Incidentally this "Hiring 500 roles" PR appears to be an effort to get ahead of news related to an impending "hit piece" the CEO alludes to in his twitter feed today ->
Also, they may have had "20 people" who were brave enough to say something but I guarantee there were more who just didn't want to speak up.
> We've got people in 70+ countries, speaking 50+ languages in the company, trying to build products for people in 190. Differing perspectives will be shared. That's DIVERSITY. It's not always easy. You've gotta be resilient, humble, open and highly tolerant of differing norms.
This question has a yes or no answer.
'Bring your whole self to work' is nonsense. If your whole self is at odds with acceptable workplace behaviour, it should stay at home.
Judging everyone on how well they can act like a rich white cis straight male is naturally discriminatory to everyone who isn't, in proportion to how much unlike that they are.
1. Treat people like human beings, not political abstractions.
2. Criticize to uplift and empower, never to tear down or destroy.
3. Root everything you do in love and compassion.
What does this mean?
I guess I'm now rich and white since I'm familiar with what is and what isn't acceptable workplace behavior. When does my check arrive, and when do you think my skintone will start to change?
It baffles me that people think it's ok to be a bigot anywhere, including the workplace. You don't get a free pass from the bare minimum societal expectation because you're sitting in a cubical.
I know quite a few high profile queer tech leaders that are constantly posting negative things about cis white men on Twitter. Am I expected to work with them when they're clearly not tolerant of me based on my immutable characteristics?
You're not expected to work with anyone you don't work with.
To address the but-for in better faith than it deserves: as a cis white dude, I absolutely do not care what a tech leader says about much of anything. I do care what my co-workers say and believe, but my co-workers are not of a political, religious, or cultural persuasion that implies that I should be killed for being a cis white dude, and I would expect my employer to do something about it if that were the case.
Wouldn't you?
So, let's try again: queer people should be expected to work with those who believe that they should be killed for being queer. Yes or no?
You like painting people into a corner, do you?
Rhetoric question.
> So, let's try again: queer people should be expected to work with those who believe that they should be killed for being queer. Yes or no?
No. But what does this have to do with DEI programs? Is the expectation that people who want to kill queers all of the sudden see the light from a powerpoint provided by HR? Or do people who want to kill queers get so outraged by DEI programs that they quit?
I think, in many workplaces, if you express the serious desire to kill a coworker, you will be fired, regardless if the reason is because of some protected class, or they just hate blue eyed people, or whatever.
However, I'm curious about this: "my co-workers are not of a political, religious, or cultural persuasion that implies I should be killed". If someone is a Muslim from Iran, is that sufficient evidence that they think queer people should be killed? If someone donated to a senator who is against immigration, is it sufficient evidence that they hate immigrants?
The interesting and unstated part of the question is, how do we know what a person believes? What's the threshold of evidence needed to condemn someone as a bigot? And who should be making this call?
Speaking like this reveals that you are part of the subculture obsessed with gender identity. If you talked this way to me at work, I certainly would not want to associate with you. I do not go to work for exposure to this type of non-sense.
The thing is today we know race is pseudoscience and doesn't actually exist. It's an outdated idea that's been proven completely wrong by advances in genome sequencing. The problem is many do not understand this because they don't understand nor care about science, they care more about feelings. That shouldn't be your problem though, because ultimately a racially and sexually charged atmosphere at work creates a toxic environment that makes it hard to work and may even affect your mental health. No one can be forced to tolerate that.
Of course being racist and sexist isn't illegal per se, but companies can use this as grounds for termination. As they should where coworkers are harassed.
This is the contention at hand. If you're going to participate in the discussion, you're going to need to grip it with both hands. I obviously think that it's a ridiculous statement, and nobody should be expected, either socially or contractually, to work with somebody who believes they should be killed. Do you?
I'm a left wing liberal and atheist but many of my friends are far right conservatives. The easiest way to avoid conflict is to not engage. I learned that when I was in high school.
What if they're my boss? How can I trust them to treat me fairly, when they very literally support the genocide of me and my family?
Why do you think that if someone — again, very literally — wants to murder me, that won't affect the way they treat me or discuss me when I'm not around?
I react the same way.
"It's good to be tolerant." "Even of Nazis!?".
I heard a nice proverb the other day: "The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down just to feel its warmth".
Seems pretty human to be afraid of being left out.
The most impressive thing I've seen in this regard has been: https://theoryofenchantment.com/
I like its principles:
1. Treat people like human beings, not political abstractions.
2. Criticize to uplift and empower, never to tear down or destroy.
3. Root everything you do in love and compassion.
I think what we are discussing here is more nuanced in nature. As in someone has an opinion on issue of the day and someone else feels that political issue defines them. It could be homelessness, taxes, or something else.
If someone interrogates me about a political topic I might tell them my opinion or I might tell them I haven't thought about it. Of course someone may get very very angry about the latter.
The most common example of what we’re talking about is LGBTQ+. It’s essentially a mainstream conservative position to try to legislate trans people out of existence, for example. That’s “nuanced” in the same way that slavery was “nuanced” 150 years ago — it‘s clear what’s right and what’s wrong, but there are a lot of bigots going to bat for the wrong side.
In the United States, it isn't illegal to be a Nazi, so I don't know why you would contact the FBI or what you expect they would do about it.
If they want to abide by the civil rights act, then yes. As otherwise those beliefs would serve as a very strong filter against people of certain religious affiliations and national origins.
https://www.creativeboom.com/uploads/articles/a3/a3e652c7fa0...
Violence or threat of violence at the workplace should not be tolerated regardless of motive.
> This question has a yes or no answer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leading_question
"Have you stopped beating your wife?" still remains the gold standard though.
> Leading questions may often be answerable with a yes or no (though not all yes–no questions are leading).
And specifically referencing your example, still from your article:
> Leading questions are distinct from loaded questions, which are objectionable because they contain implicit assumptions[3] (such as "Have you stopped beating your wife?"
That is to say: the question posed is not a leading question, and the article you linked as a citation in fact directly refutes your specific example.
Your article helpfully informs us that your example is a “loaded question,” and we can ask Wikipedia what distinguishes such a question:
> A loaded question is a form of complex question that contains a controversial assumption (e.g., a presumption of guilt).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question
Yet the original question still fails this new test: there is no controversial assumption, and certainly no presumption of guilt.
Unless, of course, you think it preposterous that anyone would hold a belief such as “queer people should be beaten to death for their sexual orientation.” Or that it’s unlikely or even impossible that one’s coworkers would hold such a belief.
Unfortunately, neither of those are exceedingly controversial - it is trivial to find ample evidence of outright calls for the execution of LGBT individuals in the past month, and I leave that as an exercise to the reader.
The most controversial assumption here is that such a person might be a coworker. And frankly, that just doesn’t rise to the level of a “loaded question.”
You just didn’t want to answer.
I don't feel one bit sorry for you.
I also made the mistake thinking they were sheep at first. They talk all about diversity and inclusion and tolerance, but in practice it's precisely the opposite.
What a truly absurd take.
/s
- CEO claims "Most American ladies have been brainwashed"
- CEO says that the company must "control the language" of employees and must not allow employees to self-identify
- CEO argues using racial slurs is fine as long as it's affectionately
- Lawsuits are filed against employees for posting Glassdoor reviews
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that what makes Kraken toxic, is not in fact people asking for consideration, but instead a CEO who thinks that (among other things) women are brainwashed. Maybe not the sort of leadership you wish to align yourself with.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/15/technology/kraken-crypto-...
It's interesting, Coinbase had the exact same issue and it ended with some employees leaving the company. But it doesn't look like the trouble has stopped, now apparently different people seemingly unrelated to the DEI crowd are also unhappy with the way the company is run. See that recent petition for example that lead Brian to react with a bizarre Twitter rant.
Many of these crypto companies seem to have grown way too fast and hired too many new people at once. They failed to integrate them.
Or mine, from 2020: https://jakeseliger.com/2020/12/03/dissent-insiders-and-outs...
To "address" means to speak directly to. The pronouns people declare aren't about how they're addressed, but rather about how they're referred to in the third person by others.
For example, suppose you've declared your pronouns to be he/him. I wouldn't use those pronouns when speaking to you. I would just use "you". The pronouns you declared become relevant when I refer to you while talking to others.
None of this is news to Kraken, whose CEO helped maintain a "more troll-ish than 4chan" group on their Slack. Professionalism simply isn't one of their company values.
At any rate: my point remains --- there's no apparent overlap between Kraken, where unprofessionalism and cultural activism is coming from management, not from activist employees, and progressive organizations, which is what the Intercept article is talking about.
I'd suggest that is weird and unprofessional of them to want. Seems like a weird power play thing in a way gender pronouns don't
Also he’s on point about the loudest people talking about being inclusive usually being the most oblivious.
UK - Oxford https://www.lexico.com/definition/minority Def 1.2
A small group of people within a community or country, differing from the main population in race, religion, language, or political persuasion.
US - Merriam Webster https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/minority Def 3a/b
a part of a population differing from others in some characteristics and often subjected to differential treatment
Bonus points is if you're in a position of power over the people complaining about your behavior.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/15/technology/kraken-crypto-...
The Vice article refers to it and the CEO's tweet:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7zwb7/crypto-exchange-ceo-c...
> In 2019, former Kraken employees posted scathing comments about the company on Glassdoor, a website where workers write anonymous reviews of their employers.
> “Kraken is the perfect allegory for any utopian government ideal,” one reviewer wrote. “Great ideas in theory but in practice they end up very controlling, negative and mistrustful.”
> In response, Kraken’s parent company sued the anonymous reviewers and tried to force Glassdoor to reveal their identities. A court ordered Glassdoor to turn over some names.
Kraken's CEO's notion of "free speech" appears to extend to exactly the periphery of criticism.
I don’t think there’s two sides in that particular cultural war, however, I can’t tell which side you are on. Both would describe their opponent position that way. It almost reads like you wanted your comment to be ambiguous.
Considering most wealth in tech is tied up in equity, and that founders are overwhelmingly white men, it feels oppressive.
Slave morality is my best guess.
> If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.
I've always thought that this is Lincoln describing that his top priority is the Union (though others claim its that he doesn't care about slavery - which I disagree with). Essentially, save the ship by whatever means necessary, then fix the conditions on the ship.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/15/technology/kraken-crypto-...
This is basic PR I would expect from even a college club, much less the CEO of a financial exchange: not getting on Twitter using laughing emojis and crying FUD.
EDIT: oh, it is mentioned: "Someone's likely been sharing internal chat (in breach of their NDA) devoid of context, with a journalist who we expect to publish a hit piece in the next few days. "
A bare minimum of consideration of people who are different from you goes an astoundingly far way.
You don't have to be super-woke or tolerant to simply refer to people correctly.
Similarly, my wife not taking my name upon our marriage was an implicit political act and my mom going by Ms. was as well.
At different points in time either of those acts could have brought ridicule to my wife and mother so that’s not a terribly good standard.
Personally, I view addressing people as they want to be simply polite but let’s not pretend that our view of “correct” isn’t a political act that is potentially outside the current norms.
It turns out the political impact of an action is derived from its deviance from acceptable norms or its reaction.
not needing to have debates about the N-word has got to be the absolute definition of table stakes when it comes to competent management. this is the funniest Twitter thread I've read in ages.
edit: and this is the CEO's pitch for RECRUITING! this is clown shit on the level of Theranos, or when Coinbase was handling all its financial transactions through Mongo.
Secondly, it's never a good look to go on the defensive on an article that isn't even released yet. If the article is bad and unfounded, then he's just bringing more attention to it. If the article is valid, then this just makes it look like he's unwilling to acknowledge or address the problems at his company.
if the information they're sharing isn't true, how does it violate an NDA?
“But not pronouns. Those are sacred.”
“How dare you leave an anonymous opinion on Glassdoor. Here are our lawyers and the government forcing you to be doxxed and the speech to be removed”.
This is a guy who just wants to be shitty to people and not have consequences
https://archive.ph/rFoq9 https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1537105903048183808
What everyone here keeps forgetting is that you just need to look what happened to Netflix. It effectively almost destroyed them from the inside out. If the stock wasn't enough for them to change, they also changed their hiring memo exactly to what Kraken has done to reject the woke nonsense and focus on the product and not the politics.
In case of Netflix it was actually the DEI people that were the first to get laid off after they cut and cancelled the DEI related films and shows that were already signed. Perhaps cementing the fact that it almost ruined them, low viewing numbers and part of the cause for tens of thousands of users cancelling.
I believe that the Kraken CEO is avoiding a situation that just happened to Netflix and it indeed seems to be very reasonable to eliminate 20 bad eggs dragging everything down as a mission focused company and they have made it clear that they won't change any of that.
Sound very fair as the goal is to make money and to continue to pay the salaries of your employees.
As a side note, if this CEO thinks it's okay to toss around "the N-word", then why doesn't he just actually spell it out in Twitter? Or is he just a coward? ;)
> We recently attempted to summarize what the @krakenfx culture has been over the past 11 years, and what we hope it continues to be.
> We had a few heated debates and it turns out we have about 20 people out of 3200 who are totally not on board.
Ok so 20/3200 are "totally not on board" - i.e. they're the group of people supposedly causing trouble that we are going to be discussing in this thread. While tweet #5 lists what this group are annoyed about:
> 5/ What are they upset about?
> * DEI (Silicon Valley's version)
> * pronouns, whether someone can identify as a different race and be allowed to use the N-word
> * whether differences in human sex exist at all
> * being respected and unoffended
> * being "harmed" by "violent" words
So my overall read is that he's taking aim at "woke" culture, and my initial interpretation of the second item was "that non-black people are using the n-word" which tracks with the overall point. I guess it could be interpreted differently ("if you identify as black [these unhappy people] think you should be able to use the n-word") but that isn't really in line with the rest of the tweet.
But my interpretation was, someone's clearly dropping n-bombs and either:
1. only a small minority are vocally upset about it, the rest are ok
2. only a small minority have no qualms with it, the rest are upset
And the scare-quotes in 'being "harmed" by "violent" words' kinda look like he's ridiculing this point. Honestly it reads like a tech-bro version of the usual "these liberal snowflakes need a safe space..." rant to me.
> pronouns, whether someone can identify as a different race and be allowed to use the N-word
Perhaps his argument is that no one should be able to use it at work? I'm not convinced your take is the correct one.
I really do not see how that is much better. The entire statement reeks of privilege.
Not as superficially bad as saying the word, but bad in the sense it is a two-for-one: trivializing the experience of black people and trans people.
I read it as him saying: the argument that "why can’t white people identify as black and say the n-word" is a troll argument, made in bad faith, and is disruptive to work culture and productivity, and people making that argument have no place in their culture.
I arrive at that conclusion because the heading starts "What are they upset about?" They are upset "whether someone can identify as a different race and be allowed to use the N-word." I dont really think someone parading against wokism would in good faith argue that somebody can identify as a different race. They would only do so facetiously. Three tweets above it, his SYN flood DoS analogy makes its pretty clear he is against people derailing good conversation with in bad faith arguments.
As an aside, I'm honestly a little concerned that basically every other commenter arrived at a different conclusion. We are all all over the place. Is our ability to connectively parse tribal language, in a consensual way, really this broken? Is what he wrote really that cryptic or unclear? EDIT: I guess he is the facetious bad actor.
One only needs to look at the history of biblical textualism to see that this is nothing new.
Edit: my interpretation of “they” btw is that “woke” people are upset someone made that argument, which ceo is arguing is a way to shut down good faith argument.
Given your interpretation, is he saying "engaging troll arguments further is a form of disruption"?
It's also possible the n-word people are prowokism but making a twisted not in bad faith argument that everybody saying the word is more inclusive. And meaning it earnestly. This reading seems the least likely.
His more egregious transgression, to me, is going from "If nobody is ever offended, we either don't have enough diversity of thought or we don't have enough transparency in communication" to 'let's sever ties with our 20 most outraged, so there isnt so many offended here.' There's some contradiction between words and actions. If he wants to build a offense-inclusive environment, it needs to include all outrage.
These 20 people should be encouraged to continue as an anti-culture team, as a counterfource and check & balance counter to their culture, albeit in a way that doesnt monopolize internal attention.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/15/technology/kraken-crypto-...
Don’t make convoluted points about discrimination on twitter. It's not suited for such points.
If you need to, draft something deliberate, long-form and edit it several times. Have a close friend review it, edit some more, and link to it from a tweet, but everything about this thread tells me no one gained much by being exposed to it. As a CEO, he should have known better, learn to communicate clearly and in the right forum, and not force you & others in a futile exercise on exegesis.
Neither of those things are true for “trans-racialism.”
Beyond that: I struggle to find almost any good-faith examples of people claiming that they genuinely believe themselves to be “trans-racial.”
[1] https://psychiatry.org/patients-families/gender-dysphoria/wh...
[2] https://www.pcori.org/research-results/2013/examining-health...
But speaking from a more practical standpoint: we know, empirically, that there are a lot of transgender people out in the world. We know that many of them feel much healthier when they are able to transition, in various different ways.
It’s not just an appeal to authority, it’s an appeal to a fairly significant consensus in medical science. Which feels better to me.
We just don’t have any meaningful evidence for “I identify as black so I can say the N-word” being anything other than an annoying troll argument. Or at least, I certainly haven’t seen any.
But if you want to talk about race/gender as social constructs, that’s a whole ‘nother conversation — one very worth having!
My problem is mainly when I think about other, similar conditions, like elderly people who think they are 8 years old or patients who think they are celebrities. I'm not asked to think of them in the manner that they think of themselves. Another example: a teenage girl with body dysmorphia identifies as obese, but you'd have to be evil to go along with that dysmorphia. It just seems to me that this one case is different but I can't point to a good reason why.
In the 90s and 00s one of the arguments was that if you legalized same-sex marriage then bestiality would be next. These arguments are just a new flavor of that so that people can still be jerks to transgender people.
Why can’t you just… make it a new reality?
Perhaps this is partly because I used to be a biologist and worked in the medical research field for a while (before pivoting to software development to get out of academia), so I have a very critical eye when it comes to the studies that proponents of this set of beliefs tend to use to support their arguments.
Trans people (as far as I know) don't claim that their genetics are different from reality, but that their experienced gender is different from their genetically determined one.
I don't know if that's enough to consider her "bad faith", though. If you genuinely did "feel black" despite having white parents, it would certainly be tempting to at least withhold information about your parents.
White identifying as black should have no impact on day to day life, as we strive as a society to not discriminate on race.
Male identifying as female does have an impact on day to day life, since we do allow for some amount of gender based discrimination.
So the solution is “either make all bathrooms, etc unisex or take trans peoples issues seriously.” But most conservatives obviously want neither.
edit: here's a source: https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-rise-of-androgyny-chan...
Of course, the conservatives approach it from an entirely different point of view to the feminists, for whom this a fundamental women's rights issue. But it's interesting how they can all reach roughly the same conclusion from entirely different sets of principles.
^That framework and the hypocrisy it breeds is honestly 99% of the humor on The Daily Show and the Fox News knock-offs of The Daily Show (Greg Guttfield etc.)
And since racial slurs carry much different, and much more charged connotations than gendered pronouns do, trying to draw analogies here seems almost deliberately designed to generate argument rather than discussion.
So if a transwoman goes on a rant about how women are all crazy bitches, she doesn't get to justify it by saying she's a woman. She can reasonably ask others to treat her as a woman. But it isn't a get out of jail free card.
Now for a harder one. Why philosophically is being trans OK, but it is not OK for a white to identify as a minority and then receive preferential treatment as one? What if the white is detectably a minority, but so little that nobody would notice if they didn't make an issue of it?
The idea that a libertarian modeled company is ruling by fiat, and issues a decree telling people they cant ask to be referred to by nicknames/pronouns, is somewhat absurd, and he doesnt appear to see the irony.
To prevent this confusion, should have said nothing at all.
> That same day, he invited employees to join him in a Slack channel called “debate-pronouns” where he suggested that people use pronouns based not on their gender identity but their sex at birth, according to conversations seen by The Times. He shut down replies to the thread after it became contentious.
> Mr. Powell reopened discussion on Slack the next day to ask why people couldn’t choose their race or ethnicity. He later said the conversation was about who could use the N-word, which he noted wasn’t a slur when used affectionately.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/15/technology/kraken-crypto-...
What's the point of being a CEO then /s
I think you and many others are misinterpreting what he wrote. He's not defending the use of the N-word and I've never, ever seen anyone use language remotely close to that in internal communications. I think the example he gave is the ridiculous scenario of someone identifying as a different race so they can have permission to use the N word.
I think people are getting outraged over literally nothing with this story, I've found the vast majority of people working at Kraken to be perfectly reasonable and respectful to each other. I don't understand why everyone on HN/Twitter is so eager to get outraged over stories like this when they have so little detail and context.
Mostly it comes across as unhinged and cocaine-fueled gibberish.
I hope his communication skills aren't this bad in real meetings.