I read the line specifically as "The employees can do better; they just don't want to try."
But that's not true. The company could do better. But the individual employees cannot. The individual employees are constrained by the profit motive of the company. They are not allowed by corporate policy to set up automatic status updates, for about the same reason they're not allowed to post their corporate log-in credentials: that the result would very likely be disastrous to the company's bottom line.
(Though, really, the corporations in most verticals are in a race-to-the-bottom in most respects. Even if you treat GitHub as a single entity capable of coherent desires, it probably doesn't desire to avoid automatic status updates. It needs to avoid them, to survive in a competitive market where everyone else is also avoiding them. People — and corporations — do lots of things they don't want to do, to survive.)
But that's not true. The company could do better. But the individual employees cannot. The individual employees are constrained by the profit motive of the company. They are not allowed by corporate policy to set up automatic status updates, for about the same reason they're not allowed to post their corporate log-in credentials: that the result would very likely be disastrous to the company's bottom line.
(Though, really, the corporations in most verticals are in a race-to-the-bottom in most respects. Even if you treat GitHub as a single entity capable of coherent desires, it probably doesn't desire to avoid automatic status updates. It needs to avoid them, to survive in a competitive market where everyone else is also avoiding them. People — and corporations — do lots of things they don't want to do, to survive.)