Does it seem like it's not the whole story? It seems like there's a piece of the story missing from before the wife's chat over beers.
It doesn't seem like the wife of a boss would ask a specific employee to one-on-one beers, unless she had a specific topic in mind. And boasting about pulling strings at Github seems like an unlikely purpose.
To me, it sounds like something happened that was unmentioned. And the wife was asked to talk to her, in order to help settle the aftermath, and make sure she was happy there. (I'm not sure why the wife was deployed instead of HR) Seen another way, it sounds like the wife was trying to help make her happy at work, and not trying to boast.
However, something went awry at the chat, and they seemed to end up not liking each other.
Anyone else feel like the whole story's not being told here?
The article goes back and forth in the chronology, which makes the story hard to parse. It's Horvath's very personal point of view, but the TC interviewer(s) should have tried to clarify it. Multiple incidents/hostility around pull requests are blurred, but there were a few notches of escalation there.
If
a) Horvath had felt for some time that she was in a hostile work environment and that she was being subjected to pressures that a male employee would not have to endure (ie sexist discrimination, and
b) the company senior management / founder(s) felt that there was a risk that she was going to leave and go public with her allegations of sexism, then
c) it makes a twisted kind of sense that the founder would send his wife to go talk to Horvath to try to negotiate some kind of truce, make her happy. The (unfortunate) logic being that a woman to woman communication might be better for defusing Horvath's concerns.
d) unfortunately the wife, whilst female, handled it clumsily and make matters worse...and as the situation deteriorated she played an increasingly crazy and (apparently) unmanaged role. For all we know she had represented to her founder husband that she could handle it and panicked when things started going downhill.
e) etc etc
Your hypothesis was what I was thinking, and that a) was the part of the story that wasn't being told.
Like you, I have no idea what's actually going on, but the way the story was told, either by Horvath or the TC writer, the details didn't quite add up. I guess we wait until Github comes out with a statement.
Obviously it's only one side of a situation that spiraled out of control. Even if that one side comes from a generally reasonable, trustworthy person trying to give a full and balanced account – it will miss the mental states, internal rationales, and significant details that the "other side" experienced.
It doesn't seem like the wife of a boss would ask a specific employee to one-on-one beers, unless she had a specific topic in mind. And boasting about pulling strings at Github seems like an unlikely purpose.
To me, it sounds like something happened that was unmentioned. And the wife was asked to talk to her, in order to help settle the aftermath, and make sure she was happy there. (I'm not sure why the wife was deployed instead of HR) Seen another way, it sounds like the wife was trying to help make her happy at work, and not trying to boast.
However, something went awry at the chat, and they seemed to end up not liking each other.
Anyone else feel like the whole story's not being told here?