What Really Happened at Basecamp | Hacker News Reader

What Really Happened at Basecamp

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193 pointsjashkenas34 comments

It's too bad this well-reported piece of what led to Basecamp's "no politics" decision isn't getting as much discussion here as the initial decision announcement [0], as it is really a case study in poor leadership and decision process. Whatever the merits and tradeoffs of a "no politics" policy, it seems rash to jump into it for an incident that was hugely preventable and had nothing to do with politics:

> A day later, Hansson responded with a post of his own. He had conducted a forensic analysis of who created the document and how it had spread around the company. He called it a systemic failure on the company’s part. In a conversation with me today, he acknowledged that he and Fried had known about the list for years.

> “There was some awareness at the time within the company that that list had existed and it wasn't acted upon. That is squarely on Jason’s and my record.” The list, he said, “in itself is just a gross violation of the trust … It’s just wrong in all sorts of fundamental ways.”

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26944192

Seriously. Maybe if it had a more clickbaity headline like, "Basecamp insiders reveal a culture of contempt for customers" it would get traction.

And all this from a management team that's published how many books on their deep people management insights?'

This bit in particular:

Employees took a different view. In a response to Hansson’s post, one employee noted that the way we treat names — especially foreign names — is deeply connected to social and racial hierarchies. Just a few weeks earlier, eight people had been killed in a shooting spree in Atlanta. Six of the victims were women of Asian descent, and their names had sometimes been mangled in press reports. (The Asian American Journalists Association responded by issuing a pronunciation guide.) The point was that dehumanizing behavior begins with very small actions, and it did not seem like too much to ask Basecamp’s founders to acknowledge that.

Hansson’s response to this employee took aback many of the workers I spoke with. He dug through old chat logs to find a time when the employee in question participated in a discussion about a customer with a funny-sounding name. Hansson posted the message — visible to the entire company — and dismissed the substance of the employee’s complaint.

Strikes me as extremely unprofessional, childish, and really just downright embarrassing for him, for Basecamp, for Basecamp's customers who now have to have their own internal discussions about whether or not their vendor ESG standards are being met, and for the employees whose personal reputations are for better or worse now associated with this PR disaster. It's truly astonishing what a series of poor choices were made (assuming, of course, that this particular piece is faithfully telling the story).

I have always found it a bit odd that their management perspective holds so much sway when it is built upon their experiences managing what has always been a very small organization.

Was it wrong on DHH's part, though? Here's how I read it:

DHH: "Making fun of names is wrong and clearly a failure on our part that we didn't stop it. Please don't take extreme views though, it is not genocide, we'd like to believe we'd fire genocide-inclined employees

Employee: continues to argue that making fun of names leads to genocide

DHH: points to employee making fun of names

Employee: surprised pikachu face

What was DHH supposed to do? Acknowledge said employee, and fire them?

Maybe not post his response for the whole company to see? It's the first thing you learn about managing people.

Perhaps you imagine DHH's response was different than his actual response? Read it (link below) - do you still consider it wrong?

https://world.hey.com/dhh/let-it-all-out-78485e8e

Are people who formerly did shitty things not allowed to ever criticize those things point out their consequences? If said employee learned to behave better, why publicly shame them?

Unless you only care about shutting them up and "winning" the argument in front of your staff, DHH didn't help himself or the company at all. He actually behaved like a spoiled chikd.

Well isn't that convenient: make your own mistakes against social propriety and have your "come to Jesus" moment, then apply your normal code only going forward, despite people losing their careers over 10 plus year old tweets? Doesn't work that way when you are not the king. If they cannot find a moral code that seeks a common denominator when other moral agents disagree, then they should not complain about being hoisted by their own petard. Maybe a little more nuance and forgiveness is in order here, and if they are not capable of that, then shutting down controversial political talk makes a lot of sense.

Could you restate that? I wasn't able to make something coherent out of it.

Sure: what you say makes sense, don't get me wrong, it's just highly morally conceited for employees to think they have any standing to have made certain jokes at a time when it was tolerated, and now they they have changed their own attitudes about what should or shouldn't be off limits in the workplace, that everyone else should find these jokes beyond the pale as well, and be talked down to about what is or is not offensive. A blanket "no politics" rule is fair because it doesn't privilege any particular person's sensibilities about what is or is not acceptable at work. Obviously there is a gray area, but employees who demand these issues be dealt at work and then don't want to face censure for their participation in it in the past are just hypocrites.

You would shame them because they haven’t suffered any consequences for their actions and the very least they can do is not be hypocritical.

I think the issue is that much of HN doesn't want to read this reporting.

It's much easier to read a PR blog post and imagine that your own thoughts and feelings about Twitter or something are what motivated it.

> Hansson’s response to this employee took aback many of the workers I spoke with. He dug through old chat logs to find a time when the employee in question participated in a discussion about a customer with a funny-sounding name. Hansson posted the message — visible to the entire company — and dismissed the substance of the employee’s complaint.

If this telling of the events is accurate, what a petty way of handling the situation. Especially for an executive and company leader. It's like when somebody on Reddit digs through your comment history to try to win an argument.

100% agree, although digging through someone’s comment history on Reddit is totally fair game! ;)

In all seriousness this is an abhorrent example for a company leader to be setting. It’s incredibly disappointing but unfortunately maybe not that surprising.

This guy sells books on how to run companies with progressive culture.

This is another case study in why I'm instantly suspicious of any company that markets themselves primarily on how amazing and perfect their workplace is. The truth is never as great as the marketing material.

Well said. To me it is a red flag. The places that I have worked that had great cultures, never spent much time promoting it. The ones that have claimed they have a great culture, best place to work ect, were toxic in some way.

Yeah, the leadership shown here is just so poor.

I've been using Rails for nearly a decade, so I'm all too familiar with DHH's penchant for inserting his opinions loudly and everywhere. He can't seem to help himself, to the point where he was allegedly trying to win arguments against his own employees by digging through their old chat logs.

With this extra context, it feels very likely that David was one of the primary instigators in making political conversations at Basecamp heated and difficult. So rather than trying to address his own problems with engaging constructively with his employees, they decided to just preemptively shut down all further discussion.

At least that's what it looks like on the outside with the context of this piece, and being very familiar with how DHH engages in debate. I'm sure there's even more to the story, but I don't think there's any world where David comes out of this looking good.

I personally can no longer trust this company with my email archive on HEY after reading this. I hope it’s not true.

History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3078-trust-is-fragile

There’s no reason to assume it isn’t true. Journalists don’t write known falsehoods. Their livelihoods and reputations are based on the accuracy of their reporting.

Are you joking to make a point? Their livelihoods are based on the number of clicks they get.

Are you being facetiously reductive to make a point? Their livelihoods are based on the integrity of their reporting.

have you heard of these things called: tabloids?

They're usually full of lies and falsehoods yet the people who write them claim to be journalists.

Just so we’re all on the same page, since I wrote my original comment, DHH has confirmed this account on his own blog.

the person I replied to claimed that journalists don't lie. That's why I commented because some journalists do (i.e. tabloid journalists), I felt like they were offering a blinkered opinion.

Whether what DHH did is confirmed or unconfirmed is but one data point in a sea of billions on the subject of the general subject trustworthiness of journalists.

Well there is probably nuance to this as is it is with everything. It's petty. But maybe DHH had a bad day. Or the employee was known for hypocritical takes and this was the last straw. Or maybe it was straight up bullying from DHH and even worse than we know. It's kinda hard to know from the outside.

Probably the employee was extremely hypocritical.

E: Making fun of people's name leads to genocide. DHH: it was wrong to allow this. But it is also not genocide, so let's move on. E: No! Making fun of people's names IS genocide. Fire everyone who had anything to do with this because it's genocide. DHH: Okay, here is a screenshot of you laughing along in the company chat. Is it still genocide, or can we move on?

With that said, this list shouldn't have existed. If I were to see a coworker collecting funny sounding customer names, I'd tell him to stop and never do that again.

That's the thing. Someone acting in an immature and dumb way is not automatically racist. I've made my share of insensitive jokes because I was young, dumb, and lacking life experience. Then I grew up, in many cases by being called out.

The woke crowd does not appreciate personal growth. Unless you are born with God-like perception of every person's sensitive points, you are a shit-tier human for life. And the hypocrisy of that crew - case in point - is sometimes just breathtaking.

Having a bad day does not excuse ones actions, especially as the leader of a company.

If this individual did think of it as a mistake the logical next step would be to apologize for that and to take actions towards not repeating them. His response was to outlaw any political conversations and ask anyone who disagrees with that extreme policy to leave.

Its really not that petty. An employee was claiming that it is GENOCIDAL!!! to participate in making fun of a _name_... yet they did it too. Something something stones and glass houses no? It is hypocritical and they are mad DHH exposed it.

I mean seriously, making fun of names leads to genocide? How dramatic.

> I mean seriously, making fun of names leads to genocide?

Making fun of names because they are foreign or different? It's a step on the path, yes. It's a long path, with many actions much worse than making fun of names (such as racially motivated killings).

But it is a step down that horrific path.

> An employee was claiming that it is GENOCIDAL!!!

While I can't speak to what was actually said, this statement is false according to the reporting in the article. Nobody was quoted as saying that making fun of names is genocidal, but rather that it contributes to a society where genocide, mass killings, or targeted hate killings are possible.

I feel you're attacking a straw-man of the argument, to make it intentionally silly, in an attempt to justify the manager's actions.

Most of the names, if they were foreign, were European. Six names were Asian.

You can read DHH’s accounting of why he posted the old chat log. It really was not petty.

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