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A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company
- thoughtstheseus 6y agoThe broader trend here is that power is becoming more concentrated in companies and institutions and away from individuals and local groupings. These differences in beliefs, ethics, morals, etc. are difficult to work through in any large grouping of people. The array of approaches to government is an example of trying to solve this coordination problem.
- synaesthesisx 6y agoYou can be “mission-focused” while still acknowledging human rights. Acknowledging that black lives matter goes beyond politics.
- t0mmyb0y 6y agoFuck you coinbase. You are just a piece of shit federal government cover company.
- t0mmyb0y 6y agoWhy would this stance be surprising? A company managed by the federal gov cannot take stances on politics. Coinbase was started and is run by the feds.
- nameless912 6y ago[citation needed]
- areichert 6y ago> “I’m worried that the severance package was too good” Yeah... I'm genuinely curious how many people actually quit over the "apolitical" stance, vs employees that were just unhappy with the job in general and took this convenient opportunity to leave with a pretty sweet deal.
- anoncareer0212 6y agoThat employee is distanced enough from the idea that people would genuinely want to leave that I kinda laugh when I read their quote. COBRA alone would eat up most of the severance. Either people managed to get through a _whole interview process_ in a week, or they're fine with the idea of being jobless during the worst economy in 12 years, or they price the benefit of not being there fairly high. Which then leads us to how the whole argument is blinkered. It reduces decisions to a cost benefit analysis where a significant part of the benefit doesn't have a market price. Then, it questions if the benefit was too large, but by definition the arguer is still at the company and thus believes the unpricable part of the benefit isn't worth enough enough to leave.
- ahelwer 6y agoSoftware seems to be doing okay, jobs-wise. The number of recruiters showing up in my inbox hasn't changed. I think health insurance is included in the severance.
- anoncareer0212 6y agoIt isn't, the generosity is allowing you to pick up COBRA
- shuckles 6y agoI believe COBRA is available for up to 36 months after your employment ends in California by law. As a result, I don’t know how to read “6 months COBRA” from the excerpt of the severance email besides “we will pay 6 months of employer premiums.”
- anoncareer0212 6y agoCOBRA means employees paying the employer premium, by guaranteeing COBRA, an employer is saying "We won't stop paying the health insurance company for _everybody else's insurance_, so you'll still have someone to pay" - it's a great PR jiu jitsu move, I didn't realize until this thread how confusing it is - I'm only familiar with it because sadly I had to sunset a company in California.
- dmode 6y agoIf I had another offer, I would also take severance over Coinbase's "apolitical" stance
- beervirus 6y agoIf I had an equivalent offer, I would take the severance (4-6 months paid leave) plus that offer in a heartbeat, regardless of any political statement or non-statement.
- x87678r 6y agoA few years ago when bitcoin was going up in value so much Coinbase was one of the best places to be, now I dont see much upside for the company, I imagine a bunch of people there are happy to leave.
- bioinformatics 6y agoI am not a mathematician, so don't quote me, but it seems 5% are happy to leave.
- raiyu 6y agoAs they make money on each trade of Bitcoin they are doing quite well financially even if Bitcoin prices aren't shooting to the moon.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- generationP 6y ago"We are the 5%" will make a great political slogan.
- aksss 6y agoYeah, that was already taken decades ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-Percent_Nation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-Percent_Nation
- haukilup 6y agoWith a severance package that good, I could be tempted to take this as an opportunity to switch jobs. I suspect that many of these employees aren't motivated by politics, but instead by money.
- PragmaticPulp 6y agoFor reference, the severance package was 4 months of salary for employees with <3 years of tenure, or 6 months of salary for >=3 years of tenure at Coinbase. The severance also included 6 months of health insurance. (Source: https://www.coindesk.com/coinbase-severance-apolitical-mission https://www.coindesk.com/coinbase-severance-apolitical-missi... ) What percentage of employees at Coinbase are actively interviewing for other jobs at any given time? 5%? If someone has one foot out the door already, taking a bonus equivalent to half a year of your salary is a cherry on top of changing jobs. I'm surprised only 5% of the company took this opportunity.
- barmstrong 6y agoWe tried to make it clear to employees that the package was only intended for folks who weren't aligned with this new direction. If folks were interviewing elsewhere, or just feeling burned out, and wanted to take it, but they were still aligned with the direction of mission focused, then we discouraged them from taking it. Of course, people can always lie about their intentions, but we're counting on the honor system preventing most of that.
- jiuahweruihawi 6y agoThis is what I love about Hacker News - it's the only forum I've ever read where the topic of discussion frequently shows up in the comments. Brian, I've never given two shits about crypto, but this announcement seriously increases my desire to work at Coinbase. You have far more support than will dare to speak up, and I hope more companies start following your lead.
- newusr7h2 6y agoI hope they provide some follow-up data on how many people took that package. My assumption is that it will be a small group. I think a lot of other companies could learn from the outcome.
- codezero 6y agoThis assumes all roles at the company are equally able to exit the company in the midst of a global pandemic and find opportune work with the same growth opportunities, salary, and locality.
- thedevil 6y agoOne thought: If you see a resume with Coinbase until October 2020, that's probably someone who prefers political activism in the workplace. That might be seen in a positive or negative light, depending on your stance. I personally am afraid to associate myself too publicly with a political stance, lest I be wrong and/or the environment changes.
- Jtsummers 6y agoThat's if people even remember. Which means maybe the next 6-12 months, and after that it'll be forgotten.
- sroussey 6y agoOr it might mean a hostile work environment. Who knows.
- paulgb 6y agoOr they joined during the crypto euphoria era and have been disappointed by the general state of the market, and decided it was a good deal to give them some runway to find something that excites them more.
- xyzzy_plugh 6y agoAlternatively, if you see a resume with Coinbase through 2020-2021, that person probably prefers the opposite, which may also be seen in a positive or negative light, depending on your stance.
- libria 6y agoIt signals that a person did not want to be politically active at their workplace enough to lose/quit their job. I think that says nothing of a persons political views and is just self-preservation or even indifference. Hiring would have to make some very tenuous assumptions to consider that a signal.
- jiuahweruihawi 6y ago
- asdfman123 6y agoI mean, I usually look for another job every year or two. If someone is also willing to pay me lavish amounts of money to do that and take a trip across Europe in between, please sign me up.
- rllearneratwork 6y agowhy? typically RSUs/signing bonus vest over 4 years period
- emidln 6y agoAt least in finance (I realize HN is FAANG/SV focused), the signing bonus typically vests in 12-18 months. Finance also offers cash bonuses instead of RSUs. Finance also typically has paid leave built into the contract as a noncompete.
- Judgmentality 6y agoTypically the signing bonus vests over 12 months in tech, and the RSUs vest over 4 years. There are also usually cash bonuses in addition to the above. YMMV depending on the company. Netflix is an obvious outlier in that they offer no RSUs and just pay very high salaries.
- dyeje 6y agoMany companies, like Coinbase, don't have RSUs.
- blck 6y agoI don't think it can be understated how much saying 'no politics' is a political statement. Supporting the status quo is a political statement. And supporting the status quo in this political climate is a strange hill to plant your flag on.
- rjldev 6y agoThat’s a very paranoid way of looking at things. Signalling support for the status quo would involve something more active, eg “wooo, go status quo!!” on a banner. Maybe they have different priorities than you and just want to make money. Not everything is political.
- tehjoker 6y agoJust wanting to make money is political because it means the environment has been configured in such a way that you can do so. If you make money in the position of a manager or boss, it is even more strongly political as you are using the configuration of the political system to direct societal resources at your whim to make money.
- cltby 6y agoJust playing the bongos is political because it means the environment has been configured in such a way that you can do so. If you play the bongos in the position of a manager or boss, it is even more strongly political as you are using the configuration of the political system to direct societal resources at your whim to play the bongos. You might be proving too much here.
- tehjoker 6y agoNot at all. While there is a tiny bit of truth to your bongo example, money in particular is highly political though it has been rhetorically stripped in order to make it appear as though it is not so the wealthy can make money in peace. Controlling the distribution of resources in society is a highly political question. Who makes more money at work for example? The low level employee or the boss? Who controls what, why, and how things are produced? What the schedules are? These are smaller questions than national policy, but they are political in nature. Of course, the socialist movement sees all workplaces' workers united together as a national political project. When you swim in water all your life, you can't see it easily unless someone points it out. Another reason "just making money" is political is because so many people can't. In a society with levels of inequality that approximate ancient kingdoms, the lowest people in society have little opportunity to "just make money" and their invisibility is a political artifice. Put another way, what is political is the ability to _not care_ when others are suffering. People are being deported, attacked in the streets, dying of disease, etc. so keeping your head down _and make money_ during such a time is something won by virtue of class. Other people can't ignore it because politics is life and death. While exhaustion is a valid excuse to rest (I'm super tired myself), what is being asked is for solidarity and to exhibit positive humanity towards other people. A primary site of conflict and domination is the workplace -- it's just that so many of us are used to losing or out competing each other that we don't band together to win.
- aaron-santos 6y ago> Armstrong said in the memo he recognizes that what counts as politics is “a blurry line.” Good luck dealing with disagreements on this when it's so poorly defined.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoIs this something where there needs to be a bright-line rule? It feels like having a rigorous formal definition for "be nice to your coworkers" - a healthy company can resolve these kinds of disputes informally, and an unhealthy company will struggle no matter how clear the rules are.
- heavyset_go 6y agoIt's interesting to hear Coinbase management insist that they're apolitical when the company makes significant political contributions itself[1]. [1] https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/?contributor_name=coinbase https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/?...
- travisoneill1 6y agoI think they only claimed to be apolitical in matters that don't affect the company's core business.
- tabbott 6y agoRight, lobbying is super valuable for a company whose business is in a legally questionable position on the boundary of the highly regulated banking industry. This "apolitical" move would be a compelling choice if their only goal was optimizing shareholder value -- it's in their interest to maximize their ability to effectively lobby both American political parties to ensure any future cryptocurrency regulations benefit them.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- vonmoltke 6y agoSomething is off about those listings. The majority of the transactions went to "Brian Forde for Congress" and have the memos like " .03533216 BITCOINS SOLD VIA COINBASE - PURCHASER UNKNOWN". I don't think these are contributions by Coinbase, but Bitcoin contributions that went through Coinbase. There is probably some byzantine election funding rule that allowed or forced these recipients to list Coinbase as the"source" of anonymous Bitcoin donations.
- advisedwang 6y agoThere's not supposed to be "anonymous" donations, that's the entire point of reporting requirements. If Coinbase is hiding political donors, that's gotta be against election law?
- lawnchair_larry 6y agoI am beyond sick of political activists in the workplace, so I hope this trend catches on.
- jojo2333 6y agosame. I don't even think the severance is necessary. Just ask people who are interested in politics in the workplace to leave.
- mpweiher 6y agoJust as a reference point: Germany is well-known for its very strong employee protection. However, activism at work is something you can actually legally lose your job over. That doesn't mean you can't express your political opinions, freedom of expression is protected, but no agitation/activism.
- LockAndLol 6y agoAnd that's exactly how it should be. It's a workplace, not a forum. Unless your job is political activism, it has no place at work.
- linuxhansl 6y agoI am beyond sick of folks in the workplace who silently accept the status quo, so I hope this trend does not catch on.
- disposekinetics 6y agoSilence gives us the ability to work together, without silence you get to hear my hardcore religious ideas all day. Silence is our truce.
- batt4good 6y agoThis is getting down-voted but honestly I agree. Silence is a professional courtesy when it comes to certain ideas. For instance, I don't talk about how I find certain parts of 4chan incredibly hilarious. As a black man, I'd definitely have co-workers blow up if I mentioned this at work - granted they feel more than entitled to talk about all sorts of things that I wouldn't even talk about if I was at a bar with friends (fringe lefty politics and sexually explicit things).
- devtul 6y agoLet's say you don't even have a new job lined up but you feel capable enough to switch jobs, why turn down a severance like that. Free money.
- mplewis 6y agoI'm curious to know how many of these exits were in engineering – those with the privilege to know another engineering job is immediately available somewhere else – versus other roles in the company.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jojo2333 6y agoQuite possible this could blacklist you from many other companies.
- MattGaiser 6y agoThe army of recruiters they have in their inboxes would turn them away now that they are available?
- Taylor_OD 6y agoHow? Maybe a short list of fintech or cryptotech companies but outside of that?
- altdatathrow 6y agoThere are literally thousands upon thousands of companies hiring software engineers today.
- jojo2333 6y agoand tons of engineers... whats your point?
- ivojp 6y agoI've been informed the term is "denylist" now.
- donatj 6y agoHonest gut impression - they were probably dead weight anyway? Talking politics at work rather than, you know, getting work done. I've certainly worked with a number of the type.
- rocketpastsix 6y agoI highly doubt they walked in the door, spent 8 hours talking politics and collected their paychecks every month.
- ceilingcorner 6y agoThat seems to describe about 40% of Twitter users, so...it’s not implausible.
- donatj 6y agoDude, you need to meet our old PM. It was politics, loudly with anyone who would listen, briefly interrupted by making our job harder. I was actually sad she left on her own rather than getting fired. She actually moved to a bigger company.
- roywiggins 6y agoSeems like a really expensive way to get rid of them if they were dead weight in the first place.
- syspec 6y agoGenerally speaking, dead weight know they're dead weight / have an easy gig, and are the last people you would see taking such a deal because they usually prefer to keep coasting. By definition most of them do not have strong principles (they're okay with mediocre work representing them), so i don't picture them leaving on principles
- beervirus 6y agoThe policy seems pretty reasonable to me. Surprising that 60 people would quit because the company wants to make money instead of virtue signal.
- sparkie 6y agoIt's the same as saying "Don't discuss religion at work." A religious fundamentalist would take issue with the mere fact that they are being told not to discuss their religion. That's what we have with virtue signalling types. They are religious fundamentalists, and their religion is Statism.
- beervirus 6y agoAnd not even “don’t discuss it at work” (although that would also be a fine rule). More just that the company itself isn’t going to be in the business of lobbying for any particular politics.
- andreygrehov 6y agoThe problem with politics- and religion-like conversations is that it's like walking on the edge of a sword–it's quite easy to get into debates. Debating with your work colleagues about politics is something one would better avoid.
- easton 6y agoOf course, it's impossible to know now, but I wonder how many people would've still left if there was no exit package. It's possible some decided they wanted to work somewhere else and saw a way out.
- jseliger 6y agoThat's just what I was thinking: if I were in a job I was on the margin of leaving anyway, and an exit package were offered, that might be sufficient to make me make the move.
- dangus 6y agoI don’t know if they still do this, but I recall Zappos having a constant offer on the table to pay you to quit. I bet they didn’t have 5% turnover over some time-deaf email from the CEO. My guess: those 5% got sick of tone-dead all hands meetings/memos and saw their chance to bail out. I wonder what other companies during the Covid recession has 5% voluntary turnover?
- giancarlostoro 6y agoMy only question is what are employees proposing CoinBase takes a stance over? If you want something like cryptocurrencies to thrive you can't be overly policing them, that's not your job as a company. Your job is not a political platform unless you work with politicians on their campaigns or are a politician / other form of politically affiliated / influenced company. Politics can make people feel extremely uncomfortable especially if they feel suppressed and as a minority are bullied by other employees.
- dangus 6y agoI made another longer comment about it on this thread. The gist of it is that a competent HR department can make a statement without directly committing support to any particular organization or group that they aren’t comfortable with. Saying “I refuse to comment and you’re not allowed to comment” is the worst way to go about it, literally anything would be better. There are also ways to train on empathy, bias, and general employee-to-employee communication that can guide employees through those conversations with colleagues.
- bdamm 6y agoCompanies aren't generally supposed to be political. Is the story here that Coinbase is offering a severance for employees that feel the company should be doing more? Seems like an incentivized quit.
- CarelessExpert 6y ago> Companies aren't generally supposed to be political. I honestly don't understand how you could believe that. Every oil and gas company or tobacco company has been historically engaged in politics. IBM and BMW famously enabled the Nazi regime during WWII. Union busting and strike breaking throughout the 70s and 80s was entirely political. Silicon Valley, in general, heavily invests in political lobbying, including Coinbase itself!
- mnd999 6y agoThis is incredibly naive. Companies hire lobbyists, make political donations, give seats on the board to former politicians, setup fake grass-roots campaign groups, play states off against each other for tax-breaks. It happens all the time. I'm guessing now they're apolitical Coinbase wont be doing any of that.
- bdamm 6y agoOf course companies play politics to tilt the market in their favor. What I mean is that companies don't often take political stances like "we encourage all our employees to vote X" or "we believe candidate y is the right fellow" or even "we support z ballot initiative" as a company position. Companies might do that one hand removed, but almost never do it directly as a company policy. An example too would be "we support black lives matter". Some companies do, vast majority do not.
- redm 6y agoI feel like this is the start of a rising tide. I think Brian's stance is great, companies have missions, they should focus on those missions. Everything has become so political that your work, which occupies a large portion of your life, should not be divisive.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ketzo 6y ago> ...your work, which occupies a large portion of your life, should not be divisive. I get that desire, I really do, but I think it's so important to recognize that your work is not apolitical. It doesn't matter what you're building. What you build does not exist in a vacuum, and the decisions you make around politics at work are themselves political decisions.
- tupputuppu 6y agoIf you want to have such a broad definition of political, then why restrict the whole fight to tech companies? Why aren't on the barricades about the fashion industry or traditional media? Are you sure this isn't just an excuse to make things political in these west coast companies that are full of young, hot-headed, extremely left wing people?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- baggy_trough 6y agoThis is really a noxious idea. It's like saying that because we all breathe the same air, everything I do affects you. No, not in the vast majority of cases.
- Avamander 6y agoOkay this is like the worst example. Everything you do does affect the environment around you. For example if you take a Bahamas trip, you are paying to generate tons of CO2. If you buy a diesel car, or just driving one, you're affecting the shared air as well.
- uniqueid 6y agoI could see this working out badly. I think Coinbase will now attract/retain fewer conscientious employees. The kind of employees who definitely won't leave are the ones with careerist/mercenary personality types. If that becomes a vicious cycle ( per the 'like attracts like' thing https://youtu.be/wTgQ2PBiz-g?t=75 https://youtu.be/wTgQ2PBiz-g?t=75 ), the culture could lead to wide-spread ass-covering and fraud. Then again, this isn't an area in which I have some particular expertise. Maybe it will work out perfectly.
- DoofusOfDeath 6y agoI'm also interested to see how it works out. Another possibility that occurs to me is that some employees are very conscientious, but have value systems that are looked down upon in mainstream Silicon Valley culture. I could imagine such employees being more willing to stay with Coinbase when that potential source of strife is removed.
- modeless 6y agoI think the opposite. The employees who stay are the kind who agree with the mission and want to focus on it. The kind who leave were focused on something other than advancing the company's goals. The company will be more effective at achieving its goals with a workforce that is all pointed in the same direction with less distraction. And the CEO mentioned that the people who left were not disproportionately underrepresented, so they are not losing diversity, just increasing focus.
- uniqueid 6y agoMy thinking is that it takes a certain personality type to whistle-blow, or push back against SOP for moralistic (or customer-focused) reasons. I don't want to overplay my hand here — I don't know for certain — but Coinbase's current messaging strikes me as off-putting to that sort of personality type.
- mtalantikite 6y ago“The kind who leave were focused on something other than advancing the company's goals.” I’m not sure that’s what happened here. This was started because employees were upset that the company wasn’t taking a stance to support the Black Lives Matter movement. If my employer decided to be apolitical around something as basic as saying racism is a thing and Black people shouldn’t be killed by the police I’d certainly leave too.
- onetimemanytime 6y agoIsn't 5%, a normal, healthy turnover for a company in that field?
- dangus 6y agoI can’t think of a worse way to handle this situation. Sure, I’m not sure what the answer is. Then again, I’m not a professional HR person who is supposed to be trained in handling these issues. Having 5% of your workforce quit over nothing more than messaging is a catastrophic failure in people management. Outright political speech bans at companies may be perfectly justified, but it’s usually the case that work environments that have a habit of outright banning things are stifling to be a part of. I’m sure this isn’t the first time that employees have heard tone-deaf messaging from corporate, and being offered some money to leave on the heels of some more time-deafness must have been appealing. It’s not hard to have policies and training rooted in being empathetic and respectful toward others. That way you don’t have to ban difficult topics. Conversations between coworkers being excessively policed never feels good. Asking people to always be work robots is completely unreasonable - lifelong friendships and marriages happen with coworkers. We are human, social creatures. Things happen in the world and we spend most of our weekday life at work, so we often need other people at work to talk with about them. I think the CEO’s refusal to take a stance on whether Black Lives Matter is a stance in itself. It’s hard not to assume that he doesn’t agree with the organization or the statement, even if that’s not the case. And while the movement is in some way political, in most ways the organization and the phrase simply stands for the idea that, well, Black Lives Matter. It’s simply a marginalized group seeking equal treatment, and there really shouldn’t be anything political about being treated as an equal. Of course, the reactionaries in our world always demand that we think otherwise: that we should be considerate of their views on keeping women, certain races and ethnicities, the differently abled, or people with the “wrong” faith as second-class citizens. They want us to consider these fundamentally flawed views as if they are on equal plane as a valid “other side” of the coin, as if it’s simple political disagreement. In reality, their viewpoints were never acceptable, we’ve just had to suffer through them. There’s nothing political about telling someone through words and actions that they matter, and treating those people with equal protections and rights in the criminal justice system. As an anecdote, my employer had no problem proclaiming support for Black lives. We have Black employees, of course we should agree that Black Lives Matter. And of course we can have difficult conversations among our coworkers, as long as we know how to listen to each other. This is where HR comes in to help train and guide around keeping those conversations productive and beneficial to everyone, because people grow by having their viewpoints challenged and expanded - and that can happen at work!
- rlewkov 6y agoOur company, our rules, if u don't like it here's some cash - buh bye
- modeless 6y ago[In response to the original headline that 5% of employees took the severance:] Good. The company will be stronger for it and the employees will be happier with the generous severance and a new job at a company that suits them better.
- blastonico 6y agoVery interesting, more than 90% prefer to keep Coinbase's core values. If they were able to keep the best employees it's worth it.
- Dan_JiuJitsu 6y agoSeems 5% attrition is a very small price to pay to weed out the bad apples. Looking at this through another prism, fully 95% of the company decided that being apolitical at work is reasonable. What happened to the rule against politics and religion in polite society?
- HappyDreamer 6y ago> weed out the bad apples What were the opinions of the bad apples? That they wanted Coinbase to support? I'm not in the US and a bit clueless
- fao_ 6y ago> What happened to the rule against politics and religion in polite society? What rule? That's only ever been the case in idealized tv 'society', and mostly-homogenous comparatively rich/affluent folk who can afford not to give a shit about politics.
- krzyk 6y agoIs "apolitical" stance a bad thing? Isn't it the default, safe? I lived in country where you had to be "political" to be in management, it didn't end up well (East Europe, Soviet Union), I always (naively?) thought that West countries were wiser. So I prefer companies to not mess with politics.
- eli 6y agoThis has been discussed extensively in the previous threads on Coinbase, but banning the discussion of certain topics in the workplace is itself a political stance. Very much so.
- JPKab 6y agoIs banning discussion of religion in the workplace a political/religious stance? Or is it just an attempt to be decent and get people to do the thing they were hired to do, which is to make their investors more fucking money? As a shareholder in several tech companies, I don't like the idea of people having discussions like these on my dime. How many bugs that were never fixed with Youtube Music, for example, could have been fixed if there weren't shit heads sitting around having flame wars on my fucking dime?
- DoofusOfDeath 6y ago> Is banning discussion of religion in the workplace a political/religious stance? (Please forgive any flawed logic below - I assure you it's an oversight. I'm posting this in good faith.) I'd say yes, but basically in the same way Coinbase's band on political speech in the office is a stance. Consider religious people whose theology holds that they should attempt to convert everybody in their circles, even their professional circles. It seems to me that banning that is tantamount to saying either (a) their theology is wrong, or (b) it's not wrong but the employer is resisting it regardless, or (c) the business has no place for employees holding those beliefs.
- tomp 6y ago
- JPKab 6y agoI feel like this confirms (although this could be confirmation bias, and would literally be a textbook case) my belief that this is indeed a tiny percentage of people at most tech companies that are really into social justice activism, and they are very, very noisy and disruptive. My suspicion is that the percentage of folks who are into this is higher at companies like Google, who have absurdly overly bureaucratic hiring pipelines that weed out free thinkers in favor of academic elites who are strong conformists. Strong conformists from academia are the ones I see gravitating most to this form of activism. Add to that the fact that your typical Google engineer is massively overqualified for the actual work that they do on a daily basis (working on a cog in a gear in a giant system) and you get a lot of anxious, bored people trying to erase their guilt over being radically overpaid. Another group of folks I've witnessed being into social justice activism (at an extreme level) are borderline Aspergers folks I've worked with who, on a good day, have a hard time navigating human relationships of any kind. I think the intersectional, hierarchal nature of these beliefs brings a Dungeons and Dragons, RPG like sense of order to humans that is comforting to them. The fact that it's mostly over-simplified and false escapes them. Basically, Coinbase probably got rid of a lot of unproductive personnel and won't have to deal with this anymore.
- dgellow 6y ago> who have absurdly overly bureaucratic hiring pipelines that weed out free thinkers in favor of academic elites who are strong conformists That’s just anecdotal but the people I know at google are the less conforming and the most “weird” (not in a pejorative sense) people I know. They also have no connection to academia and in fact all of them failed their studies for years because they were spending their time doing other crazy things.
- CJefferson 6y agoSo these people you don't like (sjas) are both disruptive and conformist?
- JPKab 6y agoYes. They conform to their peer group by embracing politics and ideas from the SV bubble, which includes being disruptive for the reasons which their quasi-religion dictates.
- Taylor_OD 6y agoI'm still shocked by the support over this policy. Having no stance on a topic is taking a stance on a topic. I'm surprised they didn't have more people leave. It's looks like from the article they have lost 5% so far and haven't finished talks with all employees.
- MattGaiser 6y ago> Having no stance on a topic is taking a stance on a topic. Semantically perhaps, but not in practice. On most issues there are those who support, those who oppose, and a lot of neutrals who do not want to be involved and do not want to be caught in the middle of the fighting.
- beefalo 6y agoI'm not surprised that it's only 5%. I think it's worth keeping in mind that this is a cryptocurrency company and so that already are within a culture that has strong libertarian leanings. The people that took the severance are very likely just bored with their job and wanted a vacation.
- pembrook 6y agoLike other comments, I am skeptical 5% are actually quitting due to this overblown twitter melodrama, instead of just taking a sweet deal. Furthermore, what political mission did these people falsely believe they were joining when they got hired? Coinbase is literally an app designed for the sole purpose of helping 22 year old kids lose money by speculating on the now deflated crypto bubble. For a while, coinbase was allowing kids to “invest” using credit cards. I’m not kidding. How could there be such a disconnect with that many people about what the company actually does—-especially from the inside where you can literally see how they actually make their money?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ada1981 6y agoIt’s unfortunate that CEOs / Founders think it’s appropriate to dictate the culture of the organization vs. learning to nurture the emergent values from within the team. It’s a sign of limited leadership capacity to attempt to install culture as a top down mandate.
- arawnx 6y agoIt's unfortunate that people who run companies... run companies? Do you understand how deluded you sound when you're indignantly concerntrolling over a crypto startup not abiding by the hyperintense political environ that you personally prefer? This is installing a culture. It's installing a culture that doesn't leech into either a. Areas they can't focus on primarily, or b. Areas that would directly make 10, 15, 25% of their human capital feel attacked/engaged in a hostile environment.
- ada1981 6y agoI’m not sure where you got that I prefer a hypertense climate. I’m referring to the hubris of a ceo who thinks they can dictate the culture in any meaningful way with top down mandates vs. actual leadership which is developing leaders and nudging culture via language and relationship structures.
- tofuahdude 6y agoLiterally the job of executives is to define mission, vision, and the cultural approach to pursue that mission. Emergent mission, vision, and culture is a recipe for bankruptcy.
- ada1981 6y agoDepends on the organization and the type of leaders within it. At the higher levels of organizational leadership, it’s exactly emergent mission, vision and culture. This is why Tony From Zappos gives away Dave Logan’s book on Tribal Leadership for free. Stage 3 leaders try to tell everyone in the company what the culture is; Stage 4 leaders create a culture based on actual shared values (not something from a mission statement or poster on the wall or offsite activity). Most cultures are still at stage 3, but the greatest ones are stage 4+. I’ve seen this in my work over the past 20 years working with founders from some of the most successful companies (as a personal coach and advisor).
- calcsam 6y agoAs a comparison, when Zenefits offered two months of severance and four months of COBRA (less than Coinbase), 10% of the company took it. https://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/20/zenefits-ceo-says-about-10-percent-of-employees-voluntarily-leave.html https://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/20/zenefits-ceo-says-about-10-p...
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- MattGaiser 6y agoZenefits does not seem to have the best company culture. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/losing-job-offer-quora-uber-vs-zenefits-tai-tran/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/losing-job-offer-quora-uber-v...
- decafninja 6y agoI don't work in a Silicon Valley tech company, so maybe my perspective is out of touch with what's going on in SV. But I thought it was generally understood that there were certain topics you really ought not to talk about at work including religion, politics, disclosing your salary, etc. Has this changed? Or am I misunderstanding something?
- elektor 6y agoNot talking about your salary only benefits the employer and allows them to deflate workers wages.
- gnicholas 6y agoAt many companies, employees are encouraged to "bring their whole selves to work". This most definitely includes politics.
- anm89 6y agoHa, yes I would say things have changed to put it lightly. The reason the CEO made this policy is because many people felt they were being pressured to be political at work which is the new norm .
- lykr0n 6y agoI wanted to find an example for my response to this article, and I can't. I was looking for the sites like GitHub, Go Docs, Cloudflare, Hashicorp, and others what splashed a "#BlackLivesMatter" header on across all their sites. I remember a lot of places slapping banners or changing their headers black in support of the movement, and now I can't find any examples of that happening. They all seem to have been removed by this point. So- what was accomplished? I don't remember which companies supported "the cause." All I know is that the companies that I thought I did no longer do- or at least don't show support any more. Which stands out to me more then their support. Tells me that two things happened. 1. The companies wasted time figuring out how they should show their support, implementing those features, and all the associated work with making major changes to frontends. Spend hours figuring it out, most likely had meetings to discuses how to do it and what they should say. 2. The stopped showing supporting it after a point in time, which tells me they don't actually care. They just want to show they do. I'm guessing they showed support for two reasons. First is some sort of genuine support for the cause, but the 2nd is a fear of internal backlash for not showing support. Good on Coinbase for removing the elements inside their company that would get pissed if their company didn't take an active stand on flavor of the month political issues. When I go to work, I'm there to do my job and get paid. I don't want to have to deal with people fighting over what political stand the company should take a position on this month. I don't care that my programming language's maintainers voiced support or not. I don't care that program X or Y slapped a banner on their products for the month. The fact that there was visible support for for Black Lives Matter that was removed a month later is a lot more telling then their support. You want to be apart of the movement without actually doing anything to fix the issues. If you want to be political as a company, quietly donate money to the causes you support. Provide resources such as technical help or free/discounted services to the causes you support. That's infinitely more productive and helpful then letting your employees fight over what token gesture they want the company to show.
- redis_mlc 6y agoFor non-US HN readers, or those not current on BLM: - to unpack your superficial post would take a 200-page book because it touches on multiple overlapping and non-overlapping issues - but the short story is that the US public, and peaceful protesters, agree with the concept of improving black legal system rights, but the organizers and rioters behind the arson attacks are Marxist fronts, apparently funded by the CCP. Their goal is anarchy, not BLM reform - literally they want to make the US ungovernable so they can field their own political structure built upon the rubble they created. - the original problem was police unions and captive DAs, which has been lost in the noise, and would take an extreme focus to fix even in the best of times. I don't think peaceful protests can solve a problem that entrenched at all, but neither can foreign-incluenced Marxists We know now that the National Guard should have been called out in downtown areas, and arsonists should have been shot. Many moved from city-to-city, burning as they went. Regarding your comment about web site banners, it's likely that when the Marxists started to burn downtowns, companies wondered what exactly they were supporting. They got a clue well ahead of the Democrats - it took Pelosi 2 months to denounce the riots, which really meant the party supported it. You can learn more about the CCP involvement by watching recent Youtube NTD/Epoch Times channel videos. They have experienced China-watch reporters on staff researching CCP inroads into the US.
- stonogo 6y agoIronically, now that the Coinbase CEO has politicized quitting, I wonder how many people wanted to take another job but now are afraid to because they'd be labeled 'activists' by reactionary hiring managers.
- mithr 6y agoThe part of the original statement that seems inconsistent to me is this. Armstrong says that one of the things that helps Coinbase achieve their mission is: > Enable belonging for everyone: We work to create an environment where everyone is welcome and can do their best work, regardless of background, sexual orientation, race, gender, age, etc. Great. So Coinbase believes that critical to their mission is enabling everyone to feel welcome and do their best work regardless of their background or identity. And then the very next part is: > We focus minimally on causes not directly related to the mission [such as] policy decisions: If there is a bill introduced around crypto, we may engage here, but we normally wouldn’t engage in policy decisions around healthcare or education for example. Ok. So to pick an obvious example, two related issues that would clearly fall into the “not directly related to the mission” bucket are gay and transgender rights. Without getting at all into the issue of where you (Dear Reader) stand in terms of these particular issues, it seems to me that by saying “we explicitly will not lobby to make sure transgender people have equal rights, because that’s outside of our mission” is at direct odds with saying “we believe a core part of our mission is making sure transgender people feel welcome and can do their best work”. The only conclusion I can come to is that Armstrong believes that people who have to fight for their rights can “feel welcome” and “do their best work” just as easily as those who don’t have to fight those same battles — and that seems, at best, a little naive/head-in-the-sand. Adding on to that, as many people pointed out in this thread, Coinbase does make political contributions — it’s just that their interpretation of this sentence > If there is a bill introduced around crypto, we may engage here Seems to be (from a cursory glance at those listed contributions) that they are willing to support any politician that promotes their stance on crypto, regardless of any other stances that politician may take on any other issue. So continuing with the example above, Coinbase may be perfectly willing to support a politician who actively opposes gay marriage, as long as that politician actively supports crypto. They’re obviously free to do so, but it seem disingenuous to do so while at the same time claiming that one of their core values has to do with enabling everyone to feel welcome and do their best work. At a guess, they are taking an extremely narrow view of “feel welcome while sitting at their office desk” — as in, they promote respectful communication in the office — but I question how “welcome” someone can feel when they know their employer contributes money towards the campaign of a person who (for example) is actively working to remove their right to be legally married.
- libraryatnight 6y agoIt doesn't feel like this is about being 'apolitical' - it feels very political, particularly when you read https://www.wired.com/story/turmoil-black-lives-matter-political-speech-coinbase/ https://www.wired.com/story/turmoil-black-lives-matter-polit...
- plorg 6y agoI think this story takes on a particular valence because it involves a libertarian-inflected business in supposedly left-leaning SV. Certainly most of the HN commentary has jumped to the assumption that this is the result of pushy SJWs etc. But I don't think this is a good way to approach political speech at work. Coinbase is aligned very closely with libertarian politics for a variety of reasons that complement each other. I would be very surprised if there wasn't rampant libertarian-inflected speech being traded by employees. Indeed, a policy against engaging in political speech unrelated to the company's goal will almost certainly amplify that particular type of political messaging. I work for a company with very conservative leadership, who contribute, individually, to very conservative causes. I contribute to and participate in a Pride event being held in my town. Last year an outside political group protested the event, and it led to the City, via the city council, chaired by the CEO of my company, creating de novo restrictions on usage of City property specially for that event, and my boss showing up to film that event. Later, the same political group ran a political candidate for mayor explicitly on a ticket of shutting out Pride from City facilities (which, obviously, is legally dubious). It was a rancorous election in a deeply conservative community, even though the challenger got nowhere near the votes required to win. My company's official policy is that, in the interest of respecting others, we should refrain from discussing politics at work. In the context of this election, my coworkers, with whom I share a pod, were discussing how the city should just be able to kick out Pride, because it's fine if people are gay, we just don't want them in our community. These same coworkers often waste their time quoting Steven Crowder and similar political talkers. My manager, who works in the same pod, initiates conversations every week about, how was your weekend, what did you do. I find them uncomfortable, but my manager sees them as valuable for team building. Generally I find my team fairly collegial, though they almost certainly don't share my political or, in some cases, religious convictions. During the week of Pride I mentioned I had attended the event with my wife, and I received cold looks from the entire office. I am frequently looking for work elsewhere, for a variety of reasons. And if I were offered a buyout this generous I would definitely take it.
- chairmanwow1 6y agoI think is one of the greatest decisions I’ve seen from a SV CEO in a long time. The expectation around this recent bout of social activism is that if you aren’t actively campaigning the cause you are against it. I hated working at one of previous jobs because there were 600 different issues talked about in the workplace. The underlying assumption was that you were always onboard. Many times I wasn’t and it. Seeing Armstrong voice this policy makes me much more interested in working at Coinbase. I’m convinced that I won’t be cornered into jumping on the latest cause de jour because that’s what’s expected of me. Where any deviation from the cause’s line would put my job at risk.
- kmeisthax 6y agoSo, if the government bans crypto, does Coinbase remain apolitical? It's not a hypothetical. Satoshi created Bitcoin as a (particularly ineffective) act of insurrection, and the only reason why governments haven't responded to it like so is a matter of political and judicial economy. Existing money-laundering and securities laws likely already ban Bitcoin, we just haven't seen them fully enforced. Using Bitcoin is inherently a political statement (which I don't entirely agree with); the apolitical choice would be to wind down Coinbase as an ongoing concern.
- abalaji 6y agoThe answer to this question is in the blogpost. The answer is no.
- morsch 6y agoWe won’t: Debate causes or political candidates internally that are unrelated to work Why limit yourself to the 40-50h you spend at work. Let's just ban political debate everywhere. It's so divisive! At maximum, you should debate causes or political candidates with people who think exactly like you. But even this may lead to unexpected frustration, it's much better to just rest assured that everybody thinks exactly like you.
- rednerrus 6y agoMy company is becoming increasingly political and it's terrible. I'd gladly go work at a company where I didn't have to engage with endless political activism. If I want to hear everyone's opinions on everything, I'd find their facebook page or the HN usernames and follow them.
- throwaway894345 6y agoMy last company was trending in a similar direction. They would allow one ideological group to post completely unsubstantiated political claims, but opposing views were not allowed to be presented at all, even if they were thoroughly researched (this wasn't "official" policy, of course). Note that while I'm not a lawyer, I suspect that these permitted ideological viewpoints were sufficiently sexist and racist as to open the company up to some legal liability.
- john_moscow 6y agoMy gut feeling is that allowing this at a workplace is a (rather perverse) variation of the "employee of the month" nonsense. I.e. instead of rewarding your subordinates monetarily, you give them a power to bully their peers, but not to compete with yourself. It is also useful in pushing out "troublemakers". People that will not call BS on the unsubstantiated political claims are also less likely to call out corruption/nepotism/inefficiency of the middle management. In the long term the company will stagnate and die, but we live in such a wonderful time of government bailouts, low interest rates and desperate investors, so it may take a long time to unravel.
- throwaway581029 6y agoIncreasingly aggressive activism of this sort started ramping up at my employer a couple of years ago. Several outspoken activists started complaining and demanding all-company meetings, which were granted by HR and company leadership. In these mandatory meetings, which were attended by hundreds of employees, all sorts of contradictory accusations were lodged by the activists. For example, in the first meeting, one of activists complained about being (accidentally) mis-gendered by a new employee. In another meeting, a different activist complained about an employee apologizing for mis-gendering them. Apparently this made the activist feel awkward, so they'd have preferred no apology at all. It was at this point I realized there is no reasoning with activists such as these. Their demands weren't coherent. They were just a bunch of people complaining about hurt feelings. These meetings must have cost the company millions of dollars and huge amounts of lost development time. And they certainly didn't resolve anything. I and a lot of my colleagues just want to do our work without being forced to participate in regular struggle sessions.
- curclerobber 6y agoThis began over something that doesn't feel "political" to me. For me, and perhaps many others, BLM is primarily about injustice. Is taking a stand against injustice political?
- jefe_ 6y agoI would say standing against injustice is not political. But there comes a point where in order for change to occur and prevent future injustices, the stand must become a walk (to keep the metaphor). Some will say it should be a jog, others a sprint, some will think continued standing is fine. And that's just discussing the pace. There will be ideas and opinions on route, and whether or not to stop for breaks, and whether water should be supplied, or what impact people walking will have on the roads, the list goes on. I think when the time comes to give direction or motion to a stand against injustice, it then becomes political. It's not bad that it becomes political, it's the natural course of change in society, but it does mean that some of the unity derived from standing must be sacrificed, as people choose the mechanism for change they support. The key is to sacrifice as little of the unity as possible.
- sneak 6y agoYou’re right on its face, but the american electoral-politics-based culture war likes to appropriate and subsume any rift or disagreement and alias it onto the existing two brawling sides. It’s a real bummer, not the least of why is because of how startlingly inaccurate it is. These narratives that fuel the culture war “decide” that certain groups are in or out. It’s entirely inaccurate but that’s what the popular narrative dictates. BLM is, under this system, on the “left” side, along with other made-up narrative entities in this fictional drama such as “antifa”. To the culture war brawlers, entirely disconnected from the actual happenings, they alias to the same thing, the same people, the same group. Coinbase has leveraged that system to cover for the fact that their silence on the matter of justice and human rights is extremely loud.
- jariel 6y ago"Is taking a stand against injustice political" That's the giant strawman if there ever was one. "Abortion is about a woman's right to chose, who's against that?" "Abortion is about killing children, who supports killing children?" Everyone generally supports equality, and something like 95% of Americans including huge majorities of Republicans etc. accept that racism exists and is a problem. Almost universally Americans want 'equal pay for equal work'. ... the question is the means, the underlying issues, social conditions, solutions, lack of recognition for other groups, the 'racial lens' that we now seem to use for everything, the double-edges sword of affirmative action, double-standards and of course accepting bad behaviour as part of the cause (i.e. riots) etc.. It's not remotely so simple, unfortunately.
- ccktlmazeltov 6y agoThe problem is that companies can have huge impact in the US due to a lack of effective regulations + legal corruption (lobbies). Large companies are pretty much the source of many executive decisions. Without that power, an employee should be able to just join or not join a company based on what the company is doing (ethically moral or not).
- DevKoala 6y ago> It was reassuring to see that people from under-represented groups at Coinbase have not taken the exit package in numbers disproportionate to the overall population. I figured as much. Coinbase sounds like a great place to work if this works out.
- AzzieElbab 6y agoWell it is either this or artificial consensus where bickering is curbed by enforcing a company wide position on every divisive issue. Pick your poison
- wahnfrieden 6y agoLet me guess that you are referring to “reverse racism” here
- voxl 6y agoHammer? Meet nail. It's not a surprise that conservative viewpoints are biased against reality. They have been for a long time. I have no issue being partisan online, in work, or out of work, my job is not as important as stopping an American Hitler.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoThank god i don’t work with you.
- tlear 6y agoIt is just racism
- monoideism 6y agoWhy use a special term? Just "racism" works very well. The idea that only certain races can "qualify" for racism is Orwellian.
- throwaway894345 6y agoNot to mention confusing. The "reverse" of "racism" would certainly be "equality", so why should "reverse racism" mean "more racism"? This is pretty elementary logic--something can't be its own opposite.
- DavidSJ 6y agoEverything else aside, the term makes sense. It’s not the reverse of racism. It’s racism in the reverse direction than the more “traditional” one.
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- ccktlmazeltov 6y agoIf I were there, and I was thinking about leaving, I would have taken that package. It's pretty good.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- joeloya 6y agoPolitical affiliation has become some sort of a new religion. This is step in the right direction. We need more secular workplaces.
- shruubi 6y ago"Does Coinbase just stand for making a profit? No, we stand for accomplishing the mission and for creating a great place to work." My god, you're a business, you're entire existence is predicated on making a profit, don't delude yourself into thinking you're chasing some higher purpose, if that was truly the case then you'd be offering your services at a loss or giving away your product for free.
- webmaven 6y ago> "Does Coinbase just stand for making a profit? > No, we stand for accomplishing the mission and for creating a great place to work." > My god, you're a business, you're entire existence is predicated on making a profit, don't delude yourself into thinking you're chasing some higher purpose, if that was truly the case then you'd be offering your services at a loss or giving away your product for free. Hey now, there are other options besides "solely driven by profits" and "non-profit solely focused on the mission" For one thing, it is a fiction that public for-profit companies have a fiduciary duty to be monomaniacal profit seeking entities that must do everything legal to achieve that end, and anything illegal where the profit exceeds the risk-adjusted cost of getting caught is at least on the table. Second, there are plenty of structures for encoding specific missions into a company's charter that are binding. I'm kind of curious to see if Coinbase will follow through on the rhetoric and do something such as becoming a b-corp.
- sergefaguet 6y agoMy observation is that people outside the US either are confused or laugh at Americans for giving in to all this social justice nonsense, the “let’s be racist to white people” the “biological sex does not exist” etc. And people inside the US who trust me enough to express their honest opinion also think it’s nonsense but are too scared to speak up. Best comment I’ve heard on this was “it’s like the USSR - everyone knows it is bullshit but nobody wants to publicly say it.” Or, from a senior person at Google “all the work on my team is done by 3 white guys in Eastern Europe, but there are 20 other people for the diversity pie chart.” It would be laughable if it weren’t so toxic.
- rrook 6y agoThis outlook strikes me as narrow. The behavior you're describing is amplified in technology corporations, and while I do agree that there is nonsense, there are also real social issues that are worth solving for. The most polarizing and extreme voices will often be the loudest or most visible, but rarely will they be representative of a group at large.
- issa 6y agoSome of the comments in this thread make me pretty sad. There is a lot of nuance, obviously, but generally speaking when people say work is too "political" and make complaints that "people are allowed to insult straight white males, but insulting other groups is off limits", it doesn't take much reading between the lines to see what is going on. I hope everyone can take a second and appreciate how underrepresented certain demographics are in tech and that we should all work to change this.
- jiuahweruihawi 6y ago> "people are allowed to insult straight white males, but insulting other groups is off limits" No-one in the thread has said this.
- issa 6y agoI believe the thread is being edited, but I read multiple comments along these lines.
- paulcole 6y agoWhere are all these politically active workplaces that these HN commenters hate. I’d love to work at a place like that!
- coolspot 6y agoWhole FAANG for one.
- notSupplied 6y agoWhen a group of employees demand that their employers engage in political activism, what they are asking for is the ability to commandeer the resources of the company, whether it be its reputation, money, or labor to advance their political objective. They want to amplify their impact beyond what they can accomplish with their personal resources. I wonder how these same people feel about the political contributions of companies from the opposing end of the spectrum. Would they say "Get corporate power out of politics!"?
- banachtarski 6y agoDuring WWII, IBM supplied the Nazis with mainframe computers and were responsible for untold deaths in exchange for money. It's not that black and white.
- kps 6y agoIt's true that IBM sold unit record (punch card) equipment to the Nazis, but we can be pretty damn sure IBM didn't sell them computers, mainframe or otherwise, because they didn't exist.
- missedthecue 6y agoThat was in the early/mid 30s, not during WW2.
- krainboltgreene 6y agoNot only is that not factually incorrect, it's pretty trivial to check before you comment. Why didn't you?
- missedthecue 6y agoExcuse me? "The Nazis used Hollerith equipment that IBM's German subsidiary during the 1930s – Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen GmbH (Dehomag) – supplied... As did hundreds of foreign-owned companies that did business in Germany at that time" https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/1388.wss https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/1388.wss
- cromwellian 6y agoIf there's rising fascism in a country, then a "neutral" position in effect is supporting it indirectly. There are sometimes you just shouldn't stand on the sidelines for. If the brownshirts and jackboots are filling the streets, silence is tacit approval. Additionally, I find it real strange that a cryptocurrency company is pretending to have an 'apolitical' mission. Cryptocurrencies were created for political reasons. A lot of the pre-cursor developers (and suspected inventors) and early proponents are anti-government libertarians/crypto-anarchists. Even before Bitcoin, cypherpunks were heavily invested into digital cash techniques, that although used centralized servers, were nevertheless, blinded and federated, again with the desire to have untraceable cash like transactions that could be sent through unbreakable channels, and untouchable by government taxation and regulation.
- CryptoPunk 6y agoBrian Armstrong is a phenomenally capable and committed CEO who has an accurate gauge on the importance of financial inclusivity. Perhaps there is no greater opportunity to advance humanity and uplift the world's population than to proliferate decentralized financial technology and thereby empower the people of every country to secure their right to control their own wealth.
- fblp 6y agoWe had a problem where political conversations were emerging in the office that may be inconsiderate of the views who may be listening. I proposed a simple rule that you should seek consent from others in the room before bringing up (partisan) politics. This simple "Hey can we talk about the debate last night..." allows for people to skip out before they get dragged into something they may not be interested in. Many people have their key social group at work, and a lot more energy is tied up in politics in the US at the moment. I think it's important that people can move this energy with their colleagues and others.
- dang 6y agoAll: don't miss that there are multiple pages of comments in this thread. That's what the More link at the bottom points to. Or click here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24721734&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24721734&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24721734&p=3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24721734&p=3
- 83afnpg 6y agoBrian seriously misunderstands what apolitical means and cannot tell the difference between Black Lives Matter and Black lives matter. The race and gender of his employees are not a political statement.
- swiley 6y agoIn his defense that's probably not immediately obvious to most people.
- HappyDreamer 6y agoIs requests from employees to support Black Lives Matter what triggered this whole discussion? Some employees wanted to support BLM, while others thought it was off-topic or didn't like it? And Brian / the CEO then decided to not allow such discussions at the workplace? noticing that some employees got upset at each other, when talking about it? (I'm in Europe and a bit clueless)
- jlokier 6y agoI see many comments about: The company internal culture being political vs. apolitical as a place to work, what kinds of stands the company makes in public (or doesn't), or with regard to inclusivity for diverse views at work, or simply about productivity and what kind of place people like. I'd like to mention something I haven't seen in other comments: Coinbase's mission to produce a new global financial system is itself a kind of political activism. One that some people believe will make the world a better place for people. When designing something as fundamentally underpinning as the future of money, that can only work if it is able to underpin the activities of just about everyone. Rather like cash money today only works because everyone knows it behaves the same regardless of who you vote for, and bank money (for the most part) also behaves the same regardless of your political views. This analogy is a stretch, because employees at a card services firm aren't the same as users of a card services firm. But let's try it: Imagine what the country would be like if, say, Visa and Mastercard (and all other payment infrastructure providers) required you to agree, and keep showing you agree, to support a particular collection of present-day political stances and voting affiliations before you could even spend any money on a card. By that, I don't mean imagine "Visa Democrat Support" card requires you to show your affiliation. I mean, imagine if all Visa card services of every kind, and all the other services, all required the same affiliation. Unless you're happy with that affiliation, you'd have to lie just to use ordinary services. You'd be at a significant disadvantage in life, and what people say in public would be very different to what they believe. Some might say at least just causes would be supported. But it's quite an Orwellian prospect. It's the sort of thing many people associate with China and too many other "less democratic" countries, where (it is said; I don't know for sure) you have to basically pretend to agree with the Party line, keep political views to yourself, and there's no democracy to speak of. A healthy democracy needs a strong underpinning of common infrastructure, of which cash and money are part, which are available to everyone in a more-or-less apolitical manner, enabling people to hold and express a range of conflicting, divisive views layered "on top" of those basic life-supporting services. (You could say cash and money, and payment services, are inherently political, as is capitalism, but that's not what I mean here. What's meant here is that a healthy democracy needs to provide some common infrastructure upon which everyone can depend regardless of affiliation. Otherwise it won't be much of a democracy for long.) Now, I said it was a stretch of an analogy, because users of a company's services aren't the same as employees. But still, imagine the chilling effect on trying to build up "a possible future of money, strong and unbreakable, available to everyone for the common good" if it was well known that the companies underpinning that future money all displayed public activism along strongly partisan-aligned views, or campaigned on big issues on which it's thought about half the population disagrees. I've said all this, even though I personally see money itself as rather political, and that's because it doesn't have the innate properties which are commonly assumed. It's possible to engineer types of money to have different properties, and if adopted, these engineered properties have a profound effect on people's lives as well as aggregate behaviour and the economy at large. So I'm not necessarily personally aligned with an "apolitical" stance on a design of future money. Nonetheless, I can see, and respect, why someone trying to build what they see as "the future of money for a better world for people" might feel that a firm, consistently "apolitical" public stance is an essential ingredient to perform their mission. To ensure the service is not just available to all who want in, but also seen as reliably available, now and in future, to all people regardless of their political affiliations. (I don't know if Coinbase or its CEO holds this view, but I thought it was a relevant idea worth sharing, having noticed other comments tending to focus only on internal culture and productivity.)
- beaunative 6y agoI've seen plenty comments saying 'everything is political'. I don't doubt that, but not every political issue, important maybe, should be the top priority for every company, there are a lot of NGOs created just for that. A company should notice the importance of politics, but should also not forget the reason of its existence, which is to provide services or produce commodities of some kinds. As citizens and organizations, we surely deserve our right to engage in politics, but that doesn't mean it should what we discuss about on every nights' dinner table. A large fraction of those conversations will be, as it should, devoted to what's going on in the lives of our own and people around us. It's easy to lose focus in the mountains and seas of all those issues that matter, things just won't change in a blink, but we simply can not afford to let those issues to be the entirety of our lives, no matter how important they are, as much as one hope for otherwise. Call it the downside of democracy, but we just don't yet live in a time where everyone can devote all parts of their lives to discussions on fairness and justice, regardless how beautiful it sounds.
- davorak 6y ago> but we simply can not afford to let those issues to be the entirety of our lives, I agree. The comments I have spent my time on in the comments seem to be taking things too far and complaining the issue is with the people on the other side rather than the people who are acting in extreme ways(preferably with concrete examples of what is extreme and why).
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- jameshadouken 6y agoI would have laughed if employees quickly unionised and 51% had decided to take the exit package.
- rbanffy 6y agoThere is no neutrality in the face of injustice. Really. It's that simple.
- petercooper 6y agoSeparate from the merits (or not) of Coinbase's stance, 5% of employees taking a 4-6 month severage package to leave doesn't /seem/ high to me. It's less than what %age churns naturally in 6 months at a tech company historically.
- tomgp 6y agoThe idea that a company which spent $200000 on political lobbying last year[1] is somehow above taking a political stance is utterly laughable. Coinbase is an intensely political company. From where I’m standing this all looks like a move to make sure everyone in the organisation is ideologically aligned so they can all carry on pretending that their actions have no effect on the broader world (beyond those areas where they’ve decided they’re going to change the world). The whole thing whilst entirely predictable also beggars belief in its incredible double-think. 1. https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/lobbyists?cycle=2019&id=F191419 https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/lobbyis...
- muyuu 6y agoCoinbase's very mission is highly political, but that has nothing to do with other completely unrelated politics taking over the focus of the company. What they did makes a lot of sense and I suspect many other companies will follow suit, even if they don't do it so openly. *typo
- jhealy 6y agoIs this a uniquely Amerian debate? I live outside America, and I don't really understand the subtext of these Coinbase posts. What does are some concrete examples of a company being political or apolitical? What are the kinds of things the Coinbase used to do and no longer does, which employees might leave over? Is it about the company donating to political compaigns, or openly participating in community debates and having a position on social issues (same sex marriage, abortion, Black Lives Matter, Trump, gun control, etc)?
- HappyDreamer 6y agoI wonder all this me too. This whole discussion is weird, to me, not knowing what triggered everything in the first place.
- jhealy 6y agohttps://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/09/coinbase-silicon-valley-libertarian/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/09/coinbas... > Cryptocurrency start-up Coinbase recently sought to restrict political speech by employees, a move many interpreted as a shift to the right because it came in reaction to internal discussions of Black Lives Matter. That makes it sound like the Coinbase thing is less about the company holding a public political position, and more of a "leave your politics at home" thing. Sounds like the corporate version of the recurring debate about whether open source projects should reject contributions from those with objectionable political views.
- baxtr 6y agoside note: I get this note on medium: You have 1 free story left this month. Sign up and get an extra one for free. Can we please stop using medium? It's getting worse and worse
- say_it_as_it_is 6y agoEvery company and university needs to address code of conduct issues related to politics and activism. It's unavoidable now. The operational risk of not doing so cannot be ignored.