Any first-hand accounts you (or anyone else) would like to share on that point?
I don't know what to think as an outsider. The coverage looks like run-of-the-mill, unsubstantiated, he-said/she-said, mainstream media BS to me, but that's just me.
He was ceo and co-founder, and harassed a female employee to the point that she quit. His wife also harassed the employee.
Forget he said she said - the company admitted the employees claims were true after investigating the situation, having previously (when he was in control) publicly refuted them.
Engineer allegations. 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. One instance was found where the engineer updated and broke some CSS in an internal application, which was fixed in a later commit. The investigator determined this change did not appear malicious.
GitHub’s working environment. Rhoma spent a significant amount of time investigating Julie’s claims of sexual and gender based harassment. 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. Employees were asked about their experiences here, good and bad. Women at GitHub reported feeling supported, mentored, and protected at work, and felt they are treated equitably and are provided opportunities.
> Founder allegations. 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.
> After being presented with the results we felt Tom could no longer be an effective leader at GitHub. He offered his resignation and we accepted.
The article linked is from Tom, who turned down an offer to join Microsoft, and went on to become CEO. My comment was about Tom then using his position as CEO to harass a female employee, which GitHub admitted he did, and Tom admitted by resigning.
> Forget he said she said - the company admitted the employees claims were true after investigating the situation, having previously (when he was in control) publicly refuted them.
The employee's claims weren't true for the part you were talking about - the article linked said that most of her claims weren't, and since you used "female engineer" like it meant something hedious had happened, your comment absolutely was bullshit.
The article I linked spells it out pretty well. None of the incidents related to her gender were found to be true, so you shouldn't bring it up. Just say "Engineer," because otherwise it sounds like they sexually harrassed her or something, which is libel. Her gender wasn't relevant for the topic, and shouldn't be brought up.
> The employee's claims weren't true for the part you were talking about
I was talking about Tom Preston Werner harassing a staff member and the company then publicly denying it happened.
If you read some other meaning out of what I said, that's on you.
> since you used "female engineer" like it meant something hedious
> Just say "Engineer," because otherwise it sounds like they sexually harrassed her or something
I don't keep a notebook on me at all times with the names of every developer who's ever been harassed at their job. I just happened to remember that a woman had made allegations against the guy who wrote this fucking blog post, while he was CEO of the company. Not everything is a fucking feminist "plot", ok? We're not all amorphous grey blobs and any further distinction is not automatically a pro/anti gender political platform.
You were implying, with your statement, that her gender was relevant. It wasn't. You implied Werner had harrassed a person because of their gender. There's no other way to interpret that there.
Hey let's all judge each other in the worst possible light by the worst possible allegations.
TPW was a visionary that started a company which revolutionized software development. Maybe some of you weren't around back then, but as a git early adopter github was a god send. And it was written by one of us. A developer who built an open source time library. A man who turned down 300k at a time where that salary was top 1%(still is, I believe).
But feel free to publicly denounce someone based on hearsay. Or you can start on the road of balanced thought and stop filling your head up with propaganda.
Since there was no criminal misconduct, everyone realized their mistakes, admitted them, and changed things to prevent further mistakes. I'm not sure you could ask for more from humans.
So ya, I'll give him a pass on this one. It's not a blanket statement that visionaries should be able to harass people. That's not the argument I'm making.
