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.’”