Behind the Controversy at Basecamp
theverge.com
theverge.com
I see this assumption a lot, too, that banning political discussion is purely a matter of preventing partisan squabbling. The truth is, though, that banning political discussion means banning challenges to the status-quo, and maintaining the status-quo is often just defaulting to political conservatism and the current organizational structure.
I'd like to think that some people will read the statement, and new ones like it, in a more cynical and suspicious light, now.
If Chris doesn't like Stan because he worked in the military industrial complex and it makes it hard for both of you to work, you've just made the team and its dependents dramatically less productive. And at the end of the day you have changed fundamentally nothing about the core issue.
Companies have limited capital to be weird, to deal with difficult problems, and to take risks. And while some things can and should deserve attention, for 90% of things it will be business as usual, everywhere. The 10% that changes in different organizations is what matters.
I read the person's letter and looked at her profile. I'm going to take a prejudiced guess and say that she doesn't sound like a person that's easy to work with or willing to compromise, and when reality hits the wall that you have someone who's killing team and management morale, there isn't much more to expect than a prompt firing or suspension.
Some people are revolutionary activists willing to burn everything down instead of compromising; others are suck-ups and bootlickers that do little things but won't raise their voice. In the real world there's a huge range of positions on how to change the world. You can't expect an oil company to drop its oil wells tomorrow and switch to green energy investments in one year just because you demand it as an employee. If that's your expectation you're far better off resigning and working through political channels to kill off the viability of oil.
She should have frankly realized that her values don't align with the management and that she could A) accept that she apparently won _many_ battles and do the best to keep the political capital necessary to work on what matters most, or B) decide that the differences are irreconcileable and leave.
The verge reports that they spoke to a half-dozen people.
> You can't have a functional organization if you spend a substantial amount of socializing dealing with disagreements that make teamwork difficult.
The question is I guess, if the organization gets to define what discussions are "difficult", can they be trusted to do so? Why? In this case, they released this prohibition on political speech as a direct result of having a wildly insensitive list of "funny names" internally. I think its very easy to argue that such a list would weaken the organization by making it less appealing to people, generally, and more specifically, to certain types of people. Is anything gained from having such a list?
Personally, I think people should take a cynical view of organizations prohibiting "political" speech at work.
You can't have functional organizations where there aren't some common values about what's important and what isn't and where discussions, even about culture, aren't aggressively prioritized.
The greatest example I've seen is in grassroots organizations run by activists with "flat" organizations. Assemblies on everything, discussions about everything, rehashing and revisiting the same points over and over again, ridiculously petty feuds, incredible amounts of energy lost and just a handful of people actually doing the real work, because it turns out that everyone would rather fight their pet internal cause unless you have strong leadership that's willing to put a sock on it to actually _do_ things.
It's clear to me that the founders have extremely strong opinions about certain topics and that's where they put their energy for change and analysis and where discussions can be had with depth. Their values lie there, and for most other things they want things to run smoothly so they can focus on their most important values. It is extremely unlikely that a challenge to those values will go smoothly unless it is absolutely paramount in importance.
Would you go to work at Apple if you're a Free Software activist? Would you work at Exxon if you're a vegan environmentalist? At some point certain accomodations are not reasonable.
Some staff have basically encountered that, effectively, they don't share all of the values that management has. They can either: live with it, quit, or try to graciously let some air in the room to reraise the conversation with cooler heads and understanding that this just might not work out.
DHH's point on certain arguments making for toxic conversation are very, very real. I've seen it in several organizations. And strong leadership means sometimes drawing lines. What others do with said lines is up to each person.
Another political and NGO analogy that I have some familiarity with: if you're a third-wave progressive feminist militant, it is _extremely_ unlikely that you would allow TERFs (trans-exclusionary feminists, ie: people who consider trans women to not be "women") into your organization, because while they may consider themselves "feminist", their value system is just too different to get meaningful consensus on extremely important topics. That's just the way it is.
I think if Basecamp had been clear about the funny names list in their hiring process, their candidate pool would be a bit different.
People vent, and they do so without thinking too much because they spent every single customer interaction censoring themselves and thinking deeply about how not leave a bad impression.
DHH did the right thing: they owned up to the problem, finished it, and moved on.
If you're going to complain about every possible grievance and unsavory behavior you're not gonna be a person that will get along with peers.
Also, I'm not seeing evidence that the Basecamp employees that had an issue with this behavior were "going to complain about every possible grievance".
I've not extrapolated it to every position, but I've worked with enough industries to know that there many have very difficult customers and it takes a toll.
> Also, I'm not seeing evidence that the Basecamp employees that had an issue with this behavior were "going to complain about every possible grievance".
DHH alluded to certain analogies in the discussion of racial and ethnic prejudices triggering needlessly emotional responses, and frankly I totally agree that a lot of contemporary framings of certain discussions don't allow for tolerating disagreement. And if you're going for those discussions that are going to draw such strong lines, yeah, either you rein in the discussion soon or you allow your teams to be fragmented needlessly.
And the same thing happens with management. Management isn't going to be willing to entertain every single discussion. To me it was clear from the start that they had limited energy to discuss the topic and once that was up it was time to move on. They may be right or wrong, but being clear on it is better than being ambiguous or allowing the thing to continue.
This isn't objective at all - and illustrates the problem perfectly.
And the difference between management making those decisions and staff is that management is ultimately where the responsibility for those decisions, right or wrong, lies.
On subjective policies a lot of things will come down to personal judgement calls. The founders have spoken as such; and frankly if staff considers the decision to egregious, at this point, they're free to assess whether their values are compatible or not.
From the article:
"That confusion is compounded by the fact that, for a small company, Basecamp has taken an outsized number of political stances — all of which employees are encouraged to discuss. Most prominently, the company and its founders have been vocal critics of Apple’s 30 percent tax on in-app purchases. But it has also involved itself in politics at a much lower level: in 2018 Basecamp let a candidate for Chicago mayor use its office in the West Loop as a campaign headquarters.
Basecamp employees are encouraged to discuss the company’s own political positions — or, perhaps more accurately, the founders’ political positions — as much as they like. Keeping track of which issues of the moment are up for discussion thus becomes one more chunk of mental overhead for employees who are already struggling."
There's no clarification here - since they've banned political discussion and this is a subjective boundary - nothing has been adequately clarified.
And saying they're just banning the "needlessly emotional responses" is again, not clear.
But I'm not demanding clarity. I'm saying it is impossible to provide clarity on a subjective topic like this.
But having someone actually _telling_ you "yes" or "no" is infintely better than a boss that sits in the sidelines or tries to please everyone fruitlessly.
If the response to that situation was to have a discussion with that employee / group of employees about the need to move on and come to a resolution, instead of blasting publicly that politics and committees, and basically everything other than DHH and Jason having absolute authority is no longer accepted, we wouldn't be having this conversation in the first place.
You either put a sock on it and move or you allow this discussion to go on forever.
And yes, as the owners and founders they are entirely within their rights to run the company as such. It hurts some people to remember that companies aren't committees where everyone's word matters the same. That's just the way it is.
Aside from going down the rabbit hole of trying to define political that bogged down the other post on this...
This doesn't appear to be a ban on political speech at work. It is a "don't use the company boards / channels / resources to carry out political discussions; if you must have them, do them with your own resources and own channels of communication."
If HR has to step in and say "cool it off", then the discussion has gone too far.
In a company of a few score employees, the "Bob and Alice can't work together because they have been arguing about {topic}" is not something that is tenable. Larger orgs can move them around so that their differences don't impact the overall company. Small ones don't have that luxury.
But that's exactly why we ought to be cynical of organizations prohibiting political speech - they get to define what is and isn't political speech.
It doesn't matter if its political or not. Politics and religion are just the two easiest ones to get into a debate about - and religion is a protected class.
Whats more, if either of them are fired and they claim a wrongful termination because of that debate (on company resources) it puts the company in a very awkward place of both previously encouraging that sort of discussion and discouraging it.
If you want to debate politics, go set up a non-work email list or slack channel.
The office isn't the third place ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place ) and discussions of politics belong there - in the third place.
Discussions of politics in the office with managers and people reporting to you and needing to get along and not being able to leave without forfeiting a paycheck - those are things that make the office a bad place for debates on politics - especially the debate of the CEO's political stances on things that extend belong the product the company produces.
It doesn't appear that this is what happened in this case, however.
> I've read that reply many times now. I can't in my most critical reading find evidence or origin for the charges that this constituted protected-class discrimination or harassment. But obviously I'm not exactly an impartial party in the matter, so we followed our standard procedure regarding such complaints and sent it, along with all the context, to external labor lawyers for review. They concluded that no discrimination or harassment had occurred, and we shared their findings with the company.
> ...
> This was the second such discussion in a few months that had to be closed out following an acrimonious devolution that pitted employees against each other, and stressed these complicated power dynamics between managers and reports, all on a company-wide stage that invariably pulled everyone into the spectacle.
> Together with other acrimonious debates and inappropriate discussions with roots in societal politics on our internal communication systems, this formed the context that led to the recently announced changes. After going through repeated, worsening incidents like this, we took a hard look at why we kept doing this, and kept getting the same unproductive, unhealthy results.
Alice and Bob are having difficulty working together.
There are additional stresses of the power dynamics of having a manager involved in it.
HR and Legal have both been involved in this.
> So connecting this to the shootings in Atlanta, because the Asian victims of that atrocity had their names misspelled in news reports, is exactly the kind of linkage I'd like us to avoid when we analyze our mistakes together at work. It needlessly creates this extremely high-stakes environment where inappropriately making fun of a name like [customer name of nordic heritage] can be rendered as part of some larger narrative of colonialism and racism that it just does not merit.
Discussing the shootings in Atlanta is not work related.
Trying to connect the misspelling of the names of the victims in Atlanta to the name list and "some larger narrative of colonialism and racism" is something that doesn't belong in work.
Which brings us to:
> This was the second such discussion in a few months that had to be closed out following an acrimonious devolution that pitted employees against each other, and stressed these complicated power dynamics between managers and reports, all on a company-wide stage that invariably pulled everyone into the spectacle.
Arguing about colonialism and racism on company boards stemming from an act of violence that the company was not involved in in any way, shape, or form - that doesn't belong on company related discussion forms. Using the 'best name list' to try to make this linkage just makes things worse when HR is finally called in to say "cool it." It is not work related.
When HR is called in to say "cool it" repeatedly in more and more acrimonious subjects, it is the place for the leadership to do something to change the tone of discussions at work and put limits on what work related politics is.
The alternative often mentioned in this context is to have some kind of democratic system for setting a definition and then resolving disputes around it, but certainly you can see how we've already started down a path that has the potential to utterly consume an otherwise functioning organization.
I wouldn't begrudge a company for trying the above approach, but I personally wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole, and I'd appreciate it if they were as transparent as Basecamp has been.
I've never worked for an organization that has had a company definition of what is and isn't political speech.
Additionally, we should be absolutely cynical about companies prohibiting political speech. As this Basecamp example shows, they'll attempt to do so about workplace matters.
> The verge reports that they spoke to a half-dozen people.
Yes, but AFAICR there was only one link labelled something with "letter" in the article, so adding two and two together it isn't all that hard to arrive at a pretty good guess as to whom the GP meant.
It doesn’t matter how much the company dresses itself up as having flat hierarchies, in the end it’s clear where the absolute power rests.
So, I don’t know what to even say. Maybe abolish capitalism?
Can you concretely define how to do this and what the alternatives are?
I had no idea we were talking about such a small company (the company I work for is 10X as large and has a much smaller profile). This has clearly touched a nerve with HN (and twitter [0]), but we are talking about one very particular group's culture-internal disputes. I don't assume that any lessons drawn about it will generalize well.
[0] https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/1388212468510380034
I would also argue that Basecamp's "internal disputes" very much reflect the current broader political climate.
In that a large contingent on either side of any discussion feels that they can do anything they like out of moral righteousness?
I didn’t meant that my employer is exemplary or representative, just that it’s a literal order of magnitude larger and you’ve likely never heard of it; and as a result, I’m surprised that this drama is so high-profile. It seems disproportionate to its scope.
On the one hand, this could be because basecamp is an effective stand-in for broader trends. On the other, it could be that basecamp has done an incredible job marketing itself as an effective role model for other companies, and people are enjoying a bit of schadenfraude at its expense.
I think the second explanation fits better. This looks like a feeding frenzy to me.
Basecamp has made an impact on software and startups. They created Ruby on Rails. Their founders are outspoken.
> That confusion is compounded by the fact that, for a small company, Basecamp has taken an outsized number of political stances — all of which employees are encouraged to discuss. Most prominently, the company and its founders have been vocal critics of Apple’s 30 percent tax on in-app purchases.
The author seems to be using a weird definition of "political". That's a business decision by Apple, which isn't a political party.
They're criticizing them on anti-trust and monopoly grounds. Anti-trust laws were created through political means. Their enforcement was subsequently weakened through political means. They're saying not just that "hey, Apple is bad for making this business decision" but that "the government should do something about it that it isn't doing by current practice of enforcement of current law".
And hn discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26967835
>Same too with the other name that was primarily made fun of in that Campfire session: [another customer name]. It's a surname that follows the Nordic style of "Son of [that customer name]". And it's again funny for phonetic reasons, because it starts with [word fragment from customer name]. [That word fragment] is just a funny word!
Why is this so hard to understand? The best way to describe those employees, honestly, is they are social justice warriors, the very definition of it.
This is why we can't have nice things.