"We didn't do anything illegal, or that would leave us vulnerable to a lawsuit" is about the only content that this blog post contains.

While Horvath characterized much of her woes as being gender-related [1], the investigation could have classified most of them as either unprovable or terrible-but-not-provably-sexist (in particular, the behavior of the Preston-Werners).

I doubt it will ever be clear what actually happened. Theresa Preston-Werner's response [2] spends more time avoiding topics than actually covering them. Tom Preston-Werner likewise [3] makes sure to reinforce the fact that GitHub is immune to lawsuit while providing no real details. I'm sure there are plenty of GitHub employees who have a strong opinion, but enough of them seem to have an ax to grind in one way or another that it's hard to trust that testimony.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/15/julie-ann-horvath-describes...

[2] https://medium.com/p/2fe173c44215

[3] http://tom.preston-werner.com/2014/04/21/farewell-github-hel...

The only problem for GitHub now is finding a way to attract talent. If your best response to

"You have a hostile work environment."

is

"We don't have a provably illegal hostile work environment."

then that doesn't inspire great confidence when evaluating it as a place to work.

I what some people here seemed to be missing, is this correlation isn't just lead was removed from the environment and 23 years later crime went down. It's that various areas has differing degrees of lead pollution and started reducing it at different times.

The places that reduced lead pollution first, saw the drop in crime first, the places that reduced it later saw the drop later. The eras that initially had high levels of lead had a larger drop in crime than areas that always had a low level.

And it's not just the USA either. The pattern holds pretty accurately for various nations around the world, like in Europe. Those who banned leaded fuel first, saw the drop in crime first, those who banned later, saw the drop later.

And these nations had massively differing crime policies. Some nations increased prison sentences to try and deter crime, and crime went down. Some nations put a huge effort into reforming criminals, and crime went down. And some nations cut prison sentence, and crime went down.

An anonymous post on medium by github insiders: https://medium.com/p/d96f431f4e8e

Unfortunate that it is anonymous, but it is still worth reading in my opinion.