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There is a lot of value in removing political activists from your company, and so it's worth paying them to leave. Aside from the combative toxic environment t

• ryanmarsh 6y ago
  True, hyper-political people of any persuasion are generally toxic. Trust and alignment are essential to performance.
• deleted 6y ago
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• stateofnounion 6y ago
  > They're just poison. This. And like another commenter pointed out, it's not unique to one side or the other. Anyone who defines their entire existence in this left/right dichotomy is suffering from media-induced mental illness.
  • blaser-waffle 6y ago
    Pepsi and Coke only want you to think about Pepsi and Coke, because it means they only compete against 1 rival, instead of Fanta, Sprite, RC Cola, Faygo, etc.
    • fakedang 6y ago
      I think Coke wouldn't mind us thinking about Sprite, as Pepsi doesn't mind us thinking about Fanta.
      • fooker 6y ago
        All those were acquisitions, iirc
        • fakedang 6y ago
          Not like they don't make money for Coke/Pepsi post acquisition.
• ffggvv 6y ago
  sounds like my experience at google
• PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  In my experience, the vast majority of employees don’t want their workplace to become a political battleground. Even those who occasionally discuss politics at work and are mature enough to behave like adults about it. It’s tempting to think of this in terms of Democrats vs Republicans or right vs left, but that’s not really the domain of the most problematic employees. The most problematic employees are the ones who have given up on the notion of reasonable debate or disagreement and instead have become convinced that the other side is committing acts so terrible that fighting them at every juncture is the only acceptable thing to do. Strangely enough, the “other side” isn’t just far-right or fad-left people, it becomes centrists, or people who don’t vote, or people who don’t want to engage in politics at work. When you’ve reached the point where a small handful of employees are fomenting outrage at their company for not putting a BLM statement on the company Twitter account, for example, the situation has arrived at a “with us or against us” false dichotomy. Generally, the only way to win with politics at the office is to not play. However, when one side decides that not playing is equivalent to being evil, everyone is forced to play. When everyone is forced to play by a handful of disgruntled employees, everyone loses. Paying to remove these people from a company makes a lot of sense. If you don’t do something to remove them, the people who are sick of being dragged into political debates at work will slowly diffuse out of the company. The hyper-political employees are a loud minority, but the people who just want to do their jobs and remain professional are very much more common. Don’t let the tail wag the dog.
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • thu2111 6y ago
    Paying to remove these people from a company makes a lot of sense I think most business owners would say this is not at all sensible. If someone is a troublemaker you don't normally pay them to leave. You fire them. Brian is being very generous here, almost inexplicably so except for the fact that they're based in the Bay Area. Most CEOs would tackle it in two phases: 1. Tell people they may not attempt to bring social activism into the work place. 2. Fire anyone who keeps doing it. Payments wouldn't enter the picture!
• Alex3917 6y ago
  > There is a lot of value in removing political activists from your company, and so it's worth paying them to leave. Your company should be 100% political activists, but (at least during work hours) they should be focused on advancing the mission of your organization. Even within activist groups you have the exact same problem that Joe is talking about, e.g. at some point in the 90s Adbusters went from lobbying against advertising to just generally supporting any leftist cause. And that's why every highway (except in Vermont, Alaska, Hawaii, and Maine) is still lined with billboards 25+ years later. The only way for an organization to accomplish its mission is to actually focus on solving the specific problem they're trying to solve, not to get distracted by trying to fix every random problem that exists in the world.
  • sieabahlpark 6y ago
    > Your company should be 100% political activists... You don't really have a company at that point anymore.
  • maxwelljoslyn 6y ago
    For an organization wishing to preserve its specific mission, I wonder if one positive step would be clearly defining the point at which the organization would say "mission accomplished" and pack itself up. Riffing on your example, suppose an anti-ad organization said, "We want to achieve a goal of 20/50 states banning highway ads. Once we get there, our organization will be wound down [in some way.]" There are reasons that might work badly, though. Without the org continuing to generate political pressure, public awareness, or money, the originally-achieved goal state could backslide. But ... change is inevitable. Perhaps at that point you try and get the org back together,; if you can, you can, otherwise you accept the world has moved on. Easier said than done.
  • nullc 6y ago
    Marin County California has banned billboards since 1935.
    • colejohnson66 6y ago
      Individual counties can ban billboards, such as Marin County, but they’re not banned state wide AFAIK.
• deleted 6y ago
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• cactus2093 6y ago
  I saw this firsthand in May/June in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing. It was a pretty small company and there was one employee in particular who was very much an activist, though a number of employees of course felt very strongly about what was going on. The company genuinely tried to do their best to support them, encouraged this person to take a week off for mental health and from my perspective was making a real effort to be understanding and support this person and also to express support for the BLM movement as a whole. There was one manager in particular who really tried to do the right thing in supporting this employee. The manager convinced the marketing folks to make a pro-BLM post on LinkedIn, but then this employee got upset that it had not gone far enough and was too weakly worded. A good friend of the employee and former coworker at this company actually called out the company in the comments of the post on LinkedIn for not taking a stronger stand. The manager also convinced the executives to have the company donate money, and this kicked off a broader giving back initiative where they wanted everyone to vote on causes that the company could support in various ways. This caused even more backlash, because it had now lost site of the BLM focus and become a broader thing. By the end, the company was just cluelessly walking on eggshells with no idea how to not make things worse in their attempts at support. The employee was extremely frustrated, struggled to regain any level of respect for the company and stopped really performing in their job and ended up leaving a couple months later. I still very much believe nobody was in the wrong here, nobody involved was a bad person or even an insensitive person. It just proved to be very difficult to navigate this situation, there were too many ways for it to go wrong and the company didn't handle everything absolutely perfectly and so they just made things worse. Anyway, in the end I'm very convinced that everyone, including the activist employee, would have been much happier under the model as stated by Coinbase. And even if this person left or had never joined this company to begin with because of that policy, the result would have been very similar in the end, but without the weeks of frustration and stress and lost productivity all around.
  • zapdrive 6y ago
    Let me guess the gender of the said employee. You know what, never mind.
  • sushisource 6y ago
• ojnabieoot 6y ago
  I suspect your comment isn't really being offered in good faith, but can you name a specific example of a company where a coworker did one of these things: > leak documents, raise alarms about operations they don't understand, and generally draw the company into litigation and it was actually a case of misguided political activism rather than legitimate whistleblowing? I suppose maybe in slaughterhouses or animal testing laboratories, but definitely not with tech. > In a highly sensitive market like crypto, you don't want to gain unnecessary regulatory attention, and activists like this will be the first to testify against the company with their biased interpretation of internal operations. It is very difficult to not read this as "sometimes crypto companies need to break the law to make that cheddar, and you really don't want any of these radical 'companies should obey the law' activists getting in your way."
  • thaeli 6y ago
    It's a very minority view on HN, but important to keep in mind that there are quite a few people who consider what Snowden did "a case of misguided political activism".
  • brippalcharrid 6y ago
    Companies that are in industries which generally attract the attention of regulators because they're doing something new, exciting and potentially disruptive won't want to create unnecessary scope for controversy that will lead to a regulator feeling the need to clamp down on them (this shouldn't happen if the controversy is unrelated to the regulated activities, but people are irrational, and it does). Conversely, an activist employee will know that they will have a far more effective platform to spread their message if they do it in an environment that has more regulatory exposure, and as a result greater potential for media coverage.
  • DenisM 6y ago
    > I suspect your comment isn't really being offered in good faith Assume good faith https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • blaser-waffle 6y ago
• awb 6y ago
  You could reasonably extend this to your friends and neighbors as well. Growing up, politics was private outside of the family dinner table. Any dedication to an injustice or a good cause was done through donating or volunteering. No yard signs, no shouting, no blaming. I understand that dramatic actions bring attention, but I just hope that we can start focusing more on doing our own part and leading by example rather than preaching and focusing on how much others are doing. This goes for everyone on the modern political spectrum.
  • jaywalk 6y ago
    Social media is the root of the problem here. All you have to do is make a post promoting the cause, and then you get a flood of little dopamine hits with each like.
    • awb 6y ago
      Social media is certainly an accelerant, but these issues of leading through blame rather than leading through example have been prevalent in our worst leaders for a long time.
      • int_19h 6y ago
        American politics, at least, has been very partisan at times long before social media showed up. Much of 19th century was like that, even outside of the Civil War. That recent period you referenced, when politics was mostly private and considered embarrassing to bring up, is actually more abnormal than normal in that regard. IMO, it just indicates a period of time after major political issues get decisively resolved one way or the other, and a new issue hasn't come up yet (or, more likely, hasn't come to the boiling point yet).
  • bcrosby95 6y ago
    > Growing up, politics was private outside of the family dinner table. Any dedication to an injustice or a good cause was done through donating or volunteering. No yard signs, no shouting, no blaming. It's a nice thought, but my mother in law has original presidential campaign pins and bumper stickers from as far back as the early 60s.
• t0mmyb0y 6y ago
  Coinbase is owned by the federal gov.