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Yes, people are reacting to the policy. But it's definitely that the policy is a reaction to something as well. Probably, the founders believed that the toxici

Yes, people are reacting to the policy. But it's definitely that the policy is a reaction to something as well. Probably, the founders believed that the toxicity of the internal culture had reached a point where it was extremely detrimental to the workplace. And, knowing DHH, it was probably not only a financial decision but a lifestyle one. He may have realized that the advocates that actively discussed and promoted political issues within the org was making his life and others in the company miserable. Would you allow a Jehovah's Witness to be a significant part of your life if they proselytize you every day? I definitely wouldn't. Some of these activists probably think that's their right to do so; so let them walk. I'd be really surprised if this surprised the executive team. This seems to be a super intentional and very professionally executed cultural shift / purge. Professional, because you give them freaking 6 months of severance and you don't call them out or force them out. If that isn't recognized as goodwill, you're blinded by your political disagreements to seeing how nice of a treatment that is. The people leaving probably grew with the company, and contributed a lot to the company, so giving them 6 months of severance is recognizing that. But it's also telling them, hey we are making a cultural shift in our identity, and if that identity is no longer you, sorry, we'll treat you really well as you find a place that supports your identity. This reeks of professionalism and GOOD management to me.

overgard 5y ago
Yeah, honestly this seems like addition by subtraction. The last thing I would want at work is to navigate around ultra-sensitive trigger-warning micro-aggression seeking activists. Not that all the people leaving were that, but it sure sounds like a lot were. At work I just want professionalism and respectful behavior, along with people that have moderately thick skin and don't seek to find offense everywhere.
- busterarm 5y ago
  Given how Basecamp is known to pay, they're going to attract a significant amount of top talent that is already aligned with the new culture.
- dannyr 5y ago
  Oh, have you seen tweets from Basecamp leaders calling people out? you could actually say that the execs are activists as well based on their posts on social media.
  - ajharrison 5y ago
    Yes, on social media. Outside of their basecamp account.
  - dccoolgai 5y ago
    Not really sure where I sit on the whole thing, still, but I've seen this parroted as a "gotcha!" and I don't think it really is. The founders' activism is _public_. The ban is only on activism _at work_. The fact that so many people don't _get this_ is sort of proving their point.
    - iudqnolq 5y ago
      That's not the case. They're explicitly saying employees are welcome to discuss the founder's activist preferences at work. They've also heavily used their workplace for activism. For example, they invited a political candidate to base a campaign out of their offices.
- StavrosK 5y ago
  I read a summary of the situation and it seemed to me like both sides handled it poorly. It sounded like there was indeed a lot of activism, which is something you don't really want in a workplace, but the C-levels didn't handle it terribly graciously either, what with looking at past logs to find an employee's messages. It's more than a little impolite, I think. I have to admit there's a certain elegance in filtering out political people by banning public discussions of politics, though. I especially cringed at this bit: > Jane Yang, a data analyst at the company, told me that restricting internal conversations would negatively affect diversity and inclusion efforts. For example, she said, the company’s profit-sharing plan gave more profits to people who have longer tenure — a group that is majority white and male. Making that discussion off limits internally could ensure that inequality in profit sharing becomes a structural feature of the company. It's not like they had a rule that white males get more money, it's a seniority rule! It seems unreasonable to me to extrapolate that to systemic racism in the company.
  - ajharrison 5y ago
    I think that’s the entire point DHH was attempting to make: internal issues don’t need to be connected with broader issues like colonialism and racism. That senior execs making more money is due to their tenure and merit, and not because they’re white and male.
  - dsr_ 5y ago
    "It's not like they had a rule that white males get more money, it's a seniority rule! It seems unreasonable to me to extrapolate that to systemic racism in the company." That's exactly where systemic discrimination originates. Hardly anyone wakes up in the morning and decides that it's a good day to oppress G people. They wake up in the morning having some amount of privilege, discover that it might be threatened, and their actions that day try to avoid reduction of privilege, even if it means treating G people unfairly. It's not anti-G people at first, it's just pro-self. Over years this becomes a de facto systemic discrimination, generally without a rule that explicitly says "we don't want G coworkers". Instead there are rules that mean that everybody works on G holidays, the microwaves can't be used for "smelly" food (and guess what, all G food is "smelly" by default), and of course, rule is by seniority in the company which just happens not to have any senior G people in it. Somehow fewer G people get hired, and those that do are in low-status positions. You can pick your own value for G; it could be gender or nationality or ethnicity or religion or skin color or whatever. It works the same way.
- geofft 5y ago
  If you're looking for people with moderately thick skin who don't seek to find offense everywhere, a good place to start is to avoid the folks who wrote this blog post: > every discussion remotely related to politics, advocacy, or society at large quickly spins away from pleasant. You shouldn't have to wonder if staying out of it means you're complicit, or wading into it means you're a target. These are difficult enough waters to navigate in life, but significantly more so at work. It's become too much. It's a major distraction. https://world.hey.com/jason/changes-at-basecamp-7f32afc5 https://world.hey.com/jason/changes-at-basecamp-7f32afc5 There's absolutely no reason to believe that there were any "ultra-sensitive trigger-warning micro-aggression seeking activists" at Basecamp among the employees. All we have is a blog post from someone who is overly sensitive to reasonable professional conversations and didn't want to deal with "unpleasant" conversations at work. It's a story told from that person's perspective and we shouldn't take it as absolute truth.
  - pageandrew 5y ago
    How often are conversations in the political/SJW space “reasonable” and “professional”? Never, in my experience, because the said activists tend to accuse anyone who disagrees with them of being a bigot.
    - geofft 5y ago
      Hm. In my experience, I've always found them reasonable and professional and I've never been called a bigot.
    - technokozak 5y ago
      Exactly. And it's especially evident when you look at their Twitter accounts
  - tha0xa1 5y ago
    >There's absolutely no reason to believe that there were any "ultra-sensitive trigger-warning micro-aggression seeking activists" at Basecamp among the employees. This is objectively false. There is 100% undeniable proof of these types of employees being there, including one of the heads of data analytics: From https://janeyang.org/resisting/ https://janeyang.org/resisting/ > Racist capitalism is poison that has weakened every facet of society and been used to “justify” horrific crimes against humanity while destroying our planet. We need massive power and wealth distribution enshrined in national and international policies. From https://janeyang.org/2021/04/13/im-getting-some-feedback/ https://janeyang.org/2021/04/13/im-getting-some-feedback/ > Guess who tends to beta spray? Men. White men, in particular. From https://janeyang.org/2021/03/18/live-forward/ https://janeyang.org/2021/03/18/live-forward/ > If you are white or a man, especially a cis-gendered heterosexual able-bodied white man, do the fucking work. Learn about the characteristics of white supremacy, push through your discomfort, and reflect on how you show up in the spaces you have power. Be ready to apologize when you screw up (we all do!) and then do better. And whatever you do: do not demand that your friends or colleagues or employees or neighbors or acquaintances who belong to historically marginalized groups explain to you all the ways you perpetuate harm and how society got here. Pay an anti-oppression professional for training and coaching; don’t expect us to get you up to speed for free.
- jiscariot 5y ago
  I feel like a lot of companies (including Google) are still reeling from Google's "Bring your entire self to work" philosophy. It does feel like good management where companies like Coinbase have reified their mission/goals, and given those who feel like solving X needs to be included, a nice payout to leave. The world has a lot of complex problems and not every entity needs to work on fixing all of them--that may in fact be counterproductive.
runarberg 5y ago
I disagree, this reeks of cheap solutions and ill thought HR managements. To me banning politics from company chat feels vague and confusing at best. Another post from a few days ago got this from a worker[1]: > “How do you talk about raising kids without talking about society?” the employee said. “As soon as I bring up public schools, then it’s already political.” At worst it feels like you are being silenced. In technology topics of diversity and inclusion tend towards the political (it doesn’t have to be; but it most often is as witnessed on HN). Does this mean if you feel like the company is not being inclusive that you cannot speak up? Tonnes of companies deal with issues like these in a better way IMO. Options include a code of conduct which prohibits escalating emotions in a political debate (i.e. by talking about genocide) while allowing (and even encouraging) talks about DE&I. Reprimand people that are found to use hostile language in public forums. Provide channels (echo chambers) where people can opt into and have a more heated debates (without breaking the CoC). Etc. 1: https://www.platformer.news/p/-what-really-happened-at-basecamp https://www.platformer.news/p/-what-really-happened-at-basec...
- notsureaboutpg 5y ago
  I don't agree that it's too hard to not talk about politics at work. I have been doing it as a rule at most of my jobs for years now without thinking of it (and so do most workers). The idea that mentioning public school is "political" is a wrong idea.
  - runarberg 5y ago
    Seriously? You—and most of your co-workers—have never mention that you wished you had more vacation time with your peers? Or that the work week should be shorter? Or that your bosses have it too good relative to you? I have never worked in a place where we don’t discus these things periodically. I don’t have kids but I have witnessed my peers in previous jobs say stuff like: “I wished school hours would be more accommodating to those of us that work shifts.” Which is a political statement about the strict nature of how we run schools.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  I don't understand the school thing. "My daughter is working on a project at school. I have to go to a parent teacher conference. etc." I'm struggling to imagine what kind of political thing you would say about school. I can't share my thoughts on the school board, pedagogy, common core, racist school names, etc? Doesn't seem like an onerous restriction and I can't recall ever having a work conversation that would've violated it.
deagle50 5y ago
It reaks of fu money to me. Not everyone can afford this kind of move.
- iainctduncan 5y ago
  Sure, but that's what you get for running a successfully bootstrapped company. You get to do whatever you want with it. DHH and Jason could have been, no doubt about it, much wealthier had they gone the typical funding route, but would not have had this kind of control. It's their lifestyle business, they get to pick their lifestyle. They who control 51% call the shots. Personally, I'd way rather work somewhere like that where a founder you know has that power than some investors you've never met. (Been there... woke up one morning and found out the company was for sale and we were to pick redundancies and slash until it sold, it sucked. )
  - deagle50 5y ago
    I’m not criticising the move. My point was that more business would like to practice “good management” but can’t afford to do so.
    - iainctduncan 5y ago
      You're not wrong there! :-)
sagichmal 5y ago
> Probably, the founders believed that the toxicity of the internal culture had reached a point There are precisely one set of actors behaving toxically in this whole fiasco, and it's the founders. > I'd be really surprised if this surprised the executive team. This seems to be a super intentional and very professionally executed cultural shift / purge. Hahaha, what? In which universe are you inhabiting? No piece of evidence supports this theory. All the evidence clearly points at this being a hasty and unplanned reaction to a hasty and unplanned emotional outburst at an employee by a founder.
JPKab 5y ago
The Jehovah's Witness comment was so on point. I grew up with a single father, who was prone to religious fanaticism. Plenty of fundamentalist, culty churches. When I was a teen, my father met a radical vegan animal rights activist, started dating, and suddenly swapped out religious fanaticism for radical left-wing activism. The smells in my house changed, and the people looked different, but fundamentally they were the same: Awful, zero original thinking, dogmatic, controlling, self-righteous, and, yeah I'm going to say it, failures in life if measured financially or in career status. The cars in my driveway shifted from rusty, beat up, old Ford's/Chevys to rusty, beat up Subarus/Civics. I hate tribal thinking, and the aggressive conformists who flock to it.
- chillwaves 5y ago
  I find it out that you choose to highlight their late model cars as symbols of their failures in life.
  - JPKab 5y ago
    Age or price of car aren't what I mean. Poorly maintained, allowed to fall into disrepair, bald tires often. Losers don't take care of things. Conversely, I love seeing well maintained older vehicles.
    - roguas 5y ago
      That's a stretch. First of all calling someone a loser cause he seeks other values in life? Also I am a huge loser, cause my car has been in garage for a year(covid homeoffice) and it got very dusty. Is rusty car really a denominator for losers, as I have met plenty of smart people who don't particularly care about 'things'.
      - antpol 5y ago
        you still need to consider that lots of people would judge you by how you upkeep things in any present moment. Sure, you can be a genius scientist in the stat of "flow", but recognition would come only later if that's the case
iainctduncan 5y ago
nailed it. Seems to me they played it perfectly. Problems are out, company hits the reset button, and it's really hard for anyone to say these people were treated badly with a voluntarily accepted giant payout. Let's not forget that to regular people, these folks just left with one to two years salary with no obligations. That's winning the damn lottery to people who don't work in our overpaid industry.
klelatti 5y ago
Remarkable how when 1/3 of the company resigns in one go - many of whom have great and longstanding professional reputations with no history of political activism and including head of marketing, design, customer support, iOS etc. - following fundamental changes they read about in a blog post, it's because _they_ were all intolerable, proselytizing activists who all had to go for the good of the company. Absolutely nothing to do with the two leaders who spend a good chunk of time on social media telling the rest of the world how to run their business in the most in your face way possible.
- prh8 5y ago
  It's interesting, all the discussion in the immediate aftermath was along your lines of thinking, and then later, everybody else came in to talk and took the side of the company without understanding what had actually occurred. They latch onto the word "politics" and decide it was the 1/3 who were toxic.
  - klelatti 5y ago
    Indeed. The narrative seems to be "politics in the workplace is bad so they were right to stamp it out". Seems to me that they had a workplace issue and dealt with it in a way that has really, really annoyed many of their staff. Other companies have similar issues and manage to deal with them without losing 1/3 of their staff.
cbozeman 5y ago
Why can't people just keep their shit to themselves? In the work environment, I don't care if you want to save the whales or arm every teacher with an AR-15. Do you do your job well enough that you don't personally impact me? You do? Good. Shut up about non-work shit and keep working. Every single person I've ever seen who was a "passionate" "political" person is a fucking trainwreck in some area of the their life. How about your fix yourself first? Then once you've got yourself ironed out, you can try ironing out the rest of society...
- ecwilson 5y ago
  It’s a false narrative that this was about politics and non-work things in the workplace. It was a workplace issue that blew up and employees were annoyed with how the founders handled it.
  - cbozeman 5y ago
    No, it's pretty fucking stupid all the way around... I broke my own rule and went to that garbage news site The Verge and read Casey Newton's article. A list of names that sound or look funny. Wow. The amount of disdain I have for idiotic busybodies who would fuss and fret over such a thing cannot be overstated, or even quantified. How about just ignoring the list? How about saying to someone, when they tell you about the list, "That's dumb. Grow up, <name>." How about just going on about your day. The fact that any human being would think a list of funny names should be a fireable offense is a testament to this new idiotic religion of Wokeness. A bunch of shitty people traded Christianity for another religion where they can be insufferable assholes, under the guise of righteousness. Where. Have. I. Seen. That. Before?
    - chillwaves 5y ago
      Don't understand why your tone is so aggressive. Do you think that kind of aggressive tone would be suitable in a work place?
      - tha0xa1 5y ago
hodgesrm 5y ago
The interesting question, which I don't see addressed in the comments, is how to avoid the Basecamp situation in the first place. Just to pick one thread of many to pull on, any management team that actively encourages intra-mural political discussion should think through possible consequences. It's difficult to take such rights away, as Google's experience has shown multiple times. [1] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/technology/google-culture-rules.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/technology/google-culture...
- spyckie2 5y ago
  A lot of gossipers, haters, and narcissists hide behind the activist label to carry out their personal agenda. If you are building policy that allows activism, you need checks and balances against this free riding behaviour. If you don’t check the behaviour it can take over like cancer. The gossipers and narcissists hide behind activism and the activists support them as one of their own because they align with the activists goal. People who do not want to deal with these people eventually leave for places without such policy and you are stuck with all the bad actors.
jvdizzle 5y ago
So, what? Hire new people to replace the ones that left and then eventually have to do a purge again in 5 years? This appears more to me like a short-sighted easy-way-out kind of move. Why not spend the time to build channels for constructive political discussion? The workplace does not exist in a vacuum. You cannot isolate work from politics these days.
- spyckie2 5y ago
  The policy they put in place is just not hiring those who would want to actively participate in political discussion at work. I think there are plenty of people in the world who see that as a net positive. Not everyone wants political discussion and to further mankind’s ideological philosophies; far more direct ways to impact society include just being nice to those around you.

overgard 5y ago

Yeah, honestly this seems like addition by subtraction. The last thing I would want at work is to navigate around ultra-sensitive trigger-warning micro-aggression seeking activists. Not that all the people leaving were that, but it sure sounds like a lot were. At work I just want professionalism and respectful behavior, along with people that have moderately thick skin and don't seek to find offense everywhere.

busterarm 5y ago
Given how Basecamp is known to pay, they're going to attract a significant amount of top talent that is already aligned with the new culture.
dannyr 5y ago
Oh, have you seen tweets from Basecamp leaders calling people out? you could actually say that the execs are activists as well based on their posts on social media.
- ajharrison 5y ago
  Yes, on social media. Outside of their basecamp account.
- dccoolgai 5y ago
  Not really sure where I sit on the whole thing, still, but I've seen this parroted as a "gotcha!" and I don't think it really is. The founders' activism is _public_. The ban is only on activism _at work_. The fact that so many people don't _get this_ is sort of proving their point.
  - iudqnolq 5y ago
    That's not the case. They're explicitly saying employees are welcome to discuss the founder's activist preferences at work. They've also heavily used their workplace for activism. For example, they invited a political candidate to base a campaign out of their offices.
StavrosK 5y ago
I read a summary of the situation and it seemed to me like both sides handled it poorly. It sounded like there was indeed a lot of activism, which is something you don't really want in a workplace, but the C-levels didn't handle it terribly graciously either, what with looking at past logs to find an employee's messages. It's more than a little impolite, I think. I have to admit there's a certain elegance in filtering out political people by banning public discussions of politics, though. I especially cringed at this bit: > Jane Yang, a data analyst at the company, told me that restricting internal conversations would negatively affect diversity and inclusion efforts. For example, she said, the company’s profit-sharing plan gave more profits to people who have longer tenure — a group that is majority white and male. Making that discussion off limits internally could ensure that inequality in profit sharing becomes a structural feature of the company. It's not like they had a rule that white males get more money, it's a seniority rule! It seems unreasonable to me to extrapolate that to systemic racism in the company.
- ajharrison 5y ago
  I think that’s the entire point DHH was attempting to make: internal issues don’t need to be connected with broader issues like colonialism and racism. That senior execs making more money is due to their tenure and merit, and not because they’re white and male.
- dsr_ 5y ago
  "It's not like they had a rule that white males get more money, it's a seniority rule! It seems unreasonable to me to extrapolate that to systemic racism in the company." That's exactly where systemic discrimination originates. Hardly anyone wakes up in the morning and decides that it's a good day to oppress G people. They wake up in the morning having some amount of privilege, discover that it might be threatened, and their actions that day try to avoid reduction of privilege, even if it means treating G people unfairly. It's not anti-G people at first, it's just pro-self. Over years this becomes a de facto systemic discrimination, generally without a rule that explicitly says "we don't want G coworkers". Instead there are rules that mean that everybody works on G holidays, the microwaves can't be used for "smelly" food (and guess what, all G food is "smelly" by default), and of course, rule is by seniority in the company which just happens not to have any senior G people in it. Somehow fewer G people get hired, and those that do are in low-status positions. You can pick your own value for G; it could be gender or nationality or ethnicity or religion or skin color or whatever. It works the same way.
geofft 5y ago
If you're looking for people with moderately thick skin who don't seek to find offense everywhere, a good place to start is to avoid the folks who wrote this blog post: > every discussion remotely related to politics, advocacy, or society at large quickly spins away from pleasant. You shouldn't have to wonder if staying out of it means you're complicit, or wading into it means you're a target. These are difficult enough waters to navigate in life, but significantly more so at work. It's become too much. It's a major distraction. https://world.hey.com/jason/changes-at-basecamp-7f32afc5 https://world.hey.com/jason/changes-at-basecamp-7f32afc5 There's absolutely no reason to believe that there were any "ultra-sensitive trigger-warning micro-aggression seeking activists" at Basecamp among the employees. All we have is a blog post from someone who is overly sensitive to reasonable professional conversations and didn't want to deal with "unpleasant" conversations at work. It's a story told from that person's perspective and we shouldn't take it as absolute truth.
- pageandrew 5y ago
  How often are conversations in the political/SJW space “reasonable” and “professional”? Never, in my experience, because the said activists tend to accuse anyone who disagrees with them of being a bigot.
  - geofft 5y ago
    Hm. In my experience, I've always found them reasonable and professional and I've never been called a bigot.
  - technokozak 5y ago
    Exactly. And it's especially evident when you look at their Twitter accounts
- tha0xa1 5y ago
  >There's absolutely no reason to believe that there were any "ultra-sensitive trigger-warning micro-aggression seeking activists" at Basecamp among the employees. This is objectively false. There is 100% undeniable proof of these types of employees being there, including one of the heads of data analytics: From https://janeyang.org/resisting/ https://janeyang.org/resisting/ > Racist capitalism is poison that has weakened every facet of society and been used to “justify” horrific crimes against humanity while destroying our planet. We need massive power and wealth distribution enshrined in national and international policies. From https://janeyang.org/2021/04/13/im-getting-some-feedback/ https://janeyang.org/2021/04/13/im-getting-some-feedback/ > Guess who tends to beta spray? Men. White men, in particular. From https://janeyang.org/2021/03/18/live-forward/ https://janeyang.org/2021/03/18/live-forward/ > If you are white or a man, especially a cis-gendered heterosexual able-bodied white man, do the fucking work. Learn about the characteristics of white supremacy, push through your discomfort, and reflect on how you show up in the spaces you have power. Be ready to apologize when you screw up (we all do!) and then do better. And whatever you do: do not demand that your friends or colleagues or employees or neighbors or acquaintances who belong to historically marginalized groups explain to you all the ways you perpetuate harm and how society got here. Pay an anti-oppression professional for training and coaching; don’t expect us to get you up to speed for free.
jiscariot 5y ago
I feel like a lot of companies (including Google) are still reeling from Google's "Bring your entire self to work" philosophy. It does feel like good management where companies like Coinbase have reified their mission/goals, and given those who feel like solving X needs to be included, a nice payout to leave. The world has a lot of complex problems and not every entity needs to work on fixing all of them--that may in fact be counterproductive.

runarberg 5y ago

I disagree, this reeks of cheap solutions and ill thought HR managements. To me banning politics from company chat feels vague and confusing at best. Another post from a few days ago got this from a worker[1]: > “How do you talk about raising kids without talking about society?” the employee said. “As soon as I bring up public schools, then it’s already political.” At worst it feels like you are being silenced. In technology topics of diversity and inclusion tend towards the political (it doesn’t have to be; but it most often is as witnessed on HN). Does this mean if you feel like the company is not being inclusive that you cannot speak up? Tonnes of companies deal with issues like these in a better way IMO. Options include a code of conduct which prohibits escalating emotions in a political debate (i.e. by talking about genocide) while allowing (and even encouraging) talks about DE&I. Reprimand people that are found to use hostile language in public forums. Provide channels (echo chambers) where people can opt into and have a more heated debates (without breaking the CoC). Etc. 1: https://www.platformer.news/p/-what-really-happened-at-basecamp https://www.platformer.news/p/-what-really-happened-at-basec...

notsureaboutpg 5y ago
I don't agree that it's too hard to not talk about politics at work. I have been doing it as a rule at most of my jobs for years now without thinking of it (and so do most workers). The idea that mentioning public school is "political" is a wrong idea.
- runarberg 5y ago
  Seriously? You—and most of your co-workers—have never mention that you wished you had more vacation time with your peers? Or that the work week should be shorter? Or that your bosses have it too good relative to you? I have never worked in a place where we don’t discus these things periodically. I don’t have kids but I have witnessed my peers in previous jobs say stuff like: “I wished school hours would be more accommodating to those of us that work shifts.” Which is a political statement about the strict nature of how we run schools.
ALittleLight 5y ago
I don't understand the school thing. "My daughter is working on a project at school. I have to go to a parent teacher conference. etc." I'm struggling to imagine what kind of political thing you would say about school. I can't share my thoughts on the school board, pedagogy, common core, racist school names, etc? Doesn't seem like an onerous restriction and I can't recall ever having a work conversation that would've violated it.

deagle50 5y ago

It reaks of fu money to me. Not everyone can afford this kind of move.

iainctduncan 5y ago
Sure, but that's what you get for running a successfully bootstrapped company. You get to do whatever you want with it. DHH and Jason could have been, no doubt about it, much wealthier had they gone the typical funding route, but would not have had this kind of control. It's their lifestyle business, they get to pick their lifestyle. They who control 51% call the shots. Personally, I'd way rather work somewhere like that where a founder you know has that power than some investors you've never met. (Been there... woke up one morning and found out the company was for sale and we were to pick redundancies and slash until it sold, it sucked. )
- deagle50 5y ago
  I’m not criticising the move. My point was that more business would like to practice “good management” but can’t afford to do so.
  - iainctduncan 5y ago
    You're not wrong there! :-)

sagichmal 5y ago

> Probably, the founders believed that the toxicity of the internal culture had reached a point There are precisely one set of actors behaving toxically in this whole fiasco, and it's the founders. > I'd be really surprised if this surprised the executive team. This seems to be a super intentional and very professionally executed cultural shift / purge. Hahaha, what? In which universe are you inhabiting? No piece of evidence supports this theory. All the evidence clearly points at this being a hasty and unplanned reaction to a hasty and unplanned emotional outburst at an employee by a founder.

JPKab 5y ago

The Jehovah's Witness comment was so on point. I grew up with a single father, who was prone to religious fanaticism. Plenty of fundamentalist, culty churches. When I was a teen, my father met a radical vegan animal rights activist, started dating, and suddenly swapped out religious fanaticism for radical left-wing activism. The smells in my house changed, and the people looked different, but fundamentally they were the same: Awful, zero original thinking, dogmatic, controlling, self-righteous, and, yeah I'm going to say it, failures in life if measured financially or in career status. The cars in my driveway shifted from rusty, beat up, old Ford's/Chevys to rusty, beat up Subarus/Civics. I hate tribal thinking, and the aggressive conformists who flock to it.

chillwaves 5y ago
I find it out that you choose to highlight their late model cars as symbols of their failures in life.
- JPKab 5y ago
  Age or price of car aren't what I mean. Poorly maintained, allowed to fall into disrepair, bald tires often. Losers don't take care of things. Conversely, I love seeing well maintained older vehicles.
  - roguas 5y ago
    That's a stretch. First of all calling someone a loser cause he seeks other values in life? Also I am a huge loser, cause my car has been in garage for a year(covid homeoffice) and it got very dusty. Is rusty car really a denominator for losers, as I have met plenty of smart people who don't particularly care about 'things'.
    - antpol 5y ago
      you still need to consider that lots of people would judge you by how you upkeep things in any present moment. Sure, you can be a genius scientist in the stat of "flow", but recognition would come only later if that's the case

iainctduncan 5y ago

nailed it. Seems to me they played it perfectly. Problems are out, company hits the reset button, and it's really hard for anyone to say these people were treated badly with a voluntarily accepted giant payout. Let's not forget that to regular people, these folks just left with one to two years salary with no obligations. That's winning the damn lottery to people who don't work in our overpaid industry.

klelatti 5y ago

Remarkable how when 1/3 of the company resigns in one go - many of whom have great and longstanding professional reputations with no history of political activism and including head of marketing, design, customer support, iOS etc. - following fundamental changes they read about in a blog post, it's because _they_ were all intolerable, proselytizing activists who all had to go for the good of the company. Absolutely nothing to do with the two leaders who spend a good chunk of time on social media telling the rest of the world how to run their business in the most in your face way possible.

prh8 5y ago
It's interesting, all the discussion in the immediate aftermath was along your lines of thinking, and then later, everybody else came in to talk and took the side of the company without understanding what had actually occurred. They latch onto the word "politics" and decide it was the 1/3 who were toxic.
- klelatti 5y ago
  Indeed. The narrative seems to be "politics in the workplace is bad so they were right to stamp it out". Seems to me that they had a workplace issue and dealt with it in a way that has really, really annoyed many of their staff. Other companies have similar issues and manage to deal with them without losing 1/3 of their staff.

cbozeman 5y ago

Why can't people just keep their shit to themselves? In the work environment, I don't care if you want to save the whales or arm every teacher with an AR-15. Do you do your job well enough that you don't personally impact me? You do? Good. Shut up about non-work shit and keep working. Every single person I've ever seen who was a "passionate" "political" person is a fucking trainwreck in some area of the their life. How about your fix yourself first? Then once you've got yourself ironed out, you can try ironing out the rest of society...

ecwilson 5y ago
It’s a false narrative that this was about politics and non-work things in the workplace. It was a workplace issue that blew up and employees were annoyed with how the founders handled it.
- cbozeman 5y ago
  No, it's pretty fucking stupid all the way around... I broke my own rule and went to that garbage news site The Verge and read Casey Newton's article. A list of names that sound or look funny. Wow. The amount of disdain I have for idiotic busybodies who would fuss and fret over such a thing cannot be overstated, or even quantified. How about just ignoring the list? How about saying to someone, when they tell you about the list, "That's dumb. Grow up, <name>." How about just going on about your day. The fact that any human being would think a list of funny names should be a fireable offense is a testament to this new idiotic religion of Wokeness. A bunch of shitty people traded Christianity for another religion where they can be insufferable assholes, under the guise of righteousness. Where. Have. I. Seen. That. Before?
  - chillwaves 5y ago
    Don't understand why your tone is so aggressive. Do you think that kind of aggressive tone would be suitable in a work place?
    - tha0xa1 5y ago

hodgesrm 5y ago

The interesting question, which I don't see addressed in the comments, is how to avoid the Basecamp situation in the first place. Just to pick one thread of many to pull on, any management team that actively encourages intra-mural political discussion should think through possible consequences. It's difficult to take such rights away, as Google's experience has shown multiple times. [1] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/technology/google-culture-rules.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/technology/google-culture...

spyckie2 5y ago
A lot of gossipers, haters, and narcissists hide behind the activist label to carry out their personal agenda. If you are building policy that allows activism, you need checks and balances against this free riding behaviour. If you don’t check the behaviour it can take over like cancer. The gossipers and narcissists hide behind activism and the activists support them as one of their own because they align with the activists goal. People who do not want to deal with these people eventually leave for places without such policy and you are stuck with all the bad actors.

jvdizzle 5y ago

So, what? Hire new people to replace the ones that left and then eventually have to do a purge again in 5 years? This appears more to me like a short-sighted easy-way-out kind of move. Why not spend the time to build channels for constructive political discussion? The workplace does not exist in a vacuum. You cannot isolate work from politics these days.

spyckie2 5y ago
The policy they put in place is just not hiring those who would want to actively participate in political discussion at work. I think there are plenty of people in the world who see that as a net positive. Not everyone wants political discussion and to further mankind’s ideological philosophies; far more direct ways to impact society include just being nice to those around you.