‘Tokenized’: Black Workers’ Struggles at Coinbase | Hacker News Reader

‘Tokenized’: Black Workers’ Struggles at Coinbase

nytimes.com

486 pointsxwvvvvwx623 comments

From Coinbase's preemptive rebuttal[1]:

"we hired an external consultant in August of this year who specializes in data science and diversity and inclusion to cull through all of our historic data related to diversity ... and conduct a high volume of interviews with employees representing all background, functions, and tenures to understand the employee experience. The independent investigation concluded that there was no evidence of structural bias in hiring, promotions or performance evaluations."

"All of those complaints were thoroughly investigated, one through an internal investigation and two by separate third-party investigators, all of whom found no evidence of wrongdoing and concluded the claims were unsubstantiated. We have shared this information with the reporter."

So external investigators didn't find anything wrong and the data was shared with the NYT reporter. What else can they do if they are really innocent?

[1] https://blog.coinbase.com/upcoming-story-about-coinbase-2012...

Did they disclose who the "external investigators" are? It matters. There are firms you can hire to rubber stamp a conclusion and others who with serious reputations.

The external investigators were hired and paid for by Coinbase and we know nothing about the details of their findings (or who they even were) other than that single mention in the company's own blog post. There's no mention in the post about 'data' shared with the NYT, they just told them the investigations cleared them. Here's NYT's version:

Ms. Milosevich said Coinbase hired a consultant over the summer who did interviews and looked at the company’s history, and found “no evidence of structural bias.”

“Employees reported a strong culture, fair employee treatment, high employee satisfaction and high energy for belonging, inclusion and diversity,” she said.

Managers in the customer support team, where many of the Black employees work, wrote their own report last month.

As far as I can tell the NYTimes was unable to find evidence either. There's no corroborating witness, emails, slacks, voicemails, statistics, or anything else concrete that you can point at in the article. It's a collection of accusations and color to lend them credence.

When a group of people say they see smoke I tend to believe them. But I'm also not a national news paper. I'd have like to see the NYTimes get some concrete facts before making such a serious accusation.

The NYT are not the police/FBI. They do not have access to those things, unless employees are able to exfiltrate said info at significant personal risk.

Seems a bit incongruous to suggest that people willing and able to accuse Coinbase of racism in the NYTimes are not willing or able to exfiltrate evidence of those accusations.

These are right in the article:

wrote in a Slack message that was viewed by The Times.

according to a copy of the message seen by The Times

according to a copy reviewed by The Times.

None of those are messages/documents contain racist action by anyone at Coinbase. They are (1) a reaction to a blog post, (2) a reaction to a letter, and (3) a conclusion in a report. They are not concrete evidence of racism.

I'm not sure what your standard is, you said 'corroborating evidence'. This is evidence that corroborates what the employees told the NYT. Now you're at 'concrete evidence'. What would that be? That someone yelled racial slurs at employees and then handed out signed receipts? The coinbase 'prebuttal' doesn't concretely dispute much either, it says you're going to see some stuff in the NYT that's 'hard to read'. If anything, it's striking how little both pieces disagree about the employees' allegations.

For example, the article talks extensively about Layllen Sawyerr's case. So I'd expect corroboration to look something like "we talked to suchandsuch other people who confirmed she was treated unfairly", "we read this email in which she was treated unfairly", or perhaps "we heard about this specific personnel decision which was unfair to her". A lack of corroboration doesn't mean her accusations are false, but a lack of attempt to corroborate is very troubling from a national newspaper, especially when the subject of the article is going on the record to say the accusations aren't true. Either Milosevich and Coinbase are lying about their investigation or Sawyerr's story is false - isn't the NYT curious to figure out which one?

This isn't Scottish Law, you don't need to corroborate every single item with third parties.

(I wonder how many people apply this level of corroboration requirement to forward-looking statements about the benefits of bitcoin?)

You don't need to do anything. Newspapers are free to publish whatever they'd like. But if the NYT isn't interested in discovering the truth of the accusations, that lends credence to the idea that their primary motivation is not the accusations but Coinbase's lack of support for racial justice politics.

Again: the NYT is a newspaper, and isn't vested with subpoena powers. They operate within the limits all newspapers operate in, and there is more than enough meat in this story to understand why they ran with it. "Isn't interested in discovering the truth of the accusations" is hardly a fair criticism here.

A lack of subpoena powers doesn't mean they can't look into it!

Take this article on the US Meat Animal Research Center (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/20/dining/animal-welfare-at-...) as a good example of an organizational misconduct investigation done right. Dr. Keen told the Times they're doing some abusive things to the animals. So the Times talked to a bunch of employees, and reviewed a bunch of documents, in order to make sure they could accurately and concretely describe specific instances of wrongdoing. This is the quality of journalism the New York Times is generally known for. It would be a much worse article - both less fair to the research center and less convincing about the accusations - if they hadn't dug in like that.

See upthread, with examples of how the article does exactly what you ask it to.

It seems like your criticism is that the article implies that Coinbase's executive management has racial bias problems, and the article doesn't establish that bias to your satisfaction. But that's always going to be a problem with news articles. Some will present evidence that is dispositive to you, some won't.

I find the reporting in this piece damning. I understand how others would view it more charitably. That's what we're meant to be discussing. Less productive: a discussion of the legitimacy of the reporting itself.

I don't see it as a discussion of legitimacy. It's about the strength of evidence the article offers, and whether there's anything the article could have done to offer stronger evidence or to better defuse suspicions that the author had motives unrelated to the evidence. That seems more productive to me than a discussion about whether Coinbase's management actually is biased, which will inevitably degrade to a dispute about how biased we thought they were before reading the article.

(For what it's worth, the article's lede is well-corroborated, and I agree it provides strong evidence of a serious problem with retention of black employees.)

The NYT didn't title their piece 'Coinbase is racist'. It's reporting on 'lots of Coinbase's black employees feel the company handles race and diversity issues poorly'. The reporting looks into that and, well, reports on why the employees think that.

The 'other side' of this is a Coinbase blogpost that says 'we hired a consultant who told us we don't have such problems'. You are certainly free to decide which of these is better supported.

The article was written as if the hook/angle for the article was created after the No-Politics-Policy, then filled in by contacting former and current employees. I don't think a report with "Coinbase gets lots of unfair flak, but tries really hard to be inclusive" article would be published, or even could have been written with the selection of sources.

That's like scientists finding a negative result, and not getting it published. Skilled scientists don't let that happen often.

An anonymous Coinbase employee upthread has claimed that the "no politics" rule was in place before 2020.

Not in response to the rule, but to the media cycle that followed publication of the rule.

I don't believe that in the editing room they went: "Next item. The Coinbase controversy. Let's do an objective investigation of this and see what we find." But I won't accuse the NYT of bad faith, economic/journalistic incentives are sufficient to explain that angle, fishing for further controversy for a company with an already bad reputation (deserved or not).

Notice the NYT article even wrote negatively of Coinbase's diversity efforts: Supposedly, black people where shoed into photos, to make the company look good to the outside, but were never promoted or listened to (implying, because they were black, and white Libertarian autist tech bro's don't listen to or promote their black employees as a matter of principle). With such an angle about questionable motives, it is neigh impossible to do anything right. It is "we already determined you are wrong, now where is your apology?".

I don't understand. If Black employees were deliberately encouraged to show up to be photographed, but otherwise ignored and passed over for advancement, it doesn't take much of an editorial slant to show a problem; that behavior is inherently problematic.

That behavior (passing over an employee due to their skin color) is not only problematic, it is against the law.

Did the editorial show that Coinbase is engaging in illegal discrimination practices? No, but they sure implied it.

Would it be problematic to encourage diverse representations to show up for company photos, if you did not ignore them for advancement? On its own, I think that's just common sense, and taking some PR advantage of the costly diversity programs.

A random/unplanned company photo I was in, was circulated online, to falsely claim that my company only hires white people. Felt really bad, especially for my multiracial colleagues present in that photo. Can you even give this movement what they want, without accusations of pandering/fake concern?

> Not specifically require Black employees to relocate to different cities while giving non-Black employees the opportunity to work out out whatever the nearest office is.

I refuse to believe that Coinbase based that decision on skin color, and I find it hard to believe anyone else sees that differently. As such, to follow this rule, you would have to overturn your decision -- based on rationale --, because it happens to negatively impact a person with a specific skin color. How is this a decent decision: "Sorry Chad, we can't let you work from home to care for your mother, because we just told some black-skinned support engineers to relocate, and we don't want to specifically require black people to relocate, and allow white people to work from home."? How is that fair? To who? It suddenly becomes justified if Chad was black, or if you allow everyone to work from home?

The comment I replied to appears to have been substantially edited in the time since I've replied to it.

Sure. You can:

* Not specifically require Black employees to relocate to different cities while giving non-Black employees the opportunity to work out out whatever the nearest office is.

* Treat Black employees respectfully in meetings.

* Not allow people who manage Black employees to mock them for being drug dealers and for carrying weapons.

* Not allow recruiting team members to discuss the merits of different races and their likelihood of success as candidates in hiring team meetings.

This all seems pretty basic?

Incidentally: I don't know what the "movement" you're referring to is. I've been in this industry since the 1990s, and these seem like rules that would have been equally germane in 1995.

I'm not trying to zing you with that, but am noticing a persistent subtext on this thread that attempts to equate Black people not wanting to be discriminated against with some larger basket of "far-left politics". Plenty of conservatives have the same objections to racial bias as whatever the "movement" we're talking about here is. Ironically, among Democrats (Black people overwhelmingly identify with the Democratic party for historical reasons), Black people trend significantly more conservative.

No edit, I just replied to you in my previous comment.

Are you under the impression that Coinbase makes Work-From-Home decisions based on the skin-color of their employees?

If yes (which it seems like to me), I'd like to learn more about that, and your reasoning. Am I oblivious to modern work-place racism? Imperceptive? Naive? Defending vile racists? I'd like to reconsider those questions on a more informed ground. My (and your) view kinda hinges on that impression and its truth.

I can understand why Black employees would have that impression, but if it's not true, then I also see that as problematic.

> I am under the impression that Coinbase demanded that the Black employees of the compliance group relocate to PDX so that the whole group could work out of the same office, and then exempted a white worker in the same group from that requirement.

Did it matter for this demand that one group was Black and the other was white? Or did this just happened to be the unfortunate outcome, which is bad optics if you focus on skin color attributes, and such bad optics should be avoided?

I am still not too sure. Can you remove "Black" and "white" from your impression and still say the same thing, or is it essential to your impression, and telling of a problematic work environment?

I am under the impression that Coinbase demanded that the Black employees of the compliance group relocate to PDX so that the whole group could work out of the same office, and then exempted a white worker in the same group from that requirement.

These kinds of things happen all the time in companies. Company relocates team x, company decides not to allow remote but that one engineer doesn’t relocate it or works remotely. Usually because the employees has long tenure/unique skillset/otherwise valuable that losing them would be a big loss.

We don’t have details who exactly was required to relocate and who weren’t. Coinbase’s compliance department is huge made of multiple teams, so it’s not just the handful of people mentioned in this article.

It's only incongruous if you evaluate it in the context of people who expect to be treated fairly when they report mistreatment.

There is a pattern of behavior minimizing the scope and impact of abusive or discriminatory actions across the tech industry, and it is very prevalent on this site as well.

The simple reality is that unless an employee is able to obtain clear, slam-dunk evidence of directly legally actionable abuse or misconduct, then it is a huge personal risk to come forward. Most businesses that are large enough to have systemic problems have enormous resources to litigate against those claims.

In contrast, for employees to collect and use evidence, it is required that they: a) experience the abuse or discrimination, repeatedly b) collect evidence and documentation of that behaviour c) exfiltrate that evidence in contravention of legal contracts that can include NDAs, binding arbitration clauses, morality/non desparagement clauses, etc d) be in a strong enough financial position to defend against litigation e) be confident enough in their own skills, reputation, and network to be able to give up future career prospects based on A-D.

And this is just from the 5 minutes it took me to compose this message.

I get that HN is a bastion of support for meritocracy, and that founder worship is a strong bias for many on this forum, but as a community, and as an industry we have got to stop undermining and destroying the folks trying to hold people and firms accountable for bad behavior.

Thinly veiled insults aside, you didn't address my actual point. The people in the article risked all the repercussions you mentioned by formally reporting the abuse and speaking with the NYTimes. Saying that they would do that but not risk snapping a pic of a racist e-mail, as an example, doesn't make any sense.

Insulting people wasn't my intention, but I have some uncharitable views of the HN community members that cry meritocracy and find founders blameless.

You are correct that the people in the article that either filed complaints, or spoke with the New York Times risked repercussions, but not all of the folks the Times spoke with are identified. People were willing to talk, but not necessarily on the record, or to be identified. That is because they are fearful of reprisal, based on past experiences and observations.

That is the biggest challenge for people confronting systemic issues like racism, poverty, homelessness, or any number of topics. It's not enough for victims to stand up for themselves, because there is a systemic imbalance in the ability to pursue remedies through the courts or other means. Getting justice in civil matters often boils down to the size of a victims pocket book (and especially in contrast to pocket books of the people or organizations that have made that person a victim). There are so many individuals who have left the tech industry after experiencing bad behaviour, discrimination, and abuse, and any one of those people could be the next Hedy Lamarr or Philip Emeagwali, and the industry is worse for not having those people in it.

Again, as a community we do our peers a disservice by not trusting them when they say there is a problem, especially when they are so consistently proven right.

>You are correct that the people in the article that either filed complaints, or spoke with the New York Times risked repercussions, but not all of the folks the Times spoke with are identified. People were willing to talk, but not necessarily on the record, or to be identified. That is because they are fearful of reprisal, based on past experiences and observations.

You're arguing against a straw man here. I did not say that the only acceptable proof was an on the record statement. Anonymous corroboration or reporting a general description of an e-mail to preserve anonymity would be fine. There's nothing even like that.

>Getting justice in civil matters often boils down to the size of a victims pocket book

That's not really true. Susan Fowler blew up Uber with a single blog post. The difference is making specific accusations and providing some level of detail. There's essentially none of that in the NYTimes piece.

> You're arguing against a straw man here. [...] There's nothing even like that.

And you are arguing in bad faith; there are several parts of the article that detail exactly what you are looing for.

In the second paragraph, the article indicates that 11 of the folks who left notified HR or their managers.

In the third paragraph one of the named victims states she made several reports.

In the sixth paragraph 5 on the record employees and 18 off the record employees, and internal documents and recordings are claimed as evidence.

Despite this, Coinbase only reports three official complaints in the year many of these folks left.

Coupled with the stream of hot garbage that Brian Armstrong has proposed trying to position as being "Mission Focused", in the middle of a pandemic, massive, ongoing riots, and political instability just illustrates how utterly tone deaf the leadership at Coinbase is.

> Susan Fowler blew up Uber with a single blog post.

Yes, you correct. You also have to look at the facts; Susan is an excellent writer, and based on her book, she already had some measure of experience speaking truth to power. Coupled with the fact that she was already recognized as a talented engineer and a published author, it's not surprising her blog post was as well received as it was.

Susan also wrote about her experience with her own voice and had receipts to show how bad it was. I certainly don't want to down play the issues that women in tech face, but it's also well known that people of color frequently have different social and economic circumstances than white or white-presenting folks (and it's not me saying this -- she calls out in her book the casual anti-semitism she faced from folks who didn't know she is Jewish).

>And you are arguing in bad faith; there are several parts of the article that detail exactly what you are looing for.

Everything you list is an accusation. What I am looking for is:

(1) Person X said this racist thing happened.

(2) The event in (1) is (a) true, and (b) backed up by a corroborating witness, this email, some document, etc

>You also have to look at the facts; Susan is an excellent writer, and based on her book, she already had some measure of experience speaking truth to power.

If the NY Times doesn't have reporters that can do that then they should fire the ones they have and find some that can.

So you're looking for a smoking gun level of proof? The unfortunate thing is that life usually isn't that easy. When smart people do bad things they generally don't leave a paper trail.

Meh. You are moving goal posts, and you are making baseless claims against an experienced reporter who is well connected in the Bay Area for a major newspaper.

You are offhandedly discounting the reported experience of more than 20 people, many of whom have come forward with evidence.

Personally, I think what he's asking for is entirely reasonable, and I was also disappointed to see a lack of hard evidence in the hit-piece.

>You are moving goal posts, and you are making baseless claims against an experienced reporter who is well connected in the Bay Area for a major newspap

You did that! You said Susan Fowler was effective because she was able to speak truth to power. Implying that this article is ineffective because the writer doesn't know how to speak truth to power.

>You are offhandedly discounting the reported experience of more than 20 people, many of whom have come forward with evidence.

No I didn't. I said I tend to believe them.

Can I just step in, in defense of individualism and meritocracy here?

I would like to challenge the perception of issues as systematic being a universal fact. You first have to accept that groups, as opposed to individuals, are responsible for action. This doesn't seem to hold up. Any delineation of people into any sort of groups is arbitrary. Corporations are legal fiction. Actions are perpetrated by individuals.

I would like to live in a society that optimizes for enthusiastic consent in, and at-will termination of all interactions and relationships for any reason whatsoever. This seems to be the only reasonable way to live in a society of people who disagree about fundamental things. To take this to the extreme, if you want to run a company full of racists, and be racist in your hiring policy, you should be able to do so. It is quite possible to support this standard of liberty without being racist oneself. I may disagree with what you say and all.

>What else can they do if they are really innocent?

Innocent of what exactly? At a certain point whether the leadership of Coinbase is racist or not doesn't matter. What matters is their actions. The article says "roughly three-quarters of the Black employees" left the company over a 6 month span due to feelings of being discriminated against. That isn't an accusation. It is a fact. It also isn't something that will just happen accidentally. That alone is a problem that demands urgent attention regardless of what is in the hearts of Coinbase's leadership team.

It's a fact, but it means nothing without context.

I punched a man in the face yesterday. To determine if I'm a violent person it's important to know whether I punched a man who was pushing his child on a swing set, or whether I punched a man who was crawling through a window in my home.

What context would exonerate Coinbase of fostering an environment that results in 75% of its Black employees feeling discriminated against? And if that context existed, why didn't Coinbase mention it in their preemptive rebuttal?

How about the CEO refusing to align with far left politics? Whether you think that is good or bad, that could well be the reason for them leaving, but it doesn't actually mean that there was overt racism.

I don't understand the premise here. Most of their Black employees left, not their far left employees.

Can you expand on what you mean by "far left politics"? Reminder, this happened in late 2018 and early 2019. It was before this year's round of Black Lives Matter protests. It was also before Coinbase issued its no politics edict. I am really struggling to think of what "far left politics" you are referring to here that would be important enough to the Black employees of Coinbase that it results in 75% of them leaving.

Most other tech firms make a specific effort to recruit Black people, promote them, and support causes Black people support. Coinbase's position is that while they support those things they want to focus on their cryptocurrency mission. Given that, the expected outcome would be 0 Black people working at Coinbase. If you were black, you'd much rather work for the firms actively trying to recruit and promote you.

> Most other tech firms make a specific effort to recruit Black people, promote them, and support causes Black people support.

Really? "Most other tech firms" do this?

I mean you have articles like these https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2020-06-24... being written.

> Baltimore said that he’s glad more people are talking about the problem, but that what’s really needed is “boots on the ground”: consistent money, time and leadership dedicated to actively bringing more Black tech professionals and investors into the industry.

That doesn't sound like "most companies" in the tech industry actively seeking and hiring minorities. Perhaps they do and articles like these are deceptive?

Google does https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/google-...

Apple does "For the past five years, we’ve continued to hire more women and underrepresented minorities every year." https://www.apple.com/diversity/

Facebook does "We’re committed to building a workforce that’s as diverse as the communities we serve" https://www.facebook.com/careers/facebook-life/diversity

I would look up others but I think those three make the point. Companies are actively hiring underrepresented minorities. Yes some people think more effort should be put in but to say it isn't happening is being ignorant of reality.

> I would look up others but I think those three make the point. Companies are actively hiring underrepresented minorities.

I was questioning the assertion that it was most companies. Three companies, no statistics showing actual improvement, that doesn't make the point. Thanks for the links. It looks like Google is having trouble achieving this goal, since the article you linked shows the same percentage of minorities year to year. Apple says they have made progress, which is good. The facebook link doesn't have any numbers. Apple says "53% of new hires in the U.S. are from historically underrepresented groups in tech" but it doesn't give a timeframe or provide statistics that show how much of their workforce is minority or how much improvement they have made. I'm not sure that public relations boilerplate actually translates to a commitment to a diverse workforce.

"If you were black, you'd much rather work for the firms actively trying to recruit and promote you."

This is a tall assumption. People are more complicated than that, and so are their identities. What if you are a pro-life, strongly Catholic black person? I can definitely see the pro-diversity campaigners balking at the "pro-life" component of your identity.

That’s the problem. Black lives mattering is a political issue only to those of privilege. I can’t believe we’re actually having political debate if certain people’s lives should matter or not.

I can think of contexts, especially when n=15(if this was a statistical study on insulin response to artificial sweeteners, people would be saying the sample size is too small to draw conclusions), but I don't know if developing hypothetical scenarios is useful.

Learning the true context is most important. This could be done by corroborating allegations for example.

> I can think of contexts

Yes that's what was asked; which ones?

> especially when n=15(if this was a statistical study on insulin response to artificial sweeteners, people would be saying the sample size is too small to draw conclusions)

And those people would be wrong. It's incorrect to dismiss a study based on sample size without a discussion of significance and effect size in the context of the data.

Moreover I reject the premise that you should be assessing this story quantitatively rather than qualitatively. But if you insist: what are your priors on whether or not a given company engaged in discrimination, and how do these change if you're told 75% of employees of a particular demographic stated there was discrimination?

Okay - one context is where one department has a large number of black people, and that department is defragged for purely business reasons to a different office across the country. Most people never choose the relocation package, and so a big chunk of black employees end up quitting. That's the event that triggered 8 black employees of the 15 who left as I understand it from the article.

> what are your priors on whether or not a given company engaged in discrimination, and how do these change if you're told 75% of employees of a particular demographic stated there was discrimination?

I completely agree that it's a very bad look. It is probably even more likely than not that given those facts, it is due to racism. I guess the question comes down to, philosophically, how one answers the following question: In the quest to eradicate racism and racists, is it better to be over-zealous and destroy a few non-racists to make sure you get all the actual racists(the chemo approach) - or is it better to be slightly more circumspect and let a few racists slip through the cracks so that far fewer non-racists are punished (the US judicial system ideal)?

But this question assumes that the root cause of the problem is that Coinbase has a disproportionately high number of "bad apples." To me that's exactly backwards; it seems much more likely that institutional culture tolerates and even encourages racism.

>I can think of contexts, especially when n=15(if this was a statistical study on insulin response to artificial sweeteners, people would be saying the sample size is too small to draw conclusions), but I don't know if developing hypothetical scenarios is useful.

N = 15 while p ≈ 20. It has been a while since I have taken a stats class, but that sample seems plenty large enough to me.

>Learning the true context is most important. This could be done by corroborating allegations for example.

Corroborating is exactly what journalists do. From the article:

>five people with knowledge of the situation said.

>But according to 23 current and former Coinbase employees, five of whom spoke on the record, as well as internal documents and recordings of conversations

>according to a recording of the session shared with The New York Times

>In a company email he sent later, which was also shared with The Times

>wrote in a Slack message that was viewed by The Times.

>three people briefed on the situation said

>according to a recording of the event

>according to a copy of the message seen by The Times

>according to a copy reviewed by The Times.

>two people with knowledge of the situation said

The NYT talked to dozens of people, watched/listened to multiple recordings, and viewed numerous emails and Slack messages. This story is corroborated.

If you order the claims in the article on a scale of not racist at all to clearly racist, you'll see basically all of the corroboration comes from claims on the left side of that scale, and few if any on the right side. The claims I was specifically thinking about were things like:

> One Black employee said her manager suggested in front of colleagues that she was dealing drugs and carrying a gun, trading on racist stereotypes. Another said a co-worker at a recruiting meeting broadly described Black employees as less capable. Still another said managers spoke down to her and her Black colleagues, adding that they were passed over for promotions in favor of less experienced white employees. The accumulation of incidents, they said, led to the wave of departures.

These have no corroboration, even though they allegedly happened in front of multiple coworkers.

We don't need to corroborate each individual complaint. The story here isn't that one employee was passed over for a promotion. The story is the trend that all these anecdotes support. There is corroboration for the trend.

But the point is that the corroborations are all on the lesser or non-complaints of the article, not the most egregious ones. To make an extreme example, posting a series of actual facts that culminate in aliens have visited earth doesn't make the latter assertion any more true.

edit: Sorry, I'm the poster from above, I just posted from my phone which has a different account logged in that I originally intended to give hiring advice unlinked to my main account(opsec fail).

The egregious complaints are corroborated by the other egregious complaints.

Let's use another example in which evidence is hard to find: sexual assault. If one woman accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault, the burden of proof for her story is high. She would need some pretty strong evidence to get Cosby charged let alone convicted. She probably wouldn't even receive coverage in the mainstream media without some other form of evidence. However the entire situation would change if she was one of 60 women coming forward. Suddenly the burden of proof for that first woman is greatly diminished. Each individual's story is corroborated by someone else having a very similar story.

> Each individual's story is corroborated by someone else having a very similar story.

Our culture is full of anecdotes and stories that serve as a warning why this is a very bad idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_witch_trials

Well I guess some witnesses lied over three centuries ago so we can't trust any group of people anymore for the rest of history. It is a bummer how that worked out.

Well I guess Bill Cosby raped a bunch of people so we need to believe every claim for the rest of history. It is a bummer how that worked out.

Interestingly, "carrying a gun" is an American stereotype here in Europe, not race-specific.

Isn't there like 400 million guns in private hands in the US? If so, the assumption that pretty much anyone you meet in the street might have concealed gun on them is not absurd per se.

But speaking about it aloud seems strange, yes.

"passed over for promotions"

This is the oldest workplace complaint ever and happens in racially homogeneous countries all the time. Favoritism in the workplace is probably as old as the pyramids.

Addressing only the viability of the sample for basic binomial analysis, the sample size is on the small end. This would be okay if we could reasonably expect the underlying events to follow identical and independent distributions, but when we know the people involved worked together that assumption is clearly void. Unfortunately this means we really can’t use any sort of statistical analysis on this datum. The models just don’t support it.

Without the additional context from the article, I think citing 75% is a bit misleading.

"When Coinbase announced it would be opening an office in Portland, Ore., several Black employees in the compliance department who worked remotely were told to move there or reapply for new jobs, four former employees said."

"All of the Black workers in the compliance division ended up among the group of 15 who left."

Without concrete evidence of discrimination in the article, my mind jumps to this being the pivotal cause of the stats, one team getting asked to relocate and that team being disproportionate in its demographics.

I know from co-workers that the company once had a strong stance against remote work and made limited exceptions. I can see that being a source of a lot of discontent. Asking folks to move to a new city is a big ask too; I could see the company having handled that poorly.

On the upside CB shifted to remote-first which should be great for being able to have a more diverse workforce. And contrary to some of the comments here, I take that as strong evidence of the ability for our leadership team to acknowledge mistakes and course correct.

Ok, let's accept what you say as fact and ignore that an exception was made for the single White employee in that department which wasn't made for any of the Black employees you are referencing. Let's also ignore the weirdness of 40% of the company's Black employees being on a single seemingly small team. That still leaves 7 other employees in other departments who left the company in a 6 month window due to feeling discriminated against. 35% is obviously a better number than 75%, but it doesn't allow you to dismiss this problem.

Just went back to double check the article and am actually not certain how you are getting to the number 75%. 11 employees cited a complaint to HR according to the article. Where are you getting the denominator for total number of black employees in 2019?

There's a data mismatch between the CB blog post and the article. CB cites that only 2-3 formal complaints were filed iirc.

11 employee complaints matches pretty closely with the PDX group.

FWIW I'm not dismissing the complaints. I've worked and studied in places where I've felt like an outsider; I've seen people make inappropriate comments about race+stereotypes in past work environments; I've also seen people make fishing claims of racial discrimination.

I wasn't on those teams in 2019, so the truth is I simply don't know.

From what I see today and the lack of concrete evidence in the article, I do have some doubts about the overall impression the article tries to give. I have the sense that certain information might have been omitted that might paint a clearer picture. I could totally be wrong as well.

The first sentence of the second paragraph of the article.

>The 15 people worked at Coinbase, the most valuable U.S. cryptocurrency start-up, where they represented roughly three-quarters of the Black employees at the 600-person company.

"[R]oughly three-quarters" implies there were likely either 19 or 21 employees Black employees at the company since 20 would be exactly three-quarters. I was just using 75% and 20 employees because that is the best estimate we got. The article also stated clearly that 8 Black employees were part of the PDX group.

The Coinbase rebuttal was worded very specifically.

>only three of these people filed complaints during their time at Coinbase.

The New York Times wasn't being as narrow with their counting and they said:

>11 of them informed the human resources department or their managers about what they said was racist or discriminatory treatment

There is obvious middle ground between these two quotes. 11 people complained to their manager or HR at some point including potentially after they left the company however only 3 filed official complaints while working there. Keep in mind that simply complaining about something to a coworker isn't the same thing as "filing" a complaint.

If this middle ground scenario transpired as I described, doesn't the NYT's recounting sound much closer to the truth than CB's? Also ask yourself who has a bigger incentive to stretch the truth here. Is it the newspaper that could instead report on literally anything else or the company that is being accused of discrimination?

> Keep in mind that simply complaining about something to a coworker isn't the same thing as "filing" a complaint.

It really depends on the HR department, too. In most, reporting something as seemingly straightforward as an overt sexual assault will raise the question "how do you want to proceed." But they might not lay out what your actual options are -- or worse, they might just offer an ear and won't offer to act unless you demand it. Sometimes, they'll make it quite clear that a complaint will be a huge pain in the ass for everybody involved, especially the person reporting. HR should understand that there can be direct and indirect blow-back; that reporting misbehavior (especially of management, or worse, HR) can have both real and perceived consequences for the person reporting. HR departments cannot, generally, be trusted to police themselves if you can't go to them or above them, the only other option is the labor relations board. So much of the time, marginalized employees will either suck it up and endure the abuse, or quietly leave to keep their reputation intact.

So if anything, I see the discrepancy of 3 official reports and 11 complaints as a weak signal about how seriously HR takes complaints about racism at the company.

> ignore that an exception was made for the single White employee

Let's not ignore that this exception is being positioned as being based on skin color (racist motives), not job role, tenure, exceeding expectations, caregiving responsibilities, or any other plausible reason for an exception. That's a laughable, yet dangerous take. Incredibly inflammatory and accusatory.

Either Coinbase is an incredibly racist and black-unfriendly company, or some people would like you to believe that, and these accusations can all be unravelled to crying wolf, accusing others of downright illegal acts, without even filing a formal complaint to help others not suffer the same fate.

As I have said elsewhere in this thread, these harmless explanations for something that can be perceived as discriminatory are perfectly reasonable when there are only a few isolated incidents. However their believability has an inverse relationship to the number of accusations. When there is a clear pattern of behavior, as their is in this instance, it gets harder and harder to argue it is anything other than discriminatory.

And at a certain point the motive for these decisions doesn't even matter. If an overwhelming majority of Black employees feel they are being discriminated against at work, that is a huge failing for a company whether there is active discrimination happening or not.

It does not work that way (logically). Listing a 100 weak, baseless arguments is a debating tactic to confuse your opponents, not allowing them to address and debunk specifics (and if they still manage: "The lady doth protest too much, methinks"). It also creates the appearance of smoke.

More likely: There is a activist political trend now, that has picked up a lot of steam. In that political view, society is racist, and whites at best profit from this, at worst contribute to this. Anything bad happening to a person of color is then used to accuse the racist system, or even individuals, of a heinous act, to force their hands to adopt your view, or deplatform them and their criticism as an obstacle to growth of your movement, for personal gain, as revenge for inequality, or as a coping mechanism.

Far easier to argue/reason/imagine that, than that Coinbase makes WFH exceptions due to skin color, or that black employee are correctly assessing skills and experience of co-workers and correctly identifying racism on skin color, when passed over for a promotion. And if you don't believe that racism is really a driver at Coinbase, the correct course seems to be to attack these allegations for what its actually doing, not to support it by falling victim to this poor-argument overload and resigning because it is too hard, or too sensitive, or too taboo, to call out this damaging and horrific behavior.

>It does not work that way (logically).

Maybe it doesn't work like that in high school debate clubs, but it works like that in the law. Look up concepts like circumstantial evidence and disparate impact.

We can infer someone is guilty of a crime from a collection of evidence suggesting they are guilty even without direct evidence.

We can also punish someone for discrimination simply for exhibiting a pattern of discrimination regardless of intent to discriminate.

Take it to court then. Collect circumstantial evidence and allow for an objective ruling on discrimination and racism in the workplace. If the circumstantial he-said she-said is of any substance, you can prove your guilt.

Don't do trial by (social) media. Especially when your accusations are incredibly heavy and damaging. Don't play judge when you are not capable of objectively looking at all the presented evidence.

Coinbase presented their side of the story: nothing went to court. No investigation found anything of substance. If the circumstantial evidence was so strong to hold up in court, why didn't it?

For the law, intent is of utmost importance. For (social) media, just "circumstantial evidence" of exhibiting patterns of discrimination is enough to act. It is not enough to act, if you are a decent person.

From the article:

>Ms. Sawyerr said she had talked with four other Black employees about bringing a discrimination lawsuit against Coinbase, but the others backed out after being offered hefty severance payments in exchange for confidentiality agreements.

It never went to court because almost everyone involved was incentivized for it to not end up in court. Going to court is often a difficult, expensive, and likely damaging path to pursue for victims of a variety of crimes. The lack of a court case has nothing to do with the amount of evidence or the truthfulness of the accusations here.

>For the law, intent is of utmost importance. For (social) media, just "circumstantial evidence" of exhibiting patterns of discrimination is enough to act. It is not enough to act, if you are a decent person.

Once again, you are factually wrong with this comment. People can be thrown in jail based purely on an overwhelming amount of circumstantial evidence and companies can be punished for discriminatory behavior even if there is documented proof that there was no intent to discriminate.

> Ms. Sawyerr said ...

Of course she said that. Big bad company silenced her co-suiters with money, after their spy devision learned that she was bringing suit. Now she has no recourse to go court herself, she absolutely needed those four other employees.

> The lack of a court case has nothing to do with the amount of evidence or the truthfulness of the accusations here.

It allows me to disqualify it as hearsay, and it allows you to think they offered severance payments, with the purpose to keep legit actual racism out of the courts.

Intent is of utmost importance for the law. Every lawyer and judge will agree to that. Punishment is increased for bad willful intent.

I give up. Clearly there is no point to this discussion anymore if you are going to dismiss any possible reporting as hearsay if it isn't argued in court. So I will simply leave this from the American Bar Association.[1]

> In contrast, a disparate-impact claim does not require proof of an intention to discriminate. Instead, showing that a facially neutral employment practice has a disproportionately adverse impact on a protected group states a prima facie case of unlawful disparate-impact discrimination.

What do you know, intent isn't needed for a valid case of discrimination.

[1] - https://www.americanbar.org/groups/gpsolo/publications/gp_so...

We can also punish someone for discrimination simply for exhibiting a pattern of discrimination regardless of intent to discriminate.

No. That's totalitarian and evil. If someone is not intending to discriminate, then they are not guilty of anything and should not be "punished". It's not even slightly reasonable to expect every possible way of slicing a group of people to be reflective of the average gender/race data of the overall population because people are different: that's the entire argument for diversity to begin with.

That's the basic position that is alienating so many hundreds of millions of people and convincing them this kind of activism is toxic. It's why Trump won the first time and did much better than predicted the second. It's why this thread is full of people that think the NYT is being manipulative and deceptive. You may not punish people simply for not having enough black/women employees if they haven't actually done anything to discrimate: end of story.

Please respond to the actual comment made, not something you made up. No where did GP suggest that if every way you slice a group based on gender and race data isn't perfect they'll get in trouble.

They stated that discrimination, even if done without intent, is still discrimination. Please respond to that statement.

And how do you define discrimination if intent doesn't matter? If decisions don't matter then the only way to define discrimination is via observed results: if you have no black employees, it must be discrimination, even if nobody ever actually discriminated in an objective way. Which means you'd be punished for not matching some theoretical demographics.

The whole notion is ridiculous. The fact that California takes this stuff so seriously just makes it look like it's throwing away its tech lead, as viewed from afar.

You seem to be acting as this is some new extreme leftist view of discrimination. This comes from Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. You can find all the details and definitions here[1].

[1] - https://www.eeoc.gov/statutes/title-vii-civil-rights-act-196...

Affirmative action has always been a racist hypocrisy. The fact that there have always been leftists campaigning for it is irrelevant, as it's by far more common. America is indeed structurally racist: against whites and (sometimes) Asians. The fact that this has a long history doesn't make recent trends any more acceptable.

No one was talking about affirmative action, but ok.

And you reveal your true motivation when you say something like "America is indeed structurally racist: against whites". No one with any semblance of objectivity would agree with that.

> We can also punish someone for discrimination simply for exhibiting a pattern of discrimination regardless of intent to discriminate.

It is scary, right? "We can also punish" hides behind the "we", unclear if they mean "We, the people, the court system" or "We, the racial justice movement, public opinion". Then what is this "punishment"? A bad article in the NYT? Calling up your network and suppliers with a 100 people (with too much time and too much anger) to cancel you for being racist? Jail time or a fine for illegal activity?

They are power hungry, totalitarian, and evil. Other comments talk of "subconscious racism" or "white privilege". This comment demands responsibility for outcomes they perceive as unjust, where it is very unjust to demand demographic parity, when it is not possible to attain that, without severely dropping in quality (there are not enough Black people in tech to fill those positions with talent). So they demand you pay/invest to increase Black people in tech. But if too vocal or direct about it, they accuse you of "stating in general that Black people are less capable" as if reasoning from racist motives. So don't look to closely at the reason for not being able to hire as much Black people as society, activist, or the board wants you to.

This activism is a very strong and dangerous and toxic meme. It leads to Qanon levels of delusion, accusing criticism of racism, so it can't be attacked. Where Qanons see the deepstate and pedophiles when looking at government or big business, these activists see a racist society and neo-Nazi's when looking at government or big business. You can't change their minds. They've been in Whatsapp groups for years, pointing out targets for collective actions, and finding counters to often used criticism. It's why no activist would use the word "Identity Politics" even though that's the animal's name (evil Neo-Nazis use that term to attack our efforts!).

So that's why you hear: reverse racism is impossible! Racism has to do with power, and whites have all the power! When nearly every white person can recount cases of being discriminated against, and how terrible it made them feel. Accused of cultural appropriation for liking rap music. Challenged by Black men for having a Black girlfriend. Chosen as victim of robbery, because perceived weak and rich. Accused of getting your promotion, not due to hard work, but because your white old boys network favored your dumb white ass over a Black deserving queen.

If this NYT article was about over-representation of not white Libertarian crypto bros, but of over-representation of Jewish people in positions of power, you'd hear a different tune. Even suggesting that clear fact labels you as anti-Semitic. Apparently white people don't have enough shared culture, shared activism, to make racist anti-male anti-white anti-autist hit pieces like this controversial, even though we supposedly run the world, actively suppress entire races and genders, and create non-inclusive companies out of principle.

Babysitting employees is not really a function of the employers. If people wish to leave it's their choice

Yep, who cares that racism and sexism can go on and create a disproportionately hostile environment for just some people right! "I don't see anything bad happening to me, so everyone shouldn't care either!"

Thankfully even if the world doesn't act that way, the majority (for now) aren't evil enough to also blatantly proclaim that this is also fine.

> I don't see anything bad happening to me, so everyone shouldn't care either!

What about:

> people's rights to have consensual interactions and relationships with each other are more important than their right to be treated "fairly" whatever that actually means.

The important point here is that we don't have a good working definition of "fair" that is universally agreed upon. The only ethical way to live in a society of people who fundamentally disagree is by optimising for consent.

As much as it's uncomfortable to define fair, I'd argue that it behooves us to strain and come to a conclusion. Every societal problem today and in history can probably be attributed to people not wanting to define a global fair, or defining it in a way (at least in retrospect) that was ostensibly below the mark. I'm sure that at some points in the US history thought it's fair to treat some people as slaves, so does your proclaimed universal sentence stand there too?

While we're straining, the more important question is to what degree is it ethical to impose your definition of fair on others. I would say that there is no ethical basis for the sort of extreme imposition that's currently the status quo. Slavery is clearly not a consensual relationship so it really doesn't apply here. Yes we should make everyone free. No we should not change the definition.

That presumes your view of fair will ultimately end up on the right side of history, just like the eventual abolition of slavery was. However that is not yet knowable at the present.

While you are focused on how your political view is the “right one”, @thegrimmest is more focused on how people should coexist when they all hold strong-but-different ideas of what is fair, and which of those will ultimately go down in history as ”moral progress” is yet unknown.

> Babysitting employees is not really a function of the employers.

If an employee was sexually harassing female employees, should the company do something or should it not babysit employees?

The company should not babysit the employees, and should call the police.

Glad you agree.

Why do you I think I agree with you?

So the company should just call the Police and wash their hands or be responsible and have an appropriate sexual harassment policy, train their employees on how to identify and deal with sexual harassment, have a clear procedure on how to file and deal with complaints.

Maybe you will call such things "babysitting", I say its being responsible.

>Why do you I think I agree with you?

"should the company do something or should it not babysit employees?"

The company is doing something by not babysitting the employees. Not baby sitting the employees is the only correct option here.

>So the company should just call the Police and wash their hands

Yes they should call the police, and it's not "washing their hands". Sexual harassment is a criminal offence. Your employer shouldn't be "handling" that like they shouldn't be "handling" rape.

>have an appropriate sexual harassment policy, train their employees on how to identify and deal with sexual harassment, have a clear procedure on how to file and deal with complaints.

The policy is the law. Adults shouldn't have their employer telling them that sexual harassment is a no no.

>Maybe you will call such things "babysitting", I say its being responsible.

The responsible thing is to involve the authorities when one of your employees is committing a crime. Simple as that.

> Not baby sitting the employees is the only correct option here.

No its not. If you ever work in big companies you will know that.

> Adults shouldn't have their employer telling them that sexual harassment is a no no.

Yes they do,

Assuming you are a male, you might be unknowingly harrasing female employees just by having a boys will be boys attitude. So an employer has to give you training and explain you why its wrong.

Some people use throwaway accounts to harass other employees on social media, if your employer gave you the training you would have learnt that is wrong.

> The policy is the law.

Exactly, now you get it, the company may get into legal trouble if they dont have an official policy or they make it super difficult to report complaints.

> The responsible thing is to involve the authorities when one of your employees is committing a crime. Simple as that.

No its not simple as that, just telling the victim to go to authorities is just washing your hands, a responsible company also makes sure that victims can file a complaint with the management. Not all victims want to file a police complaint, that does not mean they the abuser should get away with harassment. The company should still investigate and fire the abuser and then file a complaint with the victim's permission.

These are some of the aspects which you will understand if you been through some training.

>No its not. If you ever work in big companies you will know that.

This is the logical fallacy "appeal to the majority". Just because most companies do something doesn't necessarily mean it's moral, required, logically correct, etc.

>Assuming you are a male, you might be unknowingly harrasing female employees just by having a boys will be boys attitude.

"Boys will be boys" is not the legal definition of sexual harassment, so no.

>So an employer has to give you training and explain you why its wrong.

They do that to cover their ass from "hostile work environment" legal suits. This is not baby sitting.

>Some people use throwaway accounts to harass other employees on social media, if your employer gave you the training you would have learnt that is wrong.

There's nothing a company can do in that instance, no one would even know if it is company related. If the harassment veers off into criminal territory, then police should be called.

>Exactly, now you get it, the company may get into legal trouble if they dont have an official policy or they make it super difficult to report complaints.

Apparently you still don't get it. Companies shouldn't babysit employees if they're committing such crimes. Employers shouldn't be babysitting employees when it comes to crimes such as sexual harassment, rape, etc. These should be directed to the police. QED.

>No its not simple as that, just telling the victim to go to authorities is just washing your hands

It's by definition not "washing their hands" because these crimes are not something the company should be babysitting employees over.

>a responsible company also makes sure that victims can file a complaint with the management.

No responsible company would make or direct a victim to "file an internal complaint" if they are victims of a crime. That is by definition irresponsible.

>Not all victims want to file a police complaint, that does not mean they the abuser should get away with harassment.

That's on them. If you're being victimized, reporting the crime should be the only legal recourse. Companies are not in the business of handling justice, period.

>The company should still investigate and fire the abuser and then file a complaint with the victim's permission.

The last thing we need are companies replacing the role that police, laws, the judicial system, etc. provide.

If an employee is being victimized, the employer should 100% work with authorities to ensure justice is met.

>These are some of the aspects which you will understand if you been through some training.

I understand companies not wanting workspaces to be unfriendly, but "unfriendly" isn't illegal. Period.

> That's on them.

Apparently you still don't get it.

>Apparently you still don't get it.

I do. Stop projecting about "not getting it".

I fully explained the position, and why your original example falls through.

QED.

No you dont get it, its not a projection. Some people dont want to deal with police complaint. If you dont understand that you will never get it.

>No you dont get it, its not a projection.

It's IMAX-level projection.

>Some people dont want to deal with police complaint.

And if they don't want to, it's not the companies place to babysit and play judge and jury.

>If you dont understand that you will never get it.

If you don't understand that it's not the company's place to play the judicial branch (and may be illegal for them to), then you'll never get it.

It is by definition the wrong thing to do.

QED.

> it's not the companies place to babysit and play judge and jury.

yes it, why do you support people who abuse, why should they still be kept in the company if the evidence is credible?

So does it mean now you understood why some people dont want file a police complaint?

>yes it, why do you support people who abuse

I don't, and neither should the company, which is why they should call the police.

>why should they still be kept in the company if the evidence is credible?

Company is free to fire criminals if they want, no issues there. Many don't hire criminals to begin with, since your criminal history is public.

>So does it mean now you understood why some people dont want file a police complaint?

This is non-sense. If you're the victim of a crime, report the crime to the police.

> Company is free to fire criminals if they want

They are not yet criminals though.

> If you're the victim of a crime, report the crime to the police.

and you still dont get it.

> I don't, and neither should the company, which is why they should call the police.

Sexual harassment generally is not a crime (though it overlaps with some crimes), and even if there is a crime involved the police and public prosecutor are under no obligation to do anything about it.

The employer, however, is under an enforceable legal obligation to do something about harassment.

> And if they don't want to, it's not the companies place to babysit and play judge and jury.

It's absolutely the companies enforceable legal obligation to effectively prevent (including terminating ongoing) sexual harassment even if there is no crime, crime report, or criminal law enforcement action.

Sexual harassment overlaps with a variety of crimes, but it doesn't require a crime, and the employer is civilly liable for it no matter if the individual causing the problem has committed or been investigated for a crime or not.

So the company should fire someone that hasn't been found guilty, simply based on one person's complaint?

Where did "innocent until proven guilty" go?

> So the company should fire someone that hasn't been found guilty, simply based on one person's complaint?

No, the company should investigate and have evidence, one way or the other, beyond just the complaint before any kind of final action, though there are some interim precautionary mitigations that are might be appropriate, often.

> Where did "innocent until proven guilty" go?

“Innocent until proven guilty” is a maxim of criminal law; a company treating potential harassers as if the company were either the state enforcing criminal law or, worse, as if it could act only following the state enforcing criminal law will eventually find itself in quite deep civil liability for harassment.

> No, the company should investigate and have evidence, one way or the other, beyond just the complaint before any kind of final action, though there are some interim precautionary mitigations that are might be appropriate, often.

No, the company isn't equipped for this and this is the role of the police and judicial system.

> “Innocent until proven guilty” is a maxim of criminal law; a company treating potential harassers as if the company were either the state enforcing criminal law or, worse, as if it could act only following the state enforcing criminal law will eventually find itself in quite deep civil liability for harassment.

That's why the company isn't enforcing anything and delegating the task to the competent authorities. In this case the police.

Many people have been victim of wrongful firing and huge damages to their personal life due to rash decisions being taken by companies based on a single complaint from someone.

> No, the company isn't equipped for this and this is the role of the police and judicial system.

It's literally not; sexual harassment is a civil, not criminal, offense. The police have no concern with it at all, except that some sexual harassment is also a crime (e.g., rape, solicitation of prostitution, etc.)

But employers have legal liability for sexual harassment, which only gets more severe as it continues and they fail to act, whether or not there is a crime involved.

They cannot delegate this responsibility to the police.

> It's literally not; sexual harassment is a civil, not criminal, offense.

That's why I included the judicial system.

> But employers have legal liability for sexual harassment, which only gets more severe as it continues and they fail to act, whether or not there is a crime involved.

It happening is required to be based on a suite or investigation. Again, a company isn't equipped to proceed with such an investigation on it's own.

> The company should not babysit the employees, and should call the police.

Sexual harassment is not a crime, it's a workplace tort (and always a tort by the employer, regardless of who the active harasser is.) It's true that some acts which would also potentially make the employer liable for sexual harassment are also crimes, but it's also worth noting that, even where an act creating potential harassment liability is also a crime, that (1) the burden of proof in a criminal case is higher than for a civil tort, so there is no guarantee, even with the same evidence and the same jury that a criminal conviction would be rendered when there would be harassment liability, (2) the police and public prosecutor have no obligation to take action even if there is a crime, whereas the company does have an enforceable legal obligation to take effective action to prevent harassment, (3) even if the police take action and the prosecutor files charge, and a conviction eventually results, criminal process takes time during which the accused may be free, and, in the absence of effective action by the employer, continue harassing and increasing the employers harassment liability.

Does there exist a thing called "effective management" or not? Do you just give a free pass to all companies for all actions? Is there any evidence that can exist that supports bad management, given that complaining isn't evidence, leaving is not evidence, calling it out isn't evidence sufficient for you? If Paul Graham called it bad management would that suffice?

> The article says "roughly three-quarters of the Black employees" left the company over a 6 month span due to feelings of being discriminated against. That isn't an accusation. It is a fact.

I am not comfortable with promoting the framing of the article to an automatically established fact. The only solid fact here is people leaving and the inferred reason is racial discrimination. I am not saying this inference is likely to be wrong or not, but that it is nonetheless an inference and not a fact. The article also doesn't let the reader know how those numbers compare to the baseline attrition of the company, i.e. what percentage of the other demographic groups have left in the same time period, which tends to be pretty high in the startup scene. Racial discrimination at workplace being pretty seriously illegal in the US these employees would have a strong recourse against it and NYT can not possibly provide a superior standard of factuality for those accusations.

> I am not comfortable with promoting the framing of the article to an automatically established fact.

It is a fact claim that has yet to be disputed on the record by anyone who is in position to dispute it. All media outlets have their biases, but the most prominent ones tend not to make up easily refuted lies. In the claim you are referencing, they say three quarters of the black employees left over a six month period. If that's a lie, Coinbase can simply say so. But they probably won't because it is probably true.

The reasons why are more up to interpretation. Probably no way to get a firm answer on this since many of these people have signed NDAs or otherwise won't talk on the record. But I don't think it's reasonable to claim, without evidence, that the NYT is lying about the proportion of black employees that left over the given time period.

No one is disputing the act of people departing. OP tries to smuggle in the reason of departing together with the act of it as a fact and that is a problem.

Fact space is infinite, which ones we choose to surface and which ones we leave behind is called framing. Technical name for making the audience believe that relevant facts are not relevant and saliencing irrelevant ones as relevant is called bullshitting (For further reading see the essay “On Bullshit” by Harry Frankfurt) and bullshits are much harder to weed out than factual inaccuracies in themselves.

NYT, like any major publication, is not leveling outright falsehoods, but they are finessing around bullshitting. We don’t know, because we depend on them or likes of them to make sense of the events and surface the most relevant information in the first place. Like I said, I personally find it concerning that there is no mention of the baseline attrition rate in a high churn SF labor market, that there is no mention of the lack of serious legal action despite serious discrimination allegations, that there is no distinguishing between discrimination, feelings of discrimination and the types of discrimination; we don’t know if propensity for political activism is confounding the reason for those employee’s departures. Coinbase is explicitly discriminating against political activisim that they don’t deem relevant to their mission, rightly or wrongly not only it is not illegal, it is their right to exercise if they believe it would serve their company or customers better. It feels like NYT wants to penalize this act of “rebellion” by clumping all of these together, emphasize the racial angle and produce an aura of wrongdoing by that adjacency. There might as well be wrongdoing, but in that case courts are the machinery equipped to extract the relevant facts and bring justice to it. Not for-profit publications with very complex power relations and a core competency of shaping narratives. To give an obvious example, NYT the prominent media outlet once also played a role in manufacturing the public consent for Iraq invasion by surfacing such “questions”, “suspicions” while burying relevant facts. It would be naive to buy their narrative wholesale (or any single outlets narrative for that matter).

They could respond to the specific points raised in the article. An “independent” investigation setup, run, and reviewed only by the alleged perpetrator isn’t exactly definitive - especially if you see the points in the article where they acknowledge the complaints are valid (note the non-denial about the only white person in the compliance group getting an offer which wasn’t extended to anyone else) and think about how a “cull through our historical data” might not yield the full story if, as described, not everyone had formal reports included in that data because they were not informed or discouraged from doing so. “Unsubstantiated” only means they couldn’t prove it, not that it didn’t happen or even that all of the possible evidence was fully disclosed.

"Proving innocence" is as tone deaf as their autistic CEO

(who in the article is quoted himself as saying his behavior is because he's on the spectrum.)

Brian Armstrong shut himself in because he doesn't want to deal with it. He doesn't know how to deal with it. All of Coinbase's actions are guided by the consequences, for example, they never needed to address their flash crash because they just needed to placate customers while they were closing a 9 figure funding round announced a few weeks later. They aren't worried about precedent, they are worried about keeping the ship afloat long enough to sell shares to Robinhood traders. This strategy works.

They can also create an inclusive environment that allows them to address underserved markets more accurately. They didn't.

The people I know who are or have children on the spectrum would take issue with your opening sentence. Armstrong might find that a convenient excuse but it shouldn’t erase all of the effort most people put into being considerate.

It was only about the excuse the CEO made, not about anyone else.

Direct all of that energy at him for the representation he is making about people on the spectrum.

If he wants to lean on that as a crutch on all of his organizational decision making skills, then we absolutely get to call him out on that all the time until he does something different.

If you've never done this sort of thing before: there's a huge market for these "external consultants". Their unstated job (and reputations) are as whitewashing firms. You hire them to ensure there is "no evidence" of anything done wrong. The primary purpose is to create a credible defense in lawsuits but PR purposes are also common. Firms that find problems suddenly see their business dry up because most companies don't want this kind of honest evaluation (it just creates a problem and potentially exposes you to liability).

Without access to information about the firm doing the work, the report, or the underlying data it is impossible to know if a real investigation was done or not.

To repeat the grandparent, what else can they do?

Many of the "issues" bought up in this article aren't even problematic. It says John Russ left because Armstrong took public stance that he wanted Coinbase to focus on crypto space stuff.

Coinbase's stance there is fair, reasonable and moral. It is desirable that some companies just do what it says on the tin. If Russ had a reason for quitting that was race-related then the NYT didn't uncover it.

They can do nothing, once someone calls you 'racist' you're racist for good.

I don't know the details of the story, but the thing is with baseless accusations of racism is that it's a perfect slander, one can never prove innocence once proclaimed guilty.

What are you trying to say? over 16 people are just lieing! Whatever dude, you're privilege to not have to face the bs. Then why don't you go get the details before you start talking smack

> Armstrong took public stance that he wanted Coinbase to focus on crypto space stuff.

I don't think that he would have taken that public stance if he didn't feel that the company was being distracted internally by racial justice issues. It being a fair response is highly dependent on those internal conversations.

And the NY Times reports that prior to this conversation there was a public meeting where Black employees brought up difficult experiences at Coinbase. Being told that people should leave politics at home or leave the company is a horrible response to complaints about discrimination.

Well, I don't know what is going on in Coinbase. But the NYT has in the past overplayed the race card with no evidence.

Now I'm happy to agree that the retention rate of black people at Coinbase raises some questions. But the NYT, having asked those questions, came up with no particular evidence of racism.

The major piece of evidence that these issues are substantially due to race is that the NYT felt it warranted a hit piece. That is weak evidence. Being passed over for promotion and feeling unappreciated - which they lead with - isn't evidence. Most of us have been passed over for promotion plenty of times. Most people are unappreciated too.

On the contrary, they came up with several examples of biased behavior, including an instance where the Black members of a team were required to relocate while a non-Black member wasn't, an instance where a Black team member was subjected to to insults about drug dealing and guns from their manager, recruiting team member claims that Black candidates were less capable, the fact that Coinbase employs Black workers at less than half the average of the industry, and the fact that Black workers were dismissed in meetings, to the point where a pattern of repeated HR complaints occurred.

Starting with the assumption that they are racist, that is the tip of a nasty iceburg.

Starting with the assumption it is a pretty normal company, that is a list mostly of stuff that nobody should care about.

If someone can articulate what the HR complaints are about then that might be evidence. But complaints to HR are expected - that is why HR gets hired. They are there to deal with HR complaints. And read resumes.

> including an instance where the Black members of a team were required to relocate while a non-Black member wasn't

This one is stupid. Am I meant to believe they are revealing their racist ways by hiring black people then asking them to relocate, racistly? This is bog standard sucks-to-work-in-support activity. Miserable working conditions, but nothing to do with skin colour. A similar thing happened to my father back in the day. He certainly wasn't black.

Racism is endemic in the US. It was founded with the notion that black people were basically livestock. We've slowly and fitfully moved away from that, but the problem is far from over. With any company we should assume that both personal and systemic bias are present. Which is why well-run companies work to counter that.

> Racism is endemic in the US. It was founded with the notion that black people were basically livestock.

The existence of slavery in the past isn’t driving the current race issues in the US so much as fallout from much more recent segregation policies. Nobody alive today was a (or was born to) a slave and the majority of the states that make up the United States were not even part of the country during the civil war.

To claim racism is endemic now because of slavery is lazy. Racism is endemic because segregation didn’t end until approximately the same time as TCP/IP was being invented!

But how, in a democracy founded on the notion of equality, did segregation become a policy? How did the people who passed those laws get it into their heads that it would be a useful thing to do?

A democracy founded on the notion that all white male property owners were equal and slavery was acceptable? Some fancy words in a fancy document doesn't override the actual reality of who was considered equal or not.

I agree plenty of history happened in between, but your notion that they're unrelated is absurd. Nobody today learned English from Alexander Hamilton, but nonetheless we not only understand the Federalist Papers just fine, we live by many of the ideas he expressed. Culture is handed down.

If you'd like to better understand that, I'd suggest you read Kendi's "Stamped from the Beginning", who gives an intellectual history of America's racist ideas. I also think you're mistaken to lay the current troubles at the feet of formal segregation policies, which were only active in one part on the US. Maybe go read "Sundown Towns", which shows that all across America we had towns with de-facto segregation without formal policies. And it takes only a glance at modern maps showing race to see we haven't solved the problem.

> so much as fallout from much more recent segregation policies.

The existence of slavery and the view that Black people could be treated as livestock are why we had segregation policies.

The existence of slavery fueled white anger towards the idea that the "livestock" were suddenly being allowed to go to the same places and use the same services as white people. The generations of people who owned slaves raised the generations of people that enforced segregation, and those generations raised the people today who enforce racial discrimination and oppose racial justice.

And like you said, this isn't far-back history, segregation in the US was recent. People have this flowery view that racism just went away and that slavery just suddenly stopped mattering. But the effects are still very much with us today. A few generations isn't enough to eliminate a culturally pervasive, harmful ideology.

Agreed, with one caveat. It isn't "people" who think that racism just went away. It's white people.

Right, good catch.

It's important to keep in mind that Black communities (and a lot of other marginalized communities) as a group don't really have these debates as much, because it's completely obvious to them that they aren't being treated equally.

>>they came up with several examples of biased behavior,

In none of those examples is there proof of racial bias.

I'm not sure what you're looking for here. Are you saying that it is untrue that there are Black employees who feel that racial issues are being handled poorly at Coinbase? Because that's what the article says. It sounds like you're looking for enough information to make a judgement of whether the company is racist, in an innocent until proven guilty sort of way. But that is very much not the point.

For starters, they can publish the results of the external investigation they paid for, which is something other companies in similar situations have done. Then we can assess the credibility of that report. This seems pretty basic, so it's surprising to see people asking "what else can Coinbase do?".

That would probably violate privacy. It is unclear to me whether they can do that.

Whose privacy? Coinbase's?! They wouldn't be the first company to publicly publish an internal report (voluntary or not; such documents routinely go public via the justice system).

The employee's. If someone makes a complaint to HR it might easily be illegal to investigate then broadcast it to the world accompanied with a "this employee is full of it" style message. Doing that might, for example, damage that employees prospects of finding employment or reveal specific personal details. Certainly appalling form, probably illegal.

You are, due respect, basically just making this up. Companies publish investigator reports of bias and discrimination somewhat regularly. It's possible that Coinbase contractually can't disclose the reports they've already commissioned --- in which case they probably ought not to have tried to refute the article with them --- but they can certainly commission a new one that they can disclose. It's a 600+ employee company; the cost of the report is a rounding error.

As it stands, the kernel of Coinbase's defense here is "we paid for a secret report and it says we're great". Reasonable people can find that response unpersuasive.

> Companies publish investigator reports of bias and discrimination somewhat regularly.

Are you thinking of a specific example? I don't recall ever seeing this apart from sometimes a short statement on an outcomes (which Coinbase has given us - they found the complaints baseless [0]).

> ...but they can certainly commission a new one that they can disclose.

I did mention law but this isn't fundamentally a legal argument. I was just saying I'd expect there to be a law, given what releasing a detailed report would entail about employee privacy. I'd be ropeable if someone did that to me after I complained to HR and the story got international attention.

Companies have no role at all in airing internal dirty laundry of employees to Hacker News. Coinbase's position is an employee made a baseless claim - in my book it would probably be a very poor precedent for them to start broadcasting details globally. Best case, utterly unfair because of the power imbalance between a company and an individual employee. Worst case, a smear campaign. All cases, unhelpful except for the enjoyment of pundits Hacker News comment threads.

[0] EDIT Rather than replying - "all of whom found no evidence of wrongdoing and concluded the claims were unsubstantiated" https://blog.coinbase.com/upcoming-story-about-coinbase-2012...

Sure, an example would be the Uber Covington & Burling report.

I don't know where this "baseless claim" thing comes from; the only foundation you have for that belief is that Coinbase said so. The point of an external report is not having to take Coinbase's word for it. What's funny is paying for an external report, then not showing it to anybody, or even disclosing who did it, and relying on that external report as evidence.

Here's a reasonable question: is the reason Coinbase won't disclose the external reports they commissioned because they can't, because their investigators won't allow them to, because neither are willing to stake their reputations on the interpretation Coinbase drew from them? If not, how do you know that?

Do you have a link? I searched quickly and you might have been mislead by lazy titling. They released the recommendations of the report - I can find that very quickly [0] - but the actual investigation isn't obvious.

And that was investigating stuff Susan Fowler had already attacked them publicly on. I'm not going to try and look up all the details but it is probably a different set of circumstances.

[0] https://www.uber.com/newsroom/covington-recommendations/ and then https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1s08BdVqCgrUVM4UHBpTGROLXM...

The amount of speculation with regards to this topic among “engineers” and “innovators” is kind of amazing.

The HN community appears to be no more rational or evidence-based finders of fact than those found in the comments section of Fox News or the New York Times.

What hope do we have if the creators and maintainers are prone to the same proclivities as the users?

It’s always amusing to me that people are shocked HN isn’t actually that much smarter than any other internet community. The relative level of pretentiousness though is off the charts

Eh, I think it’s a bit hyperbolic to compare it to the commenters on the aforementioned sites, but yeah I mostly agree. Given the site’s founders and general audience it’s not really shocking though. I still prefer it over say Reddit, mostly because the more focused nature makes it easier to find the actual smart comments.

I agree there is some great content here, and there’s definitely a lot less nonsense compared to reddit. I do think some of the smaller subreddits are just as good as here though

Redaction is commonly used on sensitive, non-germane information - this is not an unsolved problem.

This stance is so ridiculous on it's face that I'm more likely to believe that you're Brian Armstrong than someone else.

> Coinbase's stance there is fair, reasonable and moral

The 60 people who left makes it clear this is not agreed upon. HN has already played out this debate on the original post so I'll save going into it here, but it's disingenuous to say that Russ didn't quit because of race-related policy, whether or not you think the policy is race-related.

That said, putting out that "apolitical stance" in the direct wake of George Floyd/BLM is unavoidably tied. As others have said, timing is key. If they had the policy from day 1, they might have a leg to stand on. It seems likely in context with this article (and frankly, to many before this) that Coinbase's apolitical stance is not a rejection of all politics but a tacit rejection of George Floyd/BLM. No one should be surprised about a diversity problem in such a company.

This "what else can they do?" question stems from a criminal judicial standard of guilt and conviction, but that is not where this discussion exists. To think that Coinbase must be innocent and needs to prove that over many former employees being on the record + clear statistical issues that all align with the narrative the company has set with previous actions shows a central flaw in the tech community's approach to racism and politics.

I realize the question does not direct say that they must be innocent, but the implications and assumptions here are important to note, and certainly lean in that direction.

Are there other non-crypto political stances Coinbase has taken? It seems to me that this was just the first time they needed such a policy. I certainly wouldn't have anticipated the possibility of a new political slogan that almost every major company is forced to chant.

Many companies regularly work within mainstream political action such as LGTBQ+ rights, data privacy, homelessness, local housing or public works, and children's orgs such as Big Brother Big Sister. While these vary in controversiality, relevancy, and apolitical nature, it's not at all uncommon to see companies working in these areas (and others unlisted). Often companies grow into them along with size and profits, so I don't know if Coinbase historically can be taken as sign of consistency either. What Coinbase did was effectively say "well now that BLM has entered mainstream politics and other companies are taking stances, we no longer feel that the mainstream politics of the industry are agreeable to us."

The George Floyd spark very much "outed" Coinbase here, because it became an issue you couldn't avoid taking a side on. That's just the state of the world and you're right that they couldn't have anticipated it, but they chose to make a clear stance rather than trying to ride the thin line, and they became less diverse for it. I don't know why anyone would be surprised their prior actions match that recent stance.

Again, I'm trying to avoid the philosophical "Should companies be political" debate that's already been hashed, but simply stating how their actions translate in the current landscape.

If Wired's reporting is accurate (https://www.wired.com/story/turmoil-black-lives-matter-polit...), Coinbase did try to ride the line, but a bunch of activists demanded for Armstrong to publicly chant the slogan and eventually went on strike until he did.

Then they made their choice - their employees believed their company was not supporting them as people and forced the issue. Coinbase then chose its side. Is there anything more to say?

From those actions alone you can't determine if Coinbase rejected George Floyd/BLM, or rejected all kinds of slogan chanting that the CEO was pressured to chant by strikes.

It was, after all the first time he was pressured that way.

I disagree from my interpretation of what we do know. They could have made the case about that specifically if they wanted to, but they decided to deflect with a blanket policy on politics. To say we can't determine anything is silly - we're making best guess judgements, not trying Coinbase in court for murder.

I've made this comment elsewhere, but I really would love to know why people are digging in so hard here. Let's just call a spade a spade.

> you couldn't avoid taking a side on.

Pretty sure there’s only one “side” anybody’s actually ever taken there.

You can't be saying that the country is completely unified over this issue... what do you mean by this?

Because everyone from the left to the Heritage Foundation condemned the murder.

What most don't condone is burning down buildings and attacking and harassing diners.

BLM is the ultimate motte and bailey.

Do most condone the lack of consequences for the police?

He’s asking specifically about Coinbase. Referencing how “most companies” do things isn’t relevant to his question.

And can you explain to me why one is absolutely required to publicly vocalize their stance on the George Floyd issue? How is not wanting to speak on the topic in the workplace equivalent to being racist?

Seems like an application of the "white silence is violence" principle.

Vox (among others) wrote a piece on it: https://www.vox.com/2020/6/3/21278245/antiracist-racism-race...

Can this principle be universally applied?

I'm not sure. I think it probably applies in personal life. But is there an imperative to 1) bring it into the workplace, and 2) to fall in line with any specific group and their chosen preferred language/actions?

I'm equivocal on both of these.

In the case of (1), why should the act of fighting injustice pause by some notion of decorum at work? Where should our priorities and values lie?

In the case of (2), many people have good reasons to find the prevailing leftist/progressive rhetoric distasteful. But right now the groups who espouse that rhetoric are also the most active and most effective groups taking action right now. If you aren't with them, who exactly are you with? Or so the rhetoric might go.

If (1) is true, shouldn't companies have the right to fire you due to political reasons / disagreement?

That's a good question. I don't have a good answer.

>The George Floyd spark very much "outed" Coinbase here, because it became an issue you couldn't avoid taking a side on.

You said this so casually. It's an axiomatic truth that everyone has to 'take a stand', implying that you have to call it out, and in a context moreover where not a single person applauded the murder of Floyd. How disingenuous for you to call it a stand, implying that there's a debate. Instead what you mean is, sign up to a calling out of the police. What betrays the problem at hand, why companies cannot feasibly all be political by nature, is that there a zillion possible social causes that one could rationally argue are impossible to call out, from shootings domestically (1100 in my city this year so far), to corporate malfeasance (sweat shops overseas, finance fraud), to foreign policy (bombings of middle eastern countries).

If you and I worked together and you stood up and demanded everyone call out the Floyd thing, outed as you call it, you and I would be debating the above points in front of everyone.

THAT is why companies should allow for an apolitical space.

> The 60 people who left makes it clear this is not agreed upon.

Did all 60 people leave because of Coinbase's political stance, or did some leave because of the generous severance package of 4-6 months pay that the CEO offered in September?

I know that if I were looking to make a life change, I'd seriously consider that offer even if I liked the politics.

We can only speculate on the numbers, but it can always be a both/and situation. This culture/environment itself can be part of the reason for wanting that life change.

But forget number speculation, we have concrete proof of this in the article:

> another employee who left in October was John Russ, the head of marketing and the company’s highest ranking Black employee, who had been hired three months earlier.

> In a brief phone interview, Mr. Russ would only say that he disagreed with Mr. Armstrong’s new position and left as a result.

> We can only speculate on the numbers,

We can, but we can only do this because people in the comments are independently informed. The NYT repeatedly emphasized 60 people leaving (across two articles) but never mentioned the severance.

Can anecdotally list 5 people who opportunistically took the package and were planning to make moves anyhow

We are in dynamic world and businesses need to stay away from politics and focus on its core value. Someone leaving has nothing to do with racism. We live in a time where few people and the media are manipulating the rest.

Note that I am Black too.

When penguin employees are having a cry about a guy that published a book with all the life advice a good father would give, I'm really not surprised there's people out there shoving their hands out looking for or concessions not granted to anyone else.

It's a uniquely American thing that the academic grifters with nothing better to do are desperately trying to import here as well.

> Coinbase's stance there is fair, reasonable and moral

this is a self-evident conclusion being hawked as a premise, and the rest of the comment doesn't do much to mold this premise into an argument

> If Russ had a reason for quitting that was race-related then the NYT didn't uncover it.

There's an unfalsifiability in this rhetoric, because someone leaving for race-related reasons in an industry that either: a) has "subtle racists" b) is funded by "subtle racists" c) functionally aids and/or abets "subtle racists" through inaction

would be incentivized to not specify these things, as these industries (finance and crypto) optimize for relationships almost as much (if not ==) to the amount they optimize for merit. And that's not even getting into clauses baked into employment termination contracts. So you have a scenario where you can't actually "prove" race was a primary motivator for quitting because: a) if it were a "subtle racist" co-worker, they're probably using euphemism a2) if they're a "not subtle racist" co-worker, it would embarrass the employer for keeping that person on the book swhen the reputational cost exceeds the cost of sourcing and hiring someone who's not a not subtle racist" b) If the person wants to work in tech again, relationships will likely be burned as a direct or indirect result of airing out a company's dirty laundry c) Could be sued for violating non-disparagement clauses (prices out anyone who doesn't have the security to burn the bridge between them and a growth industry)

If the point of your comment was to use a number of premises that aren't empirical, and border on dogmatic, then I misunderstood, and apologize for trying to search for rhetoric where it was not intended to be found.

If the purpose of the statements above where to be rhetorical or logical, then we're getting into a place where we're asking for evidence that would be difficult for someone with said evidence to do without them, say, being financially and occupationally secure enough to burn the bridges between them and: - Coinbase - Coinbase's Investors - Coinbase's Investors' LPs - Coinbase's Investors' companies - Every other company that either doesn't question whether they are less meritocratic than they believe, or doesn't question whether or not they can replace the problematic superstar employees

You took one example and ignored the rest. It’s not like NYT wrote this article simply because Russ left. What about the employees who were asked to be present for photo shoots to show workplace diversity but who felt ignored and talked down to during meetings? That sounds problematic. If it were a couple of employees it’s one thing but when most of your black employees leave because of what they feel is racism in the workplace that’s harder to ignore. It doesn’t necessarily prove there was racism, but it’s certainly a red flag.

> What about the employees who were asked to be present for photo shoots to show workplace diversity but who felt ignored and talked down to during meetings?

That is extremely vague. Is it a red flag? Yes. Does it imply racism? No. It doesn't even guarantee there is a problem or a systemic trend for that matter.

If there are 3 red flags and some actual evidence of racism then that is one thing. But there isn't. Even the number of black people quitting - what is the expected retention rate in that team? Most people quit due to dodgy managers, so people quitting points to a dodgy manager before it points to racism.

How is it not racist to showcase your black employees for appearances and then turn around and condescend them?

You've squeezed a bit into the premise of that question. If, why and how persistently someone was ignored are very relevant questions that we have no facts on. And what the subject of the meeting was.

We know that Alysa Butler felt unappreciated. I'm hesitant to believe the NYT is even representing her opinions fairly. If you read what they've written about carefully, the article doesn't have her accusing Coinbase of any sort of racism, the NYT is just weaving her experience into a story that they construct elsewhere (normal practice in newspapers). A 'diversity problem' is different from racism. 25 year olds being ignored in meetings is not a new phenomenon either in my experience.

And you’re completely ignoring the fact that they are using these employees who they hired for an actual job as props for diversity brochures. Is that really just a “diversity problem”? To use your employees as token figures? Not every racist act has to be consciously malicious. It at the very least implies it, diversity problem honestly just sounds like a euphemism.

> And you’re completely ignoring the fact that they are using these employees who they hired for an actual job as props for diversity brochures.

Yeah, I am completely ignoring that. "My presence in the workplace was excessively celebrated" isn't a complaint. There is nothing there to respond to.

If you want to argue that could technically be racist behaviour I agree, but typically when people talk about racism they are actually going to serious issues like money, power or personal safety. Photos taken for promotional material is not something that needs a defence - it is a frivolous thing to argue about. Any company might do that.

They probably wrote it because Coinbase stood up to BLM activists internally and the NYT is the media arm of BLM. But you get these accusations constantly against companies. "I felt ignored in meetings therefore the firm is sexist and racist". No, that happens to people all the time, including white men. A better explanation is maybe you weren't saying anything worth listening to in meetings, or you feel you were but your manager disagreed.

when most of your black employees leave because of what they feel is racism in the workplace that’s harder to ignore

They weren't ignoring it. Some of these people weren't even saying they felt that way to Coinbase - one of the people who claims she was bullied also claims nobody told her how to make an official complaint and that's why Coinbase have no record of her views. Complaining to HR has to be the easiest task in any modern corporation; if she couldn't figure out how to do even that then we probably found the explanation for why she felt unappreciated: maybe she just sucked. Or maybe she's made up this supposed racism after she left, as part of achieving other ends (like getting in the NYT).

Which all boils down to that old quote: "lies, damned lies, and statistics".

Political parties have pet Think Tanks and Consulting Companies and various other organisations that only exist to massage the existing data into the desired narrative.

Look for the data points that indicate 'normal' and orbit that. When the inevitable questions about X% of the African-American workforce quit within Y time, just point to the stats that say 'normal'. Find some other outlier statistic to point out that random groupings happen, use this to try and dismiss this scenario as a one-off random event; coincidence.

Kids: learn your statistics! You'll be able to cheat your way into at least a couple of promotions throughout your career. (What I actually mean is: learn your statistics so you can spot when you're being cheated).

Imagine if the consultants had in fact found discrimination. Would the company ever report that publicly? Maybe there was or wasn't discrimination, but there is zero reason to conclude based on somebody chosen and paid for by the company.

I think that’s unfair, not all corporations are big bad monoliths trying to crush the little guy. The New York Times article is a hit piece, and main stream media’s continuation of constantly looking to create racial tension.

> If you've never done this sort of thing before: there's a huge market for these "external consultants". Their unstated job (and reputations) are as whitewashing firms.

There are consultancies whose reputations depend on reporting only unvarnished truth to their clients. That way the client can reliably handle and eliminate actual discrimination, and defend themselves against false claims. I'm not sure that a whitewashing firm would be as valuable as all that.

> What else can they do if they are really innocent?

They can choose to ignore the NYT, since during the trump years it's been laid bare that they're a political publication.

This is the same NYT which is widely agreed to have helped elect Trump by aggressively covering a number of stories about Clinton, including an entire series based on the Clinton Cash book written by right-wing activists? Or is your objection that their reporting isn’t politicized in a way which supports your preferred outcome?

It's important that they investigate what is alleged, and fix whatever wrongdoing they find.

If any individual was treated unfairly, that individual can sue under discrimination law, for a private apology and settlement.

But beyond that, it's also important that there be NO public apology or acceptance of the idea that refusing to espouse activist politics makes a company intolerant.

I think it's admirable Coinbase is taking a stand to keep activism out of the workplace.

Treating people fairly is required; tolerating campaigning in a private enterprise is not.

> So external investigators didn't find anything wrong

This feels like a trap that we don't fall into in other areas. This is an external consultant is paid by the company, whos reviews and future job prospects are based on being an attractive hire for other companies accused of racist action. There's obviously a huge conflict of interest there.

At HN we would recognize that conflict of interest if we were talking about binding arbitration. We would recognize that conflict of interest if we were talking about a security consultant that was dismissing security disclosures from 3rd-parties. It's a little disappointing to me to see unequal standards applied here.

The question is, is what the NYT is saying plausible, is there evidence of this going on? And yeah, the story sites specific examples, interviews specific employees, and cites complaints from managers. It seems completely plausible to me.

I don't get why people are suddenly so eager to buy into corporate narratives about structural racism and bias, when they would never buy into those same corporate narratives about issues like privacy and security. Every time an Apple or a Google thread comes up, our comment section is filled with people calling them out as disingenuous; it's filled with people who are willing to read between the lines on their policies and press releases. We have no shortage of people in those threads who are willing to extrapolate or judge those companies based on the past actions of the industry. But when it comes to representation, suddenly all of that goes out the window?

Representation and bigotry even just as general topics are a huge blind spot for HN that we need to get better at talking about. We need to be less dismissive of these claims. We need to take racial discrimination more seriously, because it is a serious problem in tech.

11 of then ~20 Black employees by early 2019* had complained to HR about racism. That's over half! And that's only the people with the fortitude or optimism to talk to HR (HR is notoriously useless at many companies). That's a complete disaster. 15 of that 20 quit! Why wasn't that treated as an emergency?

*At the end the article says at the end of 2019 there's 31 Black employees of 1000. At the beginning of the article about the beginning of 2019 it's about 20 of 600 before 15 Black employees quit.

It was treated as a disaster - they labeled the leavers as “political” and announced they instituted policies to prevent future “political” employees.

According to the article 15 black people left in total between late '18 early '19. It seems that the compliance team makes up the major part of the departures (up to 8 quit, depends how you read it). From the article this could be attributed to coinbase opening an office in portland and employees declined to move.

The headline also mentions that black people were fired, but never follows up on it.

> Why wasn't that treated as an emergency?

Companies can be incredibly callous about retention issues, especially if fixing them involves noticing which managers are responsible for behaving badly towards their staff.

Especially when the solution to these issues is also a retention issue as you likely have to fire other people for their behavior.

> retention issues

Well we allow those companies to continue to dismiss their interactions with most of the people in the company as "retention issues," so I think I can spot an actual cause here. Roll in typical treatment of customers as barriers to profit and we have a theme starting.

Or if the real problem is at the top.

"Callous" would mean it's about you, but think about it from the viewpoint of the company. If the aggrieved employee leaves, the problem is solved.

Hiring and onboarding costs money. Having people quit costs money in replacing them. Allowing managers to drive them out and incur the cost of replacement is basically allowing them to light money on fire for their entertainment.

Not from the POV of the company, but from the individual actors within it, is the problem solved. Principal-agent dilemma, innit.

Only if the issue is with that individual employee. In this case, that obviously isn’t the case. Ignoring a systemic problem in your company solves nothing.

Don't know if that's true. The big goal is to avoid federal lawsuits and other scandals. If the can can be kicked down the road for a few more years, fine! Uber only blew up because Susan Fowler was better connected than most, and you'd like to know how much the scandal affected the company. Uber is fine, Kalanick is fine, a few HR drones lost their jobs, business as usual.

Highly paid people are a pain to hire for and replace.

If all of a sudden your turnover spikes that's a lot of sudden unexpected cost, which is very bad.

Diversity in team pays off, you are missing if you don’t have a diverse team. It’s not a charity anymore it’s more of a science in getting quality output from your team.

The cynical view is that you can either kick out your racists or those who complains about racists. And given how "diverse" tech is I wouldn't be surprised if the company would have a bigger problem if the racists left instead of the black people.

No, the cynical view is that the people in charge are racist.

Tech is incredibly diverse.. The racial representation in tech is roughly proportional to the racial representation in Computer Science. i.e. it's not racism that is keeping black Americans out of tech, and suggesting otherwise with zero evidence beyond the observed racial disparity is extremely irresponsible.

It’s not. It isn’t. And why do you think the racial diversity in Comp Sci doesn’t match that of America? Or even that of the general college population?

The same reasons that are always ignored or considered sinful by progressives. Some people are more interested than others, just the same way that nursing and numerous other non-diverse fields that you mysteriously aren't concerned about have people driven to them in numbers that don't match the population.

It is. A huge number of visible minorities are in tech.

>And why do you think the racial diversity in Comp Sci doesn’t match that of America?

That's a different subject, and nothing to do with whether tech is racist.

You can only claim tech isn't diverse if you ignore the massive overrepresentation of asians. Going off of Google's diversity report (because it's easy to find), non hispanic whites make up 43% of Google but 61% of America. For blacks it's 5% of Google and 12% of America. By those metric we should be pushing Google to hire more white and black employees.

if you look at smaller companies, not Google, tech is incredibly not-diverse. especially when it comes to gender

This needs a name, but when you have a very small minority in a much larger group (women who are software engineers, black people in a white company or guys who work as childcare workers) you can see insane levels of hated against members of that group, even if most of the larger group goes out of their way to be friendly with the minority, because even a very small percent of the larger group that hates the minority can still be numerically larger than the entire group. Not to mention that one bad manager can cause trouble for numerous employees.

Wow.

I find this hard to imagine without someone getting reprimanded. Not disbelieving the person's quote, but not accepting it as fact either. Seems like it would be easy to get corroborating witnesses for a situation that inappropriate.

The only group I've seen it be permissible to make stereotyped observations about in the last decade in an SF tech office is european/indian/chinese workers. FWIW I don't think that's okay either; we should be striving to make an inclusive workspace for everyone.

A lot of people traffic in blatant stereotypes in the guise of some kind of positive statement, which makes reprimands less likely. I once had a speaker tell us - in a diversity seminar! - about specific racial groups he thinks are too timid to speak up for themselves.

Our execs have short text guides on how to work best with them and everyone on my team has been encouraged to share similar. The default assumption is everyone should be working together to accommodate on how we can all work best together.

I've been in environments where certain communications styles are labeled more correct or ideal. So I've really loved this guidebook + accommodation approach.

I went into this article with an open mind about there possibly being toxicity I haven't witnessed w/i the company. But tbh the evidence comes up short and just doesn't match with what I've seen. I have interviewed at companies where some level of toxicity was easy to pick up on during the onsite (eg Uber during peak growth years).

My fear is that this article might scare away diverse folks from Coinbase, and possibly even crypto at large given some of the descriptions about the industry at the end. CB is a really great company for any curious nerd to join. I'd also say the Ethereum community and associated startups+labs are especially welcoming and friendly.

>CB is a really great company for any curious nerd to join.

Not if they're black or brown, apparently. I have no idea how you could say this is a 'great' company after reading this article. Like my mind is actually blown.

I work on a diverse team at CB that has engagement scores through the roof. And you don't need to know the survey data to know that; just join us for lunch. We're curious, we care about each other, and we care about the mission.

The NYTimes is like the Daily Prophet for muggles. Don't over-index on a hit piece.

You mention diversity. Do any black folks work on your team? Do you think it’s possible that black engineers are treated well and black CX are treated poorly?

On my direct team nope. I can imagine folks being treated differently in Eng vs CX at other companies, and have seen that. I have trouble imagining that at CB, but anything's possible.

CB stands out in my career for the number of good human beings I've gotten to meet and work with. And my read when I see Brian, Emilie, Surojit, and Manish speak at weekly AMAs is they genuinely care about everyone in the company. It's a gut instinct, and so far I have no personal experience or anecdotal from within my circles to the contrary.

My sister used to work in CX (outside of tech) and it was really damaging work for her. It'd be devastating for me to learn our folks are not supported.

> Not if they're black or brown, apparently.

You are wrong, apparently. 4 out of 7 members of the exec team have last names indicating they are people of color. Check yourself: https://www.coinbase.com/about

If the head of product and the head of engineering are brown people, I am very confident that CB is a great place to join for brown nerds since culture flows from the top.

Really missing the forests for the trees, here. It's clear that there are under-represented groups at CoinBase that are routinely discriminated. It is unthinkable to me for HN readers to defend that, but here we are regardless.

Maybe I should have used the term 'under-represented minorities,' because I don't see a single black or latino person (admittedly, this is what I meant as 'brown' since I'm Hispanic).

> It is unthinkable to me for HN readers to defend that

> admittedly, this is what I meant as 'brown'

I mean, if you are going to use 'brown' to exclusively refer to latinos when half the world (or more?) is brown, then obviously you are going to sow confusion on forums like HN with participants across the globe.

I think it’s much less an issue with people who have relocated and spent a few years adapting to us, but to succeed with foreign cultures you have to know how directly they prefer to communicate. Dave Barry tells this story:

(Beth) “… and then we want to take a plane from Point A to Point B.”

(Japanese travel agent) “I see. You want to take a plane?” “Yes.”

“From Point A?” “Yes.”

“To Point B?” “Yes.”

“Ah.” “Can we do that?”

“Perhaps you would prefer to take a train.” “No, we would prefer to take a plane.”

“Ah-hah. You would prefer to take a plane?” “Yes. A plane.”

“I see. From Point A?”

This mystified his wife but apparently between Japanese this is virtually screaming “THERE IS NO PLANE, YOU ZITBRAIN!”

Yeah, for working with non-American employees this kind of training would make a lot of sense. This guy in particular was talking about American Latinas, though.

Being timid is strongly connected to your upbringing, your upbringing is strongly connected to culture and culture is strongly connected to race.

Sure, saying "X are too timid" is a stereotype, but pointing out at a diversity seminar that you should be extra observant around X because they tend to not speak up for themselves is just good advice. Many cultures value being quiet and doing your job a lot more than others, and those values get passed down by parents for at least a few generations after immigrating. If that group doesn't have a good support structure (no BLM equivalent), that only adds to the fear of speaking out.

If you're a manager that gets many complaints from group Y but very few from group X, knowing that might lead you to do some more investigating and discover group X is being treated even worse, they're just not reporting it. Using a heuristing to optimise your search given imperfect information, if you will.

> culture is strongly connected to race.

In another context this statement would be seen as overtly racist.

See, that's the kind of thing I've never understood - how could it not be connected? Race has been historically mostly a geographic thing. You'd see Asian people in Asia, African people in Africa, etc. Anyone else had to have immigrated, or is the child of an immigrant however many generations ago. Culture is also very geographic. Immigrants tend to bring their culture with them (which is a good thing!) and parents usually want to raise their children at least partially in their culture.

So what am I missing?

Eh, I'm not sure what point I was trying to make, and to be clear I don't think your comment was racist.

Culture is obviously correlated with race in some respects. It's when you start talking about the reason behind some of those correlations that you risk (rightly or wrongly) being called a racist.

> The only group I've seen it be permissible to make stereotyped observations about in the last decade in an SF tech office is european/indian/chinese workers.

As a South Asian minority, this is also my experience. The racism, stereotyping and stigma against South Asians feels more acceptable and totally unrecognized.

People treat you with contempt and ridicule if you complain about being unfairly treated. They hide behind objective processes that give cover to be biased. If process A, B, and C are objective, A+B+C can still yield terrible, biased outcomes. Witnesses and data simply doesn’t matter without empathy and understanding.

So do you believe that all the white employees just laughed about this? Did any of them corroborate the allegations?

I work at a FAANG and a massive percentage of employees are rabidly anti-racist, and wouldn't stand for anything like that. Are coinbase employees just cut from a different cloth?

Absolutely. Look at their CEO statements. They seem to hire very anti-establishment, anti-pc (in their view). It’s easy for a culture to then not hire people who don’t fit that mold.

> I work at a FAANG and a massive percentage of employees are rabidly anti-racist, and wouldn't stand for anything like that.

I get nervous when I make a comment about Zoom being insecure because it's Chinese around Chinese coworkers, and I can at least point to its bad track record on security and how Five Eyes members are treating Huawei.

I'm not sure I fully understand your point, but it might be worth adjusting your language a little bit to account for a quirk of our language(in that Chinese could refer to the nationality, or the government): I assume your problem with Zoom is its association with the CCP, and not just that it is merely Chinese.

Conspiracy theory time: That's not a quirk with our language, there's a deliberate lack of distinction between the country and the people. During the Cold War, you could say "Soviet" instead of "Russian" to clearly demarcate between the nation and the nationality. We don't have a modern equivalent for the PRC, and that's because someone wants it that way. It'd be trivial for a new term to be pushed through media, but it's not being done, even though we clearly need one.

> you could say "Soviet" instead of "Russian" to clearly demarcate between the nation and the nationality.

The demonym for the people who lived in the Soviet Union was “Soviet.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union

Sure, but if you had neighbors who immigrated to the US from Moscow in the late 80s, would you refer to them as "Soviet" or "Russian"?

Jews, who formed such a large part of the emigration from the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s to the USA, often bristle at being called "Russian". Yes, their language is now Russian after Eastern Europe's Jews have shifted away from Yiddish, but they still don't consider themselves Russians. For example, my own mother-in-law is a member of this emigre demographic and insists on being referred to as "a Jew from the Soviet Union".

> During the Cold War, you could say "Soviet" instead of "Russian" to clearly demarcate between the nation and the nationality

That's not what that distinguished. It distinguished whether you were talking about things pertaining to the USSR and those specifically having to do with Russia; the same rough difference as between “American” and “Californian” (or, perhaps a better analogy would be “British” and “English”.)

> We don't have a modern equivalent for the PRC

Mostly because China didn't conquer a bunch of neighbors and create a name for the resulting state distinct from “China”, which remains as the name for the absolutely dominant component.

But, again, while the Soviet/Russian distinction did exist, it did not serve the purpose you describe, and we didn't have any linguistic distinction that did.

You've got a bit to learn about Tibet, HK, Xinjiang ( a muslim region), and soon Taiwan

> You've got a bit to learn about Tibet, HK, Xinjiang ( a muslim region), and soon Taiwan

Or, you've got to read to the end of the sentence:

> Mostly because China didn't conquer a bunch of neighbors and create a name for the resulting state distinct from “China”

That last part matters.

You know China doesn't refer to themselves as China, right? China is Portugese in origin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_China

China definitely refers to themselves as China when speaking English just like the United States refers to itself as 美利坚合众国 or just 美国 when speaking Chinese.

That's a good point: it's specifically CCP involvement, and language doesn't differentiate that well. It doesn't help that the CCP is the only game in town. It's hard not to be involved with the CCP in China.

It seems possible that a much smaller company could have a sizable number of employees who claim to be anti-racist, but fail to behave that way in practice. Particularly one with a concentration of libertarian "crypto bros" who are often at odds with employees who might be described as "rabidly anti-racist".

>less experienced white employees

A job in a competitive industry is probably the first area where a lot of people first see social promotion end as younger more capable people surpass them. This is going to be especially true for people who have received the benefits of affirmative action up until this point in their lives.

Posting a link to Coinbase's peremptory rebuttal seems apropos.

https://blog.coinbase.com/upcoming-story-about-coinbase-2012...

"rebuttal" is giving them way too much credit

It's interesting how spot-on Coinbase's 'prebuttal' was (https://blog.coinbase.com/upcoming-story-about-coinbase-2012...). There's very little in the NYT article that isn't mentioned. The only point of inaccuracy seems to be that the story was published on Friday morning, the day right after the prebuttal, not Sunday as originally suggested. Maybe the prebuttal forced NYT's hand?

The rebuttal said "in print Sunday" and online sometime before.

Oh, you're right, I misread that part.

It's spot-on because the NYT told them ahead of time about the claims they were going to make, in the process of fact-checking those claims and offering Coinbase an opportunity to provide quotes to rebut them in the article, which opportunity Coinbase availed itself of.

A number of details were missing, including,

I've spoken to multiple people employed at tech companies that believe they were 'token' hires, I can summarize their thoughts as thinking the situation was "awful". Biased hiring practices are in quite a few cases hurting the people they aim to help.

It’s an unfortunate consequence of diversity-driven hiring practices. Another is that applicants who would’ve gotten hired on their own merit are prejudged as diversity hires.

The much more important problem is all the people who are legitimately better qualified who are turned down because of their race.

I wouldn't say "more important", but certainly important. I've now spoken to quite a few (very capable) white friends who believe they didn't get the job due to their color - and I couldn't tell them they were wrong. It's definitely creating racial divides.

This doesn’t actually happen in tech. Nobody can hire enough people, and everyone wants minorities.

I think that's one downside of targeting increased diversity. Diverse employees might wonder if they were hired for talent or for their identity.

Along with their co-workers wondering the same thing.

There were plenty of very loud, often repeated warnings about exactly this problem happening but is seems only so much can be done.

This piece paints coinbase as a company with racist tendencies and a hostile place to work for black people. Based on the evidence or lack there of provided the article and after reading coinbase's rebuttal, I must say this NYT piece feels like an attempt to bully coinbase/armstrong into reverting its/his stance on engagement in issues unrelated to coinbase core mission and into submission to the cause.

Would the NYT just go off and... write an ideological hit piece?

Impossible!

This is in the wake of Coinbase decision to be a "mission focused company" and prevent their employees from speaking out about political issues at the workplace. It shows the dangers of being apolitical when saying "Blank employees should feel safe and welcome at their job" is apparently still a political statement.

I don’t see why we need to be debating politics all day in the work place. I can guarantee you my politics (libertarian / capitalist / corporatist / anti-collectivism) will do nothing but enrage you and debates in public chats, lunch, etc. will serve nothing of purpose. Isn’t it better if we save the philosophical debates for beers and the ballot box? I don’t want to hear your soap box and you don’t want to hear mine.

You missed the point of my comment entirely. The issue is how "politics" is defined. I couldn't care less if Coinbase banned people from talking about the estate tax or free trade. However it is a problem when people can't speak up about the discrimination they feel at work.

You are talking about something that is so wrong it warrants a front page NYT expose and results in potentially multi-million dollar lawsuits. I can understand why a company wouldn’t want to promote sessions where everyone accuses the corporation of systemic discrimination.

You can't separate work from politics. The fact that you have a job in the first place is political.

And your “everything is political even the apple you eat” post-modernist schlock is the attitude I want to avoid.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7428870/millions-of-apples-rottin...

But, even the apple you eat, though.

Nothing post modern about it. From the financial system to the rules governing corporate ownership and taxes, they are all political. These these absolutely dominate your day to day life. Even the fact that there is an internet was a political decision (see ARPA then DARPA).

> As many tech leaders publicly voiced support for Black Lives Matter protests, Black employees at Coinbase said on the Slack messaging platform that they were hurt by the silence of Mr. Armstrong and other executives about the matter.

Also seems like lack of making a statement is now a workplace risk according to the tone of the article.

Reading through the comments as black person is depressing.

Many of the comments question whether the accusations are even true or collusive attack because of an unfounded accusation that black people tend to be SJWs (stereotyping). Others blame affirmative-action, bad schools, etc. (classic misdirection). Some even venture into the possibility that a black person complaining about being passed over for promotion might just not be good enough for the job and then just blame discrimination rather than facing the truth (pure gaslighting). Others just go on to attack the New York Times (attacking the messenger). I am waiting for the data science guru to synthesize statistics about how everything is just fine!

I am not going to pretend to be the arbiter of truth here, but can we just take a moment to imagine the possibility that racism (specifically against black Americans) is a problem in America in 2020? Is it such a stretch of the imagination? I mean if we can unquestioningly believe that cryptocurrency is viable currency, we can certainly give the benefit of the doubt to the black workers who have abandoned the company.

Very well said.

People seem to be trying to apply a criminal prosecution level standard for proof/evidence, one that is almost never applied to other companies on non hot button issues or generally on HN. You highlighted the specific hoops people are jumping through well. I hope maybe people can examine why they are so motivated to use this hypocritical double standard to defend this company they have no direct ties with.

Can it not he argued that the recent phenomenon of cancelling / treating those accused of these acts as criminals and trying to ruin their livelihoods, means applying a criminal level of evidence is warranted?

No.

We have played this argument out and I'd love to get over beating this dead horse, here and all over the tech industry. Go look elsewhere in the comments. Fantastical conspiracy webs ("trying to ruin their livelihoods") require according evidence, not refutation. We have a slew of people on the record, and direct response from Coinbase. Not to mention that no one is getting "cancelled" here.

The bigger conversation to be had is that cancel culture doesn't exist as you describe even.

I'm simply tired of this.

Do you want to have that bigger conversation, or are you tired?

Is the assertion that you’re tired expected to lend weight to the version (that cancel culture is a bogus notion) for which you’re evoking (but not presenting) a defense?

No, it's a commentary on how much lifting is expected to be done by each side in a good faith discussion and the imbalance exhibited all over the current discussion. Everyone has the same tools - if you want to understand the perspective you asked for, you can absolutely do that!

Here, I grabbed a link off Google for you with one perspective: https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/2020/07/cancel-cul...

If you prefer less meat but a more known publishing house: https://time.com/5735403/cancel-culture-is-not-real/

If you find that worth discussing, I'd say go ahead and submit it to HN!

> We have played this argument out

I didn't get the memo.

> I'd love to get over beating this dead horse, here and all over the tech industry

Among the people I know closely enough, I see almost no one who has changed their minds ever since these discussions started circa 2015. And I have been in the tech industry for a long time. So keep beating that dead horse, or beat it in a different way.

> Not to mention that no one is getting "cancelled" here.

Some people are trying very hard. NYT article seems like a smear campaign as part of that overall effort.

> cancel culture doesn't exist as you describe even.

In my experience, it does. I personally know many other people for whom it does. Maybe your bubble is very thick? Maybe people are not honest and open with you because you are highly opinionated and based on this comment, not open to an open dialog?

> I'm simply tired of this.

If you keep communicating the same way as in this comment, you will keep getting tired. I don't think cancel culture, SJWs or suppression of uncomfortable viewpoints are going to stop anytime soon, nor the secret revulsion of these trends.

If you go look at my other comments over the thread, how I respond very much varies based on context. I spent energy where I think others will actually benefit.

> Among the people I know closely enough, I see almost no one who has changed their minds ever since these discussions started circa 2015.

You've pointed this out yourself, why in the world would I keep beating the dead horse here? Do you think people haven't tried different ways? Why should I expend that effort to people who are clearly dug in to the other side permanently? I look for good-will first to engage with people who appear to be open in some way, like in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25234798

The thing you're missing here is that the purpose of this type of response is not for you or OP. It's to show that this type of response is not blindly agreed upon or grounded. When its espoused with no response or criticism, it has a meaningful negative effect on marginalized people in this industry. To quote someone else on this top level thread:

> When not enough people speak up, that can send an implicit message that some life-sucking background noise from others is OK with everyone else, when it's not.

If you know zero Black people and work with zero Black people it’s very easy to come to the conclusion that there is no racism against Black people. If there was you’d see it!

This comment is too snarky for my taste but the main thrust of the message is spot on. When I've taken the time to ask black friends and black professionals in my industry about their experience, it's very clear that they deal with an extra level of complications and hardships compared to me.

And it's not "my one black friend was a victim of racism this one time." It's just generally harder to get a job. It's just generally harder to get promoted. It's just generally harder to be taken seriously relative to your white peers.

And that's why these responses from Coinbase are unsatisfying. Every company and every hiring process has elements of racism in it. We haven't escaped the biases that permeate our culture. There are companies that are aware of these biases and work hard to minimize their impact, and there are companies that stick their heads in the sand and say 'nope, no racism here! Find me actual proof!'.

Same! For instance, it never occurred to me that Black men have to be especially careful about expressing frustration, because white coworkers find any expression of anger from a Black man threatening. But that's what my neighbor, who also works in tech, told me: that he's basically never allowed to object as forcefully as white coworkers, because otherwise he'll get HR complaints.

There's probably a whole lot of shit like this that we just don't know, as a group, about.

And why does this stereotype of aggressive black men persist? Who promotes it?

White people who are afraid of Black people, I'd imagine.

And why are they afraid? Where did they get the notion that black people are aggressive?

Several centuries worth of deeply ingrained racism?

OK but why is it perpetuated today? My contention would be that it is mostly popular entertainment, movies, music, and media that perpetuates this view of the aggressive black male.

I have had little exposure to black people in my life. The few that I have encountered in school or professionally have not demonstrated any aggressive nature. I have no first-hand experience of aggression by any black man. My parents did not teach me that black men are aggressive. I did not learn this in school or from my friends. The only way I can think of that I might have gotten this impression is from movies, television, music, and media. These are the same people who are now professing and demonstrating how woke and concerned they are, rather than apologizing for their roles as the primary perpetuators of a stereotype.

Therefore when I see media or entertainment figures (I include politicians here) on the anti-racist soapbox, it all falls rather flat for me. They are the ones fanning the flames on one side, and demanding attonement from everybody else on the other side.

You are making my point so well that I'm worried people are going to think you're a sockpuppet.

Obviously, my neighbor should not be called on to answer whatever sins you think the culture has incurred.

Maybe, but I think there is more to that.

As a personal example, I have immigrated into US from the country with almost no black population, so I'd say that "several centuries of deeply ingrained racism" do not apply to me.

Within the first year of arriving into US, I've had been verbally attacked while I was riding the bus and reading the book. A bunch of teenagers started to say things like "he looks too smart" and "let's take his book away". For a high-schooler who had no exposure to violence before this was pretty scary. Since then, I tried hard to avoid riding the busses through that area. Can you guess which race were those teenagers?

(Note that I have arrived with some pretty weird believes, like the one that everyone with shaved head is a gang member and had to be avoided. That one did not last very long, because there was one person with shaved head in my math class and he was pretty great. Unfortunately, there were no similar experience to persuade me that I should not avoid groups of black people.)

> Can you guess which race were those teenagers?

Do you come on Hackernews every 2 years to write racist things? Your last comment is from 2018 and has the same white supremacist talking point.

News media. See e.g.:

https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/news-media/r...

for more information.

The general thesis of the diversity trainings I've attended is that white men believe they are superior to black men (sometimes consciously, sometimes subconsciously, depending on the fervor of the trainer). White men are racist just by existing - being part of the "white patriarchy" gives them a sense of entitlement and many advantages, whether they are aware or not. So let's say for the sake of argument all that is true...

Then why would a white man ever feel threatened by an angry black man expressing his opinion?

And anyways, what white person in 2020 complains to HR about an angry black man? And if they do, who listens? Get real.

If you're just going to say "you're a liar", why waste so many words?

Engaging with this as though it were made in good faith:

A white man might be threatened by a black man expressing their opinion for two reasons. First, the audacity of someone "inferior" daring to express their opinion assertively. That could be seen as threatening. Secondly (and probably more likely) the social conditioning that black people, but especially men, acting with anger are naturally dangerous. That is, someone may feel vastly more physically intimidated by a black man expressing the same opinion, with the same words, at the same volume level than a white woman.

Would a person complain to HR about that? Absolutely. Would HR respond? Depends on the company and the people.

> White men are racist just by existing

I've attended my share of diversity trainings but none of them taught me this. Maybe you just had shitty trainers?

Who would be filing these complaints? Do you think they would primarily be filed by men, women, or an equal mix of both? And do you believe it would exclusively be white people regardless of the gender distribution?

I apologize for the snark but tthreads on this site that touch this topic are always uh... challenging.

So the lived experiences of actual black people when they speak up and straight up say ”this is happening to us” means....what, then, in comparison to actually having dealt with said racism personally?

If it’s hard to believe because you haven’t lived it, then is listening to the multitudes of people also not enough?

Don't assume the other comments here are from non-blacks either...

Edit: so apparently the blacks I know, and who would agree with a lot of the comments here, don't exist...

It seems like what you're saying is entirely possible. However, where I disagree is that you seem to expect us to simply "face the truth" that the discrimination exists; you're deploring the existence of alternate possibilities!

> Some even venture into the possibility that a black person complaining about being passed over for promotion might just not be good enough for the job and then just blame discrimination rather than facing the truth (pure gaslighting). [emphasis mine]

Let's consider the possibility, but please don't expect us to just accept it's true. And please don't expect us not to consider other possible alternatives.

This is the problem posed by “SJW” entities in a nutshell. Of course racism exists, and AAs have been one of the big targets for decades.

But even considering another alternative explanation to something related to discrimination gets you on the list of racists/deserving-of-cancellation/etc. There is always room for debate, especially in a case like this where information is sparse. Forcibly shutting down anyone who wants to exercise their thinking is just socially acceptable censorship.

Could you show me this list of racists you're referring to, with regards to this HN thread and the dangers of disputing the racism of Coinbase's management?

This is an odd sort of response. Shouldn't the people claiming that HN is chock full of racism be the ones enumerating exactly which users are engaging in racism and exactly what behaviors they're doing that promote racism? All I see are exceedingly vague accusations, most of which seem to operate from particularly uncharitable assumptions that equate any disagreement as another manifestation of racism.

Ironically, this is not dissimilar to how Zed Shaw treated you. We could either have just believed his accusation that you defamed him, or we could ask for evidence. (My interpretation is that you were making a sarcastic joke at Shaw's expense, mostly because of his extremely opinionated personality, and not making some sort of serious evaluation of his work. And, besides, literally speaking, what you said is probably true.)

If people want to argue that instances of racist behavior exist (at Coinbase, on HN or elsewhere within and outside the industry), few are going argue. The problem is that anecdotal instances do not imply systemic issues unless there is evidence of systemic issues themselves. When the most common response to "show me your evidence of systemic racism" is "you're a racist," then don't be surprised when some of us conclude that the issue is largely overhyped nonsense.

I think the point here is “you can’t say certain things or you get put on a no-hire list” is nothing more than a boogieman for adults.

Lists that usually do exist in private tend to be ones like “Don’t work for X company/person” which have a plethora of motivations that may or may not have anything to do with discriminatory behavior. But these are circulated and composed by people at the bottom rather then the top so nobody gets fired: the biggest risk here is you lose out on talent.

But no one is being forcibly shut down here.

The debate is happening. It occurs. But then someone makes a comment like above: “is all this debate really necessary?” and the response is “this is censorship”.

I would agree that some viewpoints are silenced in public contexts. But insofar as this conversation, I don’t see anyone being cancelled or shut down for an opinion. That just seems like a defensive reaction to me.

> But no one is being forcibly shut down here

But they are. If you are skeptical of the claims in the article, then apparently you have taken a “depressing” (incorrect/intolerant) stance.

Sounds like you're upset that people are allowed to have opinions about your opinions, which would be pretty ironic.

people get very defensive when others say their opinion isn't valid.

Describing a stance as “depressing” seems like a ridiculously low bar for something to count as a forcible shut down.

That’s not what being forcibly shut down means. Somebody disagreeing with you isn’t oppression.

> But insofar as this conversation, I don’t see anyone being cancelled or shut down for an opinion

Because this conversation allows me to be anonymous. I simply don't dare expressing my thoughts with my real identity attached. Who knows whether I will get cancelled or fired.

The people working on suppression of certain viewpoints have hurt themselves in the long run. Now I am seeing candid discussions happening only in small trusted circles or on anonymous forums. That can be another reason why we saw embarrassing polling errors in 2016/2020 - openly supporting Trump can be a very risky move for someone.

When accusations of racism are being thrown around carelessly and people are having their reputations destroyed and lives turned upside down because of a single thing they (allegedly) said, the potential future targets of these accusations realize that the stakes just became much higher for them. So why would they support and enable those that might come for their own heads next?

It's rational to be antagonistic in such a situation.

What is "careless" about the accusations in the article and who at Coinbase is having their life ruined by a "single thing they (allegedly) said"? It sounds like you are letting your fears of this overall issue impact how you view these specific accusations against a specific company.

The fact that my comment doesn't mention the word "Coinbase" should be a pretty strong hint that I'm referring to a general situation.

What happens at one company is utterly irrelevant, but what happens in many places and in many countries is much more concerning and it also reflects on this situation and the comments.

So are you protesting against any accusations of racism regardless of the specific circumstances? Otherwise why bring up something that is only relevant in general instead of this particular situation?

Do you have any evidence that reputations are being destroyed by unfounded accusations of racism to a significant degree?

Secondly, have you compared that to the damage inflicted by racists not being held accountable in society currently?

that point of view is only because you feel that someone could come after you with a false accusation. but you need to see it as a feeling rather than a rational decision you made

people say the same about sexual harassment accusations, once a video, or admittance comes out silence...

most of the times people want there to be videos and solid evidence to believe - but you yourself know that in 2020 we have members of the police force actively killing an meting out their own law upon black people

why is is so hard to believe that behind closed doors people can act and behave in discriminatory ways towards black people?

shall we start walking with little microphones and cameras to work? is this what black people should deal with going to work?

I understand that people feel threatened by accusations of racism, but we should subject those feelings to the same scrutiny that fear of vaccines, fear of blood transfusions, fears of child kidnapping, fear of having our child trafficked for sex, and various fears of violence are subjected to. If we look at data, we find that many of our fears are not calibrated to probability of occurrence or even to the expected value of the outcome -- they're instead calibrated to media coverage.

Two guys and a gal were fired after Donglegate. People's lives are being turned upside-down in many ways by social media, whether its discussion of justice issues or sex tapes or your dog or your toast going viral. Discriminatory behavior has long been documented in employment, housing sales and rentals, financial services, etc -- just today I was reading about the riots in Cicero in 1951, when a mob of thousands attacked an apartment building in Cicero, IL into which a black couple attempted to move -- and now some of this behavior is being caught on video, unsurprisingly.

Sure, you can be antagonistic, but as doctors have discovered with malpractice, it's actually more productive and more optimized on a financial level to be gracious. Doctors who are honest and express sympathy and empathy, with an apology [1], when things go poorly are far less likely to be sued for malpractice (more links in linked article). Similarly, when you'd done something that appears to someone else to be racist, why not simply apologize (even something like, "Sorry, that was not my intention!") and then try to do better, even ask how you can do better?

If you are committed to an ideology of white supremacy, then of course this doesn't make sense as a next move. But if you're a normal person who just does things that in retrospect do come across as thoughtless or uninformed, like asking your Asian-American colleague where they're really really from and complimenting them on their English, or telling your Black colleague that you're surprised at how articulate they are, or giving a nine-year-old female chess genius a doll when she just wants a chess set... why not just apologize and do better next time?

The world is made of imperfect people who are all gonna die anyway. Most likely no one will care about your reputation in 100 years, even your great-grandkids (I knew my great-grandparents and I only knew a bit about them). So use this time to actually do your part to make the world better -- why not? It will most likely make you feel better, feel you have more integrity, and you'll be happier.

[1] https://www.natlawreview.com/article/you-had-me-i-m-sorry-im...

Because it's impossible to prove you're not a racist.

I could claim that you have a sexual interest in children. Good luck proving you don't. Would you just 'apologise and do better next time'?

> people are having their reputations destroyed and lives turned upside down because of a single thing they (allegedly) said

Then perhaps you can find it in you to empathize with the black folks who are scared of the police, and can begin to understand BLM. You have something in common with them.

I continue to look out after friends and of course family and strongly believe in equal basic rights for all human beings but BLM (and other causes) are not my fight.

Starting several years ago I couldn't deny any more that several groups use political correctness as a weapon to hurt others. They do not deserve my help nor empathy.

I said empathy for black people scared of the police. You really don't see the parallels?

For BLM I said "understand", not help or support.

I apologize in advance because you seem to be emotionally invested in this, but I really do not understand the questions you pose in your comment. What did you actually expect from the discussion? Were there not enough comments against Coinbase? Were there not enough comments outraged about the perceived racist behavior of it? Do you think none of those commenters "imagine the possibility that racism is a problem in America in 2020"?

Let's assume that I am 100% certain of all the accusations. How many types of comments do you expect to see about this? Condemn the company, point out systemic racism doesn't just affect Coinbase but everything, offer condolences and sympathy, support efforts to reduce racism. All of these comments exist in the thread.

What if I don't believe all the accusations are true? There are multitudes of reasons why that could be the case, which reflects in the number of possibilities being commented on. By your own contention, racism is a problem in America, so you would expect at least some of the comments to be racist, or at least controversial. You seem to have focused only on the worst ones, ignoring the discussions that followed them, whether positive or negative. You've ignored all the nuanced positions or straw-manned them. You're dismissive of people's comments or concerns while simultaneously asking people to not be dismissive of your concerns. I really don't get it.

You appear to be arguing with the comment you wish that person had written, not they one they actually wrote. The actual comment is specific about the pattern of problematic comments they observed:

* They suggest that Black people are in general SJWs

* They attempt to litigate affirmative action rather than the claims in the article

* They argue that Black employees passed over for promotion were underqualified.

* They dismiss the entire article on the basis of it having appeared in the New York Times.

Take issues with any of these specific complaints if you want, but don't pretend that the comment simply said "there aren't enough anti-Coinbase comments here", because they didn't say that at at all.

The message was I can't believe people made comments with the points above. Everyone should be on the page that racism exists specifically against black people in 2020.

I don't think the parent poster was pretending anything the parent-parent poster didn't share.

> The message was I can't believe people made comments with the points above.

Again, where was that said? Disbelief is expressed nowhere in the post.

Even if that was the message, what in the world is the reply adding here?

The post is basically:

- points out the poster is emotionally invested in being discriminated against

- "well racism exists in 2020 idk what to tell you"

- You shouldn't expect people have any sort of productive discussion about the article

All of that is then followed by then saying they misrepresented everything. I'm not even directly tied to this in any way, and that made my blood boil a bit. The first line really sets the tone by leading with an apology, yet posting still. It ends in confusion while contributing nothing and basically saying "well the world is shit, expect it" but also trying to argue that all of this isn't shitty at the same time, tacitly adding to the racism. It's just incredibly unempathetic and doesn't really serve a purpose.

And yet, we have people now commenting in detail on the linguistic interpretation of the post to try and eke out some case for the response. What is this even for?

The response from Coinbase does not feel to me like one that would be presented by a company that is effectively seeking out and mitigating pockets of racism within the org.

The comments section on HN do not leave me feeling like racism is being given enough consideration within the community.

> The comments section on HN do not leave me feeling like racism is being given enough consideration within the community.

Like it or not, there's an instinctive urge to deny that there are problems, and make it look like the victim is at fault for complaining. Nobody sits down and actually listens to what they have to say. Really disappointed by the HN community on this - and a bunch of big VCs - Jason Calacanis, Paul Graham, Balaji Srinivasan - who flocked to the defence of Coinbase after the memo pre-empting the story, but then were conveniently silent once the report actually came out.

I think this is a broader silicon valley problem - that oh, our companies are perfect! We can do no wrong. This applies to sexism, racism, any kind of -isms. It might also be illuminating reading to take a look at what HN commenters were saying about for example Susan Fowler's blog post (questioning her credentials, speculating that she was making false allegations) or even the Google protests about Andy Rubin's payout.

> I think this is a broader silicon valley problem - that oh, our companies are perfect! We can do no wrong. This applies to sexism, racism, any kind of -isms.

Shorter: We can't be racist! All we care about is money.

How 'bout comments talking about how to fix these problems proactively in other companies?

Why not do something useful instead of just waste minutes and photons?

Talk about gas lighting. The commenter should just accept racism as a daily fact, not be surprised or saddened, and not even mention the sadness it brings? I find this pretty offensive.

100% agree. I saw some of the shit posted about this on Cryptocurrency forums when Coinbase posted their weird tirade about wanting to be "neutral and apolitical" with regards to social justice and a few days ago about how everything is a lie as they tried to pre-empt this article.

It all feels of gaslighting and has a shit ton of people buying into it.

At the end of the day, the best thing for Coinbase employees to do is to jump ship to a competitor (I for one, am happy to give a referral to any Coinbase employee who is leaving due to all this) - but absolutely vile that they would try to buy-out all POC in the company.

> At the end of the day, the best thing for Coinbase employees to do is to jump ship to a competitor (I for one, am happy to give a referral to any Coinbase employee who is leaving due to all this) - but absolutely vile that they would try to buy-out all POC in the company.

What makes you think POC are equivalent with woke activists? That seems a bit like stereotyping to me. It also seems to contradict actual data.[1] While most black Americans agree that racial issues are still serious problems, they tend not to endorse the extreme progressive interpretations and policy recommendations.

If I were to guess, tech workers are much more likely to be progressive activists than workers in most other industries. This includes the (shamefully small) number of black tech workers as well. But at the same time, almost all of the activists are white.

[1] see appendix 1.1.1 https://hiddentribes.us/pdf/hidden_tribes_report.pdf

This comment is a good example of an insidious trend that has existed throughout America's history, which tries to offload any agitation against racial discrimination onto white outsiders. In the past, race riots and protests were often blamed on Northern abolitionists, communists and Jews, basically "white agitators who aren't from here". You see this same trend today, when protests are blamed on Soros-paid white agitators from "out of state" and Antifa.

It's intended to mollify any concerns of well-meaning whites that POC might actually really be upset with racial discrimination, and actually want significant change beyond superficial proposals.

> It's intended to mollify any concerns of well-meaning whites that POC might actually really be upset with racial discrimination, and actually want significant change beyond superficial proposals.

First, you have no idea of my intent, because I didn't tell you. Second, what you allege to be my intent is not my intent. Third, conceding for the sake of argument that you were right about my intent, why is it that the measured facts totally contradict your narrative, i.e. those who want radical change appear to be overwhelmingly white and particularly non-black?

Are you one of those who think logic and data are tools of the white oppressor?

Support for "defund the police", both the harsh slogan and the actual policy of reallocating some funding to social services, is dramatically higher among POC than whites so I don't think your analysis that "those who want radical change appear to be overwhelmingly white and particularly non-black" is correct.

https://morningconsult.com/2020/06/17/defund-the-police-comm...

Framing in these types of polls is incredibly important (indeed, I found two others from around the same time as yours, and all were fairly different from one another in their conclusions[1][2]).

If you ask people whether they want the police presence in their communities to stay the same or increase, large majorities agree. Only 19% of black Americans want police presence to decrease.[3]

And yet none of this is inconsistent. If the problems in predominantly non-white urban areas are at least in part crime problems that the police aren't solving, it makes sense for those citizens to want to take money from the police, whom they perceive to not be doing their jobs. At the same time, these same people probably would prefer the police to just do their jobs in the first place.

[1]https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/64-americans-oppose-defund-p...

[2]https://news.gallup.com/poll/315962/americans-say-policing-n...

[3]https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-r...

None of what you posted here supports the original claim made that "the overwhelmingly majority of people who want radical change are white and aren't black"; these polls all contradict that.

One example, from the first Gallup poll:

> Which of the following best describes your view about changes that may or may not need to be made to policing in the United States?

> Major changes needed:

> Black Americans: 88%

> White Americans: 51%

We can quibble about the definition of "radical" vs "major" but it seems pretty clear based on most polling that Black americans are far more dissatisfied as a demographic group with policing, than white americans, and are far more open to a variety of reforms ranging from minor to "radical".

As you said, there's no contradiction between wanting to reallocate money from police, who may be seen as doing a poor job, to social services, and wanting the police to actually show up and do the job they're supposed to be doing.

> None of what you posted here supports the original claim made that "the overwhelmingly majority of people who want radical change are white and aren't black"; these polls all contradict that. > One example, from the first Gallup poll: > >> Which of the following best describes your view about changes that may or may not need to be made to policing in the United States? > >> Major changes needed: > >> Black Americans: 88% > >> White Americans: 51%

My original claim was that black people make up very few of the "woke" activists who e.g. demand white people to apologize for so-called systemic racism or white supremacy. That is undeniably true based on the data. I'm not sure how we got into this rabbit hole of police brutality and racial disparities therein, but it's not at all obvious that opinions in favor of curbing police abuses are predictors of "woke"/intersectional/SJW/progressive/whatever you want to call it activism.

> We can quibble about the definition of "radical" vs "major" but it seems pretty clear based on most polling that Black americans are far more dissatisfied as a demographic group with policing, than white americans, and are far more open to a variety of reforms ranging from minor to "radical".

It's not a quibble, it's hugely important. "Major change" is about as vague as is possible. Severely restricting qualified immunity, restricting police unions from bargaining about anything beyond pay and health/safety conditions, forbidding police from using military weapons and vehicles except in extreme circumstances (with political oversight and approval), and having strict escalation-of-force procedures all seem like pretty major changes to me. They're also all policies I'd support, and I'm about as far from a woke activist as possible. (This Twitter thread has some excellent recommendations, most of which I'd endorse in a heartbeat.[1] Most woke activists have seemed uninterested, though.)

"Defund the police" sounds radical on its face, until some of its proponents reply that, actually, it doesn't mean abolish the police, but just to redirect funding to "social programs." You know, the standard left-liberal Democrat proposal for the past 50 years. The police have the honor of joining the military, NASA and foreign aid (among others) as programs that need to be raided in order to pay for an ever-increasing welfare state. It's not a policy I agree with, but it's hardly "radical." Yet others interpret "defund the police" to mean something different.

In short, these are just equivocations and word games. When black people were asked about concrete proposals, they tended to respond more like a left-liberal (as one would expect). For instance, when asked about actually reducing police presence, they opposed it by overwhelming margins; in fact, more wanted an increase than a decrease.

[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/samswey/status/118065570127173222...

> What makes you think POC are equivalent with woke activists?

It's actually the opposite of the truth; "woke" activists/SJWs/whatever you want to call them are disproportionately white.

All I see is you not finding it conceivable that someone could not think like you do, and think that every organization should be committed to your social causes, and also be a decent person who believes in fairness and justice for all.

Hence the baseless personal attacks.

I'm glad you spoke up, and maybe I and others should've.

There are some kinds of topics that I can immediately guess will invite certain kinds of comments on HN, and I've learned to just take a deep breath and ignore them. (If it gets really bad, I go catch up on that other Web site that does over-the-top criticism of HN, so that I don't feel like the only one.) On rare occasions, I've tried to engage some of the, but it's just draining.

However, when not enough people speak up, that can send an implicit message that some life-sucking background noise from others is OK with everyone else, when it's not.

> I go catch up on that other Web site that does over-the-top criticism of HN, so that I don't feel like the only one

Which is that, if you can share?

It's n-gate [dot] com

I think you have to type in that URL. If the referrer is set to this site, you get goatse'd or something.

The comments link at n-gate points back to HN?

I find it difficult to conceive how one could work at/manage a mainstream cryptocurrency company and be racist.

Both empirically (it's the most multicultural tech scene I ever witnessed), and in principles (one of the core tenets of crypto is precisely eliminating discrimination), crypto would be among the most counter productive fields for a racist to spend their time on.

Of course I'm not discounting the fact that humans are often irrational and incoherent, so it seems fair to give the benefit of the doubt to both parties until we have more information.

I think it's helpful here to examine the conception of a racist. Most racists don't identify as such and have a racist agenda they consciously act on. In these cases, it's baked in through various experiences into the subconscious, and rationalized away in many ways. Maybe it's eugenics, maybe it's media bias, maybe it's simply a personal preference, and they think they don't let it affect their decisions.

> it's the most multicultural tech scene I ever witnessed

Coinbase's own (unrefuted) numbers show they are far worse than other tech companies. Where is your conception based off of?

> one of the core tenets of crypto is precisely eliminating discrimination

As this thread as made clear if you go to the bottom of the comments, stated principles and actual beliefs/actions often don't match in tech. Closeted republicans in tech compared to the leaning of corporate action is a great example of that. In some ways, Coinbase said the quiet part out loud with their apolitical stance. When that happened, tons of people flocked to applaud them, both on HN and in the VC industry. All of this perfectly aligns with finding racism within said company, and the tech industry as a whole.

> Coinbase's own (unrefuted) numbers show they are far worse than other tech companies. Where is your conception based off of?

They are (were?) at 3% vs 6% average, on small absolute numbers. Not great but certainly within margin of forgiveness.

My conception is based on the scene as a whole, which is extremely international. Look at the public personalities in crypto vs. the wider VC tech scene. It's possible Coinbase is a pocket of prejudice, but it would be an exception.

> stated principles and actual beliefs/actions often don't match in tech.

I agree, but this isn't just a principle here, the mechanics of crypto themselves prevent racial, gender, socioeconomic bias. You can't say one thing and do the other when the code is open source and is the main UI. That's the difference with things like big-tech's empty "privacy pledges" for instance, here the bad thing is made actually structurally inconvenient.

> which is extremely international

Racism against Africans can be found internationally, but in this case we are talking specifically African-Americans. Being international does not mean diverse in this specific way, it just means diverse in terms of nationality. For a good example, as the article and many have highlighted, asian representation is not an issue at Coinbase. Racism isn't generalized but specific to races and cultures. A person can be prejudice to just one category or many categories.

> the mechanics of crypto themselves prevent racial, gender, socioeconomic bias

mechanics and community are not one in the same, and crypto is still plenty susceptible to discrimination for any transactions that begin off-network (most all, humans are social creatures). While the mechanics help a small edge case or two, I don't really see any meaningful difference. What's the real material racism that crypto stops that other forms of payment or speculative trading fall victim to?

You may be right on the first point, I won't speculate. I just wanted to point out that it's unlikely to be something endemic to the space.

> What's the real material racism that crypto stops that other forms of payment or speculative trading fall victim to?

Access to financial services like loans for instance. No human or even AI model to judge you based on external factors.

> I just wanted to point out that it's unlikely to be something endemic to the space.

I'm still not sure why that would be the case. FWIW I don't suspect it is either, but I don't see any reason it would be more or less than the tech community at large. In this case, Coinbase is reflective not of the subcateogry but of leadership.

> Access to financial services like loans for instance

https://blockfi.com/apply-for-crypto-loan

> Along with our proven KYC/AML process, we review an applicant’s credit history and other information to assess for risk.

This still has all the normal hurdles for a loan. Just because the asset is on a ledger doesn't remove the human factor. Not to mention that a direct collateral backed loan is already very unlikely to get rejected at a traditional financial institution. I didn't find any actual crypto loan options that weren't collateral backed from a quick search. Am I missing other options?

>All of this perfectly aligns with finding racism within said company, and the tech industry as a whole.

I don't understanding why you're stopping at the tech industry when it's a problem in every other industry too. I'd go so far as to say it's a problem that permeates every industry in the entire world.

All of this is within the context of the "apolitical" statement by Coinbase and those who engaged with the post, which was by and large only the tech industry. I'm not looking to go on a full analysis of "racism in the world" in HN comments today lols

I'm sorry. HN attracts a certain audience, and so do cryptocurrency companies, and some people from this audience tend to immediately pivot to "culture war" issues whenever allegations of racism arise. The priorities of some commenters on this submission are very misplaced.

For example, people can disagree on the merits of e.g. affirmative action, but if former CoinBase employees are alleging that lower-qualified white employees are being promoted in favor of higher-qualified black employees, then that's a serious matter that you ought to address before pivoting the conversation to other topics. Hiring bias is institutional racism, and allegations of such bias should be thoroughly investigated. But, it's probably easier for some people to talk about affirmative action, but harder for the same people to discuss promotion practices that are biased against black employees. I hope that people who feel eager to talk about the former are also prepared to address the latter.

Also seeing some of the comments, I would like to remind some people not to make racial equality issues into black versus Asian. Both groups experience racism (often different kinds of racism), racial equality is not a zero-sum game, and surely we can find good-faith solutions that help one group without pushing down another.

I’ve never worked in a company in Silicon Valley (I’m up to over 10 now over 20 years) where racism would just be silently tolerated. Never. I would certainly speak up against a manager who was casually racist or wouldn’t promote a good black engineer, knowing full well I might have to quit.

I’m sure racism exists but that type of overt racism that this article suggests, in the middle of SF especially in tech, is hard to believe.

So I take the accounts of some sort of systemic racism within Coinbase with a lot of skepticism. Especially the account of the support people who were forced to move to Portland. It sounds like all except one person was forced to move to Portland and both white and black people were asked. There’s a lot missing in that accusation which makes me think they are twisting things out of proportion.

I would love a more detailed account or talking with others. Could there be racists working in Coinbase? Sure. But this article doesn’t cover enough for me to not be skeptical without getting both sides of the story.

My takeaway from such comments is their perception that it is not a problem for them.

And, they are in denial, since if it wasn't a problem for them they would not question the story.

Sharing stories does help. Racism is rooted in lack of exposure to diversity. It may never be eradicated but working to end it among every new generation is worthwhile IMO.

> Racism is rooted in lack of exposure to diversity.

The biggest racists that I know grew up in an environment with the most diversity (talking about EU here, not US). It also shows in political results, where extreme right is most voted on in diverse environments.

Sure you can find racists anywhere. It's more about their home environment than it is about anything external. But if your parents tell you white people are bad and you meet one who's nice you might start to question that upbringing.

You clearly didn't hear what I said.

For example, there is a reason why gay people don't like to walk around in muslim environments, and it has nothing to do with how their parents raised them.

So like I said, your theory is that when you are exposed to diversity, you have less racism. But the numbers (such as political preference) show completely the opposite.

I did carefully read what you said. I'm sorry you do not feel understood. Have a good one mate.

"Racism is rooted in lack of exposure to diversity."

Uh, have a talk with South African whites sometimes.

And isn't American Deep South, with its 30-50 per cent black population, considered stereotypically racist, while you have a lot of anti-racist movements in mostly white places like Oregon and New England?

It does not work in Europe either. For example, the far-right Rassemblement National has most support on the French Riviera and Corsica, places where the Arab and African populations are very numerous. It struggles to gain support in Bretagne, where there is little immigration.

Israel is very diverse and the level of ethnic and religious violence there is massive.

I am Slavic myself; traveling around former Yugoslavia, I heard things that would absolutely stun American readers. There are people absolutely ready to slit throats of the villagers two kilometers away, just because of a different religion.

From your comments, I hear the conviction that upon meeting people from a different culture, everyone will rejoice and cherish the changes. You do not take into account a possibility that two cultures may, upon contact, develop a serious conflict, perhaps even ending in war.

Diverse places like Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia, former USSR, the Caucasus, Lebanon, Iraq or lately Western European metropoles seem to be a hotbed of conflicts.

You can grow up in a diverse city while isolating yourself to a subsection that has no diversity.

Look at Trump, from NYC. Spent all his time at private clubs.

I'm black too, and let's be honest here. The burden of proof that is being posed by folks on HN isn't because they are actually seeking proof, it's so that they can say

>"You don't have sufficient evidence, so we are going to go with whatever non-race based reason I can find as the cause"

Seeking evidence about an event is a worthy activity, but becomes a fools errand when the audience is sympathetic if not outright supportive of the wrongdoers.

>I'm black too, and let's be honest here. The burden of proof that is being posed by folks on HN isn't because they are actually seeking proof, it's so that they can say

That's not honest and that's not why I asked for proof.

Meanwhile you are asking us to believe your narrative without evidence.

Reading through the comments as a white person, I’m depressed, too...I hear you, and it pains me that so many in tech are just clueless / insensitive to the real problems of the minority voices in our communities.

Systemic racism is insidious, for so many reasons, and one of them is that it is not always overt. I believe the aggrieved commenters reacting to SJW boogeymen are not ‘racists’, in the sense that they are not consciously discriminating against people different from themselves. But voicing racism is only the tip of the iceberg! Systemic racism is baked into the system, that’s what makes it systemic!

Some of the important questions we (white // male // straight // what have you, fill in your own) need to ask ourselves are like:

How many Black friends do I have? (Nowhere near as many as White friends. That makes intuitive sense: almost everyone in my building is White, same for my job, most of my friends’ friends are White too... But what choices do I make on a daily basis that reinforce that? What different choices could I make to actually expand the range of people I have a chance to interact with?)

How can we better address inequality? (I have a doctorate and I’ll admit it, I’m a bit of a snob, and I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished. My strong preference is to hire based on merit: I’ve worked with incompetent people, unfortunately; and I would be pissed if I wasn’t rewarded for my own merit. But there’s a lot of backstory that got me here: private schools, SAT prep classes, I wasn’t bullied, my own computer, not having to have a job to support my family, not being sick, my native English language skills, I’m handsome and charming and tall and well educated and know lots of lingo and have shared experiences with most hiring managers I’ve met—all of these things helped me a lot to get to where I am now. Systemic racism comes into the picture because there are real social structures that have prevented Black and other minority communities from having access to these same resources. Just a few off the cuff examples: Jim Crow, urban food deserts, underfunded public schools, shitty computers at the public library. Merit hiring seems to me a lot less fair when I consider friends of mine who don’t have that ‘merit’ because of factors that were determined far out of their control.)

What would it be like for me to feel uncomfortable or unwelcome or unappreciated at my job? (Technical customer calls are always a boys club, and I’m good at banter w Midwestern ag tech b2b customers. But shit, I sure notice when they mispronounce a coworker’s name, or start a call w our group of men and women as ‘well, gentlemen’, or crack a dick pun. And it makes me sad to imagine what it would feel like to be the odd one out.)

Systemic racism isn’t going away, or easy to fix. We all ought to start giving some real thought to the unconscious choices we make that contribute to tech feeling like a blanket unwelcome industry for a whole lot of people. Smart, kind, creative, strong people, passionate people, worthwhile people.

———

Edit to add that there were supposed to be emojis sprinkled throughout there, which made clear when I was joking...so you should assume the best in me throughout ;D

You can find it as depressing, problematic and triggering as you like; those interested in a civilised society aren't interested in bringing in witch trials no matter how traumatised the progressive crowd are by their unreasonable demands not being met.

this seems like it’s also a struggle between different teams at the same company. Customer Service teams are very often looked down upon as “less than” other teams like engineering, and this article states that a disproportionate number of the black employees were on that team.

Customer Service is often regarded in companies like insurance is regarded by most people—you gotta have it, in a perfect world you’d never need it, and very few people brag about how much they pay for it.

That’s why Customer Service isn’t treated like the Rock Stars that Sales or Engineering is treated like in a company.

It also tends to have the most natural turnover, and tends to be the lesser skilled positions in a software company (not often requiring specializations, like developers).

yeah it’s unfortunate even at a finance startup that CX is so disregarded. Coinbase doesn’t exactly have a great CX reputation eg lots of horror stories plus it seems to go down every time there’s a big move up or down.

CX folks at CB are doing God's work. Nothing but respect for them on my eng team at CB. At past companies I had to do a lot more legwork to dive into an issue; our CX folks are incredibly technical and have great instincts on identifying, grouping, and triaging issues as well as providing just the right amount of context.

I’m speaking from the perspective of the customer. They might be top knotch but if it’s understaffed and underesourced then no one can be set up for success when they have to face the wrath of a million customers when the site goes down on the slightest uptick in volume due to a large move.

Man, when I was at an early stage online brokerage back in the day, customer service was pure gold. These people were mostly ex-traders who knew the ins-and-outs of complex options trades, and were legit viewed as rock stars.

I was willing to support the general message Brian Armstrong put out, but with the added context and chronology I cannot.

I would say that this kind of mission statement can only work if done at the beginning, as reacting in response to the work environment described by their employees was doomed for failure.

I know many people like Brian Armstrong, and the investors. They are all cut from a similar cloth and they honestly have no clue how to react. They don't know how to get women on a panel, they don't know how to get qualified people of color in positions to change things. They are just told what they did wrong and just shut themselves off from it. The very people with power to change anything get marginalized themselves. And yes, some - not all - of them actually are not interested in inclusion or really are racist and sexist. But for the former, there is room to empathize with these kind of people to steer their energy in more productive ways.

From Coinbase's "About us"[1]

> They don't know how to get women on a panel

2 out of 7 members of the exec team are women.

> they don't know hot to get qualified people of color in positions to change things

4 out of 7 members of the exec team have last names of Choi, Chatterjee, Grewal, Gupta.

It's almost as if you have strong biases (or delusions) and didn't even do a basic fact check before making bold claims against Coinbase.

[1] https://www.coinbase.com/about

Yeah my point was about empathizing with people being expected to make statement after statement, instead of vilifying them when they stop jumping when people say jump. Aside from the topic sentence of that paragraph it was no longer about Coinbase.

I’m saying we can all address this better.

Where is the Hispanic and Black representation? I see 3/15 people on that page being women, not a very strong point for a group that is 50% of the population.

This is the standard SV makeup. Do a random sample of any large tech company and this is the team you’d get. This tells me they’re not doing anything different.

There are not enough qualified black people in that job market, what is this that Americans have that difficult to grok?

If true, what are they doing to change that? When I was at Google there were zero paths to bring in people with potential and train them up. I’m guessing it is the same at Coinbase. Doing nothing to address the problem then pointing at your H1Bs and patting yourself on the back.

I would guess through the same system everyone else qualifies through, weather it be Google or someone else.

Your local governments have to push the education forward instead of doing these racist affirmative action rules.

The talent pools exist, they can definitely increase recruiting at different schools.

America is where it is by not even tapping into the productivity of basically up to half of its population across various demographics, imagine if it did.

honest Q: why is it their job to fix this?

also: for companies that are global in nature, with global operations, offices, employees, etc. is it right to take on the issues of the country where they have an office? (or are HQ-ed, or have X% of employees (even if majority)?)

Why not other things? Why aren't the issues of the impoverished of India an issue w/ tech companies, especially given the large presence of "well to do" Indians or upper-casters?

If corporations were not involved in our politics in the US it would be fine. You don’t get to shape the laws of a country then wash your hands of responsibility for the people.

Our healthcare relies on our employment, they fund politicians, write laws. They are very much the lords of the modern era and they need to act in the interest of people, or lose their corporate personhood.

As for the globalist perspective, I agree. We should care how people up the supply chain live. I understand the issues in the US significantly better than those in China or India though. For those issues, give them visibility and work toward a solution. It doesn’t have to be either or.

Americans think that is

a) bullshit

b) even if it wasn't bullshit, the companies improve with the representation to adequately ship products to markets that they would otherwise ignore

c) both kinds of people are benefits to the companies, as there is a greater priority to address markets than cater to egos of internal employees

> Where is the Hispanic and Black representation?

Coinbase aspires to be a global company. What does "Black" even mean in that context? People with dark skin color? If so, a broad portion of South Asians and sub-Saharan Africans would qualify.

What does Hispanic mean? Would Spanish people qualify?

Did you mean only in the context of the USA? If so, how is that different than the Nationalist jingoism of Donald Trump, where you want US-centric population representation in a global company?

> What does Hispanic mean? Would Spanish people qualify?

Yes. The word has a definition - even an official one by the Census Bureau.

Why should any company or board reflect the population?

When companies do not reflect the population then it shows that some races do not have the same opportunity as others.

Do you think there are zero differences in races and that one race wouldn't naturally drift towards particular roles or industries more than another race? Because this point of view isn't supported by data.

Asians, a minority by every measurement, are over-represented in STEM classes to the point that Harvard and others actively discriminate against them.

Studies have shown, repeatedly, that blind hiring (stripping names from resumes, showing only experience) actually worsens diversity. This means companies generally give more opportunity to black, Asian and other minority groups.

If you measure some quantity using biased sampling, you're invariably going to see biased results. The assumption that the biased results in this scenario are due to lack of opportunity, racism, etc are unfounded. Correlation is not causation.

Yes, but that's not at the hiring level but at education level. You can't expect every single tech company to be representative of the population since there simply aren't that many female/black/whatever engineers

Why is it racist or sexist to not to be interested in "inclusion" (which actually means "quotas", right?)

I would think that progressive activism is the minority rather than the default view.

Isn't it the racially discriminatory stance to make decisions based on race?

I think most rational people would rather make decisions purely on competence and facts, not identity.

> They don’t know how to get women on a panel

> they don’t know how to get qualified people of color in positions to change things

These aren’t the kinds of things that someone running a business should be concerned with.

Don’t be condescending. Women and “people of color” don’t need to be rescued and hoisted up into a business artificially. They are perfectly capable of joining the workforce through the same doors as all other people.

[Thank you for all your advice -- it's greatly appreciated. I've edited this post since it included a few personal details that I don't want permanently attached to my account on here. I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.]

One possibility is to bring it up in the interview, and ask probing questions. The downside to this is you might not get hired --- but if that costs you the job, maybe you don't want to work there in the first place? I wouldn't. The upside is that either way, you'll be sending a pretty strong signal that this article "broke through" and that people care about it; companies do tend to pay attention to things they hear in the recruiting process. You don't have to throw away your market power; you can deploy it.

This is a company that took the time to write a damage control pre-buttal to an NYT story, so you can safely assume they have a canned answer about it deployed to their recruiting teams. So the key here would be the "probing questions" part.

And, who knows? Coinbase might convince you that their heart is in the right place on this issue.

Opportunities will open up in the new year when people start getting budget and headcount. Don't feel like you don't have options.

If you want my instant feedback, while I understand that you're not getting the quantity of interviews you'd like, I'd caution you against thinking of Coinbase as a "hot" company. That designation would have been true years ago, when the work/reward balance would have been much more in your favor. Instead, right now you're going to work startup hours for less salary than FAANG and a truly miniscule and non-commensurate amount of (likely underwater, as of now) options.

The company is heavily capitalized and clearly mismanaged.

Excellent points. I'd also add that the best place to take a startup job is where societal value generation is high and rapidly growing. That way you get lots of revenue and societal support. In contrast "crypto" is a space whose demonstrated value creation is very limited, and has been stuck at that level for years. Regulators have broadly gone from "let's see what happens" to cracking down on the many excesses of the space. And that's before we look at what the new administration will do.

I can see why investors might put money in Coinbase; they can place bets on many horses. But for a full time job? I'd advise friends to work elsewhere.

Even in the absence of anything else, the fact that over half of their black employees complained to HR of racism and 3/4 quit[0] seems to be a strong signal that there is a problem.

Whether you go on with the job or not should be based entirely on how you personally feel about the situation. Maybe this bothers you but you’d like the opportunity to make a difference and try to shift the culture. Maybe you’re so bothered by it that you don’t want to work for them at all. Maybe it bothers you, but not enough to change your course. Maybe something else.

I think the one important thing to do is that, if you do pull out of the process, let them know why. Hiring people costs a lot of money, and perhaps seeing that there are actual consequences for letting their corporate culture be what it seems to be might help to drive home the message that this stuff matters enough to affect their bottom line, and that they should therefore take it seriously.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25230716

Full disclosure, I'm personally a bit more motivated than most about what the company that I work for stands for, but to me, you made the answer clear with this:

> I do already have a (very) good job, so I don't "have" to have this and can afford to just drop it.

I understand the getting an interview struggle, but you have time and comfort here to wait and find a better option. My one counterpoint in my head (change from the inside) is ruled out if Coinbase isn't receptive to the change at a leadership level, which seems to be the case here. I think you do the most good here by explicitly dropping out and telling them this is the reason why. Maybe if they won't listen to their own employees, they will listen to the labor market.

You mentioned you are interested in this space, and there’s no company in this space bigger than Coinbase.

I wouldn’t turn down an opportunity just because of a (probably biased) article. Get Coinbase’s side of the story during your interview and decide for yourself.

Listen to black debaters in the 1950's and 1960's sometime, david hoffman on youtube has a few really great videos up. Some of the Black panthers stuff is pretty interesting IMO.

Black people are more than capible of holding their own in corporate america, but they've been disenfranchised and disabused by crappy social policies and generational complex trauma stemming back to the 1600's in America, compounded by familial and community abandonment.

The net result of this is you have a bunch of basically abandoned children that, when they get into an adult environment, especially a tech environment, they can't function. Then, the devil incarnate comes along and says an environment of high emotional regulation (professional standards and boundaries) where people strive to develop cognitive function (think through their problems) and work as teams (because we all have to specailize) is "whiteness" because people are explaining the basics to them, or they can't negotiate because they get very nervous, or a myiad of other issues that really boil down to development.

It is a terrible lie, many things that aren't really racist become racist because all of a sudden we are discovering this group of disabused people don't have the development they need to have to function in that environment, are getting left behind, and have no clear path to attainment. Then the media vultures come in and "monetize" them.

And in some cases, they make people feel threatened and not physically but intellectually, and some narcisstic people feel like they've been dressed down a few notches which is BS.

You're American, some goat farmer is going to come over and invent the next big thing, put you out of work, then you're going to go work fixing robots and make 4x what you were making. Deal with it, leave your cultural identity on the boat.

So first of all, be the best you can be. You have nothing to feel guilty over by doing that and working towards that.

Second, recognize this group has been through an incredibly difficult time and more importantly, that survival instinct and moral perspective are important to really listen to and to play chess with. Keep "whiteness" and "blackness" out of the discussion and just stick to this as a navigation exercise.

Third, keep in mind a lot of them are impatient and angry. That isn't your doing, the best you can do is offer them an ear, mentorship if they ask for it, and a straightforward and fair explination.

the article is from an extremely biased source, done in the midst of 'social justice' trend running out of steam, I'd just ignore it.

Think long term.

people have been saying that about "SJWs" for >5 years now, maybe there's more to it then "it's just trendy"

yeah, the same propaganda that drives the trend also helps with the elections

I agree with your last point, it's not that hard to accept the fact that your company is influenced by social trends. Pretending that we're laser focused and everything should be checked at the door wreaks of bias.

Clearly, the CEO was not distressed at the events, and wanted to minimize anyone else's negative feelings about the matter because it wasn't important to him.

A better CEO might recognize that this issue was important to the social fabric and therefore is also important to his company's mission.

Don't bother switching, companies that can't keep their internal issues private generally have lots of other issues. The devil you know is better.

It's like the kid getting caught doing drugs who claims it was their first time so they should be let off, odds are it wasn't their first time.

Racism won’t be a problem once color of the skin is no longer a point of the argument.

As long as people demand x/y hires to be of a certain race or color, the companies will have to continue hiring for diversity, and not for the best qualified candidates.

Stop counting who is who, and the market will take of itself.

People used to hire the best qualified candidates only. Nobody hired blacks.

I’m not saying the two are related, but the latter was seen as a problem and these forced diversity quotas were instituted.

frankly its a little surprising to me how quickly some people in this comment section are to instantly dismiss the experiences of the people in this article

yes the truth is shades of gray that article doesn't really give any answers to, but the unwillingness of others in these comments to even consider the possibility of some racism, discrimination, etc. experienced by others is just disheartening

The fault here lies with our society granting far too much power to people claiming victimhood. Being a victim is now an actively sought-after position because of the rewards it yields. We’ve completely perverted the incentives.

So now, in order to protect ourselves against bad faith actors, we have to be extremely skeptical of victimhood claims. I agree, it is sad.

The problem is that if you are skeptical of the victims’ claims, you are accused as unempathetic or intolerant. Such a mentality is antithetical to “innocent until proven guilty.”

I think that view of victimhood is a very toxic view to hold. Of course innocent until proven guilty is a tenant to uphold, but extreme skepticism to the stories of real victims are why things like sexual assault cases are so under reported. a climate of such extreme disbelief painted by whatever few "bad apples" you may have witnessed tosses out the whole bushel

There's so much push-back because the answer always seems to be "discriminate against non-black candidates to improve diversity" or "allow political propaganda to be openly preached in your organization".

Precisely. It is going to be difficult for people to convince tech employees that the industry needs to change if your two methods of change are either discriminating against said employees during hiring or turning the workplace into a political powderkeg.

Here's a thought. Perhaps they were bad workers. I'll explain how affirmative action causes this problem.

You are forced to hire a certain percent of POC. Doesn't matter if they are a poor fit for the company. Doesn't matter if they are not even a good fit for the job. Doesn't matter if they are not even capable of doing the job. You can't wait to hire a POC that is a good fit or capable, or you are violating the law.

It is also difficult to fire the forced hires once you are forced to hire them. Instead of just saying "they sucked at their job" you have to play all kinds of games to fire someone that is a POC hire. All companies face this issue and until its addressed (By removing affirmative action) there will always be this dysfunctional divide.

This also causes a harmful feedback loop to POC that are simply not up to the task and always think they are being targeted (because they are) rather than upping their skill set or working on their professionalism.

And here come the downvotes.

“Most people of color working in tech know that there’s a diversity problem,”

Interesting. Are Asians or Indians not “people” or “of color” in this worldview?

In the US, being "marginalized" means you are part of a cultural minority group that is politically useful to political corporatists - typically of the cultural coalition party.

Newspeak makes a distinction between "poc" and "non black poc"

It's not "newspeak" to suggest that Black people are treated differently than Asian people; in fact, it would be more surprising to hear that they aren't, since the two groups of people have wildly different histories in the United States.

And both face heavy discrimination and racism outside of the tech bubble of Silicon Valley, both historically and in the present day. To exclude Asians from the definition of POC is to disempower us because you consider one POC “more important” than another.

Indeed, we see this mentality in programs like affirmative action in which the suffering of Asian children is seen as an acceptable sacrifice for uplifting other minorities.

> Black people treated differently

different cultural groups also behave differently and make different choices based on familial affinities & social incentives

A new term I've seen used is "black & indigenous people of color" (BIPOC), which conspicuously leaves out Asians and is fuzzy on Hispanics.

Asians are pretty much banished from the minority club in an "I am storming off angrily with words failing me." fashion.

Ridiculously, people are starting to use this term in the UK too, even though white people are the indigenous ones here.

The major problem with this "people of color" designation is that it sweeps specific discrimination against African Americans* under the rug. It is certainly possible to have 100% employees "of color" while consciously excluding African Americans, which I have witnessed at private companies (blue collar jobs mostly) in California (where I live). The result is that affirmative action for African Americans, which has been replaced with affirmative action for women and non-white men, does way more for non-African Americans than the originally intended recipients (collectively). Even black African/Caribbean immigrants are used for diversity accounting-- see the NYTimes article from 2004, "Top Colleges Take More Blacks, but Which Ones?".

Please note this is not a slight against women, immigrants, or anyone else. They obviously have valid discrimination claims. But if you work in a community where less than 1% of African-American students are scoring at grade level in mathematics, and your company claims it is "diverse" yet hires no local African-Americans, there is still a serious problem in your community that should be addressed. (It's OK if you don't care, as long as you don't pretend otherwise). So please do not conflate hiring "people of color" with hiring any specific group.

* By "African-American" here I mean descendants of slaves who lived in the USA, and are thus severely disadvantaged because of it, having actual wealth stolen without any legal means available for recovery. I do understand that "African-American" is commonly used to mean any black U.S. resident.

> By "African-American" here I mean descendants of slaves who lived in the USA, and are thus severely disadvantaged because of it, having actual wealth stolen without any legal means available for recovery. I do understand that "African-American" is commonly used to mean any black U.S. resident.

Interestingly, a growing number of activists prefer the term ADOS (American descendants of slavery) because it makes precisely this distinction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Descendants_of_Slaver...

"Tokenized" is brilliant headline writing. I'm not qualified to comment on the rest!

Simple question: have race issues become more or less of a problem since going 100% remote?

> Still another said managers spoke down to her and her Black colleagues, adding that they were passed over for promotions in favor of less experienced white employees

I hate this kind of sloppy writing. who added that, the colleague or the manager?

EDIT: Downvoted. I guess clarity in the NYT isn't allowed to be questioned..

It reads fine to me, it’s obviously the employee mentioned in the beginning of the paragraph “Still another”

It could be the manager speaking down to them, in in the course of that, suggesting other (black) employees had been passed for promotion.

Dear CEO, practice what you preach,

> Default to trust: We assume positive intent amongst our teammates, and assume ignorance over malice. We have each other’s backs.

> some of what I’ve written above will be misinterpreted, whether accidentally or on purpose. [1]

If you assume positive intent then no one would misinterpret your words "on purpose".

[1] https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-is-a-mission-focused-comp...

This is quite a surprise for a "mission-focused" company such as CB.

Racism deserves no place in modern society, and Coinbase execs should be ashamed.

Race grifters gonna race grift.

this is pretty much a every company thing...at every company i've worked at...not surprised

no paywall http://archive.is/ydbmX

This is a ridiculous political hatchet job.

> ... an “all star” culture, with mostly young white and Asian men.

Up until yesterday I was very confused at how a tech company could be accused of racism while simultaneously having a (presumably) vast over-representation of Asians who - to the surprise of some - are a minority.

I have since learned [0] that there are literally a large group of people who have redefined "racism" to "unequal distribution of privileges between white people and people of color".

I think it would be necessary for the NYT to be using that definition here to distinguish this from an ordinary labour dispute. I've seen non-black teams where half or more the people quit.

[0] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/white-fragility-de...

You can be accepting of one race and still be racist against another. Racism means discrimination against a particular group or groups. It's not mutually exclusive, you don't get a free pass for thinking Asians are great while still persecuting Black people.

So you're the one redefining the meaning of the word.

No, he's defining the meaning as you put it, or compatibly with it. And taking the claims in the article at face value -- not people's feelings, but the specific facts asserted -- it's clear Coinbase hasn't been persecuting black people.

No, this is exactly what he said, laid out in argument form:

Premise 1: Tech companies are often accused of racism (any, not coinbase, neither of us mentioned coinbase)

Premise 2: Tech companies often contain a much larger % of Asians, a minority

Premise 3: (implied) having a disproportionate % of any one minority makes you non-racist

Conclusion: Therefore Tech companies are not racist

The conclusion does not follow because premise 3 is wrong. You can be racist about other minorities even while enthusiastically supporting one minority group.

Premise 3 was not implied.

Then why is he "very confused at how a tech company could be accused of racism"?

My definition of racism (which I did not share, despite it being the source of much debate) is discrimination against a particular group or groups on the basis of their heritage (ie, stuff outside their control).

So I was confused, because companies (like Coinbase) are being asked to discriminate by raising black employees to an especially high-status position vs, eg, Asians, then getting called racist when they do not.

But if the definition of racism was redefined to "unequal distribution of privileges between white people and people of color" then the accusations make sense.

You're right, it wasn't implied: it was explicitly stated.

It wasn't explicitly stated, either.

I think mattmanser has argued the point well.

The first paragraph is the OP saying that the company cannot [0] be racist since they (might) have a disproportionate number of one minority under their employment.

[0] - "cannot without causing the OP confusion", at least

OP just said it seems [my words here:] not grounded in observations of their behavior, not some definitional impossibility.

> You can be racist about other minorities even while enthusiastically supporting one minority group

How do you in your mind construct a person with this kind of mindset? Historically, a lot of "racism" or other kinds of ethnic "othering" hatred was between very similar ethnicities - e.g. Nazis and Jews, or Japanese & Chinese & Korean. Even nowadays the "racist" far factions in the US are "white supremacist", and dislike pretty much everyone across the board - Jews, blacks, lations, ...

So my prior is that it would be highly unlikely to find a non-trivial number of people who are racist against blacks yet pro Asians, let alone a whole industry (in California, a generally left-wing state!).

I think you might be overlooking the fact that bias comes in different forms against different groups. E.g., a hypothetical racist might be comfortable around Asians because he thinks they're subservient and weak, whereas he might be uncomfortable around black people because he thinks they're angry and violent. If this hypothetical racist ran a company, it's plausible he'd hire Asians, but not hire black people at all.

Asian who spent a decade in Texas - numerous occassions where blatantly racist people would consider me as "one of the good ones" and ask questions like "why are Indians so smart?"; There are the good races and then there are the bad ones you see! In fact the racist ones were especially nice to Asians to try to emphasize they're not blindly racist, just against the criminals and illegals!

Techies are usually too naive about how the media works. This is a hit piece. Cui bono? Who are Coinbase's competitors? Who would stand to gain from Coinbase taking a hit?

> at least 11 of them informed the human resources department or their managers about what they said was racist or discriminatory treatment ... One Black employee said her manager suggested in front of colleagues that she was dealing drugs and carrying a gun, trading on racist stereotypes.

In an era of smartphones and viral videos, the fact that we don't have a single audio/video recording exposing the racism seems rather suspect. I'm not saying that is proof of anything. But something to consider.

The idea that coinbase, a silicon valley/SF/etc company, would discriminate, especially against black people, is hard for me to believe. But I'm open to anything. Certainly even if the company doesn't have a culture of bias, it may have a few bad apples.

> If the numbers haven’t changed, it’s definitely because there wasn’t a real intention to do so

This is a lie. Everyone who works in tech knows that companies are bending over backwards to hire black employees. The problem is the lack of qualified employees. Even unqualified black employees are being hired just to say "we have more black employees today than last year". It's been like this for a few years now. That tech companies had no real intention to hire black employees is simply a lie.

> When Mr. Armstrong wrote his blog post in September asking employees to leave their outside interests at the door, he was celebrated and praised by several tech investors.

So this is why we have a nytimes article. It's a political attack masquerading as a employment bias issue. Got it.

> In an era of smartphones and viral videos, the fact that we don't have a single audio/video recording exposing the racism seems rather suspect. I'm not saying that is proof of anything. But something to consider.

Do you regularly record interactions with your coworkers, on the chance they may say something incriminating? I don't, and I expect most would not try to record things at work unless they go into a meeting expecting it to end poorly.

> The problem is the lack of qualified employees.

This sounds awfully similar to the argument made against women: qualified women just don't apply! Unfortunately, that is not actually true. http://isitapipelineproblem.com/

You seem to accept Coinbase/Brian Armstrong's words without question. Why do you feel that the Black employees' words must be critiqued to hell and back?

> Do you regularly record interactions with your coworkers, on the chance they may say something incriminating?

If I'm so upset at work that I'm about to publicly call someone a racist? Yeah, I usually gather some evidence rather than just smear them.

Just throwing accusations works in 2020, however.

> Do you regularly record interactions with your coworkers, on the chance they may say something incriminating?

That's a silly response and you know it. If there was systematic racism, as the article seems to be implying, then yes, I would record it. I would record it even if it wasn't directed at me but someone else. If more than 50% of the black employees are leaving due to "racism" then of course I would record it. Wouldn't you? If a manager was being racist towards your co-worker, wouldn't you record it? Or are you a racist?

> This sounds awfully similar to the argument made against women: qualified women just don't apply!

No. I'm saying there is not a lot of black students getting CS degrees/etc. Hence the lack of qualified employees. It's a supply problem, not a demand problem.

> You seem to accept Coinbase/Brian Armstrong's words without question.

No. I specifically said I didn't in the comment you replied to. I said I am open to the idea of racism but I find it very unlikely.

> Why do you feel that the Black employees' words must be critiqued to hell and back?

The difference between you and me is that I just want the truth and you want to push an agenda. I think everyone's words should be critiqued "to hell and back". Including the ceo, black employees and most definitely the political activists at the nytimes. How else are you going to get to the truth?

Hmmm. A 'mission focused' company that bans discusses political and societal issues also has issues with diversity and how it treats its non-white workers?

I'll go ahead and file this in the 'In other news, water is wet' category.

It can go two ways:

1. Coinbase has real problems of discrimination

2. Coinbase is being targeted at a smearing campaign, for not playing ball with the ideology of de-jure of some circles. It is kinda like a repeat of 2003: "if you are not with us (for the Iraqi war), then you are with the terrorist" mantra of conservative circles to justify their war.

The truth, is probably somewhere in between. Also, NYT has become heavily biased/activist type of journal. While they don't straight up lie, they often omit many important details in their story, in order to justify their conclusion.

Just to be clear, the "ideology of de jure" is "treat human being equally regardless of their race, and do not disproportionately murder them by systems intended to protect them", right?

I mean the inciting incident for this was the protests against Police Brutality and Black Lives Matter as a response to the George Floyd killings specifically.

We're not talking about politically correct speech, or "safe spaces" or "cancel culture" or people getting fired over bad twitter joke.

The context here is a societal-wide movement to take meaningful action on data-supported systemic inequalities and discrimination, action that will require political will, individual will, and yes, major corporate support to have any likelihood of success.

If there were important details that were omitted, Coinbase had the opportunity to surface them in their widely-publicized pre-emptive rebuttal.

Also, the "if you're not with us, you're with them" mantra rests on the assumption that supporting the status quo means furthering terrorism/racism/whatever. In 2003 that was provably false given that there was no link between Iraq and Al Qaeda and no evidence of Saddam's supposed WMDs. I think the situation with regards to racial justice in 2020 is much more complex and not quite analagous.

It's important to notice that the NYC article is very light in details as well. Maybe they're keeping the details as ammunition for a legal battle, but until more is revealed to the public, it's hard to either excuse or condemn Coinbase. especially given the political campaign going on against it[1].

[1]: https://coinbaseopenletter.com/

They did:

1. They are not mentioning that one reason is that a team had transfered regions/states, and that might be the main cause of attrition on that team, and not the actual treatment.

2. In a previous article, NYT failed to mention at all that Coinbase had provided severance of 6 months (which is very generous). NYT made it seems as these employees were forced out the company and lelft out in the streets

a) Omitting key details, is a very malicious type of journalism, and NY Times has been doing that for a while.

b) Also, NYTimes has been engaging in a smearing campaign against tech, since 2012, when they realized that new tech media companies are their direct competitor, and their old business is about to be disrupted. Again, this is just a journal doing a smear campaign against their direct competitors...

c) Most news organizations have been ramping up 'click-bait' type of stories to build narratives that are as controversial as possible, as it is good for their viewership stats, and ultimately their wallets.

If you believe the 'follow the money' mantra, it is very reasonable to believe that NY Times is very biased, and untrustworthy. Someone might say it is cynical, but the fact that they are omitting details, makes them very suspect in their motivations.

> They are not mentioning that one reason is that a team had transfered regions/states, and that might be the main cause of attrition on that team, and not the actual treatment.

They did mention this: "When Coinbase announced it would be opening an office in Portland, Ore., several Black employees in the compliance department who worked remotely were told to move there or reapply for new jobs, four former employees said." They then state the sole white employee on the team did not have to relocate. That isn't necessarily hard evidence of anything on its own, but fits the general pattern described in the rest of the story.

> In a previous article, NYT failed to mention at all that Coinbase had provided severance of 6 months (which is very generous). NYT made it seems as these employees were forced out the company and lelft out in the streets

The departures described in this story all occurred prior to Coinbase's no-politics severance offer.

> Omitting key details, is a very malicious type of journalism, and NY Times has been doing that for a while.

I'm not sure what key details are omitted here. The rest of your argument, to me, is very conspiratorial. The NYT certainly has a point of view, and no one's denying that. But considering that NYT has had incredibly strong financial results over the past 5 years, I find it difficult to believe that anti-tech stories are all part of a secret smear campaign to undermine a supposed business competitor.

Please, don't dismiss arguments and call them names.

I was referring to a previous article... they omitted the severance package altogether, which was a key detail of the story and all other major outlets did mention it. It is clear that NYT is being scetchy-dishonest/has an axe to grind, or just plain sloppy/incompetent.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/28/technology/politics-tech-...

"Two months earlier, dozens of Coinbase employees had staged a walkout after executives were slow to express solidarity with Black Lives Matter protesters and minority employees, several workers said. In his post, Mr. Armstrong said employees who disagreed with his “no politics” stance could leave."

"About 60 Coinbase employees, or 5 percent of the work force, have resigned, the company said. A spokeswoman declined further comment."

They might have not lied on the article, but by omitting details they completely changed the narrative of the story to protect whatever cause they have. This second article, has an air of blackmmail to me.

I wasn't intending to engage in name-calling; I apologise if it came off that way.

I agree that the earlier story should have directly mentioned the severance Coinbase offered to employees who left. That being said, the severance was pretty tangential to the point of that earlier story: that different companies have very different policies on workplace activism, and Coinbase was taking a hard line on politics at work (no politics allowed at work).

That being said, the NYT omitting a salient but tangential fact in a different story about Coinbase written several months ago hardly smacks of conspiracy. I try to read news articles on their own merits, giving some consideration to the agenda of the publication (and, as I mentioned earlier, the NYT has a perspective just like every other publication). To me, Coinbase didn't really provide anything to refute the allegations in this story in their "prebuttal", and the portrait of the company that the NYT paints seems pretty convincing.

> Also, NYT has become heavily biased/activist type of journal. While they don't straight up lie, they often omit many important details in their story, in order to justify their conclusion.

That's also my experience with the media on the left. It's not straight-up fake news. But it's more misleading news. The infamous "women earn 78 cents for every dollar a man make". Which gives you the impression that a man and a woman both working at the same role doing the same work and woman makes 20% less than man. While in reality this is just an abject misrepresentation of the actual stat and weaponized for political gain. But unfortunately, this will not qualify as fake news.

Coinbase sucks for other reasons besides racism and libertarian ideals that suddenly are complacent with authoritarianism when it involves property law. Ask any libertarian like Brian Armstrong if they want to defund the police. Coinbase believes everyone should have equal access to an un-regulated digital Las Vegas, despite the understanding that humans have irrational behaviors associated with gambling (i.e. the sunk-cost fallacy).

Bitcoin NOT Coinbase.

Core to attitudes like Coinbase's (as described in the article) the theory that their only responsibility is profit for their shareholders.

IMHO, that theory is like many others today: It's attractive - it simplifies everything and even makes it quantifiable - but does not stand up to a moment's scrutiny.

Almost everything Coinbase has comes from their community: Liberty; peace; political functionality and stability; economic stability; the rule of law; property rights; the free market; the wealth of the market they sell to; the education and wealth of employees, customers, and partners (including the massive public education and healthcare systems - imagine how their company would survive Coronavirus without the public health system and eventual free vaccine); the physical infrastructure of housing, roads, food, power, etc., all kept functioning and safe; the incredible technology stack they build upon, from mathematics to basic literacy to electricity to materials to more proximate tech (the Internet, Web, TCP/IP, and of course the cryptocurrency technology). No matter what Coinbase does, they add only a sliver on top of what's come before.

It's just an absurd, transparent rationalization for selfishness to try to justify being a parasite, for not contributing to it and being responsible for making it work. Our community is us; nobody else will make it work. And it's sociopathic to say that, about part of our community, 'I don't care what happens to African-Americans'.

But being a sociopath and buying into this transparently false argument has become trendy and admired by a vast swath of powerful people in American business, as if ignoring problems will solve them. I used to wonder if they really were smarter than others, but recently I've concluded that they follow the herd and are easily manipulated as much as other people are (and I could have seen it earlier in financial bubbles, etc.). And as they've followed the herd in disparaging liberalism and postmodernism, rather than thinking critically about them, they've unilaterally disarmed themselves, willingly discarded the tools that would protect them from being deceived, confused, and led.

>It's just an absurd, transparent rationalization for selfishness to try to justify being a parasite on all that by not contributing to it and being responsible for making it work.

But we have an entire institution dedicated to solving these types of problems - the government. We don't want corporations trying to "make it work" or "contributing" - we want people to pay their taxes so the government can execute its mission.

The well-used argument that only government is responsible is, if you think about it for 30 seconds (try it - stop now and think about it) absurd, has never been true, is not how anything has gotten done, and never will be true.

It's a meme, a cover story for not doing your part. It's our community, our society. It depends on each person, every one of us, every day.

Eagerly anticipated and Streisandeffected piece but i got rather bored. I hope i won't be disappointed by the ensuing drama at least.

In other news, What is a crypto company even doing in SV?

This a great example of how being against "politics" is really just upholding the (garbage) status quo.

The status quo tends to be pretty good for the people who want a safe space from politics.

I’m not a fan of cancel culture, but I’ve seen enough to know that I want to move my Bitcoin trading elsewhere. Their prebuttal seemed odd, and now this article confirms the worst of my suspicions.

I’m not saying they’re racist, but they’re clearly not anti-racist.

Being "not racist" - AKA the unfairly-maligned philosophy of "color blindness" - is a perfectly reasonable aspiration. I shouldn't be any more concerned with skin color than hair color or eye color.

I find the "anti-racist" philosophy of Kendi et al. to be misguided at best and divisive and racist at worst.

> aspiration

That's pretty much what it is, and it cannot be realized in our lifetimes to say the least.

>I shouldn't be any more concerned with skin color than hair color or eye color.

And yet, there are others who will never get to hold those aspirations.

>divisive and racist at worst

Sad, yet unsurprising.

> I know it’s frustrating and distracting. Let’s keep focused on building an amazing company together.

One would hope an amazing company that doesn't cover it's ass when it turns out the executive couldn't give a hoot about the treatment of black people and now everyone knows

One could argue that it would be unethical to use your investors’ money as a political (or even idealogical) bullhorn.

Notwithstanding, such a position places zero restrictions on doing the same with your own money..but corporations make for more interesting headlines than the individuals that run them.

The fact that there are investors in the first place is completely because of politics. Other politics might have different ownership models.

I think it's pretty clear that one's moral duty to oppose racism far outweighs one's fiduciary duty to investors.

Everyone at Coinbase opposes racism. They just disagree with noisy activists about how.

> Everyone at Coinbase opposes racism.

That is clearly false, given the evidence collected by the Times, which shows an extensive pattern of racist conduct.

Do you think 11 instances in a company of 1,394 employees shows an "extensive pattern"? We also don't know how many of those were even accurate or corroborated.

When it's 50% of the black employees, yeah. When discussing issues in crosstabs, you can't use the overall number as the denominator. That's bad statistics.

Why are black employees the only PoCs that matter? Are you suggesting 100% of the non-black employees aren't marginalized?

To get a complete view, surely you need data from Asians, Indians and other minorities.

I am suggesting that even if no other employees are marginalized, the marginalization of black employees is an issue that needs to be addressed.

Why did you say that 11 employees of a single race reveal a "extensive pattern" of racism then? This seems to imply other POCs don't matter.

Because an extensive pattern of racism against Black employees is still an extensive pattern of racism. Being an exceptional employer to Asian or White or Middle Eastern employees does not excuse an extensive pattern of racism against Black employees, and vice versa.

Like, I'm not sure how to clarify this further. Being racist against only a specific race or races is very much still racism (sort of by the definition, isn't it).

I don't think it's extensive because of the very low sample size, the fact we don't know about each instance and none of it has been corroborated.

I'm also uneasy about letting black people speak for other POCs on this issue. In my experience, racists tend to be racist towards multiple or all other races rather than a single one -- hence why you dismissing other POCs views on it doesn't make sense to me.

Less than 1% is not "extensive" by anyone's metric, either.

At the risk of repeating myself, it's not 1%. It's 50%.

I don't see back people speaking for other poc. I see black people speaking about their own experiences, and you discounting those experiences because they may not be shared by other poc.

It also seems strange to me that you believe racism is always cross-cultural. The causes of anti-black, anti-middle eastern, and anti-asian discrimination by americans are all different, why do you assume they'd be the same. Things get even more complicated when you add other cultures to the mix. You presumably don't discount caste discrimination against one caste because the others didn't experience it, so why presume that someone who is prejudiced against black people must also be prejudiced against asians?

While there is racism against asian people in tech in the bay, it's usually model minority related things, or language based (or there are other kinds but less common in a workplace context). Less about being unqualified, and more about being different. It wouldn't at all surprise me if the multiracial leadership team of coinbase set the culture such that certain forms of prejudice (that affect the leadership) were not allowed, while certain forms of prejudice (that perhaps the leadership shares, or perhaps they are simply ambivalent about) can fester.

The NYT has long been complicit in promoting the divisive and racist woke/CRT cult. I can't imagine either side of this genuinely believes they are an impartial party.

if a house is burning and you have the fire extinguisher, you don’t get to be neutral buddy

you run a company and tell people they will feel included and then they face discrimination... well your house is on fire, you are the leadership and decide not to use you position to do anything

but yeah let’s make it zero sum and say that looking after the investor means that we can treat black people with some decency

Their original blog post ("Coinbase is a mission focused company") was an obvious dog whistle. How is this unexpected or surprising?

After reading this, I then wanted to reread the response from Coinbase.

It feels very unfortunate that Coinbase's response on Medium has turned off commenting. There is no way to ask questions such as what is the third party firm that investigated and are those results public.

It is funny that Coinbase says we talked to our ColorBlock ERG (the internal diversity group) to hear their comments and questions. Then, the very next sentence says Brian told them what he thinks, but nothing about what they think or had questions about.

> [Brian Armstrong] attributed [bad stuff] to being “on the spectrum,” according to a recording of the event.

Ah, the ol’ James Damore defense.

There's nothing in the article alleging that Brian Armstrong attributed "bad stuff" to being on the autistic spectrum.

The only allegation in the article is that Brian Armstrong did not speak or make decisions at meetings, and attributed this to being on the spectrum. The full quote is:

>"Mr. Armstrong rarely spoke or made decisions in meetings, the current and former employees said, leaving them uncertain about his opinions. In a staff meeting this summer, he said he knew his style made many employees uncomfortable and attributed it to being "on the spectrum,” according to a recording of the event."

There's nothing wrong or "bad" about managers who don't speak and make quick decisions at meetings. It's just a management style, and it's disingenuous IMHO to spin it as some kind of bad behaviour.

Obviously they were talking about decisions regarding the treatment and complaints of black employees.

I mean honestly what is there to think about? What are the other stakeholders he’d need to consult, racists? What other considerations, what is the other side, what downside is there about being against harassment?

Every educated person could issue a quick decision: reprimand the people harassing your black employees! So surely you can see why it makes “the inability to quickly condemn and reprimand harassers” is bad.

He adopted some really fucking stupid, untested, non mainstream cultural policy. Of course there are going to be consequences. Am I the only person who sees he’s bad at this job? And that it is a complete and utter insult to people with actual social disabilities when he blames “being on the spectrum” for being bad at his job?

> And that it is a complete and utter insult to people with actual social disabilities when he blames “being on the spectrum” for being bad at his job?

That cuts both ways. Discrimination on neuro-diversity is also bad.

> And that it is a complete and utter insult to people with actual problems with racism when she blames “being Black” for missing a promotion?

The autism-jab was in bad faith, and it worked on you. You turned his inability/carefulness not to make split decisions into a poor-faith excuse for being a racist tech bro oblivious to the struggles of others.

> What are the other stakeholders he’d need to consult

Labor attorneys, hopefully. An executive has a fiduciary duty not to make from-the-hip pronouncements (true or not) that might hurt the company’s case in court.

Fact check: James Damore never said this in his own defense and afaik didn't publicly reveal that he's on the spectrum until the Guardian wrote a profile of him months after the initial controversy.

Everyone in this thread is missing the forest for the trees.

Coinbase is a medium-sized privately-held company. Reading through those comments, they had some minor issue with a few employees and a relocation plan. This may or may not have involved discriminatory and/or racist behavior.

How is that a story in the New York Times? Or rather: Why is that a story in the New York Times?

It's obviously not because a particularly terrible thing has allegedly been done to those 15 people. This kind of labor case is literally business as usual for courts.

The NYT pursuing an agenda that has probably more to do with the company's stance on politics, and perhaps also an agenda wrt. crypto-currencies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com