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I wouldn't be surprised if this will become a case study in future in how to self-destruct a successful company with a single bad communication, much like Geral
by danjac 5y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if this will become a case study in future in how to self-destruct a successful company with a single bad communication, much like Gerald Ratner (although this may be due to long-term grievances we're not aware of).
- aaomidi 5y agoThey had many opportunities to reverse that blog post. They didn't and doubled down.
- baggy_trough 5y agoSome people are willing to stick to their principles even if it costs them. We need many more such.
- JeremyBanks 5y agoYou may see principles, but I just see ego.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- disgrunt 5y agoHang on to your ego.
- threatofrain 5y agoFor those willing to stick by their principles, we should also see if they stick their landing.
- mempko 5y agoDidn't realize authoritarianism is a principle we really should be rewarding.
- tshaddox 5y agoI’ve never seen any correlation between how willing someone is to stick to their principles and how good those principles are.
- nailer 5y agoOK. My experience is people stick to the values they hold dear and those tend to be ones they've given some thought to.
- aniforprez 5y agoGiving thought to principles and those principles being "good" or realistic have nothing to do with each other. I don't want to bring up obvious examples but there are tons of examples where principles with a great deal of thought have been clearly destructive. I cannot believe the kind of childish simplistic thinking going on in this thread
- nailer 5y agoYou don’t think that ideas being more considered means they’re more likely to be worthy of having? > I cannot believe the kind of childish simplistic thinking going on in this thread Yes.
- aniforprez 5y agoUh do you really want me to spoon feed you the obvious examples of people with strongly held opinions devastating large swathes of the world? Clearly their ideas were very well considered except they're not particularly "worthy of having"
- nailer 5y agoThe counter examples don’t disprove the effect. Yes we’ve had long considered ideas like communism that have resulted in the deaths of more than a hundred million people, no that does not disprove the notion that on average ideas that are more considered are of higher value that ideas that are not considered.
- danjac 5y agoThat's very typical behaviour from the founders. I mean it's worked for them in the past, but perhaps they never learned the value of a little humility.
- bonaldi 5y ago“If you liked “How to build a blog in 15 minutes with Rails,” check out the sequel, ‘How to destroy Rails in 15 minutes with a blog.’”(From https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/1388174804985868289 https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/1388174804985868289 )
- Trasmatta 5y agoIt's a funny Tweet, but Rails is much, much bigger than Basecamp now. There's enough money invested in the Rails ecosystem at enough large and medium sized companies that Basecamp could go away entirely and Rails would continue to persist. (I realize that there's always the possibility that this post could age like milk, and everyone might be pointing at laughing at me in 5 years. But that's also pretty much true for any piece of technology, and not unique to Rails' current situation.)
- bdcravens 5y agoI've seen more than a few tweets in recent days from those who feel distraught as Rails developers. Perhaps it's silly, but the Rails ecosystem and culture plays a big role in its success.
- Trasmatta 5y agoWith core Rails team members apparently resigning as part of this we may very well see a leadership shake up in the Rails community. Despite people claiming "Rails is dead!" for the past 10 years, it's continued to be huge at pretty much all levels of development (introductory, hobbyist, contract work, startups, small, mid, and large size companies). I don't really see this changing that significantly. If we start to see an exodus off of Rails in the next few years from the big players like GitHub, then I'll start to get worried.
- bonaldi 5y agoAgreed, but culture and mindshare matter. You can be big like node or big like Perl. Losing cachet can be like going out of business: slow then sudden.
- Trasmatta 5y agoIt's awfully ironic, given how Basecamp has built their entire brand off of good management, and running a non-toxic workplace. Regardless of what people think of the specifics of the policy, it's a good case study in how not to do something like this. Releasing a blog post that results in 1/3rd+ of your employees resigning is bad management.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago1/3rd of your employees so far. Would like to see how many stick around having to operate in an environment where a third of your coworkers just walked (based on past experiences when this occurred due to layoffs).
- Trasmatta 5y agoAnd like people have been saying elsewhere in this thread, 3-6 months of severance is really tempting even if you weren't personally offended by this policy change. If you're confident that you could get another job afterwards, why not take a free 3-6 month vacation?
- toomuchtodo 5y agoAbsolutely. The job market is going to be on fire for the next 1-2 years at least due to government stimulus, recovery efforts, “opening back up”, all that, you would have to be very confident in your decisions to do anything to jeopardize employee retention. But not my business, not my circus.
- anon7725 5y agoYes. I am very critical of the culture that led to this. But my-oh-my did they shoot themselves in the foot on this one.
- DVassallo 5y agoThis is not a layoff. This seems to be a situation where the 1/3rd minority was annoying the 2/3rd majority.
- creamytaco 5y agoA bit melodramatic. Nothing of the sort will happen and Basecamp will be all the stronger for it.
- davidw 5y agoI have no direct insight, but I'm getting a bit of a 'tip of the iceberg' feeling, like maybe there's some other stuff going on.
- predaking 5y agoI felt the same from the time the very first post from Fried dropped.
- ergocoder 5y agoYou can read the twitter thread from Casey. One of the issues was that one of the activist employees tried to link "making fun of customers' names" to "genocide". That was a big yike. And definitely a convo I wouldn't want to have.
- ummonk 5y agoThey linked this: https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/pyramid-of-hate.pdf https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/pyramid-of... I don't see what the big yikes is about that.
- ergocoder 5y agoTrying to imply people will commit genocide is not a yike for you?
- ummonk 5y agoMisreading that doc as “people will commit genocide” is a big yike for me.
- ergocoder 5y agoThe word genocide shouldn't even have been mentioned. Why would you even bring up the word "genocide" in any discussion, especially when talking about correcting bad behaviour? Are your colleagues nazis? Do you think they have potential to commit genocide? Yikes. Big yikes.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y agoFWIW, I know the message in the original communication was very appealing to a lot of people, so they could get more interested candidates because of that. I wonder if what you'll see is companies sorting into "politics encouraged" vs "politics discouraged" environments, and will be interesting to see the outcomes of these different types of workplaces.
- SpicyLemonZest 5y agoThat sorting largely already exists. The "politics discouraged" environments just don't typically need to evangelize their lack of politics; nobody's walking into their job at Oracle expecting to pressure Safra Catz into supporting their favorite causes.
- sangnoir 5y agoI don't think the public blog posts written by the leaders was the "original communication". There was a lot of internal drama[1] that led up to it (and IMO, some poor decisions made). Perhaps that's what you were referring to as appealing to a lot of people, if so, then yowsers... 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26963708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26963708
- hn_throwaway_99 5y agoThanks for posting that, it had additional info I was unaware of that changed my view. This quote in particular: > “At least in my experience, it has always been centered on what is happening at Basecamp,” said one employee — who, like most of those I spoke with today, requested anonymity so as to freely discuss internal deliberations. “What is being done at Basecamp? What is being said at Basecamp? And how it is affecting individuals? It has never been big political discussions, like ‘the postal service should be disbanded,’ or ‘I don’t like Amy Klobuchar.’ I had originally thought it was more in line with the Coinbase decision, which was more specifically about taking a stance with respect to the BLM movement, which is an external political discussion, vs. what to do about sensitive issues within your company. Discussing how to handle issues like the "Best Names Ever" list that are internal to your company isn't "politics", it's called running a company.
- odshoifsdhfs 5y agoDepends I will be looking and reaching out to them soon. A) they are now looking for a lot of people. B) I fully agree with their idea about apolitical work spaces, and I know a lot of folks that do as well. I have quit jobs due to the BLM fanfare, you are either with us or against us mentality in the workplace where I just wanted to do my job and get paid to do so. edit: I chose BLM because it was the big thing last year. Not a racist thing, but being 5000km away from all that, and still have people 'demanding' me I wear/use BLM support things was too much.
- Graffur 5y agoAgreed
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deanCommie 5y agoIf I was DHH and Jason I would be extremely wary of any applications coming in right now. When your policies are being celebrated by Breitbart and other alt-right trash publications, you are going to attract a lot of folks with extremely questionable integrity. Not saying you're one of those, but if you can't recognize your point in history and are quitting your job over "BLM fanfare", then you also know the answer to the question of what you would have done during the civil rights movements of past. Nothing. You would have kept your head down and focused on your work. Which, maybe if you're in a sustenance-based paycheck-to-paycheck environment is justifiable. But if you have the luxury to quit jobs (PLURAL!) over being asked to take a stand, then you're not apolitical.
- tosh 5y ago> We also do cut-glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks on, all for £4.95. People say, "How can you sell this for such a low price?", I say, "because it's total crap. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner
- w0mbat 5y agoIt's a shame people took that speech seriously. It was a very funny speech particularly from someone who was not a trained comedian.
- sergiotapia 5y agoI think it'll become a case study of removing bad apples to produce brilliant work. Time will tell.
- christophilus 5y agoI’ll take the other side of that bet. You just got rid of a bunch of folks who clearly didn’t want to be there anymore. You also probably put an end to those obnoxious, unproductive political debates that seemed to have been getting more pervasive. After a bit of hiring, your profits are up. Morale is much improved. Productivity is up. Time will tell which prediction turns out to be the outcome.
- randomsearch 5y agoI suspect that this opinion is held mostly by those who support the departing employees. Does that describe yourself? I think it _is_ an existential risk but having observed some of dhh's personality traits, I expect he just lost patience and said "that's it - either they go or the company does" and is quite willing to gamble the future of the company on the basis that managing a stressful, internally riven, company is worse than managing no company at all.