GitHub Founder Steps Down After Harassment Probe

Tom Preston-Werner -- founder of the immensely popular social coding site GitHub and its most prominent executive -- has left the company in the wake of widely publicized sexual harassment investigation.

GitHub, a tech-industry darling whose coding software is used by millions of developers worldwide, launched the investigation last month after one of the company's developers, Julie Ann Horvath, quit the company and claimed it had an oversized tolerance for inappropriate behavior.

Horvath's allegations, published last month on TechCrunch, kicked off a debate over whether Silicon Valley's tech companies are genuinely unfriendly toward women. In her TechCrunch article, Horvath said she was bullied after spurning one GitHubber's sexual advances, and then harassed by the wife of a company founder, presumably Preston-Werner's wife, Theresa.

>'While there may have been no legal wrongdoing, the investigator did find evidence of mistakes and errors of judgment.'

"The investigation found no evidence to support the claims against Tom and his wife of sexual or gender-based harassment or retaliation, or of a sexist or hostile work environment," GitHub said Monday in a short blog post. "However, while there may have been no legal wrongdoing, the investigator did find evidence of mistakes and errors of judgment." According to the post, Preston-Werner submitted his resignation, and the company accepted.

GitHub wasn't supposed to be like this. When Tom Preston-Werner and Chris Wanstrath founded the company just over five years ago, it was new type of startup -- a meritocracy where employees were given the autonomy to be productive and freed from the meddling oversight of middle managers -- and it soon became the symbol of a movement to push similar values across Silicon Valley.

But in retrospect, the company may have allowed for too much freedom. Certainly, Horvath's experience wasn't free of meddling. Worse, much of her issues seem to have come from someone who didn't even work for the company

Horvath didn't respond to an email seeking comment, but on Twitter, she blasted the company and the investigation, saying that being bullied out of her job was illegal and alleging that the company had promoted the "the man who bullied me out of our code base because I *wouldn't* fuck him. Too popular to be accountable, I guess."

"What a fucking joke," she added. "Company perks: Witch hunts, snow cones, and silencing."

GitHub wouldn't say exactly what mistakes Preston-Werner made, but the company is "implementing a number of new HR and employee-led initiatives as well as training opportunities to make sure employee concerns and conflicts are taken seriously and dealt with appropriately." In other words, GitHub is growing up. Autonomy is good, but only up to a point.