The point about money attracting the wrong kind of people is (I think) accurate. When a recently minted MBA looks at Github as a great career option, it's probably too late.
Ironically, that's why the money was invested in the first place, to be able to afford people like that, because the investors believe that creating a gamified system for money-driven people will result in a payout.
Github could have continued to grow organically instead of taking $100M. Since the $100M there hasn't been any significant new functionality on the web version of the site, and there have been fewer blog posts from the early team of people who many of us met and respected.
I assumed something was awry when Kneath left, he was a symbol of the culture at GH that was a legit, bootstrapped startup culture. He loved the product and evangelized it in a way that was clearly a labor of love.
The sexual-harassment stuff is unfortunate, but organizations of primates have things like that happen now and then, it's just rare that the victims decide to go public. This does not excuse it but it doesn't necessary say anything about the culture (I've seen female-founded, progressive firms tolerate very bad behavior from male employees).
Maybe Github should split into a corporate division and an open source division. The OSS division could make all of its work and decision making distributed and public, and the corporate division could do business development and attack new market opportunities.
> The point about money attracting the wrong kind of people is (I think) accurate.
We live in a time where moral hazard was effectively removed for people at the top of the economic food chain. The 2008 financial crisis should have wiped out the bad players, leaving them bankrupt and starting from the bottom to crawl their way back up. The bad bets, bad ideas and fraudulent practices that should have served as a cautionary tale to others instead became best practices. I don't think it is so much that money attracts the wrong kind of people, its that the wrong kind of people still have power because of crony capitalism.
Yes the 'sexual-harassment stuff' is unfortunate, as both accusations made by Julie Horvath appear to be baseless. Here's the second accusation she made:
Horvath had what she referred to as an awkward, almost aggressive encounter with another GitHub employee, who asked himself over to ‘talk,’ and then professed his love, and ‘hesitated’ when he was asked to leave,” TechCrunch reported in March. Hurt from my rejection, [he] started passive-aggressively ripping out my code from projects we had worked on together without so much as a ping or a comment,” Horvath told TechCrunch in an email. “His behaviour towards female employees … especially those he sees as opportunities is disgusting" (http://www.businessinsider.com.au/github-harassment-story-20...)
> The sexual-harassment stuff is unfortunate, but organizations of primates have things like that happen now and then, it's just rare that the victims decide to go public. This does not excuse it but it doesn't necessary say anything about the culture
Harassment does say something about the culture in which it happens. What you're pointing out, correctly, is that it's not exceptional for this kind of stuff to happen - that Github is probably not much worse than most other tech companies in this respect.
As you say, this is no excuse. Change has to start somewhere; we can't keep saying "oh, it just happens, you know, it's not worse here than anywhere else".
> Maybe Github should split into a corporate division and an open source division. The OSS division could make all of its work and decision making distributed and public, and the corporate division could do business development and attack new market opportunities.
I would like that, but how would it make investors money? If the answer is "it doesn't", then it won't happen.
Interesting how so casually you assume there was sexual harassment. As spangry notes later in this thread (https://github.com/blog/1826-follow-up-to-the-investigation), there was an apparently thorough investigation by a reputed external investigator who found that the claims were false. There is/was no culture of harassment in GitHub.
And yet this single person's claim was enough to force out the CEO and tar GitHub with the "harassment" reputation.
I had not seen that post about the investigation before; it's very enlightening, and I upvoted spangry for linking it.
My default assumption is that when there are claims of harassment, there is some substance to them, even if the specifics are wrong. Bringing forward claims of harassment in the tech world turns your life (and that of the accused, if their name is publicized) into a shitstorm; people don't tend to do that without reason. But this is just a heuristic. It looks like Horvath's claims of harassment might be unsubstantiated in this case.
It's hard to tell, though, because most of the things she complains about (with the exception of the code-review stuff, which appears to be just false, which is worrying) is unverifiable outside of he-said/she-said. Note the noncommittal wording: "The investigation found no information to support misconduct or opportunistic behavior by the engineer against Julie or any other female employees in the workplace." No information to support suggests "neither evidence for or against". Which is natural. Harassment is hard to prove or disprove precisely because it usually doesn't leave evidence.
> there was an apparently thorough investigation by a reputed external investigator who found that the claims were false. [...] And yet this single person's claim was enough to force out the CEO
Specifically regarding the ousting of the CEO, let me quote the investigation you linked:
> The investigation found Tom Preston-Werner in his capacity as GitHub’s CEO acted inappropriately, including confrontational conduct, disregard of workplace complaints, insensitivity to the impact of his spouse's presence in the workplace, and failure to enforce an agreement that his spouse should not work in the office.
> My default assumption is that when there are claims of harassment, there is some substance to them
So, you think we are alle guilty of harassment, until proven innocent?
I wonder what my fellow countryman Cesare Beccaria (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesare_Beccaria) would think about this kind of mindset.
> Harassment is hard to prove or disprove precisely because it usually doesn't leave evidence.
But we live in a legal system that is based on proofs, not on suspects or claims.
> and failure to enforce an agreement that his spouse should not work in the office.
Anybody knows that it's safer to jump in the mouth of a T-Rex than doing something like that. I think this is the reason he resigned: to save his marriage.
There is a difference between believing some particular individual is guilty of harassment and accepting that a harassment problem exists in an industry or company. If we want to convict someone, either in the court of public opinion or in a court of justice, we must hold ourselves to a high standard of proof. Better a murderer go free than an innocent be hanged, and so forth.
But if we're interested in whether the industry itself has a problem, in whether a problem exists, then we should take women (or anyone else!) at their word when they say they experience harassment, absent strong evidence that they are lying or mistaken. Otherwise, we are violating the same rule: assuming they are guilty of lying until they prove themselves innocent!
"There is a difference between believing some particular individual is guilty of harassment and accepting that a harassment problem exists in an industry or company."
You're right, and legal protections exist to protect individuals under these circumstances. It's a primary responsibility of Human Resources department to document such occurrences and justifiably fire bad actors when they occur so things don't devolve into 'he said, she said' chaos.
Instead there was no documented attempt at intervention. The woman in question reached out mass media to garner sympathy (a fireable offense in and of itself); 'he said, she said' was accepted as fact, and the man was asked to step down as a result.
"Better a murderer go free than an innocent be hanged, and so forth."
That's quite the slippery slope. The burden of proof exists to protect individuals from unjust accusation. Libel is a crime for a reason.
It's the legal and ethical duty of an organization to prevent from blindly taking sides in the absence of proof. Toxic, spiteful, aggressive, conniving, manipulative personalities aren't exclusive to any gender, race, creed, etc.
Considering the evidence after the fact, it seems that this was an organizational failure. As a result it set a bad precedent. GitHub lacks the ability to protect the well-being of its employees and worse, protection is exclusively granted to women.
To quote:
"Even so, we work in a world where inequality exists by default and we have to overcome that. Bullying, intimidation, and harassment, whether illegal or not, are absolutely unacceptable at GitHub and should not be tolerated anywhere. GitHub is committed to building a safe environment for female employees and all women in our community."
GitHub should be committed to building a safe environment for all employees. The resulting outcome proves that their neither willing nor capable of protecting the well being of their employees absent of institutional bias.
-----
As far as it concerns Tom Preston-Werner, he failed in his duty as the leader of the organization. From all outward appearances it seems like he's well aware of where things went wrong. Unfortunately, the damage is already done.
As much as we'd all desire to be friendly and personable with our colleagues, leadership should always maintain a degree of separation from those they lead. The military has clear rules about fraternization, well established businesses usually have similar rules. Startups are, well... startups. Their greatest strength -- to break common convention -- is also their greatest weakness.
It could be a PR and branding expense, to prevent a "Twitter Kills Ecosystem" event that drives away developers who have been evangelizing Github within large enterprises.
Preventing investor losses = making investors money.
> The right size. 300 employees is too few. Yahoo! has 12,500 employees, and is worth $33bn on the stock market. GitHub needs at least 5,000 employees.
It seems like your heart is in the right place but the quoted statement reads to me as a total non-sequitur. What model are you using to justify your calls for GitHub to hire 9x it's current number of employees?
What would these 4.5K new employees be doing exactly?
At the end of the day they provide a useful way to store and version control a code base, but the enterprise software market is very crowded and GitHub being in vogue could be a fad that gets eclipsed by something else, just like how HipChat was THE thing for teams until Slack.
Arbitrarily saying that "Google will birth AI and they need at least 1M employees to make it happen" is something that, in my opinion, sounds similarly vapid from any kind of quantitative or forecasting standpoint.
Would like to know how the figure was estimated, and how mentioning Yahoo is relevant in the least. They have a huge stake in Alibaba, and yahoos business model is a defacto investment company, with Yahoo standalone value [yhoo market cap - (yhoo stake in baba)*(market cap of baba)] around -15B last I checked. It's not even apples and oranges, it's like grapes vs dolphins - meaningless comparison
The author is being sarcastic. They are saying that, from the point of view of the "wolves", Github doesn't look like a $20bn company - so it will be made to look like one, by hiring more employees, changing the power structure, and becoming more enterprise-oriented.
He's laying out the strategy of what will kill Github - the Psychopath Code. It could have been made clearer, so I suspect many will read it the wrong way.
Those 4.5K employees will, I guess, be doing rather less than the past employees of GitHub. However they represent a weight of numbers that figures in any sale.
Why is having a high number of employees even considered a good thing? The true value of a technology company is in how much it can do with few employees.
The real value, and the perceived value to specific buyers, are two different things. Most technology acquisitions are about buying staff and clients. A GitHub engineer is worth much more to (say) Yahoo! than a Sourceforge engineer. (Even if they were hired only a year ago.)
I think the new management at Github is going to eventually alienate all of the users which have free open source accounts by introducing a monthly fee. They'll do this for 2 reasons. 1: To drive away the open source users so that the paying enterprise customers will feel better about using Github, and 2: to extract a revenue stream from the open source users which remain to cover the expenses of providing a repository.
I have several open source projects on Github, but if they try to extract a recurring revenue stream from me, I'll move the projects to another platform.
I have a few projects on github and bitbucket, and find bitbucket a joy to use (and free, even for private projects).
Obviously, bitbucket could decide to do the same shortly after github (as I'm fairly certain they made free repos available to attract github's customers, and free private repos to differentiate). In the case that it does, I'm not sure what I'd do.
Right -- I was wondering more where I would go for the social aspect.
As much as github is about just hosting code, it's also become a place where people who code/contribute to open source gather -- it doesn't seem right now like someone would just run a gitlab instance big enough to rival what github has become. Maybe the better question is when someone will step up to create that service/meeting ground.
I feel having open source project on Github is a benefit for the paying customers. You can hire employees already skilled at using it instead of it being a niche product that they have to learn. Not a major hurdle to learn it but it is a net positive anyway.
How does drive away of open source projects would make corporate customers feel better? They are related to me, but exactly opposite of what you said (open source projects test github features used by corporates).
It makes the corporate customers feel warm and fuzzy. All the resources used to support open source projects are redirected to the corporate users (i.e. the corporate users now have 100% of the attention of Github support)
You're sunk when you have an influential SJW who's going to enforce unrealistic demographics and ultimately drive out the "undesirables" who made the company work.
oracle is the only comparison I can remotely relate to what this individual is talking about. But heres the issue:
- githubs customer isnt opensource projects, its closed source. The masses moving away is a good thing
- as dependency on github increases, the larger of a liability for bigger companies. Google needs java for android, walmart needs npm for its servers, github likely has projects that are depended upon by bigger names though we would never know
- start ups and new comers likely hear about github before anything else. It is usually at the top for SEO. As this trend continues, dependence will only increase.
- are you able to break from github? At the moment, my community is the js community. There is a lot of crappy things happening in it but I cant stop using github, npm nor node. These are essential and convienient for me. Even if I agreed politically, realistically my workflow cannot change without waisting time.
I believe Im a libertarian intelligent coding machine like the rest of you. But this doomsday scenario sounds more like prayers than accurate predictions
I think the social effects of GitHub are very strong. It's the de facto arena for open source collaboration. By using it, a project signals that they choose the most widely used community, and thus encourage participation. It's familiar. Everybody has an account. There's built in GitHub support in package managers, even, so the namespace of "githubuser/project" is valuable.
Personally I'm not interested in another clone of GitHub.com. Let's try another model entirely. Something more distributed and federated. That way lies diversity and immunity to lock-in. Let's collaborate in an open fashion using open protocols and decentralized hosting.
Agreed. I also see very little value in simply cloning GitHubg, that's one of my problems with GitLab. I like it, it's open source and the perfs get better, but at the end of the day, it is a clone of GitHub. Not much innovation. I would love to say a player take some risk and try to present a new model and new way to leverage Git.
What kind of innovation would you like to see? We already added protected branches, integrated CI and many other features. Our current plans are on https://about.gitlab.com/direction/
It's an interesting topic but I don't have much to offer.
IPFS seems neat as an object store. Sign your commits and throw them into IPFS and you're good? Given a persistent distributed object store, it seems less obvious how to publish projects, refs, and pull requests.
If you hear about "Rails", you want to be able to find the actual consensus Rails repository master branch in a trusted way. Some semantic data on https://rails.org/ maybe? Then the namespace for repositories is just the DNS namespace... But that's just one way of getting the data; any source you can verify should be fine. So a signed message by a trusted Rails maintainer published somewhere. I was imagining a kind of NNTP reflog with PGP signatures....
I agree. Especially for OSS developers. Maybe some integrations are missing with tools to monitor repositories, or automatically download dependencies.
I would actually be quite happy to see GH's monopoly fade a little. I personally don't like this company, but mostly I don't like the idea of one repo manager to rule them all.
There are three aspects I can see. One is firms that use github internally, who have gone through the pain of learning to manage it. As long as the license cost remains less than the cost of moving away, they'll stay. Two is organizations who have complex team setups. You'll have noticed GitHub's increasingly complex team management? This is sticky. The more you invest in clicking on the right buttons the more you feel committed to the platform. The third aspect is integration with external systems like Travis. We've come to depend on this as part of our process.
Apart from those three cases, I think it's still relatively easy to switch to something like gitlab.
I migrated a few projects to Gitlab and pull requests and issues seemed to come over with only one problem, all issues were created by me. Not a horrible experience, but could be better (and maybe if the original creators had gitlab accounts, they would have been correctly assigned).
For those who missed it, here's the HN discussion of the recent article discussing the ongoing changes at GitHub (which was cited in the present article):
If someone I know and trust, someone close to me, says something, then yes I will take them at their word.
But media, and the law should not. The accused should always be presumed innocent until proven guilty. And the media has nearly as much power to ruin an individuals life as the law when they accuse someone. That power should not be exercised without good evidence.
Suppose a woman accuses a black man of sexual assault? Is it sexist to not assume he's guilty, or racist to assume he is?
We should give every accused person an opportunity to be presented with evidence and present evidence for their innocence before assuming anything regardless of the color or gender of the accused or the accuser.
I am also unhappy when someone downvotes me without comment, but in this case I think I can explain it.
Stating facts is not sexist. There is no sexism in that statement (if it's true). If you see sexism there, I am sorry to say that, but you're the one biased here.
> If a woman close to you were to suggest she were raped or coerced into sex, would your first response be "Show me the proof!"?
If I knew her, probably not, if she were a stranger, probably not the first response, but at some point, yes.
> Still shocked and saddened that some people around HN have this attitude. If a woman close to you were to suggest she were raped or coerced into sex, would your first response be "Show me the proof!"?
I think most people would take the word of a " woman close to you " but the important part is the "close to you", if it's between two strangers, " innocent until proven guilty " should apply as with any accusation of wrongdoing. The alternative is how internet lynch mobs form
What logic? He's making a factual assertion, not an argument. Unless you're suggesting accusations of criminal conduct don't require supporting evidence...
We hired Rhoma Young, an independent, third-party investigator that GitHub had never worked with before. Rhoma has a long history of conducting fair and impartial investigations, with 30+ years of HR experience. She has worked with every type of organization, from Fortune 50 companies to local governments, and frequently testifies as an expert witness for both plaintiffs and defendants in depositions, arbitrations, and in litigation involving discrimination, harassment, retaliation, disability, and mitigation of damages...
...We gave Rhoma free rein to review all the media reports, public allegations, and HR records so she could create her own investigation and interview plan. She identified three key issues that she focused her investigation on: the claims about Tom and his wife, the claims about the male engineer, and the general culture and working environment at GitHub... The investigation found Tom Preston-Werner in his capacity as GitHub’s CEO acted inappropriately, including confrontational conduct, disregard of workplace complaints, insensitivity to the impact of his spouse's presence in the workplace, and failure to enforce an agreement that his spouse should not work in the office. There were also issues surrounding the solicitation of GitHub employees for non-GitHub business and the inappropriate handling of employee concerns regarding those solicitations...
...The investigation found no information to support misconduct or opportunistic behavior by the engineer against Julie or any other female employees in the workplace. Furthermore, there was no information found to support Julie’s allegation that the engineer maliciously deleted her code. The commit history, push log, and all issues and pull requests involving Julie and the accused engineer were reviewed. The investigation considered all possible commits surrounding the accusation of passive-aggressive code removal... After interviewing over 50 employees, former employees, and reviewing evidence, Rhoma found nothing to support a sexist or discriminatory environment at GitHub, and no information to suggest retaliation against Julie for making sex/gender harassment complaints.
If you make an accusation, especially one like this, that could easily destroy the life of the accused, of course you have to prove your claim. Innocent until proven guilty. It's perfectly sound logic, it applies to anyone regardless of gender, and nothing about that is sexist.
Not nearly as infuriating as the demand that accusations of serious offences require no evidence when they are made by a woman against a man. Either come forward with your desires for special treatment, or stop preaching equality.
>If a woman close to you were to suggest she were raped or coerced into sex, would your first response be "Show me the proof!"?
What a weak straw man. If my friend said his neighbour attacked him, I would believe him without question, too. It's absurd to expect a stranger, and especially the law, to take the side of the accuser merely because they made the accusation, or because of the type of crime or gender of the victim.
Under the existing system, do you believe it is possible that men receive “special treatment”? Is the sh#tstorm that flares up when a woman (already a minority in tech circles) not a form of that?
“If my friend said his neighbour attacked him, I would believe him without question, too.”
Except when it comes to women and their ability to report sexual related incidents, this is not what we do as a culture, which, whether we acknowledge it or not, is directly related to the “type of crime [and] gender of the victim”.
I'm pretty sure the argument here was that most people would believe someone that is close to them. Someone that they know, someone that they trust.
However that wouldn't, and shouldn't be extended to a stranger without proof. Especially in regards to career damaging allegations and even more so after an independent investigation turned up nothing to substantiate her claims (other than TPW's wife working too closely within the company).
People like you, with your attitude, are doing much to undo all the progress that our society has made. The only one who sounds sexist in this conversation is yourself. Don't poison our communities with your hostility.
Women fought for equal rights, for centuries, and achieved this towards the end of the last century, by any measure. Feminism won the fight for equality.
You are setting the clock back, and asking for women to be treated as fragile, vulnerable, and unable to look after themselves. You are arguing is that a woman's claim of harassment needs no evidence nor witnesses. That women are so weak that to place a burden of proof on them is "sexist rubbish."
Claims of harassment are easy to make. As we know, it is easy to destroy a career by making such claims. It is also trivial to record conversations on a mobile phone, to get incriminating emails, to get witnesses, to get DNA samples. This is no longer difficult. One no longer needs to believe anyone's word.
This is why you are being downvoted.
Allegations of rape or abuse or harassment, by men or women against men or women (and the gender is irrelevant) must involve law enforcement, due process, trial, and conviction as defined by law. Period. You and I are not qualified to second-guess the legal system. If you feel the law does not protect you, go live in a country without it.
Around one in five of women and one in 20 of men have been forced into sexual intercourse against their will, in their lifetime. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_by_gender.
To deny that sexual assault happens against men is to live half-blind. Sexual assault in all cases is about power and gratification by abusive individuals (spread equally among both sexes) against the vulnerable of either sex (and the gender matters little to them).
>Around one in 20 of women and men equally, have been forced into sexual intercourse against their will, in their lifetime. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_by_gender.
"In a 2000 research article from the Home Office, in England and
Wales, around 1 in 20 women (5%) said that they had been raped at some point in their life from the age of 16 beyond.[6]"
"The same study found that approximately 1 in 21 men had been made to penetrate someone else, usually an intimate partner or acquaintance."
This is completely in line with original claim, "have been forced into sexual intercourse against their will". Wiki page does call this rape when it comes to women, but not when it comes to men.
I don't think it's intellectually honest to mix and match stats from different studies to fit your worldview. The study that has the 1 in 21 stat for men who have been forced to penetrate also says that 1 in 5 women have been raped.
I didn't see the full study. Thanks for pointing me to it. Indeed the figures are higher for women than for men. Let me edit my comment to reflect that.
Citation needed. By nearly any measure I can think of, women's political and professional lives are dominated by men's ideas and policies to an absurd degree.
Asking for consideration of others' differences is not putting the clock back -- we weren't even having the conversation a few decades ago. Talking about the nuances of that discussion now is not regression.
> Claims of harassment are easy to make.
Again, citation needed. It's not like someone can say the word "harassment" and then distance themselves from anything that happens afterwards and be free of all consequences. Since we're talking about GitHub specifically, how easy do you think it's been for Julie Ann Horvath to find a job? Regardless of whether I happen to believe her or not, the fact of her statement doomed her career among the more mainline professional networks of Silicon Valley. She's radioactive now. So, I wouldn't call that "easy" by any stretch.
> Since we're talking about GitHub specifically, how easy do you think it's been for Julie Ann Horvath to find a job?
It doesn't look like she's had too much difficulty on the employment front, based on her LinkedIn profile. The same month she left GitHub she got a job as Senior Designer and Web Developer (same title as she had at GitHub) at &yet in Seattle. When she left that job there was a 4 month gap and then she was Head of Design at Clef in Oakland. She left them at the end of 2015 and started the new year as a Senior User Experience Designer at Apple.
I don't think we can infer anything about job finding difficulty from that 4 month gap between &yet and Clef, because she moved from Seattle back to the Bay Area sometime in or near that gap, and it is not uncommon for people to take some time off between jobs when changing cities.
I'm not saying she was forever un-employable. But I am saying that like any other whistleblower in any other industry decrying her accusation as "easy" is an insult to what she went through.
EDIT: Hell, there's a flagged comment on this branch that proves my point: "If someone pulled those kind of stunts on you, I think your sympathy over their career would be limited also."
> As I've pointed out elsewhere: the original claim was "...[c]laims of harassment are easy to make". Are you voting that they are "easy"?
I'm not "voting" on anything, nor even offering an opinion on that particular aspect of your discussion with the poster above you.
You posed a specific question: "Since we're talking about GitHub specifically, how easy do you think it's been for Julie Ann Horvath to find a job?". I was curious enough to spend a few minutes looking at her LinkedIn and then a couple other public things of hers (a Medium article and her Twitter profile) to try to get an idea what the answer was to that one specific question from your comment.
Sorry, I read it as an attack on the argument as a whole rather than a straight fact-check. I knew her employment situation when I wrote the comment and thought the factual citations were refutations instead of context.
So yeah: I'm sorry I jumped down your throat for trying to add to the discussion.
That's a cute rhetorical point you've made, but I think the evidence for whistleblowers torpedoing their careers in the name of personal justice is pretty overwhelming. The fact of her eventual employment doesn't undo the damage she did to her career by making an accusation -- which is the point I was addressing from the original comment that "...[c]laims of harassment are easy to make".
Yes, it must be all part of the patriarchal conspiracy. It couldn't have anything to do with the casual dismissal of basic due process and presumption of innocence, particularly in the context of career-destroying accusations of criminal activity.
Ironically, that's why the money was invested in the first place, to be able to afford people like that, because the investors believe that creating a gamified system for money-driven people will result in a payout.
Github could have continued to grow organically instead of taking $100M. Since the $100M there hasn't been any significant new functionality on the web version of the site, and there have been fewer blog posts from the early team of people who many of us met and respected.
I assumed something was awry when Kneath left, he was a symbol of the culture at GH that was a legit, bootstrapped startup culture. He loved the product and evangelized it in a way that was clearly a labor of love.
The sexual-harassment stuff is unfortunate, but organizations of primates have things like that happen now and then, it's just rare that the victims decide to go public. This does not excuse it but it doesn't necessary say anything about the culture (I've seen female-founded, progressive firms tolerate very bad behavior from male employees).
Maybe Github should split into a corporate division and an open source division. The OSS division could make all of its work and decision making distributed and public, and the corporate division could do business development and attack new market opportunities.