Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

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>That entirely misses the point. The loss of productivity around this issue is entirely on the leadership team. They let this fester - 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.

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.

In an ideal world you don’t work at a company that maintains a list of customer names to laugh it. 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.

Pretending this list and subsequent lack of discipline isn’t about the founders vanity is very ignorant

> 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.

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 is accurate to say a founder self immolates their company if a decision they made led to 33% attrition in a week

Indeed. Imagine you’re paying for Basecamp and you need to file tickets and get support ASAP this week? What do you think of them when 1/3 of the employees are gone in a flash? Whatever you think of the debate’s impact on workplace culture, the capitalist point of view is that the founders have most certainly scuttled their company because they couldn’t manage their chosen workforce.

We've been using Basecamp for years now, I wouldn't notice if the entire company went on vacation for 6 months.

It just works.

Hey customers might notice a difference.

Depends if the attrition is people you wouldn't want working for you anyway. If not for business reasons, for human reasons.

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...

It makes no business or human sense to have your entire iOS engineering team quit at once with no one to replace them, which happened. It makes no human sense to make your company appear so toxic that it will be difficult to train or even recruit new hires, Etc etc.

There's no doubt that it's causing significant harm now, but I think you're not seeing this from a longer term perspective: if they think continuing to allow political discussion is likely to create more workplace problems in the future, then that could outweigh any problems they cause now in their hiring pipeline. Two possible points in favor of this trade-off:

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.

There is no long term if you can’t keep the lights on

I find it quite a stretch to consider this an existential threat to 37signal. They're famous for having no VC/shareholder obligations or debt while continuing to be very financially successful for a very long time. Their products are well-liked and admired. Their founders are fairly wealthy.

DHH and co made a mistake: they thought that by treating employees well, and building a good working environment, they'd get some loyalty back.

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...

Sure it can, if the situation has gotten so bad that you need drastic measures, it makes sense. It's not ideal, but that's a totally different thing that "making sense". People have to make hard decisions with temporarily uncomfortable and problematic consequences all the time at the executive level. Getting rid of a big chunk of the workforce is hardly uncommon in terms of drastic measures, no matter how it's done.

And to many people, this is going to make Basecamp appear more attractive not less. They won't have a hard time filling seats.

If a third of your small company are people you actually don't want working for you, that would be a sign of some pretty awful hiring and management.

You'd be suprised how many of your "real friends" are epeople you actually don't want near you.

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.

It's fair to say that the founder has done some level of self immolation, but intentionally or not, your original comment focuses on the reason why they self-immolated which is what I think is inaccurate:

> 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.

Aggressively? DHH published his response here:

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.

That's fair, and I wasn't aware of DHH's published response when I posted that. My "aggressive" impression was based on a third party account that mentioned employee reactions [1]:

> 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 you don’t work at a company that maintains a list of customer names to laugh it.

In an ideal world, that would be the very bottom of bad things in the world, well below "annoying ringtones".

Why does your ideal world have so many problems in it?

Because several "ideal worlds" without any problems attempted turned out to be dystopian plans by lunatics wanting everything to be perfect and clean cut according to them - and causing untold pain in the process.

The only ones who made a 'power play' were DHH and Jason. They made it clear they don't want employee input, criticism.

They don't need to make any power play, they founded and own the company. The power is theirs.

>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.

>The power is theirs.

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.

>I would say they are similar, the chart is to demonstrate that they're two ends of the spectrum of dehumanising and hatred.

In the sense that moisture in the air is the other end of the spectrum of waterboarding.

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