5 ms·

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

• 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.
      • Crito 13y ago
        If it is true and clear that the developer tampered with the codebase because of a personal issue with another developer, I am not even sure that is an issue to let HR resolve; I would want that developer fired immediately. Intentionally fucking with the product, or any other sort of company property, is inexcusable in my mind. Tanking the reputation of that developer is putting it nicely.
        • LockeWatts 13y ago
          I was trying to be measured in the language because I don't consider the TechCrunch article to be completely unbiased on the man, but yes, in general I agree. Intentionally sabotaging code should have you out the door on your ass.
          • kevinthew 13y ago
            It's straight up sexual harassment, which goes beyond sabotaging code. He shouldn't have made it through the day.
            • LockeWatts 13y ago
              No... this is the kind of response I find silly. That's not sexual harassment, it's being immature.
              • djur 13y ago
                Retaliation in response to rejected sexual overtures is one of the basic forms of sexual harassment. It's arguably a quid pro quo situation and absolutely qualifies as the kind of conduct that can lead to a hostile work environment.
      • MartinCron 13y ago
        If I ever saw this happen, I would reprimand the developer in the parking lot while the HR people were bringing his personal belongings down in cardboard boxes so he could go away and never ever come back. Seriously, some professionalism here, people.
    • zem 13y ago
      no. what needed to happen was that the guy should have been fired for deleting someone's code over a personal issue. "these two employees now didn't get along" makes it sound like there was fault on both sides, which is emphatically not the case.
    • greenrd 13y ago
      That's actually impossible at GitHub (as far as I understand their working practices) because they are not a traditional company. They use Open Allocation, which means that employees decide which projects to work on, and specifically, project leads cannot veto that.
  • zobzu 13y ago
    its super hostile. i would hope there are logs for this - but i wouldn't be surprised if there were none. as said higher it seems highly possible that she has no proof of anything - which means, if she's actually honest, she can't do much (except contacting a bunch of news sites and trying to make a big story out of it) imagine this "i did all this work but someone deleted it! worked 2 weeks on it!" while in fact you were eating donuts ;-) the problem is proof, when you have these allegations. if she has proof, then, she should sue them.
    • LockeWatts 13y ago
      It's GitHub, of course there are logs of code commits ;)
      • kansface 13y ago
        Unless he rebased!
• jkrems 13y ago
  There's socially awkward and there's openly hitting on a co-worker who is known to date another co-worker. And then not exiting as quickly as humanly possible. That's beyond "a little awkward". Saying this as a guy who is somewhat socially awkward.
• enneff 13y ago
  Why are you making excuses for these people? What purpose does it serve? I'm especially shocked to see you trivialise the actions of the jilted engineer. Reverting someone else's work without explanation is a blatantly hostile and disrespectful act that should be treated seriously in isolation, and is made more serious still in the context of the inappropriate sexual stuff.
  • zaqokm 13y ago
    > Why are you making excuses for these people? Probably because there are ample reasons why someone may revert someone's code for legitimate reasons.
    • enneff 13y ago
      Without discussion? No, there is no legitimate reason for that.
      • nknighthb 13y ago
        You're being ridiculous. Emergency reverts are normal and expected when production systems are down. I'm willing to stipulate this person's specific actions were probably hostile and unwarranted, but some sort of blanket "no revert without discussion" rule is just a way to cost your employer customers. Context is important, and we don't have enough of it to be certain of what happened.
        • enneff 13y ago
          You're right, context is important. But where I work we provide an explanation when a commit is reverted, emergency or not.
          • brongondwana 13y ago
            This. In one week I had to rip out two different things in the middle of the night. One was a simple revert, one was dropping an entire system which had taken months of work and reverting back to the old system. In both cases, I wrote a detailed technical explanation of why I had taken the action, and an apology for having to do it so suddenly, and I sent to to the entire group (a requirement anyway - if you make an on-the-fly ops change, you need to write up a full incident report so everyone knows what went wrong) Reverting always needs to come with a "this is what was wrong".
• potatolicious 13y ago
  > "but isn't it to be expected that employees of a tech company will be somewhat socially awkward?" Reverting people's commits and stripping their code out of vengeance isn't social awkwardness, it's completely unacceptable and unprofessional conduct. It doesn't matter what gender anyone is, or that it's being done out of romantic rejection, it's unacceptable. Full stop. Author's complaint is evidently less about being hit on inappropriately (something that we could charitably attribute to "social awkwardness", maybe) and more about how the rejection was allegedly handled (read: by professional retribution). You don't get to hand-wave the latter allegation as some sort of social incompetence. This borders on the "boys will be boys" argument. No, we don't get to excuse deplorably unprofessional behavior because someone is awkward. It's an injustice to those of us who are actually socially awkward but still know how to behave like decent fucking humans at work.
  • korzun 13y ago
    It's easy to assume things that were said without context. Was her code reverted at 12:00 AM because it broke the site? Or was it for something else? If so what? See how the context changes your opinion? Generic 'they reverted my code!' statement does not tell me anything.
    • potatolicious 13y ago
      That's why I qualified it with "out of vengeance". There are many legitimate reasons why you would revert somebody else's code, but doing so out of interpersonal conflict is not one of them. Note that I'm not commenting on the authenticity of the accusations laid out in this specific instance. My point is that messing with people's code because you don't get along with them - whether it happened here or elsewhere, and whether the perpetrator is male or female - is entirely unprofessional and unacceptable. It cannot be attributed to social awkwardness. Beyond the specifics of this complaint, we cannot keep falling back on the "hurr we're all aspies" excuse to explain away our shitty conduct. It is not only inaccurate, it is damaging and infantilizing to tech workers in general.
      • korzun 13y ago
• Jtsummers 13y ago
  He responded poorly (understatement) to the rejection of someone who he knew was in a relationship at the time. This is why I have a rule of never dating anyone who works where I work, not even in other departments. It just creates too much trouble. Once it's known that you date people in the office, others who are interested in you (but you may not be interested in them) may pursue you. Once you start rejecting them you can't give a blanket response of: I don't date people from work. Feelings get hurt, and people do stupid things once that happens.
• ilovecomputers 13y ago
  You're missing the point. From this story alone, it seems the company is run by individuals who never mentally developed out of high school. Those incidents you mentioned are merely a red flag of the immaturity of some of these people. Awkwardly hitting on an employee to a point of discomfort, messing with someone's work cause they turned you down to a date, creepily staring at an employee in the gym; you should at least know well into your 20s and 30s that is inappropriate behavior at a workplace. I would agree in that I wouldn't call this an instance of industry-wide sexism. The root of the problem is the immaturity at the leadership level of this company. If the leadership is as immature as this story is making it out to be, than these sexist incidents wouldn't have happened. Still, I shall reserve my judgment on GitHub until I hear more sides to this story.
  • gaius 13y ago
    it seems the company is run by individuals who never mentally developed out of high school Github is developed in Ruby. Enough said.
    • Pacabel 13y ago
      There does seem to be some truth to what you're suggesting. For whatever reason, there's a propensity for this sort of drama to occur within organizations and at events where Ruby and Ruby on Rails, or users of such technologies, are involved in some way. Off hand, I can think of that controversial presentation at GoGaRuCo a few years ago, the controversy about the diversity of the presenters at the BritRuby conference a bit later, and this matter here. Then there was that whole "Donglegate" incident, which while it occurred at PyCon, it involved at least one person with some ties to the Ruby community. I'm sure there are other events I'm missing, too. Maybe it's just the so-called "brogrammer" culture that's so ingrained within the Ruby world that's responsible. Regardless, for a community that's actually quite small, there seems to be a whole lot of this sort of strife.
      • krrrh 13y ago
        On the other hand, the ruby community just seems to have more women in it than a lot of other programming communities. Many technical communities simply don't have as many opportunities for these sorts of situations to arise. Other communities may also have less opportunities for truly great pro-women-in-coding projects to emerge. Last year the 3 people who started Rails Girls were honoured with Ruby Hero awards at Railsconf. There was near-universal support and genuinely excitement that something like this emerged within the community and had made such a strong impact in bringing women into the field. http://railsgirls.com/ http://railsgirls.com/
• agumonkey 13y ago
  How common is it to have your significant other hanging around at your workplace for no apparent reason[1], harmful or not, because you're the founder ? I'm still trying to process that. [1] IIUC github founder's wife had no role in his company right ?
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• cbsmith 13y ago
  > 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? Oh please, that's about as sexist and as hostile as it gets between programmers. I agree it should be expected that some employees of a tech company will be somewhat socially awkward --just as much as it should be expected that employees will be told that this kind of behaviour is totally unacceptable, and that companies ensure it doesn't happen. It's hard to judge without all sides of the story, but the one side does not paint a pretty picture of Github.
  • deleted 13y ago
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