Comment by drusepth | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drusepth | Hacker News Reader

I wasn't expecting to like these changes after seeing a ton of tweets from rubyists I respect criticizing them, but after reading them... I love them all.

Companies becoming vocal political entities over the past few years has been mind-blowing and I'm glad to see companies starting to reel it back and get back to, well, being companies. They make products; they don't need to have opinions on unrelated things.

IMO people (even the people in charge of companies) can (and should) have political opinions! _Companies_ shouldn't.

>You shouldn't have to wonder if staying out of it means you're complicit, or wading into it means you're a target.

This line speaks to me a lot. I find 99% of political conversations at work are just pontification and/or signaling; I don't want to waste precious time at work chatting into echo chambers (or starting fights!) -- especially in a context where my opinion (or my coworkers' opinions) literally _do not matter_.

Seems like they handled the paternalistic benefits well also by just providing direct compensation instead. I've felt left out of benefits at companies in the past because I didn't want to use a gym, or buy certain things, etc. It's kind of the same vibe as smoke breaks at some jobs -- you're missing out if you're not a smoker. This seems more inclusive for everyone, and I really appreciate companies recognizing their place in a worker's life: they sign your checks for what you do during work hours.

All in all, these seem like really great changes in theory. With all corporate policies though, we'll see how they're implemented in practice.

>Companies becoming vocal political entities over the past few years has been mind-blowing

Are we pretending that all that corporate lobbying and political donations that have been going on for years and years was non-political?

There’s a difference between economic politics to be lobbied for and cultural politics to signal/argue about.

What's the difference?

Corporations lobby for their interests.

Employees lobby for their interest by negotiating with their managers/contract or organizing into a union etc. or if they’ve been seriously slighted by lawyering up.

Arguing about race relations, gun rights, cancel culture, policing, trans rights, income inequality at large is irrelevant to 99% of employees. They’re just venting opinions and creating drama over something that they can’t change and usually is irrelevant to their workplace. They can be activists on their own time or keep it in private channels. I think all the “no politics” people want to avoid is Twitter-like conflict and drama, not a ban on all things human or real advocacy for your own interests.

That's true, but you can't separate them when making donations.

If I donate to Candidate X, I'm taking her economic and her social policies at the same time.

In practice, this means that many large companies have to choose between issues they support. Microsoft may want lower taxes from Republicans, but they also want easier immigration and gay rights from Democrats.

If a company takes only an economic perspective, they may end up doing something morally repugnant to their workforce or customers, which turns a social issue into an economic one.

> Microsoft may want lower taxes from Republicans, but they also want easier immigration and gay rights from Democrats.

That's probably why they donate to both parties: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/microsoft-corp/recipients?i...

One could also argue that they donate to both parties because they want to have influence over whomever wins any election. It may be totally divorced from ideology.

Or because they fear being targeted if they don’t contribute…

Targeted for what?

Targeted for not donating, I presume.

Many times I see people cite these statistics as if they are the actions of the company. However. 90% of those donations are from individuals that work for Microsoft and list Microsoft as an employer. It’s cited towards the bottom of the page. I think that this mostly tells us that there exists a decent number of politically active employees and that a large majority of those donate to democrats. The remaining 9% of the donations are PACs which would have their own disclosures. I couldn’t find reference on that page for which PACs Microsoft is donating too though and which party those PACs are donating to.

Does economic inequality fall in the first or the second bin?

It depends. That’s pretty vague.

if the lobbying relates to the business/bottom line of the company, then it's "non-political".

I loved everything about what I read here.

I'm not surprised at the backlash as most of the Ruby community in the west has been extremely political.

#ruby-lang is famous for K-lining people who say "guys", for example.

What's #ruby-lang?

Probably an IRC channel (the original hashtag).

Like “hey guys, can anyone help me with x?”

That’s annoying.

I had to look up K-lining. TIL.

Really? That’s a shame.

I understand the motives (at least the official ones) behind those changes, and I agree with most of the points there. I would say that to some extend, joining social/political discussions by companies becomes marketing.

My biggest issue is that companies do not live in a politics-free bubble. The bigger the company the more it cares and tries to influence the politics, either publicly or not, because politics influences the business.

But business influences politics too. And I think this is a reason that employees want the companies to take a stand. A company employing 10k people can make a bigger impact than those 10k people themselves, so people want to leverage this.

Theoretically, it should be a bad thing, in democracy, we want every vote to count equally. But in sad reality, individual people choose politicians, but after that, the politics is shaped by powerful. 10k people are not powerful, the company they work for - may be.

> Seems like they handled the paternalistic benefits well also by just providing direct compensation instead.

This one's odd to me, because I thought the point of non-cash benefits was that it was much cheaper than giving out cash because the employer has more bargaining power than you.

Totally. Not sure about the US, but at least in Spain that kind of benefits (private health insurance, restaurant tickets, etc) tend to be a lot cheaper for the employer often just for being a company, but usually for the large quantities they work with.

Well it depends -- it's fairly simple math equation. The more paternalistic benefits you have, the more they cost, and the more people take advantage of more than one of them the more you risk hitting the value requivalent to the 3-5% promotion you have given that employee over 2 years.

Just my opinion, but if you were happy to take a 90k job because you live somewhere with a low cost of living for relatively less strenuous engineering work (let's be honest, Basecamp isn't pushing the boundaries of what can be done on the technical side, more on the product side), you're probably fine with waving off the extra 10k or whatever by thinking to yourself they'll pay for schooling if you ever do that (you probably won't).

Also, important to note that their 10% thing is performance linked ("profit sharing") -- so it pays for itself. If sales at the company grow 10% so they increase your pay 10% (and that isn't even necessarily what it is, they didn't clarify what the 10% is), the incentives are aligned and the company makes an outsize gain compared to each individual employee. It's a win-win-win, but most of the wins are on the side of the company, as usual. Compounding effects are much stronger than 10% yearly gain -- and what's even crazier is that you have to keep moving the company forward to keep getting the 10% -- essentially if you keep doing that, it's exponential improvement for the company, and each new person that comes in has to get on the hamster wheel. It's brilliant (which is why it's so common).

> a 90k job

Basecamp pays SV salaries to all employees regardless of location.

https://m.signalvnoise.com/how-we-pay-people-at-basecamp/

Just a theoretical example to make the numbers easier (rounding off to 100k).

That said, I also can't find anything anywhere on what people at basecamp are actually paid (nothing on levels.fyi or glassdoor, I didn't search very hard). I don't know what "SV salaries" means but not everyone in SV is making the average or median salary -- some people will be under or right at 100k, probably very early in their careers or when a company is taking a flyer on someone with no credentials.

Not at all. They probably just got tired of people complaining that providing benefit X that could only be used by some slice of the workforce was therefore unjust. Which is absolutely ridiculous. But here we are.

At an individual level, that's often true.

An employer might, for example, negotiate a gym membership or online classes for their employees at 70% of the normal price. If you take advantage of those benefits, you're basically getting a 30% discount on something you'd otherwise pay full price for.

To continue the example, however, if less than 70% of your workforce uses that benefit, the company is now typically paying more in total than the individuals would be paying to just buy that thing on their own. (Obviously, this depends on how your perks are negotiated, but even then you also have overheads in paying someone to acquire/negotiate/maintain these kinds of nontangible benefits.)

Not to mention it falls into the Gift Card problem of dictating what those employees get to spend their money on, instead of giving them the freedom to spend it as they wish, which devalues the per-dollar benefit every time there's a perk that goes unused. (Food for thought: second-hand $100 gift cards often sell for $50-75 cash online.)

I don't have any inside numbers on what % of people take full advantage of all of their company benefits, but I'd venture a guess that there's not as much cost-savings as it seems at first glance.

Basecamp isn’t a huge company. The bargaining power probably wasn’t that significant.

Dropping group-rate benefits is a sort of a pay cut, but only if employees were using the benefit enough. You'd have to do the math to see how it shakes out.

In-kind benefits aren't taxed as income, so benefit both employer and employee in that sense, but they're also more likely than cash to never be used and thus become a waste for both parties.

Note in this case they're giving the cash value of the benefits for one year only, so presumably this will save them money in the long run unless they end up having to permaboost salaries, but that is doubtful. Market rate's the market rate and I don't think many people seriously make a decision based on whether one employer offers discounted gym memberships or not.

Calling benefits "paternalistic" is both loaded language and inaccurate:

> paternalistic : relating to or characterized by the restriction of the freedom and responsibilities of subordinates or dependents in their supposed interest

What restriction do these benefits impose?

Let's just call them benefits.

From the article:

>2. No more paternalistic benefits. For years we've offered a fitness benefit, a wellness allowance, a farmer's market share, and continuing education allowances. They felt good at the time, but we've had a change of heart. It's none of our business what you do outside of work, and it's not Basecamp's place to encourage certain behaviors — regardless of good intention. By providing funds for certain things, we're getting too deep into nudging people's personal, individual choices.

The authors were not referring to benefits in general, but to a specific subset of them that seem to fit your definition well.

I understand the authors think there is a difference.

However, I don't see a significant difference between 'traditional' healthcare and preventative healthcare (e.g. a gym membership and healthy food).

> IMO people (even the people in charge of companies) can (and should) have political opinions! _Companies_ shouldn't.

I'm not sure how this meshes with this post? Basecamps founder has been politically active in a role representing the company, by talking to congress about big techs market power (i.e. Hey's fight with Apple). That part is not what they are banning here.

Part of this post's change is that Basecamp (as a company) is pulling back on publicizing political stances that aren't directly related to their business.

From the follow-up post @ https://world.hey.com/dhh/basecamp-s-new-etiquette-regarding...:

>Next, Basecamp, as a company, is no longer going to weigh-in publicly on societal political affairs, outside those that directly connect to the business. Again, everyone can individually weigh-in as much or as little as they want, but we're done with posts that present a Basecamp stance on such issues.

>Note that we will continue to engage in politics that directly relate to our business or products. This means topics like antitrust, privacy, employee surveillance. If you're in doubt as to whether something falls within those lines or not, please, again, reach out for guidance.

The founders obviously have strong political opinions on a lot of topics and I think it's great that they're going to express more of them personally instead of expressing them through Basecamp (company).

Those sent political opinions, those are naked self-interest opinions. They overlap, but the distinction is critical.

I love Ruby but I don't share a lot of common ground with Twitter hungry rubyists.

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