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Update on an Employee Matter

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Re: Update on an Employee Matter

#131

Post by relbeek2 »

waterhouse wrote: post #120
throwawaygh wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(CONTEXT: I assume parent is referring to this comment from one of the github threads: "nazis gave the jews free healthcare". That comment was not made by the employee who was fired.) (edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25813184 which adds some additional context. I assumed when writing this comment that the nazi healthcare joke was part of the 1/6/2020 thread & a direct response to warning about violence…

Have you heard of "dead baby jokes"? What's the difference between 100 dead babies and a Ferrari? I don't keep a Ferrari in my garage. Here's a sampling. https://thoughtcatalog.com/clint-conway/2016/08/50-of-the-fu... Anyway, the thing that makes it funny is how absurd it is that the joke-teller would be an enthusiastic baby-murderer, -torturer, and/or -cannibal, depending on the joke (plus general surprise and shock…

And unfortunately in the United States being a self proclaimed Nazi or even sharing their beliefs is not in itself illegal.

Re: Update on an Employee Matter

#132

Post by OJFord »

holman wrote: post #55
jakelazaroff wrote: post #4

Context for people who don’t know what this is referring to: https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-github-backlash-je... Kudos to them for this. Screenshots of the conversations leaked [1], and there is no ambiguity as to who was in the wrong here. Note the timestamp on the thread — the comment happened well after the terrorists had invaded the Capitol. Hopefully whoever said “nazis gave the jews free healthcare”…

fwiw, the healthcare joke was tongue-in-cheek for the discussion which, ironically enough, was also about Republicans in 2014. They were discussing how many on the right compared Obamacare to Nazism and how disgusting it was to make that comparison.

Oh wow, that's taken way out of context in at least The Verge article then. Not actually a joke at Jewish expense at all, at least other than not mentioning it at all.

Re: Update on an Employee Matter

#133

Post by 8fGTBjZxBcHq »

hh3k0 wrote: post #72
pjc50 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alleged reason was "using the word Nazi on Slack", in the context of "“stay safe homies, Nazis are about.”" in relation to the events of the 6th and afterwards.

> in the context of “stay safe homies, Nazis are about.” He actually forgot a comma in that message. Maybe Grammar Nazis are about at GitHub?

how the fuck could you think this would be funny in this thread, this week.

Re: Update on an Employee Matter

#134

Post by jakelazaroff »

odiroot wrote: post #128
biermic wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Independent from the events: The way Github employees communicate with each other makes me kind of uncomfortable. In the companies I've worked here in Europe, such discussions just would not happen in a cooperate chat room.

Yes, we don't take calling anyone "Nazi" lightly. Well, at least level-headed people don't. It's disrespectful to the people who were imprisoned, tortured and exterminated by the real Nazis.

As a member of the group of people who were imprisoned, tortured and exterminated by the “real” Nazis, I’d much rather be warned that their successors were involved in an ongoing terrorist attack in the immediate vicinity than tiptoe around the issue to avoid making conservatives uncomfortable.

Re: Update on an Employee Matter

#135

Post by Jommi »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #4

Context for people who don’t know what this is referring to: https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-github-backlash-je... Kudos to them for this. Screenshots of the conversations leaked [1], and there is no ambiguity as to who was in the wrong here. Note the timestamp on the thread — the comment happened well after the terrorists had invaded the Capitol. Hopefully whoever said “nazis gave the jews free healthcare”…

You are really going to take that out-of-context 2014 post bait as truth? Really? You don't think it should be investigated a bit more before firing someone?

Re: Update on an Employee Matter

#136

Post by LiquidSky »

loeg wrote: post #56
pjc50 wrote: post #15

> 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.

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.

Re: Update on an Employee Matter

#137

Post by throwaway_6142 »

The employee who was first fired was an Antifa sympathizer had a history of harassing anybody who didn't align 100% with him politically, calling anybody to the right of Josef Stalin a Nazi, and generally trying to turn the workplace into a political battlefield at every chance. He also tried to intimidate the company by threating legal action and public defamation of the company when he didn't get his way.

The other guy had made a careless joke in 2014, which did not imply support for the Nazis but mocked the idea that free healthcare is ipso facto something beneficial. Indeed, this is something that people on the left understand very well, but you can hurt people severly by pretending to take it literally and labelling somebody a Nazi.

My prediction is that the first employee will soon be reinstated and get an official apology from Microsoft, the other guy will not.

This is a problem because it rewards the worst and most immoral behavior of the most unhinged activists from the left and increases political polarization, as conservatives, and also many white men in general, feel they are being treated very unfairly and realize that far-left activist employees are basically being allowed to frivolously hurt them with impunity and full company backing, even if their activism hurts the other employees ability to do their work and thus the company.

Young men in IT tend to have grown up with meme culture and the irreverent culture of online video games. They do not understand that people on the left really are in charge, and really want to hurt them and that their bloodlust can never be satisfied. Anybody who doesn't agree with the left is a literal Nazi in their minds and it is thus perfectly justified to use any means whatsoever to destroy them to prevent Nazis from gaining power, including lethal violence. Certainly any criticism is thus the equivalent of supporting germany in 1942. The left thinks their ideological enemies are war criminals who should be executed without trial, or even better be defamed into unemployability and homelessness and hopefully commit suicide, the ultimate triumph for the far-left mob.

Because of their obliviousness, thanks to the cultural isolation of gaming and culture and far-left academia, some naïve young software developers make stupid mistakes like believing the company will take context into consideration or that they will ever get a fair hearing. Indeed this is what happened with James Damore, who seems to be one of the most hated people on this board.

Now a massive boycott is being organized to support the histrionic leftist, and I am fully convinced it will succeed.

The most surprising thing is that the head of HR thought it was a wise move career-wise to defend the target du jour of the first guy. It speaks volumes to what "patterns of behavior" really means. There is an interesting quote from the first guy, "apparently the circle sounds akin to nazi apologists and ‘all lives matter’ type of bs."

Re: Update on an Employee Matter

#138

Post by chanakya »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #125
chanakya wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are all sorts of dangerous people out there. Of the 16,000 people murdered in the US every year, how many are by Nazis? No, it's a political statement, which is fine, politics is good. The workplace is just not the place for it.

The point is that at the time, in the immediate vicinity, there were significantly more Nazis “out there” than usual.

We don't know that, no one has counted. There were tens of thousands of people there, how many were Nazis? We don't know how many of them are there in the US, for that matter.

What we do know is that they have no real cultural influence or power. That's why calling them out as particularly dangerous is an act of politics. It attempts to smear political opponents by grouping them with evil figures like Nazis, white supremacists and racists.

Re: Update on an Employee Matter

#140

Post by jakelazaroff »

chanakya wrote: post #138
jakelazaroff wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that at the time, in the immediate vicinity, there were significantly more Nazis “out there” than usual.

We don't know that, no one has counted. There were tens of thousands of people there, how many were Nazis? We don't know how many of them are there in the US, for that matter. What we do know is that they have no real cultural influence or power. That's why calling them out as particularly dangerous is an act of politics. It attempts to smear political opponents by grouping them with evil figures like Nazis, white su…

You don’t think that in the midst of a terrorist attack in which multiple perpetrators bear Nazi symbols, people in the area should be at least slightly more worried about Nazis than usual?
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