22 ms·

Honestly, in this story everyone looks like a big child. I would maybe be more sympathetic to DHH if it wasn't the guy who was so opinionated he pushed through

• jokethrowaway 6y ago
  I've seen it happen in a company which was doing just fine. It happened randomly and completely out of the blue: one software engineer mentioned he didn't believe in the gender gap and he was promptly replied 1000 words essays by other leaders in the company shutting him down, to show that "we don't tolerate certain behaviour". Guidelines were created to avoid future political discussions in the workplace. No-one left because of it (immediately) and we sadly didn't become famous. The engineer who brought that up quit a few months after. After that, half of the employees hated thinking there were people thinking something different from them in the company, the other half was afraid to talk in public. Again, I don't think there was a particular situation in the company: just a naive person who likes to talk frankly and people who get offended and are quick to attack in order to defend the "safe space" for the people who share their beliefs.
  • Tainnor 6y ago
    Maybe. But this is (was) a 60-person company. That's about the size of the company I'm currently working at. In other words, you should know everyone and interact with a sizeable chunk of these people somewhat regularly. It strikes me as very odd that you would suddenly so fundamentally distrust your co-workers with whom you share so much. But I'm also not in the US and maybe this is just the current climate over there. (Or maybe it also shows that being a fully-remote company can have downsides, such as coworkers not socialising enough and therefore not trusting each other? Who knows. DHH certainly has championed the "remote work for everyone" approach countless times.)
    • vcavallo 6y ago
      > It strikes me as very odd that you would suddenly so fundamentally distrust your co-workers with whom you share so much. But I'm also not in the US and maybe this is just the current climate over there. Yes, it absolutely is the climate here. it’s awful. tribalism, division, distrust and eagerness to demonize anyone who doesn’t tow your line. we’re doomed
    • moduspol 6y ago
      We also may be reading a lot into how large this committee was. If I were at a company of ~58 people, and ~20 of them were forming a DE&I committee to evaluate the company's vendor relationships, speakers, etc., I'd be tempted to join just to get the potential target off of my back. They're not going to fire 1/3 of the workforce, after all.
      • thrownaway564 6y ago
        Our group has hours of meetings every week. One coworker was PIPd and he immediately joined the group. Less work and off pip now!
        • edoceo 6y ago
          a true hacker :)
    • thrownaway564 6y ago
      The culture here is getting bad. We have an "inclusion council" that hands out these diktats. The word ban list (not blacklist!) is approaching 100 words including husband, housekeeping, normal, hacker and meritocracy. Worse part is we're a security company edit: "here" is okta, not basecamp
      • prepend 6y ago
        Why hacker?
        • 6y ago
  • paulddraper 6y ago
    > I've seen it happen in a company which was doing just fine. It happened randomly and completely out of the blue: one software engineer mentioned he didn't believe in the gender gap You don't have to leave it anonymous; I think most people know what Google is. /s
• ashtonkem 6y ago
  > I think that, no matter your political views, if a situation gets out of hand that bad over matters that aren't even really directly related to workplace concerns, something must have gone fundamentally wrong much earlier. Remember, the proximate cause here was something that directly related to what happened at work.
  • moduspol 6y ago
    No, it was just claimed to be. It's not the case that forming a committee that's over 1/3 the size of the company to do unprompted evaluation of vendor relationships for DE&I and approval of guest speakers follows logically from, "there used to be a list of funny sounding names and management didn't handle it well."
    • jiofih 6y ago
      Source?
      • moduspol 6y ago
        For which claim?
  • duxup 6y ago
    The funny names list? Yeah that seems to have been the trigger but I'm not sure that such a list should lead to everything described in the article. How that lead to demanding someone denounce white supremacy at a meeting seems like things have long since disconnected from the funny names list.
    • ashtonkem 6y ago
      It turns out if you mismanage a problem, it gets worse.
• gowld 6y ago
  It's weird to criticize someone who wrote several books like "it doesn't have to be crazy at work" as "ads for basecamp" and then proceeded to run basecamp (his workplace) as a not-crazy environment. What else would you expect?
  • Tainnor 6y ago
    Not sure if I'm understanding you correctly but my criticism of the book is that, while it has interesting ideas, a large chunk of it reads as: "We do this thing at Basecamp. Most other companies don't do that. And because of that, Basecamp is an awesome place to work and other places suck.". Instead of, you know, giving a slightly more balanced account of certain things or acknowledging that even your own company has flaws (every company does).
  • prawn 6y ago
    Seems OP's reaction is like what is rife in Australia as 'tall-poppy syndrome' and cutting down prominent achievers. We collectively dislike promoters, but isn't doing something like writing a book to draw attention to your SaaS product exactly the sort of thing a founder should be doing? Especially given it worked in bringing them customers and attention. If you think they're too confident in their assertions, it's easy enough to ignore them.
    • threeseed 6y ago
      We celebrate sports stars, CEOs from Atlassian/Canva/etc. It's not about being successful. It's about not having an ego and acting like you're better than everyone else just because you are successful. Americans are much more willing to tolerate this behaviour than Australians.
      • themacguffinman 6y ago
        To the credit of Americans IMO. Ego is quite common among high achievers and often beneficial as a motivator or confidence booster. Unexamined and disproportionate egos are self punishing as they directly harm chances of success. AFAICT any additional social stigma accomplishes nothing except perhaps the soothing of egos by less successful people. There are real disparities in ability & quality between people for which proven success is the strongest (and perhaps the only real) signal.
• kbenson 6y ago
  > Honestly, in this story everyone looks like a big child. I agree for the most part there. Less so the founders, I think there sin runs more along the lines of being extremely naive (but in a way a lot of people might be, especially when the alternative might be to accept you're screwed). > something must have gone fundamentally wrong much earlier. These levels of tension and distrust don't just arise out of nowhere. Well, the tensions exist because they're being pushed for by large influences societally for political gain. The problem is they promoted a workplace environment where it was considered okay to bring it in, as well as to poke fun at clients (which is what kicked it all off). I see this as an example of the cost of free doughnuts.[1] It's well known that we value the loss of something as more than the gain of something, and we value free things for far more than they're worth. Employees were given free reign for a long time in ways that weren't all that conducive to a diverse work environment or to respecting clients. Now they are being told not to do things that most work places already expect you to know enough not to do, either by explicitly telling you or by culture, such as don't blast your political views out to everyone, and don't be disrespectful to the clients, as that's where your paycheck comes from. My guess is the majority of people that leave if honestly reflecting on this in a few years would acknowledge that maybe announcing and focusing on your differences with those you need to spend time with is not as good a strategy for a happy and productive workplace as focusing on your similarities. 1: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/13/156737801/the-cost-of-free-doughnuts-70-years-of-regret https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/13/156737801/the-...
  • Tainnor 6y ago
    > I think there sin runs more along the lines of being extremely naive [...] which would be maybe more excusable if it didn't come from the guys who wrote several books about how awesomely they run their company. I guess that's why my sympathy for their situation is somewhat limited.
    • kbenson 6y ago
      That's a good reason not to be sympathetic to them in particular. I guess you could say I'm sympathetic to some degree to the problem they were presented, but it was definitely of their own creation, so they shouldn't get a pass. I mean, it's easy to think you're doing well because you got lucky in personnel and timing for how things went, but maybe have a bit more introspection before writing a book about it and how good your ideas were (there's a lot of non-fiction that could be said about...).
• throwaway789256 6y ago
  This dynamic is playing out in thousands of companies and startups across the US. Many people in the US, the woke, have redefined "white supremacy" and "racism" to mean most inequalities and behavior that they don't like: They do not accept non-racist environments, only anti-racist ones. They do not accept that businesses be politically neutral. Businesses must take political stances internally and publicly. To do anything less, or to remain silent, is to be complicit in what they see as white supremacy and systemic racism. And if you disagree with those people, you will be accused of being racist, as Singer was. The irony, of course, is that Hansson and Fried built a reputation around righteousness and wokeness, and then it came for them, because they were two white guys with power. And when they realized what was happening, they executed their cultural pivot very poorly. They came out with a hard ban on a bunch of people who have the talent to work elsewhere. Coinbase, at least, had the good sense to focus on the positive, their orientation as a mission-focused company. At the same time, Coinbase was making its employees rich with options and headed for an IPO. The two companies will be paired case studies at HBS someday about how to screw it up and how to do it right.
  • FooBarBizBazz 6y ago
    > The irony, of course, is that Hansson and Fried built a reputation around righteousness and wokeness, and then it came for them, because they were two white guys with power. That's extremely predictable at this point.
    • stuaxo 6y ago
      From the little I know about it, they asked for people to look into inequality issues at work around hiring, then didn't like what was found and said nobody could talk about politics. Sounds like they talked the talk, but when it came to walking the walk, they walked back and told everyone to be quiet.
  • SantalBlush 6y ago
    >They do not accept non-racist environments, only anti-racist ones. They do not accept that businesses be politically neutral. Perhaps they are the ones working toward a politically neutral, non-racist environment, and it is you who won't accept it. In truth, I don't believe either they or you could properly identify what a politically neutral environment really looks like, and you're probably all unreliable and serving your own ends.
• musicale 6y ago
  > "it doesn't have to be crazy at work" but it is anyway, usually
• dexterous 6y ago
  https://twitter.com/thejoshtorres/status/1389623426688569345 https://twitter.com/thejoshtorres/status/1389623426688569345 Relevant excerpt from It doesn't have to be Crazy at Work.
  • virtue3 6y ago
    do as I say not as I do! Yowchhh. Really really good find.
  • asabjorn 6y ago
    Yes, and Basecamp has with this improved their organization in this aspect. Social justice activism divides individuals by unchosen group identities into "oppressors" and "oppressed" which is in direct opposition to acknowledging a persons feelings as well as listening to their viewpoints. Social justice activism has due to this predictably lead to resentment and unnecessary conflict in the workplace.
• listless 6y ago
  This is exactly what I thought. None of this story makes much sense on an adult level. You have a list of customer names that you mock? What kind of amateur, disrespectful operation are you running? Are you building a product or pledging a fraternity? And how does any of that lead to talking about "White Supremacy". And how does voicing an opinion about such a subject seem like a good idea for the workplace regardless of if you think it exists or not? For a company that has written a lot of books about how to build companies and cultures, this is...laughable.
  • mumblemumble 6y ago
    > And how does any of that lead to talking about "White Supremacy". Perhaps one step at a time, over the course of repeated conversations that keep dredging up more and more deep-seated resentments that have probably been festering for years and years, because of a longstanding social convention that we're not supposed to openly talk about these sorts of things at the workplace. Or perhaps, if it's the kind of company where a list like that could continue to exist for so long, there was enough pressure built up that it was more like a levee breaking.
  • foobiter 6y ago
    it’s not just the list, there were known racism issues with their head of product too… they deleted years of internal discussion and asked him to keep his opinions quiet (he deleted his tweets earlier this year around the time the d&i committee started) to avoid dealing with it directly
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• notacoward 6y ago
  > Honestly, in this story everyone looks like a big child. I don't know about "child" but there is a similar vibe here. This also comes through in blog posts and Twitter threads I've seen from some of the people involved. A certain assumption that their own account or opinion should automatically be accepted as default. Arrogance? Petulance? Entitlement? Somewhere in that space. It shouldn't even be a surprise, really. Even if they were able to overlook political differences, DHH and JF were overwhelmingly likely to hire people who were like themselves in some ways. It's what founders and CEOs have always done, and has often been remarked upon since before they were born. "A fish rots from the head" is one of the less charitable forms. People's high self-image and approach to disagreement or confrontation seems to have been one of the (quite likely unconscious) selection criteria here. After that, a blowup of some sort was only a matter of time.
• ksec 6y ago
  >These levels of tension and distrust don't just arise out of nowhere. You may be underestimating the power of modern day PC. I also think partly this is because being a remote company, these discussions, even with a Web Cam just dont convey the message much. Some of these message could have been in private with different colleague during coffee break or in pantry. So I felt it is also a failure or remote work. Remote doesn't work ALL the time, which is something DHH dont get. And VC are required for many businesses, which is something DHH dont get as well. Another problem was that most of his political message, I guess you could also argue are glorified ads for Basecamp, attract the same people with similar political views. And many of them were sold into the vision, cult of whatever that might be as Basecamp. And the new policy was felt more like a betrayal of their belief. Hence the huge reaction and backlash that happened.