Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

When you fire a Jewish employee for (rightfully) calling out that Nazis were present at last weeks insurrection, but not folks who make jokes like “Hitler gave the Jews free healthcare” (per the Verge article another commenter posted), there better be consequences at the VP level

Yeah, Github sure sounds like a lovely company to work for, and tone is set at the top.

So far as I’m concerned, how people and organisations react to their mistakes when they are revealed matters a lot more than the fact that they make mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes, improving in response to them is what matters.

Which of course implies that nothing will improve until the shitty state of affairs gains publicity. This isn't how it's supposed to work, you are not supposed to fuck up and then repent in public, you are supposed to get it right without putting on a show of public repentance.

Seriously, does anyone need to be told that the confederate flag or the thin-blue-line-flag-with-Punisher-logo are symbols of white supremacism? Who thinks that support of that is acceptable in the workplace?

GitHub HR is no stranger to mistakes.

I know the bar is low for companies, but that there was exec-level consequences impresses me and make me more likely to want to work at Github.

It's weird to me that this was the head of HR's mistake (sort of implied) and not a more junior manager (both in reality, and in who usually gets the blame even if it's a senior manager's fuck-up). There is some unnamed VP of engineering who may have kicked off the process with HR. I don't know.

I'm glad GH (1) took another look at the firing, (2) realized they were mistaken, and (3) mea culpa'd publicly.

But this is how it should work, the person in charge taking responsibility for what happens under them instead of foisting it on an underling, regardless of who made the actual decision. The buck ultimately stops at the top. More leaders should be like this.

A good leader is supposed to take responsibility for the actions taken by his or her team. Failure of a unit implies failure of the leadership. In my view, the right outcome happened here.

> A good leader is supposed to take responsibility for the actions taken by his or her team. Failure of a unit implies failure of the leadership.

I've heard the same "leadership principles seppuku" and sure, this would be consistent with that ethos. (In my experience, that kind of buck-stops-here ownership happens less often than not.) But this isn't the part of your comment I want to argue.

> In my view, the right outcome happened here.

I disagree (if it was a subordinate).

If the responsible party was a more junior member of HR, I'd like to see the blowback land on the actually culpable party. (That could be in addition, or alternative, to the leader's resignation.)

If a junior member of HR was able to fire employee without review by other people and proper plausibly lookimg documentation, then the responsibility is 100% on whoever invented such process. Which is the lead.

Because really, that would put the company not just at risk of what is going on now, but also at risk of very expensive lawsuits.

Would that not just lead to no good leaders over the long term? (with the good ones always resigning due to actions of their team members)

> Earlier this week, the company hosted an “empathy circle” to “build understanding with members of the team on things that affect us.” It did not go over well with employees.

Maybe they got fired for this terrible idea

Isn't that standard fare for workplaces everywhere in the world now? Not that I like it much, but it seems to be the normal approach.

I work at a company going hard on diversity and inclusion and they haven't gone even a baby step towards asking us to empathize with the grievances of people who feel fascism is the only thing that can help them.

Empathy isn't the same as tolerance, but I'd expect they'd either know the optics would be terrible or don't see the difference themselves.

The head of HR was Carrie Olesen, who doesn't seem like she had any odd political affiliations:

https://profilemagazine.com/2020/carrie-olesen-github/

https://github.blog/author/carrieoleson/

However, it's worth noting that the statement says "resigned from GitHub," and she was at Microsoft before the acquisition and moved to GitHub. I wonder if it means she's still with Microsoft. Maybe I'm reading too much into it.

Her political donations also look completely unremarkable: Obama, Biden, The Lincoln Project, etc.. I'm not sure what the previous commentator is wondering about possible political affiliations, but she certainly doesn't seem to stand out.

https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/?...

Seems to me that the head of HR got thrown under the bus to protect other members of the exec.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com