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I, too, greatly dislike the cruelty of public shaming. It's inhumane, and dehumanizes us all.

Recently I was tasked with improving 2FA usage in my company's GitHub organization. My first approach was to nicely, neatly, and personably ask people, coupled with regular announcements to make sure everyone knew. Every interaction came with documentation on how to do it and a sincere offer to walk them through it. Totally reasonable approach, executed with kindness and compassion.

The cynic in me was unsurprised when this rapidly became a Sisyphean task. A number of people, upon faced with being informed in half a dozen different ways, professed to have no idea that they were expected to enable 2FA. Others swore up and down to me that they knew what to do and would shortable enable it, only for it to still be off a week or more later.

At this point I decided that kindness and human compassion were a drain on my time and clearly ineffectual. So I grabbed a junior engineer and we wrote a script that automatically removes from the org anyone who doesn't have 2FA enabled. Announced it to everyone, every manager on board, and turned it on. Overnight, the problem went away, and has largely stayed away. Once in a while people publicly ask why they were kicked out and are reminded that they were informed of the 2FA requirement.

This isn't an approach characterized by humanity and kindness. It is, however, one that is effective and time-efficient.



Why did you need to write a script? GitHub allows you to enforce 2FA at the organisation level.

https://help.github.com/articles/requiring-two-factor-authen...


You're absolutely right! GitHub does offer that wonderful feature.

There are some legacy bot accounts that we cannot readily tradition to 2FA and we cannot do without. The feature you have so rightly pointed to would evict them from the org. That's not an acceptable outcome in this case.

I skipped over this in my previous comment because I felt it wasn't germane to the story or the point.




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