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Comment by pille | Hacker News Reader

Maybe she actually could've read the text and figured it out herself before sending out the note?

Just firing off a warning based on a simple text match seems high-handed and/or incompetent enough to consider leaving.

Just to be clear, you're saying: "If large company x hires a single incompetent person, that is a good reason to never deal with said company again." I think that's the parents interpretation of OP and hence the "seems like a disproportionate response." (I agree it was absurd to flag the content).

Absurd being the key word. This isn't a simple misunderstanding we're talking about, it's a company employee using company time and resources (i.e. sanctioned by the larger company) for something that can charitably be described as misguided.

It raises questions about the internal company culture, their commitment to pragmatism (doubly important for a source code hosting site), and their priorities. Any developer could have told this person that a string match does not equal a linguistic match.

Small signals matter; they're usually all you get out of large orgs.

When there are numerous alternatives to GitHub why would I continue to use them? Clearly they were not putting the time and effort in to both train their employee and review the content (simply reading the sentence would give context), why bother dealing with them?

Also why as a code hosting service would they be getting involved with the politics of the content of projects they host?

That's oversimplification. Even if it is just her own personal incompetence, if GitHub just hired her and let her loose as some kind of independent repo ombudsman to scold users, then yeah, that's a terrible management decision that warrants reconsidering your relationship with them.

We don't even know the whole story. The "woman" who sent the note is most likely just be an automated script.

Then apply the above-mentioned logic to the person/company that endorsed/approved said automated script.

The point is the same though. Resting a project's livelihood on a company that employed obviously incompetent process/humans/scripts is a risky move, and removing that livelihood from that company makes total sense.

It doesn't sound incompetent to me, there will always be false positives on that scale. Did they remove the OP's repo, or simply send them a message? If a legitimate email gets caught in your spam filter, do you switch email providers? Github and their process/humans/scripts don't sound like the incompetent ones in this scenario. I would be more concerned that my livelihood depended on such an over reactionary company.

"Hey boss,I tried cloning the Github repo of project X, but it says it can't be found, and I noticed our org page on Github is gone."

"Oh yeah, they sent us a message about the use of the word 'retard' in when referring to phase shifting."

"Oh, so they deleted our organization?"

"No."

"Oh? Well why can't I view it, weren't the projects public? What did you say to them?"

"I didn't say anything, I moved us to a different host."

You're injecting a lot of assumptions into your narrative.

My point is simply: if Github is flagging content based on perceived personal morals (not ever being allowed to use the word "retard," even in legitimate contexts), some choose not to associate their work with them.

And their bots hide "your profile from the public", when you are hit:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CpGcXmQXEAAyJU4.jpg:large

Even then, they still wrote the automation. It would be a prudent move to involve human review before emailing someone and accusing them of making a bigoted slur.

People who represent themselves as employees of a company represent the company. If the company permits incompetent employees to behave like this on their work profiles, that's not an unreasonable deal-breaker.

I don't really want my code repo judging me for my word choice.

A company shouldn't even waste time for things like that could.

I'm definitely not interested in company I'm paying for investing resources retarded things.

- a happy gitlab user.

I actually assumed that this message was automated – "We found on objectionable word in your project, please don't use it."

It just seems that this problems is remarkably easily solved with a simple "We are using a technical term correctly, maybe you should consider adjusting your automated emails."

I do get the impression that people generally seem to be all to eager to take offence, and it strikes me as a bit ironic to flounce off in a huff as a result of a badly-judged automated process!

> I actually assumed that this message was automated – "We found on objectionable word in your project, please don't use it."

How is this any better?

I find it worse. Github provides a great service and certainly has provided an incalculable value to os, but at a project level, it doesnt provide nearly enough value to dictate word choice, etiquette or style. Yes, the service is free, but github needs high caliber os projects more than they need it. It dosnt even matter who has an edge, automating spam at a user who says a naughty word is silly.

Idk, i dont understand why they would even care. Unless it reached a very intolerable bar, i dont think this is necessary

Presumably it was an automated message.

Someone had to design that automation. And it sounds like the message was at least made to look like it came from a person.

Go read up on Github user: CoralineAda [1][2] Then consider that GitHub hired her. I would not be surprised if the this automated script and her employment were directly related.

[1] https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/954 [2] https://github.com/CoralineAda?tab=activity

> Then consider that GitHub hired her.

I'm not terribly surprised. GitHub is, after all, a company which changed its logo to celebrate a highly political U.S. Supreme Court decision and which has had issues with left-wing racism (http://www.businessinsider.com/github-the-full-inside-story-...).

I really don't want this to be a witch hunt (not seeing that here, just wary of pointing out individuals)—this is exactly the type of thing a business should take responsibility for as a whole. This was a process failure, IMHO.

Exactly. The point of my comment was just that automation is no excuse for this kind of thing.

For me it's still about the organization, and singling out individuals is about as productive as yelling at customer support on the phone.

I think you guys missed my point. In pointing out one individual, I was pointing to the organization as a whole. Github supports this kind over-sensitive social-activism. Example A: dragnet language-police script. Example B: hiring controversial, social-activists.

For better or worse, the appearance of coming from a real person seems to be the trend in marketing automation. I think many people, especially outside of tech, believe they are interacting with a real person most or all of the time, when in reality, they only are during exceptions to common requests. But people like interacting with real people more than they like seeing "automated message blah blah".

Related: The company is slipping my mind right now, but one startup changed their email name in automated messages from male to female and saw improved metrics as a result.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_automation

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