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The cynical side of me thinks this is just Fried and DHH not wasting a crisis and turning it into an opportunity to quick pivot and flush out the deadwood. I d

• ashtonkem 6y ago
  I doubt this was planned, the whole thing seems like a bunch of bad impulses rather than something done on purpose. Especially since this has absolutely trashed their public reputation. I completely disagree about Basecamp being better after this. Attrition, no matter the cause, is awful for company morale. Finding out that several teams are just gone without any notice or time to transition is going to make life kind of suck for those who remain. Sure hope their docs are good. As far as stopping the politics in tech; Basecamp got a glowing write up in Breitbart. “No politics here” is political. There are good and bad ways to handle such things, but blanket bans and “here’s the door if you don’t like it” is hamfisted and clearly bad for retention.
  • randomsearch 6y ago
    > Especially since this has absolutely trashed their public reputation. Definitely this has trashed their reputation with people on the left. Some of my friends have been posting on Twitter that they wouldn't work for Basecamp now, whereas they used to aspire to work there. But it is far from clear to me that my friends are in a majority. Many people on the right, or people who are apolitical, or people who just don't like politicisation in the way that has been reported, may be perfectly fine with this. In terms of reputation, it wouldn't surprise me if this is a net win for Basecamp. For sure losing a third of employees is an existential risk, but I suspect senior management would have accepted that risk. (I consider myself to be left wing, but not woke).
    • ashtonkem 6y ago
      I think people who are viewing this through a left vs. right wing issue are missing the forest for the trees. The issue is not the new policy. The issue is the way it was rolled out; in an extremely public way that was basically a subtweet of their entire workforce, all while they knew there was a ton of internal drama they’d failed to control. That was unbelievably bad leadership, and I think anyone focusing entirely on whether or not the specific policy is good or bad, to the point where it makes them want to join or not, has been fighting the culture war way too much for their own good. I’d be fine with a no politics policy, I would not be fine with the blog post, especially if I felt that the internal problem hadn’t been dealt with and instead I’d been crapped on publicly by my boss.
• predaking 6y ago
  “I’ll bet Basecamp is a better place to work now than it was a week ago” I don’t know, if my week at work concluded with one of the founders going on a blocking spree and leading the Rails community to start discussing disassociating itself from him, I wouldn’t consider that “better”. :)
• croh 6y ago
  Officially having policy to not discussing politics is very good. In my experience, it is rarelly imposed but there is always someone who crosses line and it comes handy. On side note, sadly in my (unpopular) opinion, north americans are focused too much on being politically correct in speech instead of being correct in action and thoughts.Hope this will not be their downfall.
• kajecounterhack 6y ago
  > Stop politicizing tech. If you're in the business of "changing the world" or "changing peoples' lives" then your business is political. Politics reflect how people feel about things. You're using tech as a shorthand for "technology company" -- companies are also organizations of people with feelings. People function best when they are treated with respect and given psychological safety. People need to have room to discuss how they feel about things, so you can build better policies that make people happy and motivated to succeed at the mission. Sometimes those things are lumped into what a company might consider "political" and it's not an easy line to draw. For example, gender imbalance is one of the most important "political" things that I think every healthy company needs to look long and hard at; how do you do that if you clamp down on that as "political discussion?" Similarly if racial injustice is impacting a segment of your workforce more than others, don't you think it's worthwhile for management to do things like make statements of support, check in on their employees, and basically be a bit human and accommodating? Or wait is that political discussion? Folks like you who say employees should just "focus on the work" dismiss the idea that people shouldn't just be viewed as cogs in these money-making machines. Tech, where company profit margins are fat and where actual productivity is not measured in SLOC but in the ability to generate ideas and focus on how those ideas affect users, is actually one of the only market segments we can actually point at and say "you have the means to do better." It's really sad when founders like Fried and DHH give their employees the impression that they are no more than pieces of a money making machine after clearly fooling a lot of them into thinking there was some semblance of a social contract there. So no it's definitely not a better place to work now than a week ago. By the way, people aren't stupid for thinking that there's a social contract, especially at small companies. There's always a loose contract -- and one of the powerful things about equity and its presence in SV companies is how it aligns the incentives for management and labor. But trust is also a component of that alignment force; trust is one of the things that has always made silicon valley magical. So it's really disappointing when that trust is violated.
  • wyclif 6y ago
    If you're in the business of "changing the world" or "changing peoples' lives" then your business is political If you're Apple or Microsoft, that would apply. But Basecamp is a company that makes office productivity apps.