“About one-third of Basecamp employees accepted buyouts today”
twitter.com
twitter.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998127&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998127&p=3
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998127&p=4
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998127&p=5
(Posts like this will go away once we turn off pagination.)
Edit: as long as this is at the top, I'll include the related links that users have helpfully been mentioning:
What Really Happened at Basecamp - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26963708 - April 2021 (15 comments)
Changes at Basecamp - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26944192 - April 2021 (762 comments)
Behind the Controversy at Basecamp - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26963975 - April 2021 (32 comments)
The 6 months free money is hard for anyone entering a strong job market to pass up.
A lot of comments seem to think 1/3 left because of the no politics policy. 1 / 3 left because it would increase their wealth or give them the summer covid took away last year.
How many people would leave your job now for 6 months salary? How many could get a job tomorrow if they did?
A few probably left because they want to change social policy. Many are probably staying but still want to change social policy. The head of marketing, products and the iOS team are not leaving because of social policy.
Surely some of the employees left for ideological reasons, but 6 months of salary just for changing jobs is a difficult incentive to ignore.
Anyone who was considering changing jobs would have a hard time saying no to 6 months of free pay. The publicity of this situation also makes them attractive targets for other companies looking to hire out of the situation.
Of course putting 50% aside is huge but I think 20% is achievable and will still create in one year a couple of months to live without a job.
I find myself sometimes hearing people saying things like this “if my company will give me X salaries I will leave” but few will actually do it. I always push back saying how about in the next 6 months you put aside some money and take 1 month unpaid vacation. I listen the arguments why they will not do it and realise people say will leave job if compensated but mostly they dont walk the talk as there are other risks/loans/friends/promises that keeps them there.
If you read "Shape Up", you will realise there is a _lot_ of slack at Basecamp (I know, I've implemented it myself in one company), and a lot of space to think things through. Tons of autonomy.
6 months pay is not a good bargain for a great job.
It's a superb bargain for a job that has suddenly become very uncomfortable.
But even then...if you are a senior person that has been somewhere for the better part of a decade, you have surely both made and seen bad decisions made before. If you think that there is trust and mutual understanding and collaborative work is possible, you work through those.
(Not everyone in tech solely cares about money. And the ones that do siphon their way to certain gravitational points and/or do the jump ship every 2-3 years to negotiate a new salary and not a raise...)
It's a lot more likely that the 1/3rd that left both left because they were unhappy with the policy, and because they thought they could get jobs elsewhere. I would bet there are some people who stayed behind who didn't believe they could find a job this good soon but who also disagreed with the policy. Which, I get it.
6 months free money is not as much as you'd think; a new job hunt takes 3, even for talented, in-demand people.
Basecamp was a company built on reputation, and people joined on that and then the leaders just flushed that all away. Its not surprising that opinionated and outspoken people - the kind of people Basecamp courted - left.
It was about "what do we tolerate", "who do we welcome", "who are we as a company"? They didn't like their employees defining this for them, because it forced them to think things they didn't want to think about.
Not if you're one of the injured parties.
If you don't believe me, well, DHH himself agrees with this: it's a problem when you acknowledge the pyramid of hate, as he does.
What's at issue is that he acknowledges all of this, then refuses to recognize any wrongdoing, dresses down employees in public, and claims that "political talk" -- about the company, about whether these practices are correct, about whether this is an inclusive and equal place -- is banned.
They're not necessarily ethnic, some people just have funny names:
https://theawesomedaily.com/50-funny-names-that-are-so-unfor...
https://www.newidea.com.au/funny-names
In your opinion just how genocidal are these articles on the pyramid of hate?
I'll be frank- and I know that I'm risking the mistake of reading just what I want to read-, I think that those "counter to creating an inclusive workplace" and the general tone ("serious collective failure" etc.) are just nods to the social justice culture, and are meant to appease and concede some ground to the opponent. I don't think (also because it is clearly stated elsewhere in the same post) that there was anything intrinsically racist in that list, or anything that made it substantially different from those examples above. Apart from the obvious difference that these are customers, and it's not nice to secretly make fun of them.
The first list you posted has a bunch of "funny" East Asian names. That stuff was racist in "Sixteen Candles," there's no excuse for it in a modern workplace.
1) that the list was a mistake and that they've learned and moved on.
2) that "I was dismayed to see the argument advanced in text and graphics on [Employee 1’s] post that this list should be considered part of a regime that eventually could lead to genocide. That's just not an appropriate or proportionate comparison to draw"
3) that "the vast majority" of the names in the list were in fact of Anglo-Saxon or white background.
So he acknowledges, apologises and de-escalates. And points out that there is nothing racial about the list. What should he have done more, or differently?
To your question, I think it is the consequences of closing such a discussion that he leaves unaddressed. Does the company still value your opinion? Do you matter?
I honestly think, as DHH hints, that being able to 'rehumanize' might avoid even having to ask these questions.
It seems he clearly proved that those opinions matter, if he recognized the mistake, recognized the validity of some of the points made, and apologised.
What I've observed in this and other well known instances of "social justice" protests (I hope it's the best neutral term to describe them) is that there seems to be no endgame accepted by the protesters. No apologies are ever accepted without an explicit or implicit transfer of power to them. An example of an explicit transfer of power is setting up some commission or bureaucratic structure where the protesters or people they trust will be enrolled; and resignations represent an implicit transfer of power (the recognized power to make someone lose their job, which is not a small one).
Compare this with normal workplace dynamics. You can complain inside your workplace for many work-related reasons (workload, bad management, pay, etc.). Your complaints can be openly discussed, legitimately rejected, or acted upon. But in any case a change in the hierarchy or in the company structure is not something you expect. It can happen (very rarely) or not, and you might be satisfied with the responses or the changes or not, and if you don't like the answers after a while you might decide to move somewhere else. You don't consider unacceptable that the company doesn't see or address your point of view. At some point the discussion ends and that's it. This is not what happens on social justice complaints, and I think it's toxic (in the workplace, but in general everywhere).
What DHH neglects to address is that he's claiming the power to silence. "we had to close down this channel" or "discussions are being moved".
I like your idea of comparing this to a normal workplace dynamic. What if you get the rare change you wanted to see, but in exchange there is a new policy: no more discussions like this? Yes, your ideas about devops or whatever were fine, we're making a change, and now please never discuss our product development process again.
At the very least, does the change you 'won' feel genuine?
It's unprofessional, shouldn't have been done, we're stopping it, if people recreate it that will have appropriate consequences. Done. What's the point of even mentioning this trivial thing again?
I'm not even saying it's a cynical play, it's extremely easy to forget to reflect on it and just think you're doing the right thing all along. The outcome is still the same though.
Two other details I find interesting:
- In the post you linked to, DHH specifically talks about the Asian names on the list.
- The only attributed statements I've seen from any non-founder employees are from Jane Yang.
Might well be, and yet this doesn't mean the "white men" are always wrong. If the vast majority of the names in the list belong to Western whites, and only a few to Asians, does it make sense to claim the list is racist? I don't think so. And why should someone admit (and thus confirm) a non-existent but very serious moral failing, just to appease an angry employee? With all that it entails: once something has been confirmed to be a moral failing, the same judgement automatically applies to all similar instances. We're seeing where this is going.
On the contrary, as far as I can tell (i.e., based on information released by founders and employees), they didn't object at all to being called out on it. Everybody at Basecamp, the founders included, thought the list was wrong and inappropriate.
What they did object to was the discussion being escalated to genocide and that there appear to have been employees who refused to climb down from that.
It does become impossible to have a constructive discussion, particularly about sensitive or controversial matters, when some people involved want to escalate to the most extreme position imaginable. It tends to mute other viewpoints.
This used to be well understood on the internet, and is the reason Godwin's Law is explicitly stated (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law#:~:text=Godwin'....).
it feels like a problem with the discussions participants listening and speaking skills.
if someone immediately jumps to a negative extreme then its likely they feel quite emotionally distressed about the topic. if you notice someone is emotionally charged about a topic (either yourself or a participant) then we should seek to discover the shadow conversation that is being had. what is the true source of the emotional distress.
instead we see it as weakness and press harder.
removing politics won’t solve that.
It can be pretty frustrating when people debate in this fashion about work-related matters. E.g., nowadays I find it particularly tiresome when people frame technical discussions (such as one database platform or front-end technology versus another) in moral terms. It's incredibly unhelpful.
It has the potential to be even more disruptive for non-work matters (though the original "Best names ever" discussion was very much work-related).
Still, whilst I'm not especially critical of the position DHH and JF have taken - though initially I found myself back and forth on it - I do of course wonder if a more nuanced resolution that alienated fewer people (I don't mean on twitter and other social media, which is mostly just noise: I mean at Basecamp) could have been found than something that feels like blanket ban, even though it's not really.
Perhaps they tried - I don't know.
i suspect, a lot like becoming conscious of the impact the food we choose to eat has on things external to our local context (climate, animal welfare etc), technology decisions choices could be seen through such a lens.
as Frederic Bastiat wrote, there is “that which is seen and that which is not seen”.
Where do you work? Can I join?
More seriously, if you (have nothing better to do than) look through my comment history you'll find a discussion from a few weeks or months back where I chided somebody for saying (I paraphrase), "if you're patching directly in production you're doing it wrong." Granted doing so is far from ideal, and not something I've ever done with any kind of regularity, but occasionally it's the quickest way to resolve an issue whilst you follow proper process with a more involved investigation and fix.
I've found this varies a lot by company I've worked for: it doesn't happen where I work now much at all, but other companies I've worked at many technology choices are either "right" or "wrong". I just don't have the energy or patience for it these days.
in that case, yes. people get dogmatic about the strangest things. depending on my level of give-a-fuck i sometimes dive in deeper, “why do you think this is bad?” etc.
sometimes theres a decent learning opp either for me, discovering a new way that something can cause problems or for them, learning to apply some nuance to their beliefs.
And that's quite a long way from what I'm talking about, which are technical discussions that are more day to day concerns for many software developers in the industries and types of application I've worked with (e.g., desktop software tools and web applications/services in sectors such as telecoms, life science, payment processing, retail systems, data analytics).
Other companies are able to handle peer conversations without making such a broad and vague category as politics taboo. Like you can enforce a code of conduct and treat speech of genocide as being in violation and issue a citation for a minor offense and terminate repeated or hard offenders. You can also enforce stricter speech standards on open channels and announcements while allowing workers to have free conversation in their own opt-in echo chambers.
Nuking all political dialogs just feels like a bad HR policy.
I think this is what the policy amounts to though, right? They're banning political discussion on their shared work Basecamp, but not anywhere else, and are even encouraging it in other private and opt-in channels, as well as employees' personal blogs, social media, etc.
That's not actually what they've said though, is it? They're moving responsibility for DEI back into HR (they call it People Ops)[0]. I have pretty mixed feelings on HR as a company function[1] and choice of profession, but that's far from a ban on DEI initiatives.
(I don't dispute your comment that committees have been dissolved.)
[0] The original "Changes at Basecamp" blog post literally says, "The responsibility for DEI work returns to Andrea, our head of People Ops,": https://world.hey.com/jason/changes-at-basecamp-7f32afc5
The thing is, that is not very far at all. You were not involved in the situation at all.
Some employees have been critical on social media of the policy changes. None of them has suggested that DHH or JF thought it was OK that the names list existed. Again, all available evidence suggests that nobody who is still at Basecamp or who was there formerly, including the founders, thinks the names list is OK.
What exactly are you questioning here?
Because you evidently don't know any more than I do yet, based on that same body of information, you seem willing to insinuate a much shakier conclusion though you lack the courage to state it explicitly (because I think you know that it's not backed up by any evidence). You're not adding anything to the discussion other than noise.
The pyramid is intended to show that its foundational to hate.
Thats then being immediately taken out of context to equate stereotypes with genocide as a straw man argument. In this thread.
Nobody here or at Basecamp made such an argument. Its entirely made up to shut down discussion.
Thought is also the foundation below that. In fact, thought is much more requisite to hate rather than making fun of something.
Shall we update the pyramid and show that thought is the foundation to all hate so we can show it whenever someone thinks?
> What they did object to was the discussion being escalated to genocide and that there appear to have been employees who refused to climb down from that.
The topic brought up was the Pyramid of Hate, and I'm going to presume linking the list of names to one of the base levels of bias. DHH is the one who escalates that point to say, well this must be a fireable offense since it is on this pyramid with genocide on the top, which is really completely ignoring the point of the pyramid and not at all what employees probably said. An employee actually tries to explain this, that "dehumanizing behavior begins with very small actions". DHH ignores the point and completely unprofessionally and unethically (imagine the CEO of your company doing this) publicly shares some old chat log of the employee participating in making fun of the names, as if this employee wouldn't be aware of that and probably regretful of it.
So yes, an employee tried to explain what might be wrong with DHH's thinking and yes he did not like it at all and responded inappropriately and he was the one who wanted to "escalate to the most extreme position imaginable."
Here is the full-text from the article that described what happened:
"But Hansson went further, taking exception to the use of the pyramid of hate in a workplace discussion. He told me today that attempting to link the list of customer names to potential genocide represented a case of “catastrophizing” — one that made it impossible for any good-faith discussions to follow. Presumably, any employees who are found contributing to genocidal attitudes should be fired on the spot — and yet nobody involved seemed to think that contributing to or viewing the list was a fireable offense. If that’s the case, Hansson said, then the pyramid of hate had no place in the discussion. To him, it escalated employees’ emotions past the point of being productive.
Hansson wanted to acknowledge the situation as a failure and move on. But when employees who had been involved in the list wanted to continue talking about it, he grew exasperated. “You are the person you are complaining about,” he thought.
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."
Not at all true - they dealt with it extensively internally, agreed it shouldn't have happened, etc. But folks kept analogizing the list of funny name to genocide.
I think its been properly debunked multiple times in the comments here to say its untrue. Just wondering where it comes from that people keep commenting it so strongly.
That still looks like 3 months free money. That is a considerable offer no matter a person's politics.
Occam's razor is most of the people who left did so because they didn't like management, because that is the normal reason people leave jobs. However, it is very noticeable that if someone was looking for a reason to leave for any unrelated reason, this was the perfect opportunity.
1) Employees left for ideological reasons.
2) Employees left out of self interest.
There are reasons I believe it’s predominantly 1, but neither explanation is more convoluted. Misuse of an excellent thinking tool.
Seems like someone enjoying a break, and glad to have timed it to get a huge severance package.
Remember, it's not 6months pay to sit in prison, it's 6monrhs pay to do anything they want, including a hobby project, child rearing, a busoner idea, education... plus a few hours a week of job searching.
What people say on Twitter is hardly courtroom testimony. It is evidence, sure, but I wouldn't give it a whole lot of weight. Probably even less weight for being "incredibly vocal".
That sounds really long. It never took me more than 2 months from an initial contact to an offer (whether accepted or not) and sometimes less. I've seen people hired in less than a month - in fact, I've seen many times people hired before they left the previous job. Of course, it's just my personal anecdata but 3 months sounds really long. Any hard data to back it up?
Where is this? At Senior level in London it can take days once you're good and ready.
Basecamp is fully remote isn't it? So it could be anywhere.
I personally have a lot higher requirements for a new position than "a job that pays more than my current one". E.g. working on something that is worth doing, together with great people.
This takes a lot longer than "days" to find.
If you're a developer, that's enough runway to launch a side-business. After all, job-searching is hardly time-consuming (it takes so little time that people do it while already employed in a full-time position).
Yeah, some folk will sit at home binge-watching netflix for 6 months. I can all but guarantee you that I will have a product at the end of six months if I was unemployed for six months.
At the end of the time I'll have a new job and a product (whether the product actually makes money or not is irrelevant. Getting a product to sell is the first step).
Super tangent on the thread but if you want a product that people are interested in you might think about using a process like Nathan Barry's Authority or 30x500. Not that those are the best or only ways to make a product, of course, but they're at least a direction to take to figure out what people want, need, and buy.
And they can literally land in the company they want to work at in a week.
But, finding a job I want to do for many years probably takes a significant portion of that 6 month period.
Now, if I was already half-way out the door? Or also felt strongly about the no-politics stuff? You bet I'm taking the money and not looking back.
You do know that’s not the just world fallacy at all, right? You might be thinking of the fundamental attribution error...
edit: Excellent point below that the severance agreements probably included a non-disparagement clause, which would restrict what those who took the deal would feel safe disclosing publicly.
My guess is that some of this has been building and the 6 months of severance simply put it into high gear.
They cut a fitness benefit, wellness allowance, farmer's market share, and continuing education allowances. However, they paid each employee the value of the benefit for the year and they created a 10% profit sharing plan. https://world.hey.com/jason/changes-at-basecamp-7f32afc5
It's unclear how much money the 10% profit sharing is worth, except that now it's 50% better for the 2/3 of remaining employees. (edit: Yes, this is an oversimplification.)
Spicy.
> it's 50% better for the 2/3 of remaining employees.
Only in a very simplistic view.
Basecamp runs very lean, ~58 people before this incident, which for the number of customers (large) is a small amount.
Basecamp is going to need to replace ~100% of those people. That means hiring costs, costs for hiring the wrong people, and lack of productivity.
This will most likely cost them more money than they "save".
Given that they seem to view politic discussions and committees as non-productive and that most of the people that left did so because these were important to them, they'll probably account for parts of their work and their leaving as "lack of productivity" and "hiring the wrong people" already.
EDIT: From a company perspective - not judging either way.
All the people that left that I knew were incredibly talented and productive people, they are going to be a nightmare to replace.
I've read a bit more about the background to this now, and they hired someone in December who immediately went on an internal advocacy campaign for their personal politics. So, all of this, is the cost of hiring a "wrong" person.
Having to replace (currently) 30%+ of your org increases that risk, in addition to the initial costs of hiring all those people and getting them up to speed.
So, the message that is very easy to take from this (since the employees know they work for a profit maximizing firm) is that Basecamp's own expectation of its future profitability was that the 10% profit sharing was likely to be less expensive than the benefits it replaced.
So, yeah, its quite possible that explains some part of the departures as much as the workplace speech code. But its all part and parcel of the same thing: "We're taking away your amenities, more tightly restricting your behavior, and exposing your to more risk" is quite a package.
> It’s unclear how much money the 10% profit sharing is worth, except that now it’s 50% better for the 2/3 of remaining employees.
Assuming the 1/3 that left, including many highly placed, had no role in producing profits. Which would be kind of weird.
And assuming the fact of the mass exodus has no impact on the perception of Basecamp and its product independent of the actual impact the employees had on profits, which would also be weird.
Or that they thought providing a monetary benefit, which each employee is free to spend as they wish, is a more attractive packet and/or better due to the reduced management overhead. Also, depending on how much the benefits cost them and how many employees used them, this might still be a better option for both sides.
Sure, that's also an easy to reach interpretation. Unlike the other, not one that explains people being more likely to accept a buyout because of the change, so not relevant to the discussion, though.
If your employee gave you the individual cash value of your gym membership, it would be based on their corporate discount and the fact it was pre-tax. You would have to dip into your own pocket to renew that membership as an individual, as it would come after tax and be more expensive (joining fees, contract lock-in...). And what a shitty cop-out to call it paternalistic, as if the whole post didn't reek of paternalism.
A 10% profit share between 50 people is replacing a solid perk with an unpredictable annual bonus.
Minor points:
There was no corporate gym membership, it was just "Here's $100, spend it on fitness".
> A 10% profit share between 50 people is replacing a solid perk with an unpredictable annual bonus.
Basecamp was a phenomenally profitable company. The profit share was brought in after I left, but I'd have taken it over the other benefits if it had been either/or.
The benefits are a minor annoyance. They were likely dwarfed by the switch from Chicago to SF wages for the whole company, + the profit share.
This is about the policy and the way it was announced.
People seem to be making this way more complex than it is.
Exactly. These didn't use to have to be rules -- it was simply part of Professionalism and social courtesy. That wasn't that long ago, it seems.
Nonetheless, if something of a political nature did come up, either as a distraction that was affecting my colleagues (e.g. they're part of a minoritized group, or empathetic to one, and something is going on), or something the company was doing was at odds with my own political values; I would hope the company would accommodate the need for _some_ level of discussion.
An outright ban ala Coinbase, and now Basecamp, would send an extremely troubling message - and would prompt me to begin the motions of seeking employment elsewhere. A generous severance package would make it a much easier decision.
Corporate lobbying is going to stop just being for the owners
Though generally, it seems this kind of ban (of union discussion or pay) would be unlawful in the US,
> For example, your employer cannot prohibit you from talking about the union during working time if it permits you to talk about other non-work-related matters during working time.
https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/em...
As someone who hires I'd have zero issue with a talented person who also felt passionately about not working with people who enable racism or toxic environments. That's part of how you build good companies.
I would note as a follow up to this re: leadership and culture; 30 people left Basecamp today. DHH is hanging out on social media like it’s no big deal, back to talking about Apple. You know what’s consistent between the start of this incident and today’s behavior? The derisive and dismissal treatment of people that have been a part of his company for many years.
People with strong opinions have strong opinions about a lot of things, and are good to bounce ideas off of
Mind you, I'm friends with people who are fans of gun rights, free speech, and ensuring abortion access
I love a good debate with someone who disagrees with me in good faith, but that other sort of person is just exhausting and counterproductive to debate anything with.
This sounds like I agree with what the founders did here. I don't at all. But I understand why they did it, and I don't disagree with their intentions.
They can probably still make a fizzbuzz, which puts them far above most candidates
2. It's an exceedingly easy exercise meant out to weed out those who plan to learn to code on the job and hop to a new one when they are busted.
( You might ask what are the two twists in the original fizbuzz task:
- you have to know about the existence of modulo operator and how it can be used to test for dividibility. If you don’t know that one trick then fizbuzz is a lot harder for you.
- If you are the kind of person who translates the human sentences of the task description to code word by word then you can get into a kind of garden-path situation where you have to backtrack once to succeed. What do I mean by that? You read “For every number dividable by 3 print fizz”, you write “if i%3==0: print ‘fizz’”. Then you read the next sentence “For every number dividable by 5 print buzz” and you type “elif i%5==0: print ‘buzz’”. Then you read “for every number dividible with both 3 and 5 print fizbuzz” and you might translate that to “elif i%3==0 and i%5==0: print ‘fizbuzz’” but that of course would never execute, you have to move the translation of this last sentence to be the first condition checked for it to have a chance. Not anything I would call really challenging, but it requires a certain way of thinking to recognise that this is a problem and to solve it.
)
It's sad that Fizzbuzz is used at all. At present, using Fizzbuzz selects for people who either (1) Are math nerds or (2) Are already in the "in group" and possibly read HN. That probably makes a small contribution to the lack of diversity in tech.
Implementing fizzbuzz successfully requires someone to have the most basic understanding of cause and effect, the ability to reason from that understanding, and the ability to reason abstractly. Nearly all forms of programming require that. So yes, fizzbuzz selects people in the "in group"- the in group of people who are actually potential programmers.
It would be like testing if someone knows about a "crankshaft" in a job where they'll be exclusively working on Teslas.
Yeah completely agree. Not all things people call "programming" are the same. Only jobs that require someone to think in this way should have tests filtering for it
That may be true, but as a web dev, I use the modulo quite frequently. Just yesterday I used it to implement some code where the client wanted to insert ads after every sixth paragraph in a page body, but not if there would be two paragraphs or less left on the page after the last ad. I can't imagine what kind of goofy hackneyed solution I would have ended up with if I didn't know about `%`.
Before CSS had :even and :odd pseudoselectors, we also commonly used it to zebra stripe tables.
Web dev isn't typically as math-y as, say, game dev, but I'd encourage anyone getting into it to at least learn the modulo beyond basic algebra stuff.
Will it? I feel like I've had dozens of conversations about the coof (most recently, about getting the shots and related stuff - I had some bad side effects to mine that caused me to miss a half day of work) without politics being a part of it. Do people not even try anymore?
Just the very idea of bringing up vaccines is "political" to those that think vaccines are a means of the state to control the population. You don't think it's political, but it is to someone. And that person, under the guise of a "no politics aloud" policy could seek to silence you from any references to the benefits of the vaccines, it's side effects, etc.
.. This is a comical generalization of an entire industry which spans beyond US..
I have worked in plenty on companies (big and small) where politics was simply left outside of business and everyone was fine with simply discussing the actual system design, infrastructure and data models.
Employees were simply not permitted to attempt to convert others to Christianity or initiate flame wars regarding abortion laws.
There is a time and a place for politics and a business setting is just not it.
I think this is a great move by Basecamp and I hope more companies follow. At a minimum, their stance is now crystal clear and there will be high cohesion between employees and management.
How do capture gender in the database?
That's a political debate. Do you care that you can't correctly store 'foreign' names? Political.
Do you offer Catalan too when you translate to Spanish? Political.
Do you include disputed territories on your countries lists or allow people to enter 'other'? Political.
Privacy protection? Political.
Systems are shaped by political debate and in turn shapes it. Your decisions will have a political dimension whether or not you like it.
And that is before considering all of the internal cultural and behavioural issues that are inherently political.
As for Basecamp, I think they've set themselves up for further conflict and turmoil. If I was there and hadn't quit yet, I'd consider it now because such a huge departure will destabilize oth.the company and internal culture for a long time.
There are quite a few that don’t interact with global customers and literally never have to even discuss those things.
E.g. I had a contract to do a communications system to relay debug mapping data from an autonomous submersible. For a military research institute. It was inherently political because I had to consider if I was ok with working a project that might end up being used in armed conflict in the future my code certainly wouldn't).
Or when I worked on code to maintain the quality documentation for a systems integrated that delivered backend systems for the police. I had no problems with that, but I might have if it'd been somewhere where the police had a worse reputation than in Norway where I did that job.
I've worked on billing systems where we had to decide on anti-fraud measures. Sounds non-political, until you realise it often involves broad blocks that stereotypes behaviours based on factors that very easily ends up effectively profiling users.
I could list many more. I've yet to work on a single software system where the higher level architecture did not involve consideration of political issues whether explicitly, or implicitly. I'm sure there are some, but I think there are far fewer than you imagine.
Pencils can be used to write manifestos that result in countless deaths. Is the pencil manufacturer responsible for that?
I worked for a company that had train control systems as a product. How do you suppose that was political? Do you think we should have spent more time considering that maybe we shouldn’t have been making trains safer because we could accidentally save the next Hitler?
It’s a name, it’s generally not hard to change, and if it makes someone happier why not main is shorter to type! But people still push back against it for.. reasons
It's pretty simple, actually
Person A: We need to do thing X
Person B: Why?
Person A: Because I am morally superior to you, and I say so
You really don't understand why person B would push back against tacitly accepting that they were the moral deficient? It's the same reason people dislike vegans who say "for moral reasons", they're asserting that everyone around them is immoral, and people find it obnoxious.
“Because it reminds people of slavery which is still fresh in the minds of many and makes some uncomfortable”
“Oh, Ok” changes it and moves on with her life
Another way of looking at it is “why not?”
Well, "main" is like "mainmast" of the sailing ships that brought the slaves over.
See, once you start this game, it never ends. The master in "master branch" was never anything to do with slavery - and everyone knows it. No one in the world equated committing to master with endorsing slavery, but that is what you are accusing them of. Same as master bedroom and master's degree and mastering a skill and countless other examples. And why is "master" problematic but not "owner"? After all the common term was not "slavemaster" but "slaveowner" remember. Shall we do branch owners or code owners or file owners next?
Another way of looking at it is “why not?”
Why not leave it as it is then? Why step onto a never ending treadmill of arbitrary changes for change's sake?
Anyway I'm not trying to convince you here (I get the feeling that that would be pointless) I am merely explaining to you the behaviour you have observed but don't understand the motivation for.
If you won’t do so that’s fine, but be honest why you won’t, your arguments keep changing first it was their “moral superiority” And now “where will it end/its change for changes sake” which both sound like excuses to me
What are you implying that my "honest" reason is, of course you are insinuating that I am a closet racist. And it is just change for the sake of being able to demand a change, if you are being honest, you get a vicarious thrill out of the power you get and the sense of superiority it gives you and you won't stop, and we both know it.
You keep jumping to extreme conclusions and assumptions which is kinda hilariously sad as that's what you accuse "the other side" of doing
What you are missing - because I never mentioned it, and I should never have to mention it - is that I actually am a BAME or a POC or whatever. Not only does the word "master" not make me feel uncomfortable, noone ever bothered asked me if it did before starting to agitate for this change. Now you may be one too, I don't know, and feel free to change it to anything you want in your own repos if a word upsets you so much (and you should rid yourself of all other problematic words too, like "owner"). But don't kid yourself that you're doing it for the benefit of the wider BAME community. And don't kid yourself about your reasons for telling everyone about it.
> don't kid yourself about your reasons for telling everyone about it
You really seem to have a hard time grasping that there was nothing more to it other then being raised as a concern by POC so i just did it and moved on with my life. The only reason i mentioned it was to use it as an example of how hard it can be to escape politics entirely in the workplace and this entire conversation has really hit that point home.
Also does a single POC represent their entire race? Isn't that itself racist to think that way? In any population you'll find people who can claim to support literally anything.
Where you've taken us: You shouldn't call your main branch master
Except this isn’t how the fantasy plays out in real systems. This breaks builds, readmes, packaging, etc and takes a non-trivial amount of time to fix.
What are some of the few?
The idea that any organisation can be apolitical is fundamentally flawed. At most you can enforce the (political) choice of pretending you're not political by shutting down discussion of it and leaving it exclusively in the hands of the executives and board. This appears to be the avenue Basecamp has taken. They are free to pretend that's an apolitical choice, and we're free to point out that it's bullshit.
Obviously, but that isn't my argument. My argument is that when you create a culture that approaches political decisions from a profit perspective, it is easier to make a profit.
> And in many cases there isn't going to be a choice that maximises profit without taking into account the PR effect of choices, which again devolves into politics.
This is wrong. You are conflating understanding a political position with believing in a political position. Understanding a political position doesn't require you to believe in it.
I suggest you read up on the politics of the use of names in the context of slavery in America as a starting point for understanding why names has a long history of being inherently political.
My understanding is that these people did not leave because they were not allowed to discuss something innocuous, they left because they were not allowed to preach their belief system at work.
> you'll still occasionally discuss things like municipal broadband or the Affordable Care Act.
And if the woke crowd were able to "discuss" something without calling everyone who refused to join their belief system names, then this wouldn't be a problem.
That’s more true of a highly politicized workplace if you have the “wrong” opinions.
Depends on how you frame this. Describing it as "sudden change of company culture", "lacking leadership communication" or "wanted to change fields and took the opportunity" can both be valid and inoffensive to either side.
On the other hand, there's a chance your hiring manager will feel similarly strong about politics, especially in SV, so even your framing might work.
With that change they also got rid of the D&I committee established with employee participation. If you're gonna tell your employees 'you have a seat at the table' on something sensitive like D&I, then eliminate that group with no warning, people are gonna feel some kind of way about it. Even Palpatine didn't dissolve the Imperial Senate right away.
If I worked with a colleague from Iraq can they report me to HR for having been in the military and bombing their country?
I’m sure we can think of lots of cases where it is or isn’t easy to say yes to “report to HR”. It’s a tough topic and the answer to it changes over time and based on geographic social norms.
I think that's a big mischaracterization of what happened.
For one, it seems a lot of the issue was about the 'funny names list' and heated debate around that. It wasn't people going to war over liberals vs conservatives. It seems DHH took particular umbrage at someone brining the Anti Defamation League's Pyramid of Hate into the conversation.
Secondly, Basecamp had allowed the creation of a Diversity and Inclusion committee with at least a dozen employees joining. DHH and Fried decided to unilaterally dissolve it. If you're going to give employees your blessing for a D&I group then just axe it with no discussion or warning, some people will be put off.
Then there's the fact that employees found out about this group of changes via blog post. That betrays a lack of empathy/care for employees when implementing a set of big changes.
Lastly, saying 'no politics or societal issues' because you, as the owners of the company felt uncomfortable, is a recipe for ruining the culture of a company like Basecamp. For some employees, they can't get away from politics and societal issues because it affects them every day and their very existence has been politicized. More savvy leaders could've established a better climate of respect and politeness around any 'political' discussion rather than a heavy handed and clumsy edict.
This wasn't about a bunch of people endlessly bickering about politics at work, it's about company owners who took a manageable issue and turned it into a public crisis. Companies several orders of magnitude larger manage to accommodate employees having political conversations without making messes like this.
What a lame excuse for politicizing everything.
I'm in those shoes. I still won't interview anyone who left their previous company over an inability to keep their religious/political beliefs away from work.
It's a double whammy if the person in question left because they couldn't proselytise to their co-workers.
How will you be able to tell why they left without interviewing them?
Government policies may be unfair, unconstitutional, or discriminatory to different groups of people. But that’s not politicizing people’s “very existence.” That sort of rhetoric is just a way to dial up the temperature of political debates by equating any negative impacts with existential harm. People have a right to freely debate things like who the government will let into the country, what benefits it will provide to whom, etc.
[1] Except unborn children, whose very existence has literally been politicized.
People are being killed by gun violence, police violence, gang violence. Isn't it fair for people affected by these things to feel their lives have become political footballs?
Their presence in a country they’ve entered illegally is the subject of political debate, but that’s not equivalent to a threat to their “very existence.” Calling it that is an attempt to emotionalize a basic function of sovereign nations: policing their borders. It’s something every country does—including the countries from where these undocumented immigrants came.
> People are being killed by gun violence, police violence, gang violence. Isn't it fair for people affected by these things to feel their lives have become political footballs?
If you’ve been killed by gun violence or police violence or gang violence, then you’re dead. If you haven’t, then you’re debating government policy, not the fact of your “very existence.” Even mundane government policy has life or death implications. People running red lights kills six to ten times as many people each year as mass shootings. But framing a debate over stoplight timing in terms of peoples’ “existence” would be a way to shut down rational policy debate.
As an Asian person, I’m much more likely to be killed or attacked by a repeat offender than by the police. But that doesn’t mean I can shut down a discussion of eliminating bail by saying it’s a “threat to my very existence.”
Unless it’s your family/friends who have been? “How was your weekend Mary?” “My husband/kid was shot in the back by police”
I find it sad how your arguing how people’s existence can’t be political or if they are it “doesn’t matter” because they unborn or dead while neglecting people who would still be affected daily like family or a mother who wants to get an abortion but can’t/has to deal with the assholes out front protesting
Is any talk of bail or parole reform an existential threat that denies people's right to exist?
And no? I don’t think I gave any indication it would?
About 80 / year police shootings of unarmed individuals.
There were about 19,000 homicides last year.
1 in 55 people people are on parole or probation. So even if we make the ludicrous assumption that people on parole or probation have exact same rate of violent crime as non probation or paroled you still end up with 345 homicides by people on parole or probation.
I assume a rate 2-3x the base rate for population would be a completely reasonable assumption, giving us ~10x more homicides by people on probation/parole.
The point is if police shootings rise to being an existential threat, than criminal justice reform is at least a much of an existential threat.
and the rest of your comment is conjecture and assumptions with no facts to back them up
Putting those semantics aside, the point was, some people's lives are affected by politics (I'd argue all are) and you can't expect them not to talk about their lives, including the effect of policy and politics on them. Well, you can, but apparently 2/3 of your workforce will decide that's not cool and leave.
Of course people’s “lives are affected by politics”—often very significantly. That’s a very different statement than saying people’s “very existence is politicized.” That’s just a rhetorical device to exaggerate the personal impact of political issues.
Like I guess you could argue it's the difference between ethnic cleansing internally and invading a neighbor to engage in ethnic cleansing, but that's sort of not a hugely important distinction.
Which would seem like a very important distinction if it was my existence.
This thread was in part, but not solely, about undocumented immigrants, and sure maybe they have a place they can legally be sent to. But the same argument has been used for racial separation ("No, we don't want to subjugate black people, we just want to have a white ethnostate where the black people will be forced to move". The part not said aloud of of course, being what happens if someone wishes to stay where they have lived their whole life).
So yes, I think the distinction between "will be kicked out by force" or "will simply be shot in the street" can be a lot more tenuous than you're suggesting.
But even still, if we're discussing any group that isn't undocumented immigrants (or even potentially citizens whom the president wanted to strip that right from) the question of "where do they go" becomes even more important, because there usually isn't a place they can go.
I think what you're actually asking is if I feel that it is just to enforce immigration laws on people already in the country, and generally speaking no, I don't think deportation is a just punishment for trying to be a productive member of society but overstaying a visa or similar.
Deportation isn’t a “punishment.” It’s restoration of the status quo ante in response to someone entering illegally. If you build a house on someone else’s land, they can force you to tear it down. That’s not a punishment, it’s just undoing the effect of the illegal act.
I'm not, using common definitions. They just happen to usually be the same because culture and ethnicity are often very tightly coupled.
The factors you're talking about (border sovereignty and determination of citizenship/residency) are all related to being a "state" and have relatively little to do with being a nation, which is just a shared culture. A nation state is the term for a state, the political entirely, whose population shares a broadly homogenous culture. If you choose to define the US as a nation-state, then it blunts the "nation" portion to the point of redundancy, as the culture of sharing a government is enough to define a nation. Do a bit of research here and at a minimum you'll find that the US being a nation state is widely disputed. But we can agree to disagree because again, everything you're talking about is political determination related to statehood. Nation is irrelevant.
> Deportation isn’t a “punishment.” It’s restoration of the status quo ante in response to someone entering illegally
This is weak semantics. A goal of retribution is not a requirement for some act to be a punishment. It is simply "the imposition of an undesirable or unpleasant outcome upon a group or individual, meted out by an authority as a response and deterrent to a particular action or behavior that is deemed undesirable or unacceptable". Defacto it is a punishment. But this again doesn't matter even if you choose to find it not a punishment, it is still unjust. It may also be a return to the status quo, but so too is, for example, returning someone to prison for a parole violation, and I think you'd be hard pressed to define that as anything but a punishment.
> If you build a house on someone else’s land, they can force you to tear it down.
I'm dubious of this. You likely could not compel me to tear it down. You could sue to cover the costs, but if I had no money there are limits on what you could do.
I'm contending that deportation is similar. It, at a minimum, is not a just way to "restore the status quo".
The country of which you’re a citizen and where you’re legally allowed to reside?
Their ability to live safely is coupled fully to their ability to live safely in the us. Immigration was one, but not the only, example GP mentioned.
19,000 people killed last year
0.6% of the population is trans according to wikipedia.
So we should expect 114 trans murder victims if they had the same rate of being a victim of homicide at the standard population
Looks like they're safer.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_Uni....
Also I said about as safe. Your risk of being involved in a homicide is ~1%. You'd need to be at a much higher risk of being killed before this impacts your overall safety.
It's not the same as being dead, but it's analogous to being imprisoned or incapacitated.
To make it for home a little more, I'll ask, where would you go if you got deported?
> Except unborn children, whose very existence
To use your same disingenuous measure of argument, no their existence isn't politicized, whether or not they are "persons" (or alive) is. Fetuses quite obviously exist, everyone agrees on that.
The HN guidelines suggest you steelman the arguments of people who you respond to. I don't think you're doing that if your entire argument boils down to a weak rhetorical disagreement about how precisely to define "very existence". Since certain forms of discriminatory policy are politicizing people's very existence.
I also don't think people ever widely suggested Muslim people's existence had been politicized, so that's simply a strawperson.
But you're arguing that deciding whether or not a fetus or unborn child is a person is not an existential issue, but when someone can choose to get gender reassignment is.
One is very literally an argument about personhood and the right to terminate and the other is about children's and parents right to choose appropriate medical care.
The differences are that regulating abortion harms a third party, the woman, while allowing gender reassignment doesn't.
To expand on this - If a trans person has a coworker who consistent and deliberately mis-genders them, there's no way for the person to have a discussion about it that's not political.
The same is true for people in same-sex relationships. You can't just mention your spouse like a straight person would without it being political.
But is it the characterization that other company HR teams / managers will believe?
Citation needed. Did you talk to all of them? I have only seen people say the opposite.
A couple scenarios:
1) Employee A leaves Basecamp and says "I'm leaving for the severance package, not the policy change", and actually takes the severance
2) Employee B leaves Basecamp and says "I'm leaving because of the policy change, not the severance", but actually takes the severance package.
Employee B will both get the social virtue points of standing up for something AND collecting on the nice severance package.
Employee A may experience social blowback if they explicitly stated they weren't incensed by the policy change.
I would expect to see more Employee B's than Employee A's publicly.
Taking money that is offered is well respected across pretty well all political groups, especially those that are in charge of hiring
Taking money isn't controversial with anyone other than extreme Marxists.
My sense is that DHH is just a terrible boss.
Note the "changes" [1] are not just "no politics" but also "no more committees" (of any kind at all; that is, no authority or responsibility except individually along line-of-report hieararchy), no more 360 degree reviews (no way to formally give feedback to your boss), and no more bringing up past decisions you disagreed with (!). Basically, no more employee input in anything, and a new focus on "insubordination" (they're not using this word, but these policy changes are like -- do your job, don't tell us what your opinion is about anything else in the company especially if you don't like something).
They also introduced a 10% profit-sharing plan though, which could be real money?
I don't think the people leaving -- some of whom had been there for years -- are doing it for money. I think that's not usually why people leave a place, especially when leaving without another job lined up.
I don't think it's really about the "no politics at work" policy either.
I think it's probably mostly about not trusting or respecting or feeling respected by the boss.
[1] https://world.hey.com/jason/changes-at-basecamp-7f32afc5
Interesting. I've read everything posted officially about this by the two founders as it unfolded and I've been super impressed by how well-considered these new policies are. As someone with several decades of experience as an employee, manager and then founder in both large and smaller orgs, I felt these changes were in the best interests of all stakeholders. With the myriad potentially conflicting sensibilities in today's workplace the only fair and sustainable approach is to focus on the work and the customers.
As an employee, these policies would make me feel more respected and safe. I guess the fact that you see it as a sign of a "terrible boss" and I see it as a sign of enlightened leadership is an indication how divided perspectives on workplace etiquette currently are.
You mean the company who is flailing in the market, losing employees and generally considered a bad place to work?
>"See, I told it wouldn't work" is about the most immature and unhelpful attitude to have - no matter how correct it may be.
Blame free post mortems are vital for an organization to grow and improve with time. If you cannot review past bad decisions and learn from then then you will be forced to repeat the same mistakes while your competitors evolve.
>but it undermines everything if someone keeps harping on a prior decision.
If accepting a mistake was made and then publicly coming up with a plan to not have it happen again undermines your ability to lead then you are a horrible leader.
We're seeing shortages of chips made on everything from 30 year old processes to cutting edges fabs and that demand is likely to be relatively sticky going forward. Intel's going to have to try even harder than it is now to fail and it's going to take decades for the dust to settle, if it ever does (hello Intel Business Machines).
Hmm... Does (or should) "Disagree, but then commit" contain a corollary of "...and let's look at it again in X months/years"?
I mean, if you do argue for something, say some particular technical solution, but the decision goes against you, and you do actually accept and commit to the outcome... Is this commitment eternal?
If, say, you're still convinced the programming language / framework / style you originally advocated would be a better fit for your team / department / company, are you bound to shut up forever or can you raise it again at some point in the future? And if you can re-raise it, then when -- is there some general waiting period for stuff like this, or should it perhaps be an explicit addendum to every decision?
N.B: Not asking for myself, just a hypothetical that I find interesting... OK, come to think of it, perhaps actually asking for myself after all: I haven't been turned down on any such suggestion... Yet, but am thinking about raising one. And if I get a "No" at first, how long do I go on nagging / wait before I remind everyone of it?
Then why where a significant portion of their employees - the only stakeholders (apart from literally Bezos) - extremely vocal in their disappointment the minute it went out?
If you've never experience a spittle-inflected rant disrupting a meeting, because some individual felt it their duty and privilege to engage with everyone on their particular viewpoint ... you simply don't know how disconcerting this can be. I have. I don't care much about my co-workers political views. I'm always happy to have a beer and discuss things after work (well, virtually these days).
But making people uncomfortable because you feel entitled to push your world view at work, makes you more of a liability to the company than an asset. Which in the case of Basecamp, the owners may have addressed well for all concerned.
Another thought I had was that they wanted to slim the company down. In that case, you look at what you want to keep and what you want to lose. You make it easy for those who you want to leave to make that decision. If there was a faction that loved a hypothetical free breakfast, and these folks caused discontent and discomfort among others, elimination of that breakfast, and a way for them to bow out gracefully, thinking that they took the W, would be 4D chess for the stakeholders.
You may lose some people you'd prefer to keep, that's always a risk. But if you have a way to cluster the people you are reasonably happy about parting with, by noting common behaviors (the hypothetical breakfast model above), lowering their interest level for staying (removing the thing they like), while providing an incentive to leave (a pretty good severance/buy out), this is a win for most people.
I've seen various really bad takes on Twitter, that miss almost all the (fairly obvious) nuance of these moves. The bad takes seem to cluster about the "attack" on peoples "rights" to talk societal and political issues at work. And some sort of joy at seeing a company "suffer".
I don't think these are even in the right ballpark. There's lots of missing information, and we can speculate about it, in a way that resembles blindfolded dart playing.
However, the management response is pointed, and as they seem to be fairly specific, one could (likely far more accurately) speculate what caused them. And why they are being considered.
The bans on political/societal talk likely originated from conversations that made some folks quite uncomfortable, or unhappy. They were likely sustained after being advised to stop. Rather than allow such talk to disrupt the organization, the owners had to make a decision. So they did, and provided a mechanism for the most vocal folks to ease their way out.
Or at least it looks this way to me.
However:
* I don't believe any enlightened leadership posts publicly about wide-spread and company affected policy changes before informing and/or discussing with your staff. That's disrespectful to the people you serve.
* no enlightened leadership leads to a situation where 1/3 of your staff leaves on contentious terms. If that leadership was that enlightened, they either wouldn't be leaving or would never have been hired. It's indicative of leadership problems, cultural problems, and possibly a hiring problem.
* I don't believe at all that enlightened leadership discards its values the moment that they become difficult to uphold.
* If the new policies weren't in reaction to the leader being called to be accountable to the people he served and the mission he told them they were on, I'd probably be more agreeable to your point. In a vaccuum a safe place for people of all politica and creeds (short of outright hate) to work together is what you want. What I don't want is an unsafe space where no one feels they can question the leadership or hold the company to its values.
That being said, I totally respect your coming at this from a different angle and I agree that there's certainly more than one way to look at this (as the reactions in this thread indicate).
Perhaps this is not an enlightened view, and I would not have used the word “serve,” but employees serve the leadership, not the other way around. This is a company, not the government. As a citizen, the government serves me. As an employee, I serve my employer.
Leadership is all about serving the people you're shepherding. There is a responsibility and a stewardship that comes with wearing the crown, and it's not always for everyone. =)
To be fair to them the world has changed a lot in the last few years.
I used to talk politics with friends and family but I've have had to stop over the last couple years because because of how divisive it's gotten. I now avoid those conversations because I don't want to lose family or friends. I'm center left and people who preciously were slightly left of me would probably consider me a nazi, and people who used to be slightly to the right of me would consider me a communist.
I could see the same changes happening at work. And conversations that used to be ok escalating into insanely heated situations.
Even if I kind of disagree with how it unfolded, I still sympathize with leadership if they've given people options, generous out-terms etc..
If you have a group identity that does not match the founders, these policies will feel as if they are trying to silence you and your input when new policies arise that don't take your group identity into account.
The only fair and sustainable approach is to see humans as entire beings and not robots on a production line.
That doesn't mean the work and customers are forgotten, in fact it's exactly the opposite.
Not all the people who left worked for DHH, who is the CTO.
OTOH, if the CTO is a terrible boss, there’s a very good chance that the rest of the C-suite is suboptimal, since executives generally aren’t picked at random, so there is probably some correlation across the group. And, then, down the chain of management, for the same reasons.
Short version is that the 6 month salary, even the 3 month salary offer is quite nice. I can understand why so many took the offer up.
Woke environments can, and often are toxic to those not interested in engaging in such discussions. I worked at one of those before, where one had to tread carefully, lest some "colleagues" be triggered into spittle-inflected rants about the president at the time ... thus wasting everyone's time and energy. That was actively frustrating and annoying.
It sounds like there was a self appointed DE&I committee that had proposals for every area of the business. That doesn’t strike me as a healthy dynamic.
There’s a reason successful employee co-ops are rare and kibbutzim don’t exist anymore in anything close to their original form.
To the extent that "A long-standing group of managers called "Small Council" will disband — when we need advice or counsel we'll ask individuals with direct relevant experience rather than a pre-defined group at large."
To me this reads like a game-of-thrones-esque political maneuver, to make sure there are no loci of power that might challenge the bosses. The bosses will talk to you one-on-one if they think your opinion matters, you have no reason to be talking to your peers about anything, just keep your head down and do what you're told.
How you distinguish between "a group of people getting together to collaborate on something of importance to the company" (which the owners said DE&I was!), vs "an unpermitted committee"... I don't know if "no collaborating across reporting lines" is an intended or an unintended thing here, unclear.
If THAT strikes you as a healthy dynamic, I hope you get to experience it and find out sometime, and if it works for you, good on you. It didn't for 1/3rd of basecamp though -- I don't think it's about one specific policy, it's about this attitude toward employee involvement.
The reason they gave for removing these was that peer reviews were overly positive to the point of pointlessness. You could still give feedback to your boss without 360 degree reviews.
Money is a funny business. I'm convinced that anyone who's a skilled software engineer makes more money than they ever imagined after 5-6 years of working at a regular tech company. All the RSU upside, bonuses yada yada.
Folks who worked at Basecamp are top-notch programmers with close to a decade or more of experience. I'm certain that their motivation to work is driven in large part by craftsmanship, taste etc. Not to mention that social aspect of work -- building rapport with peers you consider intelligent/admirable; consistent record of work; crunch-time camaraderie, all of those things make up for their worth in 6 months of free money. 6 months isn't that long. Like someone else on this thread said, getting a new job, interviewing, building up trust in new team takes time.
I'm convinced that social policy at Basecamp, more than 6 months of money, influenced many people to leave. Particularly people with a lot of capital; cultural, intellectual or even financial. Personally, I'm glad. I want to live in a world where people take responsibility everywhere and not shy away from topics meant to drive morality/politics forward.
This is a problem given that politics is not universally agreed upon and if we can not work together with different politics then we can not have a pluralist society, which increasingly seems impossible as both "sides" of this debate want to sort people with differing politics as "immoral"
It has zero to do morality or “being responsible” or “making the world a better place”. It’s about pushing one particular political viewpoint with the end goal of grabbing power to benefit their group.
The people who can most afford to not put up with <whatever> are always those with the best career prospects. If you aren’t certain that you can get a job somewhere else that matches even the newly-worse conditions of your present job within the cushion provided by the offered buyout, then a buyout isn’t attractive.
If you try to form an 'issue group' at an arbitrary company, to take on the executive team, and make demands with excessive intellectualizations that 'making fun of names' lead to 'genocide' - you're not going to get offered severance, you're going to get fired immediately.
The kind of leverage that people here on HN seem to think they have is a little bit bizarre.
People deserve to be treated with dignity, of course, people should not be making fun of people's names, it was stopped, and for the most part, that should have been it. Antagonizing almost any further is going to be seen as lacking in legitimacy and probably not acting good faith.
I think 90% of companies would be 'much less open' than Basecamp even with their new policies, 9.5% would be about the same. The rest, a grab-bag of different views, mostly at smaller companies. The bigger the company, the more the actions will be based purely around legality, caution, and the companies will to maintain some semblance of positive image.
It’s putting up with terrible leadership that seems to want to keep their heads buried in the ground and not have to deal with anything.
It's not terrible leadership, I think it's just poorly communicated.
Maybe 5 years ago. Now it seems that a lot of tech companies see outspoken/activist employees as a liability, even if they are accomplished.
Probably, the founders believed that the toxicity of the internal culture had reached a point where it was extremely detrimental to the workplace. And, knowing DHH, it was probably not only a financial decision but a lifestyle one. He may have realized that the advocates that actively discussed and promoted political issues within the org was making his life and others in the company miserable.
Would you allow a Jehovah's Witness to be a significant part of your life if they proselytize you every day? I definitely wouldn't. Some of these activists probably think that's their right to do so; so let them walk.
I'd be really surprised if this surprised the executive team. This seems to be a super intentional and very professionally executed cultural shift / purge. Professional, because you give them freaking 6 months of severance and you don't call them out or force them out. If that isn't recognized as goodwill, you're blinded by your political disagreements to seeing how nice of a treatment that is.
The people leaving probably grew with the company, and contributed a lot to the company, so giving them 6 months of severance is recognizing that. But it's also telling them, hey we are making a cultural shift in our identity, and if that identity is no longer you, sorry, we'll treat you really well as you find a place that supports your identity.
This reeks of professionalism and GOOD management to me.
I have to admit there's a certain elegance in filtering out political people by banning public discussions of politics, though. I especially cringed at this bit:
> Jane Yang, a data analyst at the company, told me that restricting internal conversations would negatively affect diversity and inclusion efforts. For example, she said, the company’s profit-sharing plan gave more profits to people who have longer tenure — a group that is majority white and male. Making that discussion off limits internally could ensure that inequality in profit sharing becomes a structural feature of the company.
It's not like they had a rule that white males get more money, it's a seniority rule! It seems unreasonable to me to extrapolate that to systemic racism in the company.
That senior execs making more money is due to their tenure and merit, and not because they’re white and male.
That's exactly where systemic discrimination originates.
Hardly anyone wakes up in the morning and decides that it's a good day to oppress G people. They wake up in the morning having some amount of privilege, discover that it might be threatened, and their actions that day try to avoid reduction of privilege, even if it means treating G people unfairly. It's not anti-G people at first, it's just pro-self.
Over years this becomes a de facto systemic discrimination, generally without a rule that explicitly says "we don't want G coworkers". Instead there are rules that mean that everybody works on G holidays, the microwaves can't be used for "smelly" food (and guess what, all G food is "smelly" by default), and of course, rule is by seniority in the company which just happens not to have any senior G people in it. Somehow fewer G people get hired, and those that do are in low-status positions.
You can pick your own value for G; it could be gender or nationality or ethnicity or religion or skin color or whatever. It works the same way.
The rule that “the people who have been here the longest should get a bigger share of the company” is unfair in a society which has a history of segregation that favored one group over another, and still is dealing with the aftermath of said segregation.
To justify: The favored group has more chance of being an early hire and therefore having better current benefits. On a large scale this leads to systematic discrimination which is not cool.
If you are in favor of a revolution, all the power to you... But if not, then I’m sorry to say that our best option is the slow, painful and gradual correcting for our systemic biases for the next generations.
Trying to 'unbias' (meaning a calibrated, countervailing bias actually) at the other end of the funnel, where incidentally 80%+ are already super liberal, doesn't really get the same mileage.
If people are primarily upset about general societal things rather than clear cut workplace discrimination, I would submit they should focus their activism at those societal things.
Aside from that being illegal out of the gate due to discrimination laws, who comes up with the formula? Is it revised? What kind of additional bonus are we talking?
Join any union in the US, and seniority is pretty much the only metric used to evaluate fair compensation and benefits.
I don't understand what you are asking for.
You really need to read up on how they operate before commenting about them like this.
"It doesn't have to be crazy at work" is a good read that explains where they're coming from.
Understanding that, this move is completely rational.
> > Jane Yang, a data analyst at the company, told me that restricting internal conversations would negatively affect diversity and inclusion efforts. For example, she said, the company’s profit-sharing plan gave more profits to people who have longer tenure — a group that is majority white and male. Making that discussion off limits internally could ensure that inequality in profit sharing becomes a structural feature of the company.
> It's not like they had a rule that white males get more money, it's a seniority rule! It seems unreasonable to me to extrapolate that to systemic racism in the company.
And the reply was:
> Hardly anyone wakes up in the morning and decides that it's a good day to oppress G people. They wake up in the morning having some amount of privilege, discover that it might be threatened, and their actions that day try to avoid reduction of privilege, even if it means treating G people unfairly. It's not anti-G people at first, it's just pro-self.
The argument here is that if we evaluate by a metric that benefits the in-group more then the out-group you end up with doing discrimination.
In the comment you are replying I’m giving examples of fair pay and fair accommodations in general. It is a respond to GP which misunderstands previous post that we should be paying minorities higher to adjust for the bias that is causing seniority benefits being unfair. But as I have said, that is simply not what I’m (nor anybody here is) arguing.
Yes. That's the point. The in group in this case has invested more time. They get more reward. What you're suggesting is rewarding those who have done less more than those who have done more.
Talk about a fucked up sense of equality.
a) Misunderstanding: I’m not suggesting that people get rewarded that have done less. That conclusion does not follow from: don’t engage in reward system that disproportionately benefits your ingroup. I see how you would arrive at that conclusion, but it is false. Not engaging in policies that disproportionately reward your in-group does not necessitate rewarding an out-group by a different metric. These are not two sides of the same coin.
b) False assumptions: Staying longer at a company does not equate having done more. It is entirely possible (and even quite common) that a new hire will contribute a lot more then established workers. A new hire brings with them a new perspective. They might not contribute directly, but they might be asking the right questions which gives more senior workers a better perspective etc.
Literally no one said this.
Please try to stay in the actual conversation–it makes for a much healthier discussion.
Yes, the things you mention are hard to design/decide upon, but strictly speaking that's not an argument against the parent (ie it's not that bonuses based on race/gender are wrong because they're hard to do).
Right, so it's not that the rule is biased, it's just that there's general bias because of other things and this rule isn't compensating for it, which are two very different things.
Equality of result is, by definition, a way to bias things towards a different group, and as a proponent of equality of opportunity, I think that's not a good way to build a just society. That's why I'm against trying to "fix" rules that aren't biased in the first place (ie rules which people who support equality of result consider "not biased enough the other way").
The main concern seems to stem from making the discussion off limits. No "fixes" have been proposed. The first step to solving a problem at all is to admit that there is a problem. Being apolitical is privilege. For the unprivileged, simply defending ones rights and dignity is a political issue.
I my self am an immigrant that don’t consider me self a member of any minority and I can attest to this. I don’t experience discrimination in my day-to-day activities, nor on the job market. The only discrimination I experience is what I inherit from USA’s immigration policies. I.e. I have more restricted international travel and my visa is tied to my employer (which I would imagine would be far worse of an experience if I would belong to a minority).
And this makes sense given the sibling threads. Being from a majority group in a country where I have good access to quality education, health care and other services, as well as good job opportunities. This indeed gives me a privilege that I take with me as I migrate. Non-immigrants that have been rejected these opportunities don’t have it this good.
In my experience immigration status alone is not enough to put into a group that has increased risk of being discriminated against.
When we eventually settled she had a long backlog of health issues, which we had to pay out of pocket to the tune of dozens thousands, because the mythical European free healthcare is only for the extremely poor or the tax evaders.
So fuck people towing the line of "we help immigrants because they are resources" - there are few feel good resources that are ultimately discriminatory and capriciously allocated to the most noisy groups, leaving people in need screwed because activists don't fill their diversity quota cards below a certain melatonin concentration
This logic is kind of bizarre. You don't want to generalize, but only when it comes to putting people from one group into a different group for which you make generalizations.
Why is this?
Because executives at various massive tech companies are getting massive bonuses connected to how many diverse people they hire. They give lavish salaries and large chunks of equity to people who they otherwise would not. Somebody who is getting offers like this is naturally going to have all of their incentives misaligned for joining a startup.
My company's back end code is Java and Python and we interviewed an engineer who I was willing to teach both of these languages to. She happened to be a black woman and only new PHP using the laravel stack. Zero experience doing front end coding and not really a standout when it came to databases and barely new cloud.
She asked for a large equity stake, but also wanted a salary of $195,000. We are not at all in the Bay area and this salary is completely ridiculous for somebody who also wants a lot of equity and has very few skills that connect to our code base.
She was hired at Amazon for some rather boring role on an internal team that helps the data centers meet energy efficiency requirements by building applications that are essentially dashboards for internal decision makers.
We actually talk on regular basis now because I give her some advice for learning Python.
She was simply negotiating based on her market value and her own fiscal priorities and made a sound well-reasoned decision.
If my company hits it big one day which of course is typically not high probability, people like you will show up and say that we are systemically racist. Ironically the twisted incentives at these massive companies are creating this issue. As long as women are significantly less interested in jobs involving things just like men are significantly less interested in jobs involving people we're going to have to admit that trying to bring things to 50/50 proportions is going to create weird incentives that will further create side effects.
That level of pay is reserved for absolute top talent with at least 15+ years of experience everywhere I’ve worked. Only a major corporation could afford to waste that kind of money on a junior level dev.
And the most funny thing about it is that people propagating this system actually thing they fight for equality and against the abuse of power. While this is exactly how inequality and abuse of power is done.
Thoroughly middle of the road, PHP programmers who can't do front end at all, demanding large equity stake AND a salary higher than anyone else at company. They are just valuing themselves at market for a black engineer.
It's a shame, because in the chance my company (we are already doubling enterprise customers every 3 months) does well, some journalist will comment on how early employees are skewed towards white/male.
(I should note that founder/ceo is a woman who was so amazing when I interviewed that I took a pay cut for more equity, cuz she's a beast who I'm convinced will lead our company to success)
What’s the current gender makeup % of your engineering team, if I can ask? As well, what’s the non white makeup of the engineering leadership and overall leadership team? I found it got easier the less that ratio skewed towards 100%M engineering team and 100% white leadership team :)
I disagree with catering to candidates own biases though.
If a candidate assumes my startup is bigoted because it's all white, despite talking to us, I don't want them here. Stereotypes are stupid, useless, and immoral, no matter who they are directed at. Imagine if I had a problem with all but 1 of my leadership team being female? That would be me making decisions about them based on their immutable characteristics. Fuck that.
Ideally the earlier you can intentionally focus on diversity the better. This also goes for leadership too - both for hiring other leaders and it’s an easy demonstration that the company’s commitment to diversity isn’t just for token representation purposes.
Anyway...yeah, nothing about catering to candidates biases or people judging you as bigots. I sense the anger here at that but hopefully you can see that’s not where I’m approaching it from.
I think you hit a very good point with the pioneer attacks and it's a higher cost as the team gets larger.
Funny enough I experienced the pioneer tax myself one time but for a different reason than ethnicity or sexuality: Socioeconomic status. People can't tell by looking at me but within about two sentences they can very accurately HEAR via my speech patterns that I grew up in a lower socioeconomic class than 99% of US born programmers in the industry. I have a very rural dialect but I do work hard to have excellent grammar when I speak. Over the years I've worked hard to suppress the accent while at work and I'm sad to say that it's been very effective in reducing people's biases toward me. Of course that's just anecdotal it's not like somebody was scientifically measuring anything. And I'm fully aware it's a huge luxury to be able to hide what makes you different from people, as opposed to race/gender/etc.
Leadership team is mostly female, only 1 male, who is CTO. 1 is Latina, others white.
In the past, I joined a company where entire leadership team was Indian and male. I never would have thought to not work there because they didn't share my race. That would have been bigoted.
“ I never would have thought to not work there because they didn't share my race. That would have been bigoted.”
There’s a wealth of factors that go into a choice to work somewhere, and someone not choosing to work at your company because they don’t see themselves represented isn’t necessarily bigotry, but then also wanting an assurance of a safe space and not always knowing whether it will be. I wish I could tell you otherwise but I’ve had these conversations with a wealth of marginalized groups over my career and the teams I’ve built, so it’s not unusual. It’s not a “oh I don’t want to work with these people because I’m [x] and they’re [y]” matter the majority of the time. It’s more often “man, I’m going to be the only [x] on a team of 30 [y]s” which is often culturally uncomfortable for a lot of people.
And yes sometimes on occasion it is “man, I don’t want to be working with a company of 10 [y]s where I’m the only [x]” or “if the executive team is all or majority [y]s, do I know for sure there’s career advancement opportunities here?”
We do have a rampant amount of sexism, racism, etc in our field (just like many others) and so that is something unfortunately people sometimes suspect. I’m not at all saying that this is the situation at your company - far from it - just saying the choices for people are most often verrrrrry far from bigotry.
Not sure of your background but it’s also not too hard for a CIS white male to not sweat working on any other team composition (say, all Indian) vs the reverse, because hey - even if you’re paying a pioneer tax, you’re probably not paying it for long. There’s a lot of advantages that group has that are often taken for granted. :)
> every discussion remotely related to politics, advocacy, or society at large quickly spins away from pleasant. You shouldn't have to wonder if staying out of it means you're complicit, or wading into it means you're a target. These are difficult enough waters to navigate in life, but significantly more so at work. It's become too much. It's a major distraction.
https://world.hey.com/jason/changes-at-basecamp-7f32afc5
There's absolutely no reason to believe that there were any "ultra-sensitive trigger-warning micro-aggression seeking activists" at Basecamp among the employees. All we have is a blog post from someone who is overly sensitive to reasonable professional conversations and didn't want to deal with "unpleasant" conversations at work. It's a story told from that person's perspective and we shouldn't take it as absolute truth.
Never, in my experience, because the said activists tend to accuse anyone who disagrees with them of being a bigot.
This is objectively false. There is 100% undeniable proof of these types of employees being there, including one of the heads of data analytics:
From https://janeyang.org/resisting/
> Racist capitalism is poison that has weakened every facet of society and been used to “justify” horrific crimes against humanity while destroying our planet. We need massive power and wealth distribution enshrined in national and international policies.
From https://janeyang.org/2021/04/13/im-getting-some-feedback/
> Guess who tends to beta spray? Men. White men, in particular.
From https://janeyang.org/2021/03/18/live-forward/
> If you are white or a man, especially a cis-gendered heterosexual able-bodied white man, do the fucking work. Learn about the characteristics of white supremacy, push through your discomfort, and reflect on how you show up in the spaces you have power. Be ready to apologize when you screw up (we all do!) and then do better. And whatever you do: do not demand that your friends or colleagues or employees or neighbors or acquaintances who belong to historically marginalized groups explain to you all the ways you perpetuate harm and how society got here. Pay an anti-oppression professional for training and coaching; don’t expect us to get you up to speed for free.
To me banning politics from company chat feels vague and confusing at best. Another post from a few days ago got this from a worker[1]:
> “How do you talk about raising kids without talking about society?” the employee said. “As soon as I bring up public schools, then it’s already political.”
At worst it feels like you are being silenced. In technology topics of diversity and inclusion tend towards the political (it doesn’t have to be; but it most often is as witnessed on HN). Does this mean if you feel like the company is not being inclusive that you cannot speak up?
Tonnes of companies deal with issues like these in a better way IMO. Options include a code of conduct which prohibits escalating emotions in a political debate (i.e. by talking about genocide) while allowing (and even encouraging) talks about DE&I. Reprimand people that are found to use hostile language in public forums. Provide channels (echo chambers) where people can opt into and have a more heated debates (without breaking the CoC). Etc.
1: https://www.platformer.news/p/-what-really-happened-at-basec...
I have never worked in a place where we don’t discus these things periodically.
I don’t have kids but I have witnessed my peers in previous jobs say stuff like: “I wished school hours would be more accommodating to those of us that work shifts.” Which is a political statement about the strict nature of how we run schools.
I'm struggling to imagine what kind of political thing you would say about school. I can't share my thoughts on the school board, pedagogy, common core, racist school names, etc? Doesn't seem like an onerous restriction and I can't recall ever having a work conversation that would've violated it.
These can all be interpreted as political issues, and I think very reasonable to talk about. The policy is so arbitrary that it ends up being that you can't talk about things that the founders don't want you to talk about.
I get the sentiment, but the execution is chilling.
In the absence of clear policy, it comes back to trust, which needs to be earned and can be lost. I don't work at Basecamp, so I don't know whether they "deserved" to lose trust and my opinion doesn't really matter. But the evidence appears to show that trust was dead, whoever killed it.
We all saw what happened, and we're talking about it because most of us think things could have gone a little better.
There are precisely one set of actors behaving toxically in this whole fiasco, and it's the founders.
> I'd be really surprised if this surprised the executive team. This seems to be a super intentional and very professionally executed cultural shift / purge.
Hahaha, what? In which universe are you inhabiting? No piece of evidence supports this theory. All the evidence clearly points at this being a hasty and unplanned reaction to a hasty and unplanned emotional outburst at an employee by a founder.
I grew up with a single father, who was prone to religious fanaticism. Plenty of fundamentalist, culty churches.
When I was a teen, my father met a radical vegan animal rights activist, started dating, and suddenly swapped out religious fanaticism for radical left-wing activism.
The smells in my house changed, and the people looked different, but fundamentally they were the same: Awful, zero original thinking, dogmatic, controlling, self-righteous, and, yeah I'm going to say it, failures in life if measured financially or in career status.
The cars in my driveway shifted from rusty, beat up, old Ford's/Chevys to rusty, beat up Subarus/Civics.
I hate tribal thinking, and the aggressive conformists who flock to it.
Conversely, I love seeing well maintained older vehicles.
Absolutely nothing to do with the two leaders who spend a good chunk of time on social media telling the rest of the world how to run their business in the most in your face way possible.
In the work environment, I don't care if you want to save the whales or arm every teacher with an AR-15.
Do you do your job well enough that you don't personally impact me? You do? Good. Shut up about non-work shit and keep working.
Every single person I've ever seen who was a "passionate" "political" person is a fucking trainwreck in some area of the their life. How about your fix yourself first? Then once you've got yourself ironed out, you can try ironing out the rest of society...
A list of names that sound or look funny.
Wow.
The amount of disdain I have for idiotic busybodies who would fuss and fret over such a thing cannot be overstated, or even quantified.
How about just ignoring the list? How about saying to someone, when they tell you about the list, "That's dumb. Grow up, <name>."
How about just going on about your day.
The fact that any human being would think a list of funny names should be a fireable offense is a testament to this new idiotic religion of Wokeness. A bunch of shitty people traded Christianity for another religion where they can be insufferable assholes, under the guise of righteousness.
Where. Have. I. Seen. That. Before?
Do you think that kind of aggressive tone would be suitable in a work place?
No it wouldn't be, but this isn't work, it's an internet comment section. You're literally providing his point that "there's a time and a place" for shit like this, and work isn't one of them.
> Do you think that kind of aggressive tone would be suitable in a work place?
Apparently it is, since everyone from Steve Jobs to Bill Gates to Jeff Bezos have used a tone like that - and a lot... lot worse.
Great PR recovery after, from what I can see is one of the worst management foul-ups I can remember. But then PR is one thing that JF and DHH are good at.
In fact, send me a link to your company's Careers page, because I want to work for a company that's got their shit together so thoroughly.
Don't start saying it was all due to the people who left - there were a number highly respected, long standing and apparently extremely hard working employees in that list. And they are probably prevented from giving their views due to severance terms whilst DHH in particular will no doubt be blogging about it again within days.
Just to pick one thread of many to pull on, any management team that actively encourages intra-mural political discussion should think through possible consequences. It's difficult to take such rights away, as Google's experience has shown multiple times. [1]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/technology/google-culture...
If you don’t check the behaviour it can take over like cancer. The gossipers and narcissists hide behind activism and the activists support them as one of their own because they align with the activists goal. People who do not want to deal with these people eventually leave for places without such policy and you are stuck with all the bad actors.
Why not spend the time to build channels for constructive political discussion? The workplace does not exist in a vacuum. You cannot isolate work from politics these days.
That can't bode well for the company.
From the Verge; > While Basecamp does not publish diversity statistics, it is still, like most tech companies, majority white and male, employees said. But the idea of worker-led efforts on diversity issues got a frosty reception from the founders last year, employees told me. They were allowed to work on the project, but did not feel as if the founders were particularly invested in the outcome.
> Nonetheless, the DE&I ( Diversity and inclusion) council attracted significant support. More than a third of the company — 20 out of roughly 58 employees — volunteered to help. They began examining Basecamp’s hiring processes, which vendors the company works with, how Basecamp employees socialize, and what speakers they might invite to one of the all-remote company’s twice-yearly in-person gatherings.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22406673/basecamp-politic...
So, assume "examine how employees socialise" means "consider events where people go beyond who their usual contacts are, to enable more mentoring". Rather than, "spying on me and building a graph of contacts".
In terms of the guidelines, I am not a guideline lawyer as perhaps you are. When I think of the strongest plausible interpretation I often turn to Occam and accept the plain language meaning. For example, if a goal of the committee were to encourage mentoring, then the article could have said that.
In terms of strongest plausible interpretation of what I wrote, I did not write "spying on me and building a graph of contacts." I'm a person who is appreciative of privacy and would be annoyed by a group of colleagues who decided to "examine" me in any way. As I think about it now I can feel a wave of revulsion and annoyance toward a posse of busybodies who must not have enough actual work to do that they have time to "examine" me. Maybe you like being examined; me I still think people who volunteer to do that are creepy.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
[...]
Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it...
Did they manage to setup a tribunal and a committee of public safety?
Companies and their cultures are not equivalent. Many of those people will have joined Basecamp because of the culture and the mission. They will have joined for reasons other than money. Many of them could have got jobs at FAANGs but didn't because they believed this culture was a better fit for them.
You have no data on why people left, you only have guesses you're trying to turn into data.
Many of the replies to your comment are equally of the hand wavey "see, social policy isn't the thing here" type, when social policy is absolutely 100% the thing here.
I've never seen such a disappointing thread on HN as this one.
Too much of a liability.
Who is “we”?
The thing is, these weren't bad people. They took a chance on an self-taught programmer / art-school dropout in their late 20s with 1 year of professional experience, and they treated me well. When I moved back to New York (for other dramatic family reasons), the CEO offered for me to stay at their own house. I just didn't agree with their political opinions. I think for most folks working in tech hubs its just the other way around, where they are in a left-leaning bubble and its hard to imagine another POV. Coming from someone who was on the outside, I can say for me it was at best distracting and at worst alienating, and I can see why companies want to put an end to it.
Mostly good people, but super isolating when they would talk politics.
And I should note, that the pattern I noticed then and notice now with my mindlessly, tribally left colleagues who are mirror images of the right wing lemmings in defense: People who are really into politics at work are mediocre at best, borderline incompetent more often. Anecdotal of course, but I honestly don't think basecamp will be impacted badly by this months down the road.
I don't see a single standout amongst the folks leaving. Sorry.
Considering that those folks include one of the Rails core contributors, the Head of Design, and the Head of Marketing, either:
A) you’re mistaken in your read
B) you’re not mistaken, and Basecamp made some massive hiring and staffing flaws including but not limited to who they put in leadership positions
I’m not saying which is which, just pointing out the limited possibilities.
I was definitely wrong on that.
(Just having fun btw and not meaning to insult/offend)
I respect designers, but they can go too far (jony I've with the obsession with thinness). Basecamps business isn't at risk from that change.
Marketing: No comment.
Yes it's always boring when someone in the workplace makes bold political statements that no one asked for, but what happens when the company you work for outsources jobs abroad, is making questionable HR decisions, etc. I'm not sure it's right to say that any discussion about anything political is banned when a company policy that affects an employee can be political in nature.
Creating a positive and productive culture is hard. I don't have all the answers, but bans seem like a very blunt instrument.
If someone is being racist am I not allowed to bring acknowledge that because it is political?
Why do you think that's the policy? Did you read the blog posts?
According to DHH's post, political discussion that is related to the business is allowed. Any other political discussion is encouraged but must take place in a dedicated non-work channel. The policy is also not zero-tolerance.
> Therefore, we’re asking everyone, including Jason and me, to refrain from using our company Basecamp or HEY to discuss societal politics at work effective immediately.
> This includes everything from sharing political stories in campfire, using message threads to elucidate others on political beliefs that go beyond the topic directly, or performing political advocacy in general.
> ...
> Note that we will continue to engage in politics that directly relate to our business or products.
Not so interested in nitpicking about whether banning is semantically correct - I think you know what I meant.
What's more interesting is the awkward situation they have created, which I'd argue is a false dichotomy - where does "societal politics" end and "politics that directly relate to our business or products" start?
I don't even mean to single you out because I've seen this type of thing countless times on here and especially on Twitter over the last week or so.
"What's more interesting is the awkward situation they have created, which I'd argue is a false dichotomy - where does "societal politics" end and "politics that directly relate to our business or products" start?"
That can be tricky, which is why the policy is not zero tolerance and they already anticipate and are OK with people sometimes getting it wrong.
Banning labor-related discussions is illegal in the USA, where Basecamp is based (Protected Concerted Activity). There is also the option of unionization to provide a further structure to protect your legal rights to discuss with management issues around pay, HR, and outsourcing.
The ADL's goal is to fight anti-semitism. The Holocaust opened some people's eyes about their anti-semitism and look to a new path. But in others it simply enabled and licensed their own prejudices because it allowed them to think "Well whatever I think/say/do isn't THAT bad."
The ADL's pyramid shows that genocide doesn't happen overnight with the snap of the fingers. Each incremental step is minor and ignorable. But it starts with stereotyping and biased attitudes.
I don't know what the ADL is, but your belief in their theory is actually a political stance. It's not physics, it is a convoluted complex theory that can not be verified. Believing in it is "being on a side".
By that bar, no discussion of genocide, systemic discrimination, or individual prejudices can ever occur in any circles.
I also didn't take sides for Basecamp, I merely pointed out that the decision was in fact about politics.
Somebody said it shouldn't be done, because the end result might be genocide. That's a pretty heavy gun to bring out for a list of funny names.
Otherwise, by your logic, why not just say, "OK, we have the list, let's just all agree not to escalate it to genocide, and we can all carry on with our lives" (which would be ridiculous, because it goes without saying that jokes shouldn't be escalated to genocide)? So it won't lead to genocide, and there is no point in bringing it up.
Personally I would loath having to have such discussions at work. It's OK to consider some jokes to be in bad taste. Point it out and move on. That should be the extent of it. But not calling on some abstract higher moral framework that let's you control your colleagues.
And I am not saying it should be a general rule for companies, either. I just want companies to be allowed to set their own rules.
For all I care, there could be companies with "no jokes" policies, and people who prefer could go to work there. I would prefer the "jokes allowed" companies. I just want there to be choice. Basecamp is a little ray of hope for me, but if people prefer to have political discussions at work, I don't begrudge them for working at companies that allow them.
People have their families, their jobs, and maybe a couple of friends and that’s about it. They need an outlet to push the ideas and causes they care about. The workplace is one of the few places where they can feel like they’re having an impact, but that’s not really appropriate.
I’d hate to go into work and be harassed about being “silent is complicit” (which seems like it was one of the major drivers of the change). I would hate it even more if I went into work and people were trying to convert me to evangelical Christianity, or Islam. I like that people want to express themselves and improve the world we live in, but they need to find a better place to do that.
What you're describing is basically a textbook definition of 'politics'. I find it funny that you call this virtue signalling when that term was literally invented to describe the opposite: halfhearted political activism that isn't trying to build power.
What I'm talking about is a cynical attempt at elevating one's zero-sum standing in a social group by showing conspicuous adherence to the group's purported moral orthodoxy.
This[1] is good reading on the phenomenon.
[1] https://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Ok-...
None of my employers limited work hours or work days or children at work because of political discourse in the office. Nor did historical companies from 3 generations ago when such laws were passed.
All of those laws were created because companies did NOT implement such limits.
Many of the 'work standards' laws (including child labor laws) were actually enforcing standards and best-practices which originated from industry leaders. One example is how the mechanized textile manufacturers eliminated child labor (as it was unnecessary and uneconomical), then lobbied governments to ban child labor (probably to 'punish' their competitors). The 40-hour work week (largely) originated at various industry-leaders (notably including Ford, which was very efficient, and preferred energetic and loyal workers over tired and seasonal ones).
https://www.indiatoday.in/education-today/gk-current-affairs...
Similarly, the push for 8 hour workdays began with union support in the mid 1800s, 50+ years before Ford popularized it (and in fact it was due to this pressure that public sector employees had 8-hour workdays as early as 1869).
Individual states had banned child labor and passed 8-hour workday laws (due to union and public pressure) far before Ford or the Textile mills did so "voluntarily".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Workers%27_Day
People died so you can have an 8 hour workday, and they organized in the workplace.
Watered down a bit more... do you believe someone can be a good person without affiliating with a group in order to do it?
That's very odd to me... Similar in vein to self-studied engineers/academics vs those who need a college group of peers to do it.
Why should workplaces serve as political-outlet therapy locations because people can't think of other organizations to use for this purpose? There are, in fact, countless numbers of political organizations and groups in the U.S. and you are free to start your own if you don't like anything on offer. The idea that you a company should cater to your other non-work desires such as baptism or finding a loved one or expressing your personal angst about some topic just because you're there and it's convenient doesn't make much sense. Yes, political activism takes time and you may not have time to go to a meeting after work or on weekends. That doesn't mean you can turn your workplace into a church or other political-therapy group.
These people are totalitarians.
Forcing people to declare for this or that cause is absolutely totalitarian. It can be done with the best of intentions, but it’s still a unhealthy way of going about things.
I didn’t say anything about human rights activism. I drew a parallel between religious zealotry and political zealotry in the workplace that I have personally experienced. And the parallel is perfectly apt.
You can't escape these immature people because you need to work the job with them in order to make money. So you deal with it for a while but then you start complaining "hey man that's really not cool". They don't take you seriously, in fact their response is "hey let's not get all political about this".
Don't you see how people making racist jokes can be just as annoying as a pushy religious person? There's a lot of ways humans do annoying things to each other, but we should all be working on ways to minimize the amount we are annoying each other, and sometimes that means facing up to the fact that something you are doing is racist towards another person and you have to stop it.
We're literally talking about people keeping a list of names they thought were funny that lead to the situation, which apparently enough people internally found offensive, and you have people in this thread talking about "professionalism" and "religious thinking"; what?
And making fun of names doesn't even rise to that level. No one thinks less of a culture or a person just because their name reads like "fuck", or "Biggus Dickus", etc., in English. It's just a funny impedance mismatch between languages.
This is what empathy looks like: you listen to the one on the receiving end and you believe what they say about how they feel. At the end of the day you have the right to decide that this isn't "actual racism" in your own mind, but that doesn't change the reality that the one on the receiving end still feels bad.
That's where I can't agree. It's possible to do something that feels "racist" to someone but isn't actually racist. If I'm wrong, then there's no objective definition of racism and we can all go home and call it "lack of empathy". You can't have it both ways. Either racism is objectively definable or it isn't.
Categorically speaking, there is a big difference between offending someone's feelings or sensibilities and committing an act of racism, which is defined as discrimination on the basis of race and is objectively measurable using well-established tests.
Imagine that you are walking by someone and accidentally elbow them in the ribs. They double over in pain, and exclaim loudly that you hurt them really bad and you should apologize. Now you could get defensive and say "Well I didn't mean to elbow you in the ribs, it wasn't on purpose so I did nothing wrong" and "Also getting elbowed in the ribs isn't actually that painful, there's no reason to make a scene about it."
But what you don't realize is this person was in a car accident last week, and below their shirt their ribs are broken. Your elbow just hit them on a sensitive bruise and jostled a broken rib. Your unintentional action was actually extremely hurtful. By protesting that you didn't do anything to hurt them you are just looking like a jerk. All it would have taken was an "I'm sorry, I'll be more careful" and it probably would have been fine.
This is similar to what racism and the effects of racism are: there are people who have suffered trauma from heinous acts. As a result they are already in a wounded state, and something "not racist" in your mind can still hurt because it pokes in the same place as the "actual racism". Just like you can't accurately judge whether someone is actually in physical pain and how much physical pain they are in, you can't always tell how much your action hurts someone emotionally.
In both cases the empathetic and moral thing to do is to believe the person in pain who says that your actions are hurtful.
In fact, one could say it's racist that you're feeling entitled to appropriate their pain when you claim to speak for them. Your racism is hurting me, and will continue to hurt me until you acknowledge that racism necessarily involves discrimination based on race, and that it's wrong and problematic of you to appropriate the actual suffering of others.
And you know, democracy is all about coalition building.
The correct analogy would be if the person I accidentally elbowed claimed I was physically assaulting them, which I of course would deny.
Racism is a very extreme call-out and it is no wonder that people defend against it. It is no matter of believing that I hurt the person, I do. But I am defending myself from an attack I believe is unproportional,and actually leaves no choice but to defend myself. Call it insensitive instead of racist and people are far more likely to listen.
Murder has a definition, which is precisely why we can do something about it.
When it comes to hurt feelings, it's not always the fault of the speaker. Some emotional pain is completely fabricated for egoic or malicious reasons, or is simply mistaken.
You're making several categorical errors in your posts. We have to be careful to speak and think with precision. "The truth will set you free" and "the tongue of the wise brings healing"; but logical fallacies only muddy the water, and vague accusations stir up strife.
It's very small in comparison to more serious examples - perhaps it's even the smallest possible example of problematic behavior - but it is problematic nonetheless.
That's literally the point that the Basecamp employees were trying to make in a relatively benign way before their leadership overreacted.
Similarly, we have unlimited methods to share culture and humor in ways that don't involve backhandedly belittling others and which don't include feeding racism as a side effect.
I would also bet anything that names like "Vinh Ng" or "Ravi Chakrabarti" aren't on that list. Because those names aren't funny in English. Because they don't mean anything in English. So there's no impedance mismatch.
I know it's popular these days to claim racism all the time, but there's no actual basis for it here.
Edit: according to this article,
"Many of the names were of American or European origin. But others were Asian, or African, and eventually the list — titled “Best Names Ever” — began to make people uncomfortable."
https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22406673/basecamp-politic...
So really, the people practicing cultural discrimination were the ones who were ok with the list so long as only European names were in it.
Jokes that begin more innocently can turn racist; happens all the time. It’s best not to allow them to turn in that direction by including the types of jokes that racists always love to latch on due to an element of plausible deniability.
If people took all the mental energy they expended in being apologists for inappropriate behavior and simply applied it to finding ways to enjoy time with others that don’t have all these issues, none of this would ever be a problem.
If a racist enjoys the list, that does not make it racist. Racists also eat toast. That does not make toast racist.
If people took all the mental energy they expended in labeling things as racist, and simply applied it to finding ways to enjoy time with people who don’t have all these issues, none of this would ever be a problem.
Far from the truth. How did you surmise that this is what happened? They took it very seriously - the CEO wrote up a whole long postmortem on what happened, why it was a failure of management, and shouldn't happen again, admitting fault for not stepping in to deal with it sooner.
People act like "haha, this name sounds funny because it's similar to the English word [...]" is a huge deal and existential threat. It's ... not really. It's just inappropriate for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that making fun of your customers for any reason is not a good idea. People seem to have lost perspective here.
DHH tried to inject some nuance, and paid the price it seems :-/ All this incident has accomplished is turning off people, in spite of clearly being sympathetic to it to the important bits of social justice.
The social justice movement is eating itself from the inside out with stuff like this.
That is resolved with the manager, and if not, with hr.
Employees doing activism through the company are not doing activism, they are delegating it at seemingly no cost to them.
What is the source for this?
I think an obvious alternative is to expect employees to actually support neoliberalism as a job qualification.
Same as if you were working for an evangelical church, you'd expect people to try and convert everyone to Christianity
Most jobs have nothing to do with politics as most people don't have a true choice/luxury to be choose. Often people have to work, or starve/be homeless.
Most jobs out there are not political. That includes building a simple email client.
>[People] need an outlet to push the ideas and causes they care about
>I like that people want to express themselves and improve the world we live in, but they need to find a better place to do that.
Political parties & elections are instruments designed to do just that. It's actually mildly alarming that people are so jaded they forget about these (?).
As I commented in other thread, here in europe this is very uncommon. Here we go to work, to work. Football and politics don't lead to good ends anywhere.
So, join any company outside to the US if you want to focus on work
Politics is how groups of humans decide the distribution of power between themselves. It should be completely unsurprising that there is corporate politics around what power employees have within a company. Your claim that it isn't appropriate for employees to engage in corporate politics is a deeply political statement and just means that you think all the power within a company should be wielded by someone else. You are entitled to that position just as others are allowed to engage in collective action (also just politics) to achieve a different distribution of power.
I'd also add that it is weird how we live in a society where everyone acknowledges corporations have significant power over our government, yet people seem to be surprised that individuals working for them want a say in how those corporations operate (which would by extension grant influence over the government).
I tried twice to start a study group based on the book Becoming a Citizen Activist. Focus more on the how, vs the what. I haven't yet figured out how to make it self-sustaining. I'm not sure it's possible.
One of the arguably nicest companies to work in, which treats employees well, has a sane work/life balance and advocates so, pays well, embraces remote work, gives back to open source (RoR, etc.), and has good products, with no shady anti-consumer practices, that people actually like and pay for (as opposed to somewhere where they sell ads and attention).
It's like these people took a stance against the nicest possible employees this side of a hippie co-op.
Those leaving: (1) given the IT demand, will get a job elsewhere pronto, (2) will get the money of the buyout, and (3) will get to play the principled martyrs, too. It's a triple win for hypocrisy.
At some point in the future, this will be marked as a time when cancel culture jumped the shark in IT.
1) They were heavily incentivized for leaving. If you even considered a carreer move, the 6 month severance is your call to action.
2) I don't know that them leaving is so bad. They disagree, they leave (with generous compensation), not a huge issue in my book. Everybody is being treated fairly here, it seems. But for some reason, people have to insist that basecamp is evil, while to me it looks like they're going above and beyond the call of duty to treat their employees right.
I'd say "I've been here too long, let's shop around since IT is a buyers' market, and take advantage of this one-time buyout offer" is a far more probable explanation than "no political discussions at work rule makes this untenable for me"...
Without the buyout or in a worse job market, we'd see much closer to 0 "principled" exits...
Choosing to leave for greener pastures may be an easy decision if you're at an early stage of your career, but there's a reason these extraordinarily talented folks stayed with Basecamp for as long as they have. It's not because they just couldn't get Google to pay them more.
I'm absolutely sure of the above. Just not these people.
I'm afraid many of them will be in for a rude awakening.
Basecamp has really stood out it seems.
This is what stood out to me. Basecamp pay 90th percentile Bay Area salaries regardless of where you choose to live. Maybe I'm wrong but I'm not sure that's going to be easy to find without relocating.
Even if you're not a rabid mercenary you're certainly going to feel the impact, if not on your day to day life then on your future plans, of taking a possibly massive pay cut, if you don't want to relocate.
Maybe remote working will become more the norm post-pandemic, and that will put upward pressure on remote salaries, but I don't by any means think that's a foregone conclusion.
Framing this as 'these people' vs Basecamp is ludicrous. It's 1/3 or more of Basecamp vs. Basecamp's management. Important people in important roles, entire teams. They are this company. Or were.
Good. What exactly is the problem here?
Banning politics is impossible because everything in life has some hand in politics. When they say it can't be discussed, in the context of what is being discussed, it's really just a ban on the topics that management don't want to discuss.
You might be tolerant but many people aren't.
You don’t?
> Banning politics is impossible because everything in life has some hand in politics.
Hard disagree. You can talk about how houses are too expensive right now without someone getting political about why. It’s simple. Just don’t get political.
Another example is if you are a US company do you work with China knowing you will have to share your Chinese users data with the Chinese government. These are political and moral conversations that are decisions that should align with the companies values thus they HAVE to be discussed.
It's delusional to think you can avoid personal politics completely in a business. Basecamp is picking and choosing what is appropriate, and that's really the issue. It's an emotional response from their employees based on inconsistent behavior of management.
>If you are an international company you have to discuss these things
No, you don't. These are business discussions. You discuss the issue, not the politics behind it. You do it professionally because you are a professional adult making business decisions. You leave the politics of it for Twitter on your own free time.
>It's delusional to think you can avoid personal politics completely in a business.
It's delusional and absurd to think that you need to bring politics into any discussion at work.
No, they aren’t. You’re trying to make them political. This is entirely of your own doing.
Take housing. It’s too expensive! Many people would agree. We can talk about houses being expensive without someone detailing the conversation by injecting politics into it. It devolves into politics when you try to let other people know why YOU think housing is too expensive. You are the one injecting politics into conversation where it isn’t needed, and absolutely isn’t wanted.
If you want to talk about politics go get a Twitter account.
In my experience politics, religion, and money are all generally regarded as off topic among anyone but close friends and family. Unless any of the three specifically effect your business directly (or a member of staff is being illegally discriminated against because of their personal beliefs) I don’t see how you feel like you can’t work without discussing them.
Management took a stance. "Against the employees" is a reading, not a fact.
As I see it, there was nothing against the employees in the stance.
>Management cancelled their employees, removing their platform to talk about internal politics.
Because other companies have such a thing?
Or because it wasn't being abused to talk about BS (genocide accusations, and such).
And they are not entitled for it. They were encourage to do it elsewhere on their own dime and time, not the company's. Do these employees not know what are they hired for exactly?
it was a brilliant strategic move. accidental, as far as i can see from the outside , but brilliant nonetheless.
the leavers are in for a rude awakening when they find that most workplaces in fact don’t want their ilk
It’s, quite ironically, the height of privilege to be able to engage in distracting culture wars rather than working, be able to throw shade at your employers on Twitter and then leave with 6 months severance.
yep, the best gilded cage around. You aren't allowed to have any opinions when you show up to work, but man the dental plan is amazing!
Peter Sloterdijk once said that the person we're going to be building statues in a 100 years will be Lee Kuan Yew, for his construction of a prosperous country that is also devoid of any freedom or political expression. That's the tech CEO ideal in the valley as well if they had it their way.
I have my own tribe, consisting of my family and friends, and they won't fire me when the economy goes south.
For example, supporting the border wall, or being against gender reassignment for minors, or believing biology has an impact on career choices on average, or being against race/gender as part of the selection process at universities, or being in favor of the ar15 being available for legal purchase, or believing IDs should be mandatory to vote.
There are any number of topics where it's only safe to discuss one side of the issue at most bay area tech companies.
I'm not taking a side on these issues. I am simply recognizing that it's the case they cannot really be openly debated.
Mind expanding on this? I'm quite liberal and don't personally care what you base your morals on, so long as they don't result in, for example, you denying the lived experience of LGBT people in this country.
All of this is precisely 0% to do with the work, mind you. It's entirely philosophical viewpoint discrimination.
It's a real thing that's happening there.
The real problem is that they’ve spent years hiring for a type of person where this sort of thing is anathema.
It's only recently that parts of the progressive movement has radicalized.
That sounds like the definition of liberalism rather than progressivism. I don't think the progressive movement has ever really fit under your definition -- or even wanted to. I think what you may be seeing is more people shifting from liberalism to progressivism (at least in certain communities like this).
Many liberals like DHH who don’t stay up to the minute eventually get cancelled.
The US left is unrecognizable from just a few years ago. I couldn’t imagine being able to dissent on anything in public.
And who knows what will be outlawed in the future.
Hopefully it all collapses somehow.
> Both founders are also active — and occasionally hyperactive — on Twitter, where they regularly advocate for mainstream liberal and progressive views on social issues.
What did they expect?
Of course they were going to have employees that approached politics in a similar way, and of course that would leak into the workspace. They've built their brand on the personalities of Jason and David, which has obviously informed all of their hiring decisions.
Here’s his last in-person RailsConf keynote: https://youtu.be/VBwWbFpkltg
He’s promoting anarcho-communism in a RailsConf keynote.
This is dead on: the real issue here is not politics vs. not-politics at work—Basecamp is having a crisis because expectations were broken.
I was wondering how this would go down where I currently work, because people here rarely discuss politics at all. Then I realized that making fun of customer names - and we work with large enterprise customers across the globe - would be shut down in a personal conversation with anyone I work with, and circulating a list like this would just never happen. The way to keep politics out of work is to keep your work environment professional.
This wasn't employees pontificating on the merits of BLM or party politics in Basecamp channels, this was direct response to dumb shit the company was allowing certain people to get away with. DHH's blog post where he got into the details was still basically tittering at "lol Bigbuttson is a funny name", and it's deplorable.
If I was working with someone with that last name I definitely wouldn’t bring it up.
See paragraphs below "So I replied:" ...
But I guess that it reveals what probably should have been clear about Basecamp - it's a vehicle for the expression / gratification of the founders - financially, emotionally and intellectually.
And the loss of staff / possible impact on the company (and customers) was a price they were prepared to pay.
However, losing 1/3 of your staff overnight over an issue like this does somewhat undermine the JF / DHH narrative of extreme managerial competence.
Not sure that comparing 15 or so talented and apparently hard working staff to gangrene is really the most appropriate comparison.
"..looking to get rid of them". Hmmm.
what the sentence you quoted is saying is that its not based on political viewpoints, but based on behaviour, 1/3 of the company would not accept only occasionally being out of bounds enough to stick around. those 1/3 were likely undermining the actual effectiveness of the company for their political causes.
> Remarkable how when 1/3 of the company resigns in one go - many of whom have great and longstanding professional reputations with no history of political activism and including head of marketing, design, customer support, iOS etc. - following fundamental changes they read about in a blog post, it's because _they_ were all intolerable, proselytizing activists who all had to go for the good of the company.
> Absolutely nothing to do with the two leaders who spend a good chunk of time on social media telling the rest of the world how to run their business in the most in your face way possible.
1/3 of their workforce couldn't accept that and took the buyout instead. That's why it was important to do it - they valued their politics over their continued employment. It wasn't to purge people based on their politics, it was to purge people who couldn't limit themselves to 'occasionally straying out of bounds' - 1/3 of the company undermining the other 2/3 to push their politics.
They can afford to make it a non-issue for themselves. And so they have. An empathetic option was available to them (own up to the stupid silly names list) but they cast it aside.
As a consequence, they've lost a lot of respect both in their workforce and in the court of public opinion. I don't intend to put much stock in whatever else they have to say now.
And for me it's not about the politics at work bit. It's the rest of it that is getting less attention. Cringeworthy Huxley quotes, paternalistic benefits, etc. etc.
https://www.platformer.news/p/-what-really-happened-at-basec...
and
https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22406673/basecamp-politic...
[1] https://www.platformer.news/p/-what-really-happened-at-basec...
The idea that it's racist is that the names were only funny to English speakers, because they sounded like English words they consider funny, from the reporting I'd guess things like butt, dick or fart. That feels really condescending and exclusionary if you're on the receiving end of it.
This makes no sense to me: aren't native English-speakers of many races? Aren't there non-English speakers of many races also? Moreover, this happens with any pair of languages. I'm not a native English speaker and there are some English names that sound extremely hilarious in my language. I see myself compiling such a list just for fun. I wouldn't expect English people to be offended by this silly thing, which is inevitable: when there are different languages, there are word collisions and some of them are funny.
> people's names - from the Basecamp client list.
Ouch, this is different, then! I did not pay attention to this detail. Now I understand why the list of names does not circulate (but still, I don't get what could be so bad about it).
Making fun of people in a way that isn’t offensive is a tight line to walk interpersonally and best avoided altogether in professional circumstances. This is particularly true if you’re making fun of people for fundamental aspects of their identity, like names. How would you feel if your name was on a list somewhere and people were laughing at it and cracking jokes about it regularly? Some people might be okay with this, but I think others might be rather offended by it.
I imagine it depends to a large extent on whether you've heard the same shitty joke about your name - hur dur your name sounds like butt! - from far too many people in your professional life. Remember, this is a list of client names that was created solely for the purposes of ridicule while being passed around internal Basecamp networks. In terms of racism, I'm white and British, and it definitely has a flavour of the cultural racism that was prevalent during the British Empire which, for all its differences, America inherited.
I'd love to hear some, that sounds great.
Hah, cool.
https://boards.straightdope.com/t/english-names-that-sound-f...
—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Chevy_II_/_Nova#Urba...
The fact is we don’t know what actual behaviour this is about. I can imagine circumstances where circulating such a list was questionable but harmless fun. I can imagine circumstances in which it involved egregious and tasteless taunting and offensively derogatory behaviour. I just don’t know.
Well I imagine the list had a lot of people from certain ethnicities...
> Out of the 78 names listed on the last version we were able to recover, just 6 names appear to be Asian.
We didn't have to pay them to leave. One tried to use the company social media accounts to advance her politics, so we fired her, and the other person became frustrated that she couldn't vent at work, and quit.
I don't know if it was Trump specifically that made them so persistently agitated, but they just could not stop talking about politics and creating drama.
We later discovered that one of them had been considering reporting us to the state financial authorities because she didn't agree with our policy of accruing interest on client debts - and was collecting client invoices on her work desktop as "evidence".
Placating "activists" in the work place may initially seem like the new norm in corporate responsibility, but it is actually a self-destructive spiral, as there are ever-changing foci for woke outrage. The risk of these same employees turning on the company is extremely high in the long term.
Policies like "No Religion / No Politics" have benefits that far exceed eliminating office distractions. They limit legal liabilities by removing easily-disgruntled employees.
My assumption is that levels plummet
Facebook use after acute social stress impair recovery of cortisol levels. I translate it as "Facebook use after social altercation makes stress longer".
Thanks for idea!
Those attention seeking personalities are just the ones who get your attention and stand out.
I've noticed an overlap between attention seeking personalities and people who get noticed for...well, anything.
But that’s kind of the nature of “attention seeking”.
Two years ago we had Ibrahim X Kendi speak at our company, he's now considered by many to be a "neo racist". Within months our open Slack channel for Q&A was shut-down.
However we still have a lot of the internal activists.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/nation-div...
Regardless, I came not to blame him, but to praise him.
Though I do agree with Kmele Foster’s insistence that the term “racist” is well and good enough to describe the type of segregationist thinking and reification of the fiction of race that is promoted by so-called anti-racists.
[1] https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/the-elect-neoracists-po...
...I’m realizing I can’t use the term neoracism in the subtitle of my The Elect book.
From assorted social media posts, I am realizing that if I say Neoracists Posing as Antiracists and Their Threat to a Progressive America, many understandably think I am referring to black people being racist against whites.
I need to specify – despite that it may dampen the enthusiasm for my book among some – that I do not think of black people being racist against whites and white people being racist against blacks as equally reprehensible.
Many whites are deeply aggrieved that they are assailed for being racists, but that no one seems to mind black people not liking white people. They want us to assail black racism as vociferously as we do white racism.
I must disappoint. I am fully on board with the idea that racism is about who is up versus down. Black racism against whites is, at least at its foundation, about resentment at being abused. To apply the same judgment to this as to blacks being racist against whites is facile, uninsightful – frankly, almost a debate team trick.
“But where does it lead if you hate me and I hate you and you hate me …?” – okay. But we live in our own limited time slices. There are two layers here.
One: just a few inches past about 1964, is it so unpardonable, so incomprehensible, that black people might be mad at white people?
Two: if you object that 1964 was a while ago now, then is it so unpardonable, so incomprehensible, that lots of black people might be mad at white people now when so many intellectuals and artists and community leaders have taught them to be that mad for decades?
Note – I didn’t ask whether it was right that they have been taught that. The issue is that they were. And they harbor what they were taught at a time – today -- when no one can deny that racism does exist. Anyone who thinks I don’t know that hasn’t read me much.
So. In this vein, I am seeing that “neoracism” sounds to many like I am decrying racism against whites. I get why they think that – and I know that quite a few will think that’s what I mean without subscribing to the white nationalist groups who have used the word that way.
Some in my position would try to reclaim the word and make it mean what they want it to mean. I, for example, meant “new racism against black people.” But my comfort zone cannot fashion community meaning. I am not interested in standing athwart common human understanding and hollering “Stop!,” watching it continue despite me, and then self-gratifyingly grumbling that nobody listens to me.
My strategy will be to eschew the word “neoracism.” If people are going to read it to mean that my book is about arguing against racism against white people, they will be massively disappointed by my book.
This is because my book is about how the modern conception of antiracism is racist against BLACK people.
Social media and Substack allow one to fashion a book according to public feedback in a way never possible before. My book will no longer be titled The Elect: Neoracists Posing as Antiracists and Their Threat to a Progressive America,” because I can see that this leads some whites to see me as defending them against black racism. My book will not do that, and I frankly suggest the whites in question learn to understand it. Racism punches down. Yes, I believe that, even though The Elect do too. I always have.
Instead I will try something new. The Elect: The Threat to a Progressive America from Anti-Black Antiracists.
In this passage McWhorter clearly disavows this word completely, because of just the misunderstanding seen ITT.
[0] https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/can-black-people-be-rac...
It seems like our era of fast decentralized media makes it tough to employ a neologism in a way that clarifies rather than confuses.
I also appreciate your good faith effort to help clear this up.
Is it racist subculture or something? It just sounds absurd compared to saying 'racist'.
Race abolitionists like Kmele Foster (Fifth Column podcast) and Thomas Chatterton Williams (Self Portrait in Black and White), as well as scholars like Barbara Fields (Racecraft) point out that what people call antiracist depends on re-centering race in the discourse, which they see as promoting a race-based system of evaluation, which results in racist thinking (in the normal dictionary, pre-Foucaultized definition of the term).
Hence some people who agree with this line of thinking (though not the three I mentioned afaik) prefer to call “antiracism” neoracism because it’s a very different thing promoted by different sorts of people than what we traditionally call racism, but it still requires one to think in terms of race and to believe that race exists in a meaningful sense.
I'm sorry, what!? The author of "How to be Antiracist" is considered a "neo racist" by how many?
Kinda like how you will see a pastor rail against homosexuality, and then it turns out they have a boyfriend on the side...
"The lady doth protest too much, methinks" and all that.
If anything this C-suite freakout seems like a result of too much Covid isolation. Lots of executives are hyper-extroverts who need lots of coddling from people they've hired for that task. Some needs just aren't fulfilled over Zoom. This last year set these super entrepreneur dudes [and, to be fair, their top-percentile coding-god employees too] on tilt, and they're lashing out trying to get back on track. It's their company; if they want to sacrifice some jobs and profits on the altar of their warped personalities how can we blame them?
That’s true, but every time we humans have tried “let’s throw everything out and start over” it’s ended in tears. And that’s the prevailing vibe I get right now.
Discussing is one thing, and advocating is another, and it should be obvious which is which but some people don't know and many don't care, in fact advocacy was their goal all along.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/15/supreme-court-rules-workers-...
On an earlier thread about Basecamp, I suggested that if the real goal is to keep conversations in the office civil and focused on work, the policy should be "keep conversations in the office civil and focused on work." You can politely shut down acrimonious debate in your Slack not because it's "political," but because it's acrimonious, and you're not sending a message that "political" discussions that really do have a bearing on your workplace culture are off-limits even if they're conducted respectfully. That's where Basecamp dropped the ball. (And let the ball roll under the couch and then set the couch on fire.)
Both yours and the OP are side-stepping the main issue which is 'Identity Politics' -> it cannot be avoided.
It's 'very easy' frankly, to avoid 'Politics and Religion' at the office, frankly, it's normal.
Also fairly easy to avoid 'abortion and gun control'.
But - 'the companies position on BLM' for example, is something that basically hardly be avoided.
An initiative by a few staffers to create a 'Diversity Council' which they control ... well that's not technically political but that's effectively the same thing - it will happen, the company has to take a position.
And of course 'making fun of people's' names' isn't political either. Obviously, it shouldn't be done in a formal setting, but for god's sake if people can't have fun then the world is over. If a bunch of low-level customer service reps are having beers and laughing / venting about a bunch of stuff then obviously nobody should care. (Not that I think they would for the most part).
Companies are now teaching 'diversity sensitivity' and they have to decide whether to go the classical route, or to go with 'CRT' which uses some really inflammatory language about how all White people are guilty of upholding White Supremacy, literally for issues like 'Thanksgiving', 'Focusing on Correct Answers', 'Objectivity' (and I'm not remotely aggrandizing or being hyperbolic here - this is the extent of some of that training). This training in some form has to be given and it reaches beyond just the '2 hours' you get when you start.
So aside from the possibly bone-headed / lack-of-self-awarness moves by the leadership here, the issues cannot be swept under the rug.
Finally, even though 1/3 did take the money, and that is is probably an unhealthy number, it's possible that it's a 'accidentally smart move' by leadership to just avoid the types of people he doesn't want.
I utterly loathe the WeWork leadership - but I have to admit, when they signalled that they will not allow employees to submit invoices for meat - I thought it was brilliant. Machiavellian, unfair, yes - but it was a really smart way to define 'culture', even if they were effectively turning away a large group of people (and quietly suppressing others).
So in the end, 1) we have to navigate the 'politics of diversity' there's no avoiding it and 2) from a Realpolitik perspective, this may not be so completely bad for the company.
Companies that make you submit receipts for food are negative in my view and affect whether I want to work there. Simply set a per diem for food and leave it there. Trying to examine receipts for meat or not meat (or alcohol or salt or whatever) reflects a non-flexible mentality and likely makes other aspects of a company unpleasant and ineffective.
WeWork seemed batshit crazy this seems like one of the many signs of a dumb leadership style.
No need to make it no politics/no religion at work. Endless talking about keto or veganism or BeachBody or CrossFit or vaccines or children or being anti-child or emacs or vim or whatever can be just as divisive and counterproductive if it's not managed. Lots of people are assholes or misinformed about a lot of stuff. Big deal. Manage. That's the active part of the word "manager".
Don't use the company social media to advance your politics or sell your MLM products or shill for cryptocurrencies -- company social media must be managed. Financial policies must be managed, and if people don't like them or aren't able to accept it, talk to them directly. Clear up misunderstandings if they exist and lay out the parameters of the job.
This is not about Trump or politics or activists. This is about bad management.
I manage and work with people of a wide variety of political persuasions. Out of work I have plenty of opinions about politics and causes. In work, I demand mutual respect and professionalism. I won't let A misgender B, I won't let C make fun of D's evangelical church, we're going to keep all the politics talk to a minimum but we're not going to ban it. If someone doesn't want to engage, that must be respected as well.
But it's just foolishness to think that my "employees can come to work... without having to deal with heavy political or societal debates unconnected to that work". Not when heavy political debates unconnected to that work affect where and when they can pee or whether they fear for their lives at the speed trap that's stationed about a mile up the road from the office. We don't need to debate it, we can't solve the world's problems, and we don't need litmus tests, but the basic mutual respect and professionalism demanded of every employee applies to me too and I need to recognize that different employees walked in the door from different worlds, and their skin color/presence or lack of uteruses/accents come along. I need to proactively make this a good place to work for my valued employees because they deserve human respect and they're f(*^ing expensive to replace. That's the bottom line.
Managing people is hard to do well. It's like writing code. There are bugs, everyone has their own style, everyone thinks the other person's management process was faulty.
At some point, your organization needs to set company wide standards. ...and like coding standards, they aren't perfect, they can have grey areas, and in some contexts they don't even make sense. But on the whole, they do more good than bad.
Don't put GOTO statements in your code. Don't hard code passwords in your scripts. Don't talk about politics or religion in the office.
No, I’d more expect a tech firm that arose in that era which gave us the “tech bro” image and in which reacting against stuffy, corporate, professional corporate structure and culture was all the rage to be among the least likely of firms to have that.
1. You have a controlling share in the company and don't give af (b/c you might lose customers and employees)
2. Everyone else (at the company) already completely or mostly agrees with your rants
3. You are so damn good at what you do that people have to put up with you
Let's be honest, the most common reason people do get away with personal political rants at companies is because they get lucky and are in Scenario 2.
This is another reason why everything is becoming more polarized. Companies are beginning to "lean" much more one direction or another. There is no reason to think that this will change anytime soon.
I've seen that one before. It usually seems to involve throwing chairs.
Tech has awful leadership development pipelines and programs at the Junior and mid levels. I sort of struggle to think of anyone that actually does this at non-managing director levels other than the military with its Junior officer corps and maybe a very select few companies.
Not to be extremely pedantic, but the fact that the term “management” is thrown in as a solution and not “leadership” sort of proves this point.
OP is referring to generally strong and sound leadership techniques. These can and are taught by a select few orgs I just referred to; there’s definitely a science there to learn.
The issue is that so, so much of professional America doesn’t produce good leaders or bother to train them. The idea that strong management is a tenable, broad based solution, when the ball is currently at the line of management == don’t be an a* when you make schedules for your team, is not a good one.
Until corporate America, and especially tech, starts planning how to produce leaders and not just managers, a blanket ban is the only thing that makes much sense as an org policy that could actually work.
It’s true, fwiw. This is a leadership challenge that is solvable, and the orgs that grow leaders have track records of solving it without total bans. It’s usually just a matter of enforcing professionalism, diverting attention, steering attitudes, and most importantly working to create extremely high trust environments by designed. But: too many managers try* to hang in this brutal forum where* the best engineer who wanted to do EM stuff is a manager, and suddenly has to handle this. Leadership dev programs for junior leaders/EM-equivalent take years to do, not a promotion.
Even full MBA programs do a poor job at this.
I'll say.
One problem is that if management, especially owners, feel like control of the company is being wrested from them, they'll get pretty radical in the course corrections.
An 18th C. Navy Captain facing a mutiny will probably need to hang people until he's sure of his position. There really is no other way.
(not saying at all if this was appropriate or not)
Well it's important to keep the context in mind here: "the holocaust reference" in this case was a chart from the Anti-Defamation League making the case that normalizing seemingly minor bad behavior makes it easier to go on to slightly worse behavior, which now doesn't seem that different from what you're already tolerating, and so on, and so on.
https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/pyramid-of...
This is not a terribly controversial assertion, in and of itself. Was it a stretch to use it in this context? You could definitely make that case. (I've long been fond of the quip, "If you use a slippery slope argument once, you'll start using it everywhere.")
But I would argue that when DHH acknowledged the list making fun of 'funny names' was a bad idea, apologized, and promised to shut it down, he had the choice to stop talking at that point. He didn't have to publicly chastise the employee who brought up the Pyramid of Hate. He took positive steps toward putting out this fire, but then threw on a match of his own -- and then doubled down on that, publicly calling out an employee who kept at it.
So, if we're talking about DHH-the-manager, I would suggest he maybe didn't do the bestest job of managing here. He could have said, "yes, we'll take down the list"; instead, he went with "yes, we'll take down the list, but don't you think you're being a drama queen about it."
What do you do when a (previously-complicit) employee keeps an issue going on and on and on?
A little 'hey, get off your high horse, you were involved too' doesn't go amiss.
(As a first, second or even third reaction it's not great - but it sounds like there had been a lot of talking preceding this).
One thing that I think gets lost in discussions of hypocrisy is that there are actually two types, and they should be handled very differently.
The first type is when an alcoholic tells you to slow down on your drinking, e.g. "do as I say and not as I do" hypocrisy. This kind is usually ok, because it tends to be more of a "learn from my mistakes" situation than a failure to understand the contradiction in your own words.
The second type is "rules for thee and not for me" hypocrisy – people that try to catch others out in their "bad behavior" but then think it is totally fine when they do it themselves, as they provide some sort of post-hoc rationalization for why it is ok for them to do it ("because context" or whatever) but totally unacceptable for others to do so.
Most people conflate the two types, but I try to only refer to the latter type as hypocrisy, and I think it is generally bad to be a hypocrite in that way. And from the sounds of it, the Basecamp employees in question were definitely more of the latter than the former.
The damage done to Basecamp's public reputation, internal morale, and now all the projects set back by losing a third of their employees is unfathomable -- all for the satisfaction of "by gum, at least I don't have to say I put up with one of my now-former employees talking back to me in a way that was arguably hypocritical." On balance, was that really the right tradeoff to make here?
But it doesn't really matter if the manager (or owner) believes they handled it well. It matters if the employees thought it was handled well. In the case at least a third of them didn't.
Even putting aside the substance of the no politics policy, the delivery and crafting of it was terrible. There was a DEI committee, and it and all other committees were unilaterally dismissed. The no politics rule was decided with zero employee input. And worse than that it was delivered via public blog post that had to be hastily edited after the fact.
Had DHH and Fried carefully taken employee input and crafted a policy that took their concerns into account, and delivered with care and respect, they could've still ended up with a no politics policy. But employees would not have been blindsided and maybe more people would've bought in.
But maybe DHH and Fried really want a company culture devoid of significant employee input into how the company is run.
Politics, religion, and sex are always going to be a problem in a company, as they distract from the core mission, divide people along lines that aren’t helpful in accomplishing the core mission, and add large potential liabilities everywhere.
> keep all the politics talk to a minimum
Ok, so this is one management strategy and the parent comment provided another. You seem to be implying that one management choice has moral superiority to the other?
> whatever can be just as divisive and counterproductive
Yes, and their management choice could be to minimize these just as you choose to minimize politics. That is entirely orthogonal to making managerial decisions to ban certain topics.
They could choose to ban some of the non-politics topics of discussion as well. Hell, they could just say "shutup and work". They could say no work related discussion allowed at work.
Again, these are all managerial choices but you seem to be accusing the company of not managing at all?
> when they can pee or whether they fear for their lives at the speed trap that's stationed about a mile up the road from the office.
> their skin color/presence or lack of uteruses/accents come along.
You have addressed nothing about the actions of employees as the parent comment discussed. You have only addressed that people have different looks, feelings, organs, and politics. Great observation.
Based on the extreme degree of ... inflammation ... fanned by twitter, fb, etc I would say that people who are not able to keep their opinions under control beyond an occasional two person conversation are the ones who need to seek some sort of counseling.
There are conversations and then there are youtube meltdowns. I have no desire to work with the latter. You speak of professionalism and respect. In the diverse world we live in keeping to oneself seems the only reasonable path for the time being.
This feels like a statement along the same lines as "just don't be poor".
If it's so easy to manage, how come so many people screw it up?
On the other hand, however, these are in fact business leaders who have written books about how good they are and how much they know about leading people, so... it's reasonable that our expectation of good leadership is a bit higher for them than the average middle manager.
Wow, and I thought the HR complaint against David was nuts. Sounds like basecamp was infiltrated by Ben Kuchera's or Randi Harpers. Can't recall the name of the person GitHub miss-hired.. Recall a few years back seemed like everyone was hiring "diversity consultants" or something only to find out they were creating toxic environments by seizing political power via threatening to "cancel" anyone that didn't think and say the right things. This set them up as a type of "thought leader", or perhaps even a cult type leader, where they controlled things..
That was a weird trend and perhaps the tail end of an age in the post-gamergate era.
Duties typically consist of 1) Being a white woman 2) Sending out the monthly 'diverity of the month' celebration/awareness email 3) Rubber stamping the 'gender pay equality assessment' annual report 4) Using the word 'empathy'
Tail end of an age. But yes, we are in a new age now.
Yep. Most companies were hiring 'Chief Diversity Officer' types to inoculate themselves from the mob. Instead, the people they hired are leading the mob.
They basically let the vampire in.
That was a sentence I thought I'd never see written.
To your point, I'm glad you found that training to be helpful. The times I've been subjected to similar, I found it wasteful, condescending, and presumptive. So perhaps your mileage will vary.
"Don't be one to your friends, family, coworkers, or especially to our customers". The word is hard to define, but easy to recognize. And you kinda always know when you're being one.
Everyone has been one, and no one feels singled out or blamed. Doesn't let anybody leave feeling like a victim or a victor. Yet left people feeling powerful to call other people out for being one, without resorting to stronger language. That company had comradery; it's too bad it takes more than that.
Coraline Ada Ehmke?
This is all covered under US employment law.
A big problem in 2021, going back some years, is that the internet makes it easy for anyone to put out their slate and call themselves an "activist." Years ago people used to say that politics was the last refuge of a scoundrel. This is what activists engage in: politics.
Outrage is one of the emotions that's easiest to garner virality. Many "activists" are not conversant in ethics and philosophy. Many of them aren't good people. Many of them seem to be quite bitter and hateful while they talk about justice.
Many of the loudest voices in this arena are engaging in outrage mongering.
They limit legal liabilities by removing easily-disgruntled employees.
"Easily disgruntled" is a signpost. Activism in 2021 needs better filters, because far too many people who should be in counseling and therapy are proselytizing to the masses and young people, with public results that corroborate this. At least in the 60's and 70's, one had to be capable of organization.
Once upon a time, when I was in college one of the times (twenty odd years ago), the university debating society invited David Irving, well known Holocaust denier.
The Anti-Facist/Socialist Workers party people got involved, and threatened protests and violence, and pressured the University to not allow the talk.
This started happening then, and not enough of us (including me) spoke up, so it got normalised. Obviously the internet et al has had huge impacts on this (as well as the messed up world we live in), but I do kinda remember those experiences as a turning point, looking back.
My bank employer’s approach is maximum inclusivity and mutual respect. That generally mean no politics just because it isn’t professional. Religion is a grey area. If religion is an excuse for social gatherings and celebrations then it’s fully allowed so long as everybody is allowed to participate. If a religious focused context is cause for distraction or disagreement then the conversation isn’t professional and the behavior, regardless of the religious content, can be punished.
My military employer is absolutely adamant that politics must be far away from the office. They also strongly nurture and require maximum inclusivity. Their view on religion is maximum support for any professed religion or faith as necessary to advance the religious Liberty of all employees. They have dedicated employees to ensure and guarantee religious support and exercise for any employee that requests support.
What they said was: people who created the list went off on some weird tangent about the list being the first step towards genocide, if you have a problem with the list, you shouldn't contribute to the list (the subtle point here is that people who tend to be most active about these things usually feel guilty, management said the list was bad, management said it shouldn't have happened...what more do you want? Are you really saying that suggesting the list was genocidal is a normal response?).
Circulating a list like this would happen everywhere. Every person believes they are above other people when they see other people behaving badly...funnily enough, bad things still happen because people think they are different from everyone else (understanding this point is a big step is the difference between managing yourself and having to manage other people...things happen, people make mistakes, they do things that they wouldn't normally do...once you manage a large team, the probability of weird things happening goes to 1).
Btw, just as an aside, this whole discussion is going nowhere. I can only see this from my own perspective but most people have literally no knowledge of history, they have no knowledge of debate, they have no idea how to engage with other people in good faith. The reason why so many organizations have rules about not talking about politics is because, once an organization reaches a certain size, these discussions become impossible because the average level of a discussion is just so terrible (and there will always be a minority who actually don't want to engage with anyone else, they just want to burn it down). Ironically, this is essential to improving diversity in large organizations...but, irregardless, this discussion is pointless and will go nowhere. We will never reach a point where the complaining stops because the complaining is not related to anything outside individuals...it is just nothing (and a huge part of this is people feeling guilty).
[1] https://www.platformer.news/p/-what-really-happened-at-basec... [2] https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/pyramid-of...
That doesn't mean that keeping such a list 100% inevitably leads to losing so much of your workforce or that someone who points out that it could escalate that far (given enough time and poor handling) is "accusing" you of not wanting to retain your employees. What it means is that you should nip such things in the bud and thus simply never have to play the guessing game of "will this go catastrophically badly or not?".
Making of lists of funny names is not the first step to genocide. Genocide is horrendous, but the reasons for genocide are complex and the notion of a pyramid to genocide based only on jokes or whatever...is just wrong (again, that is what I said earlier about people not understanding history, I think it isn't coincidental that history/politics education in the US is of very low quality). That view is based on an extremely narrow, individualistic notion of human action/events that has no correlation with reality (living in a society where everyone accuses everyone else of being a genocidaire is also not fun for anyone, it is not inclusive, it is not diverse...I am sure lawyers would love it, no-one else would).
This is the kind of thing that you would hope people can appreciate through common sense...but, unfortunately, that isn't the case anymore.
Also, the issue isn't about someone being fired for promoting genocide...again, this is one of the subtleties of argumentation that you should learn at school...DHH's point was only about why the person was posting the pyramid of hate, self-evidently he did not believe that anyone in the office was attempting to organise a genocide (why does this needs to be said). His view on the list was clear: the list shouldn't have happened, it was bad, people who made the list should have not made it (rather than making it, and then attempting to over-compensate by saying the list was the first step to genocide).
...the stuff that people argue about on here is truly amazing. Again, the US underinvests massively in history/politics/philosophy...these are problems that just don't happen in some societies.
And that is not what the post you’re replying to said.
Many people literally don't care for actual issue. Lot of them are just opporunistic.
> Also, the issue isn't about someone being fired for promoting genocide...again, this is one of the subtleties of argumentation that you should learn at school...DHH's point was only about why the person was posting the pyramid of hate, self-evidently he did not believe that anyone in the office was attempting to organise a genocide (why does this needs to be said). His view on the list was clear: the list shouldn't have happened, it was bad, people who made the list should have not made it (rather than making it, and then attempting to over-compensate by saying the list was the first step to genocide).
Totally agree.
> ...the stuff that people argue about on here is truly amazing. Again, the US underinvests massively in history/politics/philosophy...these are problems that just don't happen in some societies.
I call this a north-american problem. In other parts of world (at least where I am from), it is well understood to not talk about politics at work. Americans talk about both free speech and politically correct speech, ironical.
I can relate with this based on my experience. Setting proper goals and incentive solves not all but many problems. But with big enough and diverse crowd there will be always some issues.
They were amused by a double meaning found in an arrangement of alphabetic characters.
It's really not a big deal.
Inevitably that sort of thing gets out, and insulting your customers' names is not really a great business strategy.
Beyond that, I wouldn't like working with people who are so clearly children. And not even good children.
Source: I was actually bullied as a kid. I couldn't care less if people are making fun of my name (or anything else about me) without me knowing about it.
You just have to have that mindset. Make fun of yourself instead of others, for instance.
> In fact, reviewing the original list in question, the vast majority of names on it fall into the category of the two specific examples above. It's not a list of, say, primarily Asian names. Out of the 78 names listed on the last version we were able to recover, just 6 names appear to be Asian.
> 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.
The Verge is lying about things as usual, painting an inaccurate picture of interracial conflict.
> "lol Bigbuttson is a funny name", and it's deplorable.
Hyperbole. One European making fun of another European is hardly deplorable.
Edit: nm, answered in other comments.
What list? I don't see anything about that in the tweet, or in Basecamp's blogposts the other day...
Is this true? My understanding is they said this was unacceptable and apologized for not stopping their employees from disseminating this list earlier. I guess people wanted a stronger disciplinary response to people who contributed the list and they refused?
Pessimistically, I’ve witnessed similar exchanges that didn’t seem plausible to me, but yet were very real to the people making the claim. I remember a friend who was convinced that their trans friends lives were in danger after the 2016 election and claimed that management not denouncing the election and allowing friends to work from home for safety was “literally the same” as attacking them. It was so weird having them walk through the logic I thought they were joking. Fortunately, everyone lived despite continuing to come into the office (until covid of course).
The argument here is that treating this kind of mockery as acceptable is part of what enables gradually more serious hateful behavior in a society at large. I don’t really think this is that controversial.
Whether it’s appropriate to bring it up in a work context to explain why something is racist, I’m not sure. I probably wouldn’t do it myself. But I do find it weird that DHH acknowledged the list was bad but doesn’t seem to believe there was anything ethnically or racially prejudiced about it. Children are excused occasional meanness without explanation, but adults generally aren’t.
Even if it was specifically offensive, bringing up a diagram like that in a specific instance as a path to genocide is such overkill it kind of kills the discussion.
While I think that system racism and casual denegration is bad and society needs to work to eliminate it, putting it on the same spectrum as genocide is like showing a chart that includes a light bulb and the sun as part of a discussion on luminosity. Yes, it’s technically correct but not useful for conversation. Making fun of foreign peoples’ names and genocide are both racist. But the odds of such an act leading to genocide is googol:1 given that there are billions of acts of this type of name racism daily vs rare instances of genocide.
The list is not the issue here.
In an ideal world, the list would be seen as an innocent inside joke, and be totally not newsworthy. But millenials (not all: some, enough to change the culture around this) don't know how to take a joke. Like the children of hippies turned yuppies, Gen X successors turned prudes.
If you have a name like Jonathan Lovesturds, sorry, but the name is funny, and you should be expect people to ocassionally make fun about it, including in companies you deal with. It is what it is, and it's not the end of the world, nor some huge abuse (my surname had pun potential, so I got some of this as a kid, big effin' deal).
The "politics at work" thing would be relevant and legit if it was for e.g. unionizing, abuse of power from some higher up, the company doing shady business (e.g. Google and military deals, Facebook etc.) etc.
But in 2021 this more often than not degenerates in people making a power-play, abusing identity politics and other fashionable talking points, to increase their influence in the company, attack others they don't like, and so on.
Pretending the list was about "racism" (when it had absolutely nothing to do with that, aside from: "also contains a small percentage of foreign names that sound funny on top of the anglosaxon such") is also in this very vein.
Pretending this list and subsequent lack of discipline isn’t about the founders vanity is very ignorant
This isn't accurate. DHH openly admitted that the list circulating was a big failure that fell on the founders and the company, an admission that was positively received by most employees. The explosive part of the scandal starts when some employees insisted that the list contributed to genocidal attitudes and DHH rather aggressively pushed back on this point, saying that this is an unproductive escalation of the discussion (and then DHH himself ironically escalated the discussion even further).
> He told me today that attempting to link the list of customer names to potential genocide represented a case of “catastrophizing” — one that made it impossible for any good-faith discussions to follow. Presumably, any employees who are found contributing to genocidal attitudes should be fired on the spot — and yet nobody involved seemed to think that contributing to or viewing the list was a fireable offense. If that’s the case, Hansson said, then the pyramid of hate had no place in the discussion. To him, it escalated employees’ emotions past the point of being productive.
Pointing out the problematic nature of the list was not the trigger for this. The trigger was a specific accusation made about the political impact of the list. The founders were clearly trying not to be a company that maintains a list of customer names to laugh at.
[1] https://www.platformer.news/p/-what-really-happened-at-basec...
It just works.
Hey customers might notice a difference.
The kind of backstabbing people to jump at the chance to make a grand-standing against a good employer and get a buyout bonus at a time the company is in the spotlight for BS reasons...
1. I've heard vague hearsay that it's hard to get a job there and they don't hire that often, they're not a big company with a big revolving door. Hiring new employees may be a less frequent and less consequential problem than avoiding workplace issues that affect existing employees.
2. This has apparently enhanced the company's image amongst some people, just read over this HN thread. It's not clear that this will damage their hiring appeal and overall ability to competently fill positions.
But at the first chance of them proving otherwise, money (the buyout) and the faux-hero points ("principled" exit), won for many.
Notice how for ~20 years we haven't heard any pain stories or exposes from there, until this BS story of the "name list" (which is an inside joke blown out of proportion), and the "intolerable" pain of employees told not to discuss politics at work...
Oh, the humanity...
And to many people, this is going to make Basecamp appear more attractive not less. They won't have a hard time filling seats.
It just takes a crisis to find out...
And has little to do with failure in personal relationships or management. Many people are inherently shitty.
> And if you did and someone pointed out how it can become problematic to have foreign names in the list and they tell you why, you don’t self-immolate.
No, whatever self-immolation that occurred didn't happen because someone pointed out how it can become problematic to have foreign names in the list. They acknowledged that it was hugely problematic and wanted to correct the mistake and move on, which is a pretty normal response. The problem occurred when some employees clashed with the founder over acknowledging a specific political accusation.
I find it uncharitable & inaccurate to portray this as evidence of the founders' vanity because they shutdown when someone criticises the list, because that's not what happened. A heated political clash happened, and losing your cool over a deeply political issue is not surprising or a demonstration of vanity, it is exactly why many people don't discuss that kind of thing.
https://world.hey.com/dhh/let-it-all-out-78485e8e
In particular he wrote:
> We have to be careful to celebrate that progress proportionally, though. I was dismayed to see the argument advanced in text and graphics on [Employee 1’s] post that this list should be considered part of a regime that eventually could lead to genocide. That's just not an appropriate or proportionate comparison to draw. > > And further more, I think it makes us less able to admit mistakes and accept embarrassment, without being tempted to hide transgressions in the past. If the stakes for any kind of bad judgement in this area is a potential link to a ladder that ends in genocide, we're off on a wrong turn.
And in another post:
> I can appreciate how those examples raise the sensitivity of anything related to names, minorities, and power dynamics. > > Still, I don't think we serve the cause of opposing colonial regimes or racist ideology by connecting their abusive acts around names to this incident. And I don't think we serve an evaluation of you and others making fun of names in a Campfire session by drawing that connection either. > > We can recognize that forceful renaming by a colonial regime is racist and wrong while also recognizing that having a laugh at customer names behind their back is inappropriate and wrong without equating or linking the two.
I certainly wouldn't call that "aggressive"; it reads as polite, reasoned and measured to me, and even if DHH is wrong (I don't think he is) I fail to see how this is outside the bounds of what it should be acceptable for a leader to say to an employee.
> 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.
[1] https://www.platformer.news/p/-what-really-happened-at-basec...
In an ideal world, that would be the very bottom of bad things in the world, well below "annoying ringtones".
>They made it clear they don't want employee input, criticism.
No, they just made clear they don't employees diverting the discussion to BS arguments such as that "a list of funny names" is in any way similar to endorsing genocide. If that's the kind of "ideas" people would bring in, then they prefered to keep it to work talk. Who wouldn't?
It's like many people today were pampered children throwing tantrums, and don't know the basics of logic, what's relevant and what's not, how to not slippery-slope things to death, how to deal with their "feelings", and so on.
Or, that would be the case, if it was legit rage, but a lot of it is fashion, hypocrisy and power-plays.
On top of that there are people jealous at DHH and co, who can't stand their success and advocacy, and will rejoice at the first chance to turn them into scapegoats.
You're right but I think that's kind of beside the point -- they didn't have to use that power.
>"a list of funny names" is in any way similar to endorsing genocide.
I would say they are similar, the chart is to demonstrate that they're two ends of the spectrum of dehumanising and hatred. I think it's mistaken to fixate on the "genocide" bit, there are a lot of other things in the middle of the chart also, but it all starts with subtle things like mocking other people for having names that would be totally normal in their home culture. It's a very light form of dehumanising and it may not even be intended that way but it still is one nonetheless.
In the sense that moisture in the air is the other end of the spectrum of waterboarding.
Choosing to not discuss politics is fine. But if you do that, you’re making a choice: you’re choosing to take the side of those who prefer political decisions to be made by a small elite, without feedback from people like us. You’re choosing not to weigh in.
People who are criticizing Basecamp want their politics in workplace. Every single one of them knows they won't be in the minority. They won't have to be one of the few opposing voices in a sea of anti-abortion, pro-gun-rights, anti-gay-marriage, anti-immigration coworkers.
I've never had a discussion about abortion or guns-rights or whatever in the general workplace - maybe I've had social conversations amongst work friends - but really the "political" conversations I've had at work are mostly focus on building diverse teams to build better products or calling out and addressing bad behaviour.
Absolutely. The US government considered the entire civil rights movement to serve the Communist agenda. Read about J. Edgar Hoover's enemies list[0] or COINTELPRO[1]. The FBI believed MLK was a Communist agent[2]. Any anti-war or Black activist group was portrayed as enemies of the state and left-wing extremists.
You can see the same playbook being used against BLM today. No one on the right will fail to refer to them as anything but a "Marxist terrorist group" that "burns entire cities to the ground" and "murders innocents with impunity."
[0]https://www.npr.org/2012/02/14/146862081/the-history-of-the-...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
[2]https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/federal-bure...
For example, you go to work and some of your more braindead colleagues are earnestly insisting that keeping a list of amusing customer names is the first step on the road to genocide.
Do you: (a) get involved in this nonsense, knowing from past experience how furious they'll get if you disagree, or (b) ignore this stupidity and get on with your job?
Personally, I'd pick the latter.
Work is not a politically/religiously clean room environment whether we like it or not.
What kind of implicit bias do you mean?
Compared to the US population, white people are significantly underrepresented [0] in US software development jobs and overrepresented by Asians. "Most" is technically true at > 50% but it is hardly reflective of US racial demographics.
sources:
https://www.zippia.com/software-engineer-jobs/demographics/
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045219
[0]: as are black and hispanic people
This is exactly true; I really don't understand the opposite point of view (and I'm happy if anyone can enlighten me; I'm happy for good-faith discussion). It's not hard for anyone to admit that our society, the very organization of people along economic, class, race, and gender lines is 'biased' in some way, that the equality of the law does not reflect in how people are treated. Why do people think that the door to the lobby of your workplace is like a magical portal into another dimension, where these influences/biases/perceptions no longer hold any sway?
I understand that this argument can be extended - for instance, we might say that the public/private distinction is just as arbitrary, but we have good reasons to respect, say, sexual autonomy in the private realm. Do we have similarly good reasons, speaking in terms of what a well-meaning person in society might be concerned about for why 'politics' (speaking broadly as issues from 'the outside' that manifest within the company and issues of the company itself) should enjoy a similar distinction?
We spend one third of our adult lives at work. Much of that time is spent on interacting with others in some way. Should that really be closed off to 'politics'? Is man a political animal (Aristotle's words, not mine!) or not?
It's exactly because everyone else must spend time with other people at work that they should keep their politics out of it - their right to work without being harassed for political causes is greater than someone's wish to discuss it at work. That's not why people were hired for the job, its not related to the job, leave it at home.
The main point of my comment is that saying politics is "not related to the job" is both ahistorical and incorrect, very much in the same way that ethical concerns relating to building bomb is just as "related to the job" as what material the bomb's shell ought to be made of.
Let's take a step back; are ethical concerns part of "the job"? Why or why not?
Yes, you pulled a word game to justify your position from the outset and are restating it. I disagree. Just because you consider it important to every part of your life, doesn't mean you need to bring it up in your job. It's not an overriding thing for everyone else who doesn't share your level of alarmism and the outlook that economic, gender, racial, sexual issues define every part of your existence. I'm at work - I don't want to care about any of your racial, sexual, etc issues. I will treat you professionally and I want you to do the same.
>The main point of my comment is that saying politics is "not related to the job" is both ahistorical and incorrect, very much in the same way that ethical concerns relating to building bomb is just as "related to the job" as what material the bomb's shell ought to be made of.
Then find a different job. Maybe with an NGO who shares your causes.
>Let's take a step back; are ethical concerns part of "the job"? Why or why not?
Ethical concerns are part of my profession, but they don't define my life and my ethical concerns don't define other people's ethical or professional concerns.
Just treat people professionally and don't bring identity politics into the workplace.
Work is a third of your life, but it's the third of your life that is about doing what somebody else wants you to do in exchange for funding the other two thirds. That's not true for everybody, but it's a rule of thumb.
The other week I moved houses. I hired some movers who charged by the hour. If, instead of moving my furniture, they'd stood around talking about politics, and said "how can you tell us to get back to work instead of talking politics, when labor is an inherently political subject!" I would have been angry. Most people would, I think.
That being said, there's no clear no line, I agree with you. Some political issues are related to the work place - unions come to mind - and those should not be excluded. Disallowing those is probably illegal in most places anyway and Basecamp, by the way, did explicitly exclude issues which are related to work.
But I think the general idea is that yes, you should keep politics (and religion) separated from work, as far as possible. That does not mean that you can not talk about it on your lunch break or after work or that you're not allowed to unionize. But you should not make your coworker uncomfortable because she/he likes guns and you think only maniacs do so.
my experience is that most workplaces and social spaces I'm in are systemically liberal, "reality has a liberal bias" abounds
Or talk to management (this is not a moratorium on bringing up what employees see as issues with management, this is obviously about communications between employees which is tangentially work related at best.
It doesn't need to be a clean room, but a lot of people have been treating it like the equivalent of a polling place/church (more the former, I think most businesses and employees still know enough to avoid the latter unless they are explicit about it). I don't need to know your political leanings at work, I don't need to know your religious beliefs, and for the same reason I don't need to know your sexual orientation, preferences or kinks. You can make it obvious to me, and I don't care, but work is not the appropriate place for a discussion of any of those things unless the discussion is management or HR telling you that a) none of that matters for your job so you shouldn't care about other people's details with respect to that, b) to stop if you're making it an issue with people, and c) if you don't like that, take a hike. The only other case is when you're telling them someone else won't follow those rules.
All companies want as many customers as possible. It would not be hard to make a case for something that would create more customers.
And I'm saying this as somebody who's very critical of how Basecamp has handled this situation.
If you're talking about life in general, yes, but "don't talk politics at work" is very different from "leaving all politics to a small elite because they never get feedback from people like us"
2. You discussing politics with your colleague has 0 effect on political decisions.
If the trouble with the world is too much polarisation, perhaps we shouldn't be so quick to take a side.
Or maybe people keep their friend groups so tightly curated by ideology these days that the only chance they have to argue about politics is at work?
Seriously, I get it, being ranted at sucks, but your a human, they’re a human, just say “I’m not really interested” and walk away.
Relying on company policy for this is a strange offloading of your personal social responsibility and relationships.
I understand and appreciate some work cultures are toxic, but I think it’s fair to expect people to taking a bit of personal responsibility for interacting like a normal person too.
There’s an old saying in the south: “never talk politics or religion around the supper table.” I think that it’s generally a good rule of thumb to avoid those topics when in a situation where you have a captive audience.
They said employees are not expected to curtail political speech in personal contexts or using personal accounts, just for official work accounts, where work communication is done.
That was explicitly stated, and it was also stated that employees are encouraged to speak their mind politically on their personal accounts.
This is a company setting expectations about what work time and work resources should be used for, with that explicitly not including political discussions. I think that's entirely within the expectations of most employers and employees.
Except for those of us outside the US, who have no interest in US politics are often been told if you don't pick a side you are siding with evil.
Secondly, that statement is basically public cohersion. If you are told, you have to pick - victim or oppressor - absolutely noone is going to publicly pick oppressor. Its kafaesque in its simiplicity.
As a customer why would I even care if someone on the other end thought my name was funny as long as my shipment arrived? This generation truly is absurdly sensitive.
Nope.
People have different needs that are at odds with one another. Compromising on what's bad for me but good for you (and vice versa) while doing what's good for both is how the world functions.
There aren't universal 'bad things' of varying sizes that we just need to get rid of. That's the sort of thinking that gets you Nazi Germany cleansing the earth of 'bad' people to bring about paradise - be very careful.
You can go ahead and jump right in to not tolerating wars while not caring about things that literally do not matter at all like some people chuckling at a name.
Indeed, the fact that so many people want to waste their time arguing about nonsense like this makes it much easier for the people who profit off wars to keep starting wars.
Thing is, Taylor, the head of Ops who made the fateful blog post made it up as a joke. He didn't check, or look it up, he wouldn't have done. The chance of it being called "cat.jpg" is slim. It was literally a joke based on the number of cat pictures that people uploaded to the Internet.
DHH proof-read the post.
People complained that we were prying into customer data (we weren't, and Basecamp's customer data privacy and security policies are incredibly strong), but DHH wouldn't let us "come clean" believing that people would think we were covering it up, so he apologised for it as if it were real.
Source: Worked at basecamp at the time.
After reading the article linked here in the comments a few times - "What really happened at BaseCamp" - I actually think that people who make a fuss about the list are dumb-ass. I mean, it's a list of funny names! Put mine on it, if you want! Anyone who takes offence to it, needs to chill out, forget about woke Pyramid of Hate and stop bothering other people
(for the record, pre-Nazi Germany had hate speech laws, and Hitler did write strong anti-semitic messages in his first book long before coming to power - this idea that "jokes will escalate to genocide" is pure woke fantasy & narrative that they use to promote their cause and bully other people into submission)
> they were complicit in allowing this dumb-ass list to be circulated around the company for years, and when it became an issue, they refused to take any action on it.
That's not really what happened, and is a part of this story that hasn't entirely been made clear. The list was, if I remember correctly, about 10 to 20 names long and was tucked away in the company Backpack account. I found it in ~2010 when I first started and thought little of it.
As far as I know it didn't get added to after that, perhaps it did. It certainly wasn't "passed around". Backpack was closed to new users in ~2014, but we'd stopped using it at that point and some time I think before then someone had found the list, brought it up with the rest of the company as a problem. I seem to recall the phrase "How would you feel if you discovered your name was on this list" was mentioed, but it was a long time ago. Anyway, my recollection was that it was "deleted" (I guess it was a "soft" delete) with no dissent.
This wasn't about DHH or Jason letting a list be passed around, or defending it. No-one was tittering about "Incontinentia Buttocks" in 2021. Basecamp while I was there (2010 to 2016) became incredibly good at customer privacy and security, and I would trust them with my data, and this just wouldn't happen.
Also, if someone had a funny name and they went against progressive politics, then they would be laughing about it. How about all the Donald Drumpf stuff from Oliver.
It puzzles me what progressives actually do laugh at when so much is forbidden and everything is somehow insensitive.
Most likely is that they are all just hypocrites.
Did they? My understanding it that DHH acknowledged the list was a mistake, apologised, and made it clear that such behaviour was no longer acceptable.
That's where I'm at today. There's a lot of money resting on my staying at a company for a year. I don't feel like I've been working effectively with the culture or team, and I'm pretty sure both me and the employer would be better served by my leaving, except the financial incentive, sunk cost, and avoiding having a "I worked here for only 6 months" on my resume is enough to justify me staying an extra 6 month.
Potentially not coincidentally "percent of engineers who stay a year" is one of the key metrics of the team that sets up the compensation structure...
We used to have these when I worked at Xerox. The only question I have is did everyone get the VRIF or just some people?
The managers at basecamp were unhappy that their employees asserted power over them in the workplace, and decided to assert their own power in turn over what they view as their personal fiefdom and retract some of the freedoms they had so graciously granted their workers, because those ungrateful workers actually expected them to live up to their words about openness and owning mistakes. At least 1/3 of the staff, when confronted with their true relations with their management, then decided to quit.
I did find it amusing they announced this new policy of no personal/political stuff at work on his personal blog on hey.com, not on a company blog, and DHH continues to rant on twitter about a very political and public fight with Apple, one he chose to enter on behalf of the company.
I think they realized the boss didn't respect them and wouldn't tolerate dissent, and that therefore they didn't respect the boss.
More than about "talking about politics at work".
Let’s take a recent polarizing topic: whether trans people should use the bathroom corresponding to their gender identity. Which bathroom do trans employees use? How can Basecamp possibly avoid that issue?
People are upset about the policy because it gives cover to treat people’s identities (such as using they/them pronouns) as forbidden political speech.
I mean, it's a workplace, not a school. You don't get to choose how you call other people, period. Other people's pronouns and names don't really matter to your day to day job, just call them whatever they want and go on with your life.
Someone saying that name/pronoun choice is "shoving a lifestyle down their throats" is not being reasonable and is being an unreasonable asshole on purpose just to make a point. At this point you tell this person to shut the fuck up or get the fuck out.
Telling someone how you should be called is not unreasonable. You're still allowed to roll eyes in your head, but calling them anything else is behaving like a petulant schoolchildren. There's no place for that in a professional environment. Just accept and move on with your life.
Imagine that a coworker keeps misgendering you, and that commenter is your manager. Your workplace has a “no politics” rule. Who do you think will be told to stop being “political”?
I also don't think that someone politicising something makes the "other side" political automatically.
If Basecamp hired a retrograde sexist that called unmarried women "whores" in the hallway, the women would have all the right to complain, and it wouldn't be a political discussion. It would be just be (in a perfect world) HR vs Asshole.
EDIT: Also I'd like to say that I'm not condoning banning politics at work. We probably agree on most things. I'm just saying that co-workers, managers and the company being reasonable makes way more difference than politics/no politics. Unfortunately there's no perfect solution to the problem of people being unreasonable, other than those sociopaths ceasing to exist.
The retrograde sexist thing sounds obvious because public opinion there is so one-sided. But that's not true for all issues. It was legal to fire employees simply for being gay or trans less than a year ago.
I think we're mostly on the same page here. I agree that ultimately, assholes will find a way to be assholes regardless of the policies in place. But we should still be wary of policies that give them cover to do so.
What I am saying is that someone forcing an issue doesn't make "both sides" political by decree. A person being misgendered can still bring the issue with HR without it being political in a way that's against any kind of political conversation.
Or at least, there have always been those who think that their belief system is obviously basic human decency and those of their opponents pure evil outside the bounds of civic discourse. Then they can pat themselves on the back and have their liberal pluralist cake while eating it too. Usually these people exist on both sides of a given topic simultaneously!
Telling someone who you want to be called in terms of a name, is reasonable. But asking them to reconsider what gender you are, what pronouns to use, etcetera is asking them to participate in an ideology or religion. Rather than asking people to blindly obey pronouns but “roll eyes in your own head”, we could just as easily ask those demanding different pronouns to “keep it in your own head”. What makes one stance more legitimate than the other?
I believe trans people deserve safety and legal protections but I don’t see altering genders or pronouns as being the same as being guaranteed basic rights. I would say the neutral position for a workplace might be that someone can claim a different gender or pronoun for themselves, but others could choose whether to go along with it or not, per their own individual choice and ideology. Neither side should let that deter from their work responsibilities.
Gender is completely meaningless when it comes to do real work. This should be similar to filling a form with preferred title "Mr", "Ms", "Mrs", "Dr", whatever. It doesn't make a difference in the final output of my work.
It's the same as religion, for example. Someone wearing a Hijab or a Kippah, or a Dastar shouldn't and doesn't affect anyones capacity to work. And it doesn't. I don't need access to the hair of my co-workers.
Even if you dislike someone's life choices, you're not being asked of anything other than to behave as neutrally and as professional as possible. You don't need to love them or spread their gospel. You're just being asked for a bare minimum of respect.
Just because some people want to turn this into a political crusade doesn't mean that the trans people or religious people are. They are just living their own lives and those things we're discussing so far are completely harmless.
But having political discussions is also not a panacea, and I've seen it also being weaponised in the name of the same oppression. For instance a very publicly racist CTO I worked under was kept because the CEO claimed "we want diversity, even diversity of opinion". Of course it was bullshit and both of them were ousted by the board.
I guess I'm just trying to be pragmatic and say we should solve the pronouns issue in a more pragmatic and humane manner (HR) rather than let people weaponise it with alt-right politics (or by claiming that trans people are being political).
Honestly I just wish those people had other hobbies other than picking on others.
In the workplace, respect for others is an expected part of the role of each person. If a person asks to be identified by a particular name, or by the use of particular pronouns, then no other person in that workplace has the right to argue that they can't/won't because of their personal beliefs.
Again, the point is that banning "politics" creates space for the company to say "leave the pronouns at home; engage in social issues on your own time".
2 is frankly a terrible solution. You're keeping a "missing stair" employee whom you need to carefully ensure doesn't interact with any coworkers they'd misgender. If someone can't respect a coworker, especially after being directly told to, they should be let go.
It isn’t necessary to fire every employee because a dispute is intractable. If an employee makes a good faith effort to adapt but makes innocent mistakes that are very poorly received they may not be at fault.
Why must it be me who gives up my beliefs to accommodate the other?
Why is mutual respect not the other person understanding this is my religion?
Consider if the conflict was over one employee insisting on using racial slurs instead, and the victim being moved rather than the aggressor disciplined.
To me a stance like that would make me quit as a matter of principle, and I'd also avoid doing business with a company if I was aware of such a policy.
Good point about a racial slur. But invert that. Should I be forced to call some by a racial slur because they are reclaiming the word if it makes me uncomfortable?
These are not easy issues. We are talking about the mutual rights of others and the ability to force people to act. A posture of good faith compromise is warranted.
If I was being transferred due to a transgression someone else did, I'd consider suing or leaving the company as a matter of principle. The outcome of a policy that involves transferring someone rather than dealing with abuse is you over time get left with those who are fine with maintaining an abusive workplace.
If someone is trying to force you to use a slur, they're being abusive. A pronoun is not a slur.
But again, being able to even have that discussion about what is and is not acceptable is a political discussion. That Basecamp has now banned.
I for one would never consider applying to Basecamp after this because they've made it clear employees can not safely discuss issues that may affect them at work.
More importantly, I'd consider a place that cared so little about victims of abusive behaviours a horrible place to work that'd be worth leaving regardless. I'd start thinking about leaving such a please even if I just observed it happen to others, because it says something about the lack of fundamental respect for employees.
I find it hard to emphathise with someone making a big deal out of that.
I can sort of see how you’d like to be called differently if you are changing your gender, but at the same time I cannot really blame the person calling a boy a boy.
I’d try to, but probably find it exhausting to try and keep track of how people want to be called.
Do you keep track of people's names? Their partners' names? Their jobs?
Did you ever think someone was a different gender when you first saw them? What did you do after you realized?
I don’t. But generally, by the time someone is legally allowed to change their gender it’ll be fairly hard to call them anything else, so most of the issues come from the transitional phase.
> Do you keep track of people's names? Their partners' names? Their jobs?
Fair point, though the answer is somewhere in between. I suck at remembering names too :)
I don’t think I’ve ever had to deal with it, which is probably part of the reason I find it hard to imagine.
For what it’s worth, literally everyone I’ve ever met that requests specific pronouns is fine with occasional slip-ups as long as you make a good faith effort to get it right.
However, the rest of the company openly discussing another employee's bathroom dealings probably crosses lines outside of politics. I would be highly uncomfortable if that came up at my employer about some new hire.
Look, I really don't want to be confrontational, but I would like to know more about this evidence. Can you provide me with some sources?
My religious beliefs prevent me from accepting the frame of reference of the person requesting unconventional pronouns.
Their frame is “my identity is different to what society imposes on me, I will ask that you treat me in the way I request, not using the societal default”.
My frame is “God has made Adam and Eve, a man and a woman. They are not interchangeable, by asking me to accept interchanges, you are asking me to go again my religious beliefs and commit sin”.
I am asking this sincerely. Why must I give in to accommodate the other instead of the other way around?
Why must I commit sin instead of the other accepting my religion prevents me from indulging the request?
As a concrete example: if a woman gets married and takes her husband’s name, it would be inappropriate for a coworker who believes her religion’s marriage is immoral to continue referring to her by her pre-married name.
You mention “societal defaults”, but you must know that in the west those norms are heavily influenced by Judeo-Christian (especially Protestant) values. So frankly, it’s frustrating when a presumably Christian person asks why they should respect deviation from those norms. It kind of feels like playing a game with someone who has made up house rules to give themselves an advantage, and accuses others of unfair play for choosing not to follow them.
There is also the example with the married woman changing her name. I think it’s a very good argument. In fact this is perhaps the best argument I have seen so far surrounding the pronoun debate. In the example you give, I would agree completely, the judging person refusing to use the new name is in the wrong.
But, this argument makes a hidden assumption. One cleverly hidden in the parallel. You are assuming the two scenarios ( marriage name change and trans pronoun change ) are the same category, and thus it follows those two should be traded in the same way.
Here is why I believe the two are distinct categories. The marriage name change is language neutral while the pronoun name change is language altering. Language in part exists to establish labels for categories in order to facilitate communication. You cannot “hunt mammoth” if you don’t know what “hunt” and “mammoth” is and you cannot substitute different words expecting the same result. “Hunt mammoth” is not the same as “Hunt deer”. Categories are important. They make communication possible. In the example you give, the woman changing her name does not alter the language in any way. In the pronoun side however, the request makes an implicit language change. The request involves altering the category of men or women. “He”, and “she” loose their meaning if they are applied on request.
The discussion to be had at this point is weather those are categories worth having. But that is a separate discussion. For this discussion I don’t feel like the parallel holds.
> You’re free to retain your beliefs, but you can’t vocalize them in the office.
Why can’t we apply the same logic in reverse? The person believes they are a gender or a sex and they would like to be treated in accordance with their beliefs. They can retain that belief but can’t vocalise it in the office.
> Just as it would be disrespectful to publicly judge a coworker’s religion
But, here is the crux of it. By asking me to indulge the pronoun request, they are publicly judging my religion. My religion forbids me from accepting the interchangeably of men and women. They are judging this aspect and attempt to force me to change it. How do we handle this conflict in a way agreeable to everyone? And if we can’t find a way agreeable to everyone, why should one camp give in to the other?
> in the west those norms are heavily influenced by Judeo-Christian (especially Protestant) values
This is an irrelevant point. As a side note, I don’t believe “Judeo-Christian” is a thing. This is a strange, made up category originating from the bizzare melding of politics and religion in the souther US. This concept is devoid of any meaning outside the US. It’s certainly something foreign in Europe and other broadly Christian nations like those in South America. But, regardless, this point is irrelevant. If we were in an Arab country, the influence would be Islamic. In India it would be Hindu, in every place there are influences from the past.
Let me turn on the head your assumption, because again I feel like you are making unstated assumptions.
Why should the expectation be neutrality and not conformity to the historical norm? Why should the historical norm give in to new trends?
The point about Judeo-Christian (or just Christian, if you’d like) norms is actually the root of the matter here, if you’ll bear with me for a moment. It seems like we can agree that there is a significant Christian influence in the laws and culture of the US, so let’s go from there.
That influence is the lens through which we have to view your notions of “language neutral” and “language altering”. Language naturally evolves to accommodate human necessity, including culture and norms. The state you’re referring to as neutral is a norm that was created by Christians specifically to accommodate Christian beliefs. So asking to respect the norm in cases of conflict isn’t really “neutral”, at all — you’re actually asking to revert to a state that was created to privilege your belief system.
You’re right about an influence being present in any country, and we can probably find similar examples elsewhere. For example, some Muslim-majority countries harbor negative views about women in the workplace. Imagine a man saying that working with women is an affront to his religious beliefs, and why should the historical norm give in to new trends?
Ultimately, though, no one is being forced to change their beliefs — just to be accommodating of those who don’t share them. This brings us back to figuring out who must acquiesce to whom. But here’s another place where we seem to be on the same page: the pronoun issue and the marriage example are equivalent if we ignore the status quo.
Should the status quo matter? Here (and in most cases) I think the answer is no — definitely not without considering who created it and whom it benefits.
Which is what made some employees realize the boss didn't respect them and wouldn't tolerate dissent, so they didn't respect the boss anymore, so they took the buy-out (which was in fact very kind).
First, working remotely solves that problem for Basecamp. You use the bathroom at your home.
Second, if you are designing for an office, you have private, individual bathrooms. What happens behind a closed bathroom door, and what someone looks like behind a closed bathroom door, is nobody's business.
Unisex bathrooms?
Also, the very idea that any company is “above politics” is patently absurd. Is labor organizing political? It’s certainly about the workplace. Is advocating for a tax shelter in Delaware and Ireland political? How about advocating for removing the tax shelters? That’s certainly about the company.
Nah, banning “politics” is just a way to enforce the CEO’s politics and place them above question.
And well, sure, such as it ever was. They usually try to put a fancier face on it, because when you make it so blatant, well, people who have options will leave.
Back in the day when you forked a repo on Github, it said "intense forking action". Sometimes people don't TRY to be offensive, they just want to be funny. Mix in immaturity and stir. But, given my example, should we never ever use Github again?
Edit: Like even ignoring for a moment how the employees felt about this how do you think customers and prospective customers felt? It's completely inappropriate no matter how you slice it, and DHH and Jason picked this as the hill to die on. Ridiculous.
> current employees were so mortified by the practice that none of them would give me a single example of a name on the list. One invoked the sorts of names Bart Simpson used to use when prank calling Moe the Bartender: Amanda Hugginkiss, Seymour Butz, Mike Rotch.
> Many of the names were of American or European origin. But others were Asian, or African, and eventually the list — titled “Best Names Ever” — began to make people uncomfortable. What once had felt like an innocent way to blow off steam, amid the ongoing cultural reckoning over speech and corporate responsibility, increasingly looked inappropriate, and often racist. [1]
[1] From the link dang shared, above: https://www.platformer.news/p/-what-really-happened-at-basec...
They thought this was just another instance of them having a stroke of thoughtleadership brilliance and everyone else is wrong.
And if it's about professionalism, you probably shouldn't communicate your policy change to your employees through the personal blog of an executive...
Edit: reading some of the comments below, it does also say they banned discussion of certain past decisions. It’s not just politics. Interesting.
I find this statement idealistic in the US, as so many issues, political or not, are turned into good-vs-evil moral confrontation. Universal care is taking freedom from citizens. Taking vaccine is big pharma's conspiracy. Wearing masks is eroding civil rights. The left is not better. J.K Rowling is already a Nazi. Any Trump supporter should be hunted and punished. Questioning Faucci is anti-science. Questioning Biden is supporting Trump. Asking a person not to graffiti on my house means losing my job for opposing the right movement. And how much hate did Bari Weiss get from her staff for an editorial decision?
Sometimes, yes. For example, if your company is riven by endless flame wars over tabs vs spaces or where curly braces go, it can make a lot of sense to publish a style guide and cut off further discussion.
As an example, when I first joined Twitch, it was an uphill battle initially to get buy in for automatic code formatting, however through questioning and understanding their past decisions the team came around to implementing it, as well as numerous other improvements I still have engineers reach out to me thank me for years later. If they had this policy, it’s possible I would not have been around long enough to actually champion the improvements.
I don’t say there’s no upside, only that sometimes the downside outweighs the upside (and sometimes it doesn’t.)
As an example, I was in charge of deploying the website the day we hosted a Trump rally. I made it well known to my team and manager that I did not like this, as did others, but I did my job anyways, and there were no flame wars, nor did anyone get fired. Although I disagreed with Emmets wishes, I still hold the utmost respect for him. The same cannot be said for Armstrong or DHH.
Should an employee have to accept ideological points for his company at face value even if it goes against his sense of workmanship or integrity? What about vice versa (companies vis a vis employees)?
How much does (or should) anyone's say diverge at Twitch especially from the dominant ideological creed (whether such a creed was employee-fostered or company-fostered)?
Where does one's technical achievement end and "the cause" begin?
My key point here is that in companies that allow discussions, I can ask questions of the policies I disagree with to understand what motivates the policies. I can propose alternative viewpoints. Often, via having open uncensored discussions I find that it is much easier to disagree and commit
In the Emmet / Trump example, he explained the reasoning (we are a platform) and allowed us to grumble. Had there also been a policy that anyone complaining would be terminated, I’m not so sure I would have deployed the website that day.
Hope that answers your question
In your opinion as a professional, what should Armstrong and DHH have done without kowtowing to their employees?
And while I still have your attention on Twitch, what is with the company's hypocritical stance on scantily-clad women (a la Alinity) and copyright abuses while claiming that it isn't allowed? Your employment seems to have been contemporaneous with those episodes, so it seems like you would know a few things.
I’m not convinced Armstrong and DHH had such a drastic flame war problem, for example after banning politics, Armstrong made several public political rants including endorsing Kanye West - http://modernconsensus.com/politics/ceo-of-apolitical-coinba...
Perhaps they should have done what most other companies do, and ignore the “problem” if employees are otherwise productive, and if not then replace unproductive employees with productive ones. Whether an employee is productive is tangential to their political beliefs, and an employee who is causing waves over politics will just cause waves over something else if you ban politics.
I would work for someone who I disagreed with, but if an employer tries to silence me and turns around and advocates for their own political candidate, it seems to me the employer is being narrow minded, underhanded, and hypocritical
The company leadership is framing those changes as a ban on political speech, but clearly there's disagreement about what the changes really are.
They are quitting because the founders decided to assert their power nakedly and without restraint, to berate employees, shut down their organisation and discussions and attempt to dictate terms to them in a humiliating public way, that is to break the social contract between employee and employed. In doing that they declared that they alone decide the rules, they alone decide what is acceptable to say and what is not.
Every workplace has some subtle set of rules about behaviour but these rules are negotiated between employer and employee, and if as a manager you lose sight of that, you'll lose your best employees as they decide they don't really want you to decide everything about their waking hours without consulting you.
True leaders realize the importance of cultivating those underneath them, and adapting their direction to pushback or input.
Leaders make decisions but good leaders take account of the views of their teams.
Sure, ending a relationship is disruptive. But moving on is perfectly feasible.
And the thought here is not novel -- it was taught to me as part of an Organizational Psychology class in b-school
One's ability to lead is only as good as their ability to get followers to follow their lead. Hence why so many people use fear to keep others in line -- it's the easiest and simple way to ensure compliance
Considering that most b-school students go on to become MBAs, I would hope they teach some leadership skills
You left off "if you want your boss to give you gobs of money every two weeks".
Particularly in the context of a workplace, where the workers are the ones actually doing all the work.
This is a value judgment not shared by everyone. One/few person rule can be quite efficient in certain tasks such as rapid development and deployment of resources, because you can cut through red tape. At the same time, it can be inefficient in other tasks.
I know I'm wasting my time here but here is the first three definitions of totalitarianism I was able to find :
(emphasis mine)
> Britannica: Totalitarianism: *form of government* that theoretically permits no individual freedom and that seeks to subordinate all aspects of individual life to the authority of the state.
> Google : relating to a *system of government* that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state.
> Dictionary.com : of or relating to a *centralized government* that does not tolerate parties of differing opinion and that exercises dictatorial control over many aspects of life.
A business is not a government and you are using the term in a meaningless context so you are going to have to forgive everyone else for pointing out that what you are saying makes absolutely zero sense.
Yes it is, hence the existence of concepts like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_governance and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy
Employers have a great deal of authority of their employee's lives - to that extent they govern their employees. This is all straightforward, conventional usage of these words and terms.
Government also makes the rules about how businesses operate (property law, contract law, and so forth), and give businesses the right to enforce them - in this way, businesses are an extension of government in the control they have over our lives.
All you're doing is question-begging the exact premise I'm critiquing in the first place: That the workplace is in a magic separate dimension where principles usually agreed to be good (democracy, equality) are no longer desirable or even applicable.
I'm not sure why this has made you angry - perhaps you've become irrationally attached to certain ideological beliefs, and my pointing them out has triggered you.
>Yes it is
Some things reach a point of idiocy where no one is going to be convinced and you just need to call things what they are. And that is fucking moronic. So let's just stick with that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government
Emphasis mine:
> A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, *generally* a state.
> While *all types of organizations have governance*, the term government is *often* used more specifically, to refer to the approximately 200 independent national governments and subsidiary organizations.
So you are simply ignorant of the broader meaning of the term. I look forward to your apology. But do please try to interact with more humility and politeness in future, and be familiar with the very basics of a topic before debating it.
Hire good people, give them goals, and the resources they need, then get the fuck out of their way. Let them make their own processes, rules, norms, even mistakes. Most organisations have a prevailing culture, so they'll operate in context anyway; create boundaries by application of Conway's law. Intervene by guidance and with pertinent and impertinent questions, not with directives and fiat. Authoritarianism is the death-knell of ingenuity.
Brian Epstein made lots of decisions without the bands opinion and many more when they disagreed.
I'll make N-way decisions between conflicting ideals when I'm invited to adjudicate, but refrain otherwise. My guidance would be to workshop apparently dissimilar preferences extensively, because 99% of the time there is a synthesis to be found, and creating a focus for conflict tends to encourage loud voices to get louder, drowning out alternatives. I'll treat any administrative decision-making as being on behalf of the team, i.e. as having been delegated the authority to do so from the members. I learned years ago that governing by consent of the governed is the only form of respectful leadership, and this extends to organisations and corporations, and it's never more apparent than when a manager switches jobs and people follow to the new gig because they liked working with you.
The most important function, in this management style, is hiring, and in some organisations, talent acquisition has been half my workload. Regarding which I was once told, "hire people smarter than you"; the only issue with this maxim being the corollary, viz. that the CEO is, by induction, the company dunce.
Why is it that you avoid possessiveness?
I am not asking from judgement but genuine curiosity.
I think there are some valuable ideas in your post. And I generally agree with your perspective. I also think nothing about governing with consent of the governed alters the existence of an actual power structure unless you would resign in the face of a team member not consenting to your decision.
Yes. The primary meaning of "my" is the individual possessive. The secondary meaning of association, or membership, is something one cannot reliably communicate, even to oneself.
> Why is it that you avoid possessiveness?
I don't own people. They have individual agency.
> resign in the face of a team member not consenting to your decision
That's bonkers. It's still thinking in terms of a command authority. It's not me that has to consent, it's the rest of the team. Or more precisely, don't make decisions on behalf of a team if it hasn't agreed to recognising their validity in advance. The most important consent to obtain in this regard is hiring (nuance: compensation/levelling is best left to a separate corporate organ), followed by seating (yes, really) and allocation of day-to-day work.
Frankly, a manager whose team doesn't recognise the validity of their decisions, or who can't handle being challenged to qualify and explain their thinking, should go. Continuing the earlier analogy; if the band is unhappy with their manager, they can get a new one.
Command authority is for temporary dictators in situations required real-time skilled decision making, like a surgeon in the OR, or the emergency controller for a downtime incident. It is not for deciding which continuous delivery tool we'll use, whether we're including SSO in the next release, or buying standing desks, or who gets to sit next to the window, or has to refactor a problematic query.
The hardest thing to do in this context is fire someone, but then, it always is.
The easiest thing to do is actually extinguish the team, because the quid pro quo is that it spends company resources.
Which is defined as "Psychological contracts are defined by the relationship between an employer and an employee where there are unwritten mutual expectations for each side. A psychological contract is rather defined as a philosophy, not a formula or devised plan."
So I don't know what happened at Basecamp but here is how breaking a psychological contract feel to the employee from my experience: A leader representing the company does something, an action, takes a decision. You, the employee, feel that a wrong was done to you, even if the rules, law and contract says the one who took the action has the right to do it.
And in the beginning no amount of explanation about the action will alleaviate this feeling. Logically you will agree that they can do what they did, but emotionally (psychologically) at the end of every meeting or discussion you will still feel that somehow a wrong was done to you, a balance is unbalanced ...
Shortly you lost the trust in the company that what they will do has your best interests at heart.
It takes a big amount of effort and trying to put yourself in the shoes of your leader to try to understand how they got to that decision/action and if indeed was done in good faith you might overcome this. If not, then the best is to leave.
If we say that employees should be smart enough to autonomously do their jobs well, wouldn't their collective intelligence be better at running the business in its entirety? Why isn't it smarter and more financially sound to run a business like a democracy?
> you'll lose your best employees as they decide they don't really want you to decide everything about their waking hours without consulting you.
the company is actually saying they want to not talk about anything outside of work. They don’t want you consulting them, they want you doing your job during work hours. That’s a pretty reasonable trade for money.
Honestly, a bunch of people quitting probably works out just fine for Basecamp.
It will still be damaging short term because they lost a lot of depth in cultural and product knowledge, with the marketing and product leads gone. Not easy to replace someone who’s been living and breathing the products for over a decade.
Basecamp seems very profitable, so it may not be fatal. But my guess is that it cuts far, far deeper than Jason and DHH intended. There may well be another wave of resignations next week.
I’m sure they expected attrition — hence the severance — but I’d wager they thought it would be closer to Coinbase’s 5% when they announced a similar policy, not 30% and counting.
Maybe people that never discuss politics at work want the right to do ot too.
And it won't take them long to re-fill these roles. There's a ton of unmet demand to work at a place that's purged the activists. You aren't gonna see them much on Twitter but Basecamp just gave themselves a massive recruiting advantage that FAANG cannot/will not match, and they already had a good reputation. Lots of people read DHH's blog post and thought "excellent, that's what's needed". Any impact on the firm will be transient at best.
I'm not going to argue about which culture is better, but the split between people who wanted to get their jobs done and make a good product, and the people who wanted to use their job as an avenue for social change/partisan warfare (depending on which side of the split you're on) sounded toxic.
I suspect there will be a lot of highly-qualified people who will want to go to work at Basecamp who wouldn't have wanted to work there before. We're in the middle of a culture war:
* A lot of people like wokeness.
* A lot of people hate it.
Most SV companies have gone for the woke side of the current culture war, and so my perception is that there are a lot of people who hate it and don't have good places to go. From a purely supply-and-demand perspective, running a non-woke firm seems the way to find good employees. Conversely, being a woke employee seems the way to find good jobs.
To be clear, I'm not advocating employees be overly woke -- this is all more about social signaling than actual advocacy.
The politics thing really amounts to "don't challenge me" and is a nice diversion from the actual issue.
People were hurt by a very obvious instance of the company failing to live up to its stated values, so they attempt to bring it up to its founder.
He’s painted the situation as “troublemakers out to get my skin” whereas from all the reporting it appears that he’s been the one to needlessly throw a childish and very public temper tantrum.
His public response was to post a blog about forbidding politics from work.
Part of healthy dispute resolution is recognizing how to apologize correctly and to the right people. Token apologies do not work for complex situations.
Additionally: he apologized for the list but not for his appalling behavior against an employee who pointed out issues with the list and was childishly dressed down very publicly in the company’s chat.
> Not only was it disrespectful to our customers, and a breach of basic privacy expectations, but it was also counter to creating an inclusive workplace. Nobody should think that maintaining such a list is okay or sanctioned behavior here.
> Furthermore, Jason and I should have caught this list. We are ultimately responsible for setting the tone of what's acceptable behavior at Basecamp, and in this instance we didn't. I'm sorry.
Even if they decided to go with a “no politics” rule, doing it publicly was unbelievably shitty to their employees. Such policy changes really should’ve been done in private, especially since it was clear based on the phrasing that this was in response to a specific incident.
Maybe in a year after things have calmed down they could do a “we banned politics at the office and it was great” post, but the timing was guaranteed to create a fiasco for them.
As a metaphor, what they did is closer to disparaging someone’s work performance in an all hands. It might be “transparent”, but it’s also unprofessional.
Looking at the reported details, it does _not_ seem to be an act of racism. It was reported very few names on the list were Asian, for example, and the only (not fully revealed) examples I read were European names.
I’d wait until you hear about customers quitting before you assume that they’re in trouble, and I don’t think it’ll happen.
Personally, while I’d find the list of “funny” names offputting, I wouldn’t cancel. I however would take the buyout if I worked there; leadership there seems genuinely incompetent, and it’s not like remote jobs are rare anymore.
A company I'm involved with fired their lead developer and it really was cartoonish how everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Others are stepping up, discussions don't take forever because that person needed to be at the center of everything etc. They've picked up a lot of velocity since then, simply because a problem-employee is gone.
This looks like a fatal blow, not a place someone would want to work. I’m sure they’re hiring though so you could probably get a job there and ride it out to the end.
I doubt that, most companies could not care less about the internal affairs of their tools' companies, unless it impacts the tools' performance and featureset, something we still await to see regarding Basecamp, whether they can successfully plug the employee hemorrhage wound and get new employees working on the product.
Most might be broad. Lots of companies absolutely care about the interal workings of their vendors. They can and do make decisions on these kinds of factors, especially if a large contract is on the line or they are looking for that last thing to separate 2 viable candidates. All companies doing manufacturing in places like Asia are constantly being looked at by human rights organizations to ensure the employees are being treated as humans. Personally, I won't do business with companies like Uber (even with new leadership), Wal-Mart, etc based on things reported about them.
No evidence of this whatsoever. A bluecheck on Twitter loudly proclaiming that he's not going to pay $99/yr for email (HEY) or never using Basecamp again doesn't count. Citation needed.
When I was a kid my best friend called my sandy toes because my last name was Santos.
If my name sounded like a Swedish curse word I wouldn’t be mad because a Swede laughed at my name.
Maybe part of healing division as humor and laughter. If we can’t take a joke we can’t share the connection of humor with others.
As an adult that has spent their entire life hear the same old tired jokes about their name, I could easily see/sympathize with them for no longer being amused by something that would make a 10 year old boy chuckle.
In addition, if they are so easy to one's name, it is likely that they will try to look for other sources of fun: accent, looks, type of issue.
I would not envy being a hiring manager at Basecamp right now.
Or, since I know that the common retort here is “they’re better off without the troublemakers”; good leaders don’t build organizations where 1/3rd of the organization is troublemakers; that’s a failure of hiring.
There really is no way to spin this in a way that makes them look good. The PR hit is really just the cherry on top of losing so many people, and paying 6 months of salary for the privilege to boot.
And even if they couldn’t, having a smaller but more productive workforce might be a win.
Irregardless, I think they’re going to have an increase in job applications and do very well in the future
I wouldn’t want to work for a company that somehow managed to get dragged down by 20 people. If losing those people is making the company better, then it sounds like leadership is deeply incompetent and let things fester for way, way, way too long. Keep in mind that some of those people worked there for 12 years; if losing them is a net positive why weren’t they fired a decade ago?
I also think the idea that the remaining workers will be more productive is laughable. Events like these crush morale, even if you ultimately agree with the policy decision being made. Never mind what happens when you lose so much knowledge, including entire teams and directors, with basically no warning or opportunity to transfer knowledge.
Hope their docs are world class, or their replacements are gonna have a bad time.
I do agree with others, though, that I'll bet Basecamp is a better place to work now than it was a week ago. If people want to quit because they'd rather engage in struggle sessions than focus on the work, I won't be sad to see them leave and take their distracting socio-political griefer wokeist cloud with them.
Stop politicizing tech. We are in the technology industry, not the humanities faculty lounge and our jobs should be free of virtue signalling and cancellation.
I completely disagree about Basecamp being better after this. Attrition, no matter the cause, is awful for company morale. Finding out that several teams are just gone without any notice or time to transition is going to make life kind of suck for those who remain. Sure hope their docs are good.
As far as stopping the politics in tech; Basecamp got a glowing write up in Breitbart. “No politics here” is political. There are good and bad ways to handle such things, but blanket bans and “here’s the door if you don’t like it” is hamfisted and clearly bad for retention.
Definitely this has trashed their reputation with people on the left. Some of my friends have been posting on Twitter that they wouldn't work for Basecamp now, whereas they used to aspire to work there.
But it is far from clear to me that my friends are in a majority. Many people on the right, or people who are apolitical, or people who just don't like politicisation in the way that has been reported, may be perfectly fine with this.
In terms of reputation, it wouldn't surprise me if this is a net win for Basecamp.
For sure losing a third of employees is an existential risk, but I suspect senior management would have accepted that risk.
(I consider myself to be left wing, but not woke).
The issue is not the new policy. The issue is the way it was rolled out; in an extremely public way that was basically a subtweet of their entire workforce, all while they knew there was a ton of internal drama they’d failed to control. That was unbelievably bad leadership, and I think anyone focusing entirely on whether or not the specific policy is good or bad, to the point where it makes them want to join or not, has been fighting the culture war way too much for their own good.
I’d be fine with a no politics policy, I would not be fine with the blog post, especially if I felt that the internal problem hadn’t been dealt with and instead I’d been crapped on publicly by my boss.
I don’t know, if my week at work concluded with one of the founders going on a blocking spree and leading the Rails community to start discussing disassociating itself from him, I wouldn’t consider that “better”. :)
On side note, sadly in my (unpopular) opinion, north americans are focused too much on being politically correct in speech instead of being correct in action and thoughts.Hope this will not be their downfall.
If you're in the business of "changing the world" or "changing peoples' lives" then your business is political. Politics reflect how people feel about things.
You're using tech as a shorthand for "technology company" -- companies are also organizations of people with feelings. People function best when they are treated with respect and given psychological safety. People need to have room to discuss how they feel about things, so you can build better policies that make people happy and motivated to succeed at the mission. Sometimes those things are lumped into what a company might consider "political" and it's not an easy line to draw.
For example, gender imbalance is one of the most important "political" things that I think every healthy company needs to look long and hard at; how do you do that if you clamp down on that as "political discussion?" Similarly if racial injustice is impacting a segment of your workforce more than others, don't you think it's worthwhile for management to do things like make statements of support, check in on their employees, and basically be a bit human and accommodating? Or wait is that political discussion?
Folks like you who say employees should just "focus on the work" dismiss the idea that people shouldn't just be viewed as cogs in these money-making machines. Tech, where company profit margins are fat and where actual productivity is not measured in SLOC but in the ability to generate ideas and focus on how those ideas affect users, is actually one of the only market segments we can actually point at and say "you have the means to do better." It's really sad when founders like Fried and DHH give their employees the impression that they are no more than pieces of a money making machine after clearly fooling a lot of them into thinking there was some semblance of a social contract there. So no it's definitely not a better place to work now than a week ago.
By the way, people aren't stupid for thinking that there's a social contract, especially at small companies. There's always a loose contract -- and one of the powerful things about equity and its presence in SV companies is how it aligns the incentives for management and labor. But trust is also a component of that alignment force; trust is one of the things that has always made silicon valley magical. So it's really disappointing when that trust is violated.
If you're Apple or Microsoft, that would apply. But Basecamp is a company that makes office productivity apps.
Even after the dust settles, will you trust that DHH and Jason will keep their promise of no politics? What a company says about its culture and the reality are often quite different.
That’s an oddly mechanical way of expressing that a third of the company didn’t stay. If an asteroid hit the planet and a third of the population died, it would be very weird to say “most of the population survived”.
I would count myself as someone who would simultaneously be thrilled with management's decision to ban political discussion at work but also quit to get the six months pay.
Well actual contract is do your job and get paycheck. People try to ignore other stuff you do until it becomes mess.
> In doing that they declared that they alone decide the rules, they alone decide what is acceptable to say and what is not.
Well legally yes as long as they dont brek any law. If you read correctly they consult labour lawyer for their words
> you'll lose your best employees as they decide they don't really want you to decide everything about their waking hours without consulting you
You're honestly exaggerating situation. Nobody want you to consult with them for anything. They expect you to work in office hours.
If anything, I see everyone who is leaving as being the professional ones in this situation.
> Employees say the founders’ memos unfairly depicted their workplace as being riven by partisan politics, when in fact the main source of the discussion had always been Basecamp itself.
> “At least in my experience, it has always been centered on what is happening at Basecamp,” said one employee — who, like most of those I spoke with today, requested anonymity so as to freely discuss internal deliberations. “What is being done at Basecamp? What is being said at Basecamp? And how it is affecting individuals? It has never been big political discussions, like ‘the postal service should be disbanded,’ or ‘I don’t like Amy Klobuchar.’”
If my team spent months debating these issues I would be concerned as well.
Well, of course! If you are working for a private company then this is exactly what you are signing up for.
However, if DHH’s verbatim quote of his response is accurate, it sounds like things had gotten out of hand with this company’s culture.
If a leader says “this is unacceptable - we will do better going forward”, that should be enough in this kind of situation. But apparently it wasn’t for the employee that you allude to.
A third of the company had joined some D&I committee and that committee apparently felt that its scope extended to the entire operations of the company. It sounds incredibly disruptive.
Oddly, according to the coverage, the owners had previously said publicly and internally that they thought it was important.
The owners had previously been very publicly and assertively taking very "liberal" and "progressive" positions. They have been on the "wrong" side of the "culture wars" for those who think it's "off the rails" to be spending signficant time and effort on DE&I. "Hansson had encouraged employees to read Between the World and Me, a memoir by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and The New Jim Crow... Both founders are also active — and occasionally hyperactive — on Twitter, where they regularly advocate for mainstream liberal and progressive views on social issues."
I wonder how it will feel to them to become the darlings of people very opposed to those positions they had been taking, as seen in these threads. I wonder if the owners will become born-again to the right-wing side of the "culture wars".
> Oddly, according to the coverage, the owners had previously said publicly and internally that they thought it was important.
No owners would publicly say D&I are not important.
> I wonder how it will feel to them to become the darlings of people very opposed to those positions they had been taking, as seen in these threads.
I'm sure these decisions only came about after some hard looks in the mirror.
You realize those who think it's important don't think that's what it is, right?
If 20 employees were on the "social" committee planning a holiday party, would you consider that as "off the rails", because you are paying them (some here unspecified number of hours) to throw a damn party? I doubt anyone would get that up in arms about it.
I get it, you think DE&I is a mistake, (unless you think coming up with new ways to tell people to stop being racist is not a mistake? But I think you were clear), so the more people involved in it, the bigger the mistake. But if someone thinks it's important, perhaps even more important than a holiday party, then the more people involved in it the better, and having a large portion of the company involved in it is not a mistake. That's it.
The party planning committee would presumably not try to dictate which vendors the company deals with and which speaker is at the next all-hands meeting.
There's no other way for 20 out of 58 people to spend any significant length of time focused on D&I of the company they work for.
1 out of 58? Maybe. But 20? There's only one way this thing can end.
> If 20 employees were on the "social" committee planning a holiday party, would you consider that as "off the rails", because you are paying them (some here unspecified number of hours) to throw a damn party? I doubt anyone would get that up in arms about it.
A party planning committee is not targeting the rest of the company.
> I get it, you think DE&I is a mistake,
I didn't say it was a mistake. I said 1/3 of a small remote company focused on it shows it was off the rails.
Maybe they should have just joined in. Each of the 58 employees could be brainstorming ways the other 57 employees can be less bigoted. Just hope they could find some time to write software, too.
Sounds like a pretty lame party if they're not inviting the rest of the company.
Also, that you think discussing how to make a workplace more diverse, equitable, and inclusive is somehow "targeting" the other employees says a lot about your stance on those things.
Wonder how that balances out.
These well-meaning D&I enthusiasts are pushing on a rope -- and then, when another innocent man gets killed by the cops the next week or whatever other newsworthy thing happens, they push harder. That's not how ropes work.
It express the reality that having good intentions may have nothing whatsoever to do with outcomes and that misalignment can be exacerbated under more pressure.
The issue at Basecamp and every other socially minded startup is obviously that people don't realize they are pushing on rope, and they lament anyone pointing out the fact as some kind of obstacle.
The clear majority of these kinds of 'social blow ups' are happening at companies where leaders and staff tilt way over to the Left/Liberal and Libertarian/Openness side of things, which should give pause for people consider that maybe those 'pushing back' aren't remotely trump-loving alt-righters, in fact probably the opposite.
The very nature of these threads is exhausting and frankly if I had to work at once of these places I would take respite in not having to deal with it. If there were some kind of pervasive evil that needed to be dealt with, then of course we'd have to do that, but I strongly doubt that this is the case.
A few reasons:
* They weren't hired or asked to do that
* It doesn't bring more value to the business
* It contributes to a toxic working culture
And it's especially bad in a small company, because you're no longer looking at high level statistics. With only 58 people, you're not saying, "we've got too many white men, statistically." You're implicitly saying, "Mike and Jeff shouldn't have been hired. We should have found people of the race / sex I want to see more of." And, implicitly, "We're going to have to really lean on them to not hire another white guy." Now hiring managers are hesitant to do what's best for the business out of fear of being called -ist.
This idea that employees are entitled to organize privately on company time to try and leverage the company to focus on some unrelated special interest at the expense of being as successful as possible as a business is not as widely accepted as some here seem to think.
Speaking as a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, right wingers are not the only people opposed to woke insanity.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's a 2D plane of opinions: liberal/conservative on one axis, moderation/extremism on the other.
If that sub were defining things, you would be right. But the people they're making fun of are defining things. My vote for the new axis goes to individualism vs. collectivism.
The only difference between me and you is that you think it means something when you say you've been left-leaning all your life. It doesn't. You're in the outgroup, just in denial about it.
They were not political in the sense of being about politicians or political parties. They were political in that they were motivated by the agenda and language of the activist left.
A subtext in many responses from said activists is that this is “not politics”, but something more essential or “above” politics. I agree insofar as they are treating their ideas more akin to a religion now.
It’s one thing to say someone is acting unprofessionally. It’s another thing altogether to accuse them of being on a path to genocide. If I did that to someone when it was so clearly uncalled for, I would be an asshole and my relationship with that person would be strained from that point forward.
If you don’t like that strain in your workplace, you try to draw a line on speech. It’s not something I’d want from the government, but it seems appropriate for a workplace.
Going from "someone posted an ADL infographic about the pyramid of hate" to "we're cancelling all external benefits, DEI discussion group is cancelled, and nobody can talk about politics anymore in our office ever" is an insane overreaction.
I’m led to understand the graphic in question was about how long-term tolerance of micro aggression can lead macro-aggressions over time, the ultimate form of which being genocide.
To share such a graphic isn’t to make a point that “your actions lead to genocide”, it’s to highlight the important of being diligent about not allowing micro aggressions to become commonplace and accepted within a culture. Because the long term society-wide effects of that can be genuinely terrible.
The employee wasn't accusing anyone of supporting genocide, even though DHH clearly took it personally.
If he's disavowed and apologized for the list then this genocide point is just a big waste of time and a distraction. I can't see how it would achieve anything productive.
I just think it's sanctimonious, a total waste of time and a distraction to throw such incendiary and flamebait things out into the workplace's communication channels, especially if it's been apologized for already.
Huh, sounds like the "broken windows" theory of policing. Did not expect that.
The list was clearly unprofessional and made some people uncomfortable, that is enough for it to be gone. It would be worthwhile to discuss explicitly what was wrong with the list, opening people's eyes to perspectives they hadn't considered and to take a little time to foster shared ideals for the workplace culture. Even alluding to genocide is wildly over the top and I can understand if it offended some people, regardless of whether they had anything to do with the list.
I agree.
On the other hand, it does sound as though basecamp is actually just a lifestyle company for the benefit of the founders, and once everyone realized that is the true 'mission', many left.
Tell me again how this is “about professionalism.”
Who’s professionalism might be, though.
We have lots of difficult, sometimes racialized discussions at BigCo. It makes us better at engaging with the world outside our walls. It’s not unnecessary or distracting from our work because our customers live in the same world we create products and services for, it’s part of our work.
Look at Apples stance on privacy, that’s based on a lot of difficult political discussions that culminate in corporate policy. If we did away with politics, we couldn’t have come to some of the decisions we have until forced by legislatures or our competitors.
Has nothing to do with "politics", or at least those that were trying to be banned.
I don't think that Basecamp had an issue with "flame wars", I don't think that the company tried (or succeeded) in banning them, and I don't think the company's actions represented (or increased the level of) professionalism at Basecamp.
So while in general, yes, sure, professionalism is great and we should try and stop destructive flame wars, if you dig into what actually happened at Basecamp, and the timeline, and, eg, the exact reason DHH was reported to HR internally, it becomes rapidly clear that this was something else entirely, in my view.
The policy change was not triggered by people behaving unprofessionally or having a flame war, it was not tailored to prevent unprofessional behaviour or flame wars, it was executed in an unprofessional way, and it has now itself caused flamewars. In short, I think your argument is correct, but is a damning indictment of Basecamp/DHH, not a defense of them.
Edit: I was too aggressive, have rephrased in grandchild comment.
One of the most valuable investment I’ve made in my life is counseling focused on functional, healthy communication and dispute resolution. It has allowed to respectfully resolve areas of disagreement and reach consensus on difficult issues.
P.S. thank you for engaging. I found your follow up comment helpful and important. I think it is critical we as a society build companies that can engage in difficult debates and take normative positions to improve society. Your example of Apple is an excellent example and I think added something important to this thread.
For posterity, birdy told me to go back to smoking my digitaltrees.
I'm not saying such silencing doesn't have benefits, but ensuring people aren't silenced isn't a benefit of silencing people. Bombing for peace generally doesn't result in peace, just more bombing.
In college you debate and explore ideas. Different contexts. Different purposes. Different rules.
Absolutely spot on. I think they had an implicit contract with their team which they broke in a fundamental way.
Notable that DHH's twitter hasn't seen any expression of regret or thanks to the people who have worked hard to build Basecamp and now feel they have to go.
Its really sad. He misunderstood a comment about a pyramid and instead of investigating a bit more about the meaning he decided to assert managerial power.
When he finally gets to the point where he realizes his mistake, I wonder how he'll spin it (subconciously) into a rant about how awesome he is that he realized his mistake.
Nobody was implying actual genocide. In fact the ground level of the pyramid, where you do absolutely nothing wrong, is still necessary to build it. (i.e. to make any sort of mistakes you first need humans).
If he understood it he could've just said "Yep you're right, we have to make sure we're not building the foundation for worse things" and be done with it. In fact he already agreed with that. I have no idea what he was thinking.
But why bring it into the conversation?? If you're not implying any link from jokes to genocides, why is it relevant? I agree that bringing the concept of genocide up in a conversation about insensitive jokes is absolutely escalating.
We can talk about the direct harm of insensitive jokes. That conversation can stand alone.
Those are debatable points. But they're relevant if someone else says belittling jokes are harmless.
Did the employee say anything about genocide actually? Or did they just expect people to focus on the relevant parts?
Basically a bit over a decade ago, DHH was aware of and explicitly condoned a NSFW image in a Ruby conference talk's slides.
The company doesn't think that 'name calling' is appropriate, rather, they don't believe that this activity is the beginnings of some kind of 'race war' and object to language such as 'leads to genocide' as hyperbolic.
"unhappy that their employees asserted power over them in the workplace,"
Yes, if your staff are exerting that kind power, that's in most cases an unhealthy thing, unless there is considerably legitimacy in the assertion of that power. The 'argument' is over the legitimacy.
"over what they view as their personal fiefdom"
This is not the appropriate language: it's their company, and their responsibility. It's not a 'personal fiefdom'.
"expected them to live up to their words about openness and owning mistakes."
They did. The company doesn't support the right of individuals to 'make fun of people's names'.
It's unreasonable to believe that excessive fear-mongering such as language regarding 'leads to genocide' should be accepted at face value.
"t least 1/3 of the staff, when confronted with their true relations with their management, then decided to quit."
This is clearly not true, because 1/3 of most Americans literally today, might opt to take 6 months of severance in order to leave their jobs. I probably would.
The companies language may have been lacking in self awareness and possibly tone-deaf, but none of their policies are unreasonable.
I think it was handled poorly, but just because it was, doesn't absolve the antagonists as having perfect legitimacy.
I think from a policy perspective, things are fine, but from a 'populism' perspective, no so much. It does make me question a little bit either side, as though I'd want a lot more information to determine how bad things are either way.
I don't see anything in this article as draconian or even excessive on the part of he executive team.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22406673/basecamp-politic...
I used the word deliberately. They mistook their relationship with their employees for a feudal one, they have now discovered it was not.
It's unreasonable to believe that excessive fear-mongering such as language regarding 'leads to genocide' should be accepted at face value.
I imagine gentle disagreement with this graphic would have been completely fine and appropriate coming from the manager - it's ok to disagree at work, many people wouldn't want to take part in that sort of discussion (also ok), but it's not ok for minor disagreements like this or a complaint to HR to lead to massive retaliation from management and a major restructure of the company to attempt to shut down any future complaints.
This kind overly dramatic rhetoric demonstrates the lack of perspective on the part of the antagonists which is possibly at the root of the problem.
There is no reason for leadership to risk the company and all of their time and investment over 'fake rhetorical wars over the meaning of words' which have very little substance on either side.
Of all the ways for a company to fail, having internal resurrections over nothing is at least something that can be avoided.
They company executives acted as though they were owners managers of the company - which they are - and gave their staff an option, which some of them took.
That's it.
" gentle disagreement with this graphic would have been completely fine "
It wasn't just a disagreement over a graphic, it was a group of people forming an alliance to shape the nature of the company in their social view.
That's going to require some restructuring.
Aside from the tone of the communications, the company did what any other company would do, and now they're more or less situated as most other companies.
A lot of people are here in for a rude awakening in life; questioning some actions the company is making and having them addressed is reasonable, but forming alliances, challenging the leadership is suicidal unless there's a high degree of legitimacy, which there isn't.
If the company refuses to stop dumping chemicals, then yes, you can form an alliance. If you're worried the company has a doc floating around with crude jokes - but they stopped it ... and you want to restructure the company in your social terms because you think there's something existential at foot ... you're going to be fired.
Even if the tone was off, the company acted within reason.
The only time employees at any company don't do this is when the status quo serves them just fine.
I suggest that the status quo at Basecamp was probably in any reasonable reality just fine. The movements to 'eradicate systematic racism' seem to be afoot mostly in the places that are already the most self-aware and tolerant.
This is the interesting paradox and it's why I believe that the social organizers at most of these already tolerant places are antagonists out to enforce the worldview they 'read in a book' in the workplace, out of a misguided attempt at moral justice.
Contrast this with blue-collar union formation, which is almost always in good faith in the sense we would expect, not that unions are perfect either.
I don't doubt those trying to start a union at Amazon, but I do doubt highly paid white collar workers thinking we all need some kind of 'major overview' of workplace conditions to ensure their view of the world is put in place.
I'm sure there is always a kernel of truth in demands (i.e. no making fun of names!) but that doesn't necessarily justify broad social action.
Does this square with offering people half a year's salary if they wanted to leave rather than continue working there?
You don't do something you expect to lead to a third of your company leaving. Even if you were actively planning a round of redundancies, you wouldn't do this as you risk losing your best performers.
The cost they'll face in fixing this loss of company knowledge, hiring and training replacements will be several times the cost of just the severance.
Feudalism:
"the dominant social system in medieval Europe, in which the nobility held lands from the Crown in exchange for military service, and vassals were in turn tenants of the nobles, while the peasants (villeins or serfs) were obliged to live on their lord's land and give him homage, labor, and a share of the produce, notionally in exchange for military protection."
Got it. Wait. No, lost it.
Separated from their justification, the 6 policies represent an assertion that Basecamp leadership are the sole arbiters of all things Basecamp. I don't think that's an awful thing in itself, but the way it was announced was clearly felt to be completely demoralizing for employees who assumed their judgment on the direction of the company was valued.
And the result seems likely to be catastrophic. Basecamp has had their pick of the litter for talent for years. Sure, they'll hire new folks who are aligned with their new way of running the company, but you don't go back to being a beacon of the industry when you lose 1/3 of your staff in a week over an ego trip.
How radicalized you have to be to lose your capacity for critical thinking like that?
If anything, Basecamp is a much better place to work now, without them
I continue to be amazed how strong the options of people who have no real insight into any of this continue to be.
As a younger person, I made a similar change regarding my use of the word "retarded" to refer to situations I thought were nonsensical or illogical. I'm now embarrassed to have used that word so thoughtlessly, even though it was pointed out many times that it was an unkind thing to do.
Call it radicalism if you want, but I think it's just a matter of stepping back and reevaluating behaviors I took for granted. You know, literal critical thinking.
We're not yet at the point where people look at the word "crazy" as being wildly inappropriate in the same way as "retarded", but I think it's completely reasonable for people to raise the point that putting it in the title of a book that represents the whole company is not a good idea.
You're fooling yourself if you think Basecamp will be improved by losing 1/3 of its staff, including some department heads and long-tenured employees, as well as its nearly universally positive reputation.
Just a different politics than the one people have been suggesting?
That's how you see it. Many other people do not see it in such a poor light.
Except it's really not clear how this is going to shake out, because people are quite divided on the issue.
At least 1/3 of staff, when offered either 3 or 6 months of salary just for switching employers, accepted it.
I feel like you'd get similar rates, potentially higher, at any employer recent incident or not. If you have the career power to quickly slot in to an equivalent job elsewhere, you just cut years off of your retirement date.
I don't think any "its really about" take can ignore that.
Remember, Basecamp pays the 90th percentile of San Francisco rates + profit sharing kickbacks for a company that's fully remote. Regardless of position.
If you're looking to cash in on a unicorn, you are almost always better off working somewhere else that will pay you the most in cash and using that cash to make your unicorn bets.
But the allure of partaking in massive success in a revolutionary startup is pretty significant. Less so if you have a steady salary perhaps, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a few of these people use the safety net of savings and a solid technical rep to try some riskier innovation.
I really can't believe I'm explaining startup allure on HN.
You can still partake in the massive success of revolutionary startups with your cash. In fact, you're in a much better position to, because if you're making a lot of cash, odds are you are senior and connected in your field. You have better odds of picking winners and investing in them.
There's also opportunity to buy pre-IPO shares.
Being a qualified investor (which you can get to from zero in as little as 4-5 years if you're making FAANG cash) helps a lot.
> Hansson’s response to this employee [that apologized for participating in the list] 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.
(From The Verge article[1])
In summation an employee participated in the list and wanted BaseCamp to change its ways on diversity. DHH took to publicly bullying this person and shutting down discussion.
1 - https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22406673/basecamp-politic...
However, I have to say that if I had stated "Yes, I'm embarrassed that we didn't put a stop to this list far earlier." and then some employee kept objecting, referring to the pyramid of hate and genocide and all that and I knew that said person had participated in the making fun of names themselves, I would be tempted to call that out as well.
That does not make it right and it certainly shouldn't have happened publicly but I don't think it reveals quite the character flaw that some seem to think it does.
Unfortunately when lancing that boil they also lost some people who decided that 6 months pay at the hottest market in years is too good to pass up.
Reading the official company stances, they all look like reasonable, well meaning changes. But then 1/3 of your organization quits? There must be more to this! And in fact its just a normal human squabble, with broken promises, public dressing downs, power assertions.
It can kind of put into perspective a lot of big policies in general. That almost certainly what we know today as pillars of reasoned thought, has originated by some basic human desires, and what we’re reading is only their rationalizations.
I mean it’s obvious of course, but this here is a _really_ good clear cut example of it.
> I cannot believe the kind of childish simplistic thinking going on in this thread
Yes.
(I realize that there's always the possibility that this post could age like milk, and everyone might be pointing at laughing at me in 5 years. But that's also pretty much true for any piece of technology, and not unique to Rails' current situation.)
Despite people claiming "Rails is dead!" for the past 10 years, it's continued to be huge at pretty much all levels of development (introductory, hobbyist, contract work, startups, small, mid, and large size companies). I don't really see this changing that significantly.
If we start to see an exodus off of Rails in the next few years from the big players like GitHub, then I'll start to get worried.
https://twitter.com/georgeclaghorn/status/138813100953171968...
https://twitter.com/sstephenson/status/1388146129284603906
I agree with you, and I wouldn't be that surprised to see this manifest as a Rails fork.
I think what might happen is one of the other big players in the Rails ecosystem, like GitHub, might begin taking a larger role in the development and leadership of Rails.
Regardless of what people think of the specifics of the policy, it's a good case study in how not to do something like this. Releasing a blog post that results in 1/3rd+ of your employees resigning is bad management.
No idea what the source was or how valid it is, but I can imagine a lot of other employees not liking their job anymore in the near future, regardless of their position on this debacle.
One of the issues was that one of the activist employees tried to link "making fun of customers' names" to "genocide".
That was a big yike. And definitely a convo I wouldn't want to have.
I don't see what the big yikes is about that.
Why would you even bring up the word "genocide" in any discussion, especially when talking about correcting bad behaviour? Are your colleagues nazis? Do you think they have potential to commit genocide?
Yikes. Big yikes.
I wonder if what you'll see is companies sorting into "politics encouraged" vs "politics discouraged" environments, and will be interesting to see the outcomes of these different types of workplaces.
> “At least in my experience, it has always been centered on what is happening at Basecamp,” said one employee — who, like most of those I spoke with today, requested anonymity so as to freely discuss internal deliberations. “What is being done at Basecamp? What is being said at Basecamp? And how it is affecting individuals? It has never been big political discussions, like ‘the postal service should be disbanded,’ or ‘I don’t like Amy Klobuchar.’
I had originally thought it was more in line with the Coinbase decision, which was more specifically about taking a stance with respect to the BLM movement, which is an external political discussion, vs. what to do about sensitive issues within your company. Discussing how to handle issues like the "Best Names Ever" list that are internal to your company isn't "politics", it's called running a company.
If you read the full context, the list was condemned by management. Apparently multiple times. A group of employees would not let it go for months and it developed into a huge internal distraction. So yes it was not about "politics" in the sense of Republican vs Democrat, but rather it was woke ideology.
It's why I fully expected that these changes had little to do with politics, but more about employees criticizing some aspect of internal governance.
I will be looking and reaching out to them soon. A) they are now looking for a lot of people. B) I fully agree with their idea about apolitical work spaces, and I know a lot of folks that do as well. I have quit jobs due to the BLM fanfare, you are either with us or against us mentality in the workplace where I just wanted to do my job and get paid to do so.
edit: I chose BLM because it was the big thing last year. Not a racist thing, but being 5000km away from all that, and still have people 'demanding' me I wear/use BLM support things was too much.
When your policies are being celebrated by Breitbart and other alt-right trash publications, you are going to attract a lot of folks with extremely questionable integrity.
Not saying you're one of those, but if you can't recognize your point in history and are quitting your job over "BLM fanfare", then you also know the answer to the question of what you would have done during the civil rights movements of past. Nothing. You would have kept your head down and focused on your work. Which, maybe if you're in a sustenance-based paycheck-to-paycheck environment is justifiable. But if you have the luxury to quit jobs (PLURAL!) over being asked to take a stand, then you're not apolitical.
That's not true. Being harassed to virtue-signal and not wanting to deal with those people has nothing to do with how likely you are to have your own beliefs and act upon them.
>But if you have the luxury to quit jobs (PLURAL!) over being asked to take a stand, then you're not apolitical.
No that just means that he has enough choice not to want to bother with people requiring you to take their stand. I deplore people who do not have that luxury and have to deal with people radical enough to require others to mirror them.
You tell on yourself when you use language that suggests that the people who participate in these discussions and contributions are disingenuous [1].
People are not being harassed to virtue signal. People are being harassed to be explicit about the contents of their character.
Those that refuse or think that the others are being disingenuous are also communicating something.
[1] Virtue signalling is a pejorative neologism for the expression of a disingenuous moral viewpoint with the intent of communicating good character.
>People are not being harassed to virtue signal. People are being harassed to be explicit about the contents of their character.
Whatever way you frame it, it is still harassment and IMO shouldn't be tolerated.
Cut the maudlin allusion to Dr. King. Your character is revealed by your actions, not by whether your Instagram profile is set to a black square.
Let me tell you why I call this fanfare (in my country, I won't chime in on other countries issues).
During the pandemic, we had BLM marches, politicians virtue signalling, people hating on the police ("The only good cop is a dead cop" signs during those marches), etc. Do we have racist police? For sure. Do we have a PROBLEM with the police with black people? Not so much. Yes, there are cases of abuse, but never to the level you see in the USA. The last case I remember was a year and a half ago, where a (white) cop was accused of attacking (punching) a (black) woman for refusing to pay for a bus ticket and not leaving the bus, everyone cried racism. After video from inside the bus was shown, it showed a cop 10 minutes trying to talk her to leave the bus, she kept refusing, he grabbed her arm to take her out, and she started hitting him, bitting him (there were photos released after where his arm looked like he was fighting wolves), using somethign she picked to try to hit his head.
This was a big POLICE=RACISM and whatnot. Proved wrong. But still BLM.
You know what actually happened around and no one cared? 4 Government emigration official beat to death a guy inside their offices. I saw no march. I saw no instagram posts. Why? Well, he was white. I saw no celebreties going on tv to sshow their support. No nothing.
So yes, sorry, I don't want to work in a place where I am supposed to put a BLM tag on my username or whatnot, in a country that doesn't have those problems, and being accused of being a racist because of it. Life is too short to deal with that shit.
Time will tell which prediction turns out to be the outcome.
I think it _is_ an existential risk but having observed some of dhh's personality traits, I expect he just lost patience and said "that's it - either they go or the company does" and is quite willing to gamble the future of the company on the basis that managing a stressful, internally riven, company is worse than managing no company at all.
Which is fine, but it's for the best for everyone to end that mismatch.
The resignations feel less less like a result of a mismatch and more like result of a slap in the face from mismanagement.
I'm a firm believer that you can help toxic people become normal (again). But it takes a lot of time and effort that you can't spend otherwise, and you might alienate others over it who don't want to suffer under the (maybe reforming) toxic person. The question is whether you want to help someone, or build products. Basecamp seems to have opted for not turning themselves into a SuperPAC/self-help group.
I'm not sure about that. In my experience, it's about priorities, and some people find e.g. political activism more important than building products. When they have to decide between "more activism" or "more products", they value activism higher.
I don't think it's a junior/senior thing, and not everybody will end up where they feel like they + the company have "grown apart". In this case, from afar, it looks like most in the company (including the founders) where pretty political, but some employees got more radicalized and the founders (who essentially set the company direction) did not.
It's a kind of schism, but it's best for everyone involved to let it happen. I find that kind of generous buy-out a very good way to do it. Some have suggested that it's some kind of demonstration of power, but I don't see that: in a power play, they would've fired the problematic employees (and having worked with activist employees, I'm confident that everyone knew who they were), not given them a large bonus for leaving. They've extended the bonus to everyone (which is great as well, you're not rewarding the bad apples, to so speak), and I wouldn't be surprised if some took the offer purely because of the money.
Firing them is a good way to tip them over it.
Or it was just a good deal. Do we know what the "buy-out" deal was? I mean I like my job and the company I work for well enough, but if they offered a decent enough deal and I'll happily walk away tomorrow and not look back.
> Yesterday, we offered everyone at Basecamp an option of a severance package worth up to six months salary for those who've been with the company over three years, and three months salary for those at the company less than that. No hard feelings, no questions asked. For those who cannot see a future at Basecamp under this new direction, we'll help them in every which way we can to land somewhere else.
People with lots of options are often the first to jump ship.
I realize in this case it’s likely more complicated than that because people may have moral objections to the change in policy. But the first to jump out of a sinking ship are the people who are confident they can make their way to another boat.
I'm not saying I demand the ability to be rude and awful, or go on political tirades, or anything even vaguely like that. But I spend more time talking to people I work with than any other set of people.
Telling me I have to avoid entire categories of normal conversation is itself authoritarian politicization of the workplace, and I'd happily tell him to go fuck himself, too.
prefer a workplace where I don't have to bite my
tongue 24/7 simply because my political views
aren't popular
If the discussion is about the person you are talking to getting to enjoy the same basic rights everyone else does (or even just exist) that's not just any political discussion and it affects them very personally and directly.
As they say, "your liberty to swing your fist ends where my nose begins".
You think this. Others don't. Your values are not universal. If you want to advocate for your positions, arguing on a company slack while being paid to do something else isn't the time.
If a coworker was saying or acting in an anti-semitic way (possibly not even consciously), I would absolutely feel unsafe as a Jew in a company that told me "that's just their beliefs, you don't have to agree with their politics". I would call that out on the company slack & if they continue doing so would expect them to get fired.
In the case of your other example of black and Jewish people: it’s already inappropriate to be racist at work.
This is sometimes hard to see for people who are themselves not part of the "contentious" group (and not always due to malevolence, sometimes it's just hard to sympathize with people who aren't like yourself).
Which is a reasonable solution, don't get me wrong. But this kind of solution is what people mean when they talk about limiting politics at work, and these kinds of conflicts are why it's a good idea. In order to work with people who don't share your precise values, there have to be ground rules to minimize conflict.
How I'd respond to homophobia in the workplace: I will call it out and expect that person to get the hint and no longer make homophobic comments at work. If they repeatedly continue to do so afterwards then yes I'd expect them to be fired, but it will not be out of the blue or without warning.
EDIT: I think the current top thread already better formulates my opinion so I suggest reading that instead of continuing here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27001075
Your position is probably straight up illegal by the way.
You seem to expect this to be an inevitability but I've worked with plenty of Muslims in my 18 years career as I live in a city with almost half a million Muslim residents and I've never encountered a Muslim being homophobic at work.
I have in the past called out people making misogynistic comments at work & generally people do get the hint and stop doing that. If they don't then you've identified a problem.
EDIT: I think the current top thread already better formulates my opinion so I suggest reading that instead of continuing here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27001075
See, but here is the rub. What if the comment is just "according to my islamic faith, my religious belief system does not support gay marriage".
For all I know, you would call this statement homophobic, but if you punished this person for saying this a couple times, it would absolutely be illegal.
> Nothing to do with Islam.
Yes it does. Many people, do not support gay marriage because it a part of their faith. And if you fired or punished them for stating that this is their faith, then it would absolutely be illegal discrimination on your part.
If they say that as a reaction to a gay man posting somewhere "I'm out of office next week as John & I are getting married" than answering this with "with all due respect, as a Muslim I can't support you getting married to a man" is out of place. If they repeat after being called out that then yes that's a problem.
They have the very reasonable possibility of simply not saying anything but that may require developing a company culture where people learn if and when to do that - this may require some "political" discussion between consenting adults and that's fine!
Maybe someone asks them about their faith, in an informal setting, such as during lunch, and then they answer the question that was asked of them regarding how their faith applied to gay marriage.
If you then punished them for this, then that would absolutely be an example of illegal discrimination, on your part.
Again this is in no way unique to muslims, and is just as likely to be the case with similarly devout christians so I don't see why you need to focus on islam specifically. I've personally also worked with orthodox jews who I am sure hold a lot of opinions I disagree with and somehow they managed to never voice homophobic or misogynistic comments & I managed to never tell them what I think about interpretations of the bible as the literal word of god.
This is a situation which among reasonable people doesn't require outright ban of "political speech". You can cultivate a good company culture that deescalates flame wars without such a blunt instrument that may also have a lot of undesirable side effects.
It is very much possible, that according to the law, you are engaging in illegal discrimination against certain religions.
> I don't see why you need to focus on islam specifically
Well, the important reason why to focus on certain groups, is because of the possible illegality of your actions. Thats why.
> Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.
When it comes to discrimination and freedom of religion, the ACLU[2] has this to say:
> Instances of institutions and individuals claiming a right to discriminate in the name of religion are not new. In the 1960s, we saw objections to laws requiring integration in restaurants because of sincerely held beliefs that God wanted the races to be separate. We saw religiously affiliated universities refuse to admit students who engaged in interracial dating. In those cases, we recognized that requiring integration was not about violating religious liberty; it was about ensuring fairness. It is no different today.
[1] https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=55...
[2] https://www.aclu.org/issues/religious-liberty/using-religion...
Now scramble those weakly / strongly held opinions for every individual...
Aren't they a remote company?
From my perspective that seems like an odd way to think of work. You have a life at work but it necessarily has certain constraints since you've sold your time, attention & best efforts to your employer.
That has not been my experience of these channels in general though. I think it depends greatly on the company culture and the people, code of conduct, and tone set by leadership.
> an inclusive workplace is one where leadership doesn't have to monitor each channel
I disagree with this statement. Just because there are dedicated channels for a specific subject does not mean they should be unmoderated. There should be a code of conduct and at least light moderation / ability to report misconduct just like all other company communication mediums in shared spaces (i.e. not DMs).
You don't already feel this way? There's a long list of things that would have you packing your desk if you discussed them at any other company. Society has already decided certain extreme positions are too brand damaging or disruptive to tolerate.
This policy seems to reflect that a not-insignificant portion of the population has collectively lost their minds over the past year of isolation and now is looking to pick a fight over things that no one would've blinked at 2-3 years ago. It's destroyed friendships, family ties, and I'm sure a lot of team cohesion at many companies.
I think requesting that this discussion takes place outside of company channels is a pretty reasonable reaction.
I have trouble imaging how a response to an apparent social cohesion issue that results in 1/3 of the office immediately walking can be considered a good outcome.
It sounds more like a corporate schism to me.
If there was a cascading series of events that led to this policy announcement that turned them off to working at the company, it's not my place to judge them. On the other hand, if they are quitting simply because they can't engage in inflammatory political rhetoric at work then I certainly hope that I never to have work with any of these people in the future.
Yeah, like pulling extracts of customer names to circulate and make fun of them. That mis-use of customer data, and tinged as it is with racial and xenophobic overtones, would have me sacked for misconduct in no time flat.
This appears to be a kneejerk reaction that's separated from the facts of this situation. According to DHH:
"It's not a list of, say, primarily Asian names. Out of the 78 names listed on the last version we were able to recover, just 6 names appear to be Asian." [0]
The overwhelming need to connect anything distasteful to racism or xenophobia is a relatively recent social construct that didn't manifest itself widely until we were all locked in our homes for a year during this pandemic. Before that, we could probably all agree that maintaining a list of customer names that are laughed at is a disrespectful and stupid thing to do.
That's literally 99.99% of employers.
> I'm not saying I demand the ability to be rude and awful, or go on political tirades, or anything even vaguely like that.
Based on your initial response, it sounds like that's exactly what you're saying. They have a problem with employees not being able to speak about politics without some of them going on tirades, and some of them accusing others of acting in bad faith, and more assuming those that try to refrain are implicitly agreeing with one stance or another.
> Telling me I have to avoid entire categories of normal conversation is itself authoritarian politicization of the workplace, and I'd happily tell him to go fuck himself, too.
And you can! And they did! These people were not only there by choice, they were given a very good way out if they didn't like the change. But I also hope none of them that left because they feel the need to proselytize at work don't come work with me.
But also, let's consider when the types of interactions being described at this company became "normal conversation".
> But I spend more time talking to people I work with than any other set of people.
Hopefully primarily about work, at least when working. They aren't paying you to talk about politics. If you're doing it outside work, nobody cares. Basecamp doesn't care either. They made that clear. Just keep it off their company communications. You can even talk politics privately with your friends if you work there, because they aren't going to turn you in (and if they would, then maybe you should consider why and maybe not bother them with stuff like that).
Most people aren't hired to speak their inner thoughts to the rest of the company. Most people don't try to. Somehow it's a problem when people are told explicitly what they should have already internalized, please don't.
But it's even worse because I care about my colleagues. We've worked hard together and produced some pretty amazing things. When I hear them sometimes say things that are frankly ignorant, bad-faith, uncharitable, etc. about their political out-group, I just have to shake my head.
Somehow I get through my day at work avoiding discussing much about my beliefs. We chat about our families, recent happenings in our lives, hobbies, trips, interesting articles we saw recently on HN, etc. Turns out none of those things is a terribly political topic. Maybe a small part of me wishes that the tables were turned, and the people I disagree with had to hold their tongues for fear of ostracism when "political" opinions arise. But in reality, I don't want them to feel this way either. I'd rather work at a place that strongly discouraged political chatter and activism using work resources.
I'd hope that we could at least get a balance where there enough companies like Basecamp or Coinbase that can meet my needs so that the companies like Google or Spotify can continue to meet yours, and we can sort into the places where we work best.
It seems like a real stretch to read this as anything other than a bit of a self-own. Even if you wanted to get rid of all these people eventually you'd probably want to do that more gradually.
2. If Apple had teams circulating customer data internally and laughing about it, DHH would be asking for a Congressional investigation.
I wouldn't call it SV culture. I think it's more the culture of people who are trying to use companies to promote their political ideals.
I grew up and first worked in a region where your employer was not your everything. People worked (often times with a diverse set of people) and then outside of work were part of other groups for their interests and ideologies. That separation enabled people from many walks of life to work together. I'd like to see more of this.
Those who have the expectation of talking progressive politics at work and getting what they want or they leave.
I wouldn’t touch any of them.
I do love the idea of no politics at work. Politics is not intellectually interesting for me.
If it was layoffs, you just do them. You don't explain and you don't create a large number of now-ex employees going to Twitter to say why you suck.
If it was downsizing to something more comfortable for the founders, again, more easily done with the same buyout package, and much less of a black eye by just saying "we want a smaller company, so we're putting our money behind doing right by everyone as we get what we want."
If it was getting rid of agitators, it's actually easier to fire them and deal with the lawsuits. Most companies have some amount of ongoing legal expense, and getting sued isn't that bad if you're not smoking-gun discriminatory. You can always file a lawsuit, but it's much harder to get somewhere with a lawsuit, and there's a reason corporate attorneys get big bucks--that Basecamp has to pay.
The best explanation is the most obvious one: they made a colossal blunder in handling this and have footgunned their company badly enough that there will now likely be a second wave of buyout accepters who are people who don't want to stick around to clean up the mess.
>This term has historically been used in America to describe black people who were considered to be acting above "their place", and is considered by some to have racist connotations when applied to black people and other people of color; sometimes, arrogant or presumptuous, invoking the same idea, are used as codewords for it.[3][4][5]
I don't think it's really even about the specific policy.
Note that the "changes" [1] also include "no more committees" (ie, no more feedback/authority/responsibilty except through the line-of-report hieararchy), "no bringing up past decisions you disagree with", and "no more 360 degree reviews" (no formal way to give feedback to your boss).
I think they are basically changes to focus on... "insubordination". Do what we say, do your job as we say it, don't have an opinion.
I think people are leaving because they don't trust or respect or feel respected by the boss, not over a single particular policy -- although in part over how little he cared what his employees opinions were about the policy.
[1] https://world.hey.com/jason/changes-at-basecamp-7f32afc5
Sounds pretty political to me!
Of course it's not just about the specifics of the policy. It's about the list and the leaders discussed and handled it. Rather than just taking the L they kept Posting Through It and alienated their employees.
1/3 of the company had joined this D&I committee, which apparently felt that it’s scope included everything that the company did. The employees proved that they couldn’t be trusted to self-organize into a committee and keep it on topic.
Eh? Source? Elaborate.
https://www.platformer.news/p/-what-really-happened-at-basec...
Of course a DE&I committee would look at how the company operates. That's its entire purpose...
Lack of diversity is certainly a big problem in society at large, but do "minorities" really have problems getting hired in the hot developer job market? Seems to be more of a supply issue than a demand issue perhaps.
Nothing to see here. Good on DHH.
I believe no committees is because Jason and DHH don't think they're productive.
Not bringing up past decisions you disagree with makes sense to me. What's the point in re-judging the past?
The reason DHH mentioned for 360 reviews was that they didn't contain any real criticism because you're critiquing your co-workers (I'm paraphrasing), and that makes perfect sense to me. I wouldn't want to criticize my co-workers unless I had a very strong relationship with them.
None of these changes feel like DHH and Jason being tyrants and stamping out employee insubordination.
This part stood out for me. This is a very simplistic view, and I would expect more from company leaders.
Of course peer feedback is colored. But that doesn't mean it's without signal.
A statement like "Sandra is great, her work is consistently on time" can be ignored. It's essentially no data.
But a statement like "I couldn't have completed feature X without Susan. She did X, Y, and Z, and these things weren't even part of her job. Everyone needs to be more like Susan." Well... that statement tells you something. And you now have a basis of comparison between Susan's work and Sandras. Give Susan a bonus and Sandra a thumbs up.
Today 1/3rd of the employees left Basecamp.
Also today: DHH is back to tweeting and fighting with Apple like nothing of note happened and it's just another day.
The original situation that sparked everything was brought about largely by dismissive and irresponsible leadership that disrespected and devalued the feelings of the other people the leader served.
Today's reaction is more of the same. To project to the public - whether pretending or legitimate - that 1/3rd of the company leaving barely registers with you? It's that same devaluing and disrespect, just shown off in a different form.
What would you post if you were dhh?
My top answer here would be "nothing". =) Several hours after 1/3rd of your workforce leaves isn't the time to start going after Apple again like nothing of note happened.
Hypothetically (and this is off the cuff) if I had no choice but** to post something on Hey or Twitter - it would be something to the effect of:
"You've likely heard that a large number of people left Basecamp today. They were very talented people, great contributors, and I want to thank all of them for contributing to this company.
I still strongly believe in the changes we are making, but I respect that the people who have left today don't agree with those changes and have exercised the option to leave. As promised we have provided them with 3-6 month severance packages and wish them all the best in the future."
Again, I think the best thing would have been for David to have been quiet today instead of going on a blocking spree and posting about cancel culture the night before the all-hands; but at least this statement would indicate some degree of respect for the people that had given a lot of their time to Basecamp.
* and clearly from his rampant blocking behavior (to the point that "dhh block" is the second autocomplete suggestion of twitter), he definitely cares a bit too much about it today ;)
** again, there's always a choice =) Some of the best advice I ever received was "Before you hit send, sleep for at least 8 hours."
Don't think there's anything they could have posted that would have made it better. Does feel disrespectful that they didn't just refrain from posting for a day or two.
The company got lots of free press from this. There will be many who will agree with Basecamp’s stance.
Basecamp will easily hire new people.
There are many who would love to work at a top SV company with strong values and a good culture where they do not have to worry about being cancelled by their fellow employees for not towing the progressive line.
Other companies would have similarly good results proposing similar measures I would expect.
There is a large contingent of SV developers who are just plain toxic. They make themselves feel better and avoid feeling with their own personal issues by targeting others.
They problem is they do great things for the software community because they have a drive sustained by trying to fix everything around them instead of things they can’t fix about themselves.
So we need them, and enable them, but suffer the consequences. Which is where I think DHH and Freid got cut by the double edged sword.
Of Basecamp's 57 employees, as of right now, there are 20 who have announced a departure on Twitter: https://twitter.com/_breeeeen_/status/1388198266651688963
I’ve seen comments on HN going the opposite way , but let’s be honest for a minute : most of them will find work within less then a month.
We are looking at top talents from SV with years of experience as iOS engineers / executive those talents are hard to find and quiet rare regardless of the pandemic or not.
Honestly it’s just free money , I won’t deny the emotional aspect that may take time to recover but outside of that they’ll have no problem finding new jobs in the comings weeks.
I would be tempted by that offer regardless of any other circumstances, especially in today's competitive jobs market.
but just on a numbers basis if you made 1m a year profit sharing but a normal job outside you'd make 200k, you'd have to really hate working there to quit purely for the 6month payout.
> In addition, we recently introduced a 10% profit sharing plan
If so, it's hard to say for sure how lucrative it would be either, especially if you aren't privy to the details of what they say they are offering.
But if so, nobody's gotten it already, you'd have to stay to get it.
$40k in the bank is a nice bonus, but I wouldn't quit a job I liked for it.
It reminds me of people flippantly declaring "just sue!" as if it's an easy or pleasant thing to do.
Agreed. A pain, and also a risk. A huge part of job satisfaction is working for a manager that you respect, and you can't really know that until you've been through some shit.
https://basecamp.com/handbook/08-benefits-and-perks#employee...
I guess it comes down to numbers though. How much money was this profit sharing incentive giving to most employees? And how many users did they lose this week?
Does anyone add in randomness (dice?) to actually enforce the feeling that profits/bonuses can swing wildly?
"This Program does not have any set expiration date, but the company reserves the right to amend it or cancel it at any time. You forfeit your shares in the profit sharing program if you resign or are terminated from Basecamp."
So not equity. Profit sharing.
If you read this news as "employees (who yosito disagrees with) should shut the fuck up", perhaps you think this is good. If you read this as, "I joined this company as a place where my voice mattered and now I'm being told to STFU by a founder on a rage bender", it makes more sense why people are leaving.
They asked the political conversions be kept out of work channels, but continued to encourage people to be active politically, active on social media and even active at work using other platforms.
Framing the entire thing as some extremist plot to silence dissent is absurd.
If someone wanted to come into work channels and constantly tell people about their religion, why they should convert and why other religions were wrong would you think it’s okay to for the business to ask to keep those conversations outside of the main work channels?
I don't know, maybe you missed the part where he posted on Twitter about cancel culture and then started blocking everyone who disagreed with him. Rage benders don't need to be limited to the office. =)
This one?
I guess if we're just going to go in a circle confirming that we've both observed the same thing vs. discussing, I'm happy to bounce! =) Have an awesome one!
If you saw a link posted and see that as rage, it kinda proves the point.
Did you read the NYT article or listen to the podcast? It was very reasonable.
https://www.platformer.news/p/-what-really-happened-at-basec...
When I read that, I see business leaders who engaged for months then asked people to move on when they realized it was never going to go away.
Searching the chat logs and posting in front of everybody was a jerk move for an executive, absolutely.
Everything else seems entirely reasonable.
Just from the open letter (https://janeyang.org/2021/04/27/an-open-letter-to-jason-and-...) take a look at the kind of attitudes they have; these are some serious snowflakes:
"As you know, I am writing this while on medical leave from Basecamp, a condition that was necessary in large part because of the extreme emotional duress I have experienced as an employee at the company."We don't care what you think about the impact of our poor decisions.
We don't care what you think about diversity and inclusion.
We don't want to be a workplace that cares about your health or wellbeing.
And we are going to escalate any disagreement until you shut the fuck up.
A third of the company (and counting) has decided that this sucks and is leaving.
I'm not calling this an extremist plot. In fact, I think it's the exact opposite of a plot, hence "on a bender". I think this is someone who got angry at work, had the power to win a debate by fiat, and exercised that power, and is now learning the cost of that Pyrrhic victory.
> If someone wanted to come into work channels and constantly tell people about their religion
The conversations inside Basecamp weren't about that at all, so I'm not sure why you raise this example. They were about the way the workplace had been run and citing the shortcomings of those decisions.
Well, this might be contrarian but if I worked for DHH I might very well prefer this situation.
In fact I feel like I've been in and out of situations and I tend to prefer clear command chains: I do what I am told and those under me do what they are told.
The military is a perfect good example as is certain companies.
Maybe twice (including a decade ago and now) have I experienced self organizing teams that worked.
For example, they could have structured the incentive such that it only applied to employees below a certain level. They didn't do that though because they wanted to make sure every employee who disagreed with the policy left.
Perhaps they’ve kept the employees who accepted management’s statement about the event and wanted to move past the issue.
Please don't put words in my mouth. I said nothing of the sort.
I don't know if a full third of a company leaving at once can really be explained away as people they didn't really want on the team.
I'll program and be professional at company A just as happily as I would at company B.
I'm already professional and apolitical at work, I don't feel I stand to gain much being otherwise.
So I think you'd be inadvertently discriminating against people who are simply interested in getting 2 salaries for 6 months.
It doesn't seem to matter if your getting quality PRs approved into popular FOSS software, nor do most interview processes actually vet for technical capability or quality.
My friends who work in tech right now (whether at Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Mercedes, etc) essentially set aside 6 to 18 months prior to job hunting to screw around practicing these questions.
Even with an amazing buyout like this, I feel like you have to be in that relatively narrow space of “no spouse, no kids, good health, pretty young” to be able to walk away from health insurance.
https://www.natlawreview.com/article/new-covid-19-relief-pac...
Pro: high possibility of promotion and a new position
Con: way more responsibility and stress for managing a platform and rebuilding teams on the fly.
I think they’ll need to offer some form of compensation to reward the people who stayed on, because their lives will likely get a lot harder in the short term.
I understand that there are often real issues at hand and positive movement that people want to make in the workplace, but it is career suicide, and always will be, to join a committee that makes demands of leadership.
I'm more or less OK with discussing any topic at non-work time, during lunch or whatever, but only until every participant in a discussion is willing to accept the views he/she personally disagrees with.
I know that I am just guessing, but they might have been making the lifestyle decision that they wanted a smaller and more focused company that was more joyful to manage/run. Also, I have some sympathy for a “no politics” guideline for two reasons: no one should be allowed to say or do anything at work that makes anyone uncomfortable in a personal way; no one should really care much about other peoples’ politics. Life is about so much more than politics. I am judgmental, but I judge people on how well they treat other people and by how much effort they make improving the world (understanding that people have different natural abilities).
Agreed. But frequently calling that out IS what is deemed "political" by the person who was "just expressing an opinion", and "i just have a different ideology from you"
> ; no one should really care much about other peoples’ politics.
Some people's politics is other people's human rights. Would you want to work with someone who you knew in their heart was racist and thought that people of your race were inherently less capable than their own. (Even if they believed you individually were okay)
Politics isn't ONLY about racism.
Politics isn't ONLY about NOT racism.
If you ban politics, you also ban politics about racism.
But if politics was about whether the city should spend a budget surplus on a sidewalk upgrade or a new park bench, then nobody would even think about banning those discussions.
So when you ban politics, you ban politics about racism. Because those are the controversial ones.
And less abstractly, more concretely, about the basecamp situation, the politics that led to this ban were explicitly politics about racism.
Racism isn't the only controversial political topic out there.
What does it mean to inadvertently discriminate?
As an example, a lot of websites drop support for IE. If the makeup of IE users affected by it over-indexed on any particular type of race/gender/class/sexual orientation, would you classify that as inadvertent discrimination?
If a first version of a new website/product wasn't built to be perfectly compatible with accessibility standards, are they inadvertently discriminating against those with disabilities?
Are software bugs that may not be equally felt by all users an example of inadvertent discrimination?
Is the only way to not inadvertently discriminate to ensure products are built to be optimized for every single human and use case? Every edge case needs to be solved for before launch?
To this day, our home security system sometimes recognizes my big Black stepson as an “animal.”
Facial recognition that was used by law enforcement, mis recognized minorities far more than Whites.
What you described sounds like a product flaw. Customers/users won't want to use a product that delivers sub-optimal results. Any internal employee saying "hey, we have an error rate of X% for this Y segment, and they represent Z% of the user base" isn't engaging in controversial political discussion (in my opinion).
However, if an individual chose to describe this flaw in more loaded language, it could easily turn political and combative for the team.
It would never have shipped with a product flaw that frequently caused it to classify white people as something insulting.
I do think your comment here, with an unprovable statement about an immutable characteristic, stated with absolute certainty, would invite toxic political discussions.
Speaking with humility, and honestly trying to improve processes to yield better results, is the type of communication that I advocate for on teams I'm involved with.
Of course they never would have shipped it if it didn't recognize white faces. And the big isn't in the software, the bug is that the companies producing this stuff don't have a single solitary person of color either working on the product or testing it that would have certainly noticed that it doesn't work on them or said they were an animal, etc.
If AI/ML says someone “fits the description” what better feature than being able to blame it on the computer? If law enforcement was willing to deal with the flaw, and if tech companies were willing to sell it to them, what’s to stop an unscrupulous company from continuing to sell it if they didn’t get push back?
It's likely that until recently (maybe), that IE users were more likely to use JAWS and accessibility tools than other groups, especially if they couldn't afford upgrades to newer releases of JAWS or were stuck on enterprise computers.
> If a first version of a new website/product wasn't built to be perfectly compatible with accessibility standards, are they inadvertently discriminating against those with disabilities?
Yes, if the site is inaccessible. That said it's harder to claim that a game designed for a touch screen is inaccessible and discriminates against accessible users who prefer keyboards, perhaps, due to the hardware they use. The game might work better on a touch screen, like Fruit Ninja and might be very hard to replicate without a touch screen.
> Software bugs that may not be equally felt
Maybe. If the bug was a recent introduction of a non-binary gender field and only those with non-binary genders were affected, it could be considered inadvertent discrimination. It can also be considered a bug. Its severity depends on how long the bug remains in the system. If it's pushing a year, that's more likely discrimination in addition to poor QA practices and a likely inability to listen to user feedback.
> Is the only way to not inadvertently discriminate to ensure products are built to be optimized for every single human and use case? Every edge case needs to be solved for before launch?
I think we need to keep in mind that just because something could be discrimination doesn't mean we can't forgive and move on. Mistakes are a fact of life, and nothing's perfect. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to aim for shipping fewer bugs, it means when we can, we fix the bugs, we listen to users, etc. It's very possible that one user's perfect app will in fact be completely wrong for another user, so pleasing everyone is impossible. It's why ergonomics has been so hard, humans aren't all the same height, etc.
Sometimes you need settings for users to adjust software to suit their preferences, such as font size. And sometimes you make font size part of the game, and it's not adjustable. If allowable under law, being inaccessible can be a choice, or it can be inadvertent. It's true some folks can get really worked up on a topic they care deeply about. It's also true that it's just software, and new software will come along eventually with different features that may please some audiences more. Or less. It all depends. :)
Given this thinking about inadvertent discrimination, and that the word 'discrimination' is very much coded as a 'bad' thing, what should be done about it?
Should any website/product that launches without being perfectly operable for every single user be sanctioned in some way? If not, aren't we supporting inadvertent discrimination? Isn't any allowance of inadvertent discrimination a bad thing?
Should there be some sort of utilitarian calculation with it? Or is it strictly a deontological thing? There can be no discrimination, therefore, we must not allow or we should disincentivize product development processes which release versions before they are equally workable for everyone?
For example, having a textual version of a video or image makes your page more optimized for basic search engines.
Now, of course, the same incentives could lead to dark patterns, lack of privacy, or even dividing people further, perhaps becoming a platform for divisiveness.
Personally, I think that we can identify and mark certain dark patterns as illegal, outright. We can encourage plugins and browser settings to enhance privacy. The hardest question is how much we need everything to be perfectly accessible and to not cause further discrimination or harm. That last one is difficult. I think ultimately the best answer we have is to classify some bad actors like we would dark patterns. This forum is an example of how rules and community can lead to better civil discourse online, but it's not necessarily as diverse as it could be due to those same rules. I think there will always be an unregulated middle ground where no one takes responsibility until they (a) have to and (b) understand how to, and that's especially true of government services at local and regional levels.
Would you rather have known about that risk early, or after a few years of not getting promoted?
The head of the department would often use politics as small talk leading up to meetings while waiting for everyone to show up.
There was literally no safe way to engage in the conversation- disagree, and you paint a target on your back today, agree and have a target painted on your back tomorrow when someone else is in charge (not to mention alienating people who might currently be on your team).
If my coworkers misgender me and aren’t amenable to correction, or otherwise overtly discriminate against me, I’m much more likely to quit and go elsewhere than to fight it.
This sound frighteningly religious. Here you are trying to read people's hearts and refusing to work with them.
It is this Manichean us versus them and not just judging actions but trying to look at a person's heart that has turned up the heat of discourse and is tearing our country apart.
I agree it’s not a comfortable situation and specific circumstances can trump a generalisation, but it’s not impossible that I could tolerate that sort of situation and in fact people do it al, the time. How many of us have worked at places where everyone knew there was one guy who was a misogynist but plenty of women there put up with it?
For me it’s about the actual behaviour. I can’t police what people think or believe, nobody really can in truth, but we can expect basic standards of behaviour.
I’m not able to know someone’s heart, so if I reached this conclusion I would abort out due to faulty logic.
Also, I don’t really want to know Karen in accounting’s heart, even if it’s awesome. I’d rather just be professional and not know.
Reading the experience in base camp equating this with genocide, hr complaints, etc it seems people were really convinced of things. But they seem really wrong to me. But they acted on it. Having such certainty is foolish.
I’d rather not try to adjust my workplace based on people’s hearts and would rather risk working with people who secretly, racistly hate me than to try to vet people at this level.
In Judaism there’s a tolerance for people that are orthoprax (right behavior) even if in their heart of hearts they are not orthodox (right beliefs).
Despite the increasing percentage of non-believers, America is culturally deeply Protestant and so we don’t allow this sort of thing. But I think we might be better off if we did.
Could you highlight some of the characteristics that you consider go along with this.
"Deeply protestant" to me brings to mind the Quaker (a Protestant denomination) Cadbury & Fry chocolate companies. They did things like build municipal buildings, housing, schools. Fry family members addressed prison reform (Elizabeth Fry) and studied and acted to counter poverty and it's causes, for example. They reduced working hours too!
Sure, it was paternalistic, and they grew wealthy from their employees, but it seems they acted benevolently and genuinely tried to make a difference in their communities and for their workers.
https://medium.com/@cafonline/meet-the-philanthropists-sweet... gives a brief view.
What we hear of USA this side of the pond and these sorts of attributes don't seem to mesh.
This seems like a misconstrual to me. Anglican and Methodist orthodoxy still has prima scripturum, which is only a very nuanced difference to sola scripturum; both in theory reject influences that are incompatible with scripture as the principle authority.
> In the US evangelical and non-denominational Christian theologies generally posit that accepting Christ as your personal Savior (and the sole source of salvation) is all that is necessary to be saved (and Christian). //
This is not what sola sciptura is about. This is absolutely orthodox in all mainstream Christian denominations, that faith alone is necessary for salvation. Either group would consider the NT's exortations such as "what then shall we go on sinning?" (St.Paul) or "faith without works is dead" (James-the-Lesser) as primary teachings.
I'd actually consider that things are the reverse of your suggestion, that [USA/Western] evangelicals have strayed away from the Scriptures as a principle source of inspiration and instead rely on the characters of leaders and on self-help style influences that don't match well with the revelation of Jesus in the NT. Certainly it only takes 1hr of reading NT to find that being financially wealthy is contradictory to Christianity - not impossible to get to heaven and be rich, but er, maybe as hard as getting an obstinate camel through a tiny gate!?! Prosperity gospel, bah!
Outcomes are the evidence. I am not interested in your or your company's social media statements. I'm interested in whether people who are underrepresented in the field can succeed at your company and whether you treat people like me fairly. This is obvious self-interest on my part, just like engaging in paid labor in the first place.
"People leave managers, not companies." I think this is the most appropriate cliche to apply to the Basecamp story.
Do you actually expect someone with those views to treat you fairly, though? I mean, I'm sure it's not impossible that this guy could leave his opinions at the door and fairly evaluate your performance, and evaluate you for promotion. But I certainly wouldn't expect that to be the case. You claim to have had such a manager once, so I won't deny your experience, but I doubt your experience is typical in that sort of situation.
> Outcomes are the evidence.
Yes! This is something I wish more people would focus on. Outcomes are what matter. That doesn't mean the ends justify the means, but it does mean that we should be taking actions not because they make us feel good (usually only temporarily), but because they are likely to give us the best outcomes.
Regardless, I really don't think most women are going to experience great outcomes with a misogynist boss.
Ideally, you wouldn't even know this was the case.
Wouldn't you want to know ahead of time? That way you'd know what to expect, and could make plans to switch teams or find a new job.
When someone says ideally you wouldn't know it's because unless you and I are personally close ideally you wouldn't know any of my personal beliefs / views on morality or politics. They aren't any of your business and I shouldn't want / nor need to explain them to you.
I don’t think I should be haranguing people at work about it.
I once had a job where I’d just signed the offer and was invited to their team dinner before my official start date. It was at a restaurant that only served chicken that you were supposed to eat with rubber gloves (I have no idea what that was about). It was uncomfortable to realize that I stood out like a sore thumb even before I’d started just because of a dietary preference. It had never occurred to the managers that a regular-looking man who joins their team might not eat meat.
I can't quite tell, did you go to the chicken place? Have things improved?
I left that job after six months. The four male founders turned out to be old buddies who wanted everyone in their little club to be exactly like them but with a deference to their incredible competence as employers. Maybe I’ve been unlucky, but I have the impression that small business tech jobs mostly suck. (Basecamp has a bit of that vibe, to be honest.)
What's wrong: if they decide to not care about that. What's right: they accommodate your dietary preferences.
Don't think you should put the burden on other people to consider these kinds of things beforehand.
It's great if they do, but it's not an issue if they don't.
Which is the alternative lifestyle, mine or the one where everyone at a company eats chicken with rubber gloves?
I get that you mean very well with this statement. However, given a large and diverse enough group of people working together, it's practically impossible that NO ONE will never feel uncomfortable in different situations or interactions. Be it personally or professionally uncomfortable. Period.
We would not be where we are today if it weren't for the people that put themselves in a very uncomfortable positions to talk about something and possibly offend a bunch of people along the way, or people who haven't backed down even when made uncomfortable and stood for whatever they believed in to make their point clear.
I see this sentiment a lot, and I definitely understand the impulse especially in the current political climate. "Politics" is just the word we give for how humans interact at scale, to which we all have a vested interest. I'm somewhat surprised by people taking the attitude that the policies and power dynamics that will meaningfully impact their lives, just isn't that important.
Perhaps because in the US we have had a long period of relative internal stability, we get to have this luxury of going, "Let's not care about politics, life is more than that, it's my loved one's and hobbies and watching the sunset." But all the other bits of life that are more important than politics can only exist because of politics, because of the rules and policies and power structures we all agree to live under.
A general shying away from politics means that a smaller and smaller group of people get to decide the rules for everyone, and I just have a hard time believing that that will lead to good outcomes.
All that said, I do think that the workplace isn't a great environment to have those discussions, politics gets heated and it's hard to work with people when you've dredged up a bunch of big fundamental disagreements.
> no one should be allowed to say or do anything at work that makes anyone uncomfortable in a personal way;
This is a nice sentiment but ultimately meaningless. A rule or policy so broad that it could be applied to nearly any interaction, and one that doesn't look at the actions or intents of the person committing an "offense" but just says, "If someone became uncomfortable during an interaction, the other party is at fault." This type of broad unspecified rule just gives the rule-enforcers tremendous latitude to use it as they see fit.
> I judge people on how well they treat other people and by how much effort they make improving the world
I think there's a lot of politically engaged people that believe that through politics they can improve the world much more than through a single individual's actions. There's little I can do personally to improve the access to healthcare for my fellow citizens, but through political action fellow citizens could gain access to that. Many people would consider that an improvement.
Politics sets the rules for what you can buy, what you can sell, what licensing you need, what forms you have to fill out, what taxes you have to pay, what actions lead to you losing your freedom, what actions lead to you losing your property, what actions lead to you losing your life.
Let's not conflate political discourse with politics.
Just a terminology difference I think, so we basically agree.
As someone who isn't from the US, it is very hard to comprehend.
There is a meme about Americans. You meet an American, and ten minutes later they are drilling you about politics. And I understand why US society is like this, I am familiar with US political history.
But it is very, very, very weird at a personal level. Like why do this? You are breaking a person's whole reality down to their politics...it doesn't seem like a good idea, it seems like the opposite of diversity or just accepting someone's humanity.
Clinton worked with Republicans after he lost Congress. Obama worked with a Republican Congress. And you can go further back and point to someone like McGovern (or Goldwater on the other side) as reactionary/divisive candidates. You had Eisenhower Democrats and the like but there has always been a spectrum in both parties (and that is still the case today i.e. Manchin).
I think two things have changed. One, the media. Politics in the media is different from the practice of politics, the latter largely about compromise. Because of bandwidth of media/politics as entertainment, the fringes of both parties have become more extreme (it has gotten so bad, you wonder whether some politicians know they are actors anymore). Two, diversity. Countries that have diverse populations will always have divisive politics. The US system is the most robust in the world but it is moving towards problem territory (for example, the Democrats seem to have settled on always electing a man and woman for P/VP...this is basically the segregated politics you see in Lebanon or other places with fairly massive political issues, the "our turn to eat" politics is more common to Africa than the developed world).
My impression is heavily coloured by studying American history/politics for a long time. But other people I know just find American politics very weird...it is just very weird, everything is politicised...like Germany pre-Hitler.
No, its not, at least not as a step-change, which is what you seem to be arguing against.
The common interpretation is that it began to get sharply more divisive over time starting in the mid-1990s, not that the current level of division established itself then.
> for example, the Democrats seem to have settled on always electing a man and woman for P/VP.
2 sequential nominations (2016, 2020) is a pretty weak basis for a conclusion of “always”.
I didn't say anything about the current level of division, or the quantum. I am not arguing against a step change either. Again, I said that people believe politics became more divisive in the mid-90s. I understand that people need to read things into the statements of others...there is nothing here (you are focusing on the least interesting part of the argument).
And the "always" came after "Democrats seem to have settled on". I did not say anything about what happened in the past, and did not use that evidence. My point was that Democrats have said a system of gender and racial selection will be used in the future. I did not imply that some Democrats have the power to bind every other decision in the future, but that some wanted to use the system in the future.
Simple points of comprehension here.
The examples you used from the 1990s make no sense at all as an argument against a change starting in the 1990s resulting in the current situation, though they make some sense as an argument against a rapid step change in the 1990s. “Misdirected but coherent” was, I thought, the most generous interpretation.
> And the “always” came after “Democrats seem to have settled on”. I did not say anything about what happened in the past, and did not use that evidence.
So what is your argument based on? Pure fantasy?
> My point was that Democrats have said a system of gender and racial selection will be used in the future.
(1) That’s not what you claimed, you said they seemed to have settled on a fixed 1 woman + 1 man ticket for the President and Vice President, not “a system of gender and racial selection will be used in the future”.
(2) The Democrats have not, in fact, said that anything other than the votes of the delegates at the nominating convention, without gender or racial quotas, will be used in the future to select presidential and vice-presidential nominees, and, starting with the 2020 election cycle, changed the rules so that party insiders who might want to impose such a quota-based system would not be able to do so over the votes of the delegates whose votes are set by the primary and caucus system, because superdelegates were banned from first-round voting unless their votes could not effect the outcome. So, insofar as that claim which you did not state was what you intended, it is false.
It’s been about 20 years since the longest continuous period of partisan realignment (and thus absence of clear association of ideological groups with party labels) ended; since then, US culture has been reverting to the political tribalism that has been the historical norm (possibly toward a situation worse, in terms of daily life, than the historical norm, because historically there has been a much stronger geographic component to the tribal divide.)
The situation during the overlapping realignments triggered by the New Deal Coalition and Johnson’s support for Civil Rights was not a stable equilibrium.
I agree with this but plot twist: in a world where “silence is violence” you cannot choose to simply opt out.
While this sounds good in principle, there are still lots of people offended by others' personal choices and mere existence, and who do consider these political issues.
Examples:
https://twitter.com/JillWohlner/status/1386767595374850061
> As a gay woman, you tell me I can't have a 'political or societal conversation' and that sounds a lot like I can't talk about my wife at work. Bc being in a gay marriage is a f'ing political statement to people.
https://twitter.com/liatrisbian/status/1386774755286601728
> And as a non-binary person, telling me to not have political or societal conversation at work sends me the message that I should hide who I am and can’t have conversations around pronouns etc.
> In fact, I have been told to not have those political or societal conversations. Worded the exact same way as that basecamp post.
> You know what that lead to? Not daring to say a fucking word while being misgendered all the time.
And on the other side of the spectrum, it's extremely uncomfortable to be a Baptist, work with a lot of left wing folks, and then get asked what you did last weekend.
It's not fair to expect everyone to be fully responsible for each others' feelings.
Back to opinions: There is a very wide range of topics that might be uncomfortable to any one person. You'd need to avoid the union set of all of those topics--which might mean you can say nothing at all!
> ...they wanted a smaller and more focused company that was more joyful to manage/run.
I agree with you because the six month severance offer was so generous that it can only mean that they wanted a lot of people to take it. Also, if they found that they were losing too many people, then they would start offering people money NOT to take the severance offer. But that didn't happen. So, I have to conclude that the 1/3 headcount cut is intentional.
edit: I didn't realize this happened so fast. Now I think it may have been a misstep.
No ad hominem or insults of any groups, people, or policies. People can talk about why they like things or why things will or wont work.
People continually try to work around them and sometimes there are comments that are borderline. Most people are very respectful and libs and conservatives can debate.
An example of trying to bypass is someone calling trump a Nazi. this is obviously meant as an insult. The person claimed it was a statement of fact. Trump has never identified as a nazi and therefore it isnt a statement of fact but is simply an opinion meant as an insult.
Once the insults were removed the group functioned well.
On a political forum, people's main relationship is coming together to talk politics. They sought that out.
At work people's main relationship is to work together. Talking politics becomes messy because it becomes a secondary relationship that can affect the key one, the work one.
It also runs into the messy part of some people at a workplace have authority over others at the workplace. People get really funny about authority sometimes.
I get that workplaces can become distracted. I think we've all experienced it. I just think that banning "politics" is no replacement for engaged leadership and discernment while navigating a company through the world.
Can you work on curing cancer next?
If I said Trump (or some other political figure, I’m just following from your example) was a fascist, rather than a Nazi, then undoubtedly that would also be viewed as an insult by many. But it’s a position that I could try to defend by looking at the characteristics of fascist groups, and showing how they could also apply to Trump. Trump would undoubtedly never self-identify as a fascist, but if he fit all the conditions to be a fascist, then it seems naïve to say “Trump is a fascist” could not be a statement of fact just because he disagreed with the label.
Doing such a clearly cost saving move and trying to frame it as keeping focus makes me feel like Basecamp is using "mission focus" as an excuse to make a bunch of unpopular decisions and bundle them together.
At some point the two mixed, the "pyramid of hate" is definitely out of the SJW playbook and probably went a bit too far for some people's taste. But shame on the leaders who for years have written books and blogs about how awesome their culture is to have 1/3rd of your workforce (so far) leave because of that aforementioned culture.
And there you have the unavoidable issue.
Some people believing that 'name mocking' is the 'core hate' upon which genocide is built, some people think that's a bridge to far.
I agree with the CEO that the intellectualized vitriol towards the list is just far too much.
It's hard for some people to grasp this, but if you allow rank and file to create councils that allow them to control the company, especially from inflated moral positions, then some of them will do that.
A lot of people I believe express their anger and frustration through aggressive moralization and this is another outlet for that.
There's a 100% chance that these movements attract bad faith actors and will cause problems, they have to be dealt with very carefully.
Which is a feel good piece about management philosophy ( a bit back to our roots ) and does not mention layoffs once.
And I searched the HN comments, and nobody seems to have uttered the words leaving or layoff.
In fact, it's definitely smart of Basecamp to realize that the kind of politics and ideology we encounter today in the US are anathema to any workplace and may lead to paralysis and rot-from-within outcomes. I expect more companies to follow suit.
> What that view misses, I think, is how confusing rules like these are to employees. One Basecamp worker I spoke with today, who requested anonymity, wondered the extent to which parenting issues could be raised at work. “How do you talk about raising kids without talking about society?” the employee said. “As soon as I bring up public schools, then it’s already political.”
Or what if you're black, is talking about your race or your own lived experiences considered political?
I don't tend to talk about political stuff at work too much personally, but recently we've been talking about the pandemic a lot (like everyone else). Is that political? Sure seems like it could be construed to be political. Even public health advice from the CDC is considered to be political these days.
Anyway, there was too much political arguing going on in the company, and the founders offered people they can get paid a few months salary to leave, and some people are taking them up on this offer. "About one-third".
Like 90% of the runtime of old racist Disney movies are fine and don't contain racial stereotypes, but that doesn't absolve the remaining 10% in any way, and if the movie was twice as long, the 5% of remaining insensitive content wouldn't be more justified.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/30/22412714/basecamp-employe...
I don't know how folks don't understand that - % and pure numbers tell different stories depending on scale.
If my hard drive has 5% remaining on it my reaction is going to be totally different if its a 250GB HD or a 10 TB HD.
1) Coinbase's corporate culture is more libertarian (where an argument on "don't focus on politics" may go across more reasonably) while Basecamp's entire corporate brand is based on power for employees.
2) Coinbase was about to IPO and thus taking a buyout is harder to justify financially, while Basecamp equity is essentially worthless.
How is it reasonable to enforce "no politics" when the company's culture is based on a niche political tendency?
The more reasonable interpretation is "no politics that looks different from our existing politics"
but also i think the founders kinda blindsided all the employees with the announcement which probably made it worse.
A selection bias at Basecamp, where they likely (whether intentionally or not) favored hiring politically outspoken, left leaning, progressive candidates. DHH has always been politically outspoken, so it's not a major surprise that they hired many similar types of people. Given how outspoken he is about literally everything, I'm almost entirely certain he would have been the first one out of the door if he were on the other side of this situation.
And then just the horrible way in which they mismanaged this, by announcing it publicly on a blog post (many of them heard about it on Twitter first) before actually talking with their employees.
What's your basis for believing these people don't really care?
I found it interesting to see how much he and his wife had earned for charities by working lucrative jobs and donating a large percentage of their earnings.
"Earning to give" is admitting that capitalism won, and is the most effective way at righting their perceived wrongs.
It's the same illogic right-wingers used to defend billionaires, low taxes, etc. since the late 80s early 90s. "But they donate more than anyone else! Philanthropy! Altruism!"
What issues might those be?
But this is not about that (base camp already seems to be a positive work environment). So to assume you can use the companies resources for your own activism just comes across as entitled. It’s a disconnect with the other 99% of the workforce.. many of which are forced to pee in bottles to make their paychecks. The bubble of privilege these employees live in, and their blindness to it makes them look bad.
From the companies perspective, in a healthy democracy we are going to disagree. And there’s a time and a place for those disagreements. And the company can’t start to wade into those arguments. I can only imagine what trying to manage employees with differing viewpoints is like if they feel like they can both bring those views front and center to the office.
So I know I would be unlikely to hire these employees unless the did some growing up.
I'll give it a try.
And incidentally, one of the things I appreciate about my current company is that there isn't any politics at work. Seriously, I can't imagine anyone at my company getting into political debates on company time. Why bother? If anyone at my workplace started dragging colleagues into contentious political debates of no direct relevance to the job, I'd consider that not only unnecessary but staggeringly unprofessional. How common is this at other companies? Is it a US vs UK thing?
I have no problem with people being activists in their private life but when you go to work, you have to work. You can't be an activist while at work and causing a hostile work environment for others.
I agree with the policy and think every company should do the same. Since the policy has been implemented, our work environment has improved significantly.
The issue is that the most senior people probably left first, since they’re more marketable and have more connections. A non trivial chunk of the remainder probably want to leave, but haven’t yet.
Also, I don’t think Basecamp is ready for a world where remote first is a game changing hiring advantage; that’s de rigueur nowadays, and there are a ton of companies ready and willing to snatch up engineers who have no interest in returning to an office.
That's the takeaway here.
https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/pyramid-of...
And DHH seems to have taken that pdf wildly out of context, calling it the "genocide pyramid":
https://world.hey.com/dhh/let-it-all-out-78485e8e
It seems like if your co-founders are escalating tensions at work when people bring up reasonable issues (like not making fun of your customers), I don't know what to say.
The one other time politics has come up at Basecamp seems to have been a group of people commenting to DHH and Jason that their upcoming book's title may be ablest due to the use of the word "crazy."
I work at a company where we don't talk 'politics' at work. We're a fairly professional group who frankly have a limited set of interactions. But I think both of these would be reasonable things to bring up, and at least once I did bring up what I thought was some problematic use of racially insensitive language in my team. It was changed, and we've moved on.
I'm all for getting to work, and doing good work, but when the 'politics' you're trying to remove is suggestions to improve a legitimate issue at a company, I think that leads to this kind of mass resignation.
One can imagine a situation where there really are a group of people in a company just discussing and fighting over politics all day and not getting anything done. But after reading the tweets of dozens of Basecamp employees over the past few days, I see no evidence of that happening here. If anything, it seems like the founders of Basecamp continually failed to de-escalate the situation.
See the list of Basecamp employees comments over the past few days:
https://twitter.com/i/lists/1202647
Many people whose work I've followed closely as a Rails dev have left today. People whose work I used and relied on. I appreciate all they've done for the Rails community, and wish them luck in the months ahead.
I’m so sick of politics in my office and “inclusion” which really just breeds resentment.
I’m sure basecamp discovered what most places discover - working together is better. Anything that divides us should be removed.
Let’s say you hire a gay employee, there very existence is political. Are they wrong for mentioning that they are gay (no), but to some at the company that may be trying to advance their gay political agenda.
Idk what the solution is, but just blanket “No religion/no politics” is just a way to say you like everything the way it is and don’t want to feel uncomfortable
How is that so? They have pretty clear definition.
(And those disagreeing are wrong, but telling them that suddenly, by the logic of the "no politics" crowd, makes you the problem. Almost like all of this exists to reify a status quo that's good for the people currently high on the hog. Hm.)
Given that the only obvious reason to actively refuse to use their preferred pronouns amounts to a pretty deep attack on the legitimacy of their identity, you can see why it would not feel like a trivial thing.
You might be similarly intent on insisting that people call you <actual name> rather than <offensive nickname>; that's just as real an example of "dictating other people's words".
Which, to be fair, everyone with names and/or pronoun preferences (including a preference for the pronoun that is associated with the gender one is assigned based on the appearance of one’s genitalia at birth) tends to do, its just that when either the name or pronoun preference conflicts with someone else’s ideological view of the world, then the person who is trying to impose their ideology over other’s identity projects the other person’s identity as a “political position” and an imposition on liberty.
In general I find it more productive to focus on myself than demand others conform.
This misses the point. If you would be bothered by an actually offensive nickname, surely you can empathise with trans people who feel the same way about pronouns. If you are truly unoffendable, great, but you must realise that you're unusual in that respect, and that trans people are far from the only ones 'dictating' how others refer to them.
In any case, this comment is more to the point (you may have already seen and downvoted it, I'm not sure): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27002002
But since you asked, no I don't talk about myself in the third person.
If you would complain if a colleague persistently referred to you as 'she' (if you're a man) or 'he' (if you're a woman), your real argument is not that nobody should be 'forced' to use a certain set of pronouns when referring to another person.
Deliberate misgendering is harassment.
You can put in whatever pronoun choice you believe is correct.
I may or may not have an opinion about it.
I can keep that opinion about it to myself, unless you ask for it.
Nearly all political differences have nothing to do with performing one's job.
If someone is gay, straight, whatever, it doesn't have any bearing on their work, so it's not something that's discussed. I have literally zero desire to hear about anybody's sexual relationships at work.
If someone thinks that the mere presence of a gay person is an agenda, then they fail rule 1, which is be polite and professional to your co-workers, and it's on them to either get a grip or leave.
But personal talk absolutely does not belong in larger meetings or workplace discussions where you're trying solve work issues. It's a distraction at best, and unprofessional in general.
Discussion about the details of the sexual act that led you to needing to take paternity leave: No, don't care, not interested, not relevant.
Some humans do, some don't. It makes sense for people who aren't interested to be able to avoid it and for people who are interested to be able to have it.
So you shut it down when people talk about going on a date with their spouse or talk about their kids?
Because literally, this is the bar a lot of homophobes exist at to consider a conversation about a gay relationship 'political' or even religious, and they will act on it.
So the homophobe is being political, and therefore breaks policy.
Perhaps they would feel better if they let their misapprehensions and hate towards their colleagues go.
Their goal is to further marginalize the already-marginalized, and shut down conversations about making the workplace a more inclusive place.
Because somehow "hey let's stop discriminating against $XYZ type of person" is somehow "political".
Usually its a bunch of people advocating for socialism, screaming silence is violence, and saying white people are going to hell
From what I've seen (maybe this is just the bay area) you don't usually know someone is conservative until they trust you lol
You’re not very good at straw man arguments, for what it’s worth.
How do you define what's a fireable homophopic offense. You need to discuss it, you can't shut it down because its political and uncomfortable to discuss. You need to listen to the people that are being made uncomfortable and have these discussions. "stop being political" is making a decision, it's the side of no change.
If you see a homophobic (or racist, or sexist, or inappropriate, etc) offense, you should absolutely report it to your superior and/or HR, and AFAICT Basecamp's changes don't say you shouldn't. It sounds like they're just banning discussions in the open channels with coworkers ("Hey everyone, do you think what Bob did was homophobic?").
Of course, I might be misinformed on 1) whether you're still allowed to report workplace offenses to HR, and/or 2) whether company-wide conversation about your coworkers' potential offenses is actually a positive thing to allow.
Insisting on personal pronouns over another employee’s pushback is a much more realistic (and still compelling) line of argument.
If a company I worked at went full no-politics at work after two minor incidents about the founders use of ablest language, and the acceptability of making lists of "funny" names, then I think I'd probably not know where the line is for them.
As a racially ambiguous guy, most people are professional, but I pick up occasional comments and the way people act when you try to show them a better way or correct them really shines a light on this issue.
This is what actual tolerance looks like in action!
You say that is the case. People affected by it say it isn't (and have examples). Who to believe ...
Were there people that didn't like me because I wasn't like them? Sure. They weren't the majority, most people are just fine no matter where you go in the world, and I'm doing fine myself.
Learning to come to grips that you aren't going to like everyone (and that it is mutual) is a large part of the lessons of becoming an adult. Learning to appreciate the fact that most people genuinely are able to treat you professionally at work regardless, no matter what the social media crowds say, is just as important.
It might be harder to come by in smaller metropolitan areas or rural areas.
EDIT Also, it is very difficult to suss out this type of before being hired. Most people at least pretend to be professional until they get comfortable.
It's not, though. I've worked with a lot of gay people, and none have ever brought politics into work. This is just a BS argument by the people who do. There is a legitimate point about where do you draw the line (e.g. is bitching about CA taxes "politics"), but this is not it.
Thankfully, most places have moved on from that, but many still don't allow people to, say, marry the person they love.
Maybe to you, but most of us don't give a shit either way.
Please don't use your gay colleagues as political totems. It's actually quite dehumanizing. Just treat us as people. Thanks.
If someone considers their very existence political, I think that's a big red flag. Whether it's because they think society is persecuting them for being Christian, or for being gay, it will still be a high confidence predictor that they will create drama in the office.
As in, "let's pretend they don't exist, ban them from anything that straight couples can do, and push them to get conversion therapy so they behave like us 'normal' folks".
Her big question to use was "is there going to be a problem with me working here". As in "are people going to treat me like shit because I am transgender".
It was an extremely professional environment and I and my boss unequivocally said - we don't care what you are as long as you do your job and do it well.
I worked with her for probably near a year and I did not see people overtly treating her badly, making comments of any sort at all. People called her by a name that she chose and used the pronouns she wanted.
Of course I don't know her experience but I can't express how it was a 'professional' environment enough. I have never worked somewhere that was so damn... professional. This included old dudes, old women, young men and women, people from all sorts of cultures and backgrounds (UK, India, Ukraine, and all over the US, and probably more places).
People minded their own business, were polite, did not intrude upon personal matters, and while there was some jockying around sports teams - it was a place where all sorts of people and backgrounds worked. There was an extremely competent HR department, and middle management and C levels who were very serious about being professional.
I don't know - kind of a rant - hopefully her experience at my workplace was one of her better ones.
It's not since very recently -- and to some extent still only in certain geographies -- that being gay in the workplace is apolitical.
I'm actually generally a fan of "no politics / no religion" cultures (IME: actual literal rules indicate the culture is broken... not opposed to rules, but I prefer places where it doesn't even need to be said out loud!). But there absolutely are workplaces where being gay is political. And prior to the 1990s being out at work was very much not a good idea in most of the country.
We're not talking about ancient history here...
With a few exceptions, I consider it very unprofessional for an employee or colleague of mine to start discussing their sexual preferences, gay or straight. I wouldn't ask for the same reason.
> ... just blanket “No religion/no politics” is just a way to say you like everything the way it is and don’t want to feel uncomfortable
I think you are just projecting. There are tons of benefits (mentioned elsewhere in these comments) to keeping politics & religion out of the workplace.
DHH has been very vocal in the last few months in public tirades against Apple, government lobbying, etc. While he has every right to his views, he's also the public face of Basecamp. So it comes across as a teeny bit hypocritical to issue a no-politics diktat on his workforce.
The real problem with Basecamp isn't the no politics thing. The problem is that the company exists for the personal gratification of its two founders, and it's one rule for them and one rule for everyone else. If you're on board with that, fine, but maybe for some employees this was just the final straw.
Being vocal about apple's business practices isn't necessarily political. It sounds more about business to me.
When the boss makes a decision then, the boss often gets challenged and the challengers feel right doing so. Disruption, innovation.
All this is new but we think it's normal now!
Businesses used to have clear lines of authority, heirarchy and the boss was on top, made the decisions and was generally obeyed.
I wonder how management academics will write about this period of time in 20 years or so.
But this is _way_ more interesting than that; a culture shakeup — and since Basecamp are usually trailblazers in so many areas, I’m sure we’ll see many more orgs doing similar realignments in the months and years to come.
Knowing Jason and (having also met) DHH, I know they usually do things (esp the significant things) with the utmost consideration. So I’d be shocked if this wasn’t a long time in the making.
And I won’t have to wonder about the topic of their next book any longer.
This was in response to a similarly contentious issue -- moving from Mountain View to San Jose. People said they were going to quit. John Warnock said, in effect, "good riddance." And the company started growing very rapidly after that move.
(This doesn't detract from the fact that I think DHH is a fool and often mean-spirited.)
Ironically you’re strawmanning my comment, yourself.
I think the impact of this statement would be more interesting with a big company. If Amazon or Microsoft were to lose 1/3 of their workforce, that would be something big. But knowing the size of Basecamp, it just kind of makes me shrug.
I'm guessing that Basecamp will be easily able to replace those people that took the buyout and will probably just be better for it in the long run.
[edit: removed unnecessary comment-on-voting, per HN guidelines]
Please don't break the site guidelines like this. Your comment would be just fine without it.
It looks like some companies are now going back to focusing on being companies, and less people.
This part of the article had me scratching my head:
"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"
I agree an employee could become disgruntled after a policy their disagree with is implemented, but what entitles them to a payout? I assume a 6 months payout is attractive to everyone, that you agree or not with their decision. Isn't that way more dangerous than a few disgruntled employees? (You could also offer less than 6 months and still eliminate those)
The alternative is the gory legal and political process of executing a targeted purge which may create controversy, sympathy, and miss more quiet actors.
Edit: as in, this is misleadingly phrased as if it’s a large collective action
More importantly, this 20 people includes senior employees which cannot easily be replaced.
> The entire iOS team is out, Head of Design and one of the oldest hires is out of the team and the Rails Core Team as well.
A small company may actually weather this worse than a large company. Basecamp has run lean for years. Some of those big tech companies like Microsoft often weather huge layoffs with no real ill effects. But they often get really bloated when the economy is rocking and then lean out every now and then.
But this is monstrous. I've never seen this many people leave at once.
There is no way this is good for Basecamp.
I can see a typical job interview for one of those employees: ‘And why did you leave your last job?’
‘They wouldn’t let me waste half the day arguing politics’
So I must wonder: are they hiring backend/architecture/management/IT folks right now?
It's not difficult to imagine that you'd have a handful of people who felt politically / socially strong enough to take the buyout for their stated reason and another handful that saw 6 months of pay and a high demand job market and went for it as well.
1/3 sounds like a big deal if you are thinking basecamp is a massive company but in reality they are less than 60 people last time I checked.
If I have a company with 2 other people and one of us leaves due to some sort of dispute, that's also a 1/3 but has a very different feel than if a 1000 head count shop loses 333 people.
"Oh yeah? How much did it weigh?"
The # of people completely matters - if they were all from the same subteam of the company or not doesn't really matter.
I'm saying they lost an entire functional unit of their engineering team. That's momentous no matter how many people were in it.
Sure the targeting might not be quite optimal, but if it gets the job done...
IMO, here's the very definition of a win-win.
s/Government/Company/
Back with the DotCom boom, there was an attempt to make the workplace a "club" - a place to hang out. Beer bashes, pool, foosball, ping pong tables... all of that. Yea, I'll grant its nice to relax to... but if you're staying late to play foosball with a coworker, that's the encroachment.
It may have made us more productive - gotten a few more hours a week of work in or kept some of the more vagabond-esque engineers around for a few more months.
But it also made the workplace a place to be rather than the third place and in doing so, also took some of the other things that the third place was too... but the workplace does the third place poorly... and it can't do it well.
The third place needs to be a neutral ground with no ties to those who are there. The coffee shop book club doesn't force anyone to be there. But the workplace, you need to be there for a pay check. If the book club gets bad, you can leave - not so with the workplace.
The third place needs to be level - with no status beyond "regular". The workplace has managers and leads and HR... it has CEOs and founders and a legal department.
While the workplace are sometimes saying "we are a community" - we know in our orgchearts that HR is there to protect the company, not organize book clubs and beer tastings.
This has become even more of an issue with the pandemic-wfh. The traditional third places are closed, or have limits on how many people can be there at once - and you've got to be 6' away from the other people. So we've got virtual third places. Some of the slack channels that I'm on have lit up over the past year.
And so, those companies that have encroached the most in the past are seeing it even more now. Where before the water cooler discussions of five minutes of politics are now immortalized in slack channels and message boards. Where people who would like to go to the coffee shop and pontificate about the wrongs of the workplace and politics are now forced to do it on message boards and slack channels.
Those companies that have gone further into the third places but don't have the ability to moderate the tone or power differentials are seeing it more. Those companies where the power gradient from most distant worker to the CEO is the steepest are even more likely to see it.
Larger orgs, with offices, can more easily move people who discuss and disrupt with politics further apart. Those smaller ones that are all remote? where everyone is on the same slack channel? Where the most distant employee to the CEO is only one or two managers apart? Yea... they're more likely to have trouble when the third place norms get too established in the company.
I'm not at all surprised to see this.
So, employees create a list for making fun of people.
Employees start to fight each other because they take offense.
Company states at work, you're supposed to work, not to discuss politics.
Th bad actor is the company so we all leave. (??!!!)
Honestly, I don't get it. I think it is a cultural thing in the US, due to the long term racism issues ,etc. And how extremely easy is for Americans to feel offended. Sorry if that hurts, I accept your down otra but would appreciate what I am missing.
As somebody from a first world european country, we go to work to work. If we're developers we're expected to do development.
We like football (soccer) and some like politics and discussing controversial stuff, but we do that in the proper forums. For football it is the pub. For politics ist is elections, friends and family.
Business are business and we're there because we need money and a profession we like.
I feel these problems happen only in America, it sad to see this going on.
As the boss, it’s your job to get people back to work. It seems like DHH, more than anyone, was causing the infighting. It wasn’t coworkers talking politics, and fighting amongst themselves, it was a boss handling criticism extremely poorly, and doubling down on defensiveness until he had to mandate his employees shut up, or quit.
So I do think the first one that should shut up (at work) ranting about politics is himself, and provide an example for others. I hope from now, with whatever number of employes they end up with, they get back to work.
This is the real shameful thing here, from my biased european point of view. This is the intolerable part.
Now, shutting these discussions off *from work* is the right thing to do in my opinion. Because they literally have no end, and the company is a business, which needs to build products, which needs to sell, so you have your money. If you spend your day discussing politics, you don't make money.
Do you want to discuss politics? Do you really want to discuss these societal problems? I'm all in for it, lets grab a beer at 6am pm at the pub across the street and come up with a solution for these problems. Let's found a political party or an association or whatever we want to do to fix problem.
At least here, in europe, the moment you propose to do these things out of work hours, you 1) See 80% lose interest in their principles and prefer to go home and enjoy their kids and 2) You get to meet with the 20% people with the real interest in fixing things for a better world.
I insist in my opinion. It is not that these things should not be talked about, dismissed, or whatever. These are important things for the future. It is that your workplace *is not* the place for this.
Ok, I assumed this was done and part of all the changes they just did. Wasn't it? Are they still sharing the list around?
My reading of this seems that the internal group seems to have badgered management which was probably unprofessional and stoked some sentiment but instead of DHH simply accepting criticism and trying to diffuse the situation, aggravated it and made it far worse and instead of trying to fix the issue, shut it down completely
[https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22406673/basecamp-politic...]
We didn’t have lists but funny names and stupid customers were frequent topics of discussion
God knows what my name means somewhere else.
The list itself is lost to the sands of time but I remember at least three:
Mr and Mrs Hunnybun (yes, that was the spelling), Miss Cumcup, Dr Strangleman
so I guess it was something like that.
As long as employees aren't told what opinions, beliefs to hold, and causes to rally behind, carry on.
To not be able to express an opinion related to work, or say, the weather, would just be ridiculously-insane.
Complaining does lead to more complaining, winging, and whining. It's best to not tolerate it but to do so softly: tease and suggest action. Complaining about what is "wrong" is sometimes rooted in a shared experience observation but it can just as well be people passively seeking others to fix things for them. The point being one could spend that time and energy complaining working to try to fix it.
Is there any place where you can exist, in 2021, without having political viewpoints crammed down your throat?
Some people just want to work. If you want to change the world go do it outside of business hours.
Depends on who you are. Some people have never had a refuge from others politicizing their existence.
EDIT: Looks like it bounced back and forth. I'm still getting downvoted on this comment though....
The better question is how this post got 120 points while not being on the front page.
EDIT: Looks like dang unflagkilled it.
I’ve never come across a leftist who wanted to debate anything or was open to changing their mind, or even wanted others to change their mind.
It’s all just intimidation tactics, name-calling, and cancelling.
This is what is unique today. There’s no trying to convince someone to “come to our side”.
Once an enemy, always an enemy.
No politics: trans people don't exist
As for Basecamp's leaders - I think they did the right thing in making their blog posts and sticking to their principles. However, they should not have offered a buyout incentive, which can expose a small organization like themselves to destabilization. They also tuned the buyout offer incorrectly - it basically provides free money, which will be tempting to even those who would be fine working there. Really that's the only part they got wrong. I hope they're able to hire quickly and make it through this period - if they do, this will have been the right decision in the long-term, since there's no point in retaining employees who have such a mismatched set of values.
And anything thats unchallenged is going to slowly devolve until it's unfit for purpose.
Well, yes. I only ran into it in the last decade or so.
Thinking back, it's interesting how utterly apolitical university was back in the day. About the closest we ever got to politics was the occasional and largely ignored pentecostal preacher.
In which case, not sure not offering the package would have gone well.
That said, I think a workplace where people freely argue with each other and try to make their political viewpoints "win" is going to be unproductive. Leaving out politics is appropriate because it focuses the company's efforts on providing a better product or service. I view time and resources spent on those political activities as unproductive and distracting for the workforce. So in a sense, being political at work seems like a performance issue to me. I know some people will use mental gymnastics to claim that being political is somehow beneficial to the company with vague arguments around diversity or attracting certain customers or whatever, but I don't personally find those justifications to be compelling, as they seem disconnected from the reality that apolitical companies and products do just fine.
Maybe it’s the captive audience that is the distinguishing factor. I’m not sure.
For example, I work on a software platform where our customers regularly host content that I find offensive and sometimes even disturbing. But I’m not forced to watch/listen to it, so I’m fine with it.
Unfortunately he won’t read them.
Or maybe it's because those people were upset that discussing politics was not part of their job description?
Why would I bring up BLM and how it relates to the justice system at work if my company can’t do anything about it?
On the other hand, I would be more than happy to discuss having recruitment drives at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, expanding the hiring pipeline, equal pay at my company for equal work, expanding maternity/paternity leave, etc.
I would quit if I as an employee can’t discuss my own company’s policies that affect me as an individual.
I've read everything DHH and Jason Fried have posted in the last few days, and my impression that politics directly related to the company and products are fair game for discussion. It seemed like DHH and Fried were forbidding people from connecting those discussions to larger social movements.
DHH was appreciative that people raised the issue of the Funny Names List, but he objected to people connecting it to the Atlanta shootings or genocide:
>I was dismayed to see the argument advanced in text and graphics on [Employee 1’s] post that this list should be considered part of a regime that eventually could lead to genocide. That's just not an appropriate or proportionate comparison to draw.
>Out of the 78 names listed on the last version we were able to recover, just 6 names appear to be Asian. 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.
I clicked on the story. Clicked the back button. And Twitter had a big giant popup on THIS page suggesting that I install the twitter app. That had no obvious way to be removed.
I have no idea how they did that. But I really hope that the advertising spam industry doesn't start abusing this to place invasive ads all over other people's pages.
Here: https://archive.is/UJrNo