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It's too bad this well-reported piece of what led to Basecamp's "no politics" decision isn't getting as much discussion here as the initial decision announcemen
by danso 6y ago
It's too bad this well-reported piece of what led to Basecamp's "no politics" decision isn't getting as much discussion here as the initial decision announcement [0], as it is really a case study in poor leadership and decision process. Whatever the merits and tradeoffs of a "no politics" policy, it seems rash to jump into it for an incident that was hugely preventable and had nothing to do with politics:
> A day later, Hansson responded with a post of his own. He had conducted a forensic analysis of who created the document and how it had spread around the company. He called it a systemic failure on the company’s part. In a conversation with me today, he acknowledged that he and Fried had known about the list for years.
> “There was some awareness at the time within the company that that list had existed and it wasn't acted upon. That is squarely on Jason’s and my record.” The list, he said, “in itself is just a gross violation of the trust … It’s just wrong in all sorts of fundamental ways.”
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26944192 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26944192
- rkuykendall-com 6y agoI think the issue is that much of HN doesn't want to read this reporting. It's much easier to read a PR blog post and imagine that your own thoughts and feelings about Twitter or something are what motivated it.
- NationalPark 6y agoSeriously. Maybe if it had a more clickbaity headline like, "Basecamp insiders reveal a culture of contempt for customers" it would get traction. And all this from a management team that's published how many books on their deep people management insights?' This bit in particular: Employees took a different view. In a response to Hansson’s post, one employee noted that the way we treat names — especially foreign names — is deeply connected to social and racial hierarchies. Just a few weeks earlier, eight people had been killed in a shooting spree in Atlanta. Six of the victims were women of Asian descent, and their names had sometimes been mangled in press reports. (The Asian American Journalists Association responded by issuing a pronunciation guide.) The point was that dehumanizing behavior begins with very small actions, and it did not seem like too much to ask Basecamp’s founders to acknowledge that. Hansson’s response to this employee took aback many of the workers I spoke with. He dug through old chat logs to find a time when the employee in question participated in a discussion about a customer with a funny-sounding name. Hansson posted the message — visible to the entire company — and dismissed the substance of the employee’s complaint. Strikes me as extremely unprofessional, childish, and really just downright embarrassing for him, for Basecamp, for Basecamp's customers who now have to have their own internal discussions about whether or not their vendor ESG standards are being met, and for the employees whose personal reputations are for better or worse now associated with this PR disaster. It's truly astonishing what a series of poor choices were made (assuming, of course, that this particular piece is faithfully telling the story).
- sanderjd 6y agoI have always found it a bit odd that their management perspective holds so much sway when it is built upon their experiences managing what has always been a very small organization.
- cbnotfromthere 6y agoHow exactly could be "extremely unprofessional, childish, and really just downright embarrassing for him" to prove, beyond any doubt, that the accuser on a high-horse is actually a scheming hypocrite?
- virgilp 6y agoWas it wrong on DHH's part, though? Here's how I read it: DHH: "Making fun of names is wrong and clearly a failure on our part that we didn't stop it. Please don't take extreme views though, it is not genocide, we'd like to believe we'd fire genocide-inclined employees Employee: continues to argue that making fun of names leads to genocide DHH: points to employee making fun of names Employee: surprised pikachu face What was DHH supposed to do? Acknowledge said employee, and fire them?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tomerv 6y agoMaybe not post his response for the whole company to see? It's the first thing you learn about managing people.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- virgilp 6y agoPerhaps you imagine DHH's response was different than his actual response? Read it (link below) - do you still consider it wrong? https://world.hey.com/dhh/let-it-all-out-78485e8e https://world.hey.com/dhh/let-it-all-out-78485e8e