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Comment by anon7725 | Hacker News Reader

I agree that a leader should not single individuals out in a public way. That’s wrong.

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.

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And I'm reading the company was ~60 employees, all remote. In a business that small, it's difficult to imagine how far the culture was off the rails to have 20 people focusing time and effort on something like a D&I committee.

If you don't think DE&I is important, than of course you think it's "off the rails" to have 20 people spending time and effort on it. If you do think it's important, then there'd be nothing "off the rails" about having mass participation in it.

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".

Nobody said it wasn't important, but 20 out of 60 people focusing on it in a remote company that builds unrelated software is absolutely off the rails. You're essentially paying 1/3 of your employees to come up with new ways to suggest the other 2/3 need to stop being so racist / sexist / bigoted. It's difficult to imagine a more self-destructive culture.

> 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.

Right, if you think DE&I consists of "new ways to suggest everyone else stop being so racist / sexist / bigoted", you're clearly not into it.

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.

> If 20 employees were on the "social" committee planning a holiday party, would you consider that as "off the rails"

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.

If you think a party planning committee doesn't have real power and influence, bring nothing but carrot cakes and oatmeal raisin cookies to your next party.

> Right, if you think DE&I consists of "new ways to suggest everyone else stop being so racist / sexist / bigoted", you're clearly not into it.

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.

> A party planning committee is not targeting the rest of the company.

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.

It's a committee. Not their primary job focus. You seem to be willfully misunderstanding that.

Time and effort put into the committee comes at the expense of time and effort put into their primary job though.

And a lack of time and effort put into the committee led to the expense of having to buy out 1/3 of the staff.

Wonder how that balances out.

There's a fundamental disconnect where the way that a bunch of rich, mostly-liberal tech employees in cushy jobs talk to each other does exactly dick-all for people facing the very real social problems in America. They live in separate worlds.

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.

My gosh that's such a great and funny analogy.

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.

I feel like you have a misunderstanding. Most of the work of a D&I group like this is pushing for diversity and inclusion issues in their workplace, not in the country at large. And why shouldn’t they? There are places and organizations for society-wide stuff as well.

> And why shouldn’t they?

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.

The “special interest” is not actually unrelated. A company can become better and more successful while also becoming more diverse. The very fact that you see becoming more diverse as coming at the expense of being more successful shows your inherent bias.

> 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.

You're posting this anonymously because you know that's not true. Right wingers are, by definition, the people who speak out against the woke insanity. That's how the culture war works.

So DHH is a right winger now?

Pretty much yeah. Any coverage (left or right!) of him from now on will include this stuff and paint him in that light. I think he's one step away from people disrupting his events and not being able to speak on college campuses.

I am not posting anonymously. I identify as a liberal. My other posts probably indicate that. But I think any ideology that divides humanity into a group based on social or racial factors is unfair and perpetuates harmful divisions rather than inclusion. If “woke” arguments divide according to race, class or social history then such arguments are simply inverting racism and classism rather than moving forward to a more inclusive unified world.

There is a whole class of not only liberals but leftists (socialists, communists) who oppose identity politics: r/stupidpol. I know because I frequent that subreddit. So you're not correct, it's not just right wingers.

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.

That's great. I'd probably subscribe if I still kept up with stuff like that.

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.

This is a far more accurate take, I'd say. People are analyzing this incident using old political/social categories when in fact identity politics doesn't fit cleanly into these classifications.

You're very wrong on this point. I've been left-leaning all my life, yet I'm utterly dismayed by the rise of Wokeness. In fact, I'm increasingly coming around to the idea that Wokeness is an elaborate psy-op by the rich and powerful to divide and conquer the poor and powerless.

I missed this last week. Just because what I said doesn't apply to you, doesn't mean I was wrong. Simply using the term "wokeness" and describing a suspected conspiracy puts you squarely in the group I'm talking about.

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.

The committee had yet to even meet.

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