GitHub puts founder on leave, kicks wife out of office after harassment claim

GitHub’s staff.

GitHub

GitHub has placed one of its three cofounders on leave and barred the cofounder’s wife from the office while it investigates allegations made by a former employee.

Engineer Julie Ann Horvath announced this past weekend that she had left GitHub, describing a toxic office culture in an e-mail interview with TechCrunch. The wife of the cofounder played a prominent role in Horvath’s account.

Julie Ann Horvath.

“I met her and almost immediately the conversation that I thought was supposed to be casual turned into something very inappropriate,” Horvath told TechCrunch. “She began telling me about how she informs her husband’s decision-making at GitHub, how I better not leave GitHub and write something bad about them, and how she had been told by her husband that she should intervene with my relationship to be sure I was ‘made very happy’ so that I wouldn’t quit and say something nasty about her husband’s company because ‘he had worked so hard.’”