Full stop and reverse gear: GitHub hires fired employee back, fires HR instead

The Capitol Riots in the USA on January 6th 2021 not only caused disbelief in the world of politics and journalism. It also caused a tech employee of GitHub, a Microsoft company, to be fired.

Wait. What?!

The employee in question, who's name is not revealed, allegedly sent a message to other GitHub employees mentioning "nazis", describing the mob around the Capitol Riots. This word use seem to have offset other employees at GitHub (for what reason is unknown) and led to the GitHub employee to be fired on January 8th. Reason: Misconduct.

Looking at pictures of the riot crowd however, reveals that the "nazi" statement is definitely not out of place:

Robert Packer—who celebrated the mass murder of 1m people at Auschwitz—was released with no bond after violently storming the Capitol.

I've been under pre-trial house arrest for 17 months after winning a pollution case against Chevron.

Again: What are U.S. courts protecting? pic.twitter.com/RJNrPsqCwh
— Steven Donziger (@SDonziger) January 15, 2021

The firing of the employee, who is of Jewish religion, upset more than just the technology world. Finally, GitHub announced an internal investigation on that matter. Although the fired employee doubted a positive outcome of this investigation for him, the completed internal report reconciles the employee.

Probably due to worldwide "shitstorm" directed at GitHub, the company now rudders back. The head of HR at GitHub has taken personal accountability and resigned:

We found significant errors of judgment and procedure in a recent employee separation. We have reversed the separation, and our head of HR has taken personal accountability and resigned from GitHub. We apologize sincerely to the employee. https://t.co/zm8CA15IQf
— GitHub Policy (@GitHubPolicy) January 17, 2021

Whether or not the employee in question will accept a continuity at GitHub is currently unknown.

Claudio Kuenzler

Claudio has been writing way over 1000 articles on his own blog since 2008 already. He is fascinated by technology, especially Open Source Software. As a Senior Systems Engineer he has seen and solved a lot of problems - and writes about them.