> 18. Everything that can be labeled can be hated.

That's a good one. Surprised I haven't heard that one before.

Godwin's law was not the reason that your code reviews needed to be locked down, it was that your employer had a terrible work environment, terrible employees, or both.

Actually it was neither of those. Just because a discussion is approaching Godwin's law doesn't necessarily mean anyone is being offensive or, as you say, terrible.

Also, sometimes it's not anyone's fault. It can just be down to circumstances.

I fail to see a reason why code reviews, in a professional environment, would go that way if the environment is not screwed up.

The "environment" rapidly changed and the organisational structure didn't keep up with the competing goals within the team.

None of the people were terrible. The company wasn't terrible. No-one was at fault.

If someone is mentioning Hitler in a code review someone is at fault.

No one had mentioned Hitler at that point. See another child comment for clarification.

Edit: To quote the CTO later on "I could see where the endless review discussions might end up heading so I split the team into product and project before we hit Godwin's law."

Sounds like the CTO was the Godwin's law violator, albeit obliquely.

Sounds like said code reviews were getting outright toxic and vile; referencing Hitler was probably not the main issue there.

Yep, it was an organisational issue with different work types.

To quote the CTO later on "I could see where the endless review discussions might end up heading so I split the team into product and project before we hit Godwin's law."

If they had become vile then someone would have been fired. CTO did a good job and stepped in before that happened.

That's subtly different to what you said before. Godwin's Law wasn't why you had to lock down code reviews. It was in anticipation of the law being true that you did it, which isn't quite the same thing. Self-fulfilling prophecy, perhaps.

Godwin's Law was part of the CTO's reasoning to split up the team and lock down code reviews to within each specific team.

So it forms part of the why.

Maybe they were just writing a lot of `AbstractHitlerBeanFactoryBuilder` classes.

On a more serious note, there is an argument for all computing being fundamentally authoritarian. You have one root account dictating how other users can consume resources, and from that you descend onto things like "the project owner". If this model is not tempered downstream, I can see how people can end up shouting "nazi" at each other.

(still, I guess one should probably catch himself before violating Godwin's Law in a work environment...)

RMS was anti-root (or anti-"wheel", I can't remember) for basically this reason.

There certainly is a lot to be analyzed in the power relations of control of the means of production and distribution of information, from the society wide scale to the individual device, but technologists are remarkably bad at doing this.

But also why conflate the arrangement of performance sensitive digital procedures and the social structure behind several billion people living on the same planet?

You should optimize for very different metrics.

Because it incentivises a specific mindset, which then cascades into everyday situations. Computers do what they are told (by root), other humans don’t do that - it can be a source of friction and frustration. A frightening amount of radicalised terrorists eventually turn out to be IT people... IMHO we don’t yet appreciate the influence that the tools we live and breathe have on ourselves.