GitHub is facing employee backlash

https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-github-backlash-jewish-employee-termination-2021-1

by fanf2 • 6 years ago

66 44 6 years ago

i used to come to HN precisely to avoid this sort of stuff, that anyone can read in a newspaper. jews vs nazis at github? really? is this gratifying your intellectual curiosity???

rbanffy4• 6 years ago

Should we pretend it's not happening? Can we?

lovegoblin• 6 years ago

How lucky for you to be able to avoid these topics, since it is apparently not your life being threatened.

ashtonkem3• 6 years ago

Github is a very important tech organization, and this is a tech board.

jakelazaroff4• 6 years ago

I think it's important to note exactly why it's facing backlash: firing a Jewish employee for accurately saying that some of the people involved in the protest and terrorist attack at the Capitol were Nazis.

We know it's accurate because they brag about it [1]. This isn't hard.

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/93wnja/neo-nazis-boast-about...

Simulacra3• 6 years ago

Hypothetically speaking, by that logic a black rapper who talks about being a gangster would be reason enough to assume that other black people around him are also gangsters. So if an employee said of a group of black rappers "the gangsters are out today" under your logic it would be wrong to fire that person, even though they couldn't possibly know what that person was, is, or wants to be.

You're assuming guilt by association, and probably falling to Godwin's law. There's a difference between what someone may be, and what you may say in the workplace. The fact that the person who said is is Jewish means nothing, it's only a distraction from that an employee referred to a group of people as Nazi's and the employer took a offense and..the employee is looking for a new job.

You can't fire someone for behavior and excuse it in the other simply because you agree with their politics.

HeyZuess• 6 years ago

I am going to make a suggestion that it most like not the generalization language which was used but the events which followed:

"A coworker was quick to criticize the employee for using divisive rhetoric, igniting a firestorm of internal debate, with many jumping in to take sides. That same day, HR reprimanded the employee, who is Jewish, for using the word "Nazi" in the workplace."

The disruption in the workplace is probably enough to get HRs attention.

Now to answer your hypothetical question, I think the word Nazi has deeper connotations than the use of "gangster", but in either case I don't think the words should lead to termination. To quote a man I do not like at all, 'We have a snowflake generation', Dan Pena.

jakelazaroff4• 6 years ago

Lots of people — especially Jews! — have spent enough time on this to figure out indications that someone might be a Nazi. These guys looked like Nazis, and guess what: they turned out to be Nazis.

It’s not “assuming guilt by association”, it’s pattern recognition.

wppick2• 6 years ago

I have a theory that for a lot of companies Slack is a negative ROI. I find myself having to turn Slack off to avoid being constantly interrupted by notifications. But on the flipside I also find myself having to go back and read through tons of messages incase there are a few important messages that I need to know about.

Slack is just faster, less effective email.

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

14u2c• 6 years ago

I think its entirely dependent on how the slack is structured. Its great for quick communication amongst a small team on the same project and near essential if the team is remote. On the other hand if every PM in the company can ping engineers on a whim then obviously there can be problems.

Simulacra3• 6 years ago

Slack was fun at first, then it became a distraction, now it's blocked on our networks.

sayhar• 6 years ago

They should indeed be facing this backlash.

akarma4• 6 years ago

Prefacing this by saying I disagree with the protest:

"I did not know that, as a Jew, it would be so polarizing to say this word,"

Saying this word when referring to a large protest of Americans for a cause you disagree with in your work Slack channel? Statistically, it's likely that several people in the channel either agreed with the protest, or at the least, have relatives who did. You essentially just called coworkers and their families Nazis.

In his final Slack message to coworkers, the employee said that his experience shows that the tech industry, and GitHub in particular, needs to be held more accountable for improving diversity and inclusion at the leadership level.

I'm fairly sure that GitHub's own CEO is Jewish, and would see this employee's perspective perfectly well. I don't think this is an accountability issue so much as a social-cues-in-the-workplace issue.

madamelic3• 6 years ago

I am honestly so tired of this hand wringing over calling things what they are.

It's going to be uncomfortable but this isn't as simple as pro-life and pro-choice. This is about the very nature of our country and a party wanting to throw it all out.

If you are uncomfortable with an employee saying the truth (Many seditionists wore Nazi / white supremacist apparel and were carrying Confederate flags!), you should examine your own beliefs and whether you are either a white supremacist or a sympathizer.

This isn't about being "alarmist" or a "snowflake liberal", this about saying what we _literally_ see. That's a Nazi flag, that's a Nazi; "those are Nazis". Pretending like we all need to hold hands and coddle _literal Nazis' feelings_ is absurdist and socially + morally wrong.

If you are uncomfortable with, again, LITERAL Neo-Nazis and white supremacists being called what they are, you should be the one getting fired.

akarma4• 6 years ago

This about the very nature of our country and a party wanting to throw it all out.

I agree, and I'm firmly in the camp that the election must be respected, and that it would be the death of America as we know it to overturn an election like this.

If you are uncomfortable with an employee saying the truth

Did you read the article and the phrasing of his comment? This appeared to be during the initial peaceful protest; they were not all Nazis, and I doubt that even 0.1% of them were. Read the room, it's a workplace!

I would have no problem with seeing his take on Twitter, but the workplace? I equally don't expect someone to be able to go around my work's Slack saying "watch out for the Black nationalists" and "watch out for the violent Bolshevik Commies" because they saw a raised fist and a hammer-and-sickle in the crowd at a Black Lives Matter protest.

ashtonkem3• 6 years ago

I mean, there were literal Nazis there. Several people were wearing "6 million was not enough" and "Camp Auschwitz Staff" shirts.

At a certain point, you have to be utterly delusional to not admit that there are at least some Nazis out and about.

anewaccount2021• 6 years ago

These employee "backlashes" are increasingly toothless. It was only a couple of weeks ago that a Google employee published a diatribe in Wired demanding that Timnit Gebru be rehired, promoted, and an indoctrination program be forced on employees. Google's response? Nothing. Zilch. What was the fallout? Nothing, Zilch. Has anyone responded to, or even really cared about what Google's "union" is saying? I haven't even seen as much as a "we acknowledge your statement" from Google's execs.

Typing things doesn't matter anymore! You have to be willing to act. Both Pichai and Nadella know that no one is really going to walk away from their plum, very-well-paid positions over a political issue...and they're basically right.

These employee "backlashes" are shaping up to be nothing more than Scream Therapy and are being tuned out.

BETTER DO WHAT WE SAY OR WE'LL GO BACK TO OUR DESKS AND WORK QUIETLY!

wppick2• 6 years ago

People's minds are the new real estate. The power that the traditional media and social media have over people's mind seems to be quite alarming. While something is being pushed by the media it is hotly debated, and as soon as the media stops covering it POOF the heated debates stop. Data is being collected about people, passed through some sort of psychological processing and the results used to persuade people. How do we protect ourselves, our communities, and our countries from this?

silicon2401• 6 years ago

It's not new at all. This is what religion and other ideological systems have literally fought wars over for millennia: people's minds

eloff• 6 years ago

I don't get why a company would fire someone over this.

Some of the people storming the Capitol were definitely neo nazis. Not the majority, but still.

Can you not call a spade a spade anymore?

I think what happened here is a Trump fan got butthurt over his comment and fired him. That's a cause for wrongful dismissal, right?

Firing anybody over their political beliefs is pretty dumb.

madamelic3• 6 years ago

Can you not call a spade a spade anymore?

No. We have to make sure Neo-Confederates / Neo-Nazis / white supremacists are welcome at our company too. No one can get their feelings hurt even if those ideas are antithetical to our morals.

As long as the white supremacist doesn't audibly say he is purposefully passing over non-whites for promotions and raises, it's completely ok by the company.

benjohnson3• 6 years ago

Out little company has a "no drama" policy - highly recommend it. It gives people guidance on what is acceptable behavior at work, and at the same time gives a reason if you accept that drama distracts from the work

soganess2• 6 years ago

I feel like I'm in the minority here, but I'd like to start a discussion about this! Could you elaborate some? Judging just from your one liner, this sounds like it is ripe for misuse.

Dumb examples off the top of my head:

- Lets pretend my spouse died in an accident. Everyone is understanding and I'm afforded whatever time-off I need. While I'm out, someone quits and my boss asks (they don't assume I will say yes) me if I can be in the office a couple hours on Friday to help with an important deployment. I say yes, but an hour in I spontaneously start crying at my desk. This makes it difficult for my neighbor to get their work done. Would I be breaking the no drama policy?

- What if instead of spouse's death, war erupts in my country-of-origin and I may never be able to return there. A coworker asks what's up and instead of saying "nada," I tell them and it makes them uncomfortable.

- What if I was at a rally for $opposite_political_thing and a coworker sees me on the news and asks me about it. I tell them, and contrary to what I think I know about them, they don't react well to my response and feel really uncomfortable?

Clearly we've got more and less borderline cases, but from the right purview all of the examples could be considered drama. "No drama" feels like the HR equivalent to "your taillight is out."

How does your office decide what is drama? What if you don't think it is drama? Is there some type of arbitration? What happens if you win your arbitration case, but that spoils the office?

Sorry for all the questions, I'm genuinely interested.

benjohnson3• 6 years ago

Perhaps better phrasing would be "No unnecessary drama"

If civil war breaks out - just say "my family is in danger and I need help"

Counter intuitively it can really help in sticky situations: I'm white and one of my employees is black. He didn't get a raise.

Instead of getting mad at me because he didn't get a raise, he put in our issue tracker - "Employees don't know how to calculate their pay range"

We now have an open skill system and and open salary system. We all know why each of us is paid our various rares and all of us know how to get to the next level.

We're also allowed to make mistakes - because there's not much drama, when some real drama comes up, we can deal with it.

One of my employees has nervous breakdowns now and then - not a problem because she's not having a breakdown while someone is kicking the copier and some else is playing CNN doom-news on their computer.

I can help her because I'm not already tapped out.

Apreche• 6 years ago

GitHub, which is owned by Microsoft, is using Slack instead of Microsoft Teams.

tester756• 6 years ago

what's so weird about employees having freedom to use whatever tools they want?

just don't be shocked when you find that they use chrome and firefox too

CardiBFanatic23• 6 years ago

Man, it seems like the minimums for "fireable offenses" are getting lower and lower there. I lost my job there for referencing the song "WAP" during a small internal presentation three times (Naming it Wicked Automated Premium to get the name to be WAP and saying "I hope you brought a bucket and a mop because we're cleaning up the competition" and "And now Megan Thee Stallion should rap something dirty") and I thought that was at least deserving of a warning first.

rovr138• 6 years ago

No offense, but it sounds like you didn’t know your audience.

stunt• 6 years ago

Maybe what is covered in the article isn't the full story. Now that this story is public, I wonder if Github will go public with their explanation about it or they try to explain it internally.

At least form outside it seems like they pay some attention to "inclusion" and "diversity". So it shouldn't be that simple. https://github.com/about/diversity

I would give them the benefit of the doubt until they get the chance to explain it.

ashtonkem3• 6 years ago

Assuming that all the facts stated are true, this is some bottom tier management. What a way to take a story that had nothing to do with GitHub and make themselves the villain of this story.

What were they thinking? I'm having a really hard time imagining how they thought this would go well.

Simulacra3• 6 years ago

"GitHub is facing employee backlash after the firing of a Jewish employee who suggested 'Nazis are about' on the day of the US Capitol siege"

GitHub is facing employee backlash

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