[ebiester]

I have all the empathy for people in the world.

A corporation is not a person. If your organization cannot handle the load, then you need to adjust your practices. The organization needs to prioritize their paying users. The organization needs to shift people from new features to keeping the lights on. And maybe the organization needs to find another strategy to manage its azure transition.

[otterley]

A corporation is made of people. GitHub cannot exist but for the people who continue to work for it. And they’ve already said, multiple times, that restoring availability is their top priority.

[port11]

A corporation is made of people, but its ethos is the product of decision-making. If a corporation is consistently, say, unethical, is it because they hire only unethical individuals? Or because unethical people somewhere along the chain of command make unethical decisions?

[otterley]

I'm not exactly sure what you're getting at with this question. It seems to still conflate corporate-level decisions with boots-on-the-ground work.

Are you suggesting that whatever decisions their upper-level management makes that you consider unethical irreversibly and irrevocably taints all the difficult and honorable work that their engineers and operations people are performing?

[port11]

I’m saying their lower-level employees are probably honest, hard-working people like everyone else. But the detachment that comes from a large corporate structure makes the higher-ups decide things that aren’t as honourable.

“Corporations are made up of people” is a strange way to excuse the reality that the ‘bad’ things that corporations do are often decided by top management.

[otterley]

Ah. I didn’t intend to excuse the decisions of upper management when I said that. My intent was to counter the notion that a corporation and its workers can’t be analyzed independently.

A corporation is just a business formation, and businesses are made of individual people working for it. Those people’s motivations and efforts can, and often should, be evaluated separately from the decisions of management.

[port11]

We agree, thank you for the clarification. Have a nice day!