Follow-up question: do you think of it as a good thing or a bad thing? My guess is that either way, that's perfectly fine with them. They want employees who embrace this mentality, and do not want employees who would be upset by it.
By all means, talk among your friends circle after work at the bar. But I don't have a lot of interest in engaging with a lot of political conversation that I may or may not agree with.
But I think if a company nowadays wanted to have the same stance, they could just nonchalantly say “we have the same policy as coinbase and basecamp regarding politics at work”.
If it is used as a weapon to prevent discussing of topics that management doesn't want discussed, while promoting topics they like, it becomes simply a policy of control.
As an example, recently the topic of remote work has become of interest in political debates.
In other words, if people of a particular subgroup of the population were to complain that the company's policies or culture were harmful to them, that might get shut down based on this policy. An example I could see happening is a company with a handful of Deaf employees who ask in the #general Slack channel that anyone running a Zoom meeting could please enable captioning when setting up the meetings. If few people honor this request, maybe the complaints escalate and the Americans with Disabilities Act gets mentioned. Suddenly it's "political" and the Deaf folks are causing a distraction. But really, they are just asking to be put on a more even playing field so that they can actually participate and contribute to the work, but if the wrong person got their feelings hurt, suddenly it's a "political" issue and no one can talk about it, and before you know it, all the Deaf employees have left for greener pastures, and now maybe there's no more "politics" in the shared channels, but the company is worse off for letting themselves become a hostile work environment for those folks.
I do understand your general point that it can be difficult to draw lines. I just think that issues like the one you raised would be handled through HR if a friendly "hey can we turn on captioning" message didn't get enough support. I've also never heard of anyone getting their feelings hurt about zoom captions.
But you're right that the people at the top will be the ones deciding what is deemed "political" and what is not. If their definitions don't match up with what the remaining employees think, there could be issues. I haven't heard of any drama since the original incident. Has there been any?
It seems like a sensible rule to me.
I have zero interest in politics, if I had to mentally filter dozens of lines of chat about XYZ political topic when I'm trying to find something technical that would bother me. It wouldn't offend me but it would have a negative affect on productivity due to spending more time finding things.
If a group of folks with a common interest want to talk about politics privately that seems reasonable to me. That would be comparable to going out for lunch in a non-remote setting, chatting in the parking lot or an empty conference room during a break.
I guess my take is that if you want to have a truly personal blog or social media channels, it should be as anonymized as possible. (Which has pros and cons.) Certainly, there are a ton of things I wouldn't write on a public channel even if I weren't technically violating any company policy because they would bite me.
When I was an analyst, I would absolutely not write anything about a CxO that differed from what I would put in a research report.
Are you concerned that if too many companies take this approach, it will become the norm, like it was before about 10 years ago, and that then there will be attempts by politicians to codify it into law?
The question I suppose really is to what extent society (through the agency of the law and elected representatives) can police (or more precisely in this case to prevent the policing of) private forums like company internal communication systems. I'd argue that simply being privately owned does not put up a perfect barrier to society, and that society does have a legitimate interest in how such forums are run.
There seems to be this idea in the US that any form of tyranny and oppression is ok, so long as it is not the government that is doing it.
This was the norm until recently. Would you say that these politicians (who are they, by the way?) had already won during that time?
As for companies not talking about politics, I don't care what companies have to say. They're the mouthpieces of their owners. As can be seen in this case, when the owner dictates that the company doesn't participate in politics unrelated to its business. Should companies have the right to speak about arbitrary subjects, but not the right to silence? How can an employee feel like they'll be treated fairly if they don't agree with the company line (issued yesterday) about apricots in Africa?
I'd go farther and say that the list of subjects that a company opines in public about is the same as the list of subjects an employee can feel like they're not free to have an opinion on that anyone at their job could hear about without risking their livelihood.
The fact that DHH goes on and on about politics in his personal life but keeps it away from the company is a positive indicator that it's not opinions that are being suppressed, but opinions about business-unrelated political matters on internal systems.
edit: I feel that a priority for any sort of socialism, or civilization for that matter, is to figure out how to work productively with people you don't like or agree with. And psychologically, not being able to cooperate with people who differ from you is an issue of autonomy and boundaries.
Of course we should balance this with the needs of the business in keeping company communications 'on topic' as it were, and to avoid damaging professional relationships.
This was voluntary, and there is no evidence that it was anything but internal.
Do you have something that would point to a specific politician or party being involved?
As a counterpoint, the liberalization and allowing of corporate lobbying and speech has made it much easier to manipulate political agendas, and remove agency from the population.