I disagree. It’s about professionalism. Flame wars at work create a hostile environment where quiet voices are silenced. It’s the same reason HN bans political flame wars.
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.
> 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.
The politics thing really amounts to "don't challenge me" and is a nice diversion from the actual issue.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 would not envy being a hiring manager at Basecamp right now.
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.
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.
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.
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”. :)
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’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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
True leaders realize the importance of cultivating those underneath them, and adapting their direction to pushback or input.
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.
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
Leaders make decisions but good leaders take account of the views of their teams.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.’”
Well, of course! If you are working for a private company then this is exactly what you are signing up for.
If my team spent months debating these issues I would be concerned as well.
Tell me again how this is “about professionalism.”
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.
Who’s professionalism might be, though.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Has nothing to do with "politics", or at least those that were trying to be banned.
And if it's about professionalism, you probably shouldn't communicate your policy change to your employees through the personal blog of an executive...
The company leadership is framing those changes as a ban on political speech, but clearly there's disagreement about what the changes really are.
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.