30 ms·

Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit

• Eliezer 13y ago
  Ooh! The media! We're supposed to blindly trust their reporting even though they get wrong everything we know about personally, right? Clarification from Julie Ann Horvath describing everything TechCrunch misrepresented in 3... 2... 1... (The real situation may be better or worse. TechCrunch may have left out info that helps or damns GitHub. But you're naive if you think a journalist would report on a story like this accurately.)
  • droopybuns 13y ago
    It would be enlightening to see case studies of instances where anyone in tech tried leveraging journalists to solve career problems. Over the long term, I am suspicious that volunteering yourself as a subject in someone else's narrative does not do you any favors. It'd be nice to see an analysis on how this kind of response benefits or hurts the subject personally, professionally or emotionally.
    • eruditely 13y ago
      That may be the case, but they may perceive otherwise, at least initially.
• spikels 13y ago
  Well that was disappointing. I was expecting more sexism and less crazy founder wife.
  • ScottBurson 13y ago
    There seems to have been easily enough sexism to have been a problem, but yes, it did sound like the founder's wife was the bigger problem.
• droopyEyelids 13y ago
  Earlier I thought I wanted to know more about the situation. That was wrong.
  • mantrax 13y ago
    Exactly.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  • pyre 13y ago
    Towards the end (of the article), it sounds like she was just going to 'quietly' exit the company, until someone (apparently) rage-posted some disparaging remarks about her leaving the company (prior to it becoming public knowledge). Now she wants to leverage public opinion to get Github to take some action... supposedly.
  • tesseractive 13y ago
    According to the article, she did this because she was being anonymously, publicly slandered on Secret.
    • deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    • klodolph 13y ago
      Libel, not slander.
    • testrun 13y ago
      how did she find out?
      • greenrd 13y ago
        Does it matter? Secret is quite popular in the Valley and among women in particular (right?) so it's not implausible that she had an account herself.
      • vellum 13y ago
        Maybe she was using the app. Once Secret has access to your contacts, it shows you what's been posted by your friends and friends of friends. So she would have seen what almost everyone at Github was posting.
  • klodolph 13y ago
• iancarroll 13y ago
  Until there's a second side to this my GitHub use is not going to continue. Sad to see this happen, but it's not hard to change origins on my repos to BitBucket or Gitlab. edit: and again, it's two commands to push my repo back. but i have no interest in being with github at this time
  • Ryel 13y ago
    LOL
  • iwasphone 13y ago
    Isn't it better to wait until all sides of the story have been told?
    • iancarroll 13y ago
      The likelihood she's lying is next to zero. You don't really make these things up...
      • iwasphone 13y ago
        HN really needs a reply bot that links to the appropriate wikipedia article on logical fallacies.
        • LockeWatts 13y ago
          I think that would just get out of hand. Also, HN being all human comments is actually rather refreshing, compared to the rest of the Internet.
        • baddox 13y ago
          What fallacy would that comment even be? It's just a factually incorrect statement.
      • Crito 13y ago
        I hope you understand that the truth is not simply a matter of if somebody is lying or not. Recollections can be flawed. Perceptions may be biased. Knowledge of other factors may be limited. Events or circumstances may be unintentionally unconsidered or mentioned. There is always value in hearing the take of other people, even when you are an involved party (and therefore able to be certain that you are not lying).
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• jmspring 13y ago
  If allegations of non-employee/founder wife scenario is true, I would hope the board shows said founder the door. Beyond being in bad taste, it's exposing the company to some serious liabilities...
  • cmelbye 13y ago
    Yeah, it'll be interesting to hear GitHub's response if this aspect of the story is true. Those are some pretty serious allegations - influence over business and personnel decisions, reads Campfire chat logs, has spies within the company to keep an eye on what's happening, and, of course, intimidates employees. Quite damaging things.
  • greenrd 13y ago
    What's the big deal? I am not a lawyer and I have no idea of the issues involved here, but surely if she was now made an employee and given a salary of $0, the fact that she was a significant investor (via her husband's shares) would make her relatively high-ranking within the company. So yes legally the fact that she didn't have that piece of paper (an employment contract) might matter, but why should it matter morally?
    • grifpete 13y ago
      a) you can't fix the problems of the past by giving her a job now b) being a significant investor doesn't make you 'relatively high-ranking in the company.' You are either an employee with a high ranking job, or an investor. If you have no executive functions and are just an investor you are not entitled to intervene in day to day affairs unbidden. c) It matters morally because even if she had the paper that would not entitle her to talk and harass an employee with the tacit support and protection of a senior member of the company.
• ohsnapman 13y ago
  My gut tells me there was probably sexism at GitHub, drama with founder's wife, AND she was probably not blameless either in this whole mess. It was disheartening to me to see people rally to her on Twitter and immediately cry for the sacking of GitHub before any facts or concrete allegations were made by anyone involved, her especially. That's the stuff angry mobs are made of.
  • pyre 13y ago
    True, but you can also witness the opposite on Twitter: Claims of sexism met with a deluge of trolls threatening to rape the claimant.
    • ohsnapman 13y ago
      That's worse than disheartening to me. That's straight up disgusting. I haven't seen the threats yet but it doesn't surprise me.
    • rds2000 13y ago
      I feel that these people are nothing more than an entitled group of lazy jerks that use twitter to pressure, blame and get ego boosts. They lean and get the easy way, yet claim they're disenfranchised. I can't help but ramble, but I really worry why people don't scrutinize them more. I feel they're delusional, entitled, to the point where they think they can be promoted to CTO and programming positions without actually coding. My issue is, I even see woman this girl knows who are on twitter speaking hate-speach and high-fiving each other over this. They really want to stir up trouble and ruin lives. I feel they love drama, attention and are cognitively trained by US culture to feel entitled, and use adversity and the crowd sympathy instead of bettering themselves and taking responsibility. I feel it's boy who cried wolf, they're on twitter, and press the big red misogyny button when things get tough. The truth is, I don't use twitter, but whenever I see one of these ladies, I associate it to the emotion of a entitled women coasting on the same old trick. It's like a nervous response. That's my honest feeling. "The boy who cried wolf" can pose a problem one day to minorities who one day learn to actually code, who are honest, and may cause prejudice to them because of these trolls. It also hurts people who have legitimate cases of harassment. Julia may or may not have been wronged, but the way she handles it on twitter, I feel is childish. I'm disgusted no one calls it out. Sorry for that. That said, it's never too late to learn to program. No matter who you are. I promise you if you do your job well, the people who matter want your skill and talent and the valley will always be open to you.
• rds2000 13y ago
  1. What part of the article above would be considered hearsay? Aside from the screenshots, it feels the least bit gossipy. 2. Right to confront accusers? This seems extremely one-sided. No one she blames gets to defend themselves, where are the witnesses on either side?
  • pyre 13y ago
    I'll admit that it's a bit gossipy, but in other circumstances, you likely wouldn't be calling for 'witnesses on either side.'
  • aiiane 13y ago
    Er, it's not like she's anonymously accusing them. They can confront her any time they want.
    • rds2000 13y ago
      Carried forward, in a court-like environment, or throwing salvos over PR mediums? I take it as a bad smell someone goes the PR route over a lawyer (perhaps a confidential legal threat?) to discuss things privately and settle thing amicably.
      • pyre 13y ago
        Depends on what the aim is. There are some considerations here: 1. People tend to view going for the lawyers as going for the 'big guns,' and can be reluctant to do so. 2. Companies can become less cooperative very quickly once it's a matter being decided by lawyers and/or in a court. 3. She may not have consulted a lawyer because she doesn't think that anything which transpired qualifies as 'illegal,' rather than unprofessional, rude, mean, etc. From the story presented to us, it sounds like she wants to leverage bad PR to get Github's HR / board to hold the people she views as having wronged her accountable.
      • greenrd 13y ago
        After reading the article I assumed that she didn't go to a lawyer because she believed there was nothing there that would merit a lawsuit. The fact that she didn't mention what her initial grievance was, leads me to believe it wasn't such a big deal as to rise to the level of a lawsuit. Or possibly she just believes that going public like this is the best way to bring about change.
• iwasphone 13y ago
  > Horvath then told her partner, also a GitHub employee... Protip: don't dip your pen in the company ink.
  • rdl 13y ago
    At big paranoid organizations (CIA, NSA, etc.), they actively encourage internal relationships and marriages, as it simplifies security modeling. But not really in the same group.
    • iwasphone 13y ago
      It makes a lot of sense in such organizations, as it satisfies the employees' need for close human relationships without compromising the company's paranoid culture. In this case--and likely in all for-profit companies--it only magnified the problem by adding another employee to the drama.
    • dsl 13y ago
      You are encouraged to have relationships within the community, but not necessarily at the same agency or within the same directorate. In a division the size of GitHub (in terms of total employees), a relationship would be frowned upon and one of you would likely be transferred.
    • gametheoretic 13y ago
      Those two also actively recruit Mormons for their very-above-average patriotism. Which is neither here nor there, but hey. As good a thread as any to go OT.
    • gaius 13y ago
      Actively encourage how? Genuinely curious, do you get a joint bonus if you marry a cow-orker or something?
      • rdl 13y ago
        Social events, peer pressure.
• lindig 13y ago
  Two women are dancing to music at work in a tech company and the author compares this to a scene at a strip club as men are watching this. Unless this was a regular exercise, what was everybody expecting? Nobody taking notice?
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • dangero 13y ago
    Yeah this section really damaged her credibility for me. She says the guys were "gawking", so they were not saying anything inappropriate, just "staring openly and stupidly". I can picture a professional business environment where gawking would be inappropriate, but I have a hard time picturing that environment with women hula hooping to music. Plus is gawking a crime? Yes, those random employees were being unprofessional, but worth writing about in an email to Tech Crunch?
    • intortus 13y ago
      I didn't know that TechCrunch was strictly involved with reporting crime. (Btw, TechCrunch asked.)
      • dangero 13y ago
        TechCrunch asked what? I meant crime in a figurative sense: "an action or activity that, although not illegal, is considered to be evil, shameful, or wrong.". I've quit a lot of jobs, but I've never felt a desire to correspond with the press as to why. My assumption would be that if I ever did want to share my misgivings with the press, I would want to share the substantial ones, not the petty ones. I'm just saying this seems like a petty issue that in my opinion weakens the overall narrative.
    • freshfunk 13y ago
      Same. This just makes it look like she's overly sensitive and perceiving things in a very skewed and unfair light.
• rdl 13y ago
  This sounds less like sexism and more just non-sexist batshit crazy people and incompetent HR. Somehow that isn't particularly better.
  • agf 13y ago
    I think the implication is that none of this would have happened, or at least would not have been tolerated, if she was male. And it sound like the basis of her relationship with the founder's wife being "crazy" was that she was a female employee. So I'd say sexism played a significant role here.
    • eruditely 13y ago
      Uhm, it was female on female. Is male on male intimidation, sexism? Because men are the primary victims of violence, and their sex being highly relevant to that, is that sexist? I don't think you would say that in this case it is. Not to say there can't be girl/women on girl/women sexism.
      • lutusp 13y ago
        > Not to say there can't be girl on girl [sic] sexism. True, but since the "girls" under discussion are both in fact women, that would be sexism by definition.
        • LockeWatts 13y ago
          Wait, what does the noun change? You completely lost me.
          • hluska 13y ago
            The term 'girl' refers to a female between birth and when she reaches the age of adulthood. I'm pretty sure both parties in this case are adults, so I assume that's the reason behind the correction.
• dengnan 13y ago
  OK. I thought I could know what was inside her PR. but no, it's kind of like a TV show' story line now.
• patrickg_zill 13y ago
  Some geeky types will be tempted, upon founding a startup, to thus not have ANY women in significant roles in the company, and to keep it as guys-only as possible; outsourcing as needed and doing the other legal legwork as required to stay under the headcount (is it >50 people?) to avoid the EEOC.
  • jkrems 13y ago
    I saw similar things happen with male employees. A spouse of a manager/founder (well, anyone really) having power without any official position is a disaster waiting to happen. The situation I experienced was with an all-male team. The result is people leaving, so having a small team really doesn't fix anything. Quite the opposite.
    • candeira 13y ago
      I've been in this position as a co-founder, having to deal with a contractor who was also the spouse of a co-founder, and who managed to drive everybody crazy, including other contractors and employees, other co-founders, and their own spouse.
  • rdl 13y ago
    I'd rather just have a "zero fuckwits rule" in hiring. It sounds like Github breached that rule, leading to this problem. You could possibly avoid all sexual harassment by having only men in the workplace, but if they were still fuckwits and assholes, you'd have other employment problems.
    • unfunco 13y ago
      Spotting a fuckwit during a best-behaviour interview is difficult.
      • jsmthrowaway 13y ago
        I've found Twitter timelines to be useful in this regard.
• mynameishere 13y ago
  Crazy how women can turn even canonically geeky/boring things like Github into soap operas like "General Hospital". You've got to wonder what kind of drama occurs in actual hospitals, with alpha-doctors and nurses side-by-side. I've heard stories.
  • omegaworks 13y ago
    Of course, it's always the women that make things dramatic. Not the power fetish of the founder's wife, the unwanted advances of coworkers, or the reverting of legitimate contributions to the team's project. Can't you see past the fact that she's a woman? Don't you see how demoralizing any of this would be?
    • LockeWatts 13y ago
      Can I ask a question about phrasing for a minute? What's inherently wrong with an unwanted advance? Advances have an unknown state until they're responded to. If she had accepted it, it would've been a welcomed advance. There's no way to know that until you walk up to a woman and say "Hey, I think you're pretty cool. Want to go get a drink sometime?" If she says no, that's unwanted, but I don't see how it's inappropriate.
      • theorique 13y ago
        It's sort of analogous to a quantum mechanical measurement - you don't know it was unwanted until you try it. This is why it's better to make an early advance with some plausible deniability, so you can back off if there's no mutual interest (e.g. backing away: "Ha, just kidding ... what, you thought I wanted to date you for real? That's crazy talk ... we're co-workers, and it would never work out, we're so different.")
      • Robin_Message 13y ago
        As she described it, there were at least 4 problems. 1. Its generally polite to only make advances on unattached people. 2. Going to her home to ask makes it awkward to say no. 3. Not leaving immediately compounded 2. 4. Subsequent behaviour was bad, thus showing bad faith all along.
• rdtsc 13y ago
  Well here we go Github-gate. Sigh... Regardless of the truth, just based on allegations, and what they'll stir, this will probably create a big mess. I can't see who can possibly win in this case.
  • jkrems 13y ago
    If the situation with the one founder who is injecting outside people into power is resolved, I would say everyone in the company wins (assuming the picture painted in the article is accurate).
    • rdtsc 13y ago
      Well, actually that is a pretty positive way to look at it. Good point.
    • greenrd 13y ago
      If she is his wife then she co-owns part of the company with him (assuming they do the "everything that is mine is yours" thing). So she is not an uninvolved outsider, she is an investor.
• eruditely 13y ago
  This just sounds like plain old drama of the old fashioned sort, and not especially one that relies on sexism, but crazy people. The difference being that sexism would be something ordinary citizens do naturally that is intolerable and is putting up with a discriminatory past or status quo and they are not being cognizant of what they are doing. This is just straight drama. So far at least.
• jaydz 13y ago
  A really bizarre story.
  • gcoguiec 13y ago
    yep...
• mwhite 13y ago
  Well, there are only three Github founders, and a quick search seems to indicate that Tom Preston-Werner is the only one with a wife, Theresa: http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/27/omakase-charity-tech-industry/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/27/omakase-charity-tech-indust...
  • jaydz 13y ago
    Any guess who this is? “well-liked at GitHub” and “popular in the community.”
    • eropple 13y ago
      This is super screwed up enough, I think we can do without the random guesses, yeah?
      • zobzu 13y ago
        not sure whats wrong with guesses specially if there's a disclaimer saying it's his guess, actually... otherwise, might as well not think of comment at all, since there would be nothing to say. (that goes for many, many other topics)
        • LockeWatts 13y ago
          Guessing could get a random employee at GitHub who is completely innocent targeted with a lot of hatemail he didn't deserve. Just because someone says "I'm guessing", doesn't mean people wouldn't roll with it.
        • gamed 13y ago
          Don't privilege the hypothesis. http://lesswrong.com/lw/19m/privileging_the_hypothesis/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/19m/privileging_the_hypothesis/
    • deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
  • 13y ago
• zby 13y ago
  What a mess! But it looks like sexism was not the number one problem.
  • btilly 13y ago
    The coworker who thought she was an opportunity, and the failure to discipline that coworker, definitely is sexism.
    • LockeWatts 13y ago
      The coworker should have been disciplined for mucking with the code out of anger, but as far as being super uncomfortable around her I feel like a healthy warning from his boss saying 'Hey, you're being inappropriate around her' would probably be better in the long run than firing him.
    • kansface 13y ago
      Its not sexism. It could be considered sexual harassment, maybe. Plan old harassment is probably more accurate.
    • theorique 13y ago
      Sounds like mismanagement more than sexism. Suppose I had a male coworker who had beef with me because his girlfriend broke up with him and started dating me. Suppose he started reverting my commits and interfering with my work in other ways. Essentially, the same situation with the sexes changed around. But the response should be exactly the same. At that point a manager would need to step in and lay down the law - don't bring your personal conflicts in to work. And if you can't stop, then work somewhere else.
    • kyberias 13y ago
      I'm confused. Are you sure you know what sexism means?
• asimov42 13y ago
  That hula hoops bit was a bit... strange. If it were a couple of attractive girls I probably would also find myself staring. I mean, its just not something you see everyday working at an office. I understand being stared at is uncomfortable too, and they should feel free to do whatever they want of course. It just sounds like how unattractive people "stare creepily" while attractive people "look."
  • theorique 13y ago
    Watching your co-workers as they hula-hoop in the office doesn't sound terribly sexist or out of the ordinary [1]. Hula hooping in the office is offbeat enough that you'd expect people to stop and look And it's certainly not the some kind of 'last straw' sexist incident. Obviously, what happened is that Horvath was already upset from the weirdness that had transpired thus far - and based on the article, it does sound pretty weird. Because of this she read a lot of 'meaning' into the hula-hooping that just wasn't there. It's hard to see how this situation could be a last straw otherwise. [1] i.e. "hula hooping in the office" is out of the ordinary ... watching something out of the ordinary is normal
    • RodericDay 13y ago
      It could easily have been there. Stop being condescending. A lot of "normal" interactions between men and women are fraught with creepy weirdness due to the way we're socialized. This is well studied, even if you find the conclusions of those researchers unpalatable.
      • facepalm 13y ago
        I think it's a problem if women (or men) start dishing out accusations from projecting something into other people's faces. "They looked leery" - what sort of accusation is that? All bets are off if such a thing is held up as evidence for sexism. There is a famous early cinema experiment which cuts the same closeup of a face with three different scenes (don't remember, I think a funeral, something to eat, whatever). Each time the viewer interprets a different emotion into the face (sad, or hungry, or yearning, or whatever).
• xrctl 13y ago
  The problem with the founder's wife sounds like a very one sided account of your standard interpersonal conflict. Everyone who has ever been in one of those has at some point claimed themselves to be a saint and their opponent a demon. The alleged sexism seems to be primarily imaginary. The anonymous posting that so upset her and precipitated all of this said: > has a history of RAGINING against any professional criticism. Leadership has stood idly by while she lied about contributions and threw hardworking coworkers under the bus (again and again)[1] To be honest, it seems to me that such could very well be true. [1] https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/444646082857820160/photo/1/large https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/444646082857820160/phot...
  • devnonymous 13y ago
    A good thumb rule to apply to verify whether something is about sexism is to think whether things would have played out differently if the sex of the victim was different. Do you still think in this case the alleged sexism is imaginary ? Hard to say but I'd lean towards thinking that is Julie was a guy the problem with the founder's wife wouldn't get this bad - so, IMHO, yes, this is about sexism.
• bitops 13y ago
  As usual, another HN thread that perfectly exemplifies victim blaming and a collective burying of heads in the sand. There's a few people on here who seem to get it, but most don't. I'm sick of it. Goodbye, Hacker News.
  • gamblor956 13y ago
    This should be the top comment. As long as sexism persists in the tech industry, it's going to drive women out and keep others away.
    • kisstheblade 13y ago
      I thought Julie's comments about men "gawking" was very sexist and am offended. GitHub will be a better workplace with her gone for sure.
    • Dylan16807 13y ago
      No way in hell should it be the top comment. I can't find any victim blaming at all in a quick skim, so if it's here it's not by any means a plurality opinion. bitops is being even worse and reactionary than they claim HN to be.
      • kybernetikos 13y ago
        There was quite a lot of what I would consider to be victim blaming in the previous thread where it was less clear what the allegations were. Or at least, my impression of the thread was that there were a very high proportion of commenters saying we should reserve judgement and at the same time hypothesizing about all the ways that the woman might be at fault. While this is all true (on the information we had in that thread, it was possible that the woman was the one at fault, and it's good to reserve judgement until more information arrives), it was really weird how many people felt the need to point these things out. I do agree that this thread seems more balanced, although even in this thread people are surprisingly quick to point out that these problems are not 'sexism' (despite the fact that the situations described would have been an order of magnitude less likely to arise if she were a man).
• chris_mahan 13y ago
  The company just seems to have immature leadership.
• csense 13y ago
  I don't think this was an instance of institutionalized sexism. Rather, the founder's wife seems like an unbalanced individual, and nobody effectively set any boundaries. The other founders and HR seemed unaware or unable to set the situation to right. As for her romantically inclined co-worker -- I don't see how his behavior qualifies as sexist or hostile. Merely a bit clueless, but isn't it to be expected that employees of a tech company will be somewhat socially awkward? EDIT: As multiple commenters have noted, ripping out someone's code commits because they rejected your romantic advances is unacceptable and unprofessional. The ripper-outer should be roasted by the project manager if there's no technical justification. Since the two employees no longer get along, one or both should be re-assigned to different projects if possible. And the offender should be disciplined (up to and including dismissal from the company) if he makes life difficult for her in the future. But his actions reflect on him, not Github as a whole. The article includes no information about whether any of his actions were reported to his supervisor or anyone else, and no information about Github's response to the incident. Without those crucial details, I think it's premature to point a finger at Github. As for the hula hoop incident -- if the girls doing the hooping and the guys doing the watching were okay with it, and everybody kept their clothes on, that seems pretty innocent to me.
  • johnny22 13y ago
    the dude going back and deleting her code after the rejection seems pretty hostile to me.
    • csense 13y ago
      Good point. What probably needed to happen was whoever was in charge of that project should have recognized these two employees now didn't get along, and reassigned one or both of them away from the project.
      • LockeWatts 13y ago
        Guy also probably deserved a good reprimand. Messing with code because of personal issues is a great way to tank your reputability as a developer.
• trustfundbaby 13y ago
  This is just really really messy and could have all could have been handled differently. Also, not so much sexism here as drama, a lot of which, it seemed, Ms Horvath herself participated in :\
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• Myrmornis 13y ago
  Two women [...] were hula hooping to some music. [...] 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. I don't see a problem with it. One does not "hula hoop" in a place of work if one does not want to be looked at.
• lgleason 13y ago
  I'm not going to get into what is right or wrong. With that being said, in the US HR is not your friend as an employee. Their job is to protect the company. http://abcnews.go.com/Business/20-job-tips-hr-exec/story?id=16203991#11 http://abcnews.go.com/Business/20-job-tips-hr-exec/story?id=... Any way you look at it you have a bad situation. This sounds like a clash of personalities. While the behavior is not right, the fact is that a lot of companies will 'manage out' people unfairly etc.. Politics and personality clashes are never fair. In a capitalistic society money tends to trump social justice. It sucks, but it would take some pretty large structural changes to the economy to really fix that. If the founders wife is causing issues with other employees then that could be an issue. The question is would this cause enough of a legal liability for the company to do something? Will edging out the founder be beneficial to the company, the investors and the profit of the company or not? Be it right or wrong, that is the question that is going to be asked in the board room if that option is even on the table with Github. While I like to see justice and fairness in these situations something tells me that it is probably not likely to happen any time soon. Similar scenarios to this have been playing out in many different industries and many different countries for years.....and unfortunately will continue to.
  • rdtsc 13y ago
    > Their job is to protect the company. As a general rule, if you are not paying for their time, they don't have primarily your best interest in mind. The interest of those that they work for could temporarily align with your interests, but don't rely on getting a signal when that changes.
  • gexla 13y ago
    Right or wrong, the story has blown up and the problem actors have to be dealt with. There is too much at stake. That the wife, a non-employee, was in a position to be a main character in this story seems to be a blunder by the founder. If I'm an employee there, would my wife be able to put herself in that same situation? Probably not. Would the wife make a good employee? Would she get hired to be in a position of such influence? Probably not. Yet, there she was and here is our story. Personally, I have been in relationships which were okay in my personal life, but I would have been horrified if my significant other would have anything to do with my business other than attend outside work functions with me always present. Bull in a china shop.
• jv22222 13y ago
  Without being there it's hard to discern the full facts from either side and has the potential to be "he said she said" type of situation.
• theorique 13y ago
  The bad actor in this version of the story seems to be the founder's wife. And the founder certainly dropped the ball by not keeping his wife in line. For whatever reason, the wife acted crazy, intimidating, and creepy toward Horvath. Why? Who knows? Maybe because of jealousy or concern that her husband was interested in this (admittedly reasonably attractive) female employee? The founder needed to do the professional thing and keep his wife in check, separating business and personal affairs, and not allowing this weird behavior to continue. He needed to act like a leader, taking charge in both his workplace and his home when it looked like things were getting out of hand. And the romantically inclined co-worker is guilty of two things: (1) slightly clueless behavior toward a person who was already involved in a relationship with someone else (2) extremely bad timing. He's not the worst offender in this whole drama. (Edit: I forgot (3) taking revenge by reverting code commits. That is far worse than (1) or (2) - it is unprofessional behavior and calls for some form of workplace discipline.) (Disclaimer: everything I wrote assumes that the article is telling the complete truth)
  • jsmthrowaway 13y ago
    > keeping his wife in line. I have never cringed so hard in my life.
    • theorique 13y ago
      Well, not in the offensive sense of "bitch, you better behave or ima smack you", but at least something modern like "honey, when you talk to my employees and act really strange and intimidating around them, it makes things very difficult for me at work". The wife's behavior seems to be the catalyst for nearly all the drama described here.
      • philwelch 13y ago
        In many marriages, there's one spouse who keeps the other in line and then there is the spouse who is kept in line. One does not simply reverse these roles.
• bello 13y ago
  While I see how she had quite a few valid reasons for leaving, where exactly was the sexism described? Sure, some of those people clearly have issues, but I don't think it's reasonable to generalize that to a "sexist internal culture" of an entire company. I do feel bad that she had to go through all of that though.
• watwut 13y ago
  The story is confirming my long held prejudice/bias. If a company/organization organizes women only activities, then there is something profoundly wrong in their relationship towards women.
  • MarkTee 13y ago
    The Passion Projects site says that attendance is usually 50% male/50% female. http://passion-projects.github.com/ http://passion-projects.github.com/
    • claudius 13y ago
      ‘Talks From Incredible Women In Tech, Every Month’ does not sound like 50/50. That said, even a 50/50 ratio is lopsided given the ratios of graduating students in the relevant fields.
  • jd0 13y ago
    They call it confirmation bias for a reason.
• barce 13y ago
  The law is very clear on discriminating against someone by virtue of race, gender and/or age in a work situation. A lawyer could make a very good case just based on her side of the story for the law being broken. Against the coder who undid her work because he was rejected by a woman, that is classic retaliation pure and simple. Most cases like this that don't go to court settle in the Valley for $250k. It's a million at a minimum in the Valley if it does go to court. As far as the wife goes, there was so much innuendo in the article that I wasn't sure what to conclude. Was the wife suggesting she hook up with her husband because a happy husband would make the former employee's situation better? If so, another classic open and shut case.
  • retrogradeorbit 13y ago
    Absolutely. What she should have done is not resigned, but lawyered up, and started recording everything. When she resigned she lost her power. She did exactly what they wanted her to do. I know it can be the hardest thing to do in a situation like that. But the only thing people like that understand is power and money. And taking $250k from them in a lawsuit is certainly going to be noticed at the board level and by the investors.
• Aqueous 13y ago
  I'm not entirely sure the hula-hooping incident - merely observing girls hula hooping is not a crime, is it? - by itself constitutes a hostile atmosphere for women, unless inappropriate comments were being made. What we have here is some completely inappropriate, cloak and dagger, soap opera shit being perpetrated by the wife of the cofounder, who has no business meddling in the affairs of his employees. (If true, this is completely bizarre behavior.) But I'm not entirely sure this hostility was directed at her simply because she was a woman. She is absolutely justified in getting the fuck out of dodge, either way.
  • MarkTee 13y ago
    I don't know what the day-to-day is like at GitHub, but if people were hula-hooping to music at my place of work, I'd probably be pretty interested in watching them too (male or female).
    • lancewiggs 13y ago
      It's not what or whether they were watching, it's how they were watching. It's a judgement call but pretty easy to tell if a group is leering or just watching friends have fun.
      • peterjancelis 13y ago
        Even more so, it is the sexual attractiveness of the guys who are watching.
        • chii 13y ago
          are you implying that if it had been an attractive male watching the females, there wouldn't have been any complaint, despite being leered at?
          • brazzy 13y ago
            Yes, that's what is being implied, and it's certainly something that happens, in degrees. People generally enjoy attention from those they themselves find attractive - obviously up to a limit, but that limit is much different than when you don't find the other person attractive. And that is why the "making a woman feel uncomfortable constitutes sexual harassment" standard is problematic. And of course it's not entirely wrong either because it certainly can be done on purpose.
• enupten 13y ago
  It's very sad that she had to struggle through this sort of mental anguish. May you find brighter shores, Julie.
• belorn 13y ago
  A founders wife felt that a female employee puts the company at risk, so she try to control the employee to avoid harm to the company. This then turned into bullying, stalking, and unhealthy work environment. This is why affirmative action and other "let treat women specially" crap is bad. It makes for a self-fulfilling prophesy of more sexism. The more we focus on "balancing the scales" rather than eliminating special treatment of women, the faster we can reach a place where everyone is treated the same regardless of gender. The rest of the story is not about sexism. The guy who got rejected is the prime example why some companies (and government, and armies) have anti-fraternization policies. The positive and negative aspects of office romances are old, well established and equal by both genders. At best, it is gender equal sexism. The dancing event however sound purely made up in her mind. As a species, we a interested in what others are interested in, and when people laugh or is having fun, it attracts attention. It has nothing to do with sexism.
  • phillmv 13y ago
    >This is why affirmative action and other "let treat women specially" crap is bad. This does not follow from your premise. The founder's wife's relationship to the company is inappropriate. That is also not what affirmative action is about.
• curiousDog 13y ago
  To me, it seems like this sort of problem occurs more in start-ups because the boundaries between professional and personal lives are blurred. I've heard similar stories from people working at Facebook as well. This sort of forced camaraderie to fit into the clique isn't healthy at all. When I worked at Microsoft, we had quite a few talented female engineers on our team. I don't think at any point their gender was brought into question or discussion. We'd just solve problems, write code and have the occasional team lunch where we'd talk about the latest software paradigms, competition etc and go home.
  • noir_lord 13y ago
    I completely agree. I don't have any insights into start up culture (the only one I've actually been involved in is mine, There are two of us.) but I have worked for massive companies where management was pretty evenly divided by gender and have never personally witnessed anything untoward (or actually heard about and that place was a gossip mill).
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • MarkTee 13y ago
    She didn't give any names, so I don't think it counts as "publicly shaming him". I don't think that she should have been the one to suggest he seek professional help, either. The guy professed his love to her, refused to leave her house (it sounds like they were alone), and then went on to act passive-aggressively and sabotage her work. I wouldn't blame her one bit if she felt uncomfortable or even unsafe working around him.
  • jackowayed 13y ago
    This guy may need therapy. That's not her problem. It's terrible that anyone should experience what he put her through. (Regardless of the founder's wife stuff, he produced an exceptionally hostile work environment by actively undoing her work, plus likely made her fear for her safety when he did not immediately respect her requests to leave after professing his love.) It's problematic that women in tech are much more likely to experience this than men (because of gender ratios and men tending to be more forward), and that the power dynamics and implicit threat of violence will also tend to be worse when women are the recipients of the attention. Given this, having your first response be to ask her to be empathetic is ridiculous. Do we ask the victims of shootings to empathize with the perpetrators who had mental illness, had absentee parents, grew up poor, etc? Sometimes these issues come up in the wake of tragedies, and they are an important part of understanding the problem. But the victim is the absolute last person to ask the be empathetic. She has an unquestionable right to feel personally safe and to do her work without others hostilely inhibiting her. When someone infringes on that, she's already being unfairly burdened. It's completely unfair to further burden her with an imperative to be understanding of what lead him to be the kind of person that would do that, rather than take every measure to remedy the situation, and to call out GitHub for failing to adequately do so. Yes, it would be great if everyone empathized with those who wrong them. But until it becomes commonplace for people to show understanding toward people who mug them on the street because anyone willing to risk their safety and freedom for a few hundred dollars has likely hard a very hard life rather than reporting it to the police and seeking their imprisonment, let's focus on big, clear concerns: What he did to her was completely unacceptable, and if GitHub failed to quickly take action to end it and ensure it would not happen again, they deserve to be publicly shamed.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• hrktb 13y ago
  There seem to be a lot of "it's not the organization, just some bad apples", but if individuals do shitty things and the organization (HR, the other founders, colleagues) can't do much about it, it's a company culture problem. The simple fact that a non employee (founder's wife) can boast influence on the decisions, stay at will on the work floor and just gets moved to another floor after proven problematic behavior feels horribly fucked up from an organizational perspective. And then every other aspects of this story are so shitty, and these happen so much in companies where indivuals wield so much more power that what their job title says. Of course, it's assuming the fact of the article are true.
• drawkbox 13y ago
  I think that is one benefit remote offices have is there are less chances for events like this to take place. Being confined to one space everyday with people for years will lead to dust ups, cultural clashes, personality clashes etc. How they are handled is important, it doesn't appear it was handled correctly here. High school politics are in effect at every office and I see this as more that than sexism. We live free but the office can turn into a strange authoritarian empire with banana republic like alliances. Growth at companies can also cause cultural clashes and problems similar to this with people getting wronged. Disappointed to hear it also goes on in github.
  • vellum 13y ago
    I think that is one benefit remote offices have is there are less chances for events like this to take place. I take it you've never played WoW? :) I've seen the same high school drama replay over and over, both online and offline. It's more a function of being human, than it is the environment.
• oh_sigh 13y ago
  Is there anything to comment on? the allegations should be looked in to, but right now, it is the word of a single disgruntled employee.
• enneff 13y ago
  If you are one of the people in this thread jumping to defend GitHub in this situation, ask yourself why. GitHub are perfectly capable of defending themselves. They are the group in power here. Second-guessing the motives and truth of this woman's story does nothing but undermine her, and undermine the confidence of others who may have similar stories (at GitHub or elsewhere).
  • jd0 13y ago
    Well put!
  • stoptalkingshit 13y ago
    Yes, this person who can slander GitHub all over the twitterverse with the dreaded "sexist" label with no evidence is totally powerless. lol.
    • enneff 13y ago
      This is going to hurt Horvath more than it hurts GitHub. She's going to receive a torrent of abuse for speaking out like this, whether her version of events is accurate or not.
      • stoptalkingshit 13y ago
        And yet, she initiated that chain of events. You should think more carefully about what the word "power" means.
        • enneff 13y ago
          Are you aware of how patronising this response is? If you want to make a comment about the nature of power, make it. Don't tell me to think more carefully. I'm not sure precisely which event you're saying she initiated, but if you're talking about her quitting her job and then speaking out like this: you should think about why someone would put their reputation and livelihood on the line.
• kenster07 13y ago
  I'm glad that at least some of the commenters try to wait for both sides of the story before grabbing a pitchfork.
  • ivanca 13y ago
    Upvoting by itself is handing pitchforks. It's an article in techcrunch whom only care about heating things up just to get as much page views as possible, and they'll write many more articles about the subject until HN and other social outlets stop upvoting and sharing.
  • pekk 13y ago
    When only one side of the story is presented, it leaves everyone to piece it together and look at what was presented critically. If we just take whatever anyone says at face value when they aren't disclosing everything, we are definitely going to make unfair decisions
• notastartup 13y ago
  okay so from a quick scan of that article, it appears that a) she was not made welcome for whatever reasons b) founder's wife appears to wear the pants in the relationship c) founder's wife saw her as a potential sexual partner for her husband and wanted to do a preemptive strike. This incident does damage Github's street cred (if true), it actually sickens me that this engineer was bullied out of her job (if true), and this just is the final cherry on top of Homakov's discoveries of security vulnerabilities in github.
• anthonyshort 13y ago
  Probably worth mentioning that the hula hoop dancing happened at a Github party with a lot of people not from Github. It was also super badass hula hooping, not just regular dancing. Everyone was looking, men and women, because it was pretty awesome.
  • Udo 13y ago
    This info makes the last item of the article even more bizarre. I'm starting to think this was reported inaccurately by TC. Maybe she was really referring to a separate incident that happened at the hula dancing event, an incident we don't have any information about. Otherwise, this makes no sense.
    • kyberias 13y ago
      It makes all the sense when you consider the possibility that she might be a person that specifically collects even the smallest pieces of evidence to support her theories of sexism and bigotry in the workplace.
      • waterhouse 13y ago
        Or that the TechCrunch reporter is writing the story at a certain angle, and asked for anything that could fit into that narrative. I think that, in the context of a certain sort of modern journalism, a version of Hanlon's razor is called for: "Never attribute to ideological slant that which is adequately explained as linkbait and sensationalism."
      • pron 13y ago
        Sexism in tech companies is a fact whether this "smallest piece of evidence" supports it or not.
        • kyberias 13y ago
          Of course. It is also a fact in every single community of a certain size because there's always a number of that have sexist behavior.
• yeukhon 13y ago
  There seems to be several problems. Not entirely sexism. 1. Founder's wife asked Horvath out and gave her a lecture about who is the boss. Probably out of jealousy. 2. Founder's wife physically inanimate Horvath, making her unwelcome and scared. 3. Founder did not stop the wife and protect his wife. 4. Horvath was approached by a male co-worker and according to her her rejection had caused tension between her and that co-worker. 5. Horvath's partner is also a Github employee. 6. Another founder tried to step in but the situation didn't really resolve. 7. Horvath felt male co-workers gawking/staring/looking at female co-workers hula-hooping while sitting in a couch looked like someone visiting a strip club. This is more like a failed company management than sexism at work. A partner can help his or her partner looking after/helping/running a company even as a non-employee. He or she could send employees your homemade cookie or send them birthday card. It's okay to share thoughts with partner how to run a company, how to resolve people-people problem. But the founder should not let his or her partner to intimate anyone: HR, executives, managers, engineers. This type of behavior, I thought I would only see them in drama (well I guess you can say something about WhiteHouse...) The founder accused Horvath for bringing love affair into the company because she was/is dating an employee. The founder has a good point: try to avoid dating someone working with you. It's a beautiful story; but you can cause all sorts of mess. See this childish engineer who was rejected by Horvath became angry at her and started ripping her code out. I have read about Github's open culture, but hey, how could anyone do that!? And yet no one seen to care internally at all because he's a popular figure in the company. Well, I can't say everyone in that company is shit because there is also a rank in any organization. I wouldn't go against someone senior or more popular unless I have to. This is also a bystander problem: unless we have to deal with it, let other people and the people in the story deal with the situation. While the founder is right about avoiding dating someone in your own company, he couldn't see that his wife (effectively meaning his own family problem) was also leaking into the company's daily operation. The other founder tried to help Horvath. The founder apologized and tried to restrain his wife from sitting across Horvath. But the wife continued to "spy" on her. She was welcomed to do whatever she want to do. Horvath tried to ask other executives to help for the very last time and none worked out. Either the founder was scared of his wife (love her so much he didn't want to yell at her) or none of the executives really care. Someone with management skill should have step in and tell the founder "stop letting your wife to come in!" Apparently, people fear the founder? and the wife?? Regarding the strip-club comment, I don't know the best way to avoid it. I, as a male, try to avoid staring at another female because I fear someone like Horvath accuses me of sexism. Maybe the guy was just bored or thought that female worker was beautiful. Staring at someone shouldn't be counted as sexism. It's hard. Would a female staring at a beautiful male count as sexism? I am not saying there is no sexism in work place, but I think Horvath's overall sexist experience might have been influenced/augmented based on her treatment in the company (no one stop the founder and his wife abusing power). But hey, I am just reading off the article. Her experience could be worse! I do feel bad for all the intimations she had to go through. I felt really bad as I was reading the article. Final point: Horvath then told her partner, also a GitHub employee, about what was happening. She warned him against being close to the founder and his wife, and asked him not to relay information to them. I have a mixed feeling. If I were in his situation, I would try to sort out the problem with the founder myself. But now that I read about it, I guess in the future, if I were in a similar situation, I would not talk it out until situation gets worse.
• ryan-allen 13y ago
  The wife sounds batshit crazy, but this behaviour is unfortunately pretty normal for some people who feel like they're in some kind of position of power. She asks a reasonably prolific female developer out to drinks and power trips all over her. It's just disgusting bigoted behaviour, and it happens with males just as often. I hope that whoever's founders' wife gets smacked in to line here to stay out of company affairs. But in the end, when companies are privately owned, the owners have a certain immunity to this kind of bullshit and get away with it. The probable outcome is that the wife will get a slap on the wrist while receiving crap-tonnes of likely dividends, which I'm sure will make her feel much better and well vindicated.
• hooda 13y ago
  Howsoever superman you are, you are powerless in front of your wife.. :) I would say that these things are unfortunate and can happen to any startup. Being a founder, you need to take action asap before things starts to go beyond control. Even if some investigation is done into this matter, I don't think anyone will be found guilty as it's a general behavioral/attitude problem and it won't go in matter of days. Let's stop this discrimination (howsoever minor) against women; we need to stand up and speak openly about this. And it's all the more important when a company is getting formed as culture of the company is defined in that stage.
• harshreality 13y ago
  The article quotes JAH's email as saying, "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." Certain people are extremely sensitive to what they perceive as improper or demeaning interaction, even when it doesn't directly involve them. JAH wasn't willing to let those women deal with it themselves, and doesn't mention even talking to them about it to see if they felt objectified. Instead, she talked to male coworkers, not specifically HR or a founder, about the wisdom of allowing women to hula hoop in the office? What's that going to accomplish? I understand her view that sexual undercurrents in an office makes things uncomfortable for some women, and I understand her wanting that toned down. But other women (including some feminists) have no problem with much stronger displays of sexuality, and feel it's an affront to women to suppress that. Both sides can't win.
  • unreal37 13y ago
    If someone were to hula-hoop to music in my office, male or female, I am pretty sure there would be a lot of people looking on. Not sure where the line of "looking on" and "gawking" is in that situation.
    • noir_lord 13y ago
      If both are straight and male looking on. If both are gay and male looking on. If both are straight and female looking on. If both are straight and male is hoola hooping with female watching looking on. If both are straight and female is hoola hooping with male looking on gawking. Is this not obvious, We are all uncontrollable messes of hormones and the self-control of a 15 year old boy apparently. If I was at work and women where hoola hooping I'd just go get on with my work (but then I hate goofing off at work, work is work).
      • 13y ago
• ww520 13y ago
  God. What an awful situation. WTF is the founder's wife meddling into the company's business? She is not even an employee. Githud is not a mom-and-pop shop. It's an corporation. This is just toxic.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• sgentle 13y ago
  Ouch. What a terrible situation. I'm holding out for the other side of the story, but unless you're willing to assume the entire thing is invented this is a major fuckup for GitHub. I think this is a classic problem with companies making the transition from small startup to regular business. Break down the barriers! Flat management! Kill bureaucracy and embrace no-politics DIY organisation! The article reads like an HR air crash investigation. Nebulous semi-employee with unspecified responsibilities related to a founder? Check. Unclear or absent grievance chain? Check. HR alternately over- and under-involved in disputes with no clear policy? Check. Off-the-record disciplinary meetings? Check. Founder adjudicates his own grievances? Check. And it seems like every single one of these problems could have been solved by a halfway competent manager. I mean, someone reverting your code because of a personal vendetta? Is that not like, a 5 minute conversation? "Hey, Jo, Dave's being an asshole and reverting my commits for no reason." "Oh, okay, I'll talk to him and make sure it stops." I read a great article a while back that I unfortunately can't find now, but it talked about a CEO who thought he was having a casual "hey, I'm interested in developing my skills, can you mentor me a bit?" conversation with another exec. A week later the office was ablaze with "so-and-so being groomed as successor" rumours. At a certain point you stop being able to just act like a regular person and have everything turn out fine. Red tape isn't always a straitjacket. Sometimes it's a crash harness.
  • m_c 13y ago
    I think the article you mention is Ben Horowitz's blog on 'How to Minimize Politics in Your Company'[1]. It's a great read and also has advice for CEOs dealing with disputes between executives. [1] http://www.bhorowitz.com/how_to_minimize_politics_in_your_company http://www.bhorowitz.com/how_to_minimize_politics_in_your_co...
  • buro9 13y ago
    > Nebulous semi-employee with unspecified responsibilities related to a founder? This is the point that stands out for me. That the wife is not an employee of Github but claims to be able to access private company chat records, and also is able to "work" from within the office and interact with the staff. Even with allowances that company property remains company property and private chat rooms are in fact non-private to the company... there is no scenario in which a non-employee should have access to those chat rooms. The wife, and the husband (founder), have displayed an incredible lack of professionalism here. There may even be a question about whether those acts are illegal if they are substantiated. And for companies that use Github to host private repositories, the question should be asked very loud and clear... "Who can access private company data, why, and for what reason?". If a non-employee can access information that is presumed (even by their own employees) to be private, then our (external companies) assumptions about what is private and secure at Github are weakened and demand very clear statements backed up with clear processes to reassure.
• greatsuccess 13y ago
  Don't ever work in a small company, or a startup unless you are prepared for close combat. Remember that in a small company, especially startups, everyone around you including the bosses wife, has something to prove. Through whatever means, work or socially. Usually both. Unfortunately having something to prove is basically the instinct of a prepubescent teen and has nothing to do with getting work done. Mix that with sexual tension and you have a problem. A big big problem. In college my gf worked for an unnamed insurance company where her boss would repeatedly invite her into his office to harrass her and show her naked pictures of himself until she finally quit. And this was a BIG company, so you can imagine how a small company run by social misfits would treat you. We have a long way to go folks...a long way to go.
• lancewiggs 13y ago
  What should Github do? My take: The founder leaves, at least for six months, and his wife has no further involvement ever. The clueless spurned programmer leaves, at very least works from home for six months or more but is preferably publicly fired. His behaviour is unacceptably unprofessional and as good as he might be it's not good enough to destroy a culture. The entire team (and many commenters here need this too) get coached on why its rude to stare at people, even if they are hula hooping or different. And of course a public apology (and hurry), financial support for an appropriate cause and make Ms Horvath financially happy. It will be interesting to see the actual response. The immediate one should be to stand all the protagonists down.
  • mercurial 13y ago
    There is always two sides to a story. That said, if what she claims is accurate, then yes. I'm not so worked up with the hulla-hooping. I'd probably "stare" at male coworkers hulla-hooping too - especially if they were doing if for show. As long as there is no suggestive comment/attempt to stuff bills in their underpants, I'm not sure where the problem is. I also agree with the posts above saying that a change in structure is needed. After a certain size, companies are like mini-states - they need strong institutions and establish a "rule of law" via standard practices in order not to become dystopias.
  • glitchdout 13y ago
    > The entire team (and many commenters here need this too) get coached on why its rude to stare at people, even if they are hula hooping or different. You can't possibly be serious.
    • lancewiggs 13y ago
      Not really - but the fact we have to even point this out means that some intervention is required.
• iamwil 13y ago
  Does it seem like it's not the whole story? It seems like there's a piece of the story missing from before the wife's chat over beers. It doesn't seem like the wife of a boss would ask a specific employee to one-on-one beers, unless she had a specific topic in mind. And boasting about pulling strings at Github seems like an unlikely purpose. To me, it sounds like something happened that was unmentioned. And the wife was asked to talk to her, in order to help settle the aftermath, and make sure she was happy there. (I'm not sure why the wife was deployed instead of HR) Seen another way, it sounds like the wife was trying to help make her happy at work, and not trying to boast. However, something went awry at the chat, and they seemed to end up not liking each other. Anyone else feel like the whole story's not being told here?
  • gojomo 13y ago
    Obviously it's only one side of a situation that spiraled out of control. Even if that one side comes from a generally reasonable, trustworthy person trying to give a full and balanced account – it will miss the mental states, internal rationales, and significant details that the "other side" experienced.
  • Tobu 13y ago
    The article goes back and forth in the chronology, which makes the story hard to parse. It's Horvath's very personal point of view, but the TC interviewer(s) should have tried to clarify it. Multiple incidents/hostility around pull requests are blurred, but there were a few notches of escalation there.
  • grifpete 13y ago
    I have a hypothesis but it's probably bullshit. If a) Horvath had felt for some time that she was in a hostile work environment and that she was being subjected to pressures that a male employee would not have to endure (ie sexist discrimination, and b) the company senior management / founder(s) felt that there was a risk that she was going to leave and go public with her allegations of sexism, then c) it makes a twisted kind of sense that the founder would send his wife to go talk to Horvath to try to negotiate some kind of truce, make her happy. The (unfortunate) logic being that a woman to woman communication might be better for defusing Horvath's concerns. d) unfortunately the wife, whilst female, handled it clumsily and make matters worse...and as the situation deteriorated she played an increasingly crazy and (apparently) unmanaged role. For all we know she had represented to her founder husband that she could handle it and panicked when things started going downhill. e) etc etc Like I said, it's probably bullshit...
• jw2013 13y ago
  I alway love Github as a company because Tom Preston-werner's storytelling of how Github is a company that optimize for employees' happniess. I hope Github can state something positive for this issue, otherwise it is a big hit to the company not only because of sexism, but also more importantly the losing of the culture of optimizing for happiness.
• Grue3 13y ago
  Wait, how is the wife of the founder pulling the strings "sexism"? It's the opposite if anything.
  • mcv 13y ago
    It's not sexism. It's a different kind of wrong.
• scotty79 13y ago
  Awesome piece of office drama. Github is a true corporation now. It would be good base for a movie script. I wouldn't watch because I don't like seeing people hurt eachother in believable ways.
  • atomical 13y ago
    That's good of you.
• seth1010 13y ago
  I'm interested in why so many people on that anonymous social network didn't like her so much. 'Made our jobs infinitely harder. Good fucking riddance.'
• gojomo 13y ago
  While the 'wife' aspect has drawn a lot of attention, it seems that through her marriage she may essentially have a founder's level of equity in the company. I don't know the personalities involved, but she might also have relevant professional experience, and/or have been genuinely helpful in handling thorny issues in the past (even if this case clearly escalated into many kinds of mutual suspicion and recriminations). So it seems you could replace 'wife' in the retelling with 'early investor and advisor', and be equally accurate, but without the extra (gender-loaded) implication of improper influence being exercised by some meddling consort.
  • stefantalpalaru 13y ago
    > it seems that through her marriage she may essentially have a founder's level of equity in the company What about the founder's mom? Or the founder's father? Or the founder's children? Or the founder's dear grandma? There's a reason why equity and investor/adviser roles should be clear and formalized. Bringing cookies at your spouse's work place doesn't entitle you to anything more than polite greetings.
    • greenrd 13y ago
      Marriage is typically associated with sharing assets and belongings. While some parents can be quite free in helping their children out financially, it doesn't mean you can just go into your parents' house and take their money out of their wallets without asking them.
    • GFK_of_xmaspast 13y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_property http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_property
      • stefantalpalaru 13y ago
        I don't think that property acquired during the marriage extends to jobs.
• teyc 13y ago
  Everybody should just back off and let Julie chill out before she damages herself further. This is not a general complaint against company culture, but a one that libels a lot of individuals.
• INTPenis 13y ago
  What is this, big brother?
• robobro 13y ago
  Hmmm. Here's my 2 cents. Every office has "that person" who causes/gets involved in drama, starts pointless arguments, or refuses to cooperate. Let's assume, just for entertainment' sake, that she got bored of working there, and asked herself, what looks better on my resume? Worked at GitHub, got bored/wanted a higher salary/wanted to do less work, left... or worked at GitHub and got bullied out of the marketplace for being a woman in tech, but is an honest and good person nonetheless? This is one of the few fields left in tech where men outnumber / outperform women, and I hope that changes, both because I believe in gender equality, and issues like this will be better handled internally (and someone looking to improve her resume can't pull this sort of act). And, well, after she makes these accusations, what are her former coworkers supposed to say? She's kind of poisoned the well, so to speak. Again, the way I see it, she's either tired of working there and this is her way of finding new work, or there really was an office full of awful bigoted men who all hated her because she was interrupting their boy's club. It'd actually work against her best interests if the latter were true. If she scared women away from working at GitHub and made them even more of a minority, then the few women remaining may be discriminated against further if gender discrimination's really a big issue. The worst case about the former being true (rather than the latter) is that women who actually are unethical, assuming she isn't, may find themselves able to play the gender card and find success in her same fashion. Either way, she getting big publicity for this is a "win" for her and a "lose-lose" for GitHub and the women who work there, unless they get a female-majority PR staff. How are we supposed to respond to this sort of problem? How are we supposed to assess the validity of this woman's claims? What are we supposed to do about it? This could serve as a good reminder to companies to have their HR's doors open or something, but for all we know she could be lying out of her teeth. From a philosophical (logical/rational/skeptical) perspective, this article is just editorialized, meaningless garbage. It's kind of sad, really... does anyone share my perspective? I'm just sharing because I hate bandwagons, I hate people jumping to blind conclusions, and I hate people burning witches (in this case, GitHub / anyone who defends GitHub, depending on the crowd). What I do know for certain is that GitHub provides a great service and I'll continue to use it until I can be shown that GitHub systematically and indiscriminately works against its female employees' best interests in an objective manner, and that they choose to ignore the problem in the face of overwhelming evidence and social uproar. As someone involved academically with philosophy, I am from a field also with notable under-representation / under-performance from women, for whatever reason. Maybe as a member of a "boy's club," I'm speaking out of ignorance or delusion. If I am speaking out of turn, I'd love to hear your rational response so I can correct it, and I'm sure anyone who holds a similar view would appreciate hearing what you have to say as well. (Shouting "Victim blamer!" or "Misogynist!" at me is not a rational response. It only makes you look like a fool. Personally, I'm most interested in seeing how enneff, who is definitely not a sockpuppet of the involved woman, replies.)
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• bowlofpetunias 13y ago
  I wondered how long it would take for one of these "no management" cults to unravel. Put people in charge (call them managers or not, whatever), and you may get the wrong people in charge. Put no one in charge, and the douchebags, manipulators and sociopaths will end up domination the culture. I prefer box #1, thankyouverymuch. At least those can be easily identified and removed before the whole thing has rotten to the core. And if I was part of a minority in such a company, like women generally are in tech startups, I would avoid #2 like the plague. Also, this is just begging for a culture were the founders will remain the only authority. And founders are generally not known for being very good at the actual day to day running of a company. The sexism is a red herring here btw. Could have been any form of bullying and manipulation.
• tiler 13y ago
  "I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.” --Isaac Asimov
• sunseb 13y ago
  BTW, it's not sexism at all, the main issue here is between two girls...
  • dwb 13y ago
    The word is "women". Would you call their male co-workers "boys" in the same context?
    • igravious 13y ago
      Oh give us a break, my Mum 60+ calls her friends 'girls'. The word hasn't been 'women' in ages. You people, sheesh.
      • dwb 13y ago
        (Late I know but) I said "in the same context". "Woman", "women" are very common words, but men revert to "girl", "girls" when they (usually unconsciously) are looking down on the woman in question. It should stop. As a term of endearment used by another woman it is clearly not the same thing.
• chris_wot 13y ago
  The thing I'm most concerned about is that a non-employee has access to private records. Will GitHub confirm that the founders wife didn't have access to information that is restricted? This sounds awful!
• h1karu 13y ago
  It sounds like Julie decided to start banging a coworker and then suddenly became surprised when drama arises in the workplace ?! Isn't she the one who obviously crossed the line first ? It would be one thing if she was with the guy before she got hired, but she met him at work.
• scoith 13y ago
  I definitely won't be the one to hire her next.
• scoith 13y ago
  Troll time http://www.darklyrics.com/lyrics/manowar/kingsofmetal.html#10 http://www.darklyrics.com/lyrics/manowar/kingsofmetal.html#1...
• _pmf_ 13y ago
  To me, spreading this out in public is a nice way to tag onself as unemployable / HR-risk.
• shiven 13y ago
  Can someone please explain to me why-the-f was a non-employee granted full and free access to other company employees, each and every day, on company premises, without mutual consent? What were the other co-founders thinking? This was a darn time-bomb waiting to explode. Just because you are a fancy-pants, hotshot startup and not a bigco, does not mean the same laws and liabilities don't apply to you. Founders, all that blood, sweat and tears will go down the drain if you ignore the stodgy, boring, beuraucratic 'nonsense' that was designed to protect humans from other humans, as soon as you have more than one human in your beloved startup. Humans will be humans, sooner or later; so you need to cover the proverbial mattress in waterproof covering, for there will be piss, eventually.
  • mattdeboard 13y ago
    "Red tape isn't always a straitjacket. Sometimes it's a crash harness." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7408600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7408600
  • grifpete 13y ago
    Completely agree. And it appears that the wife felt completely entitled to behave in this way. Just extraordinary.
• aashishkoirala 13y ago
  I know this is beside the point, but I'm just curious. What did Horvath do at GitHub? Design UI or write code?
  • greenrd 13y ago
    Both. Her career has taken her from cleaning, via marketing, to design and then front-end development. Quite a trajectory. (Not all at GitHub.)
    • aashishkoirala 13y ago
      Cleaning?
• LeicaLatte 13y ago
  What is the tech angle to this? Basically people fighting with other people over personal issues. Don't understand why techcrunch is covering this.
• amix 13y ago
  Allegation that a wife of a founder can read private chats at GitHub makes me question GitHub's privacy and security... I would love if we would have a statement of GitHub on this matter since it would be a huge privacy breach (and something that would make us move all of our private repos outside of GitHub). (posted this as a comment on the article as well)
  • joshbert 13y ago
    That is largely the stand out of the article for me. I know this story will be forgotten and buried in no more than a week, but until they address this, I'm going to use BitBucket instead.
• romanovcode 13y ago
  Can someone explain how does one gets a job after inflicting so much public damage on his previous workplace?
  • michaelochurch 13y ago
    Before I answer this, let me state that I'm a tactician, not a judge or a god. I don't know who's right and wrong in this mess, nor who's good and who's bad. Can someone explain how does one gets a job after inflicting so much public damage on his previous workplace? It's hard. She may need a professional to rework her public image (even if her account is 100% accurate) and she'll want to settle for positive reference (i.e. not sue Github, agree to a non-disparagement contract in which they publicly state that she was an excellent employee, and that they've terminated all responsible parties-- if the truth is that no one did anything wrong, then they don't terminate anyone and that statement's vacuously true). She might want to brand herself as an authority on workplace harassment and on what light-management cultures need to do to protect themselves from bullying, and maybe consult for a little while on how to make tech companies more accepting of women. All the while, she'll have to paint a positive image of Github, even if she dislikes the place (and may have a reason to). It'll probably be 4-5 years before she can get conventional employment at an appropriate professional level. At this point, she's made some serious tactical mistakes. For example, mentioning the hula nonincident dilutes/weakens her case dramatically. The bit about the founder's wife (if true) is utterly damning. The hula hoop? People stare at anything out of the ordinary. If it were men flying quadcopters, there'd be a group of people hanging to watch. Not sexist. When you take a story of someone (or a company) doing bad and flower it with irrelevant petty insults (they employ guys who stare at women!) it actually undermines the case that one is trying to make. If she can get Github to come out with a public story that makes her look good but also saves its face, that's what she wants. She shouldn't play for cash IMO. Considering taxes, attorney contingency, and the high risk that she doesn't get anything, she's better off putting her energy into getting her reputation fixed. Reputation repair and lawsuits are both exhausting processes that may conflict and certainly compete for one's time and energy, and so it's hard to do both.
    • greenrd 13y ago
• runewell 13y ago
  LOL, lots of founders will be sleeping on the sofa tonight after telling their spouse to stay the hell away from the office from now on.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  • F30 13y ago
    Wow. Those are some strong allegations for someone who admits they are completely unfounded.
    • deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
  • gruntmaster9000 13y ago
    Gross attempt at rationalizing inappropriate behavior. Plus, the male developer in your story would also be considered unprofessional.
• mynameisasdf 13y ago
  I can't believe that no one has spotted that she is exactly the same annoying feminist that forced the company to get rid of a rug because it used the term "meritocracy". http://readwrite.com/2014/01/24/github-meritocracy-rug#awesm=~oyFXbQA3ijTg0q http://readwrite.com/2014/01/24/github-meritocracy-rug#awesm... Tbfh, she sounds like Adria Richards v2.0
  • lucasnemeth 13y ago
    That rug was ridiculous.
  • ludicast 13y ago
    wow, thanks for posting this. throws some cold water on the situation. not saying she is right or wrong about how things went down with the founder's wife etc. but she clearly is insane.
  • wyclif 13y ago
    I found that episode terribly confused, and I never understood the rationale behind it. Isn't "meritocracy" a value and environment that feminists have told us over and over again is a positive development for women? Don't women want to work in a "meritocracy" precisely because their work will be valued and appreciated not because they are women but because excellence at work knows no sex, colour, or creed?
    • gruntmaster9000 13y ago
      Steve Klabnik explains it well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7405881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7405881 In short, it’s a not-really-present ideal that’s often used to mask the existing power relationships that are really responsible for people being promoted/demoted to where they are.
      • clavalle 13y ago
        The assumption underlying this analysis is that no merit exists outside of subjective value judgement. Furthermore, subjective value judgments are biased in favor of the existing privileged groups. Do I have that about right?
• waylandsmithers 13y ago
  Wow, what an absolute train wreck. I've only worked for medium and large companies with a borderline fantasy of hacking on a startup at some point. Seeing the dark side of what happens when you rip out the bigco controls that people tend to dislike really makes me think twice though. Sounds like you just wind up with an out of control frat house.
• UK-AL 13y ago
  Work culture at lot of startups is toxic regardless of sexism or not. Very inexperienced manager/founders running a company tends to be the cause, sometimes on powertrips. Its ok if your in the inner circle, a world of hell if your not.
• puppetmaster3 13y ago
  Sf is not a good place to be a n00b manager
• LeicaLatte 13y ago
  Given her history of leaking company matters and trivia in such a detailed way to a public blog like tech crunch, any company hiring her next is taking a big chance. The things that seem to have happened in this case happen all the time, everywhere.
• einhverfr 13y ago
  Hmmm..... I read this slowly and I see intimidation, but it is a little short on evidence of sexism. The evidence was a perception of sexism, but very little evidence of it. How much of that was in her mind vs in actual interactions with others (unless aggressive communication regarding pull requests applied evenly to both genders is inherently sexist). What I do see is something else though. I see a nebulous, bossless organization where the founder's wife is effectively running the political show. Call me old fashioned but that seems totally at odds with allegations of sexism. Reading between the lines I see something else going on. "I thought I could fix X" (where X is either an organization or a person) is something that never ends well. I hate to say this but the article did not make me sympathetic to Horvath. I have seen even in myself the tendency to try to fix an organization which was working (just in ways I didn't understand) and causing issues in the process.
  • joshlegs 13y ago
    I think you have a lot of good points. Let me just point out that aggressiveness in management is present IN EVERY INDUSTRY KNOWN TO MAN. I faced it pretty hard in the news business. Just because your boss is aggressive, and he's a man, AND you're a woman, doesnt mean shit for evidencing sexist behavior. People need to realize that aggressive management != sexism.
• blablabla123 13y ago
  Interesting how many aggressive comments there are on the TC article page...
• programminggeek 13y ago
  I would just like to say that this is not a "women in tech" problem. It's basically that the same dynamics that exist in high school often exist in business, especially small businesses. Replace the location: github with the high school cafeteria and it sounds like not unexpected behavior. I'm not exactly sure why women in tech think this is about being a woman or being in tech or working at a tech company. The same behavior exists in non tech companies and you can have equally screwed up relationships with coworkers and their spouses as a man. These problems are basic problems with people interacting with other people.
• lnanek2 13y ago
  I don't understand why she didn't see the founder's wife asking her out to a drink and saying she would work to make her very happy not as an opportunity. She could have asked for her own office at that point, or asked to not have to commit code anymore if the pull request feedback was too harsh and just run the pro-women project she was running, etc.. I would have loved that opportunity.
• marincounty 13y ago
  Github has designers? I guess I've been going to the wrong site? I see absolutely no design. It's all business look has always depressed me.
• xacaxulu 13y ago
  It's a shame that crying sexism is beginning to take on the trappings of Salem Witch Trials. Simply implying that what happened was the result of sexism seems to be enough proof that sexism was the cause. This is a nuanced case that probably has much more to do with managerial mistakes. The sexism angle in this story seems very forced and sort of used as a last minute boost to an otherwise boring story of bad management.
  • erikpukinskis 13y ago
    How is the current situation like the Salem Witch Trials? My memory is that in that situation people were burned at the stake for allegedly doing things that are actually physically impossible to do. Like casting spells on children. In this case, an employee has accused other employees of several fireable, if not illegal, actions. No one has been burned, or is in danger of being burned. Possibly some people will be fired, but no one has even been named yet, and ostensibly it will be left up to Github itself, and the courts. What am I missing?
    • Crito 13y ago
      During the 20th century, references to the Salem witch trials were used extensively to refer to hunts for people accused of doing things that were possible. Namely being a communist.^ Unlike witches, it actually is possible to be a communist, and it actually is plausible that there were communists in the Federal government. Comparing such communist hunts to witch hunts is not about comparing the nature of the accused crime, but rather about comparing the nature of the so called investigation. I have seen this explained numerous times on HN in discussions similar to this one. Several times I have explained it myself. I don't know if it is feigned ignorance and purposeful obtuseness/offense seeking, or if people are genuinely unfamiliar with the history of the term "witch hunt", but either way this is getting rather tiring. ^ The most prominent example of this is Arthur Miller's The Crucible.
      • erikpukinskis 13y ago
        I would object less to the term "witch hunt" which you're right has become idiomatic. But that's not the term that was used. The term used was "Salem Witch Trials". Additionally, I still think there is a qualitative difference between "this person is bad because they're a member of a group we don't like" and "this person is bad because they did a real destructive thing."
• thelastpizza 13y ago
  The hula hooping probably wasn't particularly sexual - I would be impressed if any of my coworkers could hula hoop. I can't. I suck at it. :(
• AgathaTheWitch 13y ago
  I'm not the first to mention it but for me the big issue is the wife having access to private company information. That type of thing really does make me start thinking about Bitbucket (any other good alternatives dudes?). I don't see a ton of sexism here though. A developer removing her code because she didn't want to date him isn't sexism. It's unprofessional as hell and possibly a fireable offense depending on the circumstances, but it's not about a generalized animosity toward women. The hula hoop thing too seems dumb. Maybe you had to be there? Were the male developers' tongues out? Were they making obscene comments? Two ladies hula hooping in the middle of an office is likely to attract attention. Are men supposed to immediately duck and cover and avert their eyes? Seems like she's over-reacting. Still, assuming everything stated in the article is true, it does raise questions about the founders' judgment. I really like Github and this situation certainly is disappointing.
  • krallja 13y ago
    > any other good alternatives dudes? Come try Fog Creek Software's Kiln!
• mark_l_watson 13y ago
  I believe JAH's story. I hope she gets another great job and puts this behind her. On a related issue, github plays a central role in the software development world, and possible signs of internal problems is troubling. It would be a good idea for the github management to properly address this story.
• tzakrajs 13y ago
  The sad thing is that this story didn't surprise me. Small to mid size startups are sometimes run by psychopaths. This is because their business scales faster than their fitness for running a business can be tested.
• dylanrw 13y ago
  Based on this article I see a few things, and some alarming ones that make me question the source. Also, hopefully to prevent me from sounding like too much of an ass, I'll use the following as the definition of sexism: "Sexism or gender discrimination is prejudice or discrimination based on a person's sex or gender." - The wife situation: Awkward/horrible. Either the wife is crazy with jealousy issues or we're missing a portion of the story. Presuming this is the entirety of the facts, I think it's plain that the woman isn't going around approaching male colleagues of the founder and harassing them. So I guess she's acting this way due to the JAH's sex, but it just sounds like a boundary issue to me rather than rote sexism. I'm surprised policy doesn't exist to prevent this sort of thing inside GH. - Rebuffed advances being handled poorly. I'm surprised that she's surprised by this, she's dating a coworker, she's introduced the concept of coworkers being viable dating options. Yes I'm sure she was approached because she's female, heterosexual males will do this. Male or female. Of course the person was disrespectful for approaching even if she was in a relationship, people will be clueless/rude, whether they work with you or not. The passive aggressive reverts, and the lack of power to abate them sounds like a lack of leverage on her part, and while she may chalk the entire thing up to her lack of pull due to being female, I see this as a symptom of the cabal syndrome you often see in self managed companies. - I think it's obvious that she's sensitive to sexist issues, even on the side of seeing it in places where it may not exist. There are even a few cases where she could even be exhibiting the behavior herself ie: Not talking to the hula-hoopers themselves (why are not capable of defending themselves?), claiming the men present were gawking (but not mentioning any other spectators), "always looking to meet women I can look up to." (I'd be seen as an ass by many if I looked for "men to look up to"), "confused and insulted to think that a woman who was not employed by my company was pulling the strings" what does the fact that she's a woman have to do with it? (This is a stretch I know but every time someone is mentioned their sex is brought up, why?) - The real major theme I see is, "I was treated poorly." Yes this happens, just not always to a highly public, touchy social subject-matter expert in this field, who then releases the story to the press (vendetta much?). It's a shame that theres dirt in the garden of Github, shockingly it's a real company run by real people. I'd carry on with making great software; always try and make sure I'm not putting up barriers (intentional or otherwise) to the entry of the just as capable minorities in this field; always strive to see the difference between true injustice and someone's poor decisions, their sensitivities, and a really messed up corporate experience.
• discardorama 13y ago
  I'm curious about the "hula hoop" issue that Julie is referring to. As a male nerd, I will admit that my social skills are a bit lacking. However: I don't see the problem with staring at women who are putting on a show which is clearly unrelated to their work. If 2 women started making out in the break room, I'm ashamed to say that I might just linger longer than usual.
  • heynk 13y ago
    It helps to focus on empathy in these situations. You may view their activities or two lesbians as making a 'show', but perhaps to them it is a personal matter which they would prefer to enjoy to themselves. Sometimes hula hooping is just embarrassing and it's usually awkward to have a bunch of members of the opposite sex staring at you while you do anything. I don't blame you at all for having those natural reactions. I do too.
    • mattdeboard 13y ago
      > You may view their activities or two lesbians as making a 'show' Well, he did set up this weird hypothetical as taking place in the break room
    • philwelch 13y ago
      If you don't want people to watch you snogging, you shouldn't be snogging in public.
  • tiredoflurking 13y ago
    You do have to realize the difference between hula hooping and making out. Hula hooping isn't even a slightly sexual act. Furthermore, objectification is a huge issue in the lesbian community, so in both the hula hooping and making out scenario, gawking is not okay and contributes to an already sexist power structure.
• soheil 13y ago
  "The aforementioned wife began a pattern of passive aggressive behavior that included sitting close to Horvath, to, as she told TechCrunch, “make a point of intimidating” her." Get a freaking life, go sit somewhere else if you see her sitting close to you. And are you a mind-reader? What if she wasn't being "passive aggressive" and just wanted to sit there! Unbelievable how as soon as a woman is involved in tech industry everything blows out of proportion. Again no one is winning, when a woman "stands for her rights", because when you stand up for your rights that means you have to be standing up against someone, that is a male or a female. If you're standing up against a female well you're not helping the women cause. If it's a male you make the industry look even worse than it is by portraying men as monster bullies who will do and say anything to destroy a "woman". The argument against men can only win if we keep repeating the same fairytales that we keep hearing from the likes of her. Geeks building an amazing platform like Github are different than the sexy attractive guys that you see on TV. Their passion lies with technology they are not here to gossip or put anyone down intentionally. We simply have better things to focus on than caring about your petty feelings. We're men building shit! Unless what women see men as changes drastically I don't see how men in positions like this would take women as seriously as other men. And by that I mean you can't think the guy must have a six-pack, not be nerdy, talk to you about your feelings when you're down. This is not reality but this is what women are brainwashed to expect from men in order to even truly respect them as human beings. This is mainly the effects of watching TV and other media, etc. Change your perspective about your enemy (stop calling men your enemies) and see if there is still such huge gender imbalance in tech.
  • kaoD 13y ago
    > What if she wasn't being "passive aggressive" and just wanted to sit there! ...day after day, staring at her, after a weird out of office interaction where she was openly aggressive? The wife was obviously trying to intimidate her and you seem to be the only individual trying to deny it. > If you're standing up against a female well you're not helping the women cause. Women can be sexist bigots just like men. > Geeks [...] are different than the sexy attractive guys that you see on TV. Geeks can be sexy and attractive too. Also: unsexy and unattractive guys can be sexist bigots too. Perhaps even more, since they might subconsciously want to backlash for their lack of sexual attention. > We're men building shit! You're exactly everything that's wrong with this industry. We're not men building shit. We're people building shit. You even intentionally left the girls out of the geek category! How do you think a woman will feel welcome when you tell her to shut up her concerns since "we're men building shit" and she's pretty much disturbing your work? How do you want her to feel she belongs with us? Let me guess that: you don't want to! You say they keep repeating the same fairy tales, but you seem like no fairy to me. - PS: I actually think this whole fiasco is not about sexism and she has disproportionately overblown the issue as gender warfare while it's just corporate politics. I just had to point out you are being sexist.
• sizzle 13y ago
  From reading the article, I got the vibe that the wife may have felt innately (territorially?) threatened by the thought of a (pretty) female in the company getting close with her founder husband in a more intimate, rather than professional, type of way. Thoughts?
• mattdeboard 13y ago
  Let's not be too quick to make this an indictment of no-management businesses. Even if you dismiss the hula-hoop stuff, the involvement of the wife, the lack of grievance resolution, & the under-involvement of HR all point to a serious lack of leadership. It doesn't take a management structure to have good leadership at an organization. It takes leaders. I have seen the "wife wearing the husband's rank" so much in my life. I spent a decade+ in the Marines, it's very common. I extrapolate from that that it's common in the world. The fact this was allowed does point to an environment where HR was either ignorant, complicit or complacent, otherwise they would have stopped this shit cold.
• rch 13y ago
  Maybe we need a new term for 'unacceptable workplace situation exacerbated by gender issues'. This story is more complex than what I expected from the title.
• patcon 13y ago
  I hate not understanding the politics of an organization and community I depend on so much. I dislike not knowing how to feel about all this. I can't help but be exasperated that the concept of an "open company" is not more common for such critical infrastructure as GitHub. I'm frustrated that I can't simply peer into all these private interactions and social exchanges and chat logs and make my own judgment
• fmax30 13y ago
  This sounds really bad . I am crossing out Github from the list of companies that i'd wish to work for.
• jroseattle 13y ago
  The impression this story leaves me with: - Github leadership is run by adolescents who behave as one might in high school situations. - Good luck to whomever says they worked in Github HR at this point in time. Your professional embarrassment is about to go off the charts. - Andreessen Horowitz gave these guys US $100MM. Yes, it reflects upon them too. But...I'd like to hear the other side of the story. As a manager for years, I've seen situations like this before (although not this sensational.) While the sexism word has been thrown out here, it's never anything as simple as gender. There are team dynamics at work, and those dynamics matter in context.
• joshlegs 13y ago
  I'm so fucking tired of this so-called "more opportunities to succeed" thing i keep hearing about. such a load of crap. you make your own opportunities. Period. That's been true of my life and everyone i know.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• ChristianMarks 13y ago
  If the allegations are true, I'd like to see a Kickstarter project to fund her litigation.
• dcope 13y ago
  GitHub employs a handful of women.[1] Have any others ever spoken out about sexism internally? Out of all these women why was Horvath singled out? Maybe I'm missing something but it really seems that this isn't adding up... [1] https://github.com/about/team https://github.com/about/team
• yawboakye 13y ago
  "On no one's word."
• digita88 13y ago
  This is a really important issue to talk about, not so much because of the sexism/female engineers angle, but because it deals with how start-ups are managed. TL;DR 1. Have legacy documents, guidelines and policies in place 2. GitHub needs to have a look within its management team and decide if they want to continue eating themselves to oblivion. 3. Similar to the hacker code of ethics, we need to work on getting MORE people into technology. We should not be excluding people out of technology!
• joyeuse6701 13y ago
  Talk about double standards. Get chastised for relationship with co-worker, When other co-worker impedes company growth (reverting commits) out of spite for rejection, they do nothing? Holy crap. It's hard to imagine this level of social dysfunction. Doesn't help for the reputation of engineers and technology being socially inept.
• allochthon 13y ago
  Without saying anything about the question of sexism at Github (which I know nothing about), I get the sense that Horvath is a complex character. It is difficult to know what is fact and what is spin.
• pekk 13y ago
  So she and another woman at work develop a bitter feud in which the other woman has the upper hand. Horvath reinterprets it as sexism and takes it to the press to hurt GitHub. If Horvath were a man, there is no way that HN would show this kind of support.
• uaygsfdbzf 13y ago
  She seems unstable.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• steele 13y ago
  Real Housewives of San Francisco. I couldn't really let myself read the entire TC article because of how it all seemed so sophomoric.
• Nelson69 13y ago
  This sounds terrible, I'm sorry what happened and I'm sorry it's all out in the open like that. While github may have some bad actors, I'm sure there are some decent hard working folks there and in the leadership team there as well. At risk of sounding like an a-hole, what has she done and why does she have a gigantic twitter following? Just out of curiosity. As with Adria Richards I can't help but think the social media power of the victim and then the public nature of the story has a radical impact. One or both parties is likely to receive some hate from the wild internet and that just doesn't seem useful or good at all. Not to condone or downplay or silence a victim, she could have just as well hired a lawyer, spoke with HR and followed the same channels that are followed at the IBM's and MS's and other big companies, all of which have had far more torrid things happening. If there is anything I can take away, it is that I'd be very careful with the kinds of social media I allow at my company.
• cwaniak 13y ago
  --- ATTENTION: THERE IS NO SEXISM AT GITHUB!!! --- Proof #1: Do I read it correctly that a woman got into fights with another woman -- and that is termed as "sexism" now? Give me a break… Proof @2: how came "sexist" is an organization that is under influence and control of the boss wife? Who doesn't even officially work there!!! Like, really? This is sexism now??? WOW!!! So, again: give me a break with this nonsense!!! Some old good venting: And finally, is this a forum for morons now who can't see through once they see a PC piece in the news? Because it seems to me so. HN is full of intelligent people but once PC piece is involved they all act like a band of brainless morons mumbling all marxist buzz-words from "equality" to "social justice". Give me a break again. And go back to coding.
  • slowmotiony 13y ago
    HN seems to me like the biggest pool of white knights on the internet.
• bsder 13y ago
  Maybe she was a victim, but the credibility of her position is heavily undermined because she is dating a coworker <facepalm> With that simple revelation, this isn't even worth following anymore.
• dobbsbob 13y ago
  Sounds like github needs a de facto employee grievance officer like a union shop steward who can sit in on HR meetings and advocate for the employee, or mediate petty personal disputes without involving the heavy and often unfair hand of management and go to the founder about issues with his batshit crazy wife.
• tsax 13y ago
  In Pakistan, personal vendettas are sometimes carried out by accusing people of blasphemy, thus deputizing the state apparatus in your service. http://www.fides.org/en/news/32696?idnews=32696&lan=eng#.UyYpD-ddXSI http://www.fides.org/en/news/32696?idnews=32696&lan=eng#.UyY... Thus, we now see the use of 'sexism' as simply a masquerade for bad shit that goes on, to deputize the internet hordes to serve your cause.
• danbmil99 13y ago
  Sounds more like a whole bunch of crazy than anything specifically related to gender. I could rewrite this drama with everyone being the same sex and gay and it would read almost identically.
• Karn 13y ago
  The founder's wife sounds like she was threatened by JAH being an attractive and presumably smart woman being around her husband. The founder sounds like a pussy-whipped loser who doesn't know how to set boundaries for his wife. Most of what JAH describes is unfortunately very believable. I've had resentful coworkers delete/overwrite my work in the past. That said, complaining about men staring at hula hoop dancers just sounds really odd to me. If someone is hula hooping in a non-private space, of course people are going to stare. Being geeks/nerds/people who generally tend not to have the most highly developed social skills, some of those stares may be awkward. Get over it. She wasn't even the one being stared at.
• sizzle 13y ago
  A coworker told me of his nightmare story from his previous job, where he was accused of sexual harassment by a fellow female co-worker. The crazy part was the HR process, where he was not told who made the complaint, or what was specifically said- so he could not defend/explain himself, let alone know if it was a lie. They did an internal investigation, sided with the female and he was fired. Is this a common HR process?!
• sizzle 13y ago
  A coworker told me of his nightmare story from his previous job, where he was accused of sexual harassment by a fellow female co-worker. The crazy part was the HR process, where he was not told who made the complaint, or what was specifically said- so he could not defend/explain himself, let alone know if it was a lie. They did an internal investigation, sided with the female and he was fired. Is this a common HR process?!
• sizzle 13y ago
  A coworker told me of his nightmare story from his previous job, where he was accused of sexual harassment by a fellow female co-worker. The crazy part was the HR process, where he was not told who made the complaint, or what was specifically said- so he could not defend/explain himself, let alone know if it was a lie. They did an internal investigation, sided with the female and he was fired. Is this a common HR process?!
• graycat 13y ago
  Looks to me that the wife of the founder was doing something that is common, 'protecting her man'. She was getting a bit carried away and using poor judgment and was apparently quite naive about business, but such things are not rare. So, it was two women fighting, very emotionally, and that's not rare either. The founder needed to keep his wife 'at home' or some such, but these days women resent such 'controls'. So, the wife was a loose cannon on the deck of GitHub. Maybe actually the wife was not a big problem except for the one woman in the OP. So, the situation was allowed to continue too far. And the woman in the story may have been a bit overly emotional about some parts of the story. Did the founder, the rest of management, HR, etc. do well? Nope. But who other than the founder was going to apply 'discipline' to the wife of the founder? Likely no one. So, there was some office politics, some clashes of personalities, some social discord, etc. Expect something else? Usually don't expect anything that looks, so far, this bad. But GitHub apparently has decided not to say anything until they have developed some good plans and a careful statement, and that might take a while. And in the meanwhile, the case will likely leave the headlines. I expect that the case will 'blow over' with relatively little long term harm to GitHub.
  • Fuxy 13y ago
    It may hurt githubs reputation a bit. I'm quite certain some women in technology will avoid them now but the reality is this has nothing to do with sexism. No guy would ever bother to create this much drama. This is clearly a girl problem. I got one thing to say to that github founder man up and keep your wife in check. What is she doing there to begin with anyway? Doesn't she have anything better to do then attempt to look important while harassing your employees?
    • graycat 13y ago
      > What is she doing there to begin with anyway? Commonly wives help their husbands with the career or company of the husband with a lot of help for the husband and nothing wrong. Of course, in this case the wife blew it, but maybe she was a pest mostly just for the woman of the OP so that others in the company didn't much care.
• nnq 13y ago
  I propose to show our sympathy towards the nice people at github by just forgetting this non-story ever existed. Or, it existed, but it was a whole different story, that had nothing to do with sexism and more to do with another woman being in a position of power and maybe using that for a non obvious purpose. ...witch hunts are cool and all, and they are even cooler when they are done "to save"/"for the rights of" women/children/etc., but you're only giving more power to the "troll" that started this in the first place, either her or someone using her, for god knows what agenda (I bet it's just part of power fight inside the company, and somebody tries to redirect some discrimination related anger collected from the interwebs against his/her opponent ...we really shouldn't let ourselves manipulated into joining this fight we know nothing about).
• Fuxy 13y ago
  Now that's a lot of drama but it has nothing to do with sexism or any abuse towards women in technology. For one thing as far as i can tell we're dealing with the wife of a founder that has delusions of grandeur and a founder who is easily manipulated. The very few allegations of sexism like some employee asking her out and the passive aggressively harassing her will happen in any environment not just in technology it's just the guy not being a man and facing the rejection. All you can say to him is grow up. I also don't see anything wrong in the guys looking a the girls playing with the hula hoops If the girls minded the wouldn't have done it what right does she have to judge them.
• bayesianhorse 13y ago
  The first reaction to sexism and racism in well-educated male circles seems to be "Well, there has to be SOME rational and objective reason for these opinions, so stop complaining!" The story certainly contains some element of "female politics" (which is neither good nor bad, just different). My theory is that these problems come from a lack of empathy, and that the use of technical skills does not improve the empathy skill. In order to effortlessly switch between empathy and technical thinking, some effort is required. For example meditation has been shown to increase empathy and improve social behavior in school classes and executives...
• debacle 13y ago
  I don't really believe that this can all be true, if only because I find it very unlikely that GitHub screwed up that badly from an HR perspective, especially one involving the founder. There is probably some measure of truth to it, but for it to be totally true would be a massive failure on GitHub's part.
• xcrunner529 13y ago
  I see 2 issues here: 1. HR seems powerless and there seems to be a very immature culture, inapproriate non-employee influence, and communication at Github and given that it is mostly young-males, may have a (perhaps inadvertent) gender bias that they do not see motivated to fix. This is a big problem and I think there can be a balance between not being stuck up and removing the "fun," while also being decent, well-meaning human beings. I admit it's a very hard balance that I think everyone is still trying to figure out in this rebellious stage of the stodgy era. 2. While I believe Julie's basic observations are valid, I agree based solely on her account so far that she was being treated differently and that there were inappropriate behaviors going on, especially with the wife – I do get the sense that Julie was considering a lot of normal societal behavior with gender-specific contexts. "Oogling" people isn't good, but it's a fine line. People are going to find each other attractive. And I don't think it's wrong, either. As mentioned here, finding someone attractive doesn't mean you discard everything else about them as a person. These things can work both ways, she just may see it from a different perspective because she's outnumbered. But this supposedly was at a party and so I'd expect looser rules there as it's not in a professional setting. There's a difference between inappropriate and just being human. All of this is a fine line and is why being human is hard and trying to manage people and create a positive, but also fun work environment is hard and we still have a lot to learn during these experimental phases. The issue really needs to be helping eliminate different treatment based on gender and sexuality rather than creating a specific type of culture. I do not necessarily believe we need to eliminate all sexuality or all fun or all emotions from a particular work environment. There can be different places and different people with different preferences can gravitate between them. I don't think going back to all stodgy, emotionless, and overtly-bureaucratic environments is a good thing. Like everything in life it seems, there really is a balance.
• jongraehl 13y ago
  Awful intimidation, my sympathies if true. But why is sexism even in the headline? As far as I can tell, 1. a coworker made advances outside work and acted weird/hostile when rejected, and 2. impromptu sexy hula hoop revue. Incidents 1. and 2. did warrant correction. If HR/founder wouldn't help when asked then I guess you could win a hostile work env. claim w/ a sexist flavor.
• FridayWithJohn 13y ago
  Sorry but I simply do not trust her. Anybody that "fights for the bad guy" for two whole years (she said "I regret defending GitHub's culture to feminists for the last two years. I'm sorry to everyone I've hurt in doing so.") can not be trusted now that she has just jumped ship. Lastly all this talk about her being a brilliant developer needs to stop. Take a look at her recent activity in her Github account: https://github.com/nrrrdcore?tab=activity https://github.com/nrrrdcore?tab=activity It is mostly just text changes! Oh and lastly anybody that thinks I'm a sexist, please note that one of the female developers I used to work with was by far the best developer the company had. She, due to her outstanding work, is now their CTO. Hard work and good skill always rewards people regardless about your sex. It is just a pity Julie wanted to play the old "sexist card".
• jdefarge 13y ago
  "Julie Ann, Adria Richards and Shanley enter a bar: the bar just explodes because it's a symbol of the patriarchy." But, seriously, I know various female programmers that I could trust not only my project, but my LIFE to. And as in the case of men, those are usually the low profile, highly productive, people. I doubt any "famous" developer this days in spite of gender/race/whatever. As with any hyped profession, there are a LOT of impostors trying to succeed without basic qualifications in computing. Hint: those are the ones who shout the loudest, have the highest number of followers on Twitter, but have very little, if any, REAL code on Github or any other public repositories. So... when the masks start to fell off they usually bail out their jobs loudly and pointing fingers to preserve their public personas. I doubt this is not the case of Julie Ann. "You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.", Abraham Lincoln
• AnonJ 13y ago
  I just don't understand. From this report, all persons involved look like kindergarten kids, herself inclusive. What's wrong with this world.
• AnonJ 13y ago
  Indeed the unauthorized access to office sucks. But what strikes me the most is the totally nonsensical(to me) sensational emotional reactions of each person. How can trivial, pointless things be blown out of proportion as to incite "crying"/"shaking" reactions, passive-aggressive behaviors, and even code-deleting? Are they really grown-ups, 30s & 40s, or just 3-year-olds? This is insane.