How Basecamp Blew Up
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I would maybe be more sympathetic to DHH if it wasn't the guy who was so opinionated he pushed through Rails features that everyone else disliked or co-wrote several books on company culture that are glorified ads for basecamp (although "it doesn't have to be crazy at work" is still a thought-provoking read, at least in part). I can only imagine that he might be similarly self-righteous in workplace situations.
I think that, no matter your political views, if a situation gets out of hand that bad over matters that aren't even really directly related to workplace concerns, something must have gone fundamentally wrong much earlier. These levels of tension and distrust don't just arise out of nowhere.
They do not accept non-racist environments, only anti-racist ones. They do not accept that businesses be politically neutral. Businesses must take political stances internally and publicly. To do anything less, or to remain silent, is to be complicit in what they see as white supremacy and systemic racism. And if you disagree with those people, you will be accused of being racist, as Singer was.
The irony, of course, is that Hansson and Fried built a reputation around righteousness and wokeness, and then it came for them, because they were two white guys with power.
And when they realized what was happening, they executed their cultural pivot very poorly. They came out with a hard ban on a bunch of people who have the talent to work elsewhere.
Coinbase, at least, had the good sense to focus on the positive, their orientation as a mission-focused company. At the same time, Coinbase was making its employees rich with options and headed for an IPO.
The two companies will be paired case studies at HBS someday about how to screw it up and how to do it right.
It seems that there was at the very least one instance of behavior that employees perceived as outwardly racist (the names list) and were seeking to address issues surrounding that behavior.
On the outside, it’s hard to know much more about the details, but it also would appear that employees took issue with other somewhat minor slights that may have amounted to a pattern of behavior, in particular relating to someone with a lot of authority at base camp, who was then given a pass under the guise of political differences.
That's extremely predictable at this point.
I would love to talk sometime, if you’re open to it. Send me an email: krschacht at gmail
Perhaps they are the ones working toward a politically neutral, non-racist environment, and it is you who won't accept it.
In truth, I don't believe either they or you could properly identify what a politically neutral environment really looks like, and you're probably all unreliable and serving your own ends.
It happened randomly and completely out of the blue: one software engineer mentioned he didn't believe in the gender gap and he was promptly replied 1000 words essays by other leaders in the company shutting him down, to show that "we don't tolerate certain behaviour".
Guidelines were created to avoid future political discussions in the workplace. No-one left because of it (immediately) and we sadly didn't become famous. The engineer who brought that up quit a few months after.
After that, half of the employees hated thinking there were people thinking something different from them in the company, the other half was afraid to talk in public.
Again, I don't think there was a particular situation in the company: just a naive person who likes to talk frankly and people who get offended and are quick to attack in order to defend the "safe space" for the people who share their beliefs.
(Or maybe it also shows that being a fully-remote company can have downsides, such as coworkers not socialising enough and therefore not trusting each other? Who knows. DHH certainly has championed the "remote work for everyone" approach countless times.)
You don't have to leave it anonymous; I think most people know what Google is.
/s
You have a list of customer names that you mock? What kind of amateur, disrespectful operation are you running? Are you building a product or pledging a fraternity?
And how does any of that lead to talking about "White Supremacy". And how does voicing an opinion about such a subject seem like a good idea for the workplace regardless of if you think it exists or not?
For a company that has written a lot of books about how to build companies and cultures, this is...laughable.
Perhaps one step at a time, over the course of repeated conversations that keep dredging up more and more deep-seated resentments that have probably been festering for years and years, because of a longstanding social convention that we're not supposed to openly talk about these sorts of things at the workplace.
Or perhaps, if it's the kind of company where a list like that could continue to exist for so long, there was enough pressure built up that it was more like a levee breaking.
I agree for the most part there. Less so the founders, I think there sin runs more along the lines of being extremely naive (but in a way a lot of people might be, especially when the alternative might be to accept you're screwed).
> something must have gone fundamentally wrong much earlier. These levels of tension and distrust don't just arise out of nowhere.
Well, the tensions exist because they're being pushed for by large influences societally for political gain. The problem is they promoted a workplace environment where it was considered okay to bring it in, as well as to poke fun at clients (which is what kicked it all off).
I see this as an example of the cost of free doughnuts.[1] It's well known that we value the loss of something as more than the gain of something, and we value free things for far more than they're worth. Employees were given free reign for a long time in ways that weren't all that conducive to a diverse work environment or to respecting clients. Now they are being told not to do things that most work places already expect you to know enough not to do, either by explicitly telling you or by culture, such as don't blast your political views out to everyone, and don't be disrespectful to the clients, as that's where your paycheck comes from. My guess is the majority of people that leave if honestly reflecting on this in a few years would acknowledge that maybe announcing and focusing on your differences with those you need to spend time with is not as good a strategy for a happy and productive workplace as focusing on your similarities.
1: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/13/156737801/the-...
which would be maybe more excusable if it didn't come from the guys who wrote several books about how awesomely they run their company. I guess that's why my sympathy for their situation is somewhat limited.
Fried and DHH are a lot of things, but naive isn’t one of them.
How anyone can look at this debacle and think of the employees as anything but victims, and the founders as anything but reactionary blowhards, is absolutely incoherent to me.
The founders are obviously the ones in the wrong here, and obviously come out with shattered reputations.
Relevant excerpt from It doesn't have to be Crazy at Work.
Social justice activism divides individuals by unchosen group identities into "oppressors" and "oppressed" which is in direct opposition to acknowledging a persons feelings as well as listening to their viewpoints. Social justice activism has due to this predictably lead to resentment and unnecessary conflict in the workplace.
Yowchhh. Really really good find.
You may be underestimating the power of modern day PC.
I also think partly this is because being a remote company, these discussions, even with a Web Cam just dont convey the message much. Some of these message could have been in private with different colleague during coffee break or in pantry. So I felt it is also a failure or remote work. Remote doesn't work ALL the time, which is something DHH dont get. And VC are required for many businesses, which is something DHH dont get as well.
Another problem was that most of his political message, I guess you could also argue are glorified ads for Basecamp, attract the same people with similar political views. And many of them were sold into the vision, cult of whatever that might be as Basecamp. And the new policy was felt more like a betrayal of their belief. Hence the huge reaction and backlash that happened.
I don't know about "child" but there is a similar vibe here. This also comes through in blog posts and Twitter threads I've seen from some of the people involved. A certain assumption that their own account or opinion should automatically be accepted as default. Arrogance? Petulance? Entitlement? Somewhere in that space.
It shouldn't even be a surprise, really. Even if they were able to overlook political differences, DHH and JF were overwhelmingly likely to hire people who were like themselves in some ways. It's what founders and CEOs have always done, and has often been remarked upon since before they were born. "A fish rots from the head" is one of the less charitable forms. People's high self-image and approach to disagreement or confrontation seems to have been one of the (quite likely unconscious) selection criteria here. After that, a blowup of some sort was only a matter of time.
but it is anyway, usually
Remember, the proximate cause here was something that directly related to what happened at work.
It's not the case that forming a committee that's over 1/3 the size of the company to do unprompted evaluation of vendor relationships for DE&I and approval of guest speakers follows logically from, "there used to be a list of funny sounding names and management didn't handle it well."
Yeah that seems to have been the trigger but I'm not sure that such a list should lead to everything described in the article.
How that lead to demanding someone denounce white supremacy at a meeting seems like things have long since disconnected from the funny names list.
If you want to attract and keep talent you need to listen to their views and involve in them defining the values of the company.
However, it also makes me face the reality that I would not want to work with many of the people that resigned. Resigning over a random employee refusing to say that "white supremacy exists" is absurd. I imagine myself working at some of my earlier minimum wage jobs in college and putting forth such a requirement to my managers then. It's a non-sequitur.
When I talk to my family and non-tech non-coasts non-city friends about the sort of political polarization I encounter at my high-tech Seattle job, they often think I'm messing with them, that I'm being facetious or exaggerating. Unfortunately, I'm not.
It's all so tiresome. The increasing politicization of everything, and tech being at the center of it, made me realize I have no interest anymore in climbing the corporate ladder. I realize that my lack of political fervor is a liability. I wish I cared more about these things, I really do, but I don't.
I totally get it. Toxic people tend to clump. And they eventually aim their toxicity at each other. You don't want them in the workplace or really, in your life at all.
> Resigning over a random employee refusing to say that "white supremacy exists" is absurd.
Not only is it absurd, the whole demand to say such a thing was a Kafka trap to begin with.
> I realize that my lack of political fervor is a liability. I wish I cared more about these things, I really do, but I don't.
It's not a liability, at least not in the long term. The time when being 'woke' is beneficial to advancement will come to an end. Because if the fervor one has for politics is what a company values, then they'll get increasing fervor until the place is too toxic to be productive.
Your inability to generate a constant stream of passion for your opinions and hate for contrary opinions is a sign that you are normal. That you are reasonable. And that you are dependable. It's nothing at all to apologize for.
There will always be companies that have employees with different political, religious, and social opinions who will find common ground in their desire to build cool shit and provide value. Go find one of those places and be happy.
It's not a random employee though. It's someone who is part of the Senior Leadership Team.
If you deny that it exists then how can you be trusted to do something if an issue does comes up ?
I get that it's super easy to just claim white supremacy is everywhere, but implicitly the claim is that someone put it there and is perpetuating it. At a company of 58 people, you're pointing at a very small group of people as the ones responsible for all of this supposed white supremacy.
Unless everyone swallows the Kool-Aid and apologizes for being so racist, someone in leadership will eventually have to say, "Actually, this isn't a white supremacist company." Otherwise you've essentially surrendered your company to the "woke" mob.
The US is the least racist nation in the world according to Pew surveys.
What we have an abundance in the US is people who, if racism disappeared tomorrow, would be out of work and have to find a new career. These same people are the ones who act as if the election, to 2 terms, of a black president translates to the US making no progress on race since the 60's.
I grew up in a mostly black county in Virginia. I know what demagoguery looks like, and witnessed it with the GOP for decades. The Democratic party has embraced it, in a big way, since Hillary's loss. It works to win elections, but at the cost of elevating racial reductionism in POC. And the more POC embrace racial reductionism, the more moderate whites will do the same, creating more white supremacists. I've already witnessed colleagues who are moderate getting frustrated in meeting where they are demonized, and next thing you know they are googling and listening/reading conservative authors who mirror their frustration and amplify it.
Singer didn't deny that white supremacy "exists". He simply stated, in my opinion correctly, that it's not embedded in American institutions. Because it's not, as evidenced by the fact that we actively import (to an extent unsurpassed by the vast majority of nations in the world) non-white immigrants to the tune of over a million a year.
My next door neighbor is an Indian immigrant family. My neighbor across the street is from Vietnam. Both are naturalized citizens, and this ethos is going to try to say that the institution that naturalized them is white supremacist. It's patently absurd and irrational, and appeals to gullible college students and losers who desperately want to externalize blame for their failures.
If I’m trying to count to 100 and someone says “Prepend, please say that white supremacy exists.” And I respond “I’m busy counting to 100 and will not comply with your wishes.” That doesn’t mean I’m denying that white supremacy exists.
It’s odd you would interpret it that way as it’s illogical.
I wouldn't have "denounced" white supremacy either. If these are the base conditions under which you're prepared to talk to me then quite frankly, fuck you. There is nothing to gain for me, and you're clearly not prepared to take anything I say in good faith. Okay, I might have in a leadership role to keep the peace as a matter of professionalism, but I'd also have started looking for a new job as this is not a healthy atmosphere. I don't want to work with people who think I'm secretly a white supremacist.
The problem is that I've seen many things being labelled as "white supremacy" that seem ... a bit of a stretch. For example people have argued that Alien (the film) is an example of white supremacy as the alien represents a stereotypical black women; "Black women have been portrayed in contemporary white social and political culture as super-fertile and indestructible breeders whose sexual reproduction must be controlled."[1]
When I first read that, it took me quite a while to realize this was even referring to the alien itself, rather than some character that got infected. It seems it purely based on the fact that the alien is black.
There are many, many examples of this, especially in the last year people have been going way to far in re-analysing everything through the lens of race, often with some very harsh words like "white supremacy". Sometimes this is a good thing, but often I find it's not. Either these are general problems that affect everyone (just black folks more, but that doesn't mean the core problem is racism), or it's outright nonsense like the above.
Now, I don't know what argument that person made exactly in support of "White supremacy existing at Basecamp", but if you make such a strong claim – which is essentially calling your leadership/coworkers white supremacists – then you better have some good arguments. I'm skeptical they existed; they're certainly not present in this article beyond wishy-washy "creating a space where people do not feel welcome".
And considering that this discussion left people "crying and screaming at the screen" it seems rather easy to make some people feel "not welcome".
The entire thing stinks; perhaps the leadership could have handled things a bit better here and there, but if you're not willing to take a somewhat nuanced disagreement in good faith then there's nothing you can do except nod and smile on every sort of nonsense they bring up, and anything else will upset people.
[1]: https://theconversation.com/how-hollywoods-alien-and-predato...
Finally! I have been pointing this out as being mostly a tech circle thing. But almost every time I get downvoted for it.
The question here is, why Tech? What is specific about Tech as an industry, and that is not just in US, it is also spreading in UK, ( or mostly English speaking countries ). I assume it has something to do with Social Media. But then other industry also have access to social media usage as well.
The founders effectively took everyone's voice away. I think that's a very consistent way to get people to leave - especially people who for whom having a voice is more important than working at basecamp
Obviously, you ideally want your job to be politically aligned with you so that your labor doesn't conflict with your beliefs. But today it seems like many feel so disconnected and disenfranchised from any communities outside of work they they put all their eggs in that basket, and that ultimately never goes well.
Setting aside the merits of all the underlying arguments, the founders were clearly only talking about their "voice" within the context of their employment at basecamp, not their ability to have a voice in all other possible contexts. And thus the following is a non sequitur:
> having a voice is more important than working at basecamp
Being an employee at basecamp is a necessary prerequisite for having a voice as an employee at basecamp.
That's completely understating the entirety of what happened; the culmination of which seemed to be frivolous HR complaints. Has anyone disputed the details of the fuller context available through David's blogs and other sources?
> no one should be able to discuss anything "political" at work anymore
Can't they though? Here is what Jason had to say:
> 1. No more societal and political discussions on our company Basecamp account...People can take the conversations with willing co-workers to Signal, Whatsapp, or even a personal Basecamp account, but it can't happen where the work happens anymore.
I have trouble imagining how labor could ever lack a political dimension, and the distinction that presents itself to me between the past supposedly 'less politicized' workplaces, is that workers (or at least minoritized workers) were simply less safe to discuss politics and justice in this context that dominates their life and survival.
- list of funny names that is kept in some persistent form and circulates the company with full acknowledgment of the head people: Childish and extremely unprofessional, but still a typical mistake rather than a colossal disaster;
- politics and racism issue: looks like typical misunderstanding but on a very fragile subjects. Very easy to get into drama scenarios with this mix. Very easy to mishandle it. But it still seems that this topic is not normal workplace topic. If there is a serious issue in that matter, you go to some authorities. If you did not address it officially and decided to attack the head people - sorry, it's not the way. That might suggest that there was no real issue as there were no serious actions;
- policy change public announcement first then to your team: Yeah that's a big mistake, something that probably their books wouldn't even advise. Head people did not recognise that this is not the way to manage fragile topics.
Is DHH and Jason all evil?
- These are the same guys that give equal pay regardless of remote worker location.
- They were always believing in remote work, which is bigger problem for company and it's more of a benefit for the employees
- Many times were vocal about issues with big companies, where many others did not have enough courage to do the same
- Creators of a breakthrough tech stack and tremendous contributions to open-source
- Always happily sharing their knowledge
They made a mistake. But they don't seem to be bad guys here overall.
In this context, the article seems to be written by someone who had some personal issues with the guys and he found a way to "show'em all". Even if it tells his version of the story, to me it's at least unfair and biased.
And then throw the timeframe on top of it. If this stuff had happened over the course of a year, it might have been fine. But if it unfolds as quickly as it did at Basecamp, people don't have a chance to stop and breathe. It's just react react react.
Once a harmful set of actions comes to light, it's your job as the leadership team to:
1. Apologize
2. Correct the wrong
3. Allow your employees the space to process and heal
a. Note: People are messy. Especially hurt people express themselves in ways that seem foreign to us. Listen to them
Rather than allow space for employees to reach catharsis, they shut down the employees internally. Rather than get their employees back on the company mission, they told them "there's the door". All while externally extolling the virtues of "staying out of politics" and gaslighting everyone.
They're within their rights to do that. Supposedly all of this passed internal HR/Legal review. It's just not the ethical way to deal with this. It's not what we expected from a company that we've long associated with being brash-but-ethical in their dealings
Whilst here at HN, different people have different viewpoints (not all of them the same) -- there are 1) some who think like those at Twitter, whilst 2) others see things more from DHH's and Jason's perspective.
And 3) some here at HN, seems you're one of them, understand both perspectives at the same time.
Why no people from the last two "groups", on Twitter? (at least I didn't stumble upon any such tweets)
I think they made more than one mistake. Overall, I think this situation really paints Jason in a bad light; I used to use Basecamp, but I actually know him more from all his interviews and writings about management and leadership.
“I strongly disagree we live in a white supremacist culture,” Singer said. “I don't believe in a lot of the framing around implicit bias. I think a lot of this is actually racist.”
He continued: “Very often, if you express a dissenting view, you get called a Nazi. … I have not felt this is open territory for discussion. If we were to try to get into it as a group discussion it would be very painful and divisive.”
Singer concluded his remarks. Fried responded, “Thank you, Ryan.”
A handful of other speakers followed. Then a Black employee asked if the company could revisit Singer’s remarks. (I’m withholding the employee’s name and other identifying details out of colleagues’ fears that they could be targeted for harassment for speaking out.)
--
Interesting that comments objecting to political hyperbole gets the commenter suspended (leading to resignation) with his name all over the place, while those who called for his censure are deemed as needing to be protected from naming due to "harrassment for speaking out".
Lots of fearmongering in the comments about “woke mobs” here, and I want to offer a counterpoint to the characterization of the Basecamp employees who left as some kind of shrill hypersensitive scolds. Put yourself in their shoes.
You notice the company you work at has a circulated list of customer’s names, some of which make fun of your race — have been used to make fun of you since you were young. You go “hey this sucks” and it gets taken down. You point out that this is part of a pattern of societal behavior you’ve known your whole life, and that pattern has affected your life negatively and materially. This is not received well — combating a single incident is easy, but unraveling a pattern of behavior is an arduous, years-long, and sometimes unprofitable path. At an all-hands meeting, a higher-up not only denies this pattern exists, but any action taken to unravel it would instead target him instead. The Big Bosses do not refute this until much later, and only partially. Would you feel respected? How would you react if someone said you were acting like a child and demanding something unreasonable? How would you feel if someone told you that you’re only doing this to perform “wokeness?”
Sure, as a poc I can empathize with this but to then escalate it beyond "hey this sucks, let's stop, let's be better humans" to godwinning it with real atrocities in the outside world is toxic to the workplace. I would not want to work at a place where a POC of my own color was constantly making everything out to be a racial issue, and saying that my colleagues were the worst and equating them to literal terrorists and nazis because they did an ignorant thing here or there, not the least because I'm sure that even as a conscientious person I make mistakes from time to time and I'd rather be treated with forgiveness than blame.
Being treated with forgiveness instead of blame goes for technical stuff and incident management, too. If you start doing this with social issues 100% the culture of blame will bleed over into the technical issues and it won't be pretty.
But I think things have gotten out of hand when at an all hands meeting people are debating topics like:
"we live in a white supremacist culture"
Or demands from one employee to another at all hands meetings to denounce white supremacy.
I doubt many companies could handle that right... and I'm sure many people would come away more hurt.
This will hurt Basecamp in the immediate term but over time they will be better off.
One can empathically agree that such injustice, and any injustice, sucks, and still advocate compartmentalizing between institutions of the society writ large. That unprofitable path is not Basecamp's to bear. Not all injustices of the society receive a corresponding level of PR and therefore can be equally leveraged in the context of employee activism in a private enterprise.
If rank ordering of the issues of the society is left to the ripples made by affluential corporate citizens, that will introduce a host of biases that will alienate the full set of citizens of the democracy, and will likely create its own class of injustices.
The issue is not about surgically removing politics from work, it is to prevent its (mis)use as a backchannel.
To be clear, I feel equally strongly against corporate activism at the C-level or at the corporate identity level. But most employee activism is not only not a counter to that, it amplifies and parasitizes those very dynamics.
No?
Politics and religion: the two topics you avoid in professional settings. Over drinks? Sure. But not at work.
On the other hand, when did racial equality become an inherently political topic? Especially racial equality inside the workplace.
This also doesn't mean that the Basecamp founders are responsible for systemic racism because they had a list of "funny" names and [gasp] employ at least one conservative.
What has happened to everyone? It's like we have taken the social media rage machine and applied it to real life interactions.
First, the executives absolutely clamped down hard on a discussion about workplace behavior. I think their attempt to cast this as “political” is deeply cynical; discussing how people behave at work will always be in bounds, even if it touches up against issues that are politicized. The initial trigger here was a discussion about the list of “funny names”; there’s no easy way to sweep that under the rug as off topic, since it’s explicitly at-work behavior.
Second, they did an end run around the employees. Announcing the policy to the world, and implying that the Basecamp workforce was having a problem focusing on their jobs was an asshole move destined to blow up in their face. Nobody likes feeling crapped on by their boss, especially not in public like that.
Honestly, it didn’t have to be about politics. Treating employees like that, especially ones with options, is typically not going to go well.
Fourth, they retaliated against employees by taking away benefits in the most humiliating way possible, via the aforementioned disastrous public blog post.
And yet, people are still going to bat for them because...I don't know. It seems like a lot of people have a religious faith in the decision-making capabilities of men like DHH and JF. Seems like it might be related to some of the issues employees tried to raise internally.
I can think of a reason. To protect employees who are not part of the woke mob from being “canceled” by the woke mob.
The current state of politics bled into this. There is a fair amount already written on it but the insinuation that laughing a names leads to genocide ended up in the picture. It wasn't about what was appropriate or not and then handling it. The discussion went far beyond that.
> Second, they did an end run around the employees.
This was really surprising to me. I thought they would have posted publicly after all the employees had learned about this. This is poor change management within the company and a lesson I hope they learn.
Classic and indisputable example might be Germany in WW2. It wasn’t like citizens woke up and immediately decided that genocide was okay; they slowly were worked into finding it acceptable and palatable as a measure to endorse.
It is only meant to illustrate the classic slippery slope.
A name like, say, "Fuk Yo" is accidentally similar to the English "Fuck you". It's kinda funny in a childish way, but I don't think that making fun of it automatically implies that they think these people are of lesser value. i.e. I don't think it's automatically racism in the first place.
It's inappropriate because making fun of your customers is never a good idea, and it's also inconsiderate and impolite. But that's not the same thing as racism, or evidence of white supremacy.
And maybe some employees who worked on that list were racist; there is no way for us to know. I like to opt for a more good-faith interpretation, which seems very uncommon these days.
The idea that this would "escalate" from a simple list to actual racism seems unlikely. Everyone knows the difference.
Also, the holocaust was a lot more complicated than this "pyramid" lets on. The Nazis took power by force, in some exceptional circumstances, and the Holocaust wasn't widely known among the German people. It's overly simplistic at best.
> It is only meant to illustrate the classic slippery slope.
I have never seen a single "slippery slope" argument that I found convincing, including this one. In every single case I've seen everyone is acutely aware of the difference between A and B. I don't consider it an argument, I consider it a fallacy.
Racism is the air we breathe. I grew up around mostly white kids, and there is undeniably more fear amongst those kids (myself included) when interacting with black people than with white people. It seems similarly undeniable that affluent white people are more afraid of african american people when its dark out than they are of other white people. When a black person applies to a job, their blackness is not neutral. It seems to me that most people have underlying feeling about blackness, and that people of color have to contend with that when they're going through their lives.
I'm not saying there aren't problems; I just don't see the connection between something like this list and the actual problems, and I certainly don't see a good reason for some of the strong and bold claims that are made about it.
I've read a fair number of books on helping things through change. The pyramid being put where it was seemed like a bad idea the moment I read it. The way it was responded to is something I would have expected.
There is a lesson here. If you want to bring about change in others it's about leading them rather than saying what you want to say.
I don't find it challenging to make that argument at all.
"Laughing at names leads to genocide" to me implies that laughing at names is a necessary and sufficient condition to a genocide.
The pyramid of hate, to me, implies that laughing at names is a necessary but not sufficient condition of genocide.
Therefore showing the pyramid of hate does not imply that laughing at names leads to genocide, as it lacks the sufficiency condition.
Not so hard to argue.
I think that's a misinterpretation of what that graphic is trying to convey. The point isn't that people and groups that exhibit behavior at the bottom of the pyramid are on the march to genocide. It's that there's a spectrum of bigotry and discrimination, and each level of it that is tolerated enables worse behavior. It doesn't mean every situation is going to get to the level of mass-killings.
Normalizing bigoted behavior encourages more bigoted behavior. The same way that normalizing managers who scream and yell at people often leads to others becoming more openly belligerent or otherwise creates a toxic workplace.
You might feel the illustration is incendiary, sure, but I think coming down as hard as they did on it to a pretty valid concern of "hey maybe no funny names list" did no favors to those concerned, and subsequently doubling and tripling down on it has really really not helped.
No, it's a class thing. Among unionised labour work has always been a political battlefield. What's new is that you know have a politically activist group of people within upper middle class white collar jobs who, traditionally were conservative in temperament because they were materially well off.
Professionals whose values do not align with their management have figured out that they actually have influence, and the top 1-10% have noticed that they can actually press the top 0.1% if they want to.
When in the history of the US has racial inequality not been an inherently political topic? At its founding, the statement "all men are created equal" was highly contentious.
When it was turned into one by politicians and activists, just like masks were.
I'm a firm believer that if you actually sit a few people down and try to have a sane conversation where people actually talk and don't spout slogans, you find that their views aren't all that different, then just put emphasis and importance on slightly different things, and have been presented with subsets of the facts that emphasize those preferences.
The problem is, we're going on a few decades of a concerted effort to confuse and separate us based on language, and specifically meaning of words. What used to be camps choosing words that placed their views in a beneficial light (pro-life vs pro-choice, for example), has moved to very purposefully continuing to use the same words on both sides but to re-frame them to mean something entirely different than intended by that side. For example, Black Lives Matter and how it literally means different things to different people, regardless of the originators intentions and protestations.
Information silos allow this to happen. If you can exert control over the information environment, you can change the definition of words, and then people can't even communicate correctly any more. That's a real goal of those that wield political power. Moderate is just another name for someone dangerously close to being a swing voter to them, so promoting enough animosity that even things overtly against your own interest are seen as the lesser of two evils is a winning strategy.
Lest you think I'm talking about the left or the right, they both do it. And lest you think "sure, but one side does it more", no, they both do it so egregiously that the difference does not matter, and all you're seeing is the effect of Knoll's law in action. Make no mistake about it, you're getting screwed from both sides. That you tell yourself that your side is the more sane one is just the fiction that lets you sleep at night (and hopefully that's all it's doing, and not empowering you to be a complete asshole to people just as screwed over as you are).
"Politicians and activists" obviously didn't politicize masks. No coherent reading of the last 2 years supports that conclusion.
It was the screeching Republican base, who decided on day one that the masks were a symbol of government overreach and I guess got Covid to own the libs.
The base is multiple tens of millions of people spread across the entire United States and in many socioeconomic strata. The only time anything gets as widespread acceptance by even a portion of the base like the mask thing is because a narrative was being pushed that most of the base was exposed to. That used to be a hard thing to do (easier if you could rely on a large religious bloc to see it one way), and now it's a frighteningly easy thing to do. That's the point.
Yes, more or less? I can't think of a single right-wing activist or politician who was truly rabble-rousing for the cause.
I've worked for several companies headquartered out of different regions of the world. The amount of politics at work I've seen has related to where leadership is from.
What other category would you put it in?
Since literally forever.
Like when wasn't it?
This is not about Trump or Obama, that's easily avoided, it's about Identity Politics, which cannot be avoided:
They are arguing over Identity Politics and definitions of privilege.
"“The fact that you can be a white male, and come to this meeting and call people racist and say ‘white supremacy doesn't exist’ when it's blatant at this company is white privilege,” the employee said. “The fact that he wasn’t corrected and was in fact thanked — it makes me sick.”"
The Executive basically stated he doesn't believe the organization or it's culture is rooted in 'White Supremacy' - echoing the aggressive language used nowadays in Critical Race Theory.
The Employee, I believe mischaracterized that statement as 'the denial that racism exists' - which is an unfair, but also pointed out the denial of 'White Priviledge' - which is a valid point to make if one actually believes that.
The argument is existentially problematic - some people believe that groups are not inherently racist, others believe that if there are White executives then the system is inherently racist, going so far as to use terms like 'White Supremacy'.
This 'debate' is raging everywhere right now - schools, public sector, private companies, NGOs etc.
It's hard to rectify because those who don't see systems as overtly or fundamentally racist are challenge by those who do, and those who do, are inclined to believe those that disagree with them are basically evil.
It's a low-grade cultural race war unfortunately, pitting regular people against other regular people, often over some very abstract things, like naming things 'blacklist/whitelist' instead of 'blocklist/playlist' etc..
Equality vs hierarchy is literally the core of the difference between right and left, that is the definition of inherently political.
Let’s be honest - the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) committees that have appeared in companies and governments all over are simply a Trojan horse for far left progressive politics, and a vehicle to take over an institution by making a particular political ideology the official religion of that organization. DEI groups and policies usually serve to prevent any actual diversity, labeling dissenting thought as racist and coating their own racist policies (for example race or gender based hiring/promotion) in vague terms like “justice”. Usually those participating in DEI efforts are so distracted by it that they add no actual value to the business, and I’m sure the third of the company that joined that group at Basecamp were no different.
I’m betting Basecamp will pull through just fine without such toxic employees, and am glad to see companies like Basecamp and Coinbase take steps to keep from having their workplace and company weaponized by activists to serve divisive ideological purposes that have nothing to do with the company’s business.
It was a bad idea and it wasn't handled well. But geesh.
It seems to me all these problems at Basecamp could have been avoided in the first place if these people were dismissed for their unhinged and cultish behavior as soon as they started to exhibit it. If they are suffering some sort of mental trauma the proper place to address that is therapy, not at work.
"Kinda sad, found out I was accepted into a twitch team because of my skin colour so that “diversity” can be preached & not for my values or the blood, sweat n tears I’ve put into my work. Plus then being left out of everything & watching from the sidelines continuously..." https://twitter.com/Sharesee/status/1389522366515056641
Also weird for someone to complain about "because of my skin colour" when she identifies herself on Twitter as "Bajan and British" first and foremost, not anything about her "values or the blood, sweat n tears".
> “The fact that you can be a white male, and come to this meeting and call people racist and say ‘white supremacy doesn't exist’ when it's blatant at this company is white privilege,” the employee said. “The fact that he wasn’t corrected and was in fact thanked — it makes me sick.”
Isn't this employee declaring that "white supremacy" is "blatant at this company" ? His reaction that such "white supremacy" and "white privilege" "wasn't corrected" made him "sick."
It's albeit not a direct demand that Ryan Singer be called out as a white supremacist, but it does seem to both imply it and express a strong grievance that it was not called out or corrected. Maybe you have a different interpretation of this?
- Announced a new company policy publicly before telling the staff
- Deleted internal threads that would go against their narrative of why they did so
- Had a conservative senior employee go off about politics on the call discussing the new no politics policy.
- refused to reprimand said employee on the call
- had one founder take this extremely sensitive call from his bed with his camera off and on mute.
- After the employees resigned, did not send any sort of public message thanking them for their time at the company.
Can't believe only 21 employees walked. What idiots these founders are. There is no way to defend this poor management even if you agree with the rule they tried to put in
This is really sad hearing about how crummy DHH and Fried are at one central piece of management: having very hard conversations with people while still treating them with respect and dignity.
The article said they extended the buyout offer indefinitely, so I wouldn't be surprised if more people leave over the next few weeks.
Even if you weren't thinking of leaving, 3-6 months severance would be really hard to turn down, especially if you know you can get another job quickly.
Kind of gives the lie to the progressive, all-in-it-together environment they portray with their public image.
So, just like any other company really, except due to the excessive power of the top two execs, no recourse if you have a problem they don’t perceive as a problem.
If he was sick, whether physically sick because of their own actions or otherwise...sick is sick. Seemed like a no-win for him whether he could either refuse to show up because he is sick, or show up to at least listen to what's going on (assuming recording it wasn't an option).
Maybe he was that sick, but I would be kind of pissed if I were one of the employees. The power dynamic is weird, because if a regular employee were sick they would definitely feel the pressure to show up at a desk, on camera, if they were trying to make their case in this meeting.
Color me skeptical.
Bad
> - Deleted internal threads that would go against their narrative of why they did so
I am not sure where you are getting this, but I might have missed it.
> - Had a conservative senior employee go off about politics on the call discussing the new no politics policy.
Yes, on 90th minute - we are not sure what was said before that.
> - refused to reprimand said employee on the call
For what? I don't understand.
> - had one founder take this extremely sensitive call from his bed with his camera off and on mute.
We all can be sick sometimes, certainly would be better to it in some other way, but maybe he was just that sick?
- After the employees resigned, did not send any sort of public message thanking them for their time at the company.
Pretty bad, especially considering comments from Highrise employee in this thread.
He was busy hitting Twitter pretty hard during the day, throwing some shade at Apple. No mention of company, employees, anything.
That's bad optics, regardless of how you're feeling. If you're sick, you're sick. If you're too sick to deal with the most pressing issue your company is facing, you should consider yourself too sick to devote chunks of time to Twitter feuds.
Ironically it seems that, contra to the narrative existing in the minds of quite a few HN posters, it was the Brietbart quoting, "white people are the real victims of racism" guy who had spend over a decade being unable to shut up about politics in the workplace.
The article really doesn't tell us whether that senior employee just went off on a political tangent for no reason whatsoever, or he was responding to an earlier made political statement that he decided to disagree with.
What the article does suggest is that that contribution by that senior employee was preceded by a discussion of the funny names list that involved the mentioning of the "pyramid of hate". That pyramid is already a political statement and should not, if the company were true to its new policy, have been brought up in the discussion.
(NB even David and Jason seem to have recognized this -- after the meeting, Singer was suspended; he's since resigned, but this is likely the only one of the several recent resignations that was not entirely of the employee's own volition.)
That's... a win?? I mean, I've worked at some companies where some employees, specially some which basically are activists disguised as developers/PMs/etc cause 90% of the management work because everything is an issue to them. It's tiring, really tiring, and some of these people have negative value for the company actually, from my point of view as a developer anyway.
I'm a developer. I love my profession, I want to build cool shit all the time, and learn, and progress. I want to build a great product and, if possible, earn a ton of money. I don't want to go to the office to discuss the issues of the society or try to fix the world. I do that on weekends and after work, in the right forums. I do not force my coworkers to "take sides"... either you're a racist or you're this other thing or if you don't say anything then that's conceding.. WTF!!! I just want to work, learn, and earn money. Fix the world in some other place, please.
Hope this makes basecamp even stronger in the long term.
Consider someone for whom "white supremacy" means "it is right and appropriate to act deliberately to create and preserve white dominance of other races". Versus someone for whom it means "privilege exists in many, though often subtle ways, and advantages white, male, older, cis, het people".
It's a lot like how "defund police" means radically different things.
It's now tiresome to hear the defense "oh defund doesn't mean _defund_...." -- then don't say it. If the charge of white supremacy isn't meant to insult people based on race (overt racism, itself), then maybe convey the thought more clearly.
CRT definitions of 'White Supremacy' are not about 'people acting deliberately' to support it.
CRT laments that 'regular people' doing 'regular things' act unconsciously to support oppressive systems, hence 'White Supremacy'.
Making a film about 'something' and hiring those people you know to make it, who by virtue of your social network might be 'mostly white' - would be an example of 'White Supremacy'.
Ergo - in their view, unless you are actively fighting to dismantle the concept of whiteness - you're supporting 'White Supremacy'.
I believe there is a kernel of truth in systematic, even unconsciously biased systems, however, I don't remotely agree with many of the assertions. Unfortunately, to disagree with their assertions makes you a 'bad person' in their view.
Have a read [1]. A thesis of 'self examination' i.e. a fairly progressive individual addressing their own 'white supremacy' due to their lack of active assertion of issues of equity etc..
http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2019/06/25/disman...
The people not dismantling the system are not white supremacists, they just don't believe we have systemic racism.
I'm definitely not a white supremacist (I'm not even white) and I can't find a single instance of systemic racism.
Sure, I met a bunch of racist individuals, but that doesn't prove systemic racism.
https://news.stanford.edu/press-releases/2020/05/05/veil-dar...
"The largest-ever study of alleged racial profiling during traffic stops has found that blacks, who are pulled over more frequently than whites by day, are much less likely to be stopped after sunset, when “a veil of darkness” masks their race."
> Creating that database enabled the team to find the statistical evidence that a “veil of darkness” partially immunized blacks against traffic stops. That term and idea has been around since 2006 when it was used in a study that compared the race of 8,000 drivers in Oakland, California, who were stopped at any time of day or night over a six month period. But the findings from that study were inconclusive because the sample was too small to prove a link between the darkness of the sky and the race of the stopped drivers.
> The Stanford team decided to repeat the analysis using the much larger dataset that they had gathered. First, they narrowed the range of variables they had to analyze by choosing a specific time of day – around 7 p.m. – when the probable causes for a stop were more or less constant. Next, they took advantage of the fact that, in the months before and after daylight saving time each year, the sky gets a little darker or lighter, day by day. Because they had such a massive database, the researchers were able to find 113,000 traffic stops, from all of the locations in their database, that occurred on those days, before or after clocks sprang forward or fell back, when the sky was growing darker or lighter at around 7 p.m. local time.
> This dataset provided a statistically valid sample with two important variables – the race of the driver being stopped, and the darkness of the sky at around 7 p.m. The analysis left no doubt that the darker it got, the less likely it became that a black driver would be stopped. The reverse was true when the sky was lighter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism
> Institutional racism was defined by Sir William Macpherson in the UK's Lawrence report (1999) as: "The collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour that amount to discrimination through prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness, and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people."
I definitely get stopped more often than my white friends (albeit it changes based on the country). I've been asked several times by police officers in Europe whether I was an immigrant from North Africa with the implication I was dealing drugs.
A lot of north africans immigrants in the country where I was actually deal drugs and I look like I'm from North Africa, so it makes sense for police officers to question me more.
This is not systemic racism, this is recognising patterns, this is an explicit bias.
I can't find a single law discriminating on people's skin color: that's why I think there is no systemic racism.
An explicit bias, held by agents of the state, affecting their behavior towards the citizenry with no regard to individual innocence. Congrats, you've demonstrated systemic racism.
> I can't find a single law discriminating on people's skin color: that's why I think there is no systemic racism.
Kristallnacht wasn't legally authorized, either, but it'd be an odd claim that it didn't reflect systemic anti-Jewish bias in Nazi Germany.
I don't want the government to intervene between me and a drug dealer to prevent me from buying what I want.
I don't want the government to spend billions of taxpayers money (and incurring debt - and devaluing my money) killing dudes in the middle east. There were definitely economical and geopolitical reasons to do the war on terror, but that's not something I wanted. 9/11 was merely the reason to attack a oil rich country.
I don't think there is anything racist with any of these wars.
Black people are disproportionally poorer and that's why they're overrepresented in drug related crimes and jail convictions. This happened mainly because stable families were destroyed in the 70s thanks to welfare policies. I'm not the best at explaining this kind of stuff, listen to Thomas Sowell for more.
I'm against prosecution for any drug related crime - but if drugs were legal, I'm sure a portion of poor people would move to whatever shady business they can do as long as they can survive and conviction rate wouldn't change much. Maybe street scams, maybe stealing, maybe begging.
Sure, go ahead and push for an end on the war on drugs, but you have to solve poverty and stable families as well if you want to see meaningful outcomes.
I think similarly of the war on drugs. Sure, we absolutely need to fix the precursors to addiction and the things that keep it entrenched, in order to keep black people from being victimized by addiction and imprisonment at such a high rate, but isn't the fact that this obviously unjust, bastardized, and warped form of health policy is at all acceptable to many voters, partially because a lot of white voters don't see it as affecting their communities (even though it definitely does, trust me).
You can say the same thing about the basic conditions of poverty- if a huge chunk of the population did not identify the injustices faced by those who are impoverished as "black people problems", and if the other enormous chunk of americans didn't identify them as "white trash and black people problems", maybe our policies about for-profit schools, food stamps, and HUD, would look a little more promising.
I'll lay my cards on the table, I believe that most structural exploitation occurs on an economic basis, for economic reasons. I think economic class is the primary stratification that supports most of our unjust political structures. However, it is also clear to me that, at an ideological level, these unjust measures hide themselves behind racial boundaries and political borders, so they can remain palatable to those who might have the power to change them. In other words, racism wasn't a motive, but it is a hell of a shield.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws
systemic: > relating to a system, especially as opposed to a particular part.
How many racist people are needed before it's not a particular part"?
I've shared and laughed at funny names in the past, as recently as last year. I can't imagine an official or permanent list such as the one pointed out here.
---
It's really fucking hard to talk about stuff like this online or big groups. I would encourage people and companies to have small, offline discussions and start with humility and empathy as the guiding principles.
---
I've typed and deleted all of this three times. Anything I say feels like not enough. People are people.
But what I really see here is the way power can blind. This situation was 100% avoidable but the dudes didn’t think the incoming fire was at their level.
Fried and DHH have been making “fuck you money” monthly, for well over a decade. And I happen to know what Ryan Singer’s salary was many years ago - even if he never did anything smart with it, and he is very smart, he has an impenetrable financial moat.
The money, combined with a measure of fame and influence, compounded by the fact that they have full control of Basecamp and by some intrinsic hubris is the reason this blew up in their face.
It’s a shit show but this will basically blow over. The customers mostly don’t care.
article - "he questioned the existence of white supremacy at the company"
Not the same
Calling out a senior staff member when they state 'white supremecy doesn't exist' is 'appalling'....yeah ok bud
Yes, reading this entire exchange between Singer and the unnamed employee shows exactly why there shouldn't be political talk in the workplace. Disastrous indeed.
If you're curious to get going on this subject so as to not make these mistakes, "HBR's 10 Must Reads on Change Management" is a great resource.
"we live in a white supremacist culture"
Or demands from one employee to another at all hands meetings to denounce white supremacy.
There are few stories that grab attention like hubris & comeuppance.
Sounds a hell of a lot like the house cleaning needing to happen is at the top.
That quote is the clearest indication that this isn’t a politics issue, it’s a management issue. This sort of “I don’t think it’s an issue so let’s not handle it” attitude applies just as much/more to actually getting work done. Classic bad manager 101 stuff.
You can have good success by being a bad manager of course! My bet is that there’s a lot of great ICs that counteract whatever messy people mgmt stuff is going on.
If an employee calls another employee on racist acts and this is true, fire the racist. If it was a lie, fire the accuser. It feels easy and natural to just take the accusation very seriously with very serious consequences instead of framing this as a political discussion.
There is no reasoning with idiologues as reason does not enter into dogmatic rhetoric.
Act decisive as it will only get worse, and never apologize.
In my company I regularly remind our employees that we are not allowed to insult customers, ever. I even try to find the good in everyone. People have competing priorities, personal issues, etc. You never have the whole story.
> Calling someone or a policy racist would fall under insults.
How can a policy be insulted? Policies are not people. I don’t see how calling a policy racist falls under ad-hominem.
Take a look at the comments in this thread, and figure out the ones that are created with a throwaway account.
Add to the fact that Fried and Hansson are supposed to be thought leaders in (alternative) Silicon Valley Company Management and Philosophy.
That’s a whole lot of “severance” to pay out.
Regardless of what happens to the company, their reputation as Leaders/Managers will take a hit.
The fact that Hansson “peaced out” and left Fried to Moderate the meeting at such a critical time doesn’t bode well either.
Any power struggle inside an organisation can quickly turn into mutiny...
That’s a bad take. Everyone I’ve ever heard mention those books has talked about them in a very positive light. I’ve never heard anyone describe them as lecturing.
The books aren’t what earned them enemies. Their behavior in the last week did. I’ve seen a lot of people on Twitter badmouth Fried and Hansson who admired them deeply until now.
Children understand that calling people names isn't the same as violence.
At some point can we all admit that the most narcissistic, dramatic people are overly-indulged by this garbage?
I'm at a startup now, but left a company in February that got torched by this toxic BS. My favorite moment was sitting there, and having a coworker (US born, but of Arab descent) who grew up in an extremely wealthy neighborhood with immense privilege, lecturing a blind white male employee about how much privilege he had, and then going on to talk about how white people were uniquely tainted by the slave trade that some of their ancestors engaged in. Naturally, he didn't seem to realize that the African slave trade was invented by his Arab ancestors. Nor did he see the irony in the fact that holding a person responsible for horrible action of people who look like them is the same way of thinking that leads bigots to blame all Arabs for the actions of the 9/11 hijackers.
Seeing good companies get torn to shreds by this campus idiocy reminds me of how insulated academia is from the real world. The absurd, essay-driven philosophy masquerading as social science makes it impossible for groups of humans to achieve anything productive. Nobody ever noticed this before, because in the pseudo social science world they inhabit, productivity isn't a thing.
This isn't the argument actually being made here, so if that's what DHH thought when he shut the thread down then that might explain part of the outcry.
The argument is simply that the behavior everyone claims to decry (e.g. racial violence) starts somewhere, far below violence. "Funny names" turn into off-color jokes. Off-color jokes turn into jokes with a darker edge. Then it turns into "just asking questions", and before too long your organization is acting as much as a group radicalization effort as it is a business.
This still isn't "cause and effect", where anyone who chuckles at a funny name is fated to be building the next Stormfront unless stopped by an intrepid band of culture warriors. But we've known since Ben Franklin that an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure, so under the 'pyramid of hate' argument, a company trying to foster a safe workplace for all workers should strive to keep potential racism from turning into a problem by enforcing standards of workplace conduct that don't wait for actual racism.
Just like we build secure software by building security in early into the release process.
Just like we build functional and well-integrated software by building the testing early into the release process.
Just like we avoid pest infestation by keeping the food off of the tables and floors. On and on it goes.
The standard we walk past is the standard we accept. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRQBtDtZTGA
I like to do the "Muslim test" on these things: replace "white people" (or "men", or any other group) with "Muslims" and see how it sounds then. If it sounds yikes then it's probably not a good thing to say.
I use "Muslim" because there's been a lot of discussion surrounding that in my own country, but you can use "Jew", "black", etc. as well.
It's easy to forget how sweeping statements can be received by its targets. I think we've all been guilty of this sometimes. The only time I've ever had a HN comment moderated is when I made some overly general statements about British culture. Mea culpa.
It's only natural to make mistakes, and that's okay. The difference is that I've apologized for it and realized my mistake, rather than double down hard (in my defence, as an EU expat living in the UK at the time, I was rather ... peeved ... about Brexit at the time, the surrounding debate regarding EU migrants, and various people ranting to me about this, as were most of my EU expat friends).
I vote things like the Green party and Socialist party, and the only time I've been directly involved in political activism was to campaign in favour of an asylum centre in my home town after idiots started opposing it with all sorts of bullshit. It's perhaps a bit said that this needs to be said, but I'm hardly some alt-right troll. But I find the messaging on these kind of things increasingly tiresome and frankly toxic.
"My suspicion is that this is a weird tic of campus politics that has followed graduates into the professional arena where they unconsciously started deploying it in less appropriate contexts. If you’re in a dorm at a fancy college and you can convince an administrator that something is racist, the administrator will probably put a stop to it. At the same time, “this is bad for poor people” just isn’t going to get you far as a campus argument. After all, these schools more or less openly auction off a number of admissions slots to wealthy donors (while, of course, practicing affirmative action to keep things diverse) so they can hardly take a hard line on class politics."
What is likely to happen is we will always see it moving forward, but eventually (outside of extreme circumstances like violence), these things become less powerful as the novelty of the charge wears off.
Constant bashing of white men on company calls. Exceptions if you were openly non straight. They also loved talking about how inclusive they were.
Constant mocking of customer base, who was mostly traditional white people.
I figure out quick I was hired only because they were desperate for someone with experience.
Which sadly meant hiring an undesirable.
At some point if I really need a job I may need to put on a dress.
And if you actually employ someone who perpetrates violence or harassment, then it really doesn’t matter whether they were prompted to do so by a list of names intended as a joke.
That person (a) needs help and (b) probably shouldn’t be kept as an employee for the safety of your workforce.
I kind of can’t believe we live in a world in which we can’t acknowledge that keeping a list of funny names is disrespectful to our fellow human beings, without then jumping to genocide as the justification for why we shouldn’t do this (and subsequently implying anyone who advocates otherwise is this pro-genocide).
What does this have to do with academia?
Adults understand that dehumanizing someone is one path along the road that ends in violence.
I find it pretty hard to believe this went down the way you say.
> Children understand that calling people names isn't the same as violence.
So in your ideal professional environment, name-calling would be fine?
If this is how these two are going to manage after decades at this, maybe they should bring in some executives willing to do the actual work of managing instead of bungling it themselves.
ik its not exactly relevant to the article but I want to know...
But to the issue itself. I've read what I can about it and it's tragic. I'll start by saying that I believe the founders had the right to make the call that they did and give them credit for offering severance packages to those who disagreed with their decision. However, the whole affair is a disaster and a cautionary tale. It seems to have started out with good intent. A group of employees wanted to create a more equitable workplace. They found a list of "funny" customer names and realized that this was a bad thing to have. The founders agreed--mocking your customers is a bad idea. The question is what happened next. I was unaware of the idea of the pyramid of hate. It kinda reminds me of Yoda “Fear is the path to the dark side … fear leads to anger … anger leads to hate … hate leads to suffering.” It looks like the implication is not that funny names === The Holocaust, but rather that a certain context is required for something like The Holocaust to occur. I believe that idea is true, but am not sure if this was a productive path to take. It seemed like the company had decided that the list was bad, to discontinue it, and to move on. The call not to fire whoever made the list doesn't seem to be a bad one. Contexts change and people make mistakes. If people evolve that should be encouraged. Where it seems that things fell apart is in how the CEOs responded to this. It's a really difficult issue and it would seem that discussion could have led to some mutual understanding. Moving to cancel social-political discussion in response (and to announce it in a blog post instead of internally) strikes me as where things took a tragic turn. While it's possible to have a policy of not discussing partisan politics at work (for example, it's not allowed for federal employees), not having discussion of equity issues at work is more problematic. Because for some employees, it's not just a question of doing their job and talking about these things in their own time--because for some, it effects their ability to do their jobs. For an in-person company, there can be something as simple as bathrooms. I'm a heterosexual male and never thought about there being a need for unisex bathrooms until an LGBTQ+ group at work pointed it out. Now in our building we have some. It doesn't effect me, but it means a lot to them. I can picture a woman wondering if she didn't get a promotion because there was something that she wasn't doing at work or if it was because of her gender--for her, it's not an abstract sociopolitical question--it's a question that has an impact on her ability at work. Or, if she's in a meeting and she finds that she's being ignored when she speaks, but men of similar ability are not, then it's not just an abstract issue, but a question of how she gets her job done. I am not even saying that if it happens that men are doing this that they are sexist--they might simply be oblivious to it. By my personality, I have a tendency to talk over people and have to remind myself to let other people talk (I think it's a good idea because then I can hear ideas that I might not have considered and sometimes save myself from doing something dumb). I hope that it's something that I never get called into HR about and would much rather a coworker told me if it was a problem. I think there's a worthwhile set of discussions about workplace culture that are worth having about what it means to be professional in the workplace. Of course there are cases that can go too far. But, a lot of it just strikes me as being polite to people. If someone wants to be called Robert instead of Bob, then if it makes him happy, ok. Other things are related to questions of cognitive bias. For example, if if I want to hire someone, it's pretty natural to use my network. However, maybe I can surface better candidates by searching more broadly. Am I using a good set of criteria in hiring?
But, back to the list. Without seeing it, it's not possible to judge whether was it just in bad taste to mock customers period, or did it have racial overtones in the "funny" names for some racial groups. A lot of the interpretation hinges on that. Also, the perception of whether it was racially motivated or not (unless it was particularly blatant could also vary depending on if one was a member of the targeted group or not. But from the exchange on white supremacy to occur and for such a large fraction of the company to quit, then it would suggest that there were deeper issues at the company and that the CEOs didn't want to engage with those issues.
While I seldom partake in threads, I do read and save interesting perspectives and opinions on topics I am interested in for more personal dissection & discussion (with myself and close friends), and I found your comment to be valuable and worth reading, so thank you for sharing.
Where my dad came from (Scary Gary) you voted Republican because up until about the 1960s, they were the party that cared about immigrants and wanted them to succeed. So, when he moved to a similarly Republican state in the 80s, he remained a Republican. The Republican is not a werewolf boogeyman around here. I made the mistake once of saying that I was a "closet Republican" on HN and I got downvoted so fast that I lost all self-confidence for about a year.
I went to a student Democrats meeting on my local campus. Now I know college political groups are a unique demographic and I get why these people (these people, yikes) feel this way, and those that I talked to were completely rational; like I could be and was one of them.
But when we were asked at the beginning of the meeting why people were Democrats, the very first person responded that they were a Democrat because they were not a racist.
The tactlessness, the arrogance, the naivety, and immaturity were so concentrated in a single sentence that I wish I could have left. But I stayed and learned even if that tribalism is toxic and wins no friends nor understanding nor ultimately progress.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
So for someone to say they aren't Republican because they aren't racist is hyperbolic, but it isn't wrong.
What is Scary Gary?
Quit. Life's too short to waste time at a company that's forgotten it's purpose.
This ideology borders on cult like.
A good sign that you are dealing with an irrational ideology is non-sensical, illogical and inconsisten rules. For example, in this article, "Black" is capitalized everywhere its mentioned, and "white" isn't. There's nothing logically consistent about this, because it's a borderline religious ideology.
"white" isn't capitalized because it doesn't bear as much similarities to those words, as "white" is not a cultural identity.
Going to quit after vacation this summer by just not showing up. See how long that lasts
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27044726.
But go where? Where can you go to escape this insanity? It seems to have taken hold everywhere (except, I guess Basecamp?)
- Announced a new company policy publicly before telling the staff
- Deleted internal threads that would go against their narrative of why they did so
- Had a conservative senior employee go off about politics on the call discussing the new no politics policy.
- refused to reprimand said employee on the call
- had one founder take this extremely sensitive call from his bed with his camera off and on mute.
- After the employees resigned, did not send any sort of public message thanking them for their time at the company.
Can't believe only 21 employees walked. What idiots these founders are. There is no way to defend this poor management even if you agree with the rule they tried to put in
de·fund; prevent from continuing to receive funds
Courtesy of the dictionary. This is not hard. Stop entertaining people who redefine words.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: it's clear from your comment history that you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of what they're battling for. (Actually a lot of the time we don't know, or care, what they're battling for. We care about HN not becoming a flamewar hell site.) If you would please stop doing that and use HN in the intended spirit, we'd appreciate it.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27044182.
It is very similar to people who say "I'm not racist, I don't think I'm superior to anyone and the dictionary definition of racism is to assume superiority based on race" (this is more or less a direct quote from Pauline Hanson, an Australian Senator who is wildly racist).
What I have found in discussions with people who I think are racist, but who deny it, is that they have an emphasis on personal agency and personal responsibility. So while they might be able to happily have black friends, they see, for example, disparaties in incarceration rates not as a social problem but as an aggregation of personal failures. If one believes that a particular race is, on average, more likely to commit the types of crime for which one should be incarcerated, and one sees incarceration as an "inferior" way of life, then the logical conclusion is that they are racist.
An interesting thing to note about analysing racism this way is that it can also uncover racist attitudes in the very minority populations who are being discriminated against.
Also "defund the police" is a shorthand that typically means "reduce direct law enforcement funding and instead fund other community engagement programs". Of course we need cops, but we don't necessarily need them all armed to the teeth in riot gear showing up for a drug bust (sub-question: do we really need drug busts at all?), and maybe they're not the best first responders in domestic disputes, and so on. Most people for whom "defund the police" is a catchcry recognise this, because there are very few true anarchists in society (and anarchy is kind of where "left meets right" in the political spectrum anyway, which is why libertarianism is such a dangerous and insidious ideology).
disingenuous (adj) giving a false appearance of simple frankness
obstinate (adj) pertinaciously adhering to an opinion
pertinacious (adj) marked by an unyieldingly persistent fixedness (as of opinion, purpose, action) that is often annoyingly perverse in fact or in appearance
It looks like you simply googled those words and copy-pasted the definitions. I can do that, too (using a more credible dictionary vis-a-vis American usage, to boot. Mine’s MW, yours is Oxford, which is very British; we’re discussing an American company):
white supremacy (n) the social, economic, and political systems that collectively enable white people to maintain power over people of other races
defund (v) to withdraw funding from (as a government-funded program)
This isn’t a helpful approach. Prescriptivist appeals to the dictionary and dismissal of others’ viewpoints are not ways of listening to the perspectives of others or empathizing with different experiences, and seem to be actively preventing constructive discussion in this case.
I take it you still stick to the original definitions of "fun", "garbled", and "terrible", then? Good on you.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/defund
> : to withdraw funding from
and "withdraw" does not mean "remove completely"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/white%20supremacy
> 1 : the belief that the white race is inherently superior to other races and that white people should have control over people of other races
> 2: the social, economic, and political systems that collectively enable white people to maintain power over people of other races
That depends very heavily on the nature of the injustice, doesn't it? I mean, take Godwin's perspective here: that's literally the logic that gave us the holocaust!
Implicit in your statement is the idea that the "injustice" might "suck", but not so much that it's worth blowing up your employer. Which is to say: you really don't think this injustice sucked very much. Well... some people disagreed. And they were willing to quit over it.
Isn't that an existence proof that your intuition is simply wrong here?
You're both misreading and over-reading.
The comparison is not between how much the injustice sucks vs. the cost of blowing up the employer. It is a) whether all injustices have equitable access to pressuring employers and b) whether parasitizing any organization to advance a cause, however honorable the intentions are, is a fair game despite the negative externalities.
If any cause fails either of these criteria, it is bound to be creating its own injustices.
I appreciate that you may be arguing a minority position in this particular thread (at least from the portions that I've seen), but that doesn't absolve you of needing to follow the site guidelines, and your comments have been noticeably more flamey than many others.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27046069.
Um... I completely failed to follow this. Are you talking about Godwins law? What is the logic that literally gave us the Holocaust?
> Isn't that an existence proof that your intuition is simply wrong here?
I believe you have an error in your modal logic. Existence proofs can only disprove 'all/no X are P' statements and prove 'there exists an X that is P' statements. The claim you cite is of the later form.
Generally, the way to disprove such a claim is to assume it is true then reach a logical contradiction.
It's not possible to call it from outside, but there was no actual racist behavior cited, apart from the list of funny customer names, which is not really racist (more culturalist - if that were a thing), but it is a terrible idea anyway.
It sounds like a bunch of people got upset and quit over white privilege and the usual similar nonsense. Good riddance, why would you want activist employees like that?
> “I strongly disagree we live in a white supremacist culture,” Singer said. “I don't believe in a lot of the framing around implicit bias. I think a lot of this is actually racist.”
Those with historically unassailable, unnamed, and most sensitively, unearned, prerogatives, become understandably if unfortunately upset when this state of affairs is questioned.
While they retain a platform and resources to do so, they lash out.
The details will vary; the attempts at spin and chaff will vary; the root issues are no mystery.
We're in a moment of cultural shift.
Those who perceive themselves rightly as historical "winners" are going to fight "loss" of status, control, hegemony, pick a word.
All the more so, to the extent that they are prone to understanding the world in terms of zero-sum games.
(As others have noted, the Basecamp trashfire has nothing to do with "politics," that's one transparent attempt at spin.)
Weak leadership that fostered a political culture that they eventually lost control of, and a workforce so engulfed in politics that they lost sight of focus. DHH playing sick is just the Cherry on top. I can't say that I don't feel an enormous amount of that petty German word towards to founders who love to preach about company culture having this blow up so spectacularly.
I'm beginning to understand why Andy Wingo emphasized filtering out fash when doing your hiring: https://www.wingolog.org/archives/2017/09/04/the-hardest-thi...
Really? Someone who writes that is where you're looking for guidance? Words fail me to describe how appalling this is.
Free clue: You can believe in strong free speech protection without being fascist. You'd be amazed at how many people do so - who believe in free speech on principle, not because they want to be able to say their secret horrible beliefs out loud. Putting them in the fascist category merely shows that your brain has turned off, and you're willing to harm completely innocent people in order to try to protect against your current bogeymen.