17 ms·

A lot of the conversation from the "no politics at work" crowd here is centered around "these folks were wasting company time and losing productivity protesting

• Graffur 5y ago
  Is Bigbuttson an actual name? That is funny to an English speaker.
  • wincy 5y ago
    Just as funny as something like Takeshita, which is a real Japanese surname. If I was working with someone with that last name I definitely wouldn’t bring it up.
    • hpkuarg 5y ago
      Can confirm, went to (an English-speaking) school with a Takeshita. Juvenile jokes were had.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • Rapzid 5y ago
      It sounds better than it reads with the appropriate pronunciation, but with a western accent.
  • Griffinsauce 5y ago
    It's also pretty offensive to your customer if that's their name.
    • jtdev 5y ago
      Maybe it’s a pornography company...? Maybe people should chill the fuck out with the constant thirst for being offended.
  • grumblestumble 5y ago
    Deliberately not an actual name, but I'm guessing the actual one he referenced is along those lines (he specifically mentioned it being Nordic)
  • koolba 5y ago
    If his first name was Bigsby I’d probably be laughing too. Though I doubt I’d put that in writing, in particular in anything remotely corporate related.
  • secondcoming 5y ago
    Not according to google (nsfw)
• jon_bigbuttson 5y ago
  Please do not make fun of my name.
• jimmaswell 5y ago
  To me the world's gone crazy where the word "deplorable" is unironically attached to some people making fun of some names. Unprofessional is the furthest I'd take it. Something you get a finger wag for. As a customer why would I even care if someone on the other end thought my name was funny as long as my shipment arrived? This generation truly is absurdly sensitive.
  • DSingularity 5y ago
    Especially when you juxtapose superficially-and-barely offensive things like this with ongoing things like war which are truly deplorable in real human suffering they cause.
    • philistine 5y ago
      Which is exactly the point! We tolerate war in the world because we tolerate smaller bad things. If we stop tolerating the smaller bad things, we can build a better society that no longer tolerates the really bad stuff.
      • LegitShady 5y ago
        >We tolerate war in the world because we tolerate smaller bad things. Nope.
      • DSingularity 5y ago
        Not sure I agree. Seems to me plausible that humans have empathy and outrage limits. Unless you think someone can be outraged all day every day — because it seems like there is a new issue for the mob every day.
      • alexashka 5y ago
        No. People have different needs that are at odds with one another. Compromising on what's bad for me but good for you (and vice versa) while doing what's good for both is how the world functions. There aren't universal 'bad things' of varying sizes that we just need to get rid of. That's the sort of thinking that gets you Nazi Germany cleansing the earth of 'bad' people to bring about paradise - be very careful.
• gregsadetsky 5y ago
  DHH's blog post: https://world.hey.com/dhh/let-it-all-out-78485e8e https://world.hey.com/dhh/let-it-all-out-78485e8e See paragraphs below "So I replied:" ...
  • christophilus 5y ago
    Well, that seems like a generous and reasonable solution to the problem.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• klelatti 5y ago
  It really sounds like JF / DHH really didn't want to have to deal with the issue - minimal disciplinary action and then push all discussion away from official channels. But I guess that it reveals what probably should have been clear about Basecamp - it's a vehicle for the expression / gratification of the founders - financially, emotionally and intellectually. And the loss of staff / possible impact on the company (and customers) was a price they were prepared to pay.
  • reachtarunhere 5y ago
    I don't see any issue with that. They get their gratification and the employees get paid for providing their work as a service.
    • klelatti 5y ago
      It wasn't meant to be criticism. However, losing 1/3 of your staff overnight over an issue like this does somewhat undermine the JF / DHH narrative of extreme managerial competence.
      • LegitShady 5y ago
        counterpoint - maybe the significance of not undermining the other 2/3 of the company is exactly extreme managerial competence when the crisis has already made itself clear.
        • klelatti 5y ago
          If you're saying that limiting their losses to _only_ 1/3 of their staff is a sign of great managerial flair then I'm afraid that I disagree very strongly.
          • LegitShady 5y ago
            It's like cutting off a limb with gangrene. The mistakes they made to get to this situation have been recognized, and now the next decision is how to make sure you continue to live, unpoisoned.
• honksillet 5y ago
  What list? What’s the back story!
  • gregsadetsky 5y ago
    A list of customers with "funny" names. See https://www.platformer.news/p/-what-really-happened-at-basecamp https://www.platformer.news/p/-what-really-happened-at-basec... and https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22406673/basecamp-political-speech-policy-controversy https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22406673/basecamp-politic...
    • enriquto 5y ago
      But where is the actual list? The only bit of information marginally interesting in this stupid drama is the list itself, yet it is nowhere to be found! Moreover, how can a "list of best names ever" be so troubling, let alone racist? I don't understand.
      • pantulis 5y ago
        I dont think the relation "best names ever" -> "no politics at work" is that straightforward. There had to be a lot of escalation in the discussion internally, and then political issues were raised.
        • jjeaff 5y ago
          Ya, it almost seems like once the criticism of the list took on a somewhat political component (people saying it was racist), that the critics were silenced with the no politics rule.
          • garmaine 5y ago
            According to the summary articles posted upthread, that seems to be what happened. The list was reinterpreted in the context of Stop Asian Hate to be racist. Which is not exactly fair given that the list is 10 years old. One should judge by the standards of the time, not the changing standards of today. And reading between the lines, that's essentially what the Basecamp founders said too: (paraphrasing) "this was a joke in bad taste made by people who aren't even at the company anymore. we're sorry that it happened, but it's water under the bridge." Then someone filed a racism complaint with HR against the founders and it escalated from there.
• koheripbal 5y ago
  Our experience when we issued our "No Politics / No Religion" policy at work was very positive. The few people who had an issue with it, subsequently quit or were terminated, and many of their co-workers actually thanked us afterwards for it. We didn't have to pay them to leave. One tried to use the company social media accounts to advance her politics, so we fired her, and the other person became frustrated that she couldn't vent at work, and quit. I don't know if it was Trump specifically that made them so persistently agitated, but they just could not stop talking about politics and creating drama. We later discovered that one of them had been considering reporting us to the state financial authorities because she didn't agree with our policy of accruing interest on client debts - and was collecting client invoices on her work desktop as "evidence". Placating "activists" in the work place may initially seem like the new norm in corporate responsibility, but it is actually a self-destructive spiral, as there are ever-changing foci for woke outrage. The risk of these same employees turning on the company is extremely high in the long term. Policies like "No Religion / No Politics" have benefits that far exceed eliminating office distractions. They limit legal liabilities by removing easily-disgruntled employees.
  • rPlayer6554 5y ago
    I'm sorry...what fantasy land do you have to live in where you think it's ok to use a company social media account to promote your own politics not only without permission from the company, but an explicit denial.
    • koonsolo 5y ago
      It was with the best intentions to improve the world! ;)
      • hparadiz 5y ago
        There is nothing you can tweet that will improve the world. Lol
        • prepend 5y ago
• hogFeast 5y ago
  That isn't what they said. What they said was: people who created the list went off on some weird tangent about the list being the first step towards genocide, if you have a problem with the list, you shouldn't contribute to the list (the subtle point here is that people who tend to be most active about these things usually feel guilty, management said the list was bad, management said it shouldn't have happened...what more do you want? Are you really saying that suggesting the list was genocidal is a normal response?). Circulating a list like this would happen everywhere. Every person believes they are above other people when they see other people behaving badly...funnily enough, bad things still happen because people think they are different from everyone else (understanding this point is a big step is the difference between managing yourself and having to manage other people...things happen, people make mistakes, they do things that they wouldn't normally do...once you manage a large team, the probability of weird things happening goes to 1). Btw, just as an aside, this whole discussion is going nowhere. I can only see this from my own perspective but most people have literally no knowledge of history, they have no knowledge of debate, they have no idea how to engage with other people in good faith. The reason why so many organizations have rules about not talking about politics is because, once an organization reaches a certain size, these discussions become impossible because the average level of a discussion is just so terrible (and there will always be a minority who actually don't want to engage with anyone else, they just want to burn it down). Ironically, this is essential to improving diversity in large organizations...but, irregardless, this discussion is pointless and will go nowhere. We will never reach a point where the complaining stops because the complaining is not related to anything outside individuals...it is just nothing (and a huge part of this is people feeling guilty).
  • matteotom 5y ago
    [1] is a useful overview. Somebody posted the ADL's "pyramid of hate"[2], which links biased views and actions as necessary (but not sufficient) preconditions to genocide. Some people saw this as going too far since "obviously" anyone who contributes to genocide should be fired, while the whole point of the pyramid is anybody can perpetuate these really early preconditions (and at the end of the day we should encourage people to learn from these smaller mistakes, and not punish them as harshly as firing). [1] https://www.platformer.news/p/-what-really-happened-at-basecamp https://www.platformer.news/p/-what-really-happened-at-basec... [2] https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/pyramid-of-hate.pdf https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/pyramid-of...
• corey_moncure 5y ago
  Someday you will look back on a world where it was okay to laugh at things, and perhaps you will even remember writing this comment.
  • grumblestumble 5y ago
    I'm generally perceived as a pretty funny guy, I joke around with both my reports and those I report to, and, yes, even with customers all the time. I've found that I don't need to diminish others to do this, there's plenty of other crap to joke about, like the quality of our products, how long it takes to get stuff done, the UX of the tools we share, dumb programming trends. It's easy to laugh without it being at the expense of others.
    • moistbar 5y ago
      Joking about the quality of your products is hurtful to the people who made them. Joking about dumb programming trends is offensive to the people who find them useful. You're still happily diminishing people, only now you won't even do it to their faces.
      • pshc 5y ago
        Criticism of a product or trend is not the same as criticism of its creator or users--if it even is valid criticism rather than social noise
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
      • grumblestumble 5y ago
        I'm joking about the quality of the products I make, to be clear.
    • eropple 5y ago
      I'm glad that you wrote this, because "punch up, stupid" is just not that difficult a concept in humor.
• nailer 5y ago
  From DHH at https://world.hey.com/dhh/let-it-all-out-78485e8e https://world.hey.com/dhh/let-it-all-out-78485e8e: > In fact, reviewing the original list in question, the vast majority of names on it fall into the category of the two specific examples above. It's not a list of, say, primarily Asian names. Out of the 78 names listed on the last version we were able to recover, just 6 names appear to be Asian. > So connecting this to the shootings in Atlanta, because the Asian victims of that atrocity had their names misspelled in news reports, is exactly the kind of linkage I'd like us to avoid when we analyze our mistakes together at work. The Verge is lying about things as usual, painting an inaccurate picture of interracial conflict. > "lol Bigbuttson is a funny name", and it's deplorable. Hyperbole. One European making fun of another European is hardly deplorable.
  • brailsafe 5y ago
    Seems like pretty innocuous lulz to me.
    • ezekg 5y ago
      Nothing is innocuous to outrage culture.
• SkyMarshal 5y ago
  >They let this fester - they were complicit in allowing this dumb-ass list to be circulated around the company for years Edit: nm, answered in other comments. What list? I don't see anything about that in the tweet, or in Basecamp's blogposts the other day...
  • mbreese 5y ago
    They had a list of “funny” customer names. Needless to say, “funny” wasn’t a good description. The existence of this list for many years (and a recent reckoning over it) was what precipitated this entire situation for Basecamp.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• JamesBarney 5y ago
  > they refused to take any action on it Is this true? My understanding is they said this was unacceptable and apologized for not stopping their employees from disseminating this list earlier. I guess people wanted a stronger disciplinary response to people who contributed the list and they refused?
  • jolux 5y ago
    They said it was unacceptable but denied that it was evidence of larger problems, basically.
    • kbenson 5y ago
      Which, until I see more of the discussion and the list in question, I'm inclined to believe given the blog post someone else posted where they outlined the problem and their specific response.
      • jolux 5y ago
        I think when something like that flies under the radar for over a decade, serious organizational problems are not far behind.
        • iudqnolq 5y ago
          They also admitted it wasn't under the radar, the founders says they'd known about the list for years.
    • jack_riminton 5y ago
      The main crux was a denial that this sort of behaviour led to genocide. I’m not kidding
      • prepend 5y ago
        I would like to see the counterpoint to DHH’s blog post. There seems to be something missing because saying a names list is part of or indicative of genocide/systemic etc seems too far out to only be that. Pessimistically, I’ve witnessed similar exchanges that didn’t seem plausible to me, but yet were very real to the people making the claim. I remember a friend who was convinced that their trans friends lives were in danger after the 2016 election and claimed that management not denouncing the election and allowing friends to work from home for safety was “literally the same” as attacking them. It was so weird having them walk through the logic I thought they were joking. Fortunately, everyone lived despite continuing to come into the office (until covid of course).
• tlogan 5y ago
  If a company ensures that everybody needs to act professionally all the time then even talk about politic will be done in professional matter. But as soon as you allow unprofessional behavior or talk regarding any topic (deals, customers, code comments, etc) you will have trouble with politic.
• coldtea 5y ago
  >That entirely misses the point. The loss of productivity around this issue is entirely on the leadership team. They let this fester - they were complicit in allowing this dumb-ass list to be circulated around the company for years, and when it became an issue, they refused to take any action on it. The list is not the issue here. In an ideal world, the list would be seen as an innocent inside joke, and be totally not newsworthy. But millenials (not all: some, enough to change the culture around this) don't know how to take a joke. Like the children of hippies turned yuppies, Gen X successors turned prudes. If you have a name like Jonathan Lovesturds, sorry, but the name is funny, and you should be expect people to ocassionally make fun about it, including in companies you deal with. It is what it is, and it's not the end of the world, nor some huge abuse (my surname had pun potential, so I got some of this as a kid, big effin' deal). The "politics at work" thing would be relevant and legit if it was for e.g. unionizing, abuse of power from some higher up, the company doing shady business (e.g. Google and military deals, Facebook etc.) etc. But in 2021 this more often than not degenerates in people making a power-play, abusing identity politics and other fashionable talking points, to increase their influence in the company, attack others they don't like, and so on. Pretending the list was about "racism" (when it had absolutely nothing to do with that, aside from: "also contains a small percentage of foreign names that sound funny on top of the anglosaxon such") is also in this very vein.
  • DiNovi 5y ago
    In an ideal world you don’t work at a company that maintains a list of customer names to laugh it. And if you did and someone pointed out how it can become problematic to have foreign names in the list and they tell you why, you don’t self-immolate. Pretending this list and subsequent lack of discipline isn’t about the founders vanity is very ignorant
    • themacguffinman 5y ago
      > And if you did and someone pointed out how it can become problematic to have foreign names in the list and they tell you why, you don’t self-immolate. This isn't accurate. DHH openly admitted that the list circulating was a big failure that fell on the founders and the company, an admission that was positively received by most employees. The explosive part of the scandal starts when some employees insisted that the list contributed to genocidal attitudes and DHH rather aggressively pushed back on this point, saying that this is an unproductive escalation of the discussion (and then DHH himself ironically escalated the discussion even further). > He told me today that attempting to link the list of customer names to potential genocide represented a case of “catastrophizing” — one that made it impossible for any good-faith discussions to follow. Presumably, any employees who are found contributing to genocidal attitudes should be fired on the spot — and yet nobody involved seemed to think that contributing to or viewing the list was a fireable offense. If that’s the case, Hansson said, then the pyramid of hate had no place in the discussion. To him, it escalated employees’ emotions past the point of being productive. Pointing out the problematic nature of the list was not the trigger for this. The trigger was a specific accusation made about the political impact of the list. The founders were clearly trying not to be a company that maintains a list of customer names to laugh at. [1] https://www.platformer.news/p/-what-really-happened-at-basecamp https://www.platformer.news/p/-what-really-happened-at-basec...
• mhneu 5y ago
  “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” -Elie Wiesel Choosing to not discuss politics is fine. But if you do that, you’re making a choice: you’re choosing to take the side of those who prefer political decisions to be made by a small elite, without feedback from people like us. You’re choosing not to weigh in.
  • thinkingemote 5y ago
    Choosing a side is how you get polarisation. If the trouble with the world is too much polarisation, perhaps we shouldn't be so quick to take a side.
  • BitwiseFool 5y ago
    I feel like I'm more tormented by people demanding I take "a side" which is invariably their side. God help me if I choose to disagree. Besides, we live in a Democratic Republic and it's my representatives making the decisions, not me. That's literally by design. My only real feedback is casting a single vote when it's the right time.
    • TheTrotters 5y ago
      Yes, the unstated fact in these discussions about politics in workplace is that the dominant group is very liberal or even leftists. Especially on social issues. People who are criticizing Basecamp want their politics in workplace. Every single one of them knows they won't be in the minority. They won't have to be one of the few opposing voices in a sea of anti-abortion, pro-gun-rights, anti-gay-marriage, anti-immigration coworkers.
      • madeofpalk 5y ago
        I wonder if discussing removing racial segregation from workplaces back in the 60s or 70s or whenever was considered a "very liberal or even leftist"? Sometimes there's just a right side to be on. I've never had a discussion about abortion or guns-rights or whatever in the general workplace - maybe I've had social conversations amongst work friends - but really the "political" conversations I've had at work are mostly focus on building diverse teams to build better products or calling out and addressing bad behaviour.
• gkedzierski 5y ago
  This reminds me of an incident they had years ago, when they blogged the name of the millionth (or something) uploaded file and then had to apologise for betraying their customer’s trust.
  • wlll 5y ago
    Ah, "cat.jpg". 100 millionth file name, you can see the post where that nugget was let out, and the followup apology from DHH on the svn blog still. Thing is, Taylor, the head of Ops who made the fateful blog post made it up as a joke. He didn't check, or look it up, he wouldn't have done. The chance of it being called "cat.jpg" is slim. It was literally a joke based on the number of cat pictures that people uploaded to the Internet. DHH proof-read the post. People complained that we were prying into customer data (we weren't, and Basecamp's customer data privacy and security policies are incredibly strong), but DHH wouldn't let us "come clean" believing that people would think we were covering it up, so he apologised for it as if it were real. Source: Worked at basecamp at the time.
• tomp 5y ago
  > They let this fester - they were complicit in allowing this dumb-ass list to be circulated around the company for years, and when it became an issue, they refused to take any action on it. After reading the article linked here in the comments a few times - "What really happened at BaseCamp" - I actually think that people who make a fuss about the list are dumb-ass. I mean, it's a list of funny names! Put mine on it, if you want! Anyone who takes offence to it, needs to chill out, forget about woke Pyramid of Hate and stop bothering other people (for the record, pre-Nazi Germany had hate speech laws, and Hitler did write strong anti-semitic messages in his first book long before coming to power - this idea that "jokes will escalate to genocide" is pure woke fantasy & narrative that they use to promote their cause and bully other people into submission)
• wlll 5y ago
  I left 5 years ago, so I'm remembering this as well as I can. > they were complicit in allowing this dumb-ass list to be circulated around the company for years, and when it became an issue, they refused to take any action on it. That's not really what happened, and is a part of this story that hasn't entirely been made clear. The list was, if I remember correctly, about 10 to 20 names long and was tucked away in the company Backpack account. I found it in ~2010 when I first started and thought little of it. As far as I know it didn't get added to after that, perhaps it did. It certainly wasn't "passed around". Backpack was closed to new users in ~2014, but we'd stopped using it at that point and some time I think before then someone had found the list, brought it up with the rest of the company as a problem. I seem to recall the phrase "How would you feel if you discovered your name was on this list" was mentioed, but it was a long time ago. Anyway, my recollection was that it was "deleted" (I guess it was a "soft" delete) with no dissent. This wasn't about DHH or Jason letting a list be passed around, or defending it. No-one was tittering about "Incontinentia Buttocks" in 2021. Basecamp while I was there (2010 to 2016) became incredibly good at customer privacy and security, and I would trust them with my data, and this just wouldn't happen.
  • bastawhiz 5y ago
    DHH's own blog post seems to contradict your account. https://world.hey.com/dhh/let-it-all-out-78485e8e https://world.hey.com/dhh/let-it-all-out-78485e8e
    • wlll 5y ago
      How so?
• chubbyish 5y ago
  Everyone has laughed at these kinds of jokes. Also, if someone had a funny name and they went against progressive politics, then they would be laughing about it. How about all the Donald Drumpf stuff from Oliver. It puzzles me what progressives actually do laugh at when so much is forbidden and everything is somehow insensitive. Most likely is that they are all just hypocrites.
  • dlp211 5y ago
    The difference is punching up versus punching down.
    • KODeKarnage 5y ago
      And you just presumed everyone on that list was in the "down" group. Why?
      • CallMeJim 5y ago
        Presumably if everyone on the list were wealthy white males, grandparent would be ok with the list being circulated.
    • BeFlatXIII 5y ago
      Real differences, not made-up nonsense.
• yerwhat01010 5y ago
  > they refused to take any action on it. Did they? My understanding it that DHH acknowledged the list was a mistake, apologised, and made it clear that such behaviour was no longer acceptable.