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One possibly missing bullet point from the first list: Disbanding the committee for working on diversity, equity and inclusion. Previously this subject was explicitly a workplace conversation topic at Basecamp. They even sanctioned it with a committee. Apparently right up until the point where the committee found a skeleton in a closet.

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.

Ultimately, no, they're not "bad guys" in the sense that they're irredeemably evil. Unfortunately, the current situation certainly paints them in the "extremely foolish or downright spiteful" territory

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

4. Get employees back on board the company mission and work together as a team

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

Are you past or present employee? If so, then you probably know better, but I can only response to what I know, and I was never related to Basecamp.

What you say is correct in really bad situations. Thing is, that I have trouble to see real issue in what has happened here. It somehow feels surreal that DHH and Jason were able to fool us all for years, and now it seems that they are being accused of almost being hostile to their employees. Everything arose around this darn name list. How this ended up with using words of "white supremacy" is beyond me, and genuinely feels as words misunderstanding or misuse. In a team with non-natives, it is extremely easy to have such misunderstandings. But it is also easy to not spot that misunderstanding quickly. And that someone misunderstood something is not a reason to apologize I believe. Also the way they tried to handle the situation, seems to me like they were stunned by it and it took them off guard, because they are probably not racists guys, and instead they are fully and deeply against such people. That's why further developments seem more random than professional or done on purpose.

I just had a situation in my team where we had a junior guy that we wanted to train. He was very hesitant to learn, he always knew better, and any PR feedback ended always with 2 hours-long calls, trying to explain him the comments there. He was always told that we want to get feedback from him, that he always will be listened and he was always assuring us that he is fine, that he finally understood the feedback and all. Guess what - today he told me that he leaves and the main reason was that he could never understand the PR and that he never could agree with it, and that he always felt that he can't say word and that he has to obey..... I'm feeling confused and cheated all day. I went far and beyond to make him feel as comfortable as possible, it took many overtime hours to stay with him to discuss stuff and then go back to do my tasks. I'm speechless right now, and trying to not loose my self-confidence as I literally don't know what I've done wrong.

I feel that their situation might be somewhat similar now:

1. Apologize - but maybe they don't see what for?

2. Correct the wrong - but what was wrong?

3. Allow the space for employees - what kind of space? How are they not allowed for that already? Do you mean doing some sessions and commit weeks to try to solve people's own issues?

4. Get employees back on board - ok they messed up with this one by posting the policy change publicly.

Not sure it was noticed, but DHH hasn't tweeted once in May. I obviously don't know the reason, but maybe, just maybe, he is trying to put all the pieces together to at least have an idea what just happened?

Was it his first job?

>Not sure it was noticed, but DHH hasn't tweeted once in May

It was definitely VERY noticeable, considering the case EPIC and Apple is going on right now.

> He was very hesitant to learn, he always knew better, and any PR feedback ended always with 2 hours-long calls, trying to explain him the comments there.

After this, it's totally clear where this is headed. Why were you surprised?

You said he was hesitant to learn and always knew better. That struck me as a little incongruous? He was opinionated, and his opinions were different than yours. You wanted to do things your way, he wanted to do things his way. I imagine he might also describe you as hesitant to learn. From what you wrote, it really isn't clear which of you was "more right", but it's clear it wasn't a good fit.

I was surprised because he said we didn't do what actually did for him many times. Not sure if that answers your question.

For more context: I'm 8 years at the project, it's multi-stack, we have some conventions worked out through years that more or less work for us. You don't want to adapt new ideas with every new developer as that would become a mess. But we are also open for changes, but they have to be reasonable and worth spending time on them.

The guy is/was ok in regards of front-end skills, but he lacks a lot about how to connect the dots from business logic perspective. He never got the point about making code friendly to get through instead of easy to write at the moment when he was working on it. He also wasn't good at abstractions, and I didn't expect him to be since he was hired for junior role, but he either never wanted to accept that we want him to be better at it. One of many examples: he wanted to use BEM in Vue's single-file components. I showed that him that even Vue tells that scoping could be done by `scoped` attribute _or_ BEM. Since we use scoped, using BEM is overlapping the need of scoping. He was like "fine, but I will do it my way anyway, because I like BEM"... And then I will need to explain it somehow to some other developer who would ask - "Hey, why we have double scoping? What was the reasoning behind it?"

That makes more sense to me, thank you.

With the attitude "fine but I will do it my way anyway" I'm surprised you didn't fire him. Probably a good thing he left? It wasn't a good fit.

Well, I was willing to continue, I was kind of waiting for the covid to fade-away so I could start working with him in an office (we live close each other) which I believe would have helped either helping him to progress or helping us to see him not a good fit. It is also that our project is quite complex, that we give a new person about a year to get to know it. But from the perspective of what just happened, yeah, it seems that we should consider firing him.

You’re missing a crucial bit that changes everything: one of the earliest employees is ostensibly a very, very right leaning person who made super questionable comments unprompted in the townhall, and refused to acknowledge racism as a concept could exist in companies. And one of the founders just couldn’t say anything that would have helped in that moment.

To be honest, it's hard to judge this just by reading this article. They only way to have own word on this matter would be to take part in the company meetings. Check his email after he departed - for him it was misunderstanding. What if that was actual misunderstanding?

I'm a pretty left leaning person and I mostly agree with the things he's quoted as saying in this article.

I hugely disagree with the way that white supremacism has had it's definition widened within certain circles and how those circles are now attempting to push that definition into wider usage through the type of bullying that's on display in this very article.

For most people white supremacism conjures up images of nazi germany, the slave trade, jim crow, lynchings, the kkk, etc. Our society today does not resemble those in such a way that we should begin using that word to mean something totally different. It feels like an awful rhetorical trick where the emotional resonance of the older meaning of the word is felt by everyone each time it's used while meaning something far more subtle. We're dealing with something far more complicated today, and no number of performative denouncements will help us solve our problems.

It's a fair point, and I too have a tendency to get annoyed at politically motivated language drift. But it's a thing that happens, and it's been happening since the dawn of time, and I'm personally pessimistic that there's much that can be done about it. Might as well curse a puddle for being muddy.

There's a lesson to be learned here. I wasn't there, of course, but, based on reading this article, it seems that arguing semantics was possibly Singer's single biggest tactical error in that meeting. There were much more pressing issues at play, and choosing such a banal hill to die on sent a strong message to at least some portion of the staff. Perhaps not one that he would have wanted to send if he had taken the time to count to ten before opening his mouth.

It's like in that Hacker News commenting guideline: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

The problem is the definitional issue is the foundation of many of their arguments. If you give in here, then it's much easier for them to convince you that something must be done.

"There's not much we can do as a company to confront the white supremacist society we live in" sounds downright dismissive compared to "there's not much we can do as a company to support police accountability or any of the other myriad ways in which racism shows up in our society, since that stuff mostly happens outside our company".

I guess? Though I'm not sure that arguing about the name of the ocean is actually the easiest way to convince people not to get hung up on trying to boil it. Even when fuzzy language is directly responsible for sucking people into a boil-the-ocean mindset, I've never seen anyone actually succeed by choosing that plan of attack. Usually it just results in people talking past each other.

To awkwardly extend the metaphor:

If a group of people trying to boil the ocean are convinced that the basin of the ocean is just a really big pot and argue that anyone who argues otherwise is a BAD PERSON obviously it would be great if we could convince them that the part where they're accusing people of being BAD PEOPLE for thinking differently is the real problem and reassure them that they can continue to believe that the ocean is in a really big pot.

Except that these two things seem utterly tied up together in their minds -- they learned it because it's stated exactly that way in many books and other media (you haven't read the nytimes best seller Non-ocean-pot-thinking Fragility?). They think it's as true as 2+2=4 because the theory's origins are academic and we must believe science don't you know?

Attacking the definitional issue seems doomed to fail to me as well, but I can't think of any other way forward that isn't worse.

It's tricky though, because I could make a series of arguments that sound reasonable individually or out of context, but when made together in a specific context, they take on new meanings. Without more context, we end up inferring quite a bit based on the info presented to us.

Beyond that, I think it was foolish to prioritize debating language in the first place rather than focusing on making employees feel valued and included. People in leadership positions hold a lot of power in shaping where the conversation goes, and they could've pivoted to a more constructive conversation about company values at any point. But rather than do that, it was more important to be right.

If you start calling modern social justice issues with a term without that historical "baggage", then it would quickly be dismissed as [first world problem](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=First%20Worl...)

It occurs to me now that this somewhat resembles the squabble over the “commons clause” and whether or not software using it is open source.

I’m extremely leftist - have organized for unions for 5 years. I didn’t see what he said that needed denouncement from the boss or something. Maybe a better phrased “thank you for your point of view” than “thank you” if you really wanna be political.

Like I don’t agree with him. And I do see how a funny names list is a form of “violence” in a way. I also think Singer is a tad misleading.

But he’s just like, wrong. You can have a discussion or a disagreement on this topic. The way this has all been escalated and framed as “you’re not taking a stand against white supremacy” makes my head spin.

Again, I’m a staunch leftist. I agree with a lot of the arguments made, but the way they are being made and the expectations on the employer are very confusing to me.

A lot of comments have said childish and I agree. Everyone looks like a horribly communicative child in this story, and it’s really uncomfortable to watch.

I in no way see how his comments were “very questionable”. I disagree with them? But I just like think they’re wrong.

“Very questionable” is going off on a tangent about (((globalists))) and a worldwide conspiracy network. This is a very uncomfortable shift of the Overton window for me.

People change their beliefs over time and the current environment of toxic social media makes it easy for people to go to the extremes. I am not defending the racism-denial, but could we give him another chance to explain before we “cancel” him?

>could we give him another chance to explain before we “cancel” him?

If I worked there, I would've quit, or made plans to quit, immediately regardless of which side I was on or the nuances.

People read about this stuff because a civil war is interesting. It's not interesting when you're in it. If I worked for them, I might wait to quit and forgo the severance, because of the politically charged interpretations of people quitting without a job lined up. But I would make the decision to quit immediately, once it was clear 1/3 of the company was leaving.

A similar sort of situation is when you have a struggle over unionizing. I'm in favor of unions in the abstract, I guess. I currently have a union job. But a company that is in a battle over unionizing clearly has a toxic relationship between management and employees that has reached a breaking point. The rational response to to bail out.

He did not "refused to acknowledge racism as a concept could exist in companies", he said "We don't live in a white supremacist culture."

Consider the phrase "We live in a democracy culture": You can practically assume that everyone the conversation believes democracy is the correct way to govern, and NOT believing that would be considered very far outside of the overton window. Even as Democrats and Republicans fight over voter ID laws, both sides claim their view is more true to democracy.

So similarly, while racism exists, we do not live in a culture where it is the norm to openly state that "White people are superior." Yes, white nationalism exist and it is a nasty idealogy, but the fact that they have to airbrush their ideology in "ethnostatism" is a sign that openly expressing white supremacy is an unmarketable idea.

This is what I take the phrase "We don't live in a white supremacist culture" to mean. It is a very different claim from "racism doesn't exist". However, I think a more empathetic thing to say would be something along the lines of "White supremacy doesn't define our culture. We live in a nation where this ideology is openly condemned by the vast majority people on the left, center, and right. However, that doesn't mean it is completely absent, especially in our past, whose effects still linger on today."

I agree with you too. Jason and DHH draw a lot of attention, especially DHH, and some of it is not favorable. This incident just gave fodder to those who already had a pet peeve with them.

Having and acting on "Pet Peeves" in the workplace is about as unprofessional as one can get.

Why do so many / "all" people at Twitter seem to agree with the most disappointed people who quit?

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)

They made a mistake.

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.

Best reasoning I've read so far. Can't agree more with you.