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Comment by catbuttes | Hacker News Reader

Normally I don't support going to peoples employers for shit they do outside of working hours, but I am willing to bet that some of those fucknuggets were using work email addresses/accounts. If I was their boss I would want Kat/Github to reach out and let me know about this.

By using their work accounts, they are stating that the company condones their behaviour - and I suspect that isn't the case in the majority of cases. I would definitely want to know if any of my employees were engaging in this shit so I could explain in very simple terms why it is unacceptable - because they clearly don't get it on their own.

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I went through a couple of these GitHub usernames, they are all first deleted, but there's some presence in other sites, and it's clear that none of them likely hold a regular job in any place of consequence. One of these accounts seems to spend time finding other female GitHub accounts and making condescending PRs while another was busy on far right subreddits crapping on various groups of people.

Do yourself a favor and don't contribute to another history of $regular_dude who got fired/life ruined because his account/name was similar to someone else's in the Internet.

when has that happened before?

It’s pretty stupid to use a work account for personal stuff, I even have two brokerage accounts because of this attitude.

But using a work account to harass someone is a completely new level of stupid.

I wonder the consequences of having an account blocked or suspended if your employer used Github. And including your employer to an account you used for harassment would not, I think, be unfair grounds for "disciplinary action".

I don't know why people do this, but to figure out how to stop it, we need to understand it, don't we?

How?

How about, if any employer wants to hold one of these employees to account, how about requiring they make a video apology that begins with an admission of what they did, and an explanation of what was going on in their mind when they did it?

Anonymise the subject and make it public?

Give it to university psych departments for study?

In the US at least that makes them a liability ticking time bomb to an employer, especially if they go beyond mere "asshole jokes" like the bloat removal which deletes everything. Since if the employer got involved in a discrimination or sexual harassment lawsuit later knowing about it makes them look very willfully negligent and complicit in a lawsuit. The ironic thing about it being for a "wrong reason" is that the incentive doesn't depend upon character of the employer.

Just fire their ass, and walk them to the door. Simple. Of course, lock their internal accounts first.

Sure. And then fire them.

I think they should suspend access (with right to appeal) to all of their employer's repos until they address their employee problem.

Normally I'm not racist but...

This is a false equivalence. You should directly explain why this is bad, rather than pointing to another similar bad thing.

It is encouraging d̶o̶x̶x̶i̶n̶g̶ finding identifying information of that person and using it against them.

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