Comment by igneo676 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by igneo676 | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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