To be honest, the entire problem IMO was always with the wife, Theresa Preston-Werner. She should have known better and I think it comes from her lack of professional experience in the workforce.
FULL explanation:
It comes down to the unrestricted access that was granted. It introduces a person with extreme power but carries no responsibility with regards to work or culture. The end result is what we have today. This type of culture is actually very prevalent in asian companies (where families have unrestricted access) and have been demonstrated to be extremely detrimental. Theresa Preston-Werner blog post is extremely telling where she says "I have many close friends at GitHub, and I certainly had reached out to them when I began to build my company". My wife made the same mistake at her first job (trying too hard to be friends), except that she was an individual contributor and not the wife of the CEO. Her co-workers could just tell her off and she quickly learned the balances that were necessary. It's obvious that Theresa had no experience of this kind and had too much power for people to say "no".
I want to add, I think there was an overfocus on gender issues by all parties (victims, plantiffs, media & company) in the first place. When I read the original article, I felt that regardless of the incident, Julie Ann Horvath was just pulling out the gender card. This was a mistake since it gave Github an easy way out to simply deny the gender-based accusations without any wrong doing.
Despite, being found not guilty of the harassment accusations, questions popped up regarding Tom’s judgment in a separate area. We learned that unnamed employees felt pressured by Tom and me to work pro-bono for my nonprofit.
The whole issue wasn't merely (the alleged) harassment as much as it was the appearance of 'undue influence'. The admission that GitHub forced out the co-founder for this very reason--all the while stepping clear of the topic of sexual harassment--is basically the crux of the matter.
I sort of feel that if this anonymous posting was 100% accurate, then the cofounder wouldn't have resigned. Better if the people involved came out and told the truth.
Not necessarily. Even if Horvath was the original bully, inappropriate retaliation can still get you fired.
Also, it may have come out in the investigation that the founder gave his non-employee wife way too much inappropriate latitude inside the company. She's conceded that she went too far with her activism around her startup. But especially if she crossed boundaries and had inappropriate access to private company information (as Horvath said she claimed), the founder could take the fall for enabling that.
If his statement is to be believed then his resignation did actually have nothing to do with JAH's allegations. I'm not saying that anyone is lying here, just that the anon posting is plausible. I agree with you that it would be better if everyone just told the truth.
Let's not go there. Incorporating random anonymous posts will only make things worse.
For all we know Julie-Ann started dating someone close to Theresa Preston-Werner who shared that he, and several others, slept with her and could even be the father of Tom's child and then refused to distance himself from Theresa. When she shared this sad state of affairs in her private love life with some colleagues she was suddenly requested to meet with Theresa and....
See how that's both consistent and perfectly plausible yet still went from bad to worse pretty quickly? These things are messy enough as they are; let's not make them any messier than they need to be.
>if Julie wants to share this story so publicly then everyone should at least have all of the story
the whole thing is crass and distasteful to my british sensibilities, but if this the future of how conflict in internet corporations is represented, then we shouldn't be surprised to see allegations from all sides. The key skills that we as audience have to develop is critical thinking, impartiality and a good sense of decency.
we shouldn't be surprised to see allegations from all sides.
The line is drawn at "anonymous internet sources". At least in the sense of euclidean geometry, that is not a "side" of the argument as much as it is a literary device to create an infinite attack surface.
Since you don't have a means of contact in your profile, I'm just going to tell you directly. That was an incredible turn of phrase. Really nicely said.
Anyone speaking against Horvath would be publicly attacked, and GitHub employees aren't allowed to speak of the matter. Unfortunately anonymity is the only option.
I disagree. We must treat every anonymous source as if it has that reputation for lying, as otherwise a source can simply become anonymous to improve the credibility of their lies.
Until, of course, a source presents evidence, at which point we evaluate the credibility of the evidence instead of the source.
Maybe not by definition, but it's almost irrelevant because a not anonymous source is so much easier to verify / disprove. Sure, in theory an anonymous source could be 100% accurate, but since they are very tricky to back up, they almost always have the effect of stirring the pot without resolving anything, and thus quite often appear as nothing more than attempts to do just that. And after a while, people unsurprisingly start to treat them as such.
Well, certainly it's significantly more credible if it's an actual Github employee putting their name on it and standing behind that sort of statement. At least in that case you would hope that the possible repercussions of making such a bold lie would prevent most people from lying about something like that.
https://medium.com/p/d96f431f4e8e