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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, j

by 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.)

dfraser992 13y ago
> How are we supposed to assess the validity of this woman's claims? One source of information is data available about her past behavior, or reputation, or etc - unbalanced people hardly ever go off the deep end in the blink of an eye or out of the blue (unless they have abrain tumor or something like that, but that situation is rare compared to the majority of cases). As an example, let me explain my story: I got hired to build a website, somehow I turned into quasi-employee #1 / acting CTO. The main reason I was the ONLY employee for this B2B startup for 4 years was that the founders have anti-social personality disorders (the CEO is a full blown sociopath, which I can prove in court as I have the evidence) - the other founder merely has a criminal record for fraud. The wife of the CEO turned out to be a psychotically manipulative bitch... But I didn't know any of this when the whole company got started and the CEO was an acquaintance of someone I've worked with for over a decade. I made some mistakes, and got sucked up into the work - I finally realized the full nature of the situation when the CEO was caught blatantly lying to customers in order to make the sale (and expecting the customers to have zero recourse when they figured it out... dumbass) - the entire company was nothing but a hobby for a rich man and they were out to exploit everyone they could. Anyway the point is, my friend FINALLY admitted he knew there was something wrong with this guy and told me stories about his behavior when they worked together. From the stories, it was crystal clear this guy had significant psychological issues aka no ethics and everything fell into place with me realizing he truly is a sociopath. This was 30 YEARS ago... and other data I'd gotten from the CEO about his other business and the shady shit he'd pulled then... If my friend had just told me all this data at the beginning (he didn't want to "spread gossip" even though he knew it was true) I would have never taken the job. The record of people's behavior doesn't get lost in some black hole. That is one of the purposes of gossip within a community - to spread info that can't be disseminated normally due to social constraints or niceties. I am reminded now as well of that 'developer evangelist' who flipped out at some conference claiming that people behind her were being sexist even though the joke they told amongst themselves wasn't about here and she wasn't even part of the group. She had a history of being a nutcase (aka 'sensitive') as well, so given that, her complaints about sexism were quite unfounded. But does the woman in this situation have such a history? I don't know. I don't think so otherwise it'd be in this thread. And given my experience with lunatics, her story seems quite plausible - and that fact she tried to leave it all behind by moving on says a lot - if she was the out of control one, she, logically, would have an general attitude of 'entitlement' and entitled people always like to create drama because that is one way to gain and keep control. So her side is far more plausible and internally and externally consistent than anything I think the other side (GitHub) is going to be able to produce. I would myself be shouting from the rooftops about this sociopath and how this company is a threat to their customers and employees, but I can't figure out how to break the NDA. There is no contract anymore as they deliberately breached that... I realized I was dealing with experienced criminals who have been twisting the law to their advantage for their entire business life... so they undoubtedly will sue me into oblivion given a chance. That is how fundamentally evil they are. So I stay quiet and brood. But this woman has no constraints like that and I support her fully because shit like this needs to exposed for the good of all - people like this founder's wife who are not stopped only gain more and more experience in being manipulative and entitled and 30 years from now, she will be even more evil. If anyone who dealt with the people I did before me had made an effort to stop them in some way, then I (and everyone after me) wouldn't have had to suffer at their hands. Again, if I had the money for lawyers, I'd risk it, but given the nervous breakdown I had because of these people, I'm not up for it - YET. When the NDA expires, I will be spreading their name across the entire Internet.

by robobro 13y ago

dfraser992 13y ago

> How are we supposed to assess the validity of this woman's claims? One source of information is data available about her past behavior, or reputation, or etc - unbalanced people hardly ever go off the deep end in the blink of an eye or out of the blue (unless they have abrain tumor or something like that, but that situation is rare compared to the majority of cases). As an example, let me explain my story: I got hired to build a website, somehow I turned into quasi-employee #1 / acting CTO. The main reason I was the ONLY employee for this B2B startup for 4 years was that the founders have anti-social personality disorders (the CEO is a full blown sociopath, which I can prove in court as I have the evidence) - the other founder merely has a criminal record for fraud. The wife of the CEO turned out to be a psychotically manipulative bitch... But I didn't know any of this when the whole company got started and the CEO was an acquaintance of someone I've worked with for over a decade. I made some mistakes, and got sucked up into the work - I finally realized the full nature of the situation when the CEO was caught blatantly lying to customers in order to make the sale (and expecting the customers to have zero recourse when they figured it out... dumbass) - the entire company was nothing but a hobby for a rich man and they were out to exploit everyone they could. Anyway the point is, my friend FINALLY admitted he knew there was something wrong with this guy and told me stories about his behavior when they worked together. From the stories, it was crystal clear this guy had significant psychological issues aka no ethics and everything fell into place with me realizing he truly is a sociopath. This was 30 YEARS ago... and other data I'd gotten from the CEO about his other business and the shady shit he'd pulled then... If my friend had just told me all this data at the beginning (he didn't want to "spread gossip" even though he knew it was true) I would have never taken the job. The record of people's behavior doesn't get lost in some black hole. That is one of the purposes of gossip within a community - to spread info that can't be disseminated normally due to social constraints or niceties. I am reminded now as well of that 'developer evangelist' who flipped out at some conference claiming that people behind her were being sexist even though the joke they told amongst themselves wasn't about here and she wasn't even part of the group. She had a history of being a nutcase (aka 'sensitive') as well, so given that, her complaints about sexism were quite unfounded. But does the woman in this situation have such a history? I don't know. I don't think so otherwise it'd be in this thread. And given my experience with lunatics, her story seems quite plausible - and that fact she tried to leave it all behind by moving on says a lot - if she was the out of control one, she, logically, would have an general attitude of 'entitlement' and entitled people always like to create drama because that is one way to gain and keep control. So her side is far more plausible and internally and externally consistent than anything I think the other side (GitHub) is going to be able to produce. I would myself be shouting from the rooftops about this sociopath and how this company is a threat to their customers and employees, but I can't figure out how to break the NDA. There is no contract anymore as they deliberately breached that... I realized I was dealing with experienced criminals who have been twisting the law to their advantage for their entire business life... so they undoubtedly will sue me into oblivion given a chance. That is how fundamentally evil they are. So I stay quiet and brood. But this woman has no constraints like that and I support her fully because shit like this needs to exposed for the good of all - people like this founder's wife who are not stopped only gain more and more experience in being manipulative and entitled and 30 years from now, she will be even more evil. If anyone who dealt with the people I did before me had made an effort to stop them in some way, then I (and everyone after me) wouldn't have had to suffer at their hands. Again, if I had the money for lawyers, I'd risk it, but given the nervous breakdown I had because of these people, I'm not up for it - YET. When the NDA expires, I will be spreading their name across the entire Internet.