Don't forget this link, the anonymous GitHub employee response to Horvath's claims: "Facts Conveniently Withheld".
What every founder fears - https://medium.com/p/2fe173c44215
The whole issue wasn't merely (the alleged) harassment as much as it was the appearance of 'undue influence'. The admission that GitHub forced out the co-founder for this very reason--all the while stepping clear of the topic of sexual harassment--is basically the crux of the matter.
FULL explanation: It comes down to the unrestricted access that was granted. It introduces a person with extreme power but carries no responsibility with regards to work or culture. The end result is what we have today. This type of culture is actually very prevalent in asian companies (where families have unrestricted access) and have been demonstrated to be extremely detrimental. Theresa Preston-Werner blog post is extremely telling where she says "I have many close friends at GitHub, and I certainly had reached out to them when I began to build my company". My wife made the same mistake at her first job (trying too hard to be friends), except that she was an individual contributor and not the wife of the CEO. Her co-workers could just tell her off and she quickly learned the balances that were necessary. It's obvious that Theresa had no experience of this kind and had too much power for people to say "no".
I want to add, I think there was an overfocus on gender issues by all parties (victims, plantiffs, media & company) in the first place. When I read the original article, I felt that regardless of the incident, Julie Ann Horvath was just pulling out the gender card. This was a mistake since it gave Github an easy way out to simply deny the gender-based accusations without any wrong doing.
Out of the mouths of babes...
Also, it may have come out in the investigation that the founder gave his non-employee wife way too much inappropriate latitude inside the company. She's conceded that she went too far with her activism around her startup. But especially if she crossed boundaries and had inappropriate access to private company information (as Horvath said she claimed), the founder could take the fall for enabling that.
That's a nice way of putting it.
For all we know Julie-Ann started dating someone close to Theresa Preston-Werner who shared that he, and several others, slept with her and could even be the father of Tom's child and then refused to distance himself from Theresa. When she shared this sad state of affairs in her private love life with some colleagues she was suddenly requested to meet with Theresa and....
See how that's both consistent and perfectly plausible yet still went from bad to worse pretty quickly? These things are messy enough as they are; let's not make them any messier than they need to be.
the whole thing is crass and distasteful to my british sensibilities, but if this the future of how conflict in internet corporations is represented, then we shouldn't be surprised to see allegations from all sides. The key skills that we as audience have to develop is critical thinking, impartiality and a good sense of decency.
The line is drawn at "anonymous internet sources". At least in the sense of euclidean geometry, that is not a "side" of the argument as much as it is a literary device to create an infinite attack surface.
A named or pseudonymous source necessarily has an associated reputation, but an anonymous source has no reputation at all.
Even taking all emotion out of it, a story from a source that is probably a lie convey s more emotion than a story from a completely unknown source.
Until, of course, a source presents evidence, at which point we evaluate the credibility of the evidence instead of the source.