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>What else can they do if they are really innocent? Innocent of what exactly? At a certain point whether the leadership of Coinbase is racist or not doesn't m

• oh_sigh 6y ago
  It's a fact, but it means nothing without context. I punched a man in the face yesterday. To determine if I'm a violent person it's important to know whether I punched a man who was pushing his child on a swing set, or whether I punched a man who was crawling through a window in my home.
  • slg 6y ago
    What context would exonerate Coinbase of fostering an environment that results in 75% of its Black employees feeling discriminated against? And if that context existed, why didn't Coinbase mention it in their preemptive rebuttal?
    • zpeti 6y ago
      How about the CEO refusing to align with far left politics? Whether you think that is good or bad, that could well be the reason for them leaving, but it doesn't actually mean that there was overt racism.
      • tptacek 6y ago
        I don't understand the premise here. Most of their Black employees left, not their far left employees.
        • polartx 6y ago
          If you’re truly ignorant to the social pressures the black community places on each other (specifically the prevailing majority on the ‘dissident’ thinkers), than it’s a topic I suggest you read in to.
          • tptacek 6y ago
            Black Democrats (most Black people are Democrats, something for which there is some social pressure) are generally more conservative, and significantly more religious, than other Democrats. So: no, this isn't responsive to what I said. (One good source: White & Laird).
            • polartx 6y ago
              All that means is that social pressures (in this case) weren’t exerted using the lever of religion or political affiliation. That doesn’t at all mean that other levers don’t exist or weren’t leveraged. Such as the common, ‘uncle tom’ or ‘not black enough’ social pressure commonly applied in the black community.
              • tptacek 6y ago
                "Uncle Tom" and "Not Black Enough" have nothing to do with far-leftism. As I just said, with an academic source: Black people are relatively more conservative than other Democrats. To the extent that we're including Black Republicans in the mix, the analysis gets even weirder.
            • kortilla 6y ago
              > which there is some social pressure Lol, that’s understating it a bit. The president elect said “you ain’t black” to black people who even consider Trump. An old white man confidently telling black people their identity is jeopardized if they even consider not voting for him.
              • tptacek 6y ago
      • slg 6y ago
        Can you expand on what you mean by "far left politics"? Reminder, this happened in late 2018 and early 2019. It was before this year's round of Black Lives Matter protests. It was also before Coinbase issued its no politics edict. I am really struggling to think of what "far left politics" you are referring to here that would be important enough to the Black employees of Coinbase that it results in 75% of them leaving.
        • ergocoder 6y ago
          Far left politics is an extremist. For example, if you criticize BLM for looting, you will be labeled racists. Looting small shop owners makes no sense. Many shop owners are even black. This happened in Seattle where many shop owners support BLM. You might say, well, that was an exception. But Noah Trevor (an influential person) also justified looting because police breaks social contract first. Now why would you loot random shops because of that? The fact that Noah hasn't been canceled makes me think a lot of BLM supporters see looting as positive. To sum up, you basically can't say anything bad about BLM. Otherwise, you would be labeled as racists and canceled. This is a trend in the far-left politics. They would force you to personally sacrifice to better society. Another example is homeless people camping in front of your shop. If you try to make them go away, you will also be canceled. This far-left politics is just evil, IMO.
          • slg 6y ago
            To repeat myself, this happened in late 2018 and early 2019. That was before the round of protests that you are speaking about. What far left political issue was Coinbase potentially fighting against during the relevant time window that would have pushed these employees out? Also I think you mean Trevor Noah and not Noah Trevor.
          • cbthrow91 6y ago
            @slg: I believe CB has internally discouraged politics in the workplace not related to the mission since before 2020
            • deleted 6y ago
      • CyanLite4 6y ago
        That’s the problem. Black lives mattering is a political issue only to those of privilege. I can’t believe we’re actually having political debate if certain people’s lives should matter or not.
    • oh_sigh 6y ago
      I can think of contexts, especially when n=15(if this was a statistical study on insulin response to artificial sweeteners, people would be saying the sample size is too small to draw conclusions), but I don't know if developing hypothetical scenarios is useful. Learning the true context is most important. This could be done by corroborating allegations for example.
      • fractionalhare 6y ago
        > I can think of contexts Yes that's what was asked; which ones? > especially when n=15(if this was a statistical study on insulin response to artificial sweeteners, people would be saying the sample size is too small to draw conclusions) And those people would be wrong. It's incorrect to dismiss a study based on sample size without a discussion of significance and effect size in the context of the data. Moreover I reject the premise that you should be assessing this story quantitatively rather than qualitatively. But if you insist: what are your priors on whether or not a given company engaged in discrimination, and how do these change if you're told 75% of employees of a particular demographic stated there was discrimination?
        • googlryas 6y ago
          Okay - one context is where one department has a large number of black people, and that department is defragged for purely business reasons to a different office across the country. Most people never choose the relocation package, and so a big chunk of black employees end up quitting. That's the event that triggered 8 black employees of the 15 who left as I understand it from the article. > what are your priors on whether or not a given company engaged in discrimination, and how do these change if you're told 75% of employees of a particular demographic stated there was discrimination? I completely agree that it's a very bad look. It is probably even more likely than not that given those facts, it is due to racism. I guess the question comes down to, philosophically, how one answers the following question: In the quest to eradicate racism and racists, is it better to be over-zealous and destroy a few non-racists to make sure you get all the actual racists(the chemo approach) - or is it better to be slightly more circumspect and let a few racists slip through the cracks so that far fewer non-racists are punished (the US judicial system ideal)?
    • cbthrow91 6y ago
      Without the additional context from the article, I think citing 75% is a bit misleading. "When Coinbase announced it would be opening an office in Portland, Ore., several Black employees in the compliance department who worked remotely were told to move there or reapply for new jobs, four former employees said." "All of the Black workers in the compliance division ended up among the group of 15 who left." Without concrete evidence of discrimination in the article, my mind jumps to this being the pivotal cause of the stats, one team getting asked to relocate and that team being disproportionate in its demographics. I know from co-workers that the company once had a strong stance against remote work and made limited exceptions. I can see that being a source of a lot of discontent. Asking folks to move to a new city is a big ask too; I could see the company having handled that poorly. On the upside CB shifted to remote-first which should be great for being able to have a more diverse workforce. And contrary to some of the comments here, I take that as strong evidence of the ability for our leadership team to acknowledge mistakes and course correct.
      • slg 6y ago
        Ok, let's accept what you say as fact and ignore that an exception was made for the single White employee in that department which wasn't made for any of the Black employees you are referencing. Let's also ignore the weirdness of 40% of the company's Black employees being on a single seemingly small team. That still leaves 7 other employees in other departments who left the company in a 6 month window due to feeling discriminated against. 35% is obviously a better number than 75%, but it doesn't allow you to dismiss this problem.
        • cbthrow91 6y ago
          Just went back to double check the article and am actually not certain how you are getting to the number 75%. 11 employees cited a complaint to HR according to the article. Where are you getting the denominator for total number of black employees in 2019? There's a data mismatch between the CB blog post and the article. CB cites that only 2-3 formal complaints were filed iirc. 11 employee complaints matches pretty closely with the PDX group. -- FWIW I'm not dismissing the complaints. I've worked and studied in places where I've felt like an outsider; I've seen people make inappropriate comments about race+stereotypes in past work environments; I've also seen people make fishing claims of racial discrimination. I wasn't on those teams in 2019, so the truth is I simply don't know. From what I see today and the lack of concrete evidence in the article, I do have some doubts about the overall impression the article tries to give. I have the sense that certain information might have been omitted that might paint a clearer picture. I could totally be wrong as well.
• 6c9be5fc6b39 6y ago
  It is possible for a Black person to feel discriminated against because of their race even when such discrimination has not occurred. The event mentioned in the article referring to a Black person dealing drugs and having a gun is bad, but the rest of it just sounds like normal annoying work crap. Being talked down to and belittled in a work meeting? I'm a middle-aged white programmer and that's happened to me a number of times over my career.
  • slg 6y ago
    >It is possible for a Black person to feel discriminated against because of their race even when such discrimination has not occurred. This explanation's believability has an inverse relationship with the number of claims. I could buy the idea that a couple people perceived "normal annoying work crap" as discrimination, but would that happen 15 times? 75% of the Black employees left the company in a 6 month window. You don't see anything like that at any other company.
    • 6c9be5fc6b39 6y ago
      The article implies that a number of the Black people who left did so because the compliance division was relocated and they didn't want to relocate with it. It doesn't say how many people's decisions were influenced by annoying work crap that they interpreted as discrimination. This is a really dishonest article. It tries to lead one to believe things (e.g. that 15 Black people left Coinbase because they were belittled in meetings) without stating it outright or making a case for it. Just insinuation spun up from a few concrete situations that themselves are mostly vague or not obviously discrimination (the gun and drugs thing being the obvious exception).
      • whakim 6y ago
        Well, the article starts from the premise that an abnormally large percentage of Coinbase's black employees left over a short period of time. It then uses a large body of circumstantial evidence to (pretty convincingly, in my opinion) portray the culture at Coinbase as hostile to employees of color. Not really sure how that's dishonest.
• dstola 6y ago
  Babysitting employees is not really a function of the employers. If people wish to leave it's their choice
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • ramraj07 6y ago
    Yep, who cares that racism and sexism can go on and create a disproportionately hostile environment for just some people right! "I don't see anything bad happening to me, so everyone shouldn't care either!" Thankfully even if the world doesn't act that way, the majority (for now) aren't evil enough to also blatantly proclaim that this is also fine.
    • thegrimmest 6y ago
      > I don't see anything bad happening to me, so everyone shouldn't care either! What about: > people's rights to have consensual interactions and relationships with each other are more important than their right to be treated "fairly" whatever that actually means. The important point here is that we don't have a good working definition of "fair" that is universally agreed upon. The only ethical way to live in a society of people who fundamentally disagree is by optimising for consent.
      • ramraj07 6y ago
        As much as it's uncomfortable to define fair, I'd argue that it behooves us to strain and come to a conclusion. Every societal problem today and in history can probably be attributed to people not wanting to define a global fair, or defining it in a way (at least in retrospect) that was ostensibly below the mark. I'm sure that at some points in the US history thought it's fair to treat some people as slaves, so does your proclaimed universal sentence stand there too?
        • thegrimmest 6y ago
• acituan 6y ago
  > The article says "roughly three-quarters of the Black employees" left the company over a 6 month span due to feelings of being discriminated against. That isn't an accusation. It is a fact. I am not comfortable with promoting the framing of the article to an automatically established fact. The only solid fact here is people leaving and the inferred reason is racial discrimination. I am not saying this inference is likely to be wrong or not, but that it is nonetheless an inference and not a fact. The article also doesn't let the reader know how those numbers compare to the baseline attrition of the company, i.e. what percentage of the other demographic groups have left in the same time period, which tends to be pretty high in the startup scene. Racial discrimination at workplace being pretty seriously illegal in the US these employees would have a strong recourse against it and NYT can not possibly provide a superior standard of factuality for those accusations.
  • asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
    > I am not comfortable with promoting the framing of the article to an automatically established fact. It is a fact claim that has yet to be disputed on the record by anyone who is in position to dispute it. All media outlets have their biases, but the most prominent ones tend not to make up easily refuted lies. In the claim you are referencing, they say three quarters of the black employees left over a six month period. If that's a lie, Coinbase can simply say so. But they probably won't because it is probably true. The reasons why are more up to interpretation. Probably no way to get a firm answer on this since many of these people have signed NDAs or otherwise won't talk on the record. But I don't think it's reasonable to claim, without evidence, that the NYT is lying about the proportion of black employees that left over the given time period.
    • acituan 6y ago
      No one is disputing the act of people departing. OP tries to smuggle in the reason of departing together with the act of it as a fact and that is a problem. Fact space is infinite, which ones we choose to surface and which ones we leave behind is called framing. Technical name for making the audience believe that relevant facts are not relevant and saliencing irrelevant ones as relevant is called bullshitting (For further reading see the essay “On Bullshit” by Harry Frankfurt) and bullshits are much harder to weed out than factual inaccuracies in themselves. NYT, like any major publication, is not leveling outright falsehoods, but they are finessing around bullshitting. We don’t know, because we depend on them or likes of them to make sense of the events and surface the most relevant information in the first place. Like I said, I personally find it concerning that there is no mention of the baseline attrition rate in a high churn SF labor market, that there is no mention of the lack of serious legal action despite serious discrimination allegations, that there is no distinguishing between discrimination, feelings of discrimination and the types of discrimination; we don’t know if propensity for political activism is confounding the reason for those employee’s departures. Coinbase is explicitly discriminating against political activisim that they don’t deem relevant to their mission, rightly or wrongly not only it is not illegal, it is their right to exercise if they believe it would serve their company or customers better. It feels like NYT wants to penalize this act of “rebellion” by clumping all of these together, emphasize the racial angle and produce an aura of wrongdoing by that adjacency. There might as well be wrongdoing, but in that case courts are the machinery equipped to extract the relevant facts and bring justice to it. Not for-profit publications with very complex power relations and a core competency of shaping narratives. To give an obvious example, NYT the prominent media outlet once also played a role in manufacturing the public consent for Iraq invasion by surfacing such “questions”, “suspicions” while burying relevant facts. It would be naive to buy their narrative wholesale (or any single outlets narrative for that matter).