GitHub is facing employee backlash
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
Slack is just faster, less effective email.
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
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.
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.
I can tell you see the policy as a net positive. Have you noticed other employees didn't like policy as much? What were their grievances with it?
In my opinion, the issue system needs to be used all the time for everything - so that nobody feels that thyr're the only squeaky wheel.
It does require trust however. We have been known to punt an issue to let us all collect our thoughts.
I know the system keeps me from micro-managing, keeps one of my guys from just complaining (we ask for a potential solution), and keeps another employee from feeling un-empowered.
The only bad second-order effect I've seen is sometimes people wait to fix simple problems - they tend to it in the system instead of just fixing it.
But... Usually I'm wrong, the issue usually is deeper upon reflection.
What were they thinking? I'm having a really hard time imagining how they thought this would go well.
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.
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...
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.
> "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.
It’s not “assuming guilt by association”, it’s pattern recognition.
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.
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.
just don't be shocked when you find that they use chrome and firefox too
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!
> "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.
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.
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.
If I show up at a protest and someone is carrying a Confederate flag, I am leaving. Full stop. No more excuses, no more "but some are good people!".
If you are hanging with Neo-Confederates in political spaces, you are at best a sympathizer and at worst a silent Neo-Confederate.
If I see a neo-Confederate at a political rally toting a Confederate flag and I am in that group, I am going straight home and evaluating my opinions.
> If you support a president who separates children from their parents
Obama's Homeland Security secretary, Johnson, confirmed with NPR's Mary Louise Kelly that this predates the Trump administration.
> terrorize your elected officials
AOC has said that the whole point of protesting is to "make people uncomfortable." A professor at Wellesley wrote an article in Slate that "Violence can be an important tool in protests." The destruction of government buildings has certainly occurred in recent protests, there are dozens of instances of this.
> build gallows outside the building
Even the irony in this! Black Lives Matter protestors built a guillotine in front of Jeff Bezos' DC home.
I support Black Lives Matter to be clear, but obviously this whole "Nazi by association" schtick leads to the conclusion that we would all, in fact, be Nazis.
Do you have numbers on how many children were separated from their parents? How many parents were repatriated without their children? How many kids died in custody and of how many they lost track of?
> Black Lives Matter protestors built a guillotine in front of Jeff Bezos' DC home.
Did they also invade Bezos' home with the intention to drag him out?
> obviously this whole "Nazi by association" schtick leads to the conclusion that we would all, in fact, be Nazis.
When you think about that, do you feel comfortable at endorsing the policies that caused kids to be permanently separated from their parents? Kids that died without the comfort of being with their families?
HRW did a report on that https://www.hrw.org/report/2018/02/28/freezer/abusive-condit...
I face a similar issue in my own home country of origin: 58 million people voted for a corrupt ex-military drop out, racist, homophobic, and incompetent beyond belief who's trying to bypass all democratic processes and take over local police forces which overwhelmingly support him. I can't have those 58 million fellow Brazilians in high regard. Even if you say the previous government was corrupt, corruption is much less serious than letting 200 thousand people die while sabotaging emergency healthcare measures so that your possible political opponents in the next presidential election don't get credit.
In addition to the literal neo-Nazis in attendance, there were also plenty of groups — such as Proud Boys — that may not be technically neo-Nazis themselves, but are definitely Nazi adjacent; I don't think it's a particular stretch to put them under the Nazi umbrella.
Given all that, 30 seems like a real lowball.
With that said, I agree 30 may seem like a lowball and it possibly is, but I've seen so many cases of people who went to the initial protest being doxed, and it's been some random kind woman from the Bay Area, some random woman who works at a hospital in Massachusetts, and so on. They very much just appear to be regular people brainwashed by Trump and his cronies.
Because it's a sliding scale, right? And just because there's no single objective line doesn't mean that we have to give up drawing a line entirely.
I'm not giving an opinion on doxxing random people at the protest who weren't involved in the terrorist attack. I'm just saying that it's fair to see the crowd that showed up and say "stay safe homies, Nazis are about." It turned out to be prescient.
Article:
> he sent the original message because he wanted to warn people to be careful: *The mob rampaging* through the US Capitol
At a certain point, you have to be utterly delusional to not admit that there are at least some Nazis out and about.