9 ms·

The only problem for GitHub now is finding a way to attract talent. If your best response to "You have a hostile work environment." is "We don't have a prova

by ender7 12y ago

The only problem for GitHub now is finding a way to attract talent. If your best response to "You have a hostile work environment." is "We don't have a provably illegal hostile work environment." then that doesn't inspire great confidence when evaluating it as a place to work.

danielweber 12y ago
I can make that same accusation at any company you can think of, and the best response they could hope to give is "no, we aren't a bad place to work."
onewaystreet 12y ago
But does anyone actually think Github has a hostile work environment? There is a difference between misunderstanding and systemic hostility.
- CocaKoala 12y ago
  I would submit that at least one person thought it was a hostile work environment.
  - onewaystreet 12y ago
    At every company in the world you can find at least one person who hates their job or has problems with their coworkers. I'm not sure they are the person you go to for a fair opinion.
    - sheetjs 12y ago
      > the investigator did find evidence of mistakes and errors of judgment. GitHub isn't denying that there were problems and isn't claiming that her story is a complete fabrication. They merely said they don't believe they will lose a lawsuit over it. If anything, they validated that her opinion was fair
      - kelnos 12y ago
        If you read Theresa Preston-Werner's post (linked above), she claims that the "mistakes and errors of judgment" were completely unrelated to the harassment story, but were discovered during the harassment investigation.
        sheetjs 12y ago
        That's Theresa's claim (if we are going to play he-said-she-said we might as well be consistent). The official response does not suggest that the errors of judgment were unrelated to the subject at hand
        lobotryas 12y ago
        What makes Horvath's claim have any more bearing than Theresa's? What happened to "innocent until proven guilty"?
        sheetjs 12y ago
        A priori, Horvath's claim has no more bearing than Theresa's. That part is very clear and it takes a very strained interpretation of my words to conclude I automatically assumed Horvath was correct. My first comment was in response to onewaystreet's comment "At every company in the world you can find at least one person who hates their job or has problems with their coworkers. I'm not sure they are the person you go to for a fair opinion." The statement seems to imply that it was sour grapes and not an actual systemic problem that led to this situation. My response was that Github's official response admitted that there were problems (explicitly, mind you) but they believed they would win a legal case if it came to it. My second comment was in response to kelnos's comment 'If you read Theresa Preston-Werner's post (linked above), she claims that the "mistakes and errors of judgment" were completely unrelated to the harassment story, but were discovered during the harassment investigation.' That comment gave Theresa's story much more credibility than Horvath's. Now, this would be a standard he-said-she-said were it not for the fact that Github's reply doesn't refute Horvath's allegations. In fact, Github's reply implicitly refutes Theresa's claim: after all, if what she were saying is true, the official response would have made it clear that the investigation uncovered issues unrelated to the situation at hand.
  - justizin 12y ago
    Because tech companies have never followed any significant rules regarding employment, most tech companies are de facto hostile work environments, even if they try not to, because of the behavior of individuals toward each other. There's a culture that is changing, if slowly, but this is basically always the case. IMO what it means is that people should work extra hard not to contribute to a hostile work environment, or expect to be perceived as contributing to a hostile work environment at randomly unpredictable points in their lifetime.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- ProAm 12y ago
  I think a lot of people do.
weixiyen 12y ago
I believe they hired HR and put new policies in place. Chances are this incident will make it a better place to work than before.
- mtrimpe 12y ago
  True. Chances are also that our collective estimate of how great a place it is to work at are now more accurate. That probably says more about the mythological status they had before than about the reality now, but it of course will have an impact on their ability to hire though. It also should have, and it's normal, and it's how startups turn into big-corps, and that's just the way things are. The sad truth about culture is that a sustainable culture will feel much more like your parents home than your college dorm; and that will never change... because it's a good thing.
  - billiam 12y ago
    "The sad truth about culture is that a sustainable culture will feel much more like your parents home than your college dorm; and that will never change... because it's a good thing." That is the single best line I've read about work culture in software companies in......ever.
    - afarrell 12y ago
      This does depend on how dysfunctional your parents' marriage was. Though, I suppose a marriage in which both partners feel trapped is sustainably dysfunctional in that it won't end.
- jowiar 12y ago
  And this speaks, in many ways, to the purpose of HR. It's not good enough to say "We don't think we have a hostile work environment", or "Asking around seems to show that we don't have a hostile work environment". You need to be able to say: "Here's why there is no way we can have a hostile work environment, and how we're taking action to ensure we don't". Part of it is policies, part of it documentation of events, part of it is ensuring that employees feel they have a way to resolve situations. I read Github's statement as: "We don't really have any evidence of anything, so we're not going to say anything because we might get sued by one of the involved parties." That situation isn't a good one to be in (and letting an organization get into that situation is serious negligence on the part of leadership).
joshlegs 12y ago
news flash: 80% off work environments are hostile. Followup: that statistic is 75% made-up.
Bahamut 12y ago
The best talent probably won't be so quick/shallow/naive to pass judgment so quickly. It probably will challenge their recruitment of women though.
- astrodust 12y ago
  So "women" and "best talent" are mutually exclusive? Classy.
  - Bahamut 12y ago
    That was absolutely not my implication - that is an incredibly dishonest commentary on my post.
    - jacalata 12y ago
      It's probably not what you meant to say, but it is a plausible reading of the actual text - it's just a slightly awkward phrasing that appears to say 'the best talent won't care, but women might' which casts them as disjoint groups.
      - jacalata 12y ago
        I cannot believe the over-sensitive linguistically challenged group that must be downvoting that. Boy, doesn't it suck to know that sometimes words join together to have meanings and occasionally it includes one you weren't thinking of? Best approach is to say 'oh oops, I didn't mean that' and learn to construct your sentences better for next time. Worst approach is to deny that it could have meant that and learn nothing.
  - kogf04 12y ago
    Well the most followed projects on Github are led and created by men, so....
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- 12y ago
opendais 12y ago
I'd say the fact the offending party no longer works at GitHub is reason enough to give them the benefit of the doubt. Of course if this happens again, I'm willing to revisit that opinion. Shit does happen, regardless of the majority of one's coworkers best intentions.
nailer 12y ago
If you want to know if GitHub is a hostile work environment according to women who work there, take a poll of current and past female employees, including Horvath. I did. So far it's working out in GitHub's favour. But maybe I missed something, so do your own research.
- kenferry 12y ago
  That's interesting - want to give your numbers? I would think, however, that any sort of reasonable minority calling it a "hostile work environment" would indicate a problem.
- sneak 12y ago
  https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/458342995469688833 https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/458342995469688833 https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/458347143086870528 https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/458347143086870528 https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/458347574672388096 https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/458347574672388096
  - lawnchair_larry 12y ago
    What a drama queen. Hard to take her seriously with these antics.
    - TheRealDunkirk 12y ago
      I love all the random people piling on as though they're intimate with the parties or facts involved, taking 140 characters as a single data point to pair with their prejudices to draw a line to a foregone conclusion. It's a very strange time in the course of human development.
    - zorpner 12y ago
      Yes, this is a common rhetorical tactic used to dismiss the opinions of women when they address issues of sexism publicly. Thank you for demonstrating this disingenuous method of discourse so ably.
Nelson69 12y ago
Surely other women work there. Time will tell here, won't it? The story is dramatically more powerful if other women come forward. I don't know that it lessens things if others do not but it does create some interesting questions to those brave enough to ask them.
- AnthonyMouse 12y ago
  > The story is dramatically more powerful if other women come forward. This is dangerous logic. The court of public opinion is a feedback loop. If an unconfirmed accusation gets no traction then the most hardcore wrongdoers will escape justice because everyone is too afraid to come forward. At the same time, if a confirmed accusation goes unquestioned then someone who has made a false or exaggerated accusation has a huge incentive to cajole friends into making confirmations that are also false or exaggerated, and the more false accusations are made the easier it is for the original accuser (or the likes of Nancy Grace) to convince others to make further false accusations. That's why these issues are so contentious. Getting to the real truth is practically impossible because people form an opinion first and then produce evidence that comports with it, and that misleading evidence influences the opinions of others who do the same thing until the truth and the story have no relation to each other. It's an issue where you have to choose between punishing a lot of innocent people (and increasing the power and thereby occurrence of false accusations) or allowing a lot of guilty people to escape punishment. There isn't a good answer, and that makes people angry -- especially if you're one of the innocent people who was punished or one of the victims of the guilty people who weren't.
- malandrew 12y ago
  If this is a true systemic problem, the next person better be sure to actually collect evidence/proof of what happened and then clearly present facts instead of resorting to histrionics. If this whole thing were as bad as JAH has made it out to be, I would have imagined we would have already seen damning emails and other written correspondence backing up here allegations. As a company that doesn't most of its work asynchronously through written prose, it's not like github doesn't have oodles and oodles of written correspondence that would support her position better. There's email, pull requests, chat, etc. Given the duration of employment, she must have plenty of things to point at. If she didn't she should have made sure that some of the offending interactions were captured in written form at least once.
malandrew 12y ago
Can you show me a work environment that is not hostile to anyone? Every work environment has hostilities. The only way they each differ is in who is the recipient of the hostilities, the degree of hostility present and if that hostility is illegal or not. In that sense, the statement "We don't have a provably illegal hostile work environment" means exactly nothing, making Github no different than all the other workplaces you are evaluating. There are three sides to every side of a story... TPW's side, JAH's side and the facts. Given that all we really know are TPW's side and JAH's side and that we have no real facts beyond admitted errors in judgement, we really have no more information upon which to base judgement than before. I know of no company in the world provably immune from errors in judgement, do you? In other words, you and everyone else should evaluate github based on everything else you know about github and completely discount this entire debacle, since it has not shed light on anything that isn't as equally possible at every other company you may be considering.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- TheRealDunkirk 12y ago
  > Can you show me a work environment that is not hostile to anyone? That strikes me like saying that all sex is rape, it's just a matter of how violent or unwilling.
  - malandrew 12y ago
    Thank you for contribution. I'm trying to figure out which of the common relevance fallacies it falls under if anyone can help? Here are the possible options as I see it. * reductio ad absurdam * red herring * strawman * non sequiter
    - gamed 12y ago
      Reductio ad absurdum is actually a completely legitimate method of argument. There is nothing fallacious about it whatsoever.

by ender7 12y ago

danielweber 12y ago

I can make that same accusation at any company you can think of, and the best response they could hope to give is "no, we aren't a bad place to work."

onewaystreet 12y ago

But does anyone actually think Github has a hostile work environment? There is a difference between misunderstanding and systemic hostility.

CocaKoala 12y ago
I would submit that at least one person thought it was a hostile work environment.
- onewaystreet 12y ago
  At every company in the world you can find at least one person who hates their job or has problems with their coworkers. I'm not sure they are the person you go to for a fair opinion.
  - sheetjs 12y ago
    > the investigator did find evidence of mistakes and errors of judgment. GitHub isn't denying that there were problems and isn't claiming that her story is a complete fabrication. They merely said they don't believe they will lose a lawsuit over it. If anything, they validated that her opinion was fair
    - kelnos 12y ago
      If you read Theresa Preston-Werner's post (linked above), she claims that the "mistakes and errors of judgment" were completely unrelated to the harassment story, but were discovered during the harassment investigation.
      - sheetjs 12y ago
        That's Theresa's claim (if we are going to play he-said-she-said we might as well be consistent). The official response does not suggest that the errors of judgment were unrelated to the subject at hand
        lobotryas 12y ago
        What makes Horvath's claim have any more bearing than Theresa's? What happened to "innocent until proven guilty"?
        sheetjs 12y ago
        A priori, Horvath's claim has no more bearing than Theresa's. That part is very clear and it takes a very strained interpretation of my words to conclude I automatically assumed Horvath was correct. My first comment was in response to onewaystreet's comment "At every company in the world you can find at least one person who hates their job or has problems with their coworkers. I'm not sure they are the person you go to for a fair opinion." The statement seems to imply that it was sour grapes and not an actual systemic problem that led to this situation. My response was that Github's official response admitted that there were problems (explicitly, mind you) but they believed they would win a legal case if it came to it. My second comment was in response to kelnos's comment 'If you read Theresa Preston-Werner's post (linked above), she claims that the "mistakes and errors of judgment" were completely unrelated to the harassment story, but were discovered during the harassment investigation.' That comment gave Theresa's story much more credibility than Horvath's. Now, this would be a standard he-said-she-said were it not for the fact that Github's reply doesn't refute Horvath's allegations. In fact, Github's reply implicitly refutes Theresa's claim: after all, if what she were saying is true, the official response would have made it clear that the investigation uncovered issues unrelated to the situation at hand.
- justizin 12y ago
  Because tech companies have never followed any significant rules regarding employment, most tech companies are de facto hostile work environments, even if they try not to, because of the behavior of individuals toward each other. There's a culture that is changing, if slowly, but this is basically always the case. IMO what it means is that people should work extra hard not to contribute to a hostile work environment, or expect to be perceived as contributing to a hostile work environment at randomly unpredictable points in their lifetime.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
ProAm 12y ago
I think a lot of people do.

weixiyen 12y ago

I believe they hired HR and put new policies in place. Chances are this incident will make it a better place to work than before.

mtrimpe 12y ago
True. Chances are also that our collective estimate of how great a place it is to work at are now more accurate. That probably says more about the mythological status they had before than about the reality now, but it of course will have an impact on their ability to hire though. It also should have, and it's normal, and it's how startups turn into big-corps, and that's just the way things are. The sad truth about culture is that a sustainable culture will feel much more like your parents home than your college dorm; and that will never change... because it's a good thing.
- billiam 12y ago
  "The sad truth about culture is that a sustainable culture will feel much more like your parents home than your college dorm; and that will never change... because it's a good thing." That is the single best line I've read about work culture in software companies in......ever.
  - afarrell 12y ago
    This does depend on how dysfunctional your parents' marriage was. Though, I suppose a marriage in which both partners feel trapped is sustainably dysfunctional in that it won't end.
jowiar 12y ago
And this speaks, in many ways, to the purpose of HR. It's not good enough to say "We don't think we have a hostile work environment", or "Asking around seems to show that we don't have a hostile work environment". You need to be able to say: "Here's why there is no way we can have a hostile work environment, and how we're taking action to ensure we don't". Part of it is policies, part of it documentation of events, part of it is ensuring that employees feel they have a way to resolve situations. I read Github's statement as: "We don't really have any evidence of anything, so we're not going to say anything because we might get sued by one of the involved parties." That situation isn't a good one to be in (and letting an organization get into that situation is serious negligence on the part of leadership).

joshlegs 12y ago

news flash: 80% off work environments are hostile. Followup: that statistic is 75% made-up.

Bahamut 12y ago

The best talent probably won't be so quick/shallow/naive to pass judgment so quickly. It probably will challenge their recruitment of women though.

astrodust 12y ago
So "women" and "best talent" are mutually exclusive? Classy.
- Bahamut 12y ago
  That was absolutely not my implication - that is an incredibly dishonest commentary on my post.
  - jacalata 12y ago
    It's probably not what you meant to say, but it is a plausible reading of the actual text - it's just a slightly awkward phrasing that appears to say 'the best talent won't care, but women might' which casts them as disjoint groups.
    - jacalata 12y ago
      I cannot believe the over-sensitive linguistically challenged group that must be downvoting that. Boy, doesn't it suck to know that sometimes words join together to have meanings and occasionally it includes one you weren't thinking of? Best approach is to say 'oh oops, I didn't mean that' and learn to construct your sentences better for next time. Worst approach is to deny that it could have meant that and learn nothing.
- kogf04 12y ago
  Well the most followed projects on Github are led and created by men, so....
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
12y ago

opendais 12y ago

I'd say the fact the offending party no longer works at GitHub is reason enough to give them the benefit of the doubt. Of course if this happens again, I'm willing to revisit that opinion. Shit does happen, regardless of the majority of one's coworkers best intentions.

nailer 12y ago

If you want to know if GitHub is a hostile work environment according to women who work there, take a poll of current and past female employees, including Horvath. I did. So far it's working out in GitHub's favour. But maybe I missed something, so do your own research.

kenferry 12y ago
That's interesting - want to give your numbers? I would think, however, that any sort of reasonable minority calling it a "hostile work environment" would indicate a problem.
sneak 12y ago
https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/458342995469688833 https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/458342995469688833 https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/458347143086870528 https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/458347143086870528 https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/458347574672388096 https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/458347574672388096
- lawnchair_larry 12y ago
  What a drama queen. Hard to take her seriously with these antics.
  - TheRealDunkirk 12y ago
    I love all the random people piling on as though they're intimate with the parties or facts involved, taking 140 characters as a single data point to pair with their prejudices to draw a line to a foregone conclusion. It's a very strange time in the course of human development.
  - zorpner 12y ago
    Yes, this is a common rhetorical tactic used to dismiss the opinions of women when they address issues of sexism publicly. Thank you for demonstrating this disingenuous method of discourse so ably.

Nelson69 12y ago

Surely other women work there. Time will tell here, won't it? The story is dramatically more powerful if other women come forward. I don't know that it lessens things if others do not but it does create some interesting questions to those brave enough to ask them.

AnthonyMouse 12y ago
> The story is dramatically more powerful if other women come forward. This is dangerous logic. The court of public opinion is a feedback loop. If an unconfirmed accusation gets no traction then the most hardcore wrongdoers will escape justice because everyone is too afraid to come forward. At the same time, if a confirmed accusation goes unquestioned then someone who has made a false or exaggerated accusation has a huge incentive to cajole friends into making confirmations that are also false or exaggerated, and the more false accusations are made the easier it is for the original accuser (or the likes of Nancy Grace) to convince others to make further false accusations. That's why these issues are so contentious. Getting to the real truth is practically impossible because people form an opinion first and then produce evidence that comports with it, and that misleading evidence influences the opinions of others who do the same thing until the truth and the story have no relation to each other. It's an issue where you have to choose between punishing a lot of innocent people (and increasing the power and thereby occurrence of false accusations) or allowing a lot of guilty people to escape punishment. There isn't a good answer, and that makes people angry -- especially if you're one of the innocent people who was punished or one of the victims of the guilty people who weren't.
malandrew 12y ago
If this is a true systemic problem, the next person better be sure to actually collect evidence/proof of what happened and then clearly present facts instead of resorting to histrionics. If this whole thing were as bad as JAH has made it out to be, I would have imagined we would have already seen damning emails and other written correspondence backing up here allegations. As a company that doesn't most of its work asynchronously through written prose, it's not like github doesn't have oodles and oodles of written correspondence that would support her position better. There's email, pull requests, chat, etc. Given the duration of employment, she must have plenty of things to point at. If she didn't she should have made sure that some of the offending interactions were captured in written form at least once.

malandrew 12y ago

Can you show me a work environment that is not hostile to anyone? Every work environment has hostilities. The only way they each differ is in who is the recipient of the hostilities, the degree of hostility present and if that hostility is illegal or not. In that sense, the statement "We don't have a provably illegal hostile work environment" means exactly nothing, making Github no different than all the other workplaces you are evaluating. There are three sides to every side of a story... TPW's side, JAH's side and the facts. Given that all we really know are TPW's side and JAH's side and that we have no real facts beyond admitted errors in judgement, we really have no more information upon which to base judgement than before. I know of no company in the world provably immune from errors in judgement, do you? In other words, you and everyone else should evaluate github based on everything else you know about github and completely discount this entire debacle, since it has not shed light on anything that isn't as equally possible at every other company you may be considering.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
TheRealDunkirk 12y ago
> Can you show me a work environment that is not hostile to anyone? That strikes me like saying that all sex is rape, it's just a matter of how violent or unwilling.
- malandrew 12y ago
  Thank you for contribution. I'm trying to figure out which of the common relevance fallacies it falls under if anyone can help? Here are the possible options as I see it. * reductio ad absurdam * red herring * strawman * non sequiter
  - gamed 12y ago
    Reductio ad absurdum is actually a completely legitimate method of argument. There is nothing fallacious about it whatsoever.