I wouldn't be surprised if this will become a case study in future in how to self-destruct a successful company with a single bad communication, much like Gerald Ratner (although this may be due to long-term grievances we're not aware of).
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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 cannot believe the kind of childish simplistic thinking going on in this thread
Yes.
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.