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this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
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sigh, people suck.
This is actually something that bugs me about GitHub - I'm a Professional Software Developer, and we use GitHub enterprise internally at work (don't @ me, we don't have the budget to run our own infrastructure, BitBucket is crap and the sales person at GitLab ghosted me on 3 consecutive calls that we set up to discuss our needs). I'm also in charge of a team, and actively encourage the team to contribute to open source - find a bug? Draw up reproduction steps, report it upstream, and Fridays after lunch are dedicated to getting those bugs fixed. One of these days one of my team is going to run across one of these assholes, and I'm going to have a proper HR incident on my hands because that is a hostile work environment. Doesn't matter that it is a member of the public being a dick, I've got an obligation to ensure that my staff have a workplace free of harassment, and I've got absolutely no recourse against this other than to say "cool, we don't contribute to this repo anymore".
I understand your frustration. I go to GitHub für code, not for some weirdo's Telegram channel. But, come on, do your employees have access to the internet? Does someone maintain a Facebook page on the clock? Is Google allowed? Reasonable people can distinguish between workplace and internet hate.
Where I live at least, there is a difference because they are performing a task that they are being directed to perform as part of their job, as opposed to just randomly stumbling across hate while browsing the internet - if I've directed one of my staff to "submit a PR to this repo and work with the maintainers to get it merged" and some asshole drops into the comments they are being forced to engage in that situation, and that is not ok.
One case that I've heard of is a pizza delivery place that had to pay some serious compensation to a couple of their delivery people because they refused to stop accepting orders from someone who would be super abusive if their delivery person wasn't a white guy. Management knew what was happening, the drivers had complained and asked for a resolution, management had refused to do anything about it, so the business had to pay compensation.
I agree. This makes it a workplace problem. Sucks.
I'm guessing they looked at your company and decided you weren't worth enough to them.
We found Gitlab's pricing to be, frankly, ridiculous for the number of seats we have. Shame, the product is nice, just the sales team and pricing structure blows goats.
Rules around preventing a hostile work environment don't place an obligation on anyone to prevent it at all costs. It means that if an employee or - more relevantly here - a customer - is being hostile, then the workplace needs to make sure the employee or customer stops. But if you work in a call centre cold calling people, your company isn't going to get fined if you get an earful of abuse. (They might get fined for cold-calling depending on specifics :P) Same here.
A lot of call centres do not tolerate abusive behaviour directed towards their employees exactly for the reason of providing a safe work environment.
What does that mean in practice? The only way to "not tolerate" abusive behaviour in this context is reactive - blacklist the number, report the incident to the police if it was so bad it might constitute a breach of the law, etc. But the effect on the working environment has already happened, employees will still be calling new numbers, and will still receive abuse. Similarly, in the example above, HR could have a policy to report comments people come across, but the same situation occurs: the effect on the working environment already happened, and there will be more bigoted comments out there.
It's not the employer's job to shield their employees from every possible abuse they might encounter when interacting with the public through phones, the internet or indeed real life. They do have a duty (depending on jurisdiction) to take reasonable steps to protect them from abuse, but do you not see how while it's reasonable to remove a customer saying bigoted stuff to someone working in a shop, it's not reasonable to disable effective internet access in a job where you need access to third party libraries?
In practice it means that employees are allowed to end the call at will rather than "having" to continue to deal with them. That's the difference and it's as simple as that. No one is asking the employers to shield their employees from every possible harm.
Right so in practice employees shouldn't have to interact with people on github who are abusing them, but OP was making it sound like they had to do more than that, to me.