GitHub apologized and offered a former employee the job back on Sunday after an investigation found “significant errors of judgment and procedure” after the man, who is Jewish, was fired for warning colleagues to take care of Nazis on the day of the Capitol revolt.
GitHub, the code-sharing site owned by Microsoft Corp. MSFT,
he also said that his head of human resources resigned.
The unnamed employee was fired on January 8, two days after he posted a message to his colleagues in the Washington, DC area on an internal Slack channel: “Stay safe, the Nazis are close.” Another employee allegedly committed a crime and complained to HR.
Among the far-right factions that took part in the January 6 Chapter uprising, which left five dead, were white supremacists who publicly displayed Nazi shirts and banners.
The shooting caused a stir, both on GitHub and online. In a blog post on Sunday, GitHub’s chief operating officer, Erica Brescia, said the company opened an external investigation into the matter last week, which found the shooting was wrong.
“In light of these findings, we immediately reversed the separation decision with the employee and we are in communication with his representative,” she wrote. “We want to say publicly to the employee: we sincerely apologize.”
Brescia said the head of the company’s human resources, whom he did not name, “took personal responsibility and resigned”. Carrie Olesen served as head of human resources at GitHub.
Brescia added that “employees are free to express concerns about Nazis, anti-Semitism, white supremacy or any other form of discrimination or harassment in internal discussions.”