This is the point that stands out for me. That the wife is not an employee of Github but claims to be able to access private company chat records, and also is able to "work" from within the office and interact with the staff.

Even with allowances that company property remains company property and private chat rooms are in fact non-private to the company... there is no scenario in which a non-employee should have access to those chat rooms.

The wife, and the husband (founder), have displayed an incredible lack of professionalism here. There may even be a question about whether those acts are illegal if they are substantiated.

And for companies that use Github to host private repositories, the question should be asked very loud and clear... "Who can access private company data, why, and for what reason?".

If a non-employee can access information that is presumed (even by their own employees) to be private, then our (external companies) assumptions about what is private and secure at Github are weakened and demand very clear statements backed up with clear processes to reassure.

This seems to me to be the major takeaway for organisations outside github from this sorry affair. I'm sort of surprised you are the only person to raise this so far.

In the UK, the employee who resigned could have a successful day in an employment tribunal. And one aspect of the hearing would be privacy and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act provisions.

The right to be sued for libel whenever they write something that someone else doesn't like?

Employment rights however are slightly better. The employee interviewed in the OA would have recourse to an employment tribunal for what used to be called 'constructive dismissal' - the terminology may have changed recently. The monetary compensation would be quite basic by Valley standards, but the public exposure of the employers, subject to cross-examination, would be most satisfying I imagine.

Get all their details, and complain if you think you were treated unfairly.

Unfortunately, this doesn't invalidate the fact that you're correct in a way. If Simon Singh hadn't been able to afford the time and money to defend this case, the libel suit would probably have stood.

Still, it's a step in the right direction, and an important legal precedent.

If this happened in my company, lawyers would be crafting a settlement right now.

'They purposefully allow this glaringly obvious mechanism for insulting and annoying their members and are actually involved in the joke. Until I broke their server they were all laughing at my "testing", then they were pissed when they had to fix the bug I found. If you don't believe me, look at the HackerNewsTips twitter account, which I know is astroturfed by a github employee.'

In one of the first few paragraphs, there's this block:

"The other piece of information you need to understand is that there's a sort of running hidden gag among the Ruby Iluminati (aka Rubynati) within San Francisco. Employees from Engine Yard, PowerSet, and ... github love this joke where they create code that generates ASCII art penis pictures and then force other people onto their project without permission. Here's another one called dicks by Martin Emde."

It's a shame that companies doing some useful things have to encourage a culture of brutish behavior.

That assumes that the story, as told in the accusation, is completely accurate. One could envision a scenario where the founder felt his wife may be able to relate to the situation better and could actually assist the accuser. However, in spite of best intentions, its possible that the wife's actions were misinterpreted by the accuser. Until Github or the wife gives their side of the story, perhaps withholding judgement is the optimal strategy.

Yes, but its the difference between malice and an innocent error in judgement.

It's not uncommon for business owners to rely heavily on non-employees for advice, even in the day-to-day operations. Spouses are especially common. What confuses me is that the wife, as portrayed, seems a bit irrational--if not delusional. There's a big difference between even vocal trusted advisors, and the sort of power the wife described herself as having.

So much so that I think there's a third possible interpretation: the quotes are accurate, given by a wife that genuinely believes her statements even though they have no basis in reality. This sort of delusion, in varying degrees, is quite common across the population. We convince ourselves of something--in this case, the wife that she has power in the Github organization--and then attempt to reduce the cognitive dissonance that arrises from the belief and the evidence to the contrary. As time goes on, we try harder and harder to justify those irrational beliefs.

It's entirely possible that there's no truth whatsoever to the wife's words, but that the wife genuinely believed them in spite of it. And that Julie Horvath is entirely accurate in detailing the conversation and the implied hostility she felt from the founder and his wife. So now, not only do you have to determine whether the conversation took place, but also whether the power the wife alleged existed in the first place. Unfortunately for Github, even if the wife never had that power, the wife was still able to contribute to a hostile work environment and that can have significant legal ramifications even though she wasn't an employee.

Friends you go out for drinks with to talk about life and work slowly transform into "spies" who keep you informed of what's happening in the office under the guise of gossip. Curiously taking a peek at an open chat tab on the husband's laptop becomes "access." Commenting on whether you liked a potential hire you met earlier becomes "responsibility over hires." Love for your husband and concern for his work becomes an overprotective desire to shield him from harm.

Given how rapidly Github has grown, the idea that any trusted non-employee, wife or not, would have that sort of power and influence described seems absurd. Hell, for a while it seemed as though they announced a new hire daily. Far too many for one non-employee, no matter how often she went into the office, to have that sort of power. Especially when most were technical positions.

Time will tell, but for now, more information is needed. Anyhow, I suppose I took issue with the phrase "undocumented employee" and ran off on a tangent :). The wife needn't have been an employee at all to have helped cause a shitstorm.

If someone was not on payroll and interacting with my employees on a personal level and on a daily or weekly basis I would have reasons to be concerned.

Being a "start-up" doesn't make you impervious to these problems. It simply means you haven't run into them... yet.

What business do I have with my husband's colleagues other than being polite at the summer barbecue and the holiday party?

Of course that doesn't include "accessing private chats of company members", but for that reason the more I read about that story the less I believe "the victim".

Also looking at her github account, she is a designer, not a developer A bit different education.

Completely ridiculous and unprofessional.

But, not sexist. Just terrible.

I've met the opposite as well, charming, well dressed, and physically fit engineer types who can hold a conversation with the opposite sex without any awkward vibes at all.

The awkward types seem to lack some dating experience and thus cannot discern positive/negative social cues or read body language as well.

> The awkward types seem to lack some dating experience and thus cannot discern positive/negative social cues or read body language as well.

I hate replying to this, but here it goes: have you even given positive social cues to guys who weren't "charming, well dressed and physically fit engineer types"? Also, if you're only getting "awkward vibes" from unattractive guys, that might not be a problem with their social skills (at least not in the way you're putting it; charm is a social skill).

Not to mention, what does "well dressed and physically fit" even have to do with "awkward"?

And no, a man sexually harassing a woman isn't always sexist (even though I'd imagine that in the large majority of cases sexism plays a role).

Sexual harassment ≠ Sexism

What's important to discern is the reason behind the harassment. If a man is harassing a woman because he views his gender as superior to hers, or that she's nothing more than a sexual object, then that's a pretty clear-cut case of sexism. But if a man acts inappropriately towards someone because he lacks self control/tact, has poor social skills, etc. and is only targeting that person because he's attracted to them, then it's sexual harassment.

I am against using private github repos simply because: it's safe to assume that the NSA can access them via hardware backdoors on github's premises (as per many US ISPs), or by compromising crypto keys that github holds (as per lavabit).

It's also safe to assume that github will be legally compelled to either remain silent on this topic or lie and deny it.

Github is great for my open source work. Everyone's allowed to see that code, even the NSA. However you can find source to LOIC on github. I'm sure that who put that there and who worked on it when would be of interest to them and form a suitable pretext for a dragnet.

You can also use Tor to sync small github projects through ssh. Employee internal communications should all be done away from Github and encrypted if you're working on something like p2p software and worried your flippant piracy jokes might be held up in a court room one day as "proof" your project is criminal. I would always assume all comms are stored forever and available to anybody who requests them, like lawyers looking to sue you and would like all your HipChat logs.

It's just a .onion github clone to pseudoanon share booters/LOIC and other "evil" code. It was called GitTor but I guess they recently changed the name.

People keep confusing targeted attacks with bulk data collection. Nobody doubts the NSA can successfully launch a targeted attack against nearly any organization.

But that's not economical to do against everyone all the time. Whereas bulk collection of unencrypted or poorly-encrypted data from the handful of biggest cloud providers and network operators is cheap and easy.

So yes -- leaving the big providers in favor of competently-managed small-scale, lesser-known providers is probably a step up in privacy.

For U.S.-based cloud infrastructure it's at least possible to take it to court (as Levison did).

So it's a pick your poison thing unfortunately. If you think you can outwit targeted surveillance then by all means use an overseas hosting provider but if they would be targeting you either way then it might actually be safer doing what The Guardian does, and using U.S. law as a shield.

Treating notionally allied countries as free-fire zones is a curious definition of "easy". You run this kind of risk: http://en.alalam.ir/news/1528560

And for that reason, anyone with regard to the long term would deploy that kind of thing cautiously, if at all. But I have no idea if that applies to the NSA.

It's curious, I have seen this kind of comment on HN before, essentialy saying "US law doesn't apply in other countries therefore the NSA can do anything that they want there" ignoring that other countries have their own laws, often stricter in terms of privacy. My suspicion is that this is a particularly USAian myopia, which does not bode well for the NSA. Clearly they have gotten away with for a decade or more; but it relies on goodwill and secrecy; and those reservoirs are looking very low lately.

I am telling you literally like it is. Whether or not you want the Fourth Amendment to apply outside of the U.S. (keeping in mind that amendment is the only part of U.S. constitutional law restricting electronic surveillance by the U.S. government anywhere in the world), the fact is that legally speaking it doesn't. I'm not telling you how the world should be here, I'm telling you how it actually is.

This is not specific to the U.S. though. Does Germany have constitutional laws forbidding them to collect intelligence from networks in France?

Now you have changed the subject. The original assertion was that it was "easier" for the NSA to collect bulk data outside of the USA. If the 4th amendment was the only factor then it might be so. My point was that the 4th is not the only factor.

For another example of this, how seriously would someone like Lavabit take a US court order to hand over keys and shut up if they were based in Reykjavík?

Did you miss the "legally speaking" in my original sentence before you accused me of changing the subject?

TAO (I.e computer network exploitation) may be easier if you possess a legal/ethical framework whereby allied counties are free-fire zones; at least up to the point when they're no longer allied.

But bulk data collection is not TAO. As far as I can see, it relies on firstly on physical access to network infrastructure, so you can put a secret room at the Phone company or copy off the network traffic off the undersea cable as it lands. This is legally easier in your own country.

Secondly it relies on legal authority over companies. US agents arrived at lavabit with a US court order to hand over the crypto keys and tell no-one. How would that play for a company based in Reykjavik? I expect that after the laughter and blog posts, a bit like this: http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/view/30559/iceland-expe...

Except, of course, when TAO allows you access to data in bulk. That was my whole point, and if you guys keep conflating legal jurisdiction, technical capabilities, and scope of effect with each other then you'll have only yourself to blame when you get outwitted and your data ends up in a database with ALLCAPS naming conventions. :P

You should write an article about that, I do like to learn more. So long as it doesn't consist of "lol you got outwitted :P" style taunting.

Interesting how your loyalties are expressed in that comment. BTW, based on your other comments, what exactly do you do "in the military" ?

This sounds a lot worse and blatant than just shoulder surfing at home.

But the cloud. The cloud!

I laughed out loud when I read this and several other specific details in the story. It sounded very familiar.

I have several friends and many acquaintances who work at Valve. One very senior engineer initially worked on Source 2 about three years ago but had to quickly switch projects because another, more tenured engineer was expressing his disagreements by silently reverting some of my friend's check-ins.

The founder's wife story also reminds me of episodes I've heard involving the wife cabal. It's nothing as sinister as the GitHub story, but I see a lot of the same structural issues reflected in these telling anecdotes. The lack of an overt chain of command means that power asserts itself covertly. If you are unhappy, you have little recourse but to express your own power by indirect passive-aggressive means. That's bad enough when it happens in any corporate structure, but here it is almost the only possible course of action.

Valve might have been a lot like GitHub if it had hired inexperienced, smart, cocky web programmers in their early twenties. In both cases the companies also boast a level of success that makes it hard for them to evaluate whether elements of their company culture is detrimental to their continued development at this stage of their existence. It's probably hardest for Valve because of the inexhaustible money faucet that is Steam. There is so much squandered potential at that company, which is a weird thing to say considering how much they've done and are still doing.

I'm waiting for a hip rebranding of the term 'management' once these no-management companies realize they have issues that cannot be resolved by hiring supposedly perfect people.

This was not in a public interface, this was in variable names.

Ignoring that every word in programming is in US English: color, gray, program.

We were deadlocked for weeks, with him refusing to ship working code that fulfilled the business goals over this single issue. Quitting resolved the deadlock, and I learned afterwards that he really did go through the work and change it all to "dialogue".

And yet architects usually originate from promoted engineers. And that means they are stubborn, and the result is all kinds pointless conflicts with all the other developers.

Technical Architecture should be about making the right set of trade offs given the business goals of the system being developed. That involves spending a lot of time talking to people both inside and outside of dev team about what the goals are and how the decisions that devs are making are impacting everyone else in the company. That stuff is time consuming, but if there's any time left you should really be keeping up with the latest frameworks and tools.

If you're spending your time reviewing commits and enforcing coding standards, you're doing it wrong.

Quitting because of that is just stupid. In my company CS rules are almost opposite to my preferences (and to common style for that language community of course). I use every opportunity to grumble about it, but it would be much worse if everybody (me included) shaped the code based on personal preferences, not style guide.

I don't understand how these guys were "deadlocked" for weeks.

So, the traditional CTRL+F, or :%s/dialog/dialogue/g would have resulted in at least some instances of 'dialoguegue' as a result. Yeah, the obvious remedy there is :%s/guegue/gue/g, but that too could lead to unintended results, etc.

Not that I don't agree with the intent of your statement, search and replace across 20k lines of code, over however many files, is likely a more involved process than it sounds like.

    dialog\>

    dialog\b

    :%s/dialog_/dialogue_/g

    :%s/\([dD]\)ialog\([A-Z][A-z]*\)/\1ialogue\2/g

I don't have experience with them, but I imagine an IDE with refactoring support should make these sort of changes trivial.

Or use variable renaming in an IDE that actually parses the code.

I spelled it in consistency with everything else in the source code at that time... US English. It was a British company, and I understood that the UI should be UK English, but did not comprehend/believe that variables should be too. Especially as one can't force CSS to stop calling it color.

What was _your_ reasoning for losing a job over a completely semantic argument?

Did the illogicality of it all really irk you so much that you couldn't stand to change it? What do you mean by saying that you couldn't 'comprehend' why variables should be written in UK English? It seems pretty clear that they should be in UK English because that's what you were told to write them in... at your job...

If this happened as described then I would have loved to be a coworker watching this hilariously petty feud unfold.

I wanted a reasonable work environment that was delivering product to the customers, for the business.

The work in question was 20k lines and involved the whole stack. As it bled into web page stuff that actually had calls to browser open "dialog" commands, no find and replace was going to safely work to now make it comply with the clarification on the coding standards (UK English var names). We would spend weeks changing it and re-testing, weeks in which we were not delivering it.

I felt we were no longer working for either the customer or business, when we were willing to hold back an improvement that would immediately create revenue, for a petty argument.

It wasn't the first time I'd seen this architect do that to others, but I never thought it would happen to me so long as the product was good, the code was good, deadlines were met.

I was no longer convinced it was possible to create work that wouldn't fall foul of some rule or other. And the architect had managed to position himself on the org structure outside of a chain of command, so there was no-one to appeal to.

There are too many good jobs, and good companies, that want to ship product to their customers and build a great business to even consider staying somewhere that doesn't.

It was a very easy decision.

I still would like to see someone that ridiculous operate... Sounds like the most incompetent architect/engineer I have ever heard of.

Sorry for the snark fellow human.

Particularly given that it's a UK company, the request may be arguably wrong, but it's at least semi-reasonable. Why make such a huge deal over it from either side?

I would have done the same thing. If someone is hanging your job over your head over spelling in source code, then the issue is no longer about spelling in source code. It's about dick wagging.

Software engineers are a stubborn bunch. It's kind of necessary given the nature of programming. However, if promoted to an architect, stubbornness is a real problem, with little to no upside.

Architects will usually stick mostly to design and not do a lot of debugging. So that stubbornness is not useful. But it sure can rear its ugly head when it comes to pointless conflicts like this one. And the problem is, all the junior developers are also stubborn.

Welcome to software development. What you want in in a software architect is primarily a diplomat. Not someone who is stubborn.

If there's a disagreement that can't be resolved between the two of them, the architect is the one whose stubbornness I value more. You have managers to be diplomats. You have technical leadership to say, "they pay me more than you because they trust my judgment more than yours. I've heard your argument; I found it not compelling enough to overrule my own experience and judgment, and the decision has been made."

Ideally you have more than one such person to help surface the cases where the architect was wrong, but if you're routinely treating them as though they're no more reliable than junior developers, why are you paying them so much?

Actually... It's (jokingly) possible :)

http://spiffingcss.com/

You can get pretty close :)

http://spiffingcss.com/

Edit: not to imply a reason for the noted situation, just an example to lend some credence/reasoning elsewhere

The parochialism of the wannabe "hacker" (entreprenerd) here used to be cute.

If any of these people has a disagreement with a co-worker over the co-worker's changes, it's their duty as a fellow employee to explain to the co-worker why they disagree, or at least explain to the manager why they disagree with the change, so that the manager can explain it to the co-worker. But just making the change and then threatening to quit... that is most definitely crazy.

> No, they are crazy.

That may be.

> Reverting someone else's changes without explaining why is crazy.

Not necessarily. There are times when you are so wrong you aren't even wrong.

> If any of these people has a disagreement with a co-worker over the co-worker's changes, it's their duty as a fellow employee to explain to the co-worker why they disagree, or at least explain to the manager why they disagree with the change, so that the manager can explain it to the co-worker.

Let's imagine a scenario where they had done this, and yet nothing had corrected the problem. At that point, it would be quite reasonable to revert someone's changes without explaining why, and threatening to quit if one wasn't allowed to.

Those are pretty big flags that you screwed up.

The person making the threat felt they were immune from backlash, but they were threatened by where I was working in the code base because they lacked the expertise to compete on a technical level. What I found even more interesting was that our mutual manager felt that his position was an even more tenuous political position so he wasn't going to do anything he wasn't told to do by someone above him in the chain of command.

If someone working for me threatens to quit, I first ask them if their issue can be resolved rationally, and if it can't I ask them when will their last day be. But that is because even if my boss then comes to me and says "You told this guy who is friends with <important person> to quit? Your fired!" I am totally ok with that. Not everyone is.

To look at the flip side though as to whether I screwed up or not, I'm reasonably self aware enough to know when I do. And prior to this incident going 'nuclear', as it did, I had come at it from several different directions to try to eliminate bias. Every third party consulted felt my reasoning was pretty sound. But we all know that being "right" doesn't mean you get what you want in a politicized environment. Just ask the Ukrainians living in Crimea, life is what it is. We move past it.

I had assumed as much. Sun seemed to be very political except for a very few areas; I avoided it for that exact reason.

It's always a hard lesson for a junior person to realize that politics exists. I had my introduction to that at a very big company in a very hard way.

And yet it happens everywhere. The question is what narratives can be told about it more than what actually happened.

Wait, they're a ruby shop, they don't even believe in letting the compiler help you avoid making basic mistakes. dons flame-retardant suit

Easy, just start calling managers "people hackers" and launch a people hacking tips blog next week.

If you are male and a founder, one of your most valuable business resources is your wife. People will call me sexist for saying this, I expect, but women think socially with a level of complexity that I think most men never approach. If you are a man, chances are your wife does more to build the business than you ever do.

I see nothing wrong with the involvement of founders' wives in the business.

> The lack of an overt chain of command means that power asserts itself covertly.

Thats the whole point of bossless environments and both their greatest strength and their greatest weakness.

> In both cases the companies also boast a level of success that makes it hard for them to evaluate whether elements of their company culture is detrimental to their continued development at this stage of their existence.

I don't think any company can evaluate that. Culture arises from the grass roots and that means that the floor employees are the ones who ultimately decide company culture.

> I'm waiting for a hip rebranding of the term 'management' once these no-management companies realize they have issues that cannot be resolved by hiring supposedly perfect people.

What do you think of WL Gore and Associates?

Edit: Figured out why.

I don't understand why saying, "people will call me sexist for this" immediately validates your statement as "not intended to be sexist".

>"If you are male and a founder, one of your most valuable business resources is your wife. People will call me sexist for saying this, I expect, but women think socially with a level of complexity that I think most men never approach."

It's pretty clearly a sexist statement is it not? Am I confused about what makes a statement sexist?

Does that entire paragraph not just objectify the wife and establish differences between the sexes based on anecdotal experience?

>"If you are a man, chances are your wife does more to build the business than you ever do."

And this one doesn't even really make sense(as in where are you pulling this random ass statement from), not to mention stating it as, "If you are a founder, chances are your spouse does more to build the business than you ever do." feels literally 10x better to me(even if it still sounds false). Even the punctuation in that sentence makes the word man stand out when it could have easily been written without said punctuation.(well without the comma at least :-p ).

I realize this is super overly sensitive by the way. I normally wouldn't comment, I had already posted "this post really bothers me somehow" though, and felt an explanation was warranted. Definitely curious if anyone else felt the same.

Lastly, I'm a 21 year old white male; the only adversity I've ever faced is being called a ginger, so don't think this is coming from a longstanding feminist, just a human.

The point is that when you look cross-culturally and cross-historically, where you don't have women certain things like rule of law don't happen (you see this develop in the American West for example as gender rates stopped being so lopsided).

I would suggest that recognizing that the genders do have differences in terms of social aptitudes and needs, and different positions relative to life choices is the first step in reducing the male-normative view on our economic model (i.e. "if you work like a man, and wait to have kids like a man, you will get paid like a man").

This always drove me insane - people seem to confuse value equality/congruence and strict identicality. The latter seems to either try to create a female default and punish men for not living up to it, or create some weird fuzzy default that nobody really fits comfortably.

What we want is to say that women are as valuable as men, and then let individuals figure out who they want to be.

The answer isn't to change the (currently relatively male-normative) norm, it's to defenstrate the idea that having a norm in the first place is a remotely good idea.

It creates a female default and punishes men for not living up to it in some areas (like public school in the US), but it creates a male default and punishes women for not living up to it in other areas (academic careers in life sciences, the job market, etc).

> The answer isn't to change the (currently relatively male-normative) norm, it's to defenstrate the idea that having a norm in the first place is a remotely good idea.

Agreed.

> What we want is to say that women are as valuable as men, and then let individuals figure out who they want to be.

Agreed here too. The question then is, how we address this.

Objectify is a really overused term that has lost all relevant meaning. How can saying that someone is better than you at something possibly objectify that person? Maybe I'm overly sensible as well, but it's really sad that this is where PC has led us.

That's the objectifying part imo.... Would you disagree?

Do you consider that statement equally objectifying? If not, why?

I think it's perfectly fine to objectify a role though... An accountant is an object after all.

This comment bothered me because OP is fetishizing and tokenizing women in a way that purports to be admiring and supportive of them. In fact, he simply has weak social skills; for example, this post.

It can't be both. Either men or women are (as groups, i.e. averages) innately differ on the social vs analytical axis, and diversity is a net plus, or gender is entirely socially constructed, and adding women to a group shouldn't do anything in aggregate.

Studies point to the former rather than the latter.

Stupid analogy: I hate it that only tall people seem to design store displays of pants. Remarkably, tall people don't seem to notice that putting the small sizes on the top shelves and the larger sizes lower does not make sense. It's because they have a different experience of reaching for things on shelves. Height diversity, though, makes for a better user experience.

It is true in my stupid analogy that tall people and short people do have genetic differences, as on average they innately differ in height. But it is not their innate genetic traits that makes these tall people ignorant both on the social and analytical axes when designing store displays.

Or is it? Hm....

It's okay to make generalizations based on imperfect correlates - like gender - as long as you understand they're generalizations, and are open to revising your judgment if new, more specific information appears. The comment that sparked this thread didn't evidence any of that understanding.

You can't see a third possibility in between those two?

Re objectification: couples get advice from their life partners. That doesn't mean this is their life partners only goal.

Re: 'establish differences between the sexes based on anecdotal experience' is there anything ethically wrong with this? Would you prefer a citation be added, eg, 'newborn female infants stare at faces more often than male newborn infants'?

Or do you find the mere existence of differences between the sexes to be 'offensive'? In which case, you're more than welcome to be offended.

Completely true, valid point.

>Re: 'establish differences between the sexes based on anecdotal experience' is there anything ethically wrong with this?

I would argue that there is something ethically wrong with this. Take this statement:

>" women think socially with a level of complexity that I think most men never approach."

Yeah, on it's face it's a compliment(I guess?), but all it really serves to do, in this context,(for me, might read totally different to you) is illustrate the differences between the two sexes. Where's any evidence that his assertion is true?

Anecdotal evidence is by definition flawed. I don't really understand where you're failing to see the potential for harm in this.

> Would you prefer a citation be added, eg, 'newborn female infants stare at faces more often than male newborn infants'?

Do you have a source stating that females raised in the same environment as males exhibited a higher level of social complexity? Because, yes, I would like to see that before changing my worldview based upon this persons statement.

>Or do you find the mere existence of differences between the sexes to be 'offensive'? In which case, you're more than welcome to be offended.

Not at all; what I find offensive is when people try to extrapolate meaning and form social constructs based upon differences that often aren't conclusively proven or even relevant. When I'm talking about these differences I don't mean boy-penis girl-vagina, I mean boy-brave/courageous/smart girl-cute/supportive/geeky.

In my opinion these social constructs are already so ingrained in our society that this will be just as long and drawn out a problem as racism. I mean just define Masculine and Feminine in your head.

I'm not trying to make a point here, or to white-knight, my original response was just how that post genuinely made me feel, I didn't like it.

> Do you have a source stating that females raised in the same environment as males exhibited a higher level of social complexity? '?

Yes, I have a source stating precisely that newborn female infants stare at faces more often than male newborn infants (Baron Cohen at Cambridge):

http://www.dailymotion.com/playlist/x1xv47_BrainwashingInNor...

The experimenter who was interacting with the babies and measuring the time they spent staring at faces knew the gender of each baby - in other words, it wasn't double blind. This is a well known recipe for allowing the experimenter's bias to influence their recording of the results. This is just one of several basic flaws in the study; see the analysis starting on page 113 of Cordelia Fine's "Delusions of Gender."

"Delusions of Gender" has lots of similar analyses of the research "proving" innate gender differences. The takedown of Louann Brizendine's references starting on page 158 and the one about the frozen salmon MRIs on page 150 are particularly hilarious. One example:

"Casually, Brizendine notes, 'All of the therapists who showed these responses happened to be women.' For some reason, she fails to mention that this is because only female therapists, selected from phone directories, happened to be recruited for the study."

Not does it invalidate male/female roles being consistent across over 200 cultures.

If you accept that men build muscle different from women, and have different hormones, could you not also accept that the differences in gray/white matter proportions, size etc are not 'cultural'?

Women objectification is about treating a woman like an object, a belonging, a resource.

As it turns out, the person writing the parent comment defined a founder's wife as "one of your most valuable business resources". That person should have said, "some of your most valuable business insights will come from your wife". It wouldn't be objectification, but it would still establish differences between the sexes based on anecdotal experience.

Assuming unproven differences between the sexes to be true has always been ethically borderline from a scientific perspective. From a social perspective, it artificially deters persons of each sex from doing something which is then implicitly considered "unnatural" for them.

To be fair, in a world (the world of business) where employees are referred to as "human resources", everyone involved has already been objectified.

> The person writing the parent comment defined a founder's husband as "one of your most valuable business resources".

Nope, not offended. The husband is valuable, in no way does it state this is the only value of the husband.

Um, I'd say that your spouse (of whichever gender) is one of your most valuable business resources, period - if they're someone who can hear your side of the story who aren't actually involved in the situation and someone who knows you better than you know yourself.

But that person should never proceed to involve themselves in your business situation, unless your colleagues approve of their involvement. That appears to be the issue here.

Or, as this story demonstrates, accountability.

This is nuts.

If person A works at a company then obviously their significant other (male or female) will likely talk with them about work situations and that may be more or less helpful to A and the company. But the idea that as a general rule a female significant other's contribution will be so significant just by virtue of the "level of complexity" of the "social thinking" is just absurd.

If you are a male founder, you might not be married and you might not be straight. Also, one way to kill romance is to tell your significant other that they are your most valuable business resource.

> Thats the whole point of bossless environments and both their greatest strength and their greatest weakness.

What, their point is to encourage death-match power struggles? And that's their strength?

In nature, the fittest survive, but that's because nature is cruel (indifferent, actually). But a business must nurture its employees and make them feel safe – not send them into a battlefield.

I've definitely seen this in the past. At startups where I've worked or friends have worked, the founder's wives have played important support roles in ways that are easy to observe but hard to quantify.

When one spouse is a startup founder, then it's a true "family effort" whether the other spouse likes it or not. And if it's "or not" ... well, then, that substantially hinders the chances of success.

I will also say that in many instances, if you have this opinion about women (or any group of persons), it's probably somewhat evident in your interactions with them, and you may not be treated quite as well as you would be otherwise. This can be self-reinforcing, but unfortunately the responsibility lies with you to pull yourself out of it and get some perspective.

If you don't, well, get a strong pre-nup, I guess, or stay single forever.

For the supporter, the advantage of legal marriage—where the supporter owns half the assets plus some rights to future earnings—is obvious. Smart, capable supporters know this, and won't make that investment without legal protections. Anything else would be reckless.

The advantage to the breadwinner is that this is a way to get a smart, capable supporter. If you're not willing to provide the legal protections, you're just going to get someone who doesn't really understand the situation and doesn't understand the risks. There's some chance you could find someone who was generally capable, but who was naïve on this point, but that's a smaller dating pool. And I'd argue it's ethically wrong, and the unfairness will eventually degrade the quality of the relationship.

People think alimony is just someone sucking someone dry while doing no work, but it's really just a dividend being paid out from a shared venture that you were both equal partners in.

Not to mention the sizable portion of men who don't care about the intelligence/capability of their partner, or those who don't believe that wanting a legal upper hand correlates positively with the type of intelligence/capability that they desire.

You can find more here:

http://lesbianlife.about.com/od/wedding/f/MarriageBenefit.ht...

In your 20s its fine, put off getting married, but the 40 something guy who introduces you to his girlfriend sends a totally different signal than someone who introduces you to his wife (and vice versa if the genders are swapped). It says you're noncommittal, bad at relationships, maybe previously divorced, constantly shopping around, maybe breached partners trust repeatedly, whatever, take your pick. What it never says when someone is judging your book by its cover though is "this is just some guy who's been hedging against marital risk for a couple decades", any other snap judgement requires the person know you better.

For tens of thousands of years, it was possible to marry someone without recognition from the US government. I suspect it still is.

See the recent arguments about same-sex marriage for a fulsome discussion...

I chose marriage, because I was really f'ing excited about calling my partner my wife. Now, I am really proud to call her that. Note that financially, she is far more well-off than me, but we have similar lifetime earnings potential. YMMV.

Edited: grammar.

Hell, my wife has offered to let me quit my job, where I make nearly twice as much as her (her electrical engineering salary would be enough to get us by), just so I can work on art full time, because she knows it will make me happier. I haven't, yet, because I also want her to be happy and I'm not so unhappy with my work yet that I can't earn us some more savings and hopefully make an exit for both of us.

Wow. Just wow. This pisses me off especially, because to make it as a freelancer I've had to work damn hard to develop self-discipline, maturity, and reverse a path of self-destructive behaviour.

To see people in senior positions act like complete fucking children irritates me to no end, and I will do everything in my power to stop this when I run a company.

Does anyone know, with regards to employment law, whether it's ok to include provisions that allow us to fire or at least demote, for people acting like nasty, immature human beings?

Although it may have sounded like the "cool teacher" way to address things by having your wife take an employee out for drinks to discuss grievances, clearly this should have been handled in a professional setting according to a clear grievance process. That could have led directly to policy changes (e.g. keep pull request comments professional, have management review reverts) and nipped the problem in the bud instead of getting Really Fucking Weird. That goes for any grievances against her as well, instead of being vented on Secret.

Even GitHub's VC backer (A16Z) has blogged about the need to have clear process when it comes to HR stuff.

Actually, this struck me as purely a "remember who you're talking to" problem - the team were used to a more aggressive level of language than the new hire was, so what should've happened is that the team should've learned to make the same strength of point with less aggressive words and the new hire should've worked to take aggressive words less to heart. Being as I'm a blunt bastard, I've been through this a fair few times with employees and contributors.

This is not a gendered problem, this is a 'loud brash people' versus 'quieter nicer people' problem. The reason people try and make it gendered is because, at least on average from the people I've worked with, women are more likely to be 'quieter nicer people' - but the truth, honestly, is that rather than anti-women this is a 'no structured group exists to stand up for the quieter nicer men so they go unnoticed' situation.

I've had to unpick these issues with all combinations of people.

> have management review reverts

Actually, just having a manager take him aside and say "dude, you're being a dick and either you stop it right fucking now or there will be consequences that you're really not going to enjoy" should be sufficient. Shadowcat is a relatively flat org but we have just enough hierarchy that there are people who can absolutely do that.

Sadly, the article goes back to the founder's wife problem (which, omgwtf, but that's been analyzed to death upthread) so we don't know whether it was reported (of course, dependending on who she'd've needed to report it to, that may've been difficult ...)

I realize that's a lot of assumptions, but that's why the founder needs to get out in front of these things and make them explicit.

It's my hope that having a more diverse workplace will help the "quiet nice people" with and without Y chromosomes.

I find your use of 'more diverse' to mean 'more gender balanced' distasteful, because privileging gender roles as important like that is a huge part of the problem.

This is especially problematic when trying to overcome culturally calcified gender discrimination. What you're describing as being a "blunt bastard" could very well come off as male-privileged locker room talk. In the sports world there have been numerous attempts to contort locker room talk as somehow gender neutral, just a function of personality, some women talk that way, not all men do, and so forth. These arguments miss the forest for the trees: there does exist a culture of male privilege that is overwhelmingly less welcoming to women.

In the Victorian era, until relatively recent times, men were expected to refrain from swearing or discussing 'serious' subjects such as war or politics when 'ladies were present'.

The usage (or not) of blunt words of criticism or profanity in informal company documents (e.g. code comments, pull requests) isn't necessarily a gendered thing. It speaks to the company's culture, but it nevertheless feels like a step backward to suggest the corporate equivalent of "gentlemen need to mind their language when ladies are around".

Where there are problems that affect both genders, they should be tackled as that - treating a 'loud people' versus 'quiet people' problem as a male privilege problem is unbelievably problematic since it plays into the 'women just can't cope with men being honest' bullshit, and ignores the fact that men can be quiet and women can be loud. This devalues women's contributions and effectively silences discourse about how to deal with quiet men and loud women (and in this tale the latter was a big part of the problem), and basically is a net negative for everybody except the loud men, thereby reinforcing gender role designations and privilege structures.

> What you're describing as being a "blunt bastard" could very well come off as male-privileged locker room talk.

And in that case, once again, I've failed at "remember who you're talking to". The manner in which I LART somebody if it's necessary is tailored to the person, because people are all different.

> The point is, in the lean management organization you don't really have someone to take you aside and tell you to stop being a dick.

Given that Shadowcat has next to no hierarchy and yet we do have somebody - me - I'm not entirely sure how to respond to that except perhaps to say 'oh, bother' and disappear in a puff of logic.

I'm saying that sometimes the answer is to remember that people are different full stop rather than jump straight to gender as the key difference, which may give you a mistaken analysis of the problem. If you have a situation that disadvantages quiet nice people and most of your quiet nice people are women, this results in negative outcomes for women but the best path to a solution is to figure out how to fix it for -all- quiet nice people.

I've made no claim either way in this thread so far as to whether sexism exists in tech - what I've done is to point out certain things that were cultural/management fuckups in general rather than specifically sexist, and to suggest that calling them what they are will make them easier to fix. It seems reasonably likely to be true that the origin of the bias against 'quiet nice people' comes out of gender roles, but that which is sanely classifiable as structural sexism at an institutional and cultural level by the time it manifests at the ground level is hurting everybody holding those personality traits and is therefore best dealt with as it is.

Or: Patriarchy theory is a useful analysis tool but I'm damned if I'm going to try and teach it to everybody if I can get results at least as effective much more quickly by making them realise they're being an asshole to nice people.

Honestly, I would rate the probability as pretty high that the culture also has a sexism problem, and that there will be plenty of issues that are best addressed in those terms, but that's orthogonal to the point I was trying to make.

To me, the story sounds of a critical failure in some decision making positions, something that happens over and over and over again every day, we just don't get to hear it.

[1] The trainee was forced to leave, for all that are curious.

That right there is a scary sentence. Sure, HR shouldn't dictate everything (hiring developers, for example) but No one should be exempt from rules about how to treat other employees.

Thinking about it, assuming everyone knows that is naive. Point conceded.

The problem is that not many people like that exist and can be recruited. For a sufficiently small organisation peer pressure and a clear-cut common goal may help smooth over the imperfections of the individuals involved. But once the organisation grows to a certain level, those forces will start losing their effectiveness and you require a substitute to ensure reasonably smooth operations.

I think the key take away is that there is no perfect organisational structure. All you can do is to find a structure that works best for the current situation, but you need to be prepared to make changes if your organisation's current stage of development requires it.

[1] http://www.bhorowitz.com/how_to_minimize_politics_in_your_co...

...maybe.

Of course, this means they may be at times too conservative in the interests of having an easy life. Doesn't mean they're not useful at all.

I think a balance of conservative and progressive opinion is required for almost any organisation to operate effectively: (genunie) progressives drive us forward, and (genuine) conservatives stop us going over the cliff - it is pretty much as simple as that. Unfortunately, finding the appropriate balance for any particular situation can be extremely tricky, so largely we get it wrong, and just stumble along, grumbling to ourselves about how stupid and ineffective everything is.

On the assumption that there are genuine problems within Github, hopefully this situation will at least give them a chance to engage in a bit of rebalancing, and find a more sustainable path for their future. This is, of course, the problem of solving problems by trial and error - you have to deal with the errors, and in cases like this the errors can be quite painful for the people involved.

The problem with legal is that the safe position is always "no". So, finding legal who understands that businesses sometimes have to take a risk, and we need to know if this is "illegal" as opposed to "inadvisable, because it's going to cost money" as opposed to "inadvisable, because it might cost money but might be worth the payoff" is not easy.

HR is simply useless. It's only useful tasks are all effectively part of "legal". It can't make useful decisions on hiring and actually gets in the way. Any employee with a genuine grievance knows that HR is the companies rep, not yours. Oh, and they generally have access to a whole bunch of things that stir up hideous amounts of politics (salaries, reviews, promotions, etc.) So, what's left that's useful? Nothing.

So while for a single employee HR might seem like a waste of air, it's elementary for any business with a reasonable number of employees.

An HR department absolutely works to protect the company, but a good HR department will also work to protect the employees, because in the long view that is also beneficial to the company. And many HR people who I've talked to specifically enjoy their jobs because they like working to make employees lives better. Where their directives conflict with that they will try to fight the directives.

Certainly in some cases where there is a unresolvable conflict between employee and employer, HR will work against the employee. But for a good HR department those situations should be very few. A good HR department will be able to project forward into a long enough view that they can find ways to move forward amicably that protect both the employee and the employer, to everyone's benefit.

Can I come live in your world where everything is solved by a quick talk.

1. A friendly conversation in which the manager points out the problem, establishes that they expect it to stop, but that if it stops immediately it'll all be forgotten.

2. A less friendly conversation in which the manager says I thought we were clear that you aren't supposed to do it. You're still doing it, WTF? Depending on the problem maybe the employee has some reason/excuse and you need to do something to help them with it/remove it as an excuse.

If the employee is the cynical type, the aim is to establish that while you have an incentive to keep him (because you want good employees on your team), now you've taken a stance on his behaviour, letting him walk all over you would harm your reputation as a competent manager, so the incentive to keep him isn't the only one.

3. A conversation where you tell them you've started the ball rolling on getting rid of them. It's nothing personal, but the employee's actions mean your hands are tied. You've already cleared it with political allies they have at the company who could stop it. Here are the numbers of some recruiters if they'd prefer to jump before they're pushed.

4. A conversation where they are fired.

GOT fans will remember Ned Stark made a similar mistake.

B) The whole point of conversation 3 is that it's true; by this point, you need to know for sure that the political situation is under your control. To go even more GOT on this - Ned bargained as if he were in a position of strength, when his position was in fact very shaky.

You've already cleared it with political allies they have at the company who could stop it.

If I found out that a manager was undermining me in this way, I'd strike back and it probably wouldn't be good for me or him. Trying to turn my friends against me? That's war. I'd fuck him up and I'd keep fucking him up after the end of that job.

Letting an employee go isn't personal. Reaching out to his "political allies" to undermine him is personal. If you want me off your team, I'll leave. If you try to stop a transfer by corrupting people who like me, then I'm going to fuck up your shit, and it's totally personal.

All that said, no organization should be in a state where a truly toxic person can be protected by having a political power base. If you can't fire someone who's genuinely causing problems (e.g. harassment) without bringing that person's political power base into the equation, you have a dysfunctional organization.

This sort of thing is why companies should fire fast and be generous with severance instead of writing dishonest "performance improvement plans" that essentially mean an already-fired employee gets a month to come in to the office and still wreak havoc. It's better to err on the side of a bad employee getting an "undeserved" severance package than to have "walking dead" employees pissing all over morale. Once it's clear that the only move is to fire someone, it's best to do it quickly. Severance (enough to cover a typical job search) is actually very cheap when you consider the risk and misery (for the manager and team) involved in a PIP or paper trail.

  If I found out that a manager was undermining me in this 
  way, I'd strike back and it probably wouldn't be good for 
  me or him.

This is for exactly the reason you say: If you openly try but fail to get rid of someone, they may take it personally and try to "fuck up your shit".

If there's someone who can stop your threat (e.g. the employee is buddies with your boss) you go to that someone, lay out the problem and what you see as the options for solving it, and ask them for their advice. This advice will either be "go ahead" or "I'll take care of it"; in the latter case you should allow some time for them to take care of it.

Yes, this means you'll have to pay a severance because there is no paper trail. A typical severance (enough to cover the expected length of a job search) is a small cost, considering what you're getting in the deal: non-litigation, non-disparagement, minimal drama, and the employee moved out the same day.

as a manager, the conversations go like this:

1 - please (do/don't do) X. Hopefully this takes care of things.

2 - I said (do/don't do) X. why the fuck are you (not doing / doing) X. Now I'm unhappy, but again, hopefully this is the end of things and the employee starts doing / not doing X.

3 - (and this is what parent was talking about; I now have an employee refusing to do what I said and not providing good reasons for said refusal.) Now the conversation is: do / don't do X again and you're fired.

it isn't a decision, it's laying out consequences. Now, between steps 2 and 3, when I become aware of the doing or not doing X, I'm now moving on to the point where I have to give pretty blunt orders. I'm going to make sure my boss and potentially a peer or two, depending on which teams this employee works for, are aware of the situation and are ok with what will happen; I think that's what michaelt is talking about. There's also, obviously, a query for extenuating circumstances that they are but I am not aware of.

No, you're not going to solve completely toxic situations, but you could slow them down so they could be managed. You want to know about issues before they hit the front page of Techcrunch. Regardless of what happened, it is clear that GitHub didn't manage this situation well.