Comment by myfavoritedog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by myfavoritedog | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to be a curmudgeonly contrarian in this thread. You can highlight the text of my comment to make it easier to read after the incoming downvotes. :)

I'm not desperately searching for work-life balance, using the latest fad of a technical stack, remoting, unlimited vacation, having the best free snacks in the break room, etc.

Sure, at a superficial level, all that stuff sounds great. I'll make use of the in-office climbing wall sometimes. But if you lead with that pitch, you give me no confidence that your company will even be around that long, much less provide me with room to grow professionally and financially.

I want a company to sell me on its vision for success in the market that I would be participating in. I want my co-workers to be motivated by the success of the endeavor in which we're all involved. I want an ESOP that will be valuable for my retirement.

Why do I want to work with a bunch of people who are mainly there for the freebies?

Look at what just happened to Basecamp. They cultivated a workforce that was more concerned with airing political grievances than they were with the success of the company. The second the politics were shut down, a third of their employees walked out. Imagine you're a developer at that company, trying to ship some product or feature to meet some bonus metric - and the people you're depending upon to do their part quit their jobs because they absolutely must argue politics during their work day.

My superficial read of the Basecamp kerfuffle is that what people are really upset about is a lack of professional development, but it was expressed as a sort of aimless resentment of everything the founders are. If what the founders are is the most important thing in the company - if the company is thought of as their thing, and not a thing any other employee will ever have a hand in steering, it would be frustrating.

I think the walkout is a symptom of the problem you're pointing out, not the cause. People started to think of it as a dead-end job working on someone else's toy.

I could see some of what you're saying as well. Although I would argue that if people think it's dead-end job working on someone else's toy -- the company leaders aren't focused on winning. They're still going to attract new employees for the wrong reasons, or at least for reasons that wouldn't get me to want to work there.

> They cultivated a workforce that was more concerned with airing political grievances than they were with the success of the company. The second the politics were shut down, a third of their employees walked out.

That is a very inaccurate retelling of the story: https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/3/22418208/basecamp-all-hand...

Uh, yeah, I've read the account of the Basecamp all-hands meeting a couple of times. I couldn't believe how childish the whole dispute was after the first reading, so I read it again.

Rather than spending that morning strategizing about the next version of their software, what bugs needed fixing, how to increase sales, what features were working or not -- they argued over politics.

I mean, no one was accused of doing something illegal or even wrong. There was no sexual harassment. There were no racists or racist work practices uncovered.

Just non-work political grievances. One guy had different political opinions than some other people. I think he said something positive about Breitbart, gods forbid. Some of the participants claimed to have been literally crying and yelling at their computer screens. Words were interpreted or twisted to frame an argument over if there was no white supremacy anywhere, or whether there was no white supremacy in that work environment. "Privilege" accusations were leveled.

The whole thing was ridiculous.

>There were no racists or racist work practices uncovered.

Pretty sure someone saying "white supremacy isn't a problem" is implicitly racist.

You don't just state that and suddenly, there is no white supremacy or racism. It's the same people who declared racism was officially over in the US after Obama was elected. The last decade of racially biased policing says otherwise.

Part of the story also was the founders were annoyed the D&I team had asked the company to get rid of & stop maintaining their "Funny customer names" list which apparently was mostly African & Asian people.

> Why do I want to work with a bunch of people who are mainly there for the freebies?

I mean, some of us value work life balance. Even on projects I'm insanely passionate about, I need to pace myself, otherwise I'll get burnt out.

I don't think this is a very contrarian view, is it? I value the same things in the company - I want to work on something that changes the world, I want a company that has a vision, mission and strategy - where the business side is at least as senior as the engineering side. And of course I want to take part of what I create home financially. Bells and whistles in the form of remote work, snacks, etc are nice, but they are bells and whistles :)

this mini-rant you posted about Basecamp is not just a wild tangent completely unrelated to the topic of discussion, you're also making things up that have no correspondence to the reality of the situation.

to say "They cultivated a workforce that was more concerned with airing political grievances than they were with the success of the company" is just absurd.

they lost Sam Stephenson, who had been there 15 years and authored a sizeable amount of their open source. to shine as an open source contributor at a company with DHH, you've got to produce a lot of good work.

the guy who kicked off the firestorm was another long-term employee, Ryan Singer, and it's true that he did it by posting about politics. (specifically, praising Breitbart.) but he posted about politics after a decade or more of doing great work for the success of the company.

in each case, these people absolutely proved their commitment to the success of the company. and there is absolutely no evidence that the specifics of the political division even had anything to do with airing grievances per se.

if you're going to go off on a wild tangent, at least talk about things that actually happened in real life.

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