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Medium sees employee exits after CEO publishes ‘culture memo’

318 points by elsewhen 5y ago

eyelovewe 5y ago
I’m still trying to figure out what Medium provides that a wordpress site or html webpage doesn’t provide. Oh that’s right, a boatload of bloat and a paywall. I tend to avoid Medium articles. The actual content tends to be as fluffy as the platform, these days. I’m not surprised that such a fluff engine produces leadership like this. Sinking ship, IMO. I have no basis for this beyond sentiment and observations.
loopz 5y ago
Who are these "woke" people? We don't see them in comments here on HN to defend themselves. Are they strawmen, loud groups and living in their own bubble? I'd ask the same for far-right too. Are these platforming issues?
- concordDance 5y ago
  As the cultural pendulum swings people are more or less vocal. Four years ago the woke were in ascendence on HN (being vocal on their opinions) and now the anti-woke are. I don't fully understand what drives these trends.
  - loopz 5y ago
    Most people join in the middle of the swing perhaps, then get dragged too far to one extreme.
    - cloudfifty 5y ago
      "The middle" is no position though. The middle in the US is and has been wildly different over the last 50 years. Both in the US itself and certainly compared to Western-European countries. An example would be that an old school democratic socialist since the 80ths or whatever shouldn't be seen as an extremist now just because the window has shifted so far to the right with Trump etc.
- routerl 5y ago
  Not only that, but there is a tendency to group too many phenomena under the heading of "woke", both by people describing themselves with that label, and describing others. For instance, I've seen people deride someone for "being too woke" when the issue at hand was sexual harassment. This is clearly absurd, since we have laws about sexual harassment, and it can't be simply "woke" people who respect laws. On the flip side, things like "let's not name our principal branch 'master'" are, to me at least, clear examples of excessive wokeness. This word, "woke", has become a smokescreen. People who use the same word may not be remotely talking about the same things. They only seem to be agreeing, but neither one actually knows what the other is saying. "Woke" is a pointer, whose pointed at memory location has wildly varying values for different people.
  - tstrimple 5y ago
    When it comes down to tolerating sexual harassment versus renaming your primary git branch, I know which side I’m supporting.
    - loopz 5y ago
      I see only upsides with "main" though.
knorker 5y ago
These "activist first" employees should understand that if their primary purpose is activism, then they should indeed switch to a company that hires activists instead of people who are there to get the work done. Activism is not a job. I see many people who think it is. "Pay me to change your values and judge you". Thanks, but I can get that for free.
- teachingassist 5y ago
  I don't do activism at work, but I certainly do sell myself to employers and potential employers. The greatest value that I provide in my work is that I am me: I am a person, with human needs and concerns and thoughts and inspiration and creativity. I leave some of myself in my work. It surprises me when people have the attitude that you have expressed, that you are just there to get the work done. Is your job in high tech really to robotically do the task? It makes it seem, to me, like you are greatly underselling yourself.
  - knorker 5y ago
    No, I said "activist first". Or for many "activist only". I see people who think the actual work is incidental. You say you don't even do activism at work, and even less activism first. So how do you imagine you disagree with me? Unless you have a super low qualification job where you're hired to be a warm body, you're actually hired for the traits you mention, so that is the job. That is actually the "get the work done".
    - teachingassist 5y ago
      > So how do you imagine you disagree with me? Ah, ok. Then, I imagine that you really think it's fine for people to do politics, as long as it's politics that you agree with. You simply see politics that you don't agree with as an "activism first" attitude.
      - knorker 5y ago
        No. So you say you're not an activist at work. So do I. Then you say that I'm an activist. And you're kinda implying that you are, too.
LatteLazy 5y ago
This worries me because I "just don't get it". If I worked at medium I would expect to have zero input on editorial decisions (unless I was hired as an editor). The CEO publishing some fluff about not reopening old wounds is something to ignore (like most CEO messages), not something to interpret as a personal attack. It's doubly ironic that a message about assuming good intent is immediately assumed to have bad intent. What is up with people today? What am I missing?!
modularform12 5y ago
Pushing out lowlife scum is always good.
mrweasel 5y ago
This is a broken management style, carried out by people who have no training in managing company culture or people in general. It's the same broken idea that Basecamp implemented. There's nothing wrong with wanting a certain culture within your company. It's healthy to have a shared vision, and shared idea of how you should behave and present yourself. It gives people a sense of belonging and a community around their work. That culture needs to be implemented with actions, and by the leadership behaving according to that culture, not by sending out a memo. If the problem is that some people are aggressively pushing a certain politic or behaviour not tolerated by the company, then you deal with those individuals directly. Trying to manage by memo is like being back in school when your teacher would complain endlessly about those students who doesn't show up. You just end up sitting there an wonder: "Is he complaining about my behaviour? Am I suppose to do something?" and then you get angry, because you have to listen to someone going of about something you have no control over. Sadly a tendency to avoid interaction with "assholes" and just blasting out a message and expecting the assholes to understand that they are the target of the message. It's not working and it provoking the rest of us, pushing us to a point where we stop careering.
- nodelessness 5y ago
  > That culture needs to be implemented with actions, and by the leadership behaving according to that culture, not by sending out a memo. I think the memo saves a lot of people a lot of time and frustration. By actions you mean "not tolerated" in the sense that someone is fired or reprimanded for a set of behaviours then that would raise a lot of questions about what else doesn't fly when working there. It is better that they published a memo.
- colonwqbang 5y ago
  >It's healthy to have a shared vision, and shared idea of how you should behave and present yourself. But writing down what that idea is and sending out a memo about it, that's bad?
whoknowswhat11 5y ago
Article says Trump supporters get hate. Latinx employee group outraged / changes made employee who wrote article fired? Engineer complaining about the article says they were attracted to medium because of free speech which is gone so now leaving - referring to free speech to complain about the article Isn't some of this contradictory
jollybean 5y ago
"In July 2019, for example, Medium chose to publish a series that included a profile of Trump supporter Joy Villa with the headline “I have never been as prosecuted for being Black or Latina as I have been for supporting Trump.” When the Latinx community at Medium spoke to leadership about discomfort in the headline, they claimed that executives from editorial didn’t do anything about the headline until it was mentioned in a public Slack channel. One editor asked anyone who had gone through the immigration process or was a part of the Latinx community to get in a room and explain their side, a moment that felt diminishing to this employee. The headline only changed when employees posted in a public Slack channel about their qualms." I'm not empathetic with the employees. I despise Trump, it's unconditionally within bounds to publish something like this. If you want to work for a political organization, or a 'far-X' organization please do that. Medium already tilts very strongly in one direction and their political orientation is well known. If people are being actually mistreated, there should be a discussion but this is getting out of hand.
mattacular 5y ago
Found it - the absolute worst and dumbest comment thread on HN
phillias 5y ago
"caring .. is not enough.”. Then WTF is enough? Because it seems like you're trying to change my mind so that I have to agree with you. "listening is merciful and really caring...that is not enough." China keeps looking better.
A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
I read through the article and I genuinely do not understand what it is trying to say. Maybe I do not understand the backstory. Can someone explain it to me like I am five?
muyuu 5y ago
although I don't see how their memo has anything to do with the much clearer Coinbase memo, if employees left because the company isn't political enough or doesn't have enough secondary agendas, then this was a good move
gentleman11 5y ago
Is this article written by a bot? It repeats itself awkwardly and doesn’t flow properly
Bayart 5y ago
Such stories always strike me as quite incredible and conducive to mental instability. Why would anyone get so invested in a company aside from major shareholders ? These places don't need a culture, they're not nations, you don't share a common destiny or anything of the likes.
mkr-hn 5y ago
It sounds like their workplace policy is as confusing as their editorial strategy.
- Lazare 5y ago
  The good news is, if their workplace policies are anything like their editorial policies, if you don't like it just wait 3 months, they'll have a new one.
  - failwhaleshark 5y ago
    San Francisco's microclimate weather as a policy magic 8-ball. I never thought of that before.
    - Google234 5y ago
      In 3 months SF might collectively decide that magic eight balls are racist.
  - busterarm 5y ago
    Having worked at a company that restructured every 6 months, that shit is so exhausting.
spoonjim 5y ago
This is framed as a bad thing but it seems like the purpose of these “no politics at work” “culture memos” is specifically to encourage people to the door who require or desire a more modern/activist/diverse/BLM work environment. I suppose we see an experiment playing out between the companies that want to preserve the “old” ways of companies with their politically incorrect employees who would be considered “toxic” and “bros” and “problematic” (and to adapt to modern standards, to adopt a don’t ask don’t tell policy with respect to their personalities) whose animating principle is “coffee is for closers” and the newer diverse, “intersectional,” “antiracist” culture that claims “diversity is our strength.” It will be interesting to see which model wins.
- ehnto 5y ago
  You have made a false dichotomy of it I feel. I don't think there are two models, just various points on a spectrum of tolerance. I don't entirely disagree that politics is not needed in the workplace, but people spend almost all their time at work now and so it has become their defacto social space. If you spend 8 hours a day there it is important to make sure it's comfortable. That increase in diversity is a direct result of talking about the issue of intolerance in the workplace, making it more comfortable for different people to work there. You can be a hard working closer and tolerant of others all the same.
  - redis_mlc 5y ago
    > That increase in diversity is a direct result of talking about the issue of intolerance in the workplace, making it more comfortable for different people to work there. "Intolerance in the workplace" is pretty vague. > You can be a hard working closer and tolerant of others all the same. Nobody should be tolerant of Marxists and Critical Race Theorists. Half of the US population has sadly lost their way. Guess we need another World War to cure the rampant navel-gazing.
  - dkarras 5y ago
    From the employer's perspective, there is one type of employee that can pretty much work in any environment given that they are paid - and there is another type that needs ALL the other coworkers doing things and acting in a particular way for them to feel safe and productive. I'm not even against their need to feel safe, included, heard, or their claimed victim status, ptsd, lack of representation, whatever they are concerned with at any point in time - but it is very hard and expensive to build and maintain an environment where they will prosper - very expensive too. A new drama every week, dealing with bad press from a resigned "activist" employee every other month. Even with sympathy towards those people, I probably wouldn't want to touch them with a ten foot pole when money and livelihood of all my employees are at stake. I'd probably just try to help their cause by other means but would not try to torture them in an environment where they'll inevitably suffer and be unproductive. Their utopia does not exist in planet earth (yet), is it reasonable to expect that to exist in a company working environment? From a certain perspective, more is wrong with the world than right, and it is impossible to provide an environment that is "right" when most of the world is wrong. When you are the employer, you take the implicit role of building miniature model of that world in their working environment and I reckon that is impossible, at the very least very very expensive.
premium-komodo 5y ago
It sounds as if it was another emergency woke cancer operation. CEOs are realizing that they can have a lot of happy woke employees doing woke religious rituals and a dying company, or they can pay the woke to leave and have a functional company.
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zackees 5y ago
Top comment on tech crunch: > You’re quitting over that memo and “the timing of it”??? Don’t let the door hit ya where the good lord split ya. “While the Medium memo doesn’t wholly ban politics, the first engineer said that the “undertone” of the statement creates a “not safe work environment.” Oh it’s the “undertone” of the memo that’s so threatening to you. Ok bbbyyyyyeeeee! :-) Snowflakes gonna snowflake. Oh and we get yet another Tech Crunch article pushing for companies to allow their employees to spew on and on about politics.... as long as they are the right politics, and by “the right politics”, I of course mean “left”. It’s a workplace... not a coffeehouse. Keep your politics to yourself, do your job, or show yourself the door.
- jacob2484 5y ago
  While the woke ones were "triggered" (as they are by most things these days), I'm sure a good portion of employees are relieved to just have a normal workplace again.
- aliswe 5y ago
  I dont like that simply quoting the top comment on the website gains you downvotes.
ppf 5y ago
>many employees said they appreciated the clarity Anytime corporate-speak includes the word "clarity", you can be sure it is anything but clear.
- alpaca128 5y ago
  Just like all the cookie banners starting with "we value your privacy". Always written by websites who don't value privacy, otherwise they wouldn't need to write this message.
ALittleLight 5y ago
I worked at Amazon when what we called the "Crying at desk" article[1] was published in the New York Times. The memorable moment from that article was an Amazon employee who said he had, at one point or another, witnessed every one of his teammates crying at their desk. For what it's worth, in my ~10 years at Amazon I saw only one person crying at their desk. After the article came out, it actually had a big effect on our group. Our leaders talked to us about the article and about morale. We instituted a "happy hour" which basically ended the workday early (earlier than usual) on Fridays. We opened a little snack pit in our area with free food and drinks. We started doing irregular team building exercises. This moment, with the NYT article, was actually the only time I recall seeing noticeable changes to our day to day work. Leaders came and went. Teams changed. But everything was more or less the same. Then, one day, this article comes out of nowhere. I didn't identify with it at all, our group was much more mild than anything the article talked about, and suddenly we were making all of these changes - almost instantly. I liked and appreciated the changes but it always perplexed me why it took a story in the NYT to get them to come about. Either the NYT knows our internal morale better than our leaders did, and our leaders didn't react until they saw it in the NYT - or, the NYT didn't know our morale and our leaders overreacted based on third hand reporting about it. It's very odd to me. I've seen people directly telling leadership that we are overworked, that schedules are impossible, that we need to work on group morale, etc - and it very obviously meant nothing to the leaders. You could almost see the words washing over them and leaving nothing behind and indeed, nothing ever came from complaints or feedback like that (so far as I could tell). And yet, if a NYT reporter writes a single article, instant and dramatic reaction. All this is to say that whenever I see articles like this one, I have to wonder first, if the average Medium employee is going "That's weird, I didn't know there was a culture war going on here." And second, what the reaction to something like this article would be. Are the leaders at Medium going to start suddenly doing different stuff because of the "Techcrunch article"? Would it need to be from a media company with more cachet to make a difference? 1 - https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...
- ardit33 5y ago
  You were in a good bubble/team. I worked at Amazon around that time (I had left amazon right before that article) and noticed a lot of morale problems at work, and yes, people crying. In one of my most stressful projects, was me taking over the work of an engineer, who had a breakdown at work (crying and all), as she requested some time off and was denied. She obviously ended up quitting (or fired, can't tell). I was done with my project, and it was a super tight deadline, and had to finish her part and worked weekends for a couple of months. At the end, I barely got a thank you from my manager. The red flag would have been when I joined the company, as my team had a good-bye party for a lead engineer, who had been there for barely a year. During that lunch I learned that he left as he was burnt out, after just a year. And, yes, that was a very successful project and product at Amazon. That was a sign, that even if you product/project succeeds and does really well, amazon doesn't reward you but still treats you like being expendable. Anyway, your experience might not reflect many others in the company
PaulHoule 5y ago
I didn't know they hired anybody to write content.
- listless 5y ago
  Right?! That’s the real story here. When the heck did that happen and why did it not work?
  - whymauri 5y ago
    This article goes into detail on why it failed despite receiving critical acclaim: https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/24/22349175/medium-layoffs-union-evan-williams-blogger-twitter-subscription https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/24/22349175/medium-layoffs-u...
jokethrowaway 5y ago
This new trend sounds great for companies as a way to purge extremists from their workforce. From my anecdotal experience the people trying to bring politics at work were not very effective. It would be interesting to compare productivity before and after the exits.
- tluyben2 5y ago
  Yeah, let's have a completely uniform bunch of people without contrary opinions and all completely PC, sounds like paradise. /s
  - sputr 5y ago
    You are attacking a strawman. The commenter said extremists, not diversive opinions. It's one thing to have diversive opinions and comely discussing them... And another to be emotionally overinvested and dumping you issues onto your coworkers.
    - tluyben2 5y ago
      Agreed, but the definition of extremist seems to be moving; seems you cannot voice opinions anymore and it seems especially a US thing. Bill gates and Steve Jobs would be marked as extremists in the way they led the business now. Not political but angry and aggressive to the max. I think we need 'extremists' to not have a flat society where nothing happens.
      - rainonmoon 5y ago
        You're voicing an opinion right now. Unfortunately there's a common misconception that everyone is entitled to voice their opinion without criticism. If you go around all day saying stuff that people think is hurtful or obnoxious, the freedom that allows you to do so is the same freedom those people have to tell you to get lost.
      - dale_glass 5y ago
        I think you weren't paying attention? Both were always known as extremists. Steve Jobs was a raging asshole, until it caught up with him. Turns out you can't bully cancer into submission. Gates was involved in some seriously shady stuff and under his rule, Microsoft ruined a whole lot of companies, some of which thought they had a profitable agreement. And not by some sort of honest competition, but some very underhanded tactics. Gates seems to have a much better reputation as of late, but he used to have a Borg style icon on slashdot for a reason. Lots of people didn't like him at all back when he was running the show.
0xFFFE 5y ago
Why is it difficult to keep the political leanings, opinions, activism away from the workplace and act like professionals? If you disagree with something your colleagues or the company you work for, just quit and find another job. In my humble opinion, there is a place for expressing/speaking up about the things you care about, but workplace is not one of it. You have no locus standi.
- alpaca128 5y ago
  It's difficult when the company itself decides to be political. Acting like professionals and having official channels talk about ethnicity ratios is not very compatible: > Medium said that 52% of departures were white, and that one third of the company is non-white and non-Asian.
- tayo42 5y ago
  America atleast created a society where life revolves around corporations. Your job is a big part of your identify. Corporations are part of your identity in general. Your a McDonald's or a burger king person, coke or Pepsi. private corporations run America. I think it's only natural for people to express them selves through their work
- chasd00 5y ago
  I think younger workers bought the lifestyle pitch of their employer hook, line, and sinker. They see the office (virtual or otherwise) as a part of their identity.
  - pseudalopex 5y ago
    Right. Companies insist employees believe in the mission. Employees insist on a mission they can believe in.
  - adrr 5y ago
    It’s hard to get employees to work 60+ hour work weeks if they aren’t bought into the company mission. It is very effective to blur work and life lines to get workers to put in the extra hours.
bsd44 5y ago
1. A company is a place of business and every company exists to create a product or a service and make enough money in order to produce more products or a better service. 2. I am a professional and I offer my skills, experience and expertise in exchange for money. I might really like the job or not at all, makes no difference because work is to be done. 3. I am not interested in playing a social justice hero or promoting politics of current world affairs at my workplace, nor am I interested in a culture, mentality or values. If I wanted to join a cult I'd join one where they have drugs and naked ladies, not your company. I am getting sick of people pretending to try and change the world through their jobs when they only speak up as long as their jobs are secure. I see this often in my company that is trying really hard to be as liberal as possible while burning investor money where people keep raising political questions such as doing business with China not understanding that their roles will likely be cut if the company loses those Chinese contracts. Goes without saying topics regarding sex and sexual orientation are always hot, but others such as the Palestinian genocide are frown upon. You can't be selectively X, that just makes you a hypocrite. I am currently looking for a new job because I refuse to work in an environment where people are more preoccupied with non-work related problems than they are with the actual work itself. We all have interest in moral issues as individuals, but there is a time and place to discuss those issues. A workplace is not it. For the same reason I am removing myself from LinkedIn.
- wildrhythms 5y ago
  "Shut up and dribble."
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  - ta2162 5y ago
    "Silence is violence! If you don't support the right for women to conceal carry firearms, it's because you hate women, want them to experience violence, and want them to be defensless. Your silence on this topic is complicit anti-women violence." The workspace consumes the vast majority of me, the worker's waking hours. You not permitting me the agency to being pro-gun politics to work is direct anti-woman violence.
OldGoodNewBad 5y ago
Lefty tech geeks are going to become poisonous as time goes on. You’re at work to work, not to wheedle and your job is not a platform for whatever social causes the local DSA chapter’s into this week.
neonate 5y ago
https://archive.is/Tx6pv https://archive.is/Tx6pv
realpol1t1k 5y ago
Trump Won! Fauci is a criminal! Biden works for the CCP. Would you like my political activism at work? Discuss.
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vmception 5y ago
I'm glad these shakeouts are happening I'm not a cis white male and I'm not internalizing oppression but obviously (to almost everyone) these are unfalsifiable standards that self-proclaimed far left extremists have created to invalidate everyone's thoughts but their own if anyone hasn't been exposed to this experience, the people that want corporations to "use their platform" for things unrelated to revenue are also believing that all aspects of life are political for people that aren't "cis white males" and if you're any combination of minority/woman/LGBT and disagree with that then you're "internalizing oppression" because to them we can't have independent thoughts. For me, these "allies" are worse than the silent apathetic people as well as the overtly prejudiced/racist people. Primarily because they're unpredictable and even more reactionary to having their world view challenged.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  The article says the primary reason people exited is that the memo was seen as shutting down unionization activity. > these are unfalsifiable standards that self-proclaimed far left extremists have created to invalidate everyone's thoughts but their own How do statements like this fit HN's guidelines? Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. EDIT: Perhaps the thing to do is to write to the mods at hn@ycombinator.com.
  - vmception 5y ago
    > However, several current and former employees told TechCrunch that they believe Medium’s mass exodus is tied more to Williams’ manifesto, dubbed “the culture memo,” A perspective. You chose one of several from the article. These are related controversies. The opposite of unrelated.
    - 5y ago
gfodor 5y ago
Man these “woke people (for lack of a better descriptor) we love you but you’re making the workplace unbearable so it’s time for you to stop making everyone angry or take a pile of cash and leave” memos are increasingly abstracted away from the real issues - do the people writing these really think they can come up with a formula that doesn’t peg them as anti-woke but still gets the desired result? Because they can’t.
- premium-komodo 5y ago
  I basically agree -- the woke interpret anything other than absolute unconditional support as opposition. But there may be something to this strategy of making the announcement so insipid that the woke don't have anything in particular to get upset about, or perhaps aren't even sure they're being opposed.
  - busterarm 5y ago
    It's hard to say you're being oppressed when bags of money are being tossed at you.
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neRok 5y ago
Ignoring all the social aspects of the article, regarding this quote from the memo; > “repeated interactions that are nonconstructive, cast doubt, assume bad intent, make unsubstantiated accusations, or otherwise do not contribute to a positive environment have a massive negative impact on the team and working environment.” I've had experiences where different levels of management within the company (macro level) or project (micro level) have been making what appear to be less than ideal choices. Often this is because they aren't listening to all or the right workers, which could mean they might not understand all of the issue, or possibly that they don't know all of the options/solutions. Of course, the workers might not understand all the aspects that management does either (which might relate to the quote in the article: "even tough feedback can and should be delivered with empathy"). However, this won't stop the workers that feel wronged or otherwise justified from voicing their discontent to their peers, and so the problem of negativity quickly snowballs. And so a naive solution is to send out a memo with a sentence like my first quote. But it's a bit of a chicken or egg scenario, because if the management were achieving better results, the workers wouldn't feel negative in the first place.
throw55 5y ago
Bye, Felicia
ryanmentor 5y ago
Where are the companies capitalizing on this by issuing memos saying "Everyone who cares about this, come work with us"?
- insert_coin 5y ago
  Exactly, there are none that wants them. That should be the wake up call to all "wokes".
waheoo 5y ago
> But Medium specifically recruited people who care about the world, and justice, and believe in the freedom of speech and transparency.” I fit this bill to a t, medium sounds like a great place to work. The progressive left is slowly finding out that the general left doesn't give a shit about them and is finally starting to wake up to the fact they don't have to put up with be called a racist trump supporter for simply disagreeing with the woke left on any of its insane ideas.
roenxi 5y ago
I think this article is off-topic to the memo itself - it seems to be going to a lot of random culture war issues that don't seem to be dealt with or related to the part of the memo quoted. The journalist is probably looking to gin up controversy by attaching issues to Medium that aren't really the driver of the situation. The story here seems to be Medium is struggling to turn a profit, and there are a lot of people reading which direction the wind is blowing and getting out. Mass resignations are a sign of poor job security and general management problems, not people seeing red over vague and not-much-quoted-here memos.
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yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
> “[Medium wants] to enforce good vibes and shut down anything that is questioning ‘the mission,’” they said. Medium are right to “enforce good vibes”. Nobody wants to come to work to constantly defend themselves from ideological harassment. It is openly conceded in the piece that the critics know that Medium leadership didn’t write anything unacceptable, and that those critics are leaving owing to their understanding/interpretation of leadership’s implicit message that while philosophical diversity is acceptable, harassment of colleagues is not. Good for Medium.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  It's enough to make me wish I liked Medium.
speedgoose 5y ago
> Medium said that 52% of departures were white, and that one third of the company is non-white and non-Asian. As an European reader, it's incredible to read such a statement. USA has a skin colour / racism problem.
- enw 5y ago
  Honestly I don’t understand what the whole point of that statement is, apart from fueling racist woke rhetoric and contributing to divide.
- diamondhandle 5y ago
  As a European who doesn’t think Europe has an ongoing skin color / racism problem, you’re signaling that you’ve never really thought about the proceeds of slavery and colonialism to finance, well, almost everything we associate with modern Europe. Especially ignorant if you’re French, British, Dutch, Belgian, Italian, and probably a few other extreme oppressors left off that list. America has a lot of problems, but we TALK about them. Europe is at least 20 years behind the curve. You guys would be happy with pedophile priests if we hadn’t exposed them.
  - speedgoose 5y ago
    I didn't want to start a comment war of Europe against USA. I'm saying that from my outsider point of view, with an European education that taught me about slavery, colonialism, and a little of finance, USA has an obvious ingoing problem with skin colours and racism. I don't really think us European are behind the curve, we are just on another line. We are not perfect too, and we haven't been in the past. You mention slavery and colonialism I will add the too many genocides. We can take, and we do take lessons from USA, sometimes a bit late yes. USA could also take lessons from Europe, we have some experience about what not to do.
  - yreg 5y ago
    Nice, blame today's europeans for the horrors of collonialism. How dare they not base their identities around talking about it.
  - 5y ago
deegles 5y ago
I knew of a person who quit their company over a scandal, only to have their new company have a similar one a few months later. Employees should not be playing musical chairs with employers as a form of protest. If you’re willing to quit, better to stay until you get fired striving for real change instead of hoping that quitting will make management realize they were in the wrong. It rarely works.

318 points by elsewhen 5y ago

I’m still trying to figure out what Medium provides that a wordpress site or html webpage doesn’t provide. Oh that’s right, a boatload of bloat and a paywall. I tend to avoid Medium articles. The actual content tends to be as fluffy as the platform, these days. I’m not surprised that such a fluff engine produces leadership like this. Sinking ship, IMO. I have no basis for this beyond sentiment and observations.

loopz 5y ago

Who are these "woke" people? We don't see them in comments here on HN to defend themselves. Are they strawmen, loud groups and living in their own bubble? I'd ask the same for far-right too. Are these platforming issues?

concordDance 5y ago
As the cultural pendulum swings people are more or less vocal. Four years ago the woke were in ascendence on HN (being vocal on their opinions) and now the anti-woke are. I don't fully understand what drives these trends.
- loopz 5y ago
  Most people join in the middle of the swing perhaps, then get dragged too far to one extreme.
  - cloudfifty 5y ago
    "The middle" is no position though. The middle in the US is and has been wildly different over the last 50 years. Both in the US itself and certainly compared to Western-European countries. An example would be that an old school democratic socialist since the 80ths or whatever shouldn't be seen as an extremist now just because the window has shifted so far to the right with Trump etc.
routerl 5y ago
Not only that, but there is a tendency to group too many phenomena under the heading of "woke", both by people describing themselves with that label, and describing others. For instance, I've seen people deride someone for "being too woke" when the issue at hand was sexual harassment. This is clearly absurd, since we have laws about sexual harassment, and it can't be simply "woke" people who respect laws. On the flip side, things like "let's not name our principal branch 'master'" are, to me at least, clear examples of excessive wokeness. This word, "woke", has become a smokescreen. People who use the same word may not be remotely talking about the same things. They only seem to be agreeing, but neither one actually knows what the other is saying. "Woke" is a pointer, whose pointed at memory location has wildly varying values for different people.
- tstrimple 5y ago
  When it comes down to tolerating sexual harassment versus renaming your primary git branch, I know which side I’m supporting.
  - loopz 5y ago
    I see only upsides with "main" though.

knorker 5y ago

These "activist first" employees should understand that if their primary purpose is activism, then they should indeed switch to a company that hires activists instead of people who are there to get the work done. Activism is not a job. I see many people who think it is. "Pay me to change your values and judge you". Thanks, but I can get that for free.

teachingassist 5y ago
I don't do activism at work, but I certainly do sell myself to employers and potential employers. The greatest value that I provide in my work is that I am me: I am a person, with human needs and concerns and thoughts and inspiration and creativity. I leave some of myself in my work. It surprises me when people have the attitude that you have expressed, that you are just there to get the work done. Is your job in high tech really to robotically do the task? It makes it seem, to me, like you are greatly underselling yourself.
- knorker 5y ago
  No, I said "activist first". Or for many "activist only". I see people who think the actual work is incidental. You say you don't even do activism at work, and even less activism first. So how do you imagine you disagree with me? Unless you have a super low qualification job where you're hired to be a warm body, you're actually hired for the traits you mention, so that is the job. That is actually the "get the work done".
  - teachingassist 5y ago
    > So how do you imagine you disagree with me? Ah, ok. Then, I imagine that you really think it's fine for people to do politics, as long as it's politics that you agree with. You simply see politics that you don't agree with as an "activism first" attitude.
    - knorker 5y ago
      No. So you say you're not an activist at work. So do I. Then you say that I'm an activist. And you're kinda implying that you are, too.

LatteLazy 5y ago

This worries me because I "just don't get it". If I worked at medium I would expect to have zero input on editorial decisions (unless I was hired as an editor). The CEO publishing some fluff about not reopening old wounds is something to ignore (like most CEO messages), not something to interpret as a personal attack. It's doubly ironic that a message about assuming good intent is immediately assumed to have bad intent. What is up with people today? What am I missing?!

modularform12 5y ago

Pushing out lowlife scum is always good.

mrweasel 5y ago

This is a broken management style, carried out by people who have no training in managing company culture or people in general. It's the same broken idea that Basecamp implemented. There's nothing wrong with wanting a certain culture within your company. It's healthy to have a shared vision, and shared idea of how you should behave and present yourself. It gives people a sense of belonging and a community around their work. That culture needs to be implemented with actions, and by the leadership behaving according to that culture, not by sending out a memo. If the problem is that some people are aggressively pushing a certain politic or behaviour not tolerated by the company, then you deal with those individuals directly. Trying to manage by memo is like being back in school when your teacher would complain endlessly about those students who doesn't show up. You just end up sitting there an wonder: "Is he complaining about my behaviour? Am I suppose to do something?" and then you get angry, because you have to listen to someone going of about something you have no control over. Sadly a tendency to avoid interaction with "assholes" and just blasting out a message and expecting the assholes to understand that they are the target of the message. It's not working and it provoking the rest of us, pushing us to a point where we stop careering.

nodelessness 5y ago
> That culture needs to be implemented with actions, and by the leadership behaving according to that culture, not by sending out a memo. I think the memo saves a lot of people a lot of time and frustration. By actions you mean "not tolerated" in the sense that someone is fired or reprimanded for a set of behaviours then that would raise a lot of questions about what else doesn't fly when working there. It is better that they published a memo.
colonwqbang 5y ago
>It's healthy to have a shared vision, and shared idea of how you should behave and present yourself. But writing down what that idea is and sending out a memo about it, that's bad?

whoknowswhat11 5y ago

Article says Trump supporters get hate. Latinx employee group outraged / changes made employee who wrote article fired? Engineer complaining about the article says they were attracted to medium because of free speech which is gone so now leaving - referring to free speech to complain about the article Isn't some of this contradictory

jollybean 5y ago

"In July 2019, for example, Medium chose to publish a series that included a profile of Trump supporter Joy Villa with the headline “I have never been as prosecuted for being Black or Latina as I have been for supporting Trump.” When the Latinx community at Medium spoke to leadership about discomfort in the headline, they claimed that executives from editorial didn’t do anything about the headline until it was mentioned in a public Slack channel. One editor asked anyone who had gone through the immigration process or was a part of the Latinx community to get in a room and explain their side, a moment that felt diminishing to this employee. The headline only changed when employees posted in a public Slack channel about their qualms." I'm not empathetic with the employees. I despise Trump, it's unconditionally within bounds to publish something like this. If you want to work for a political organization, or a 'far-X' organization please do that. Medium already tilts very strongly in one direction and their political orientation is well known. If people are being actually mistreated, there should be a discussion but this is getting out of hand.

mattacular 5y ago

Found it - the absolute worst and dumbest comment thread on HN

phillias 5y ago

"caring .. is not enough.”. Then WTF is enough? Because it seems like you're trying to change my mind so that I have to agree with you. "listening is merciful and really caring...that is not enough." China keeps looking better.

A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago

I read through the article and I genuinely do not understand what it is trying to say. Maybe I do not understand the backstory. Can someone explain it to me like I am five?

muyuu 5y ago

although I don't see how their memo has anything to do with the much clearer Coinbase memo, if employees left because the company isn't political enough or doesn't have enough secondary agendas, then this was a good move

gentleman11 5y ago

Is this article written by a bot? It repeats itself awkwardly and doesn’t flow properly

Bayart 5y ago

Such stories always strike me as quite incredible and conducive to mental instability. Why would anyone get so invested in a company aside from major shareholders ? These places don't need a culture, they're not nations, you don't share a common destiny or anything of the likes.

mkr-hn 5y ago

It sounds like their workplace policy is as confusing as their editorial strategy.

Lazare 5y ago
The good news is, if their workplace policies are anything like their editorial policies, if you don't like it just wait 3 months, they'll have a new one.
- failwhaleshark 5y ago
  San Francisco's microclimate weather as a policy magic 8-ball. I never thought of that before.
  - Google234 5y ago
    In 3 months SF might collectively decide that magic eight balls are racist.
- busterarm 5y ago
  Having worked at a company that restructured every 6 months, that shit is so exhausting.

spoonjim 5y ago

This is framed as a bad thing but it seems like the purpose of these “no politics at work” “culture memos” is specifically to encourage people to the door who require or desire a more modern/activist/diverse/BLM work environment. I suppose we see an experiment playing out between the companies that want to preserve the “old” ways of companies with their politically incorrect employees who would be considered “toxic” and “bros” and “problematic” (and to adapt to modern standards, to adopt a don’t ask don’t tell policy with respect to their personalities) whose animating principle is “coffee is for closers” and the newer diverse, “intersectional,” “antiracist” culture that claims “diversity is our strength.” It will be interesting to see which model wins.

ehnto 5y ago
You have made a false dichotomy of it I feel. I don't think there are two models, just various points on a spectrum of tolerance. I don't entirely disagree that politics is not needed in the workplace, but people spend almost all their time at work now and so it has become their defacto social space. If you spend 8 hours a day there it is important to make sure it's comfortable. That increase in diversity is a direct result of talking about the issue of intolerance in the workplace, making it more comfortable for different people to work there. You can be a hard working closer and tolerant of others all the same.
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  > That increase in diversity is a direct result of talking about the issue of intolerance in the workplace, making it more comfortable for different people to work there. "Intolerance in the workplace" is pretty vague. > You can be a hard working closer and tolerant of others all the same. Nobody should be tolerant of Marxists and Critical Race Theorists. Half of the US population has sadly lost their way. Guess we need another World War to cure the rampant navel-gazing.
- dkarras 5y ago
  From the employer's perspective, there is one type of employee that can pretty much work in any environment given that they are paid - and there is another type that needs ALL the other coworkers doing things and acting in a particular way for them to feel safe and productive. I'm not even against their need to feel safe, included, heard, or their claimed victim status, ptsd, lack of representation, whatever they are concerned with at any point in time - but it is very hard and expensive to build and maintain an environment where they will prosper - very expensive too. A new drama every week, dealing with bad press from a resigned "activist" employee every other month. Even with sympathy towards those people, I probably wouldn't want to touch them with a ten foot pole when money and livelihood of all my employees are at stake. I'd probably just try to help their cause by other means but would not try to torture them in an environment where they'll inevitably suffer and be unproductive. Their utopia does not exist in planet earth (yet), is it reasonable to expect that to exist in a company working environment? From a certain perspective, more is wrong with the world than right, and it is impossible to provide an environment that is "right" when most of the world is wrong. When you are the employer, you take the implicit role of building miniature model of that world in their working environment and I reckon that is impossible, at the very least very very expensive.

premium-komodo 5y ago

It sounds as if it was another emergency woke cancer operation. CEOs are realizing that they can have a lot of happy woke employees doing woke religious rituals and a dying company, or they can pay the woke to leave and have a functional company.

deleted 5y ago

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zackees 5y ago

Top comment on tech crunch: > You’re quitting over that memo and “the timing of it”??? Don’t let the door hit ya where the good lord split ya. “While the Medium memo doesn’t wholly ban politics, the first engineer said that the “undertone” of the statement creates a “not safe work environment.” Oh it’s the “undertone” of the memo that’s so threatening to you. Ok bbbyyyyyeeeee! :-) Snowflakes gonna snowflake. Oh and we get yet another Tech Crunch article pushing for companies to allow their employees to spew on and on about politics.... as long as they are the right politics, and by “the right politics”, I of course mean “left”. It’s a workplace... not a coffeehouse. Keep your politics to yourself, do your job, or show yourself the door.

jacob2484 5y ago
While the woke ones were "triggered" (as they are by most things these days), I'm sure a good portion of employees are relieved to just have a normal workplace again.
aliswe 5y ago
I dont like that simply quoting the top comment on the website gains you downvotes.

ppf 5y ago

>many employees said they appreciated the clarity Anytime corporate-speak includes the word "clarity", you can be sure it is anything but clear.

alpaca128 5y ago
Just like all the cookie banners starting with "we value your privacy". Always written by websites who don't value privacy, otherwise they wouldn't need to write this message.

ALittleLight 5y ago

I worked at Amazon when what we called the "Crying at desk" article[1] was published in the New York Times. The memorable moment from that article was an Amazon employee who said he had, at one point or another, witnessed every one of his teammates crying at their desk. For what it's worth, in my ~10 years at Amazon I saw only one person crying at their desk. After the article came out, it actually had a big effect on our group. Our leaders talked to us about the article and about morale. We instituted a "happy hour" which basically ended the workday early (earlier than usual) on Fridays. We opened a little snack pit in our area with free food and drinks. We started doing irregular team building exercises. This moment, with the NYT article, was actually the only time I recall seeing noticeable changes to our day to day work. Leaders came and went. Teams changed. But everything was more or less the same. Then, one day, this article comes out of nowhere. I didn't identify with it at all, our group was much more mild than anything the article talked about, and suddenly we were making all of these changes - almost instantly. I liked and appreciated the changes but it always perplexed me why it took a story in the NYT to get them to come about. Either the NYT knows our internal morale better than our leaders did, and our leaders didn't react until they saw it in the NYT - or, the NYT didn't know our morale and our leaders overreacted based on third hand reporting about it. It's very odd to me. I've seen people directly telling leadership that we are overworked, that schedules are impossible, that we need to work on group morale, etc - and it very obviously meant nothing to the leaders. You could almost see the words washing over them and leaving nothing behind and indeed, nothing ever came from complaints or feedback like that (so far as I could tell). And yet, if a NYT reporter writes a single article, instant and dramatic reaction. All this is to say that whenever I see articles like this one, I have to wonder first, if the average Medium employee is going "That's weird, I didn't know there was a culture war going on here." And second, what the reaction to something like this article would be. Are the leaders at Medium going to start suddenly doing different stuff because of the "Techcrunch article"? Would it need to be from a media company with more cachet to make a difference? 1 - https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...

ardit33 5y ago
You were in a good bubble/team. I worked at Amazon around that time (I had left amazon right before that article) and noticed a lot of morale problems at work, and yes, people crying. In one of my most stressful projects, was me taking over the work of an engineer, who had a breakdown at work (crying and all), as she requested some time off and was denied. She obviously ended up quitting (or fired, can't tell). I was done with my project, and it was a super tight deadline, and had to finish her part and worked weekends for a couple of months. At the end, I barely got a thank you from my manager. The red flag would have been when I joined the company, as my team had a good-bye party for a lead engineer, who had been there for barely a year. During that lunch I learned that he left as he was burnt out, after just a year. And, yes, that was a very successful project and product at Amazon. That was a sign, that even if you product/project succeeds and does really well, amazon doesn't reward you but still treats you like being expendable. Anyway, your experience might not reflect many others in the company

PaulHoule 5y ago

I didn't know they hired anybody to write content.

listless 5y ago
Right?! That’s the real story here. When the heck did that happen and why did it not work?
- whymauri 5y ago
  This article goes into detail on why it failed despite receiving critical acclaim: https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/24/22349175/medium-layoffs-union-evan-williams-blogger-twitter-subscription https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/24/22349175/medium-layoffs-u...

jokethrowaway 5y ago

This new trend sounds great for companies as a way to purge extremists from their workforce. From my anecdotal experience the people trying to bring politics at work were not very effective. It would be interesting to compare productivity before and after the exits.

tluyben2 5y ago
Yeah, let's have a completely uniform bunch of people without contrary opinions and all completely PC, sounds like paradise. /s
- sputr 5y ago
  You are attacking a strawman. The commenter said extremists, not diversive opinions. It's one thing to have diversive opinions and comely discussing them... And another to be emotionally overinvested and dumping you issues onto your coworkers.
  - tluyben2 5y ago
    Agreed, but the definition of extremist seems to be moving; seems you cannot voice opinions anymore and it seems especially a US thing. Bill gates and Steve Jobs would be marked as extremists in the way they led the business now. Not political but angry and aggressive to the max. I think we need 'extremists' to not have a flat society where nothing happens.
    - rainonmoon 5y ago
      You're voicing an opinion right now. Unfortunately there's a common misconception that everyone is entitled to voice their opinion without criticism. If you go around all day saying stuff that people think is hurtful or obnoxious, the freedom that allows you to do so is the same freedom those people have to tell you to get lost.
    - dale_glass 5y ago
      I think you weren't paying attention? Both were always known as extremists. Steve Jobs was a raging asshole, until it caught up with him. Turns out you can't bully cancer into submission. Gates was involved in some seriously shady stuff and under his rule, Microsoft ruined a whole lot of companies, some of which thought they had a profitable agreement. And not by some sort of honest competition, but some very underhanded tactics. Gates seems to have a much better reputation as of late, but he used to have a Borg style icon on slashdot for a reason. Lots of people didn't like him at all back when he was running the show.

0xFFFE 5y ago

Why is it difficult to keep the political leanings, opinions, activism away from the workplace and act like professionals? If you disagree with something your colleagues or the company you work for, just quit and find another job. In my humble opinion, there is a place for expressing/speaking up about the things you care about, but workplace is not one of it. You have no locus standi.

alpaca128 5y ago
It's difficult when the company itself decides to be political. Acting like professionals and having official channels talk about ethnicity ratios is not very compatible: > Medium said that 52% of departures were white, and that one third of the company is non-white and non-Asian.
tayo42 5y ago
America atleast created a society where life revolves around corporations. Your job is a big part of your identify. Corporations are part of your identity in general. Your a McDonald's or a burger king person, coke or Pepsi. private corporations run America. I think it's only natural for people to express them selves through their work
chasd00 5y ago
I think younger workers bought the lifestyle pitch of their employer hook, line, and sinker. They see the office (virtual or otherwise) as a part of their identity.
- pseudalopex 5y ago
  Right. Companies insist employees believe in the mission. Employees insist on a mission they can believe in.
- adrr 5y ago
  It’s hard to get employees to work 60+ hour work weeks if they aren’t bought into the company mission. It is very effective to blur work and life lines to get workers to put in the extra hours.

bsd44 5y ago

1. A company is a place of business and every company exists to create a product or a service and make enough money in order to produce more products or a better service. 2. I am a professional and I offer my skills, experience and expertise in exchange for money. I might really like the job or not at all, makes no difference because work is to be done. 3. I am not interested in playing a social justice hero or promoting politics of current world affairs at my workplace, nor am I interested in a culture, mentality or values. If I wanted to join a cult I'd join one where they have drugs and naked ladies, not your company. I am getting sick of people pretending to try and change the world through their jobs when they only speak up as long as their jobs are secure. I see this often in my company that is trying really hard to be as liberal as possible while burning investor money where people keep raising political questions such as doing business with China not understanding that their roles will likely be cut if the company loses those Chinese contracts. Goes without saying topics regarding sex and sexual orientation are always hot, but others such as the Palestinian genocide are frown upon. You can't be selectively X, that just makes you a hypocrite. I am currently looking for a new job because I refuse to work in an environment where people are more preoccupied with non-work related problems than they are with the actual work itself. We all have interest in moral issues as individuals, but there is a time and place to discuss those issues. A workplace is not it. For the same reason I am removing myself from LinkedIn.

wildrhythms 5y ago
"Shut up and dribble."
- deleted 5y ago
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- deleted 5y ago
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- ta2162 5y ago
  "Silence is violence! If you don't support the right for women to conceal carry firearms, it's because you hate women, want them to experience violence, and want them to be defensless. Your silence on this topic is complicit anti-women violence." The workspace consumes the vast majority of me, the worker's waking hours. You not permitting me the agency to being pro-gun politics to work is direct anti-woman violence.

OldGoodNewBad 5y ago

Lefty tech geeks are going to become poisonous as time goes on. You’re at work to work, not to wheedle and your job is not a platform for whatever social causes the local DSA chapter’s into this week.

neonate 5y ago

https://archive.is/Tx6pv https://archive.is/Tx6pv

realpol1t1k 5y ago

Trump Won! Fauci is a criminal! Biden works for the CCP. Would you like my political activism at work? Discuss.

deleted 5y ago

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vmception 5y ago

I'm glad these shakeouts are happening I'm not a cis white male and I'm not internalizing oppression but obviously (to almost everyone) these are unfalsifiable standards that self-proclaimed far left extremists have created to invalidate everyone's thoughts but their own if anyone hasn't been exposed to this experience, the people that want corporations to "use their platform" for things unrelated to revenue are also believing that all aspects of life are political for people that aren't "cis white males" and if you're any combination of minority/woman/LGBT and disagree with that then you're "internalizing oppression" because to them we can't have independent thoughts. For me, these "allies" are worse than the silent apathetic people as well as the overtly prejudiced/racist people. Primarily because they're unpredictable and even more reactionary to having their world view challenged.

wolverine876 5y ago
The article says the primary reason people exited is that the memo was seen as shutting down unionization activity. > these are unfalsifiable standards that self-proclaimed far left extremists have created to invalidate everyone's thoughts but their own How do statements like this fit HN's guidelines? Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. EDIT: Perhaps the thing to do is to write to the mods at hn@ycombinator.com.
- vmception 5y ago
  > However, several current and former employees told TechCrunch that they believe Medium’s mass exodus is tied more to Williams’ manifesto, dubbed “the culture memo,” A perspective. You chose one of several from the article. These are related controversies. The opposite of unrelated.
  - 5y ago

gfodor 5y ago

Man these “woke people (for lack of a better descriptor) we love you but you’re making the workplace unbearable so it’s time for you to stop making everyone angry or take a pile of cash and leave” memos are increasingly abstracted away from the real issues - do the people writing these really think they can come up with a formula that doesn’t peg them as anti-woke but still gets the desired result? Because they can’t.

premium-komodo 5y ago
I basically agree -- the woke interpret anything other than absolute unconditional support as opposition. But there may be something to this strategy of making the announcement so insipid that the woke don't have anything in particular to get upset about, or perhaps aren't even sure they're being opposed.
- busterarm 5y ago
  It's hard to say you're being oppressed when bags of money are being tossed at you.
- deleted 5y ago
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deleted 5y ago

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neRok 5y ago

Ignoring all the social aspects of the article, regarding this quote from the memo; > “repeated interactions that are nonconstructive, cast doubt, assume bad intent, make unsubstantiated accusations, or otherwise do not contribute to a positive environment have a massive negative impact on the team and working environment.” I've had experiences where different levels of management within the company (macro level) or project (micro level) have been making what appear to be less than ideal choices. Often this is because they aren't listening to all or the right workers, which could mean they might not understand all of the issue, or possibly that they don't know all of the options/solutions. Of course, the workers might not understand all the aspects that management does either (which might relate to the quote in the article: "even tough feedback can and should be delivered with empathy"). However, this won't stop the workers that feel wronged or otherwise justified from voicing their discontent to their peers, and so the problem of negativity quickly snowballs. And so a naive solution is to send out a memo with a sentence like my first quote. But it's a bit of a chicken or egg scenario, because if the management were achieving better results, the workers wouldn't feel negative in the first place.

throw55 5y ago

Bye, Felicia

ryanmentor 5y ago

Where are the companies capitalizing on this by issuing memos saying "Everyone who cares about this, come work with us"?

insert_coin 5y ago
Exactly, there are none that wants them. That should be the wake up call to all "wokes".

waheoo 5y ago

> But Medium specifically recruited people who care about the world, and justice, and believe in the freedom of speech and transparency.” I fit this bill to a t, medium sounds like a great place to work. The progressive left is slowly finding out that the general left doesn't give a shit about them and is finally starting to wake up to the fact they don't have to put up with be called a racist trump supporter for simply disagreeing with the woke left on any of its insane ideas.

roenxi 5y ago

I think this article is off-topic to the memo itself - it seems to be going to a lot of random culture war issues that don't seem to be dealt with or related to the part of the memo quoted. The journalist is probably looking to gin up controversy by attaching issues to Medium that aren't really the driver of the situation. The story here seems to be Medium is struggling to turn a profit, and there are a lot of people reading which direction the wind is blowing and getting out. Mass resignations are a sign of poor job security and general management problems, not people seeing red over vague and not-much-quoted-here memos.

deleted 5y ago

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yakshaving_jgt 5y ago

> “[Medium wants] to enforce good vibes and shut down anything that is questioning ‘the mission,’” they said. Medium are right to “enforce good vibes”. Nobody wants to come to work to constantly defend themselves from ideological harassment. It is openly conceded in the piece that the critics know that Medium leadership didn’t write anything unacceptable, and that those critics are leaving owing to their understanding/interpretation of leadership’s implicit message that while philosophical diversity is acceptable, harassment of colleagues is not. Good for Medium.

ALittleLight 5y ago
It's enough to make me wish I liked Medium.

speedgoose 5y ago

> Medium said that 52% of departures were white, and that one third of the company is non-white and non-Asian. As an European reader, it's incredible to read such a statement. USA has a skin colour / racism problem.

enw 5y ago
Honestly I don’t understand what the whole point of that statement is, apart from fueling racist woke rhetoric and contributing to divide.
diamondhandle 5y ago
As a European who doesn’t think Europe has an ongoing skin color / racism problem, you’re signaling that you’ve never really thought about the proceeds of slavery and colonialism to finance, well, almost everything we associate with modern Europe. Especially ignorant if you’re French, British, Dutch, Belgian, Italian, and probably a few other extreme oppressors left off that list. America has a lot of problems, but we TALK about them. Europe is at least 20 years behind the curve. You guys would be happy with pedophile priests if we hadn’t exposed them.
- speedgoose 5y ago
  I didn't want to start a comment war of Europe against USA. I'm saying that from my outsider point of view, with an European education that taught me about slavery, colonialism, and a little of finance, USA has an obvious ingoing problem with skin colours and racism. I don't really think us European are behind the curve, we are just on another line. We are not perfect too, and we haven't been in the past. You mention slavery and colonialism I will add the too many genocides. We can take, and we do take lessons from USA, sometimes a bit late yes. USA could also take lessons from Europe, we have some experience about what not to do.
- yreg 5y ago
  Nice, blame today's europeans for the horrors of collonialism. How dare they not base their identities around talking about it.
- 5y ago

deegles 5y ago

I knew of a person who quit their company over a scandal, only to have their new company have a similar one a few months later. Employees should not be playing musical chairs with employers as a form of protest. If you’re willing to quit, better to stay until you get fired striving for real change instead of hoping that quitting will make management realize they were in the wrong. It rarely works.