[SnakeDoc]

It's amazing to see how many people here are commenting and voting on emotion.

The facts are:

1) We have an ex-employee who is very disgruntled.

2) Said employee has laid some serious allegations regarding genderism

3) No allegation is provable nor has been proven

4) Other female employees interviewed have countered the allegations

5) Independent audit found no proof whatsoever, yet commented that some things in the company could use improvement (as with all companies, especially large ones)

This is not a sexism issue here guys. It's a typical case of an upset ex-employee -- it happens all the time, just with much less media.

Other Github employees even said she was really not good at her work, difficult to work with, didn't except criticisms, etc.

[jawns]

Did you miss the part where the CEO resigned?

"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."

[maccard]

Nobody is questioning TPW's behaviour, the question mark is over whether she was being discriminated against by the other engineers and founders. It's evident from the resignation, and this report that TPW was behaving inappropriately towards multiple employees, not just one female, which seems to imply that this wasn't a case of her being discriminated (in this instance, however we have no proof either way for the rest of the accusations)

[kemayo]

I think the parent was just talking about the "serious allegations regarding genderism" part, as opposed to the crazy-founder stuff.

[metaphorm]

its an atypical case of upset ex-employee. most ex-employees are not harassed by the CEO and his wife.

also, most ex employees don't immediately attempt to summon a torch wielding mob by baiting with the "misogynist culture" card.

[yulaow]

So the important part is that only a few are harassed and not most? Please.

[SolarNet]

Independent auditor hired by the company being audited, instead of hyping her record, they should have provided evidence of it. I'm not saying the auditor wasn't independent, just that I don't trust the claim coming from the company that paid for it and is presenting the view.

[cantankerous]

With respectable auditors, independence is what you're paying for. Auditors that are found out not to be independent quickly go up in smoke. Just ask anybody who worked at Arthur Andersen about the Enron scandal.

[Rantenki]

Arthur Anderson was founded in 1913, so they were around for quite some time before they "went up in smoke". Anderson started auditing in the early 90s, and apparently was ignoring serious red flags from the very beginning. I guess auditors can get away with biased/dependent behavior for a long time.

[cantankerous]

And yet up in smoke they went. Here today, gone tomorrow.

[Rantenki]

Yes, but they lasted for a nearly a century first. While corrupt auditors will fail _eventually_, it isn't realistic to expect auditors to all be honest because they bad behavior will kill them in the long run. They can do a lot of damage in the short term before they fall apart.

It'll be interesting to see how this situation shakes out for this auditor, but I suspect they'll keep ticking along just fine.

[thwarted]

So then you're going to take at face value evidence provided by the party who hired the auditor? That sounds just as dubious as the claims of independence asserted by the hiring party itself!

It's entirely possible for one to look up an independent auditors credentials and history out-of-band. If you can't find anything to substantiate Github's claims of the auditor's record/independence, then call that out.

[chippy]

The auditor did their job. But only their job. Their job was to their client. They have no responsibility for example, to expose other illegal employment issues, or financial irregularities when they find them. Their job was not to the whole truth, but to the parts that they have been asked to investigate. They have to be discrete.