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Comment by aeturnum | Hacker News Reader

This is the problem with "no politics at work": work has political salience. Politics concerns regulation of the world and work happens in the world.

Whenever an executive starts complaining[1] about how politics is impacting their workplace I see management incompetence. Politics exists. It exists for everyone. If your company is having an unusually difficult time getting work done in a given political environment, the conditions that are causing that probably have more to do with the company environment than politics writ large.

Prohibition is always a largely ineffective policy. People have feelings about the world. If you can't find a way to make space for those feelings somehow they will make their own space, often at the least convenient moment.

[1] Most recently this was Kraken CEO Jesse Powell

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Particularly notable here since Coinbase is famously a "mission-focused" company [1]:

> Coinbase’s mission is to create an open financial system for the world. This means we want to use cryptocurrency to bring economic freedom to people all over the world.

Selling geolocation data to ICE definitely detracts from that mission. Whoops!

[1] https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-is-a-mission-focused-comp...

Hah, does anyone actually believe a company's "mission statement"?

> We act as #OneCoinbase, putting the company’s goals ahead of any particular team or individual goals.

The thing I hate about this fake corporate mission is there is absolutely no need for the lie.

Just be honest, hey we started this company, the founders will have disproportionate returns because we were first and control the equity power structure, you will work for us and make less money - even in the event of an exit. Sometimes we will fire you. We will make mistakes. Lets be adults.

Instead its: "In our supreme nobility we sacrifice everything at the alter of the almighty cause, and so should you. Follow in our virtuous foot steps. Ask not what your company can do for you, but what you can do for your company!" ...

The only honest mission statement is, "we exist to make as much money as possible"

And until shareholder supremacy is no longer a thing, anything else is a lie

Support your favorite B-corp, folks

Exactly this. I don't understand why companies that exist to make money feel the need to be dishonest about their desire to make money.

Because far too many potential employees still believe in a just world.

Capitalism exists to eat all else. Every class has its own destiny.

"we exist to make as much money as possible".... for ourselves.

You plebes should just be thankful that you have jobs.

And it better be your favorite B-corp, too, we pay your f'ing salaries.

Not exactly right anymore. Check out https://www.unepfi.org/publications/investment-publications/...

"Large institutional investors are, in effect, “Universal Owners”, as they often have highly-diversified and long-term portfolios that are representative of global capital markets. Their portfolios are inevitably exposed to growing and widespread costs from environmental damage caused by companies. They can positively influence the way business is conducted in order to reduce externalities and minimise their overall exposure to these costs. Long-term economic wellbeing and the interests of beneficiaries are at stake. Institutional investors can, and should, act collectively to reduce financial risk from environmental impacts."

Also https://theshareholdercommons.com/ / https://engine1.com/ that are working to embed this into corporate DNA

> The thing I hate about this fake corporate mission is there is absolutely no need for the lie.

I get what you're saying, and I dislike the deception also, but there is an intention and a purpose behind it.

The mission statement is for recruiting and retention. At a good company, it has some truth to it. Coinbase management understood that companies are supposed to have mission statements, and they may have even understood why. They just didn't understand that mission statements are supposed to be true.

(Obviously a lot of other companies don't get that part either.)

> Ask not what your company can do for you, but what you can do for your company!

I once had a CEO literally drop that line in to an email, after berating the dev team for failing to hit an impossible deadline, that he'd pulled forwards over the vehement objections of the VP of Development.

It was the most utterly bizarre, and divorced from reality, email I think I've ever seen from leadership.

I guess that shareholders. If a company lies on its mission how can anyone invest on it?

I would go as far as saying that company's "mission statements" are in fact the inverse of what they do.

It always portrays the image they would like to have and by default do not, otherwise there would be no reason to communicate it so prominently.

To me, that's a very political mission.

it is a very, very intensely political mission. it's phrased almost entirely in political terms.

When I see that it always seems to me that the real issue is the CEO has made a conscious choice to pick profit over doing the right thing, and wants employees who dislike this choice to leave. Which is essentially bad for society and why I think most firms in our economy should be co-operatively managed.

I think you're giving them a bit too much credit. I suspect that is what they think they are doing - but IMO they're just being ineffectual. The real villains manage this like any other aspect of company culture. Exxon doesn't ban talking about politics and it hasn't crippled their operations!

>Exxon doesn't ban talking about politics and it hasn't crippled their operations!

Probably because it's not happening there to nearly the extent it happens at big tech companies, partly due to the culture of older companies and partly due to the company attracting a certain type of morally agnostic person. Exxon did not release a statement following Friday's supreme court decision like most tech companies did and did not respond to comment when asked about it.

> When I see that it always seems to me that the real issue is the CEO has made a conscious choice to pick profit over doing the right thing

Just going to toss my hat in the ring and say that I think selling data to ICE falls on the right half of the right/wrong spectrum. Not everyone agrees with your specific take on right and wrong. Sometimes those discussions shouldn't happen in the workplace.

Can you expand on why you think this is a good thing?

Not the OP and don’t agree at all but “a strong border is central to a strong state, which is central to a functioning state” is a logical argument.

Belief that statehood is evil or that free immigration is a natural right are fairly out of the mainstream. Given that tools that support enforcing the opposite is mainstream.

It would be the height of irony for a crypto company to adopt this stance.

Crypto deals with digital transactions. There's essentially no geographically relevant scarcity.

Migration impacts all kinds of things which are intertwined with physical scarcities and order- community service funding, housing needs and so forth. Having an orderly process for migration isn't at all related to cryptocurrency; many aren't actually private at all, and for the most part merely allow control over the supply to not be controlled by a central agency like the federal reserve.

Being opposed to unlawful migration would be the equivalent of opposing people generating coins off the chain then forcing them in, creating more than were actually generated by mining. (I may have butchered the analogy, hopefully it at least makes some sense as to why they may not see it as an ironic or hypocritical stance).

This a stupid statement thats NEVER been TRUE. No one state has ever existed in utopia its own vacume without immigrants. its a complete falasy without any basis in reality, much like religion, its pushed by the conservatives as a way to maintain repression.

ICE is just a continuation of slavery. If Central/South Americans didnt continue to be leveraged by EVERYONE in the economy then there would be no american dream for them quest over the boarder for.

Countries are defined by their borders, and governments are perfectly justified in using force to control access to their territory. The fact that there is a pathological unwillingness in some industries to comply with immigration law (in collaboration with some politicians and administrators) and a willingness to externalise the costs of their "cheap" labor might have given you the impression that this state of affairs was inevitable or necessary, but it is just a mechanism for corrupt businessmen and opportunistic politicians to gain monetary and political advantage at the expense of citizens, as well as technological progress (an endless supply of unskilled and semi-skilled labor below the market rate removes the incentive to invest and innovate). Factors like birthright citizenship and chain migration further exacerbate these problems.

You think people shouldn't discuss this topic (whether to sell data to ICE) at work, but that they should end up on your side of the decision magically? Am I understanding this comment right?

That is arguably the CEO's responsibility, and I'm not saying that as a defense, that is a defect of the companies we build. If we don't want CEOs that choose profit over community, then you have to build a society that rewards that, and companies that make it possible.

It seems more like an ethical concern (mishandling customer data) than a political concern.

Ethical concerns should be raised at work, but I believe politics at work should be avoided.

There's no such thing as a group of people who agree about politics. They only think they agree until enough details start coming out.

The question is whether these differences are handled respectfully and people learn from each other, or whether they see it as a moral battle and end up hating each other. In the current cultural climate, the latter seems more likely. And I see no benefit from carrying that into the workplace.

How can you possibly claim to separate ethics from politics in a work context? The two are hopelessly intertwined.

Ethics in the workplace is about your behavior while carrying out your job duties. For instance: lying to a customer to make a sale and hit your quota is unethical.

Politics and ethics can intersect, for instance, if you are writing some graphics software and someone realizes it would make a great missle guidance system. Some people might feel that's perfectly patriotic and be happy to provide it to the DoD; others might never want to work on a weapon. Political opinions lead to divergent ethical codes.

But here with Coinbase it doesn't seem to be an intersection at all. It's unethical regardless of political persuasion.

While you are correct, this is the logic that is used to guilt-slash-shame folks who do not want to get involved into getting involved. It is one of the many sources of intense polarization that we suffer from today, and it forces people to take uninformed stances on things that makes them little more than mindless footsoldiers for causes that need a nuanced touch.

Either way, the Coinbase employees are now involved with this. They helped build this, they are in this. The discussions may be silenced but "politics" isn't. It's not possible to not be political. This is a great demonstration of that.

> it forces people to take uninformed stances on things

There are lots of ways to unproductively engage with politics - and I agree that we live in an age of highly visible unproductive engagement. However, banning engagement makes it official company policy that every interaction with politics be uninformed. "It was hard so we gave up" is just not a good sign for your leadership.

> I agree that we live in an age of highly visible unproductive engagement. However, banning engagement makes it official company policy that every interaction with politics be uninformed.

Not necessarily - I don't think engagement is particularly informative. A ban, even a widely flouted one, gives people permission to disengage, and might be valuable for that reason alone (in the same way that e.g. people have argued that monasteries and convents created a good place for asexuals in society, even when their rules were widely flouted).

Yes one of the main responsibilities of government is to govern the interaction between different entities within the community. If you move then to law, and consider law an arm of government and politics, the vast, vast, vast majority of law is about industry and commercial concerns. By contrast, individuals are actually the governments least concern, and that bias often shows very clearly and even proudly in policymaking.

This is why it's critical to boycott companies whose politics don't match yours.

It's not really political at all. The government is going to get the data one way or another. Or shut down Coinbase and be done with it. It's the survival instinct of a company playing a very dangerous game.

Why is it dangerous?

Can you translate that? You're saying leave politics out of work, leave your politics at home, right? Or are you saying the opposite, just bring your personal politics so the workplace?

They're saying neither; they're saying that politics is inextricable from life, and that work is part of life. You can't extract politics from work any more than you can extract personal life from work. People aren't robots.

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