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Comment by Trasmatta | Hacker News Reader

It's awfully ironic, given how Basecamp has built their entire brand off of good management, and running a non-toxic workplace.

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.

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1/3rd of your employees so far. Would like to see how many stick around having to operate in an environment where a third of your coworkers just walked (based on past experiences when this occurred due to layoffs).

And like people have been saying elsewhere in this thread, 3-6 months of severance is really tempting even if you weren't personally offended by this policy change. If you're confident that you could get another job afterwards, why not take a free 3-6 month vacation?

Absolutely. The job market is going to be on fire for the next 1-2 years at least due to government stimulus, recovery efforts, “opening back up”, all that, you would have to be very confident in your decisions to do anything to jeopardize employee retention. But not my business, not my circus.

Yes. I am very critical of the culture that led to this. But my-oh-my did they shoot themselves in the foot on this one.

With layoffs I've heard the guideline that at least as many people as you lay off will quit in the near future (because for example you gutted their team, they lost their work buddy, they lost trust, their job got harder, etc).

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.

Why are you assuming it's a bad thing that they walked? If they're so sensitive about this that they'd quit, I'd be really hesitant about working with them on a project critical to my business. Plus there is a long line of people that would give their left [---] to work there.

This is not a layoff. This seems to be a situation where the 1/3rd minority was annoying the 2/3rd majority.

What makes you think that? Wouldn’t the people who were routinely annoyed at work be more likely to take a 6-month severance deal?

Effect is still the same. Lots more work for a smaller pool of workers who are also going to have to try to attract and onboard new staff to backfill folks who left in a competitive job market. All of which has a cost.

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