A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company
blog.coinbase.com
blog.coinbase.com
The severance also included 6 months of health insurance. (Source: https://www.coindesk.com/coinbase-severance-apolitical-missi... )
What percentage of employees at Coinbase are actively interviewing for other jobs at any given time? 5%? If someone has one foot out the door already, taking a bonus equivalent to half a year of your salary is a cherry on top of changing jobs. I'm surprised only 5% of the company took this opportunity.
Bitcoin isn't hurting, either.
Ecommerce is booming, but you're not likely to get a job in support/services which is likely already filled with experienced folks at most companies, and isn't likely to churn in a pandemic.
There are a lot of pockets like this, but they mostly benefit software engineers and more experienced roles. It's pretty common on HN for folks to assume that everyone has the role/job fluidity as your average tech person, or worse, your average software engineer.
Lots of folks "in tech" aren't really deeply into tech, so it's even more difficult for them to navigate a chaotic time.
I.e. the “people who are able to exit” group may not overlap the 5% that would have resigned because they were already searching for something.
The GP’s (codezero) point above still seems valid to me because of that.
> I want to engage with politics at work.
> Why did you leave Coinbase?
> Because I was ready for new opportunities and they were offering a hefty severance package.
> They didn't align with my ethical framework.
What kinda of things are people talking about?
This is the reality of working for large tech companies in the US, just with Trump instead of Johnson.
That said, one thing we have to consider is the environment in which the discussion takes place. At work people shouldn't have to get stressed with non-work related things, that's not in the interest of the company nor of the employees. So even if you know you can have respectful deep conversations of controversial current day politics with your colleagues, a better question would be, should you even have those conversations at work?
I feel for people that suddenly need to discuss such topics, it means that they probably don't have IRL friends or friends outside of work if they really feel that they have to talk about no-work related issues at a work lunch. It's sad.
I don't think it's a matter of ideas vs persons. Already I hear that speech and ideas are violence, and violence requires fighting back (by complaining to HR that you made them feel unsafe). Of course, you cannot keep quiet either, because "silence is violence" too.
> It's unfortunate discussions can't be kept over ideas and policies instead of veering towards persons.
This is a sensible expectation, and I think that's what reasonable people should be able to do. However, my experience tells me that there's nothing to win by having such conversation in work environment, so I'd prefer them to be avoided altogether. However, both the company as an institutions, and many individuals working on it, are insisting that the employees have these discussions, no matter how irrelevant it is for the actual job. This is the reality on the ground in most big US tech corporations.
> I feel for people that suddenly need to discuss such topics, it means that they probably don't have IRL friends or friends outside of work if they really feel that they have to talk about no-work related issues at a work lunch. It's sad.
I don't think that this is the case. In my experience, it's the more social people who are insisting on having these conversations. I think this is because the more social people are better at gauging social climate, and the purpose of these conversations, often purportedly about diversity and inclusion, is to enforce uniformity and exclusion of people with alternative views.
To me this might be the best example of a 'meme', in Dawkins' sense of the word, that I'm aware of.
- It's short
- It rhymes
- It gives new territory to a powerful word
- It creates an in-group signal
- It's self-amplifying, and most importantly
- It's ridiculous
It's absolutely destined to go far beyond it's own merit by outcompeting everything in its domain on 3+ metrics.
It also helped me understand one possible reason why so many broken slogans are rising to the top. There are many factors in totality of course, but the ones that are ridiculous drive engagement from everyone, the proponents to echo and the opponents to mock.
Note that a working ingroup signal needs to be costly.
Something that sounds idiotic to the outgroup means people can't just casually say it, and it creates clear divisions.
Brian, I've never given two shits about crypto, but this announcement seriously increases my desire to work at Coinbase. You have far more support than will dare to speak up, and I hope more companies start following your lead.
I get that desire, I really do, but I think it's so important to recognize that your work is not apolitical. It doesn't matter what you're building. What you build does not exist in a vacuum, and the decisions you make around politics at work are themselves political decisions.
Everything you do does affect the environment around you. For example if you take a Bahamas trip, you are paying to generate tons of CO2. If you buy a diesel car, or just driving one, you're affecting the shared air as well.
I'm nearing the point of being aggressively dismissive towards this kind of attitude, because a lot of it doesn't even seem to be laid out in good faith. People are just addicted to being mad, addicted to being right, addicted to the idea that they can channel their anger through pop politics and get validation for it as a bonus.
I have an extremely low opinion of the people and groups who follow along with whatever pop social issue is trending today because they don't want to get in trouble, and IMHO those people aren't really worth interacting with because again, it's more about landing a spicy dunk on the bad guys (tm) and collecting heart icons than whatever issue they're using as a weapon today.
>your work is not apolitical. It doesn't matter what you're building
spare me.
Who is "we"?
The majority of people here don't work for FANG
But those political decisions are ones relevant to the mission of the company.
Coinbase probably shouldn't be involved in politics around police reform, fracking, climate change or the Second Amendment because they are orthogonal to its mission. Insert other topics as you see fit.
And hence its employees should leave their opinions of such matters at the door.
Coinbase should be focused on politics around global financial regulation. And its employees should focus their workplace political energy on those matters.
Also, it's generally just polite and respectful to your coworkers to provide a non-political, non-partisan workplace.
That's a very wrong way to understand what democracy means. If you're incompetent, you are still afforded a vote. And you sleep on the bed you make.
and in any case, the incompetence voter implies that they could be voting "wrong". This is a deep and insidious implication because implying something can be wrong also implies the other "competent" voters are "right". The very notion that one side is "right" is very anti-democratic.
Is it selfish? Probably, and I'm open and proud about that.
Individualism as a political philosophy would be smth like advocating for libertarianism/adjacent stuff, etc. The apolitical stance is the apolitical stance. I do not engage in politics unless it's a minimum-effort activity like the default mail-in voting (WA). Sure, I may know approximately what the best way to organize society is, and if aliens landed and put me in charge I'd become political; but as it is, I do not care, mostly because it's not productive, but in no small part because actively caring about how to organize society is heavily correlated with being very wrong (IMHO).
It's impossible to not involve yourself in politics that effect your employee's everyday lives.
But many things in the world that should not be politicized are, in fact, politicized. Perhaps Coinbase wants to hire a more diverse bunch of people, and starts an internal initiative to do so. Perhaps they do this not out of any political motivation, but because they genuinely believe (as they should!) that having a more diverse workforce will help them make better decisions about their product.
But of course there will be some (many?) who will decry this as Coinbase "being political". You just can't win, really.
"We should hire a more diverse workforce because diversity improves our collective judgment, thereby furthering our mission" is on its face a fine subject for discussion provided you're evaluating the claim on its merits and not sneaking in overtly political implications like "we have a moral responsibility to hire diverse candidates". One could envision a fruitful, dispassionate discussion about how much return on investment the company could expect from a diversity initiative, how that ROI stacks up against other opportunities, how to measure the ROI and make sure the initiative is meeting expectations, whether or not it runs afoul of anti-discrimination law, what kind of diversity (race, gender, viewpoint, etc) is most likely to yield the highest ROI, etc.
Of course, it's prudent to stay away from these kinds of charged topics altogether because it's very likely that you have employees that will take this as an opportunity to pollute a potentially productive conversation with their overtly political opinions.
That some things are easily abused by bad-faith employees doesn't mean that we should let bad faith employees have free reign.
Are you sure this isn't just an excuse to make things political in these west coast companies that are full of young, hot-headed, extremely left wing people?
This is just one more step in that direction.
Funnily enough, I think it has been extrapolated by Neal Stephenson in Diamond Age. We will end up having parallel societies which define themselves not by geographic boundaries, but by affiliation. A North Korean community could be your neighbour.
I'm curious what your definition of political is, because my gut feeling is that (Almost) nothing is political.
How do you believe Coinbase, a cryptocurrency corporation, will remain "a political" in the design of their systems given the changing political climate around crypto? Does that just mean bowing down to whatever the administration says? Do you believe Coinbase will remain "apolitical" is the US begins to enact policy that causes Coinbase users to find alternatives?
Do you believe Coinbase employees will have no opinion on the way the justice department handles cryptocurrency?
But if it's unrelated to the business, then the business is no place to undertake such activism.
Politics is more than just the rituals of government officials or what gets written about in the politics section of the newspaper:
> Politics (from Greek: Πολιτικά, politiká, 'affairs of the cities') is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations between individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics)
For instance, this effort to create an "apolitical workplace" could probably be understood as political project to stamp out elements of bottom-up democratic political culture in favor of a more autocratic political culture. At work we keep our heads down and follow the edicts (mission) of our leaders.
1. relating to the government or public affairs of a country.
Not the one the parent probably means:
2. (DEROGATORY) done or acting in the interests of status or power within an organization rather than as a matter of principle.
Whatever a company does, it relates in some way to the public affairs of a country. Either in what you offer, or what you need to produce your offer. Your company is hopefully affecting the public affairs of your country in more than one way. And that I think had very much a place at work.
The delineation between public affair and private matter seems to be quite arbitrary at times.
I would say abortion is a private matter, or who you marry or which combination of sex chromosomes you have, but all those things are very high on the list of things being discussed.
Here I have to say, I'm more likely to give the point, that those topics are not professionally relevant, but neither is sports.
Arguments like "abortion is highly related to site reliability engineering" are pretty overtly disingenuous in a very clear-cut fashion.
> Here I have to say, I'm more likely to give the point, that those topics are not professionally relevant, but neither is sports.
Sports don't cause the same degree of strife in the workplace. No one is demanding anyone's termination because they like a different sports team or because they were caught in a photograph gesturing in a way that looks vaguely like the hook 'em horns gesture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hook_%27em_Horns).
All of these actions can be viewed as political statements. Everything is political.
Coinbase is intrinsically political. They're a financial institution. Their product is subject to both laws and public scrutiny.
Fundamentally, this is our disagreement.
One clever way to deeply entrench a political decision is to convince others that it's not a political decision at all. If you're successful, you've erected a barrier against your opponents by interfering with their ability to even conceive opposition to your position. It's sort of like the concept of Newspeak.
Which is better for a gay man in Saudi Arabia? A company where people only talk about work, or a company where everybody is expected to take a stance on homosexuality?
> Which is better for a gay man in Saudi Arabia? A company where people only talk about work, or a company where everybody is expected to take a stance on homosexuality?
You're talking about something completely different. What I'm talking about is basically falsely depoliticizing a political decision, so people think it's something that cannot be changed, like nature or something. The reference to Newspeak, which was imagined as a way of dismantling the mental machinery of political opposition, should have made that clear. That you missed it is ironic given your username.
If you want to map the experience of a gay man in Saudi Arabia onto what I was talking about, he would marry a woman and not even think things could be any different.
Your appeal to newspeak is pretty pointless, as it applies only inasmuch as it does to anyone who might claim that something is its opposite, for example the slogans "the personal is political" and "silence is violence".
Sure, if you accept lies like that, you may lose the ability to think about the true nature of those things.
But you haven't really contributed anything to the conversation. You're just saying "ah, but what if they're /lying/! To /trick us/!"
You're still not really getting what I was saying. Directly claiming something is apolitical won't actually create the state I was talking about. To do that you actually have to get a bunch of influential people to talk about some political idea like it was obviously some kind of natural or social law or something.
Not everything is political, but many people are ignorant of the political nature of many things.
> Your appeal to newspeak is pretty pointless, as it applies only inasmuch as it does to anyone who might claim that something is its opposite, for example the slogans "the personal is political" and "silence is violence".
You're thinking about the slogans like "freedom is slavery," which weren't Newspeak and would have been unexpressible in it.
> But you haven't really contributed anything to the conversation. You're just saying "ah, but what if they're /lying/! To /trick us/!"
I'm not sure I'm contributing the the conversion that you want to have, which makes it a little baffling why you're engaging with me and not one of "the others" who seem to be who you really want to engage with.
No, the distinction is not whether somebody _decides_ if a topic is political or not, but that the conversations' intension is to convert the other party that your point of view is correct for society. I.e., you have to undertake political activism towards something for the topic to be political.
It's like religion as a topic of conversation, vs religious conversion. Two people can be talking about religion, but if neither is trying to "convert" the other, then this is not a religious conversion.
But if one party is talking with the intent to convert the other party to said religion, then it's a religious conversion. And the argument is that this should not happen in the workplace.
If a coworker talks about his husband, is that a political statement? To some people, absolutely, right?
How about someone mentioning a concert that they've gone to, for an artist that's outspokenly political one way or another? Just a concert, right?
What about talking about a great movie or TV show, if those are, I don't know, "Sorry to Bother You" or "Lovecraft Country"?
Can you mention that you went to a gun show, or a shooting range?
Can you recommend a Jordan Peterson book?
Can you put an NRA logo on your car?
What about a BLM logo?
What about on your T-shirt?
If a coworker goes through a gender transition, how does that get handled in a way that everyone, across the board, considers apolitical? Good luck with that: the very act of transitioning is, to a significant portion of the population, itself political.
So, I mean, sure, not literally everything is political, but if you give the statement a bit more of a generous reading than "Come on, are you saying ice cream is political? Harrumph!", you can see the point being made.
(Also, re: ice cream: what about Ben & Jerry's?)
Or are they taking action not for such purposes? For example, a gay person talking about their spouse to a colleague without the intent to change any political beliefs of anyone around them?
But, this doesn't mean an organization has to take a position on every hot-button political issue. Even the Biden campaign, a a political organization if there ever was one, needs to focus on getting their candidate elected, and not on things that divide Democrats.
To agree on a mission doesn't mean people on the organization need to agree on everything. Putting aside any differences on stuff not related to the mission is important in being able to work together as a team.
There are going to be political issues that involve Coinbase, and if they're deciding already to ignore any role they play in society, we need to be highly critical of every decision they make moving forward.
And that constitutes a much larger part of our lives than is traditionally acknowledged. Which is itself, also, a political matter, because designating a subset of actual politics as "officially politics", and then marginalizing that subset, is one way to slow down further political developments in that department.
No, its not.
"Everything must be directed by the coercive power of the state" is. The former does not imply the latter (the scope of the coercive power of the state is, itself, a political issue.)
Yes, actually it absolutely is. Putting everything up for grabs for state (or in modern day; the mob) control is literally totalitarianism. People who "don't understand" this are either abysmally stupid or are power mad imbeciles who are pretending not to understand for Machiavellian reasons.
If "everything is political" there is no room for private life, which is the only life that matters.
I agree that our divisiveness is caused by an unwillingness to listen to one another, but I don’t think avoiding discussion in the workplace is making us less willing to listen. People have lots of opportunities to listen to opposing views outside of the workplace, and yet many positively pride themselves on ignoring dissenting opinions—ostracizing one’s family for wrongthink is a veritable badge of honor in certain ideological communities. I don’t see how bringing that divisiveness into the workplace is going to soften those people.
If someone is deeply committed to ignorance and divisiveness, allowing them to proselytize at work doesn’t seem fruitful (everyone who is not committed to ignorance has likely already considered their views) and is very likely going to be harmful. On the other hand, there is a chance that by ignoring politics at work, people might have a chance to build relationships with reasonable people (who they otherwise would have written off or persecuted for heresy) which might have a deradicalizing effect (if you look up to someone who is charitable, honest, and open minded, you are probably more likely to emulate those qualities yourself).
Only in a world where words have no meaning.
I think the parent meant that the more you use the term "political" to refer to everything, the less meaning "political" has.
That only means the word "politics" has no meaning at the limit.
This is textbook pedantry. Obviously "don't discuss politics in the workplace" means "don't discuss divisive topics, especially when they're not particularly relevant to your work".
Of course everything is "technically political", but that's not how anyone uses "political" except when they're trying to argue in bad faith (specifically engaging in tautology).
The funny thing about politics is: a company doesn't get to choose what topics are divisive. People do. All it takes is one person to strongly hold a belief in the office to make it political.
Not like "we need to put gay marriage banners on our home page" is political.
I really think people should start respecting the difference.
> All it takes is one person to strongly hold a belief in the office to make it political.
No. It requires them to act on it. To engage in political activity.
It's not political to be a communist at work. It's political to use this belief to steer how the job is done or how the company should perform its mission, or indeed to try to change its mission.
Talking about one's wedding around the water cooler is not political, irrespective of the speaker's orientation OR the audience's opinions about gay marriage. Similarly, an argument in favoring or opposing gay marriage would be political irrespective of the speaker's sexuality or the audience's opinions. This seems perfectly straightforward to me. It seems like you're trying to make a problem where none exists.
Don't talk about your abortion and how it made your life better or worse.
Don't talk about your birth control.
Don't talk about how you were explicitly told by an authority figure you were not worthy of a job because of your sex/gender.
Easy for me to imagine someone being told not to talk about their gay marriage under similar circumstances.
I think commonly used phrases are "its not for polite company", "keep politics out of it", "don't bring your politics here", etc.
It is obviously selective enforcement of the rules, but that is a common and unfortunately often effective shield.
Luckily I have heard/see less of the above over the last 10 years than the 10 years before that.
I think the fact that there are two sides to US politics, and those two sides split cleanly along almost every controversial topic, is causing the confusion. Because it's both.
Abortions are controversial because some people believe they should not be allowed to happen, while others belive women should be in control of their own bodies. Abortions are political because the Republican party has a publicly-stated policy of wanting to legislate against abortion. The Democratic party has a publicly-stated policy of wanting to maintain women's ability to get an abortion if they need one.
Thus a controversial topic is also political. Any discussion of the topic will inevitably reduce to a political discussion because the two political parties are so closely aligned with the two sides of the conversation.
Because of the way that US politics has been so data-driven, focus-group informed, every controversial topic is being used as a method of creating political traction. So everything controversial is becoming political. Even something as banal as wearing a mask during a pandemic is turned into a political statement.
I didn’t claim otherwise. I believe that people are told not to talk about their abortion because it’s controversial, but not because it’s political barring perhaps a few people who aren’t educated enough to understand the distinction.
> Abortions are political because the Republican party has a publicly-stated policy of wanting to legislate against abortion.
The Republican party’s political advocacy is obviously political, but it doesn’t follow that any given account of an abortion is political. Both are controversial, however.
> So everything controversial is becoming political.
Controversial things frequently are political, but that doesn’t mean any particular speech about a controversial topic is political speech. You seem to be confusing a prohibition about politics with a prohibition against any topic that has a political aspect. So at coinbase, a gay man could talk about his marriage despite that gay marriage is also a political subject (and also a controversial topic in some spheres, albeit probably not the SV spheres), but he (and any employee for that matter) couldn’t advocate for or against gay marriage policy or norms.
So if people live their life having people around them using the word politics like in my phrases above they will also start using the word that way. A way that does not match up with your definitions.
> You’re confusing “controversial” with “political”.
So when you say things like the above it comes off to me as unreasonable/uncharitable. Since the people you are talking to are using a set of definitions that are relatively common in my experience.
edit: unreasonable -> unreasonable/uncharitable
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> I’ve never heard anyone told not to talk about those things because they’re political, but I could believe they were told not to talk about them because they’re controversial.
Knowledge and understanding of a topic is required before reasoned action is taken. If you can not talk about abortion, birth control, sexual/gender discrimination, gay marriage, and more because it is controversial then we might be getting in to an area where speech is so restricted that it impedes knowledge transfer and understanding on those topics.
In order to have an informed populace then need to be exposed to things, sometime controversial. If you remove a reasonably large mechanism for that, conversation at work, it will have political consequences.
And you can research and discuss those topics outside of work.
You're not being paid to show up to work and form PACs. You're not being paid to show up to work to virtue signal about the most fashionable wedge issue of the day. You're not being paid to show up to work and sow discord by assuming moral high ground and vilifying the other side. etc., etc.
>In order to have an informed populace then need to be exposed to things, sometime controversial.
The political culture status quo at Bay Area companies is that this is an alt-right talking point.
>If you remove a reasonably large mechanism for that, conversation at work, it will have political consequences.
Conversation at work absolutely should not be a large mechanism for political discussion. It's work. If there are political consequences because workers are no longer allow to virtue signal all day, then that speaks more about their weak mental state than it does about politics.
In my experience in the USA it is common for conversations at work to be about family, kids, life experiences(good and bad), current events, etc. It is something people bond over and use to help form a common company culture.
Different companies vary what is allowed and or encouraged and experience different benefits and consequences.
> You're not being paid to show up to work and form PACs. You're not being paid to show up to work to virtue signal about the most fashionable wedge issue of the day. You're not being paid to show up to work and sow discord by assuming moral high ground and vilifying the other side. etc., etc.
I do not see anyone in this thread advocating for anything that extreme.
>>In order to have an informed populace then need to be exposed to things, sometime controversial.
> The political culture status quo at Bay Area companies is that this is an alt-right talking point.
I am not in the know about bay area culture but that does not match my limited view from the outside.
> Conversation at work absolutely should not be a large mechanism for political discussion. It's work. If there are political consequences because workers are no longer allow to virtue signal all day, then that speaks more about their weak mental state than it does about politics.
My focus on for this comment was not politic conversation in the work place but on how removing a large mechanism of knowledge and understanding transferal in the work place would have political consequences for society.
None of which are politics, so we agree.
>I do not see anyone in this thread advocating for anything that extreme.
Did you by chance not RTFA? Employees are literally planning virtual walkouts because they felt that Coinbase didn't virtue signal enough.
>I am not in the know about bay area culture but that does not match my limited view from the outside.
Your limited view is in total contrast to reality. I've lived in the Bay Area for the past 8 years, and attempting to consider outside viewpoints that may be controversial might as well make you a Nazi sympathizer. https://www.cnn.com/2017/09/14/us/berkeley-ben-shapiro-speec...
>My focus on for this comment was not politic conversation in the work place but on how removing a large mechanism of knowledge and understanding transferal in the work place would have political consequences for society.
This is a non sequitur. No one is suggesting removing knowledge transfer and communication at work. People are suggesting limiting the amount of political activism at work that's outside of the scope of what you were paid to do (the company's general mission).
I did not suggest anyone here was advocated for that in this thread. I provided examples above where people are told not to talk about, abortion, contraceptives, discrimination based on gender/sex, conversations about a gay marriage because they are "politics". Hence why some people are objecting to removing political conversations from work.
It was part of back and forth conversation with throwaway894345.
And before anyone says anything, when religion informs lawmaking, it becomes political.
Of course, I'm asking rhetorically. They know perfectly what it means and they don't like it.
To answer your question, no I don't believe "gay man talking about his wedding" will fall under what's not allowed to be discussed around a water cooler at Coinbase.
Unless you are living in a post-scarcity, post-status, post-power anarchist society, populated entirely by The New Soviet Man (or some other fictional relative thereof), everything that's meaningful is, indeed, political.
You can draw a contrast between personal politics and organizational politics. An organization can be explicit that it engages in organizational politics, but bars personal politics. That is what Coinbase is currently doing[1]. That's the CEO's, and the board's prerogative.
[1] It does, however, falsely claim that its organizational political activity is somehow apolitical. It's not.
That's like saying every conversation is about syntax and semantics.
1. Deciding that a new table is a worthwhile use of resources (vs reuse, for example)
2. Deciding who to sell it to (if it's not for your own use)
3. Deciding what to make it out of (resource cost, ethical implications of the supply chain, concern about wood glue toxicity, ...)
And so on, and so forth. You might not consciously think about these as political, but.. that's also a political opinion.
> then "it's political" has no useful meaning.
Exactly.
Which is why Coinbase is saying specifically there are politics which are central to their mission that they still must naturally engage with.
I think any engineer who has a moral quandary about the work the are doing should absolutely take it up with management, up to including whistle-blowing or resigning. Professional Engineers put their license on the line with this, mere computer engineers may not have so much at stake professionally but are equally ethically bound.
let me reverse this, and present a different scenario. You are doing your job, but you feel strongly about a certain political movement (be it BLM or abortion rights, or whatnot). You tell your boss that you are going to spend some work time to talk to other employees and may be convince them to join your cause. What should the boss do? Let you work on it without bringing up their concern? Or fire you?
If I knew that they manufactured these land mine bears before I started, I wouldn’t be there anyway.
I definitely see the point of keeping a company focused on its task, though probably we have then the same discussion with different terms.
Serving coffee is not political. Planning the network installation is not political. Code reviews, cleaning your office, optimizing the VM, getting a bandwidth deal, negotiating the SaaS pricing, choosing ingredients for the new dish, figuring out how many loads of gravel are needed for the landfill, picking a guy to fix the fence ...
It's 99% not political.
Google search is barely political, ads are a little bit.
Social Media is political and not that-that much more.
It's 100% fine for you to 'work on something consistent with your political views' but at the same time just 'pick the place' instead of 'making the place' inherently political.
In 2020, the answer that google search gives to the query "Do masks protect you from COVID" is political.
Whether or not google search even works in, say, Russia... Or Australia is political.
Could it be that it's actually not that political, it's just that these companies are filled by extremely left wing west coast people who want to make it political?
You obviously have an axe to grind against a particular political spectrum, so I will pose a more direct example that does not involve it.
Is Russia Today political? Is choosing to display it prominently in a search result political? Is choosing to display a 'this is state sponsored news' tag on it political? Is not choosing to display that tag on a link to the CBC, or NPR not a political decision?
If you don't think RT is political, I can go down the list until we find something that is. Zero hedge? QAnon? The International Council of Communism? The newsletter published by your local KKK chapter? BLM?
The reason the work of tech companies is political is because they've installed themselves as gatekeepers of political information. If they were dumb pipes, this wouldn't be an issue. They aren't, though.
Would you consider it possible I'm a liberal myself? And that my liberalismi is exactly the reason it's difficult for me to accept this sort of behavior?
Google is making everything political with its "Machine Learning Fairness" initiative. Like when you google image search "european art" or "white men".
You'd think European art was 50% black person portraits and that 50% of white men were criminals or black.
But the point I trying to make is, that "apolitical" is not the absence of political. It is a political choice. Here a definition of apolitical: "not interested or involved in politics"
> Serving coffee is not political.
Which coffee do you serve? If you don't care, you are apolitical, but you can either serve coffee with child labour or not.
> Planning the network installation is not political.
So, it will include equipment from Huawei? Or Cisco?
> Code reviews,
If someone puts in there a "joke", do you address it? Should you?
> cleaning your office, optimizing the VM,
Yeah, probably not.
> getting a bandwidth deal, negotiating the SaaS pricing, choosing ingredients for the new dish,
To which standard do you hold your suppliers? Are they subscribing to any social corporate responsibility standard? Are you? Are you trying to make a vegan dish or not? (Not that I care, I am apolitical there, but I do not think, it is not political)
> figuring out how many loads of gravel are needed for the landfill,
Probably not.
> picking a guy to fix the fence ..
Are you rejecting the guy who has a MAGA bumper on his truck?
> Google search is barely political,
Really? There was just recently a case of republicans complaining about how they are ranked. What about Google in China? Or Hong Kong?
> It's 100% fine for you to 'work on something consistent with your political views' but at the same time just 'pick the place' instead of 'making the place' inherently political.
Here I think, I can understand that you want to say, that all the points I just made, are likely to be unproductive to be discussed at the workplace. And I would agree. You may say, you are tired of hearing those issues, and I can understand.
But I would say, one doesn't make a place inherently political, it is. Being apolitical doesn't make it go away, that decisions have an impact on the public affairs of a country. In a small and intangible way probably, but so does a vote.
Choosing coffee is not child labour, bad jokes can happen anywhere, Huawei/Not Huawei is a security choice not a political one ... and for god's sakes we're picking our caprenters based in their bumpers stickers? No. I don't care what bumper stickers my carpenter has, and although I personally hate Trump, I don't care one bit that he has such a bumper sticker, and nobody else should either.
99.99% of Google content is mundane and not political.
They're not banning a lot from Google search other than really illegal stuff.
'Choosing the SaaS vendor based on price' is not just 'going with the status quo.
I get what you are trying to say, I just don't agree.
I don't even think that workplaces embracing popular social issues directly that much, what matters is addressing the social issues directly, not as a matter of populism.
Saying "our company doesn't hire black people, that doesn't seem fair, can we think about that" is 100% reasonable, but making public statements about BLM etc. is more political, less pragmatic.
For some reason it's just the west coast tech companies where information or search is political, but with traditional media it's not?
Search for "american mathematician" on Google and the first six images that come back with the search results are of black mathematicians, 3 of them women.
That is political.
Nothing wrong with female or black mathematicians, the more the better, but that's not how it went down.
If I worked at Google and they asked me to code that, I would have said, "Sure, I can do that", which would be a non-political decision, but whoever decided on how that should be implemented was making a political decision.
99.99% of searches are just searches, and that's it.
And why do they get to decide that?
If it cannot be disjoint, then it seems like it has become a requirement for it to be aligned in only one acceptable direction - hence why Coinbase's move is apparently controversial. Failure to actively support the standardized and approved message is apparently not acceptable!
> This is just one more step in that direction.
One more misstep. The combination of this effect with polarization means it's only a matter of time before someone realizes there's actually going to be a market for legitimately countercultural companies that reach out to those who don't walk the new party line. Since there's enough of them to elect a president, it's probably high time for some brave company to take you up on your suggestion that everything be political.
Money is money, and the money of a jew, nazi, gay, christian, muslim or pedophile are all equally good. Anyone rejecting money because they don't agree with where it comes from is either lying or about to be eaten alive by someone who doesn't.
There is a reason why everyone in China is trying to escape to our system, while they have invented personal money - in the form of your social score.
I'll take a shot: - I think compelled activism is inappropriate. You know, the "silence is violence" stuff. - I think expecting to have power to set a company's political agenda and expressing anger when you don't get your way is inappropriate. That power belongs to the board. Employment and stock-options are not "fractions of board seats".
i agree that employment is not "fractions of board seats. But stock options (when converted to stock) holds voting power, and thus _do_ represent "factions of board seats". Very little amount, but an amount nonetheless.
I would argue that the board wouldn’t exist without the people that make up the company. I would also argue that with monied interests and lobbyists in Washington, one of the last places that people can really effect societal change is at the work place. Companies have become the power center in American politics, so of course activism is going to rise up there.
As far as compelled activism goes, I feel that silence _is_ violence.
“The Only Thing Necessary for the Triumph of Evil is that Good Men Do Nothing” (JFK, Burke, Mill...)
The issue comes when some people are uncomfortable with work being done and others aren’t. Those who are uncomfortable are probably going to want to have discussions about it. If I was asked to contribute to a system that put people (any people) in to cages I would refuse. But that’s precisely what ICE is doing in the USA. If such a contract came up you can bet it’s something I’d want to talk about with my coworkers!
If you’re not going to take a stand now, when will you?
When I'm not at work.
When and where I stand is my business, but "when" is definitely not when I am at work and nobody is bullying anyone.
A company operates in a political environment, whether or not people want to acknowledge that. Workers have real power and can advance their goals whether or not management wants to accept it. Politics in the workplace isn’t something to shy from, but to embrace. Any company that tries to refute politics will find themselves behind the curve on something they should very much so try to stay ahead of.
Yes you could stretch any argument to categorize anything as what you want, but I think under a reasonable interpretation of 'politicized workplace', Twitter could institute a policy of adding warnings to content it deems misinformation without politicizing its workplace.
As for workers having power, yes, but the company has the right to dictate what the worker does in their capacity as workers, if they choose to stay employed at the company.
Maintaining a mission focused company that doesn't allow employees to turn the company into a vehicle to advance a political cause unrelated to that mission is good for productivity.
I'm trying to solve for how decision making power is allocated without making assumptions about which side is right or wrong. In other words, the argument that "The company must do XYZ because this political cause is simply on the RIGHT side of history!" is not acceptable to me, even though I often personally agree that the cause really _is_ right.
I never believed the whole "change the world" SV nonsense, and always knew it was nothing more than cynical marketing. But at least in places like Google the employees who were brought on that premise, fight to achieve it, and make it real.
Coinbase is still hypocritical, and I wouldn't expect much more.
But this whole, "you are only a serf and the whole of power morally belongs to the board" reveals an unsettling feudal mentality.
I don’t think it compares, even as a hyperbole, to Coinbase employees.
It certainly is.
But I like to believe, there is an underlying reasonable philosophy behind it. Every company tries to make a difference, that is its value proposition. If your value proposition has a negative social impact, it is not a sustainable business model. Legislation will eventually render your business untenable. (Even if it takes centuries or decades like tobacco, or fossil fuel).
So, considering your social impact makes business sense.
To quote Paul Drucker:
"Responsibility for social impacts is a management responsibility — not because it is a social responsibility, but because it is a business responsibility. The ideal is to make elimination of such an impact into a business opportunity. But wherever that cannot be done, the design of the appropriate regulation with the optimal trade-off balance—and public discussion of the problem and promotion of the best regulatory solution — is management’s job."
To be involved in any and all politics is just absurd.
Even personally if you want to change something you have to have a very narrow focus. You can’t change everything.
Perhaps less Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age, and more Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe:
Typically the whole discussion around overly political workplaces revolves around west coast tech companies, which are a monoculture of liberalism. Republican views are definitely not heard or dealt with.
I think people are talking past each other with the word 'political'. Some may define it as the execution of governance, and others may define it as partisan gamesmanship, and of course lots around and in between.
Coinbase will have to make political decisions, and it's natural that people within the company will have differing opinions -- informed by their personal politics -- as to the course those decisions should take.
[1] https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/?...
Their position is pretty straightforward and sensible, even if it is not entirely straightforward to implement in an even handed way.
that is the rights of ownership, and is a capitalist ideal. To change it is to strip these rights from ownership and give it to those who do not currently have ownership (and is basically what communism is).
It is also useful in pushing out "troublemakers". People that will not call BS on the unsubstantiated political claims are also less likely to call out corruption/nepotism/inefficiency of the middle management.
In the long term the company will stagnate and die, but we live in such a wonderful time of government bailouts, low interest rates and desperate investors, so it may take a long time to unravel.
I and a lot of my colleagues just want to do our work without being forced to participate in regular struggle sessions.
Instead, the signs could be changed to simply state "Restroom". Sure, one might have urinals and the other a tampon dispenser, but anyone can use either and everyone could agree to be adults about it.
I imagine transitioning is a very emotional and vulnerable thing to happen. Hence it being awkward that someone apologized for misgendering isn't unreasonable at all. Advocating that no-one should even do that would be unreasonable. But just presenting "this happened, this is how it made me feel" is a very natural thing.
From such a presentation general rules cannot always be derived. That is not the point of such a presentation. The point is for someone who is having feelings to have those feelings heard and recognized. Maybe that can lead to a bit more understanding for people who were never in such situations.
It seems like a waste of time to make these meetings all-hands company wide. But don't dismiss these activists just because they pushed for an all hands meeting. It wasn't a good thing to push for, but people get things wrong sometimes. Having been wrong is not the same as always being wrong.
The NRA is also a 501c4.
The EFF is a 501c3, which limits what sorts of political work it can do.
You can transparently see that some 501(c)(3)s are mostly political groups. As this becomes more common I expect politicians will use them to bypass campaign finance election laws. They will create charities that 'educate' voters about how bad their opponent is without naming that opponent.
Re: your hypothesis, after learning about 501c4s from Jeff in this thread and reading about for 10 seconds on Wikipedia, it seems that those actually serve that purpose quite well ("super PACs" are apparently 501c4), so I don't think the 501c3s are highly likely to get used in that way.
That's not quite how it actually works. https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organiz...
Your advice would be great for people who are uncomfortable mainly about coworkers using an employer mailing list or chat to ask people to vote a certain way. Otherwise, not so much, I think.
My impression is that restrictions on 501(c)(3)s' political activity are grounded in something like campaign finance concerns.
IMHO, this is not the problem. The problem are the managers of the work. One doesn't need to micromanage to stop this from happening. Nor does one need to limit free speech to prevent this.
Companies aren't working enough, that's the problem and managers aren't keeping people focused on the actual challenge at hand.
P.S. I feel this is a white-collar problem. These soft skills are paramount but also come from leadership. Restricting speech doesn't really deal with the people that the decision affects. Instead, one needs to become a better manager/leader to get 'buy-in' from the workers and then work!
As one example you can see it in the way you can make hostile comments about “straight white males” and nobody says anything, but if you were to make a hostile comment for a perceived racial or sexual minority you’d be fired before even finishing your sentence
You're speaking from a personal experience. I'm not minimizing your experience with my comments.
But if you have time to browse Social Media or enough time to get into extended hostile discussions (about ANYTHING), then your manager isn't doing their job. Full-stop.
What you describe is a sweat shop, not knowledge work. You can have downtime while still getting your work done and acting like an adult with colleagues. If you don’t have this skill set, make the effort to cultivate some tact and decorum.
This is where you might be misunderstanding. Downtime shouldn't be to engage in more stressful mental activity. Think about it. Go to the gym. Study for a big exam. Are you really engaged on the goals of a gym? Are you really engaged in getting a good grade on an exam? If you are, you are finite and I highly suspect that the high performers aren't going to try and add more stress on their lives (political or anything else). I'm suggesting they aren't sweating enough at the gym. I'm suggesting they aren't working hard enough. I'm not suggesting that they're a slave. I'm not suggesting they are a wage slave.
I'm suggesting they are more likely to be working in a half-assed way and don't have a 'buy-in' to the company's objectives. Which tends to be true based on numerous business management studies (since at least the 1970s that I've read).
Hard workers want enjoyable leisure. Not pissing off a Karen. Or dealing with a Greg. This is a toxic mindset that doesn't make any sense.
P.S. There is also another variable. That some people are closed minded but, imho, that can be overcome with good soft skills of a good manager/vision/buy-in.
It doesn't matter if it's fun. It doesn't matter if someone paid them money to sabotage another company. The blame for allowing this excessive behavior in a business environment, lays with the leadership, full stop. Management is typically to blame and since CB is tiny, then it lays with the CEO.
One could look at even the positive aspect of it. Say a group of coworkers are very close friends (either through work or prior) then they are excessively talking about something. Well, then that situation is the responsibility of their bosses.
P.S. I've said my peace. If y'all still don't get it. Go read a few leadership or business management books.
As for the belief that the left are intellectually superior, that's not specific to tech firms. You get empty slogans about being "reality-based" from the left in all walks of life. It's why the left are struggling so much with COVID and lockdown: it's been chaos and incoherence from scientists/academics from day one so people who define themselves as superior due to their higher faith in "the science" have been taking a self-image beating. Or simply have gone into denial about it.
Depends on the subgroup.
> As for the belief that the left are intellectually superior, that's not specific to tech firms.
IMHO, I feel this is an organic collusion of messaging. Like the boomers felt a little envious to Leftist ideas and it shows in how boomers are teaching future generations. I don't think this is intentional but there does seem to be an implicit shift in the writings that teach the youth. I grew up in the public education system and various books almost assume that Leftists are more critical thinkers. It could be a phrasing of a topic or a popular narrative that has taken root in the culture. Compound this overtime, you have a new generation that assumes the indirect messaging that they've been conditioned on.
In conclusion, I think you're getting a lot of downvotes for two reasons. 1. You're making grand/general statements without supportive points. 2. You are contrarian to the current zeitgeist. I happen to agree with your main points (sheep are sheep and wolves are making sheep frantic). I wish more people were critical thinkers.
This is why I call the left aggressive. I've never seen those sorts of tactics from libertarians and I have years of experience of them, or even conservatives. I have seen people who claim to be libertarian suddenly turn out to be totalitarian and start behaving in ways that are totally opposite to their prior stated positions once they got hold of some power, though. So I think there are some people out there who self-identify as libertarian because they came to associate it somehow with critical thinking or other positive qualities, yet never truly adopted the world view. But this is rare. Most people who claim to be libertarian act in ways that are relatively consistent with that claim.
I agree that leftists push hard the idea that leftism is the same thing as critical thinking. This confusion can be especially seen in universities, which regularly claim to be teaching students critical thinking yet in which leftists have steadily pushed out anyone not aligned with them over the decades. People truly trained in critical thinking would ask what justifies the claim that universities teach critical thinking, but of course none of them ever seem to do this. It's just taken as given.
We can see the results: academia is filled with groupthink, in which people's worth is based on vague groupthink-oriented concepts like "reputation".
Think about it this way - sometimes, you have to be on call and stay up till 5am because of some crappy code you didn't write, and it sucks. Sometimes, you have to go to the May 1st workers parade and help carry a banner you disagree with, and it sucks. Sometimes, you have to go to a silly training session and explore the feelings you don't have, and it sucks. It's all part of the job - it was all fun activities, they wouldn't pay you to do it :)
If you're a parent of a child in K-12 schooling right now, you have a lot of reasons to be worried.
That might be seen in a positive or negative light, depending on your stance.
I personally am afraid to associate myself too publicly with a political stance, lest I be wrong and/or the environment changes.
I think that says nothing of a persons political views and is just self-preservation or even indifference. Hiring would have to make some very tenuous assumptions to consider that a signal.
Those who are politically possessed like to claim that “everything is politics” and that “it’s a privilege to not care about politics”, but every Hispanic and Filipino immigrant I’ve known (which is not a negligible number) care about family, hard work, and stability: not politics.
I'm not sure how anyone can think that being politically active would make your life more stable.
Edit: An example of this is that black people are much less likely to vote than white people. Is this because black people support the status quo while white people want to change things? No, it is because black people don't have the time and energy to spare to vote. And no, this isn't about voting disenfranchisement, black people are less likely to vote even in very blue states.
Stability isn't about dominance, stability is about being uninteresting enough not to get your teeth kicked in.
[1] https://genius.com/Tyler-childers-long-violent-history-lyric...
Your statement that the immigrants you know care about x and y and not politics doesn't actually make sense in response to the concept 'everything is political'. You are responding from the perspective that politics means elections, or some similarly narrow set of topics. But 'everything is political' explicitly rejects that perspective. It means that a Filipino immigrant thinking about whether their uncle and cousins will be able to visit them is political because it's harder for them to get a visa than my English cousins. It means that a Hispanic immigrant talking to her friend in a restaurant after dropping the kids at school should not risk being detained by ICE because speaking Spanish makes some dropkick immigration officer decide they must be illegal immigrants, which happened in Montana.
A whole lot of people in the world are actively indifferent to politics.
Those apolitical people vastly outnumber all the hyper political "your with us or against us" group.
Rubbish - we all know what type of political activism is tearing these companies apart and we all know what political views are the only ones that can be safely expressed.
If everything is political, then the moniker "political" is meaningless.
Most politics and also culture expresses itself tacitly. By requiring some sort of conscious intent you're actually ignoring what is arguably the vast majority of political interaction. For example casual sexism and systematic mistreatment of women was just "normal" but nonetheless political. Of course the people doing the subtle discriminating don't like to think of it as political, because that implies responsibility for action.
First, literally anything could have political consequences, from a solar flare to a fly landing in someone's hair. This logic easily devolves into absurdity. Famously, Chinese government under Mao declared sparrows "public animals of capitalism" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign
Second, when anything could be political, the moniker "political" (like any other inflated moniker) loses a lot of its meaning. And yet real politics is still done by real people with real consequences.
Third, raising everything to the status of political is an example of politicization. This is typical of totalitarian regimes. Totalitarian regimes are in fact characterized by the fact that literally everything is raised to the realm of political, the realm of rule by the regime. By pressuring others to be political, you are creating a totalitarian environment, a very unpleasant environment for most people to be as we already know from some very bitter 20th century lessons.
Fourth, politics is about having political enemies. When political enemy (opponent) does not exist, there is no politics as such. By insisting that people act politically, you are simultaneously insisting that they have enemies. There are profound moral problems with this, whether you are Christian or even not religious at all.
The solar flare isn't political obviously, but the response to it is. human disaster usually is the consequence of bad responses to catastrophes which have been declared inevitable. (see the current American covid response). Something that actually is in the realm of politics is shoved into the category of thoughts and prayers.
>Third, raising everything to the status of political is an example of politicization. This is typical of totalitarian regimes
Politicisation isn't bad and the only thing your post is any evidence of is the typical midbrow "no politics or gulag" logic that every conservative American who is afraid of engaging in political conflict has been repeating ad nauseam. You may think you appear smarter if you complain about tribalism every five minutes and act like you're above the fray, but you are not. It's just a silly straw-man made by people who are afraid of political change.
That's not an inconsistency.
> Would you consider "sorry, I didn't get a lot of sleep due to police sound grenades going off until 3am" a political statement?
No, of course not.
> No, of course not.
Awesome. So it follows that you would have no issue then with a coworker stating: "Police activity in SF has negatively impacted my ability to do work". Congratulations, you have a significantly broader definition of acceptable workplace speech than Coinbase.
Of course I wouldn't have an issue (ignoring for the moment that you're apparently conflating me with coinbase), because this isn't a political statement.
> Congratulations, you have a significantly broader definition of acceptable workplace speech than Coinbase.
This is a pretty obvious straw man argument.
For instance, there was an instance not too long ago at Facebook where one engineer publicly attacked another completely peaceful coworker on Twitter because the latter declined to put a BLM statement on the landing page of an open source project they maintained. The former employee was eventually fired. These kinds of antics are deeply divisive and destructive to the workplace.
It is unclear from your comment which employee was fired, unless "former" is intended in the ordinal sense (ie. "first") rather than temporal (ie. "prior"). Can you clarify?
My wife works for a huge social media company that you've definitely heard of, and some of her higher-ups have told her they're worried that the rise of employee activism is going to tear the company's culture apart. I told her she should tell them to follow Coinbase's example.
It's probably for the best.
Taking the package can be seen as a strong stance, not taking it... not really.
Ironically / IMHO, the irritant at the center of the pearl that is many of these ('social justice') issues is people treating other people as a member of an imagined group rather than a specific human they can talk to.
Whether you talk to them (or not) about it doesn't change that - just means you're hiding that part of the process or including them in it.
Definitely not. Unconscious bias is a huge issue in interviewing. Blinding your interviewers to political orientation, or any other factor, is far more effective than telling them just to ignore it.
Altho TBC I do think you're right that blinding is better than attempting to ignore.
I have some on my own resume and I don't mind explaining that here the company was acquired, here we ran out of money, here I had to move to be with family, etc etc.
It's just normal due diligence for a hiring manager.
I can understand this fear, but generally if you choose a stance based on compassion for all beings you’ll be in the right in the long run.
This particular issue was sparked by Coinbase not taking a stance on Black Lives Matter, which they are wrong about. Standing for dismantling racism is always correct.
I like capitalism and the free market because I think it's the best system to give most prosperity to a broad spectrum of society. I believe that I take this stance based on compassion but I can assure you that this view is not popular among other people who are in the compassion camp.
No one is asking Coinbase to take a stance and say that the police must be abolished, or that the way forward for Black liberation is X policy. They were simply asking them to acknowledge that racism exists and Black lives do in fact matter.
> Standing for dismantling racism is always correct.
As opposed to standing against it, yes. As opposed to "we're just building a juicer, man", no.
Not every group of people "must" take an active stance on every social issue. If they did then they would do nothing but that.
This is why I'm hesitant to invest in Silicon Valley stock at the moment. If this trend continues they'll spend 100% of their time "making a stand", and not innovating or trying to fulfil their stated mission.
I have a responsibility to keep my own house in order. To make sure I'm not racist, homophobic, etc... I don't have a responsibility to spend my life on a cause you select for me, even if that cause is just.
If I were to pick a cause it would be that the central organization for a leading religion is actively harboring and protecting child rapists from international law enforcement. But still I would not, like you, say that every organization that doesn't march under that banner are "wrong about" that.
Companies are not "supporting status quo of child rapists" if they don't put up banners on their website. They're just not. That's nonsense.
You can't condemn me for not marching with you. That's fascism.
I will disagree somewhat with the people who say that companies never have a place for political stuff. If you are any company involved in South Africa during apartheid you should choose a side on apartheid and voice that position.
If BLM means just the simple definition of what the words imply (that black lives matter), there's no point in saying it. Because there's literally no one on the other side. I suspect that's not what it means, because saying a broader statement "All Lives Matter" seems to be considered a kind of slur.
So "Black Lives Matter" means something deeper. More like "Black people are killed indiscriminately by police in this country. The cops get away with it, and it's a huge problem." That is full of assumptions and political beliefs that reasonable people can disagree about. And I don't see why every company should take a side on that issue.
Child pornography, from what I can tell, is not a controversial issue. Most companies haven't made statements about their views on murder, theft, and slavery either. But if the nation were prominently split over whether murder, theft, slavery, or child pornography are good things, I would hope some companies would make a statement.
It is, however, prominently split over whether the specific, contentious version of "anti-racism" though promulgated by the likes of Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo - "Critical Race Theory", to call it by its academic name - is the One True Anti-Racism that it claims to be, or whether it's counterproductive, divisive, anti-liberal and on track to set race relations back by decades.
Companies have as much moral obligation to state support for CRT as they do to state their support for Trotskyism or Randian Objectivism.
If you don't agree with some of their stated objectives, tactics, leadership, it should be OK to refuse to offer support, and that doesn't automatically imply a tacit support of racism, and it doesn't automatically imply resistance to lower-case black lives matter.
"Well, whatever life is, you’re going to die. So if you’re going to make things better for yourself or for those you care about, you had better become an activist while you’re still alive." -- Will Provine
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=ptb;c=ptb;...
Put differently: There is a difference between advocacy and activism, between holding political opinions and being comfortable with them as a central focus of your life, or as a central characteristic that you wish people to see in you.
I lived in country where you had to be "political" to be in management, it didn't end up well (East Europe, Soviet Union), I always (naively?) thought that West countries were wiser.
So I prefer companies to not mess with politics.
Or is it just an attempt to be decent and get people to do the thing they were hired to do, which is to make their investors more fucking money? As a shareholder in several tech companies, I don't like the idea of people having discussions like these on my dime. How many bugs that were never fixed with Youtube Music, for example, could have been fixed if there weren't shit heads sitting around having flame wars on my fucking dime?
(Please forgive any flawed logic below - I assure you it's an oversight. I'm posting this in good faith.)
I'd say yes, but basically in the same way Coinbase's band on political speech in the office is a stance.
Consider religious people whose theology holds that they should attempt to convert everybody in their circles, even their professional circles.
It seems to me that banning that is tantamount to saying either (a) their theology is wrong, or (b) it's not wrong but the employer is resisting it regardless, or (c) the business has no place for employees holding those beliefs.
There's a difference between saying "we don't think it's appropriate for us to take an official stance on X, but feel free to discuss X on your lunch breaks like you would any other topic" and "thou shalt not mention X in any context while an employee of this company"
The problem is that this is, in itself, a political stance.
An example could be climate change. If Coinbase is doing nothing to make energy more green (even if that's just writing amicus briefs or blog posts), then they are effectively saying, "The way things are is fine."
I disagree strongly & think you're dead wrong here. Apolitical in the workplace is saying "we come to work to align on & collaborate in working towards shared goals and those goals are what we should be focused on at work. People who share this goal (coinbase, make money, promote crypto whatever) may vote R, D, or not vote at all. We can all still work together on our shared goal."
It means people with different views can work together on stuff they do agree on rather than "I can't work with anyone who doesn't vote the same as me" which is what social-justice-in-the-workplace seems to lead to, for better or worse.
It is NOT an endorsement of the status quo, it's a recognition that you and I might both oppose the status quo for completely different reasons that have nothing to do with work.
Politics is a very broad and encompassing concept. It isn’t synonymous with some nation’s representative political system.
When I go to work I focus on things to the exclusion of other things. That's fine, but we shouldn't think that on entering the office of my employer corporation I am somehow exiting the political realm. That would be engaging in a blindness to the politics of my employer's business practices, and the politics of my office workplace.
I'm not sure what politicization of the workplace is intended to lead to. At some point people have to put their differences aside to work on a shared goal. If you disagree with the shared goal then why join in the first place?
Statements like this make me think we're not on the same page here. The workplace is always political. It can not be politicized in the sense of changing from apolitical to political.
"Politicized" has to mean then that political conflict has escalated or the political dimension of the workplace has become more visible.
In this sense what politicization of the workplace is intended to lead to is political change, that is, a change associated with the decision making in groups, or change in other forms of power relations between individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status.
> If you disagree with the shared goal then why join in the first place?
Political conflict in the workplace is in the vast majority of cases not like this. When thinking "politics in the workplace", the typical issues are around worker safety, worker compensation and benefits, the status of lgbt employees, or sexism.
A little while ago Github employees protested the involvement of their company with the ICE department of the USA government. In that case, could you simply say to the protesting employees, "Well, you must just disagree with the shared goal of the company and so you should quit". I think it's obvious that would be a ridiculous response given the complaints of the employees.
What I generally understand as "politicization of the workplace" is more around employees talking about issues they care about unrelated to what the company is doing and creating an hostile environment for dissenting views to theirs. If you think an issue unrelated to what you're doing is more important than having a good working environment to work on that shared project, then I still think you should just quit since you're not fulfilling your obligations as an employee.
As for the other kind:
>A little while ago Github employees protested the involvement of their company with the ICE department of the USA government. In that case, could you simply say to the protesting employees, "Well, you must just disagree with the shared goal of the company and so you should quit".
I believe you should tell them exactly that if they voiced their concern to management but they still decided to go forward with the deal. What else are you going to do? Sow a negative/divisive work environment because your political views are more important than the product everyone is working on?
Politics are quite diverse, if every employee were to bring in negativity over every deal they disagree on, you wouldn't have collaboration and your product would not exist.
You can still be very politically active on your own time.
You cannot escape politics in work, because every workplace is making decisions about benefits, wages, their use of energy, who they hire, who they donate to, how accessible their products are, etc. All of which have a political component.
An aluminum smelter, for instance, uses lots of electricity. How they choose to source that electricity is absolutely a politically linked decision.
Work is inherently political. There's no escaping that your workplace is making decisions about wages, benefits, access to their products, how they spend their donation dollars, if they support candidates, who they employ, etc. etc. etc. All of these are political decisions that (I believe) are inescapable and also that workers should have input into.
A web design shop could be a co-op or it could be a standard llc with a founder on top. It might make price services to be accessible to everyone or exclusively focus on enterprise software. They might donate to a local politician. Or rent in a particular area of town. Or purchase carbon offsets for their energy use. Etc. etc.
All of these are inherently political decisions. There's no such thing as an Apolitical workplace.
I, likewise, am not interested in discussing presidential candidates with my coworkers. But every employer makes decisions about wages, benefits, donations, access to their products and services, energy consumption, their local communities, support of political candidates, etc.
No workplace is an island, and if a workplace is going to engage in those things, I want to be able to discuss how my particular workplace interacts with them. (E.g. if I worked in a factory, maybe I'd want to talk about how the factory sourced energy.)
You have life outside of work where you can be political.
I believe it's the job of companies to be 'good citizens' and only to be active politically if it's either really part of the mission statement - or - unavoidable, perhaps in the case of NFL, they had a huge communications issue.
Beyond that, protest at your hearts content, just not at the office.
Finally - you can make a political choice in your work if you want merely by choosing disciplines/companies. If you really want to 'push green' then getting into that industry might be a good personal choice.
If I don’t know someone’s political stance, my default isn’t to assume that they think “things are fine”, my default is to assume that they have some set of beliefs that are irrelevant to that particular interaction with them.
You think every single company that isn't writing amicus briefs or blog posts about climate change is taking a political stance against fighting climate change?
Should Coinbase have a political opinion on native rights in South Australia? What about the status and social standing of Burakumin in Japan? What about the Indigenous goups in Taiwan: the Ami, Atayal, Paiwan, Bunun, Puyuma, Rukai, Tsou, Saisiyat, Tao (Yami), Thao, Kavalan, Taroko (also Truku), and Sakizaya?
I think Coinbase should have said "we are a deeply political company concentrated on a single issue to the exclusion of all else. If you want to work where there is more than a single political focus, we are not a good fit".
You can't optimise in all directions, and being clear about what is in scope and out of scope is vital, not just in tech but in life.
According to my coworkers, who discovered this because they saw her bumper sticker when she picked me up one day, this is because she is "ignorant and doesn't know the facts" and "if she knew the facts she wouldn't think that way" and that I "need to talk to her and explain them."
They think that, due to their profession, they are intelligent, and therefore anyone who disagrees with them about a complex topic is either less intelligent or uninformed. It's the epitome of youthful arrogance. Naturally, none of them have kids and really don't see the nuance of the issue. It's insufferable, and at one point I was getting ready to clobber a guy who I am 100% positive has never been hit in his life.
Politics should be left out of work. And yes, by convincing a broad spectrum of the American public that Trump won the election because of a few facebook ads bought by Russian assets, instead of simply saying that they had a shitty candidate, the Democratic party has essentially pressured tech companies to have political filtering on their staff. If Facebook had Republicans working at senior levels in their company, they would have been subjected to even more harassment from Dem leaders who scapegoated them for their loss in 2016. Facebook has former Democratic party operatives at high levels in their company. They don't and can't have anyone from the Republican party. They get unending amounts of shit for Thiel being on their board.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/03/facebook-... https://popular.info/p/the-republican-political-operatives
If you wife for example got a manager that thought the females had no place in the workplace and should be a stay at home wife and was open about this, would that be ok?
If you are gay, and your manager loudly say that being gay is a sin, would that be ok?
I get that it can feel like the other way too, it probably feels hostile to be conservative in a fairly liberal company. But being open and supportive of all your employees seems like good and understandable business decision. That of course includes being welcoming to conservative people. If you think your coworkers are a disgrace, no matter the reason, I think it would be smart to not make this known.
If the first manager fires her because of her gender, we can take him to court for unlawful dismissal.
There are many mean individuals out there. That’s because we all have capacity for discrimination and ultimately violence. The call to stop discussing politics at work might result in fewer such frictions and keep us focused on the job at hand. A more productive and socially cohesive outcome in my opinion.
However, if I worked at an oil company, and had tons of very conservative co-workers, would you think it was ok for them to do the same thing to me if my wife pulled up and had rainbow/equality stickers on her car, or pro-choice stickers? I'm curious if you have a double standard on this topic due to prejudice against my wife's viewpoint (which my coworkers clearly have).
it's not apolitical, it's just giving yourself a formal policy note to point to for any future need to tell people to "shut the fuck up and get to work"
Not in tech. If you're not actively competing to be more woke than the next guy, then you're a literal nazi and your silence is violence.
The problem is that “political activism” also encompasses the ongoing american culture war, which indeed does not belong at work in any capacity. Reasonable people don’t want to engage with the culture war at work, and, increasingly, ever.
They want you to think the latter when they mean the former, and support them. The problem is that the “activism” they’re complaining about isn’t the culture war, it’s the fact that there was a widespread social movement to protest racist police abuse, and Coinbase management didn’t feel it important enough for them to participate. Many of their staff took an issue with that, which has absolutely nothing to do with the sort of “who are you voting for?” thing that springs to mind when you think of “political activism at work”.
Don’t get me wrong, advocating for human rights is indeed political activism, which is why their technique is so effective.
It’s intentionally designed to deceive you.
And what were/are the different opinions of (some) employees at Coninbase that triggered this whole thing in the first place?
> pushing the society we were escaping to into the society we were running away from
This is too abstract for me. Would it be weird if I asked for concrete examples? (of how society is getting pushed in a bad direction)
1. Blind worship of "equality"
2. Control and censure of language, communication and media
3. Demonization of money, successful people and corporations
4. Politicization of workplace and professional activities
5. Politicization of schools and academia
6. Polarization between "right" thinking and "evil/unacceptable/deplorable" people
7. Politically connected minorities overwriting democracy
8. Ceding more and more power and responsibility to governments from individuals and NGOs
9. Governmental intrusion in more and more aspects of our lives
10. More and more rules and regulations in our everyday lives in the name of stopping evil/wrong elements
11. Fall of meritocracy
12. Wishful thinking ignoring evidence of reality
13. Using guilt for historical misdeeds done by forefathers to silence contemporary groups
I could go on, but I think this is a sufficient sample.
Yeah... I'm genuinely curious how many people actually quit over the "apolitical" stance, vs employees that were just unhappy with the job in general and took this convenient opportunity to leave with a pretty sweet deal.
Either people managed to get through a _whole interview process_ in a week, or they're fine with the idea of being jobless during the worst economy in 12 years, or they price the benefit of not being there fairly high.
Which then leads us to how the whole argument is blinkered. It reduces decisions to a cost benefit analysis where a significant part of the benefit doesn't have a market price. Then, it questions if the benefit was too large, but by definition the arguer is still at the company and thus believes the unpricable part of the benefit isn't worth enough enough to leave.
A single software engineer paying for full price for high premium plan on COBRA would be spending around $400[1], over the whole 18 months of doing that it would be $7,200 which would be less than one month's paycheck on a $160,000 salary.
A cursory look at h1bdata.info shows that Coinbase pays plenty of H1B's that much, on the low side.
Your view is a little exaggerated.
There isn't a downside here. If you were there a very short amount of time, just remove it from your resume and have a gap. Its inconsequential for software engineers. If you were there for over a year, take your vested shares, leave it on your resume, and still coast. If you were already interviewing and had another offer, do the same.
[1] To my surprise, people are paying WAY more for health insurance. Are they San Francisco/Bay Area residents? Unknown. Are they individuals or paying the family rates? Unknown. Are they using the most competitive providers? Unknown. Is Coinbase still covering health insurance for people on severance as if they were employees with COBRA starting after the severance period is over, adjusting all of our math? Unclear.
Last time I continued health insurance via COBRA, I paid nearly $2k a month in premiums alone.
Survey of purported 2019 data shows $570 * 12 = $6,840 for individual, $19,000 for family (for some reason, no monthly cost there)
So lets say you only pay the feds income tax, and don't bother with medicaid, social security, state income tax, 401K, any other witholdings whatsoever - you'll earn 85% of $160,000, or $136,000. Divided into 26 paychecks, $5230 biweekly.
If you're single, yearly premium would be covered by 2.6 weeks of work, or 11% of your severance. If you have a family, 7.26 weeks of work, or 30% of your severance.
yeah this is a better metric than my napkin math above.
it is also important to elaborate that we are talking about 4 months of payment with continued health insurance included, and calling that savings for an additional 12 months of paying for health insurance.
Kaiser Permanente is from what I've heard an unusually good deal without anything comparable in NYC or most of the rest of the US, though not without their own weaknesses in areas like mental health coverage and dispute resolution.
Getting people who are unhappy (politics aside) to leave sounds more like "the severance package was a nice move" than "the severance package was too good."
Might be a silly idea, but I wonder if more companies would benefit from doing something like this on a semi-regular basis, i.e. giving unhappy employees the opportunity to leave with a decent "severance" package?
It would be great for those employees, though!
Original deck: https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664/
Up to date statement: http://jobs.netflix.com/culture
In an ideal world a reporter could answer your question by talking to many of the people who quit and ask what motivated their decision, but the severance package almost certainly came with an NDA that would make doing so impossible.
So we'll likely never know. Probably one should assume that the answer doesn't look great for Coinbase's narrative; if they thought it would, they might have done a survey and published data from it.
Frankly, giving the non-offended but unsatisfied employees a ready out is probably good for Coinbase in the long run.
Just ask people who are interested in politics in the workplace to leave.
However, activism at work is something you can actually legally lose your job over.
That doesn't mean you can't express your political opinions, freedom of expression is protected, but no agitation/activism.
1) don't allow any activism in the company
2) allow ALL types of activism in the company
Right now, it seems most companies only allow liberal activism but not conservative activism. This is a recipe for problems because it's arbitrary and not democratic.
Protected classes aside, if I start a company I can choose to hire or exclude whomever I choose. I could start a company that only hires registered Republicans, or only people who can't stand the taste of bananas. If this turns out to be a bad business decision (which it probably is), the market will punish me and I'll eventually lose to smarter competitors. Right?
This might be illegal in California, which considers political activity to be a protected class.
When a political faction deems that those who refuse to pay half their income for a highly benevolent social program, will face punitive legal consequences, that is authoritarian. I only bring this up because I suspect you are in support of these kinds of programs.
If there are only 10 companies and only one will hire you, with no capital you have zero choice but to work for that company.
I quote Frédéric Bastiat:
Man recoils from trouble, from suffering; and yet he is condemned by nature to the suffering of privation, if he does not take the trouble to work. He has to choose, then, between these two evils. What means can he adopt to avoid both? There remains now, and there will remain, only one way, which is, to enjoy the labor of others. Such a course of conduct prevents the trouble and the satisfaction from preserving their natural proportion, and causes all the trouble to become the lot of one set of persons, and all the satisfaction that of another. This is the origin of slavery and of plunder, whatever its form may be - whether that of wars, imposition, violence, restrictions, frauds, etc. - monstrous abuses, but consistent with the thought which has given them birth. Oppressors should be detested and resisted - they can hardly be called absurd.
Slavery is disappearing, thank heaven! and, on the other hand, our disposition to defend our property prevents direct and open plunder from being easy. One thing, however, remains - it is the original inclination which exists in all men to divide the lot of life into two parts, throwing the trouble upon others, and keeping the satisfaction for themselves. It remains to be shown under what new form this sad tendency is manifesting itself.
The oppressor no longer acts directly and with his own powers upon his victim. No, our conscience has become too sensitive for that. The tyrant and his victim are still present, but there is an intermediate person between them, which is the State - that is, the Law itself.
One is a freely chosen personal belief, and the other is a freely chosen personal belief.
In an industry full of data scientists and engineers, it amazes me how people go along with this narrative that disparate outcomes among members of arbitrary group identities is evidence of discrimination. We know that is not a valid application of statistics, yet people who know better still keep repeating it.
Social advocacy is a spiritual replacement to religion and supporters are even more fervent.
Personally i would expect the former to have more widespread support in America. The latter stands for many things that could be more controversial in the states. A DuckDuckGo for "blm demands"[0] returns the following NPR piece[1] from DC-based interviews. It lists BLM demands as:
- Defund Police
- No New Jails
- Decriminalize Sex Work
- Police-Free Schools
- Drop Charges Against Protesters
- End Cash Bail In Maryland
- Ban Stop And Frisk
1: https://www.npr.org/local/305/2020/06/09/872859084/here-s-wh...
Nobody thinks black lives don’t matter. This is very different from supporting BLM, however. Many prominent black public figures have come out denouncing BLM, and it isn’t because they think their own lives don’t matter.
The name is purely orwellian PR trickery that you can’t argue with, just like “antifa” is. It’s a remarkably effective tactic because most people assume it just means what the words say.
Similarly, you can go to work wearing a blue Biden hat, and nothing would happen. However, if you went to work wearing a red Trump hat, it might be your last day at work.
In a democratic society, this doesn't make sense.
In a way it's an optimization. My hope is that one day, when the two sides have finally come to a conclusion as to which one is right, I can join that one, and save myself a lot of trouble in the meantime ;)
You might adopt a political position that your privileged position of safety and comfort is not subject to any particular obligations to engage with others and become involved in society’s problems, but that would be politics all the same.
That doesn't make inaction immoral. It just means that it's not apolitical.
Or were we both heavily downvoted?
This isn’t about office politics, or political activism at work. This is about Coinbase making an explicit vote for the status quo of American racism, and trying to deflect the heat they’re taking for that by confusing people into thinking that this is about standard political discussion.
It makes me really angry that they would do this.
It makes me really sad that it worked.
I guess with that much money you can hire really good PR people to shape the narrative into exactly what you want, and dupe tons of people who are rightfully tired of the american culture war into thinking that this has anything to do with that.
It's a moral "package deal." The idea being that if you reject BLM for its bad politics, you reject that black lives matter. And if you accept it, you also accept a bunch of other shit you're not actually for.
BLM should be recognized for the moral "package deal" that it is, and vehemently rejected. It's dishonest.
It's not Coinbase that is conflating anything, BLM itself is a conflation of ideas.
The fact that you believe that is probably most of the problem.
You'll certainly find 11-year olds in Call of Duty who will say it for shits and giggles to control you; you won't find anybody who actually believes it.
The disparities in policing, application of police violence, and prosecution are well-documented.
This is why the movement exists. It's a real problem, whether you personally have experienced it or not, whether you personally wish to acknowledge it or not.
There are many people out there who simply do not think that it matters whether or not black people live or die. Many of them are in uniform.
One of my favorite things about this new type of political activism is that words no longer mean what we all understood them to mean in ages past. "Explicit" would mean something along the lines of Coinbase or Armstrong saying "we support the status quo of American racism", as you have alleged. Alas, I've read all these blog posts and there is no sentence that matches or even could be remotely construed to resemble the one you have wrote.
A good example recently from current events was the US president being asked in a press conference to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, "win, lose, or draw". He responded with "we'll have to see what happens". In the context of the question being posed, that's a clear and explicit failure to commit, given that context.
Context can entirely invert the meaning of two identical statements, and, in the right context, a failure to do a certain thing, or even remaining silent, can indeed be an explicit statement.
Another case comes from 2013, Salinas v Texas, when the police were questioning a murder suspect who suddenly became quiet during questioning when the topic turned to the murder. They were able to use this sudden silence as incriminating circumstantial evidence, given that specific context. This resulted in silence in the face of questioning by the government having to be explicitly invoked as such to not be potentially incriminating, which is an odd state of affairs and probably not the best outcome, but you can however tell that those judges weren't completely insane. Silence after saying "I affirmatively invoke my right to remain silent" is very different than silence after you were just answering police questions voluntarily, until they asked you about a murder they thought you committed.
Silence can speak volumes, explicitly, given the circumstances preceding and surrounding that silence.
Desmond Tutu, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, once said:
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”
If in your parent comment you had accused Coinbase/Armstrong of implicitly supporting the status quo (as you define it) I would've said "yeah, sure, if I squint hard enough and wash it through the 'silence is violence' filters I can see how you'd think that".
Another troubling thing I want to point out here is your comment is part of an accelerating trend where people, particularly from but not limited to those on the left, consistently attribute maximum malice of intent to peoples' comments (said and unsaid) or their actions. That is, imo, one of the reasons these environments are so toxic, because people are immediately put on the defensive.
Two can play this game.
And it is a game.
Given enough time, your being incorrect on the topic will only harm yourself, not others.
It's not that black and white.
"The Nazis used Hollerith equipment that IBM's German subsidiary during the 1930s – Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen GmbH (Dehomag) – supplied... As did hundreds of foreign-owned companies that did business in Germany at that time"
Because if you were, you should also argue that during WW2, any companies that helped the Allies should also befall the same criticism (that of being politically aligned rather than be neutral).
IBM helped with the holocaust. Actively. Past 1939.
IBM is bad for helping the nazis and for helping kill many people.
[1] https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/?...
This "apolitical" move would be a compelling choice if their only goal was optimizing shareholder value -- it's in their interest to maximize their ability to effectively lobby both American political parties to ensure any future cryptocurrency regulations benefit them.
So- what was accomplished? I don't remember which companies supported "the cause." All I know is that the companies that I thought I did no longer do- or at least don't show support any more. Which stands out to me more then their support.
Tells me that two things happened.
1. The companies wasted time figuring out how they should show their support, implementing those features, and all the associated work with making major changes to frontends. Spend hours figuring it out, most likely had meetings to discuses how to do it and what they should say.
2. The stopped showing supporting it after a point in time, which tells me they don't actually care. They just want to show they do.
I'm guessing they showed support for two reasons. First is some sort of genuine support for the cause, but the 2nd is a fear of internal backlash for not showing support.
Good on Coinbase for removing the elements inside their company that would get pissed if their company didn't take an active stand on flavor of the month political issues. When I go to work, I'm there to do my job and get paid. I don't want to have to deal with people fighting over what political stand the company should take a position on this month. I don't care that my programming language's maintainers voiced support or not. I don't care that program X or Y slapped a banner on their products for the month.
The fact that there was visible support for for Black Lives Matter that was removed a month later is a lot more telling then their support. You want to be apart of the movement without actually doing anything to fix the issues.
If you want to be political as a company, quietly donate money to the causes you support. Provide resources such as technical help or free/discounted services to the causes you support. That's infinitely more productive and helpful then letting your employees fight over what token gesture they want the company to show.
We saw a similar fashion trend in company cancellations of Facebook ads, multiple companies cancelled their ads for a short duration at the same time (each cancellation catalyzing the next) and we've heard nothing about that since.
I find it quite interesting honestly.
If a corporation posted a black square on its Instagram earlier this year, that doesn't tell you anything about whether the corporation cares about racism. It only tells you that the corporation cares about its own self-preservation.
I bet they didn’t have 5% turnover over some time-deaf email from the CEO.
My guess: those 5% got sick of tone-dead all hands meetings/memos and saw their chance to bail out.
I wonder what other companies during the Covid recession has 5% voluntary turnover?
Your job is not a political platform unless you work with politicians on their campaigns or are a politician / other form of politically affiliated / influenced company.
Politics can make people feel extremely uncomfortable especially if they feel suppressed and as a minority are bullied by other employees.
The gist of it is that a competent HR department can make a statement without directly committing support to any particular organization or group that they aren’t comfortable with.
Saying “I refuse to comment and you’re not allowed to comment” is the worst way to go about it, literally anything would be better.
There are also ways to train on empathy, bias, and general employee-to-employee communication that can guide employees through those conversations with colleagues.
Coinbase's offer was 4-6 months severance with benefits over that timeframe.
My guess: 1-2% of those people are the loud, annoying group that demands everyone behave how they think they should, and the other 3-4% were people who saw an opportunity for a long paid vacation while they look for another role.
Furthermore, what political mission did these people falsely believe they were joining when they got hired?
Coinbase is literally an app designed for the sole purpose of helping 22 year old kids lose money by speculating on the now deflated crypto bubble.
For a while, coinbase was allowing kids to “invest” using credit cards. I’m not kidding.
How could there be such a disconnect with that many people about what the company actually does—-especially from the inside where you can literally see how they actually make their money?
I hated working at one of previous jobs because there were 600 different issues talked about in the workplace. The underlying assumption was that you were always onboard. Many times I wasn’t and it.
Seeing Armstrong voice this policy makes me much more interested in working at Coinbase. I’m convinced that I won’t be cornered into jumping on the latest cause de jour because that’s what’s expected of me. Where any deviation from the cause’s line would put my job at risk.
Social media has amplified polarization.
Is it really the case that everyone must support one or other of the poles?
Saying "my business supports whatever the current US government's stated opinion is on all issues" is a political stance. It may not be partisan, but it absolutely is political. Those aren't synonymous.
Nobody supports the status quo.
The statements we were talking about upthread don’t reduce to these ones.
[1] https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/?...
Pretending that you're unaware of or completely ambivalent about the consequences of shifts in political power (so long as it benefits you financially) doesn't really qualify you as "apolitical." You're still involved in the political process even if you stick your fingers in your ears and chant "nananana I can't hear you."
I hate to sound incisive, but it kind of seems like the position that Coinbase's leadership has taken is "The board and CEO will decide what qualifies as 'apolitical' and as such will dictate the ongoing political activity of the company, which they have no desire to stop being involved in."
The issue that I intended to address is the interesting usage of language to sidestep making political contributions and supporting candidates and parties as being political acts.
I think that's too strong a statement in support of the current default, which is the largely feudal corporation.
First, company structures are pretty clearly being pushed in a more democratic direction, and have been for quite a while. Silicon Valley is the poster child for flatter organizational structures, "good ideas can come from anywhere", increased freedom of movement for workers between companies, as well as sharing the financial gains more broadly (at least, that is the ideal that SV represents to the outside world).
You look at a typical SV corporation and see a rigid hierarchy. Most of the rest of the world sees an insanely freewheeling mess that can't possibly work.
There are also today already companies that are explicitly structured as democracies (in some cases a bit more like constitutional monarchies, and in other cases more like minarchist collectives). Not all of these experiments are successful, nor should we expect them to be.
But I certainly don't expect this overall trend to reverse, stop, or even slow down. If anything, I expect it to accelerate, as existing companies continue to try to pick out and graft on the parts and tools that seem to be working for other organizations. Even when these grafting attempts are unsuccessful (which is often), they just draw attention to the orgs that are succeeding (inspiring attempts at analysis of what is different), which leads to more such experiments.
"In recognition of his work, Brian was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and one of the ten most influential people in bitcoin and blockchain"
"No politics = politics" is an utterly vacuous statement.
If you become friendly with a person in the workplace you'll eventually learn their politics, right? Either through how they act or what they say. How do you limit how much a person reveals about themselves at work?
The CEO is saying Coinbase won't take political stances. That's fine in theory but in practice it's not. The whole idea of cryptocurrency itself is political.
There is a difference in being passively apolitical and actively apolitical for sure.
The stance "I am avoiding politics because there's nothing worth my time to be an activist about but I would if that changed and political decisions started seriously affecting me, my family, or my friends" is "the status quo is fine."
The stance "I'm avoiding politics because it's bad for my metal health or $any_criticism" is an act of protest! Super political.
I have genuinely never met someone in the first camp.
Hell, refusing to engage with certain types of politics isn't just political, it's an act of protest!
Maybe they have different priorities than you and just want to make money. Not everything is political.
You might be proving too much here.
Who makes more money at work for example? The low level employee or the boss? Who controls what, why, and how things are produced? What the schedules are? These are smaller questions than national policy, but they are political in nature. Of course, the socialist movement sees all workplaces' workers united together as a national political project. When you swim in water all your life, you can't see it easily unless someone points it out.
Another reason "just making money" is political is because so many people can't. In a society with levels of inequality that approximate ancient kingdoms, the lowest people in society have little opportunity to "just make money" and their invisibility is a political artifice.
Put another way, what is political is the ability to _not care_ when others are suffering. People are being deported, attacked in the streets, dying of disease, etc. so keeping your head down _and make money_ during such a time is something won by virtue of class. Other people can't ignore it because politics is life and death. While exhaustion is a valid excuse to rest (I'm super tired myself), what is being asked is for solidarity and to exhibit positive humanity towards other people. A primary site of conflict and domination is the workplace -- it's just that so many of us are used to losing or out competing each other that we don't band together to win.
One day, Alice has a clever idea: she can create a digital representation of money. Both Alice and Bob agree to accept these "tokens" in lieu of barter.
Big mistake. CarelessExpert announces to Alice and Bob that their creation obligates them to join in bitter arguments about abortion, climate change, and LGBT rights.
My point, since apparently I need to clarify it, is that Coinbase claiming to have an "apolitical" workplace while a) operating in a business that's driven by libertarian and anarchist philosophy and b) spending time and money lobbying politicians in Washington in support of said values is, at best demonstrative of a total lack of self-awareness, and at worst represents rank hypocrisy.
I tend to suspect it's the latter.
As such, I don't see the hypocrisy. Now, I'd be more inclined to agree if the "politics ban" covered activism around crypto policy issues. But of course, then management's position is very easy to see. They hired developers to implement their vision, not to fight it.
I prefer to not be lectured on political issues by my orange juice brand. Their mission should be to sell high quality orange juice and make a profit.
But what if your orange juice brand of choice was actively contributing to the destruction of the environment, lobbying politicians to make them exempt from environmental regulations, and destroying competition in nefarious ways?
That's an extreme but if that's information you have and you still support that orange juice brand then you are supporting everything that is public knowledge about that brand.
I think one problem with the concept of "everything is political (including supporting the status quo)" is that it provides no principled mechanism for determining what counts as "too far" (costly) for any given political cause. The nice thing about having a dictator (CEO) in this regard is that it provides a fixed point.
IMO Coinbase is "doing it pretty well", not by saying "we'll be apolitical", but by saying, "we're going to be political ONLY about X & Y".
My read is that they're not discouraging their employees from being political (unclear to me ATM if they're still doing donation matching regardless), and they're not stopping work-place diversity programs... they're just limiting their lobbying to, you know, their own issues.
My life may not be political.
But the life of a black trans woman? That's political by its very nature, in today's climate. One party doesn't want her to be allowed to exist, the other does.
Believing it's possible to be "apolitical" in any time of polarization is a privilege of those who benefit from the status quo.
Your view is not above regular politics. It is a view that's firmly embedded within the right wing of regular politics. I personally wouldn't consider it "Nazi" but would definitely consider it deeply transphobic, and exclude you from my friend circle. If I met someone with your view at work, I would avoid any interactions with them other than the minimum necessary to perform my job.
The First Amendment cuts both ways.
Sure, and the implication that letting discriminatory behavior remain normalized can be a strategy that lets you court voters at the margin isn't new.
In a sense, it is a strategy that grants political power but denies a mandate to do much of anything meaningful with it to combat discrimination. It also cedes the initiative to the opposition who can easily retreat or just run (and then continue to portray your compromised proposals as just as extreme as ever).
In your example, the black trans woman has no choice about being black and no choice about their cisgender.
Technically, they have a choice about whether they transition, but the alternative is living with the emotional pain of extreme gender dysphoria.
Would you deny someone medical care for a physically painful but not life threatening medical condition (say arthritis, or psoriasis), or tell them that treating it is their choice and responsibility?
How about mental conditions such as clinical depression, or bipolar disorder?
Would you relax the requirements on businesses to provide reasonable accommodation for wheelchair access to parking and restrooms? After all, it is their choice to go out in public.
Would you allow discrimination for employment or a mortgage based on these conditions?
This isn't really that complicated. Gender dysphoria is a real thing, and while the choice to transition (with or without gender reassignment surgery) is a personal one, and likely never an easy one to make, it should be an option that society supports and simply does not allow discrimination against.
Making arguments in good faith sometimes feels like pointlessly shouting into the void.
Obligatory xkcd: https:// xkcd.com/386/
I thought this deserved to be broken out to a separate reply.
I actually used to be in that camp. In my case I used to say some extremely heteronormative patriarchal objectifying bullshit ironically (typical examples would be "barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen" or "get me a beer, bitch". This started pretty darn early, like 10 years old. My mom's friends all thought it was hilarious when I was asked what piece of chicken I wanted and I answered with a deadpan "well, I'm usually a leg man, but..."). In other words, I was pretending to be a misogynist asshole for purposes of humor.
It turns out that as an adult, many of the people closest to me couldn't always tell I was being ironic, despite the obvious (to me) extreme contrast between these statements and my everyday persona.
And that's entirely aside from the fact that this sort of humor is painful to people who regularly encounter the real thing when it is meant to hurt them, even if they completely understand that I don't mean it that way. I was essentially using their pain as a prop for my humor.
So, I could have responded with some variant of "fuck 'em if they can't take a joke", but that would have left me associating only with people who a) got my sense of humor and put up with it, as well as b) people who didn't but approved of the literal interpretation and were encouraged by it. That wouldn't have been a good outcome for me.
To give a less pointed example of my sense of humor, I once horrified a co-worker who brought to my attention a severe defect that would have caused a user security issue if it had been deployed to production by responding "Well, we certainly couldn't allow that!" with heavy sarcasm. I was using sarcasm ironically. Since I immediately escalated the issue I would have thought that it was obvious that I was taking the issue very seriously, but I had misjudged my audience.
It is incumbent on me to communicate clearly, even or especially when using humor. And my sort of weapons-grade irony and sarcasm can't be handled too carefully.
Now, what you're talking about isn't quite the same thing (since I actually try to not be an asshole), but in your case it really is incumbent on you to communicate clearly as well when you're being an asshole that you are not being an asshole to a black trans woman because they are a black trans woman, and also that you aren't being an asshole to them as a black trans woman. And you have to somehow do it without a bunch of "I'm not a racist etc., but..." qualifiers. The latter point is so subtle, you're never going to be able to get it right, except perhaps one-on-one with someone you know very well (eg. my spouse thinks a "get me a fuckin' beer, woman" demand from me is hilarious, but that's in part because she knows I don't like beer, and rarely swear. Even with her I would be pretty careful about asking for anything else that way). You certainly won't get it right while still using racist and transphobic rhetoric.
So, you have a stark choice similar to mine: stop being an asshole to black trans women, or end up associating only with people who think doing that is excusable, normal, or even desirable, behavior.
Since, as a member of a minority group, they probably get more negative feedback than average, and since probably most of that negative feedback is due to x-ism, why shouldn't they assume you're an x-ist?
And that's completely leaving aside whether there exists any sort of stereotype that members of group x aren't as smart or capable as non-x folks that you may be playing into.
It's really on your shoulders to indicate or demonstrate that you're just an asshole and not an x-ist asshole. Because, as far as the various x-folk are concerned, isn't it simpler to assume that a non-x is being an asshole to them because of x-ism? Odds are that they're right.
I understand folks feel uncomfortable talking about systemic bias. Especially if they don't suffer from it. But that's exactly the issue of status quo vs change - getting folks to notice/discuss it. So there can be change, which requires the comfortable to change too.
“You’re either with us or against us.”
Leave it to the woke crowd to take a page out of the Karl Rove handbook.
Time is a flat circle and all that.
Anyone using it is just saying “If you are not with us, your against us”.
It’s simply a way to force a divide of the world into black and white and that sucks.
I disagree, and I think you're grossly overstating it.
I can see how you could characterize their stance as "supporting the status quo". But, there are varying degrees of "support", and this is pretty much the lowest degree of "support" imaginable.
Put another way, you're painting this as "with us or against us" when in reality there's a spectrum of support. Coinbase is standing just SLIGHTLY off center in one direction.
> And supporting the status quo in this political climate is a strange hill to plant your flag on.
Why do you think it's strange? The vast majority of employees prefer a work environment that is stripped of political conversation. And, such an environment is more conducive to focus and productivity.
While I generally agree, I think there is a tacit assumption that Armstrong's actions will work exactly as intended. 5-8% of workforce is...honestly I don't know if it's high or low, but is certainly non-trivial. These weren't strategic layoffs or restructurings, so certain business-critical projects might be delayed due to headcount issues/loss of senior staff. If we hear about another walkout at Coinbase 6 months from now, this might just look like a catastrophic management blunder.
Literally firing the walkout organizers would probably have led to a worse media cycle, but likely fewer staff quitting in protest (Google firing the walkout organizers seemed to have little to no effect).
The problem with the view that activism is ok if the current administration is objectionable is that the "status quo" changes from cycle to cycle.
Presidential politics is only a very small part of political activity in the US (though it is the most visible). What if your frame of reference is state and local politics? Is political activism in the workplace ok if you don't like the local school board?
This is kind of the same kind of fallacy as people who try to say that atheism is a religion. No, it's the absence of religion. In the same vein, an apolitical workplace isn't support for the status quo. It's the absence of any political, either for or against the status quo.
How many defense contractors are there? These people do have a vested interest to vote for candidates that increase govt contracts with the private sector. This is a massive industry.
Now that govt is getting more involved in health care, we're seeing that too.
These are trillions of dollars we're talking about.
This is also valid for small businesses too. How taxes are done in a given community. Etc.
I can't emphasize enough the vested interest a business has to be selfish. I'm indifferent on if this is a drawback.
I just wish there was more competition/choices for everyone and like you, I wish people would be more upfront (or self aware) of what they're doing.
P.S. When it comes to Coinbase. What stops them from backing a racist KKK member whom backs Bitcoin/crypto? What stops them from backing an anarchist whom backs Bitcoin/crypto? Etc...etc... This silencing of discussion...it a bit disgusting.
This is often presented as obvious self-contradiction, but in fact the definition of "politics" here changes from first use to the second. In other words, this is a cheap rhetorical trick to make something sound irrational and self-contradictory, while int fact it isn't.
I'm sure you meant "overstated".
As citizens and organizations, we surely deserve our right to engage in politics, but that doesn't mean it should what we discuss about on every nights' dinner table. A large fraction of those conversations will be, as it should, devoted to what's going on in the lives of our own and people around us. It's easy to lose focus in the mountains and seas of all those issues that matter, things just won't change in a blink, but we simply can not afford to let those issues to be the entirety of our lives, no matter how important they are, as much as one hope for otherwise. Call it the downside of democracy, but we just don't yet live in a time where everyone can devote all parts of their lives to discussions on fairness and justice, regardless how beautiful it sounds.
1. https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/lobbyis...
What they did makes a lot of sense and I suspect many other companies will follow suit, even if they don't do it so openly.
*typo
I proposed a simple rule that you should seek consent from others in the room before bringing up (partisan) politics. This simple "Hey can we talk about the debate last night..." allows for people to skip out before they get dragged into something they may not be interested in.
Many people have their key social group at work, and a lot more energy is tied up in politics in the US at the moment. I think it's important that people can move this energy with their colleagues and others.
These narratives that fuel the culture war “decide” that certain groups are in or out. It’s entirely inaccurate but that’s what the popular narrative dictates.
BLM is, under this system, on the “left” side, along with other made-up narrative entities in this fictional drama such as “antifa”. To the culture war brawlers, entirely disconnected from the actual happenings, they alias to the same thing, the same people, the same group.
Coinbase has leveraged that system to cover for the fact that their silence on the matter of justice and human rights is extremely loud.
That's the giant strawman if there ever was one.
"Abortion is about a woman's right to chose, who's against that?"
"Abortion is about killing children, who supports killing children?"
Everyone generally supports equality, and something like 95% of Americans including huge majorities of Republicans etc. accept that racism exists and is a problem.
Almost universally Americans want 'equal pay for equal work'.
... the question is the means, the underlying issues, social conditions, solutions, lack of recognition for other groups, the 'racial lens' that we now seem to use for everything, the double-edges sword of affirmative action, double-standards and of course accepting bad behaviour as part of the cause (i.e. riots) etc..
It's not remotely so simple, unfortunately.
https://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/20/zenefits-ceo-says-about-10-p...
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/losing-job-offer-quora-uber-v...
Good luck dealing with disagreements on this when it's so poorly defined.
I figured as much. Coinbase sounds like a great place to work if this works out.
No, we stand for accomplishing the mission and for creating a great place to work."
My god, you're a business, you're entire existence is predicated on making a profit, don't delude yourself into thinking you're chasing some higher purpose, if that was truly the case then you'd be offering your services at a loss or giving away your product for free.
> No, we stand for accomplishing the mission and for creating a great place to work."
> My god, you're a business, you're entire existence is predicated on making a profit, don't delude yourself into thinking you're chasing some higher purpose, if that was truly the case then you'd be offering your services at a loss or giving away your product for free.
Hey now, there are other options besides "solely driven by profits" and "non-profit solely focused on the mission"
For one thing, it is a fiction that public for-profit companies have a fiduciary duty to be monomaniacal profit seeking entities that must do everything legal to achieve that end, and anything illegal where the profit exceeds the risk-adjusted cost of getting caught is at least on the table.
Second, there are plenty of structures for encoding specific missions into a company's charter that are binding. I'm kind of curious to see if Coinbase will follow through on the rhetoric and do something such as becoming a b-corp.
But I thought it was generally understood that there were certain topics you really ought not to talk about at work including religion, politics, disclosing your salary, etc.
Has this changed? Or am I misunderstanding something?
The reason the CEO made this policy is because many people felt they were being pressured to be political at work which is the new norm .
I think Coinbase will now attract/retain fewer conscientious employees. The kind of employees who definitely won't leave are the ones with careerist/mercenary personality types. If that becomes a vicious cycle ( per the 'like attracts like' thing https://youtu.be/wTgQ2PBiz-g?t=75 ), the culture could lead to wide-spread ass-covering and fraud.
Then again, this isn't an area in which I have some particular expertise. Maybe it will work out perfectly.
Another possibility that occurs to me is that some employees are very conscientious, but have value systems that are looked down upon in mainstream Silicon Valley culture.
I could imagine such employees being more willing to stay with Coinbase when that potential source of strife is removed.
I’m not sure that’s what happened here. This was started because employees were upset that the company wasn’t taking a stance to support the Black Lives Matter movement. If my employer decided to be apolitical around something as basic as saying racism is a thing and Black people shouldn’t be killed by the police I’d certainly leave too.
To my point, though, I'm envisioning a longer-term culture-shift.
Life is complicated, we have a lot of things to focus on, most people like to do work at work, not get tangled in what might be suppressive or irrelevant social webs.
My bet is that 70% of people would prefer apolitical, 20% 'moderate' and only 10% activism - of course - only if it's specifically their view of activism.
Some employees wanted to support BLM, while others thought it was off-topic or didn't like it?
And Brian / the CEO then decided to not allow such discussions at the workplace? noticing that some employees got upset at each other, when talking about it?
(I'm in Europe and a bit clueless)
I suspect that many of these employees aren't motivated by politics, but instead by money.
My suspicion is that the percentage of folks who are into this is higher at companies like Google, who have absurdly overly bureaucratic hiring pipelines that weed out free thinkers in favor of academic elites who are strong conformists. Strong conformists from academia are the ones I see gravitating most to this form of activism. Add to that the fact that your typical Google engineer is massively overqualified for the actual work that they do on a daily basis (working on a cog in a gear in a giant system) and you get a lot of anxious, bored people trying to erase their guilt over being radically overpaid.
Another group of folks I've witnessed being into social justice activism (at an extreme level) are borderline Aspergers folks I've worked with who, on a good day, have a hard time navigating human relationships of any kind. I think the intersectional, hierarchal nature of these beliefs brings a Dungeons and Dragons, RPG like sense of order to humans that is comforting to them. The fact that it's mostly over-simplified and false escapes them.
Basically, Coinbase probably got rid of a lot of unproductive personnel and won't have to deal with this anymore.
That’s just anecdotal but the people I know at google are the less conforming and the most “weird” (not in a pejorative sense) people I know. They also have no connection to academia and in fact all of them failed their studies for years because they were spending their time doing other crazy things.
Looking at this through another prism, fully 95% of the company decided that being apolitical at work is reasonable.
What happened to the rule against politics and religion in polite society?
What rule? That's only ever been the case in idealized tv 'society', and mostly-homogenous comparatively rich/affluent folk who can afford not to give a shit about politics.
What were the opinions of the bad apples? That they wanted Coinbase to support?
I'm not in the US and a bit clueless
I honestly don't understand how you could believe that.
Every oil and gas company or tobacco company has been historically engaged in politics.
IBM and BMW famously enabled the Nazi regime during WWII.
Union busting and strike breaking throughout the 70s and 80s was entirely political.
Silicon Valley, in general, heavily invests in political lobbying, including Coinbase itself!
I'm guessing now they're apolitical Coinbase wont be doing any of that.
Really. It's that simple.
It's not a hypothetical. Satoshi created Bitcoin as a (particularly ineffective) act of insurrection, and the only reason why governments haven't responded to it like so is a matter of political and judicial economy. Existing money-laundering and securities laws likely already ban Bitcoin, we just haven't seen them fully enforced. Using Bitcoin is inherently a political statement (which I don't entirely agree with); the apolitical choice would be to wind down Coinbase as an ongoing concern.
Acknowledging that black lives matter goes beyond politics.
What does are some concrete examples of a company being political or apolitical? What are the kinds of things the Coinbase used to do and no longer does, which employees might leave over? Is it about the company donating to political compaigns, or openly participating in community debates and having a position on social issues (same sex marriage, abortion, Black Lives Matter, Trump, gun control, etc)?
> Cryptocurrency start-up Coinbase recently sought to restrict political speech by employees, a move many interpreted as a shift to the right because it came in reaction to internal discussions of Black Lives Matter.
That makes it sound like the Coinbase thing is less about the company holding a public political position, and more of a "leave your politics at home" thing.
Sounds like the corporate version of the recurring debate about whether open source projects should reject contributions from those with objectionable political views.
YMMV depending on the company. Netflix is an obvious outlier in that they offer no RSUs and just pay very high salaries.
E.g. in my case only my third offered it, and I was like "What is that?", in my case it started vesting after 1 year (linear). So at that point one can think of looking for new job.
https://battlepenguin.com/tech/tech-culture-shock-from-ameri...
I know people who've been at the same job for 6~7 years and they are totally getting paid way under market. A company might give you a 2~3% cost of living increase, or a $5k promotion every few years, but switching jobs let's you ask for $10k or more.
On the downside, I would NOT recommend anyone else change jobs almost yearly like I did. My job loyalty is shit and it's hard for me to take on other jobs when people are concerned I could just leave.
That being said, the good jobs with good pipeline engineering, tests and CI/CD flows allow people to flow in and out; quickly pick up things and move with fast/good deploys. Those shops are the best, but they are rare. They tend to not care as much weird resumes because they want to hire people who are innovative.
Right... but aren't the options you're throwing away worth 10x that? How can it possibly be worth it?
Let's say your vesting schedule is 4 years w/ 1 year cliff, it's only necessary to stay 1 year. Thereafter you're not 'losing' options by leaving.
You're awarded $100k but then it grows to $200k by the time you start cashing it in. When you switch company you get $100k again, not the $200k you threw away.
Most places I know of do not
My experience with smaller startups, was that it's impossible to determine if the options would be worth $0 or $$$.
Additionally, I find it real strange that a cryptocurrency company is pretending to have an 'apolitical' mission. Cryptocurrencies were created for political reasons. A lot of the pre-cursor developers (and suspected inventors) and early proponents are anti-government libertarians/crypto-anarchists. Even before Bitcoin, cypherpunks were heavily invested into digital cash techniques, that although used centralized servers, were nevertheless, blinded and federated, again with the desire to have untraceable cash like transactions that could be sent through unbreakable channels, and untouchable by government taxation and regulation.
But I don't think this is a good way to approach political speech at work. Coinbase is aligned very closely with libertarian politics for a variety of reasons that complement each other. I would be very surprised if there wasn't rampant libertarian-inflected speech being traded by employees. Indeed, a policy against engaging in political speech unrelated to the company's goal will almost certainly amplify that particular type of political messaging.
I work for a company with very conservative leadership, who contribute, individually, to very conservative causes. I contribute to and participate in a Pride event being held in my town. Last year an outside political group protested the event, and it led to the City, via the city council, chaired by the CEO of my company, creating de novo restrictions on usage of City property specially for that event, and my boss showing up to film that event. Later, the same political group ran a political candidate for mayor explicitly on a ticket of shutting out Pride from City facilities (which, obviously, is legally dubious). It was a rancorous election in a deeply conservative community, even though the challenger got nowhere near the votes required to win.
My company's official policy is that, in the interest of respecting others, we should refrain from discussing politics at work. In the context of this election, my coworkers, with whom I share a pod, were discussing how the city should just be able to kick out Pride, because it's fine if people are gay, we just don't want them in our community. These same coworkers often waste their time quoting Steven Crowder and similar political talkers. My manager, who works in the same pod, initiates conversations every week about, how was your weekend, what did you do. I find them uncomfortable, but my manager sees them as valuable for team building.
Generally I find my team fairly collegial, though they almost certainly don't share my political or, in some cases, religious convictions. During the week of Pride I mentioned I had attended the event with my wife, and I received cold looks from the entire office.
I am frequently looking for work elsewhere, for a variety of reasons. And if I were offered a buyout this generous I would definitely take it.
Can we please stop using medium? It's getting worse and worse
> Enable belonging for everyone: We work to create an environment where everyone is welcome and can do their best work, regardless of background, sexual orientation, race, gender, age, etc.
Great. So Coinbase believes that critical to their mission is enabling everyone to feel welcome and do their best work regardless of their background or identity. And then the very next part is:
> We focus minimally on causes not directly related to the mission [such as] policy decisions: If there is a bill introduced around crypto, we may engage here, but we normally wouldn’t engage in policy decisions around healthcare or education for example.
Ok. So to pick an obvious example, two related issues that would clearly fall into the “not directly related to the mission” bucket are gay and transgender rights. Without getting at all into the issue of where you (Dear Reader) stand in terms of these particular issues, it seems to me that by saying “we explicitly will not lobby to make sure transgender people have equal rights, because that’s outside of our mission” is at direct odds with saying “we believe a core part of our mission is making sure transgender people feel welcome and can do their best work”.
The only conclusion I can come to is that Armstrong believes that people who have to fight for their rights can “feel welcome” and “do their best work” just as easily as those who don’t have to fight those same battles — and that seems, at best, a little naive/head-in-the-sand.
Adding on to that, as many people pointed out in this thread, Coinbase does make political contributions — it’s just that their interpretation of this sentence
> If there is a bill introduced around crypto, we may engage here
Seems to be (from a cursory glance at those listed contributions) that they are willing to support any politician that promotes their stance on crypto, regardless of any other stances that politician may take on any other issue. So continuing with the example above, Coinbase may be perfectly willing to support a politician who actively opposes gay marriage, as long as that politician actively supports crypto.
They’re obviously free to do so, but it seem disingenuous to do so while at the same time claiming that one of their core values has to do with enabling everyone to feel welcome and do their best work. At a guess, they are taking an extremely narrow view of “feel welcome while sitting at their office desk” — as in, they promote respectful communication in the office — but I question how “welcome” someone can feel when they know their employer contributes money towards the campaign of a person who (for example) is actively working to remove their right to be legally married.
Unless some law is interfering with the ability of Coinbase to provide a welcoming workplace to employees who are gay/transgendered, gay/transgender social causes have nothing to do with Coinbase's goal of providing a welcoming workplace that maximizes its ability to advance its mission.
You can't shoehorn every 'social justice' issue into the goal of providing a welcoming workplace. The latter statement is not meant to be interpreted in such an all-encompassing way.
The kind of absolutism that premises your perspective/position would engulf everything in politics.
I'd like to mention something I haven't seen in other comments:
Coinbase's mission to produce a new global financial system is itself a kind of political activism.
One that some people believe will make the world a better place for people.
When designing something as fundamentally underpinning as the future of money, that can only work if it is able to underpin the activities of just about everyone.
Rather like cash money today only works because everyone knows it behaves the same regardless of who you vote for, and bank money (for the most part) also behaves the same regardless of your political views.
This analogy is a stretch, because employees at a card services firm aren't the same as users of a card services firm. But let's try it:
Imagine what the country would be like if, say, Visa and Mastercard (and all other payment infrastructure providers) required you to agree, and keep showing you agree, to support a particular collection of present-day political stances and voting affiliations before you could even spend any money on a card.
By that, I don't mean imagine "Visa Democrat Support" card requires you to show your affiliation. I mean, imagine if all Visa card services of every kind, and all the other services, all required the same affiliation.
Unless you're happy with that affiliation, you'd have to lie just to use ordinary services. You'd be at a significant disadvantage in life, and what people say in public would be very different to what they believe.
Some might say at least just causes would be supported. But it's quite an Orwellian prospect.
It's the sort of thing many people associate with China and too many other "less democratic" countries, where (it is said; I don't know for sure) you have to basically pretend to agree with the Party line, keep political views to yourself, and there's no democracy to speak of.
A healthy democracy needs a strong underpinning of common infrastructure, of which cash and money are part, which are available to everyone in a more-or-less apolitical manner, enabling people to hold and express a range of conflicting, divisive views layered "on top" of those basic life-supporting services.
(You could say cash and money, and payment services, are inherently political, as is capitalism, but that's not what I mean here. What's meant here is that a healthy democracy needs to provide some common infrastructure upon which everyone can depend regardless of affiliation. Otherwise it won't be much of a democracy for long.)
Now, I said it was a stretch of an analogy, because users of a company's services aren't the same as employees.
But still, imagine the chilling effect on trying to build up "a possible future of money, strong and unbreakable, available to everyone for the common good" if it was well known that the companies underpinning that future money all displayed public activism along strongly partisan-aligned views, or campaigned on big issues on which it's thought about half the population disagrees.
I've said all this, even though I personally see money itself as rather political, and that's because it doesn't have the innate properties which are commonly assumed. It's possible to engineer types of money to have different properties, and if adopted, these engineered properties have a profound effect on people's lives as well as aggregate behaviour and the economy at large. So I'm not necessarily personally aligned with an "apolitical" stance on a design of future money.
Nonetheless, I can see, and respect, why someone trying to build what they see as "the future of money for a better world for people" might feel that a firm, consistently "apolitical" public stance is an essential ingredient to perform their mission. To ensure the service is not just available to all who want in, but also seen as reliably available, now and in future, to all people regardless of their political affiliations.
(I don't know if Coinbase or its CEO holds this view, but I thought it was a relevant idea worth sharing, having noticed other comments tending to focus only on internal culture and productivity.)
It’s not the reverse of racism. It’s racism in the reverse direction than the more “traditional” one.
“Reverse” is not the most precise word for the term, but so long as there is no compiler error when a person uses the wrong word, human natural language will continue to be sloppy. Let’s stop being overly pedantic — that is one of the guidelines of this site
Individual racism is a personal belief in the superiority of one’s race over another. It is linked to racial prejudice and discriminatory behaviors, which can be an expression of implicit and explicit bias.
Institutionalized racism is a system of assigning value and allocating opportunity based on skin color. It unfairly privileges some individuals and groups over others and influences social institutions in our legal, educational, and governmental systems. It is reflected in disparities in, but not limited to, wealth, income, justice, employment, housing, medicine, education, and voting. It can be expressed implicitly or explicitly and occurs when a certain group is targeted and discriminated against based on race.
It would be unfair not to recognize that some groups have considerably more power than others.
That said - it's still racism one way or another, discriminatory etc. and in 2020 it's getting really hard to talk about individuals as being a function of their race.
So while it's worth reminding ourselves of the intersectional issue ... it doesn't really justify bad behaviour one way or another.
I could get down with this if whites behaved as a class, working for their own mutual interests; however, such whites are few and far between and generally powerless.
I feel like racism and classism is often not separated cleanly in discussions about these things, especially in the US.
That's why Democrats (comically) fought so hard to preserve the SALT tax break for higher income earners - so many Democrats earn six figures in locations like SF, LA and NYC. It's comical because it put the Democrats in a position of fighting for tax breaks for people earning high incomes.
The notion that the Republican Party is the party of the rich is no longer accurate. The voting foundation of the Republican Party today is the middle class that the Democrats have increasingly abandoned over the last 30 years (which is entirely what got Trump elected; white, educated women are what cinched Trump's election, and the middle class voters in critical states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin).
The Democratic Party is largely hyper bifurcated between wealthier white people and poorer miniorities, heavily coastal in location. The Republican Party largely consists of the lower middle class up to the lower upper class, and is largely centered in so called fly over or red states, non-coastal, and almost entirely white. These are generalities (ie there are exceptions), however they are broadly correct.
Democrats dominate to an extreme all the high-wealth locations in the country, including nearly every major metro (which is where most of the high wealth individuals live in the US). Those metros include: Seattle, NYC, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Jose, Austin, Denver, Washington DC, Boston, and so on. There is only one Republican mayor among the top 10 largest US cities, with Republicans only having the mayorship of 13 of the 50 largest cities.
The richest people also tend to be Democrats: Gates, Zuckerberg, Buffett, Bezos, Bloomberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, MacKenzie Scott, Steve Ballmer, Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Laurene Powell Jobs.
It doesn't get any more elite and money-representative than that list. Nine of the ten richest people in the US are Democrats. It's hilarious that the Republican Party is supposedly the party of the rich, and those people are all Democrats. I say all of this as someone that has never voted Republican in my life. I don't care for the party, however the old propaganda narrative that they represent the rich is false today.
Second, you’ve selected examples separated in time by decades. When you grant yourself the power of time travel, it certainly does become a lot easier to come up with examples. The world is changing fast nowadays. The landscape is completely different today than it was even 10 years ago.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24724617.
Sure, I’m not sure what the answer is. Then again, I’m not a professional HR person who is supposed to be trained in handling these issues.
Having 5% of your workforce quit over nothing more than messaging is a catastrophic failure in people management.
Outright political speech bans at companies may be perfectly justified, but it’s usually the case that work environments that have a habit of outright banning things are stifling to be a part of. I’m sure this isn’t the first time that employees have heard tone-deaf messaging from corporate, and being offered some money to leave on the heels of some more time-deafness must have been appealing.
It’s not hard to have policies and training rooted in being empathetic and respectful toward others. That way you don’t have to ban difficult topics. Conversations between coworkers being excessively policed never feels good.
Asking people to always be work robots is completely unreasonable - lifelong friendships and marriages happen with coworkers. We are human, social creatures. Things happen in the world and we spend most of our weekday life at work, so we often need other people at work to talk with about them.
I think the CEO’s refusal to take a stance on whether Black Lives Matter is a stance in itself. It’s hard not to assume that he doesn’t agree with the organization or the statement, even if that’s not the case. And while the movement is in some way political, in most ways the organization and the phrase simply stands for the idea that, well, Black Lives Matter. It’s simply a marginalized group seeking equal treatment, and there really shouldn’t be anything political about being treated as an equal.
Of course, the reactionaries in our world always demand that we think otherwise: that we should be considerate of their views on keeping women, certain races and ethnicities, the differently abled, or people with the “wrong” faith as second-class citizens. They want us to consider these fundamentally flawed views as if they are on equal plane as a valid “other side” of the coin, as if it’s simple political disagreement. In reality, their viewpoints were never acceptable, we’ve just had to suffer through them.
There’s nothing political about telling someone through words and actions that they matter, and treating those people with equal protections and rights in the criminal justice system.
As an anecdote, my employer had no problem proclaiming support for Black lives. We have Black employees, of course we should agree that Black Lives Matter. And of course we can have difficult conversations among our coworkers, as long as we know how to listen to each other. This is where HR comes in to help train and guide around keeping those conversations productive and beneficial to everyone, because people grow by having their viewpoints challenged and expanded - and that can happen at work!
If BLM was just that, most people, even on the political right, would have no problems with it. The trouble is, BLM the organization is run by Marxists, is openly racist in itself (black exclusivity), and their aims are much more than racial equality.
Their leaders have made statements regarding dismantling capitalism, have attended rallies with Nicolas Maduro, and have had their funding organized by ex-convict Susan Rosenberg, who was part of the terrorist May 19th Communist Organization.
I'm a fan of racial equality, and by that I mean completely eliminating racism quotas, making hiring based purely on merit and not melanin. I will have nothing to do with the organization BLM.
From Wikipedia:
> The phrase "Black Lives Matter" can refer to a Twitter hashtag, a slogan, a social movement, a political action committee,[18] or a loose confederation of groups advocating for racial justice. As a movement, Black Lives Matter is grassroots and decentralized, and leaders have emphasized the importance of local organizing over national leadership
Again, as a company it’s not even hard to take a not-tone-deaf stance on the issue while avoiding directly supporting the original organization. It’s not hard to reassure your Black colleagues that you recognize their struggle and that you support them.
When you as a company say “we refuse to discuss this, you are forbidden from discussing this,” it’s inhuman and tone deaf.
Let's get real. People on the political right have been yelling about kneeling in the NFL since that particular form of protest began. And it has few/none of the associations you describe.
> I'm a fan of racial equality, and by that I mean completely eliminating racism quotas, making hiring based purely on merit and not melanin.
Sounds great in theory. Now try to ascertain if someone made a hiring/promotion decision based on merit or on melanin without some kind of Star Trek era brain scan.
I'm of the opinion that business owners should be the sole arbiters of who is hired and promoted anyway. The State should mind its own business. A good business owner will promote the best talent which will make their company grow. If they start filtering talent based on skin color, they're hurting their own pocket.
You can't ascertain whether individual hiring decisions are based on merit or not, but you can make a statistical guess at what percentage of each ethnicity would be promoted based on the demographics where the hiring is taking place. If the population is 10% black and 90% white, you'd expect an organization to be 10% black and 90% white on average, if no racial screening is occurring.
However, the common "diversity quotas" which are commonly employed now want a different outcome. They want to see at least 50% of hires from BAME, even if BAME are only 20% of the demographics. There's a term for this. It's called racism.
I'm pretty sure this is a straw man. 50% quotas are common for women (50% of the population), but otherwise I could find no evidence of 50% quotas based on race.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
> I think the CEO’s refusal to take a stance on whether Black Lives Matter is a stance in itself. It’s hard not to assume that he doesn’t agree with the organization or the statement, even if that’s not the case.
I think you're right about the second part, but I disagree that it's "nothing more than messaging." Surely it must not be about "focusing on Coinbase's mission" but rather that the Coinbase leadership feels that the Black Lives Matter issue simply is not important enough to take a stance on and thus potentially alienate some people. I strongly suspect that Coinbase would take a stance if they deemed the issue to be important enough. Would Coinbase take a stance if there was a current prominent debate over whether Black people should be allowed to vote? Or is that not related closely enough to their mission? What if the prominent debate was over whether Black people should be allowed to have bank accounts, or purchase cryptocurrencies?
That's just wrong. "Black lives matter" encompasses at least three separate categories of claims:
1. The lives of black people are inherently as valuable as the lives of others.
2. The US and western civilization in general is based on white supremacy at its core, and all disparities that disfavor minorities are solely due to present-day racism.
3. Radical change is necessary in order to solve the problems of racism, including reparations, abolishing the police, and ending capitalism.
BLM often ends up being a motte-and-bailey where anyone who isn't totally on board with #2 or #3 is accused of denying #1.
This is where HR comes in to help train and guide around keeping those conversations productive and beneficial to everyone, because people grow by having their viewpoints challenged and expanded
I suspect there are certain viewpoints that can be challenged and others than cannot.
#2 is objectively true, ask any historian.
#3 is making a whole lot of assumptions about the goals and beliefs of an extremely large tent.
There are absolutely viewpoints that aren’t allowed to be challenged at work. But what you’re getting close to alluding to is the flawed idea of all ideas being equally acceptable.
The idea that Black Lives Matter is not on equal plane with the inverse. Those against the idea over technicalities are on the wrong side of history and human decency.
Are you suggesting that all stances on all controversial issues are acceptable, and that it is impossible to hold a stance which is an affront to human dignity? Or are you merely saying that these issues are relatively unimportant compared to one's labor at their place of employment, and should thus be ignored?
Other political issues may very well be important to people, and they're free to act on them in their own time. Your co-workers are a captive audience, and it's not appropriate to abuse that relationship for political activism. People who want to be politically active can do so on their own time. I would not take issue with, say, a Mormon co-worker who goes door to door on weekends and takes PTO to go on missionary trips. I would however, take issue with proselytizing to co-workers. I regard politics the same way.
There are a variety of controversial issues where one position is a literal affront to human dignity (i.e., a deliberate act of disrespect).
> This kind of rhetoric creates a hostile and toxic work environment
This is a privileged view of the situation.
As a simple example, imagine you have three coworkers: Alex, Blake, and Taylor.
Alex believes that Taylor should not have been allowed to have married their current spouse, and posts on their personal Twitter account advocating that the decisions which allowed that to be possible be repealed.
Alex hasn't shared their beliefs in a work setting, but did tweet something about the company and as a result Taylor saw the other tweets and learned how Alex felt.
Taylor believes that Alex's position is a deliberate act of disrespect. Taylor fears a decision that would result in no longer being married to their spouse, which would lead to problems with medical insurance, child custody, finances, etc. Taylor doesn't feel safe working with someone who actively wishes to destroy a meaningful part of their life.
Taylor asks the company to make a statement supporting their right to have married their partner.
Blake says that Taylor is creating a hostile and toxic work environment.
Is Blake right? Or is Taylor acting in self defensive, in response to an already-hostile and already-toxic work environment? Is the discomfort felt by Blake acceptable "collateral damage"?
Do your answers change if the hypothetical scenario is not about a same-sex couple in 2020 following Obergefell, but an interracial couple in California in 1950 following the ruling of anti-miscegenation laws as unconstitutional?
A substantial segment of people have realized that they can shut down any conflicting opinions on controversial issues by proclaiming that divergence from their orthodoxy amounts to an affront to human dignity. Over the course of my employment I've seen people claim:
* All positions must pursue at least 50% female representation, and anything less than that amounts to misogyny.
* Voting for the current president of the United States amounts to an act of overt racism.
* Opposing affirmative action amounts to overt racism.
* Supporting affirmative action amounts to overt racism.
These positions are not affronts to human dignity. Maybe some people genuinely do believe that it does, but their views are disconnected enough that it's no excuse:
* Say an anti-abortion activist genuinely does believe that terminating a pregnancy amounts to murder. I'm sure such a person would be deeply offended by someone who supports a woman's right to do so, and would see it as an affront to human dignity. Say they posted on Facebook to this effect, that abortion is murder and should be banned. A co-worker who has had an abortion complains to HR saying a co-worker accused them of murder because of their contraceptive decisions. No HR person worth their salt would take action in this case, since it's effectively firing ~30% of the population because of their political or religious beliefs. If you don't want to be exposed to your co-workers political views, don't friend them on Facebook and don't follow them on Twitter.
* Say Bob makes a tweet supporting affirmative action in hiring and promotion, and Lin (who is Asian and opposes affirmative action) sees this. She finds it an affront to her dignity and amounts to asking organizations to deprive her right to equal opportunity. Does Lin have grounds to ask the company to sanction Bob for openly espousing discrimination against her? If these statement were made in the workplace, maybe, but otherwise Lin should just not view Bob's out-of-work communications. The company's policy is to give equal opportunity to all races, and Lin has no proof that Bob brought his views into the workplace.
Crucially, though, these two examples occurred outside of the workplace. Had they occurred inside the workplace ,then they now have much stronger cases. Your co-workers are captive audiences, in the context of interactions in the office. If Bob says this to Lin in the office, Lin can't just block him.
As far as your example goes, If Taylor doesn't want to see Alex's political views Taylor should block Alex on Twitter. They're not a captive audience in this situation: there's zero reason why these two people need to see each other's tweets to do their job. But if Alex said this inside the office, then there'd be better grounds for taking action against Alex. That's why offices are increasingly telling co-workers to keep their politics out of the office.
I've certainly worked with a number of the type.
I was actually sad she left on her own rather than getting fired. She actually moved to a bigger company.
By definition most of them do not have strong principles (they're okay with mediocre work representing them), so i don't picture them leaving on principles
It’s a sign of limited leadership capacity to attempt to install culture as a top down mandate.
a. Areas they can't focus on primarily, or b. Areas that would directly make 10, 15, 25% of their human capital feel attacked/engaged in a hostile environment.
I’m referring to the hubris of a ceo who thinks they can dictate the culture in any meaningful way with top down mandates vs. actual leadership which is developing leaders and nudging culture via language and relationship structures.
Emergent mission, vision, and culture is a recipe for bankruptcy.
At the higher levels of organizational leadership, it’s exactly emergent mission, vision and culture.
This is why Tony From Zappos gives away Dave Logan’s book on Tribal Leadership for free.
Stage 3 leaders try to tell everyone in the company what the culture is; Stage 4 leaders create a culture based on actual shared values (not something from a mission statement or poster on the wall or offsite activity).
Most cultures are still at stage 3, but the greatest ones are stage 4+.
I’ve seen this in my work over the past 20 years working with founders from some of the most successful companies (as a personal coach and advisor).
It's like that person who screamed "we're trying to build a home here!" at a university when someone was to be cancelled. What? No... that's not what a university is.
Emergent values and culture? A CEO should just start paying people and hope that a business emerges? What? It's literally the job of the leadership to steer the company.
But note "Leaders nudge people and the tribe to the next stage". In this case the leader sees where the tribe is going and is steering away from that sinkhole of unhappiness (constant workplace politicking doesn't make anybody happy, even when perceived progress is being made) and unproductivity that is workplace activism.
Putting a fire extinguisher on that self-destructive behavior seems like the leader's job. It's not something you should be nurturing.
You may disagree about it being self-destructive, but that would be a different issue.
But thanks for the book recommendation. Adding it to my list.
Debate causes or political candidates internally that are unrelated to work
Why limit yourself to the 40-50h you spend at work. Let's just ban political debate everywhere. It's so divisive! At maximum, you should debate causes or political candidates with people who think exactly like you. But even this may lead to unexpected frustration, it's much better to just rest assured that everybody thinks exactly like you.
Semantically perhaps, but not in practice. On most issues there are those who support, those who oppose, and a lot of neutrals who do not want to be involved and do not want to be caught in the middle of the fighting.
No-one in the thread has said this.