GitHub apologized and offered the job to a former employee on Sunday, after an investigation found “significant errors of judgment and procedure” after the man, who is Jewish, was fired for warning his colleagues to monitor the Nazis on the day of the Capitol revolt.
GitHub, the code-sharing site owned by Microsoft Corp. MSFT,
he also said his head of human resources has resigned.
The unnamed employee was fired on Jan. 8, two days after posting a message to colleagues in the Washington, DC area on an internal Slack channel: “Stay safe, the Nazis are close. “. Another employee had reportedly been offended and complained to HR.
Among the far-right factions that took part in the January 6 riot at the Capitol, which left five people 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, Erica Brescia, chief operating officer of GitHub, said last week the company opened an external investigation into the matter, which found the shooting was wrong.
“In light of these findings, we immediately reversed the decision to separate from the employee and we are in communication with their representative,” he wrote. “We want to say publicly to the employee: we sincerely apologize.”
Brescia said the company’s head of human resources, whom he did not appoint, “has taken on personal responsibilities and resigned”. Carrie Olesen had been the head of human resources at GitHub.
Brescia added that “employees are free to express concerns about Nazism, anti-Semitism, white supremacy or any other form of discrimination or harassment in internal discussions.”