of the company and from the company itself ("you told us we didn't have problems! but now our stock tanked")

The best you likely can get is a detailed description of what they did in their research. That limits the risk for that company. If they claim they read every e-mail message, and it later turns out that they could have spotted a problem from there, they are liable, but if it turns out they could have spotted a problem from the phone records, they are off the hook.

So yes, it would be nice to learn what exactly this outside firm did, so that we can gauge how hard they tried to find something, but I don't blame them for saying they found no evidence.

chippy6• 12 years ago

This is a great example of the type of critical looking at the evidence. The words that are used should be examined closely - especially official / legal words. There should be no reading between the lines if written properly.

Here we have "no gender based..." of Tom and his wife. Nothing mentioned about whether there was other people who did were involved in that type of activity, nor whether the two individuals were involved in other types of activity.

Basically, legal speak only addresses a specific thing. The objective is not to uncover the whole truth about an event, but to reveal only as much as necessary.

In short, the report on the investigation should not if done properly comment on anything outside of it - even if evidence of those things are found.

Thus, looking at it - it gives no evidence of other things.

jfc5• 12 years ago

Here we have "no gender based..." of Tom and his wife. Nothing mentioned about whether there was other people who did were involved in that type of activity, nor whether the two individuals were involved in other types of activity.

Great point. I didn't notice that phrase, but now that I think about it, you're right.

caio1982• 12 years ago

I really don't care about how it's published in the media, I mean, this last episode at least. It was clear since the very beginning when it broke out that it would be dirty, really dirty. It's a shame not only for the people involved but more specially for Github as an ecosystem. Such incredible company bleeding in the media... sad times... and when I say incredible company I don't mean incredibly owned or well run company, you know what I mean. I lost a bit of faith in them today anyway. Sad times...

seanhandley• 12 years ago

Hope that Julie publishes a detailed account. Sources I've read so far are vague and subjective as to what actually happened.

volune2• 12 years ago

What a crock of shit. People don't typically quit companies they built from the ground up when they have "done nothing wrong".

mariusmg• 12 years ago

To me it seems Github fired him but allow him to "save face" with the resignation story.

barce• 12 years ago

This is pretty much standard procedure. Depending on his contract, it saves github from paying severance.

avenger123• 12 years ago

We have a process for all this. It's called the legal system.

It's not perfect but it mostly gets the job done.

Has Julie Ann Horvath formally sued Github? It's not clear to me that she has.

It seems that she may have grounds for some kind of lawsuit. Why hasn't she sued the company (if in fact there is no lawsuit)?

This to me is the most important question. At the moment, it seems this is becoming a matter of public opinion.

I would rather it be moved over to the legal system where the rules of engagement are much less malleable.

chippy6• 12 years ago

Quite so, and in most legal cases, both sides tend not to speak openly or publicly until the case has finished.

tdicola• 12 years ago

So what happens when a founder leaves like this, do they give up their % ownership and the other founders gain what was lost?

jessaustin2• 12 years ago

I suppose it depends on how the articles of incorporation are written up, but I really doubt it would work that way. It's more likely that the leaving founder will become a sort of silent partner, retaining equity but not managerial input.

smrtinsert3• 12 years ago

I wonder why his wife had to be at Github at all. I've worked at half a dozen startups now. Never would a spouse of either gender be in the office, and if they happened to maybe communicate with anyone, it was only a quick introduction and then they got out of your way.

I would consider it highly inappropriate.

hackaflocka7• 12 years ago

His wife's twitter bio reads:

"Obsessed with inspiring the tech community to support underfunded nonprofits."

It's so much easier to pressure, oops I meant "inspire," people when you're the wife of the CEO.

kfcm3• 12 years ago

I've been in a couple Midwestern start-ups, and founder's spouses (wives, in both cases) often did come into the office. Generally they were going somewhere together, or whatever. Chatted several times, and it was no big thing.

When they did ask how things were going business-wise, I got the nod from their husband. Turns out, they were also on the hook (co-signatories) for much of the start-up capital vehicles/loans/lines of credit.

Their money on the line, they own the company, IMHO.

smrtinsert3• 12 years ago

Also, can they get rid of Gravatar now?

markjaquith• 12 years ago

They kind of did. You just start with a Gravatar, but can upload your own image.

srik• 12 years ago

https://github.com/blog/1803-switch-your-picture-with-ease

harrystone• 12 years ago

His wife says she didn't realize that soliciting contributions from her husband's employees may not be appropriate.

She pretty plainly states that it never even entered her mind. That tells me more about the atmosphere there than anything.

kelnos10• 12 years ago

Yes, I agree, but I'm sympathetic: GH has always pushed the flat-hierarchy, we-are-all-peers attitude. And I think that's cool in theory, but has potentially bad side-effects like this one, where people feel pressured in situations where they viscerally know they are not peers, even if the atmosphere tries to push that idea.

andyl• 12 years ago

Kicked out of his own company - ouch. Taking VC and giving control to outsiders is Russian roulette.

Writing and adhering to HR/conflict-of-interest policy is a no-brainer. A board who cared for the interests of its founder would not leave this as a trap for the founder to step in.

I note with interest that the other accused was given a promotion.

ia• 12 years ago

we have one side of the story, for fuck's sake. the other side--the github side? it's lawyer-speak and completely devoid of anything that addresses the specific accusations.

how so many ostensibly smart people can simultaneously lose their ability to think critically is incredible. add the word "gender" to anything and people lose their minds.

emocakes2• 12 years ago

github raped me! now lets start the misandric shitstorm.

abalone3• 12 years ago

This anonymous post from an alleged GitHub employee adds some interesting perspective.[1] It alleges Julie Ann Horvath was actually spreading rumors of a personal nature about the founder's wife before any of this. In other words, Horvath was the bully, and she really didn't like having the tables turned on her.

If true, this would be a very difficult employee to keep at the company. She should have been fired for inappropriate behavior rather than given an elevated role (which she can now use to bolster her case). Very poor handling and it does suggest a degree of naivety on the part of management.

Having said that, the founder's wife also admits that her actions were a role in his departure.[2] It sounds like she had way too much free reign at the company and was making people uncomfortable with her activism around her startup. The fact that she presented herself to Horvath as having a lot of influence and power within the company reflects that. Plus it's a fertile ground for more serious transgressions into company privacy and so forth. Also should've been nipped in the bud early on.

[1] https://medium.com/p/d96f431f4e8e

[2] https://medium.com/p/2fe173c44215

cpncrunch6• 12 years ago

It does sound like ineffectual people management. By the sound of it there were potentially a number of employee problems at the company, which they basically just ignored.

The fact is that if someone is a bullying douchebag, they're probably going to continue with the same behaviour. (I'm not making any comments as to exactly who was the bully here, as it depends who you believe).

alelefant• 12 years ago

This anonymous post is no better than the unsupported claims by Julie. Unsupported claims on top of unsupported claims.

carterehsmith• 12 years ago

Popcorn time! Seriously.

So, she thinks someone undid her commits because… something. Is it possible that her code was… inadequate? Obsolete? Had bugs? Because, guess what, no line of code could ever be changed without someone calling names. Consider this:

- OMG I am Mexican and this Asian guy undid my commits. He did it because he is racist! Call Techcrunch.

- OMG I am 23 and this 45-year old guy undid my changes. Guess I should call the papers and complain!!!

- OMG I am 45 and this 23-year old guy undid my changes. Guess I should call the papers and complain!!!

- OMG I am gay and this coworker undid my changes. He did it because I am gay and he is straight and he is intolerant!!!

- So I am Armenian and this Turkish guy undid my changes. WHAT THE HELL he did it just because I am Armenian! He hates me!

- OMG I am a woman and this guy undid my changes. He did it because he hates women! Call the police!!!

- OMG I am a man and this woman undid my changes. She did it just to because she is feminist bi0tch!!!

- OMG I prefer functional programming, but this imperative-programming guy undid my changes! WTF what a horrible workplace can I sue someone about this?

Guess what. On a large project, any piece of code may be changed by any number of people. Usually because someone found a bug, or improvement is needed. If you claim that someone changed your code _because_ you belong to some minority or whatever group, you better have some proof. In this case, if I was Ms Horvat’s employer, I would ask her to either prove her allegations, beyond reasonable doubt, in a court of law, or shut up and apologize. Maybe I would sue her for libel, too.

foohbarbaz• 12 years ago

What an ugly mess!

Somewhat related: I am amazed now much gossiping goes on in an entirely male work group behind other people's backs. Males are definitely worse than females in that regard. I would not be surpised if allegations were true. A bunch if primadonna devs can be nasty to work with. Just stay away and separate work and life.

sergiotapia3• 12 years ago

Eh no, in my personal experience in a workplace where there are majority women you -will- get cliques and you will hear some nasty rumors go around. Women enjoy spreading gossip and harassing each other.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hmlPtRu1SQ

hackaflocka7• 12 years ago

This is what happens when you hire people for their gender (Horvath) or race. Injudiciously applied 'Liberalism' is the core problem here.

lifeisstillgood• 12 years ago

it's not idea Sunday but: a wearable video recording device that documents everything.

It may sound crazy but it would be interesting to me to find out how much of my rather boring life is actionable / illegal or distasteful

graup• 12 years ago

Devices like this exist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifelog http://getnarrative.com/

EGreg• 12 years ago

"The investigation found no evidence to support the claims against Tom and his wife of sexual or gender-based harassment or retaliation, or of a sexist or hostile work environment."

"We still have work to do"

Which is it? A non acknowledgement acknowledgement?

logn• 12 years ago

This is a misleading title and not the actual title on the page.

drunkcatsdgaf• 12 years ago

Im over using anything with this much drama, I want features, not headline news.

hackaflocka7• 12 years ago

Theresa Preston-Werner's twitter bio reads:

"Obsessed with inspiring the tech community to support underfunded nonprofits."

Mostly, her own nonprofit, I imagine.

hackaflocka7• 12 years ago

3 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 just performing being excited, but I really am insanely excited to change the world!

(people who express themselves with such extreme language, usually are batshit crazy. not taking sides here, the Horvath lady also seems to be batshit crazy from a reading of her tweet stream.)

fizx• 12 years ago

people who express themselves with such extreme language, usually are batshit crazy

Quick question: Would you consider "batshit crazy" extreme language?

hackaflocka7• 12 years ago

Best, ever, happiest founder ever, changing the WORLD

kmonsen• 12 years ago

The meatball show is legendary, can't blame her for that one.

Many people talk about their coworkers as insanely great, I think that is common tech language.

I don't think this is extreme language.

omarhegazy• 12 years ago

This fucking sucks, man. Tom's always seemed like an awesome guy.

As always, absolutely overblown PR messes like this are a result of faulty communication.

Without proper context or research done about it by Internet warriors frothing at the mouth, a one-off donation ruins Brendan Eich's once rich and successful career. Partly because Internet warriors tend to make emotional judgments before they properly study the evidence and contex and before they think through things, but also because Eich ... never responded. He never let the facts through, never let out an, "Oh, sorry guys. This donation was done because of X and Y and Z (don't support marriage as a whole/don't want government getting it's hands in things/etc.,etc.) and it doesn't reflect my current views on sexual orientation or that people with certain sexual orientations deserve less opportunities.", he never gave proper context and evidence to suggest that he wasn't a bad character.

Similarly with this. People are (conveniently?) keeping facts back, giving very vague stories, saying very little with a lot of words, etc., etc. If we are to believe that this thing was a huge misunderstanding and GitHub doesn't employ a bunch of mysognisitic, immature people, why hasn't Tom spoke up? I'm sure that GitHub is internally a lot better than it's image on the Internet right now is -- why doesn't anyone speak up?

Or is it really as bad as the Internet's image of it is?

rajacombinator• 12 years ago

What a load. Good luck with your hiring goals for 2014...

thedaveoflife• 12 years ago

The best thing about this article is that it hopefully signals that we will no longer have to here about this anymore. As much as I love using GitHub, I hate hearing about the internal politics of their executives and engineers.

shiven• 12 years ago

This is turning into a Soap-Opera-via-Social-Media... What happened to the good old days of people suing for damages in a court of law and moving on?

Public name-and-shame has its place in the grand picture of such incidents, but the longer it stretches, relative to time on social media, the more sudsy it turns.

xrt• 12 years ago

Think this might make those "Fork me on GitHub" badges a little less popular? I sincerely hope so.

zenbowman• 12 years ago

It is shortsighted to think there is nothing we can learn from this. There are certainly things we can learn.

1) A good lawyer is worth a 1000 tweets.

2) Getting deeply romantically involved with coworkers carries serious risks, whether or not you believe a company has the right to restrict office romances or not.

3) The fetishization of "we don't have any process!" is a mark of immaturity, not Zen. One would think engineers of all people would understand the importance of formalized process.

I don't think anyone walks away a winner here.

superduper33• 12 years ago

"There was no investigation." - Julie Ann Horvath

https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/458342995469688833

mundanevoice2• 12 years ago

If you haven't read already, check this: https://medium.com/p/d96f431f4e8e She did a lot of wrong things: - Dating a coworker is not one of the best practise. - gossiping around about your co-workers/founders character is the also not the best thing to do. - If you write shit code, your code will be removed. She is definitely not known for her coding abilities. She is just a melodrama queen who is bad at heart, opportunist, blackmailed founder to poison the company atmosphere. - You can create a healthy workspace shouting "Women Women" every time. We work with women too. Our behaviour and respect is based on compassion and professionalism. They are just like any other person in the company. - The real story must have been that she is a bad/mediocre developer who was being reviewed which didn't turned out pretty well (Obv since she was busy bitching against coworkers). The only good way she had to abuse and insult the company publically , get sympathy and then a Job. She seems to have good PR skills. (Pun intended) Again, here are some of her recent tweets: https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/458347574672388096 https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/458345005866696704

doktrin• 12 years ago

I have not followed this case. However, this just rolled across my FB feed :

http://www.businessinsider.com/julie-ann-horvath-github-hara...

Maybe I'm being uncharitable, but based on her [JAH] public statements I have a hard time taking her version of events 100% at face value. The drama to fact ratio feels high.

"Company perks : witch hunts, snow cones and silencing"
"I am not a victim. I'm someone that a company's negligence pushed too far, for too long. I am living, breathing consequence"
"Leaving GitHub was the best decision of my life"
"Hmm still no mention of the man who bullied me out of our code base because I _wouldn't_ fuck him. Too popular to be accountable, I guess"

Is Github that awful? I'm not seeing it.

abvdasker• 12 years ago

There's a strong current of spitefulness in those Twitter posts. While I understand that Horvath is clearly livid, and obviously not without some reason, that kind of public vitriol would make me question anyone's rationality.

poissonpie• 12 years ago

"This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper"

I think with the amount of coverage this story has gotten, everyone wanted something big to happen. Instead, we just get something mundane in some carefully crafted words that seem designed to give no information whatsoever, while still ensuring nobody can be sued any further. I kind of get the feeling that they are all trying to say "Nothing to see here....move along....cows turn themselves inside out all the time".

pandatigox• 12 years ago

Weird that just a few months ago, Tom became the first President of Github.

Results of the GitHub Investigation

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