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Maybe the company did negotiate. Most of the company stayed. I know I’d rather work for basecamp now, because they agreed to knock out the BS at work. > you'll
by lettergram 6y ago
Maybe the company did negotiate. Most of the company stayed. I know I’d rather work for basecamp now, because they agreed to knock out the BS at work.
> you'll lose your best employees as they decide they don't really want you to decide everything about their waking hours without consulting you.
the company is actually saying they want to not talk about anything outside of work. They don’t want you consulting them, they want you doing your job during work hours. That’s a pretty reasonable trade for money.
- hardwaregeek 6y agoDid they knock out the BS? Or did they just get dragged into a massively political and now massively open fight? What do you think the average productivity of a Basecamp employee is right now? Even after the dust settles, will you trust that DHH and Jason will keep their promise of no politics? What a company says about its culture and the reality are often quite different.
- fancyfish 6y agoExactly this. What people don’t realize is this move is hardly political. It’s all about building a better business. When work is a safe space free from political flame wars, employees can actually focus on the one thing they were hired to do, and be happier doing it: write code, manage projects, etc.
- nr2x 6y agoWith 1.5x more work for the remaining people they’ll need to be focused…or just find jobs that are 1x the work for same or better pay.
- brianwawok 6y agoOr just ship less features. I doubt basecanp is feature constrained right now.
- staticassertion 6y ago1.5x work today. Basecamp will backfill most of those roles, no? Honestly, a bunch of people quitting probably works out just fine for Basecamp.
- fancyfish 6y agoYeah, seriously. It’s Basecamp. There’s a very deep bench of engineers and product people that would love to backfill the roles. It will still be damaging short term because they lost a lot of depth in cultural and product knowledge, with the marketing and product leads gone. Not easy to replace someone who’s been living and breathing the products for over a decade.
- jakelazaroff 6y agoIf the response to this is any indication, they've just alienated a significant portion of that bench. Basecamp seems very profitable, so it may not be fatal. But my guess is that it cuts far, far deeper than Jason and DHH intended. There may well be another wave of resignations next week.
- staticassertion 6y agoIf your goal was to get likeminded people who don't want to discuss politics into the company, and "pot stirrers" out, seems like the post succeeded. Maybe that wasn't the intent and they were naive enough to post something publicly like that and not expect resignations, I couldn't say.
- jolux 6y agoI don't think they expected to lose 30% of their workforce. That doesn't seem like something you'd do intentionally except in dire circumstances.
- staticassertion 6y ago30% is like ~a dozen employees
- gtaylor 6y agoNo, it's about DHH using politics as a stand-in for the actual issue: they mishandled this issue with the name list, they got called out and held to task for it, and they don't like that behavior. The politics thing really amounts to "don't challenge me" and is a nice diversion from the actual issue.
- fastball 6y agoWhat are Fried and DHH supposed to do, flagellate themselves?
- pm90 6y agoAdmit they made a mistake and address it, rather than institute a childishly overbroad ban on all "political conversation" specifically to shut down criticism related to their mistake.
- fastball 6y agoHave you read DHH's blog? It sounds like they did exactly that, and the instigating employees were unwilling to let things go and insisted on continuing to escalate things.
- pm90 6y ago“Instigating employees” really? People were hurt by a very obvious instance of the company failing to live up to its stated values, so they attempt to bring it up to its founder. He’s painted the situation as “troublemakers out to get my skin” whereas from all the reporting it appears that he’s been the one to needlessly throw a childish and very public temper tantrum.
- digitaltrees 6y agoRead his words. They offer a respectful measured tone. They acknowledge and seek to make amends. It is a case study in healthy communication and dispute resolution, and that is saying something for someone like DHH who is prone to bombastic trolling generally. DHH never said instigating employees he merely requested that the apology be accepted and the team move forward. Then he asked everyone to consider the degree of severity of the problem and not give in to the temptation to bring slippery slope arguments into the debate because it actually undermines any possible progress by inflaming the debate, making people’s opinions more intractable and destroying any possible resolution.
- billybatson 6y agoI would argue that a mandate to not have societal/political discussions/statements is in itself a societal/political statement.
- causality0 6y agoThe mistake was the timing. If they'd started the company off banning that stuff, they'd have been fine. If they'd waited until months after this controversy died down, they'd probably have less than 10% losses. Doing it now was a truly enormous screw up.
- jolux 6y agoWe will see if most of the company stays after losing a third of its staff including several directors and some of its most senior and longest-tenured engineering talent. Would you? I’m not sure I would.
- astrange 6y agoIs the company still going to exist after this? That's quite a lot of severance, unless they manage to renegotiate it all.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ashtonkem 6y agoThey’ll live. They just kneecapped themselves for no obvious reason, but they’ve got enough cash, remaining talent, and customers to live. Especially since they’re not VC backed, and slowing growth isn’t fatal. I’d wait until you hear about customers quitting before you assume that they’re in trouble, and I don’t think it’ll happen.
- astrange 6y agoThey lost the entire iOS app team. If they live I think it'll be because they convince the people to stay, not because they replace them.
- riffraff 6y agoSome people have said they'll abandon basecamp products because of this. My gut feeling is that this won't be a significant number but it is happening
- rzz3 6y agoPeople always say that though. A few weeks go by, hype dies down, no one cares. Boycotts are rarely effective. Most people just want software that works, and migrating creates time and effort that affects business. I’m sure most people who cancelled were already on the verge of it before.
- solosoyokaze 6y agoThey’re not just hemorrhaging employees, they’re hemorrhaging customers too. I know I will never give them money. This looks like a fatal blow, not a place someone would want to work. I’m sure they’re hiring though so you could probably get a job there and ride it out to the end.
- cercatrova 6y ago> they’re hemorrhaging customers too I doubt that, most companies could not care less about the internal affairs of their tools' companies, unless it impacts the tools' performance and featureset, something we still await to see regarding Basecamp, whether they can successfully plug the employee hemorrhage wound and get new employees working on the product.
- sombremesa 6y agoCompanies do definitely care about PR, however, and can easily get called out for associating with known bad actors.
- dylan604 6y ago> most companies could not care less about the internal affairs of their tools' companies Most might be broad. Lots of companies absolutely care about the interal workings of their vendors. They can and do make decisions on these kinds of factors, especially if a large contract is on the line or they are looking for that last thing to separate 2 viable candidates. All companies doing manufacturing in places like Asia are constantly being looked at by human rights organizations to ensure the employees are being treated as humans. Personally, I won't do business with companies like Uber (even with new leadership), Wal-Mart, etc based on things reported about them.
- cercatrova 6y agoSure, depends on industry, I was talking about tech specifically. And in tech, many might care, but most will not.
- ummonk 6y agoAre you sure “most of the company stayed”? Over a third has already publicly announced they’re quitting, and the changes were only announced like a week ago, so...
- bartvk 6y agoAnd there must be employees who privately made a decision to leave.
- ashtonkem 6y ago“Most” of the company staying is cold comfort when that “most” is a slim majority. Losing a third of your work force at once, effective immediately (or close to immediately) is a catastrophic outcome that’s really hard to sugarcoat. Especially when the company has just gotten into a very ugly public fight with their employees, and remote work is no longer a rare benefit to entice talent. I would not envy being a hiring manager at Basecamp right now.
- kyawzazaw 6y agoThere's 58 employees at the entire company (or was)
- xmprt 6y agoThat's almost more surprising to me. In small companies I usually expect most people to stick together because everyone knows everyone. Having 1/3 leave isn't something I'd ever imagine.
- foobaw 6y agoI'm guessing more people will leave in the next few weeks.
- KingOfCoders 6y agoI think with more and more remote work social ties get weaker - at least from what I have seen people are easier to leave because the group isn't as tightly connected when everyone knows each other just from some remote meetings and PRs.
- ashtonkem 6y agoI doubt it. Basecamp has extremely long average tenures. The people who are quitting are often 9-12 year veterans. If social ties were that weak there, they would’ve been pealed off by recruiters before.
- eyelidlessness 6y ago> Most of the company stayed. That’s an oddly mechanical way of expressing that a third of the company didn’t stay. If an asteroid hit the planet and a third of the population died, it would be very weird to say “most of the population survived”.