In the following weeks 1/3 of their employees left as a direct result of this.
I lived in Chicago at the time and other companies scooped those jumping ship up really quick. https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/4/22419512/basecamp-politica...
They were on the verge of mutiny, and they managed to stop it just in time.
1/3 of the company actually quit because they were discouraged from talking about biden/trump/jan 6/etc on slack? If that were happening I could see why a ban would be beneficial. That sh*t's distracting and there's never a winning side to the argument.
I mean it's supposed to be a company, not a political cult.
Edit: After more reading, sounds like the policy was sparked by an employee reviving threads about Basecamp's diversity, inclusion, etc.
It was handed down by public announcement with zero discussion or warning.
If my boss pulled nonsense like that I would consider quitting too.
Company leadership deciding that political discussion/debate is too distracting to go in the remote team's official communication platform seems totally reasonable. They didn't say you can't talk about it with anyone at all, they just said don't do it in the chat rooms that are used by everyone at the company.
I'm not sure when the norm changed but it had to be very recent, I've never worked in a place where it was acceptable to debate politics in a company-wide platform.
Obviously, corporations have zero incentive to improve the society as a whole, it's easier to just tell everyone either they get along or they're fired.
So I smile and wave towards everyone. They'll never know I'm whatever-ist, and I silently vote for politicians that take away rights of certain social groups I'm prejudiced about.
> Around 2009, Basecamp customer service representatives began keeping a list of names that they found funny. More than a decade later, current employees were so mortified by the practice that none of them would give me a single example of a name on the list. One invoked the sorts of names Bart Simpson used to use when prank calling Moe the Bartender: Amanda Hugginkiss, Seymour Butz, Mike Rotch.
> Many of the names were of American or European origin. But others were Asian, or African, and eventually the list — titled “Best Names Ever” — began to make people uncomfortable. What once had felt like an innocent way to blow off steam, amid the ongoing cultural reckoning over speech and corporate responsibility, increasingly looked inappropriate, and often racist.
> Discussion about the list and how the company ought to hold itself accountable for creating it led directly to CEO Jason Fried announcing Tuesday that Basecamp would ban employees from holding “societal and political discussions” on the company’s internal chat forums. The move, which has sparked widespread discussion in Silicon Valley, follows a similar move from cryptocurrency company Coinbase last year.
As other employees said-
> Employees say the founders’ memos unfairly depicted their workplace as being riven by partisan politics, when in fact the main source of the discussion had always been Basecamp itself.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22406673/basecamp-politic...
Trying to act like this was simply a "no politics" rule, when it was actually a "don't criticize the leaders of our company" rule, show they either weren't paying attention to this when it happened or that have an agenda to push.
I also heard that they offered very generous severance packages(6 months salary), so there may have been other factors contributing to the exodus.