3 ms·

A big part of me wonders if this was the point of this whole exercise. A certain subset of employees are getting too uppity, so you just tell them to fuck off a

• sbierwagen 5y ago
  Elsewhere in this thread it's said that in the compensation package there's a big payout if the company is acquired. Though I can't imagine how huge it would have to be that paying each employee six months of salary is cheaper.
  • easton 5y ago
    They created that rule with the plan that Basecamp would never be bought out or acquired though. If they were planning something we would've heard something, although their business model/culture is basically the opposite of something that someone would want to acquire. It's biggest feature is that it doesn't feel like enterprise(tm) software.
  • asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
    I highly doubt losing 30% of the talent, including a big chunk of built up institutional knowledge, is going to make them a more attractive buyout target. Would you want to acquire a company with maybe a little too much internal political discussion? Or one that just spent a million of dollars to buy out their entire iOS team, low and high performers alike? To me it seems like I'd much prefer the company with the iOS team, all other things being equal.
• Ar-Curunir 5y ago
  These are all core team heads...
• prh8 5y ago
  They're not losing the bottom third of employees, no company ever wants this.
• 40acres 5y ago
  Doubt it. They are bleeding talent, generating terrible PR, and definitely did not plan for a massive buyout this year. This plan backfired heavily. Am amazing case study in incompetent leadership.
• fatbird 5y ago
  None of the "it was all their secret plan!" explanations make sense because whatever the plan, it could have been done more directly and easily (and probably more cheaply), and without all the drama and negative publicity. If it was layoffs, you just do them. You don't explain and you don't create a large number of now-ex employees going to Twitter to say why you suck. If it was downsizing to something more comfortable for the founders, again, more easily done with the same buyout package, and much less of a black eye by just saying "we want a smaller company, so we're putting our money behind doing right by everyone as we get what we want." If it was getting rid of agitators, it's actually easier to fire them and deal with the lawsuits. Most companies have some amount of ongoing legal expense, and getting sued isn't that bad if you're not smoking-gun discriminatory. You can always file a lawsuit, but it's much harder to get somewhere with a lawsuit, and there's a reason corporate attorneys get big bucks--that Basecamp has to pay. The best explanation is the most obvious one: they made a colossal blunder in handling this and have footgunned their company badly enough that there will now likely be a second wave of buyout accepters who are people who don't want to stick around to clean up the mess.
• throwaway526874 5y ago
  > getting too uppity Uppity has a racist history.
• gifnamething 5y ago
  >Usage notes >This term has historically been used in America to describe black people who were considered to be acting above "their place", and is considered by some to have racist connotations when applied to black people and other people of color; sometimes, arrogant or presumptuous, invoking the same idea, are used as codewords for it.[3][4][5]
• brown9-2 5y ago
  Sure, it was the master plan to light their reputation on fire in a single week