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.
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”. :)
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.
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.
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.