A few years ago there was a controversy where it turned out some staff at Basecamp had been passing around a list of customer names they thought funny. So gutter highschool humour.

Apparently the people or person who did that had left some time ago, someone else found said file and made a big stink, leadership apologised, but not in the right way(?), there was some expressed "outrage". Then the leadership, obviously out of frustration, said no more politics allowed at work and offered redundancy to anyone who disagreed.

Seems all forgotten now which is good because the whole thing was dumb. Someone thought having the surname Wang was funny. Ok it's childish but they left already so who gives a shit? One side asking that we all be outraged by this behaviour, sorry no. Another side saying employees can't talk about politics, sorry that's stupid.

Anyway, that was my remote reading of the story, I'm sure I missed the important nuances. It shouldn't have been a public thing anyway imo.

Probably a reference to employee complaints about a list of "funny" customer names and the culture surrounding that list, the CEO in response trying to flatly shut down all discussion of the subject (after having previously encouraged internal discussion of other politics), and in response to that tone-deaf treatment more than one-third of the company's employees deciding to quit.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/3/22418208/basecamp-all-hand...

Employees came forward that 37 kept a list of "funny" customer names - some offensive and racist. Instead of fixing the problem Fried and DHH banned employees talking about it. Later it came out DHH was a contributor to the list. https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22406673/basecamp-politic...