7 ms·

There appear to have been weirdnesses around the investigation, such as Julie Ann Horvath (and other ex-employees) remaining uncontacted until it was wrapping u

There appear to have been weirdnesses around the investigation, such as Julie Ann Horvath (and other ex-employees) remaining uncontacted until it was wrapping up: https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/453298152569720832 https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/453298152569720832 So I don't know how much stock you can place behind the idea that the investigators GH hired, who did not contact ex-employees competently, found them blameless. The resignation probably speaks for more than the investigation does.

hntaway 13y ago
An anonymous post on medium by github insiders: https://medium.com/p/d96f431f4e8e https://medium.com/p/d96f431f4e8e Unfortunate that it is anonymous, but it is still worth reading in my opinion.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - wlesieutre 13y ago
    Really? I must have missed the part where people were burned alive or had their heads chopped off.
    - wlesieutre 13y ago
      For reference, parent comment was along the lines of "Woah. This is crazier than Game of Thrones!" Maybe an attempt at humor, but it's really not.
- TodPunk 13y ago
  This is probably the most relevant article of the 6 or so I've read in the comments. It shows both sides as human and lacking good social management constructs for the situation. Reading several weeks of Horvath's twitter feed and several articles where she's quoted, it's apparent to me that regardless of what happened at Github, she is a bitter and dramatic individual. That's NOT the kind of person that backs down to the adult-talk at the table. Again, I don't know what happened at github, and I honestly don't care. What I do know is that I would never hire Horvath regardless of what she could do for the company. Far too much risk, and exemplified with a terribly immature response even if everything she says is true.
- stefantalpalaru 13y ago
  Those details completely change the story. Why not make them public when the scandal erupted instead of a month afterwards? Now that the subject is dead and buried there will probably be no journalistic investigation.
- leccine 13y ago
  Wow, this actually makes the rest of the story more clear.
- bitlord_219 13y ago
  It's telling that nobody would attach their name to the article. Horvath's already publicly laughed it off.
  - nailer 13y ago
    What was her alternate version of the missing events? It's hard to believe the techCrunch story when it starts so late in the game. If I was in a similar position I'd take it to court, but if for some reason I wanted to do trial by media, I'd be gushing with detail.
  - boklm 13y ago
    It's not telling. Whether what you say is true or not, in either case it would be risky to attach your name to something like this.
- hntaway1 13y ago
  obvious that it's z holman.
  - elliotanderson 13y ago
    Based on what evidence?
    - FireBeyond 13y ago
      "Recently promoted to lead the engineering team", which I believed was ZH.
- sseveran 13y ago
  This whole episode has reminded me that when I start my next company we will have a non-fraternization clause.
- neilk 13y ago
  Anonymous allegations are worthless unless other Githubbers can confirm this.
  - kelnos 13y ago
    Why? You'd still have the same sense of doubt as to whether or not the non-anonymous person is telling the truth. The only extra information you'd have is a) you'd know it was coming from another GitHubber who could conceivably know these details, and b) if you know the person, you can weigh the words against his/her reputation and past action. Not saying those two things aren't useful, but I would certainly not characterize this anon blog post as "worthless" by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, it makes the whole situation make a lot more sense. The original one-sided account from Ms. Horvath always sounded a bit implausible to me, at least without more information to frame it.
    - SEMW 13y ago
      > Why? You'd still have the same sense of doubt as to whether or not the non-anonymous person is telling the truth. The senses of doubt will only be ~the same if your prior for the probability of "someone out of ~200 github employees would lie about this and attach their name to it" is about the same as your prior for "someone out of the other ~3,000,000,000 people on the internet would pretend to be a github employee and make this up". The larger someone's prior is for the latter relative to the former, the more worthless an anonymous blogpost is to them.
      - neilk 13y ago
        Adding to what SEMW said: for all we know, this story could be pure fiction, written by the Preston-Warners themselves, or someone else with a strong incentive to do so. The fact that this story helps everything "make sense" is not a useful heuristic. Anybody can craft this kind of tale, and it might also be playing on our prejudices - the spurned, jealous, bitchy lover narrative. But, as for myself, I don't have to make any judgment, nor do I want to. I don't want to do is pick a side based on my prejudices and a few blog posts. By now we all should know that women are routinely harassed in tech companies to a preposterous degree. On the other hand, I've seen cases where mentally disturbed people invent (or self-delude) incredibly detailed narratives of persecution. We could be dealing with a situation where one, the other, both, or neither is happening. If you have evidence that settles the case, by all means please post it. Something that is clear is that Github's investigation was flawed. And if Horvath really wasn't contacted until late in the process, it certainly makes it look like Github was more interested in a coverup than the truth.
- LordHumungous 13y ago
  Sounds plausible, but without a name to back it up it is nothing but hearsay.
  - kelnos 13y ago
    Even with a name to back it up, it's still hearsay. I agree that it seems plausible, though, and does make a bit of sense given the rest of what we've all heard.
michaelt 13y ago
Hiring outsiders to investigate your management team for wrongdoing is like hiring outsiders to evaluate your environmental performance or to make recommendations on executive pay - possibly useful if you genuinely want to act on their findings, but equally often used to add a sheen of 'independent' legitimacy to whatever result you want. Outsiders know what answer you want, and know it's unprofitable to have a reputation for biting the hand that feeds them. To take a british example, back in 2006 the news of the world hired harbottle & lewis to do an internal investigation of phone hacking. Guess what, they didn't find anything. Edit: Clarified that if the person paying for the investigation doesn't have a conflict of interest or plans to act on the recommendations, independent (or even non-independent) investigations can produce results.
- leccine 13y ago
  Or hiring an outsider to perform a security audit. It never works. Right.
  - johansch 13y ago
    How is that even remotely similar in terms of conflict of interest on the part of the buyer?
    - leccine 13y ago
      You know a company hire another companies to perform a check. They usually expect everything ok. Audit comes, it turns out there is a security hole in the software, or your books are off or you threat employees badly. Nobody wants these, yet everybody hires external companies. You think that you can bribe a legal firm to give you a green flag on harassing employees and they gonna risk their reputation on 50K USD? I don't think so...
      - jessaustin 13y ago
        Accounting firms provide a pretty good counter-example here. Everyone thinks of Andersen, who actually had to close as a result of their "customer-focused" service at Enron, but actually all the "big" firms were implicated to varying degrees in the subsequent unpleasant business with CDOs. Any service business will hesitate to piss off the guy who hires them every year.
mef 13y ago
Theresa Preston-Werner's response https://medium.com/p/2fe173c44215 https://medium.com/p/2fe173c44215
- throwaway1991 13y ago
  Theresa is full of it. I have no idea what happened at Github but she's been telling people in New York she started Omakase because she's "angry with the tech industry." With that kind of attitude it's no surprise Github employees felt pressured into volunteering for her. She has admitted that she's not just someone excited about her new venture, she is beginning conversations with the idea that she knows what's best for the other person and that's working for her/contributing to her charity. Not to mention that it seems like the tech industry has done a lot for her family's life so it seems strange and ungrateful to respond with anger that other people in positions of less influence than her family has, are not doing enough for the world in some vague sense. Not to mention the massive hypocrisy that she is raising money from institutional investors as donors to cover operations costs for her non-profit which is ultimately a shakedown on salaried employees. There are things I agree with Theresa about, but asking the ultra-rich for money to support her venture to pressure regular people to give more to charity is nuts.
  - marshray 13y ago
    That does sound like a little more than the boss bringing around the Girl Scout Cookies signup sheet.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - tptacek 13y ago
    No, that's saying that Tom Preston-Werner was exonerated, and that a different problem surfaced during the investigation. It is not necessary for Horvath to have lied for that to be the conclusion reached. Misunderstandings happen.
DannyBee 13y ago
So, remember that what Julie says about them not contacting her is itself, and allegation. Her picture proves nothing, after all. Your conclusion about "how much stock to place" does not follow, since this allegation has not been proven true. Having been involved in this sort of thing before, both on the "asked to investigate" and "asked to play witness for an employee side", i'd say the truth always lies somewhere in between, and both employers and employees tend to behave badly.
- weixiyen 13y ago
  So how much stock we can expect to put into such investigations?
- Tloewald 13y ago
  > the truth always lies somewhere in between In my experience, the truth usually lies very strongly to one side of the spectrum, and sometimes beyond an extreme (as reasonable people often bend over backwards in giving their version of events, while unreasonable people do not), but you'll never find out for sure. E.g. in the Techcrunch piece Horvath says that the founder's wife spoke of having spies, and influencing HR decisions, and so on. I can easily imagine the conversation taking place over drinks, and it could be horribly sinister or it could be someone's not-very-well-judged attempt at humor. But this doesn't mean that "the truth is in-between".
  - DannyBee 13y ago
    You appear to have had very different experiences than me. Horvath said the founder spoke of having spies, etc. The founder says she did nothing of the sort, and blah blah blah I would thus expect the truth is "the founder said she kept in touch with goings-on in the company through friends" or something similarly in-between. Not "The founder has hired spies that prepare detailed daily reports" (which would be very strongly to one side) or "the founder has no idea what goes on in the company, and knows nobody" (which would be to the other). IMHO, of course. Maybe you have a different view of what it would mean to lean strongly to one side of the spectrum in that situation?
- deleted 13y ago
mmanfrin 13y ago
while there may have been no legal wrongdoing, the investigator did find evidence of mistakes and errors of judgment 'found them blameless'?
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
Nelson69 13y ago
More weirdness than the whole entire thing? I don't think you can read much in to anything here, GH painted themselves in to a corner and either had to deny the allegations or their seriousness or someone had to get punished. If she reported something to HR and it backfired, I think she should sue them, I really don't care about the co-founder's wife lurking around too much or who was friends with whom or who was sleeping with whom. That's pretty serious to me, so sue them.

hntaway 13y ago

An anonymous post on medium by github insiders: https://medium.com/p/d96f431f4e8e https://medium.com/p/d96f431f4e8e Unfortunate that it is anonymous, but it is still worth reading in my opinion.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- wlesieutre 13y ago
  Really? I must have missed the part where people were burned alive or had their heads chopped off.
  - wlesieutre 13y ago
    For reference, parent comment was along the lines of "Woah. This is crazier than Game of Thrones!" Maybe an attempt at humor, but it's really not.
TodPunk 13y ago
This is probably the most relevant article of the 6 or so I've read in the comments. It shows both sides as human and lacking good social management constructs for the situation. Reading several weeks of Horvath's twitter feed and several articles where she's quoted, it's apparent to me that regardless of what happened at Github, she is a bitter and dramatic individual. That's NOT the kind of person that backs down to the adult-talk at the table. Again, I don't know what happened at github, and I honestly don't care. What I do know is that I would never hire Horvath regardless of what she could do for the company. Far too much risk, and exemplified with a terribly immature response even if everything she says is true.
stefantalpalaru 13y ago
Those details completely change the story. Why not make them public when the scandal erupted instead of a month afterwards? Now that the subject is dead and buried there will probably be no journalistic investigation.
leccine 13y ago
Wow, this actually makes the rest of the story more clear.
bitlord_219 13y ago
It's telling that nobody would attach their name to the article. Horvath's already publicly laughed it off.
- nailer 13y ago
  What was her alternate version of the missing events? It's hard to believe the techCrunch story when it starts so late in the game. If I was in a similar position I'd take it to court, but if for some reason I wanted to do trial by media, I'd be gushing with detail.
- boklm 13y ago
  It's not telling. Whether what you say is true or not, in either case it would be risky to attach your name to something like this.
hntaway1 13y ago
obvious that it's z holman.
- elliotanderson 13y ago
  Based on what evidence?
  - FireBeyond 13y ago
    "Recently promoted to lead the engineering team", which I believed was ZH.
sseveran 13y ago
This whole episode has reminded me that when I start my next company we will have a non-fraternization clause.
neilk 13y ago
Anonymous allegations are worthless unless other Githubbers can confirm this.
- kelnos 13y ago
  Why? You'd still have the same sense of doubt as to whether or not the non-anonymous person is telling the truth. The only extra information you'd have is a) you'd know it was coming from another GitHubber who could conceivably know these details, and b) if you know the person, you can weigh the words against his/her reputation and past action. Not saying those two things aren't useful, but I would certainly not characterize this anon blog post as "worthless" by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, it makes the whole situation make a lot more sense. The original one-sided account from Ms. Horvath always sounded a bit implausible to me, at least without more information to frame it.
  - SEMW 13y ago
    > Why? You'd still have the same sense of doubt as to whether or not the non-anonymous person is telling the truth. The senses of doubt will only be ~the same if your prior for the probability of "someone out of ~200 github employees would lie about this and attach their name to it" is about the same as your prior for "someone out of the other ~3,000,000,000 people on the internet would pretend to be a github employee and make this up". The larger someone's prior is for the latter relative to the former, the more worthless an anonymous blogpost is to them.
    - neilk 13y ago
      Adding to what SEMW said: for all we know, this story could be pure fiction, written by the Preston-Warners themselves, or someone else with a strong incentive to do so. The fact that this story helps everything "make sense" is not a useful heuristic. Anybody can craft this kind of tale, and it might also be playing on our prejudices - the spurned, jealous, bitchy lover narrative. But, as for myself, I don't have to make any judgment, nor do I want to. I don't want to do is pick a side based on my prejudices and a few blog posts. By now we all should know that women are routinely harassed in tech companies to a preposterous degree. On the other hand, I've seen cases where mentally disturbed people invent (or self-delude) incredibly detailed narratives of persecution. We could be dealing with a situation where one, the other, both, or neither is happening. If you have evidence that settles the case, by all means please post it. Something that is clear is that Github's investigation was flawed. And if Horvath really wasn't contacted until late in the process, it certainly makes it look like Github was more interested in a coverup than the truth.
LordHumungous 13y ago
Sounds plausible, but without a name to back it up it is nothing but hearsay.
- kelnos 13y ago
  Even with a name to back it up, it's still hearsay. I agree that it seems plausible, though, and does make a bit of sense given the rest of what we've all heard.

michaelt 13y ago

Hiring outsiders to investigate your management team for wrongdoing is like hiring outsiders to evaluate your environmental performance or to make recommendations on executive pay - possibly useful if you genuinely want to act on their findings, but equally often used to add a sheen of 'independent' legitimacy to whatever result you want. Outsiders know what answer you want, and know it's unprofitable to have a reputation for biting the hand that feeds them. To take a british example, back in 2006 the news of the world hired harbottle & lewis to do an internal investigation of phone hacking. Guess what, they didn't find anything. Edit: Clarified that if the person paying for the investigation doesn't have a conflict of interest or plans to act on the recommendations, independent (or even non-independent) investigations can produce results.

leccine 13y ago
Or hiring an outsider to perform a security audit. It never works. Right.
- johansch 13y ago
  How is that even remotely similar in terms of conflict of interest on the part of the buyer?
  - leccine 13y ago
    You know a company hire another companies to perform a check. They usually expect everything ok. Audit comes, it turns out there is a security hole in the software, or your books are off or you threat employees badly. Nobody wants these, yet everybody hires external companies. You think that you can bribe a legal firm to give you a green flag on harassing employees and they gonna risk their reputation on 50K USD? I don't think so...
    - jessaustin 13y ago
      Accounting firms provide a pretty good counter-example here. Everyone thinks of Andersen, who actually had to close as a result of their "customer-focused" service at Enron, but actually all the "big" firms were implicated to varying degrees in the subsequent unpleasant business with CDOs. Any service business will hesitate to piss off the guy who hires them every year.

mef 13y ago

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

throwaway1991 13y ago
Theresa is full of it. I have no idea what happened at Github but she's been telling people in New York she started Omakase because she's "angry with the tech industry." With that kind of attitude it's no surprise Github employees felt pressured into volunteering for her. She has admitted that she's not just someone excited about her new venture, she is beginning conversations with the idea that she knows what's best for the other person and that's working for her/contributing to her charity. Not to mention that it seems like the tech industry has done a lot for her family's life so it seems strange and ungrateful to respond with anger that other people in positions of less influence than her family has, are not doing enough for the world in some vague sense. Not to mention the massive hypocrisy that she is raising money from institutional investors as donors to cover operations costs for her non-profit which is ultimately a shakedown on salaried employees. There are things I agree with Theresa about, but asking the ultra-rich for money to support her venture to pressure regular people to give more to charity is nuts.
- marshray 13y ago
  That does sound like a little more than the boss bringing around the Girl Scout Cookies signup sheet.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- tptacek 13y ago
  No, that's saying that Tom Preston-Werner was exonerated, and that a different problem surfaced during the investigation. It is not necessary for Horvath to have lied for that to be the conclusion reached. Misunderstandings happen.

DannyBee 13y ago

So, remember that what Julie says about them not contacting her is itself, and allegation. Her picture proves nothing, after all. Your conclusion about "how much stock to place" does not follow, since this allegation has not been proven true. Having been involved in this sort of thing before, both on the "asked to investigate" and "asked to play witness for an employee side", i'd say the truth always lies somewhere in between, and both employers and employees tend to behave badly.

weixiyen 13y ago
So how much stock we can expect to put into such investigations?
Tloewald 13y ago
> the truth always lies somewhere in between In my experience, the truth usually lies very strongly to one side of the spectrum, and sometimes beyond an extreme (as reasonable people often bend over backwards in giving their version of events, while unreasonable people do not), but you'll never find out for sure. E.g. in the Techcrunch piece Horvath says that the founder's wife spoke of having spies, and influencing HR decisions, and so on. I can easily imagine the conversation taking place over drinks, and it could be horribly sinister or it could be someone's not-very-well-judged attempt at humor. But this doesn't mean that "the truth is in-between".
- DannyBee 13y ago
  You appear to have had very different experiences than me. Horvath said the founder spoke of having spies, etc. The founder says she did nothing of the sort, and blah blah blah I would thus expect the truth is "the founder said she kept in touch with goings-on in the company through friends" or something similarly in-between. Not "The founder has hired spies that prepare detailed daily reports" (which would be very strongly to one side) or "the founder has no idea what goes on in the company, and knows nobody" (which would be to the other). IMHO, of course. Maybe you have a different view of what it would mean to lean strongly to one side of the spectrum in that situation?
deleted 13y ago

mmanfrin 13y ago

while there may have been no legal wrongdoing, the investigator did find evidence of mistakes and errors of judgment 'found them blameless'?

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

Nelson69 13y ago

More weirdness than the whole entire thing? I don't think you can read much in to anything here, GH painted themselves in to a corner and either had to deny the allegations or their seriousness or someone had to get punished. If she reported something to HR and it backfired, I think she should sue them, I really don't care about the co-founder's wife lurking around too much or who was friends with whom or who was sleeping with whom. That's pretty serious to me, so sue them.