Well they left all the juicy parts out

Context: https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/15/22232766/github-employees...

I can’t believe people talk like this on a work public channel.

> Our head of HR has taken personal accountability and resigned from GitHub yesterday morning, Saturday, January 16th.

You don't normally see consequences for senior officers for this kind of mistake. I would be curious to know who this person was and if they had any odd political affiliations.

Context for people who don’t know what this is referring to: https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-github-backlash-je...

Kudos to them for this. Screenshots of the conversations leaked [1], and there is no ambiguity as to who was in the wrong here. Note the timestamp on the thread — the comment happened well after the terrorists had invaded the Capitol.

Hopefully whoever said “nazis gave the jews free healthcare” was fired as well.

[1] https://twitter.com/zoeschiffer/status/1350159432282357760?s...

In HN, I've been seeing way more comments supporting the "freedom of speech" for those who stormed the Capitol, compared to other sites. (That might tell more about what sites I visit, but whatever.) So far I chalked it up to the strong libertarian bent of an average HN user - some people really believe in absolute freedom of speech. While I don't necessarily agree, I can live with that.

...And then I see multiple comments defending a company's decision to fire someone for one slack comment.

Makes me wonder if people just want their side to win.

This is what should happen when an employee is unfairly targeted and fired. Accountability for the decisionmaker, an apology, and a re-hire.

> "Separating with an employee isn’t easy for anyone. When we do separate we want to protect and (sic) employee’s privacy so we do not provide details regarding separations.”

They weren't fired. They were separated.

There are few key properties in self-reflection - (1) Revaluate the decision independently, (2) Focus on the process and see if you come to the same conclusion, (3) If the conclusion is not the same, make the decision maker accountable. If it is the same, recheck the process to see if something is amiss. and (4) Revisit the original decision.

I don't about the details at Github but it seems they have indeed self-reflected swiftly.

https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/github-fires-jew... seems to be about this?

"We did something wrong which we don't want to talk about, and as part of an agreement to save ourselves from a lawsuit we are now apologising publicly for that bad thing we did and we promise not to do that bad thing again"

Wow, well, that's the biggest move any big org has taken on an employee matter in recent years.

Coinbase CEO must be patting himself on the back right now.

I am afraid to ask this but can someone explain the "nazi joke" to me?

Glad to see they got this right in the end, but a shame it happened in the first place.

Is there any info on what actually happened?

That’s great news! Sometimes justice is, in fact, done. I look forward to more good news in 2021.

Is there any context available on what the employee was accused of doing?

It's a good thing Nat took the time to tell us that GitHub condemns the attack on the US Capitol. We might not know otherwise.

I mean seriously, why do corporations feel the need to say this nonsense? Are we really at the point where a corporation needs to waste time to tell us "hey y'all, in case you weren't sure, we don't actually support an armed insurrection attempting to stop the democratic transfer of power, and lynch a sitting Vice President."

Feedly tagged this with keywords "GitHub Jewish Nazis" without commas.

Can anyone provide some context for this?

There innumerable (I do not say this lightly) cases where election procedures were compromised. This election is a standing act of illegal and fraudulent action by county-level and state-level election authorities.

This is not a debated aspect of the argument. Ask me, and I will show you just a slice of proof that would warrant a forensic audit (esp if the shoe were on the other foot).

Now, for Mr Friedman to call these great patriots numbering the tens of thousands that spent their own money to support the president in D.C. as, categorically, Nazis is ludicrous.

It's an injustice to these American patriots, and to those that actually suffered under the Third Reich.

This is a joke at this point if you refer to you grandpa who wears Trump shirts as a "Nazi". It's a pure joke.

> the sacred seat of our democratic republic

If it's so sacred, why does it have a 15% approval rating?

And this "sacred democratic republic" talk that's pivoting around the woke narratives that pervade tech seems to conflict with the 1619 project line that we're irredeemably corrupted and evil by design.

> It was appalling last week to watch a violent mob, including Nazis and white supremacists, attack the US Capitol.

Entrance to the US Capitol was led by a BLM/antifa activist, with several more spotted.

Its a little frightening to see purportedly intelligent people running around talking about, "nazis" invading the capital. The delusional, unhinged rhetoric that has been mainstreamed is another symptom of our fraying society and the widespread mental illness that has resulted. There are numerous accurate (and pejorative) terms that can be used to describe the mob on January 6th, but they were not members of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei. The use of such delusional and hyperbolic language by the brass at Github certainly doesn't inspire confidence in the organization.

.

The employee who was first fired was an Antifa sympathizer had a history of harassing anybody who didn't align 100% with him politically, calling anybody to the right of Josef Stalin a Nazi, and generally trying to turn the workplace into a political battlefield at every chance. He also tried to intimidate the company by threating legal action and public defamation of the company when he didn't get his way.

The other guy had made a careless joke in 2014, which did not imply support for the Nazis but mocked the idea that free healthcare is ipso facto something beneficial. Indeed, this is something that people on the left understand very well, but you can hurt people severly by pretending to take it literally and labelling somebody a Nazi.

My prediction is that the first employee will soon be reinstated and get an official apology from Microsoft, the other guy will not.

This is a problem because it rewards the worst and most immoral behavior of the most unhinged activists from the left and increases political polarization, as conservatives, and also many white men in general, feel they are being treated very unfairly and realize that far-left activist employees are basically being allowed to frivolously hurt them with impunity and full company backing, even if their activism hurts the other employees ability to do their work and thus the company.

Young men in IT tend to have grown up with meme culture and the irreverent culture of online video games. They do not understand that people on the left really are in charge, and really want to hurt them and that their bloodlust can never be satisfied. Anybody who doesn't agree with the left is a literal Nazi in their minds and it is thus perfectly justified to use any means whatsoever to destroy them to prevent Nazis from gaining power, including lethal violence. Certainly any criticism is thus the equivalent of supporting germany in 1942. The left thinks their ideological enemies are war criminals who should be executed without trial, or even better be defamed into unemployability and homelessness and hopefully commit suicide, the ultimate triumph for the far-left mob.

Because of their obliviousness, thanks to the cultural isolation of gaming and culture and far-left academia, some naïve young software developers make stupid mistakes like believing the company will take context into consideration or that they will ever get a fair hearing. Indeed this is what happened with James Damore, who seems to be one of the most hated people on this board.

Now a massive boycott is being organized to support the histrionic leftist, and I am fully convinced it will succeed.

The most surprising thing is that the head of HR thought it was a wise move career-wise to defend the target du jour of the first guy. It speaks volumes to what "patterns of behavior" really means. There is an interesting quote from the first guy, "apparently the circle sounds akin to nazi apologists and ‘all lives matter’ type of bs."

Can someone offer an explanation as to why HN is nuking all threads and comments discussing the theverge article on this incident?

All Muslims are not terrorists

All Trump supporters are Nazis

Congratulations western progressives

Edit: intentionally provocative comment - broader intent is to expose this thinking, which is unfortunately not given serious criticism.

Giving the reporter the benefit of the doubt, the person might actually have been completely oblivious to current events, and taken offense to what seemed like someone calling all republicans nazis. It really speaks to the absurdity of the resent events that this is where we are, that absolutely correct warnings that litteral nazi's are assaulting the Capital are discarded because reality cannot be distinguished from hyperbole.

That said, I for the life of me cannot understand how any HR employee would look at that conversation and decide to reprimand, let alone fire someone for issuing a warning that could quickly be backed up by checking the news. I would not be surprised if both the reporter and now fired head of HR where republicans and Trump supporters, who have a cognitive dissonance around what transpired on the 6th.

Don't discuss politics at work. It's unprofessional.

What was the improper reason for termination? I'm guessing that the employee had some distant political alignment with the insurrectionists, but not close enough to warrant disciplinary action?

I've just seen the screenshots from https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/15/22232766/github-employees...

You just shouldn't be speaking like that in a company Slack channel. Politics should really not be discussed at work, and especially not in a public Slack channel. It's not the right place for it. It makes me not want to work there if they are discussing politics all day in a public Slack channel

There's detail missing, so it's hard to be sure, but this just seems like HR incompetence more than anything else, and it's right that the head of HR left.

Companies shouldn't have political discussions in work forums, so the comment about Nazis was inappropriate. But was it a firing offense? They do talk about a "pattern of behaviour", but this comment can't trigger a firing. If they had just reinforced that work forums aren't the places for political discussion, that might have been the end of it.

Now they have to put out a virtue-signalling report about racism and actually encouraging people to discuss politics in internal forums.

Unrelated meta-question:

In the screenshots in the article posted by bmiller2 https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/15/22232766/github-employees...

You can see something I honestly dislike very much in discussions - a "bombing" of emoji reactions during discussions.

For instance, the "I think this comment is completely appropriate" has 35 "+"-sign emojis. I find this concept of "reaction bulldozing" to cause any discussion to be shut down prematurely. Adding a reaction like that is so simple to do and doesn't require any effort, it's very easy to do, but actually adding your own opinion or nuanced explanation is very much harder, especially when the other side then already has so many "reaction emojis". I feel like the "signal-to-effort" ratio is completely skewed by this. You'd have to be a very assertive person to pierce through it and offer your, possibly only slightly, different opinion after seeing this.

I'm not sure what exactly it is that I dislike about it - does it stifle discussion? Does it diminish diversity of opinions? I think it does, if you're not early enough to give a dissenting opinion then it's you against the group, and I'm guessing a lot of people at that point would rather not react at all anymore.

Am I alone in thinking this? Is there a solution for this? I often encounter this phenomenon in discussions with engineers, not just with contentious topics like nazi's, but also e.g. styleguide or architectural discussions. I hope there's a word for it so I can learn how to deal with it, because currently I really can't pinpoint it.