GitHub apologized and offered a former employee his job Sunday after an investigation found “significant errors of judgment and procedures” after the man, who is Jewish, was fired for warning colleagues to keep an eye out for the Nazis. day of the uprising in the Capitol.
GitHub, the code-sharing site owned by Microsoft Corp. MSFT,
also said the head of human resources has resigned.
The unnamed employee was fired on January 8, two days after posting a message to his colleagues in Washington, DC on an internal Slack channel, “Stay safe homies, Nazis are about.” Another employee allegedly insulted himself and filed a complaint with HR.
Among the far-right factions that took part in the January 6 riot in the Capitol, which killed five people, were white supremacists publicly displaying Nazi shirts and banners.
The fire caused a stir, both on GitHub and online. In a blog post Sunday, GitHub Chief Operating Officer Erica Brescia said the company opened an outside investigation into the matter last week, which found the shooting was wrong.
“In light of these findings, we immediately reversed the decision to separate with the employee and are in talks with his representative,” she wrote. “We want to say publicly to the employee: we sincerely apologize.”
Brescia said the company’s HR chief, whom she did not name, “has taken personal responsibility and resigned.” Carrie Olesen was GitHub’s Chief Human Resources Officer.
Brescia added, “Employees are free to voice concerns about Nazis, anti-Semitism, white supremacy or any other form of discrimination or harassment in internal discussions.”