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Follow-up question: do you think of it as a good thing or a bad thing? My guess is that either way, that's perfectly fine with them. They want employees who emb

Follow-up question: do you think of it as a good thing or a bad thing? My guess is that either way, that's perfectly fine with them. They want employees who embrace this mentality, and do not want employees who would be upset by it.

somewhereoutth 3y ago
If, as a politician/party, you wanted to exert complete control over a population, then banning talk about politics at work (where lets face it the majority of people spend the majority of their lives), and ensuring companies don't talk about politics themselves either, would probably be an essential step.
- sparklingmango 3y ago
  Additionally, DHH somewhat regularly blogs about political things. While I understand it's his "personal" blog, can you really have a personal blog separate from work when you're the CTO of the company and the creator of Rails?
  - ghaff 3y ago
    It's complicated if you have personal but identified channels and are also a somewhat public figure in the context of various communities, including companies and tech projects. I guess my take is that if you want to have a truly personal blog or social media channels, it should be as anonymized as possible. (Which has pros and cons.) Certainly, there are a ton of things I wouldn't write on a public channel even if I weren't technically violating any company policy because they would bite me. When I was an analyst, I would absolutely not write anything about a CxO that differed from what I would put in a research report.
  - jen20 3y ago
    I don't see why not - and notably they don't seem to attempt to ban other employees from having personal blogs or engaging in activism outside the workplace either.
- charlotte-fyi 3y ago
  Right, it's an explicitly political stance. I think there are plenty of ways to speak to the need for collaboration, kindness, respecting difference without drawing artificial boundaries around what is and isn't politics. It's pretty clear that DHH is doing politics all the time, just that his politics are conditioned on understanding itself as "not political."
- gnicholas 3y ago
  It would be very concerning (and in violation of the First Amendment) if the government forbade you from talking about politics at work. But this is not that — it's a company saying that at their company, they don't have political debates on their internal communication systems. This is different in both degree and kind. Are you concerned that if too many companies take this approach, it will become the norm, like it was before about 10 years ago, and that then there will be attempts by politicians to codify it into law?
  - somewhereoutth 3y ago
    If it became the norm, politicians wouldn't need to encode it into law - they'd have 'won' already. The question I suppose really is to what extent society (through the agency of the law and elected representatives) can police (or more precisely in this case to prevent the policing of) private forums like company internal communication systems. I'd argue that simply being privately owned does not put up a perfect barrier to society, and that society does have a legitimate interest in how such forums are run. There seems to be this idea in the US that any form of tyranny and oppression is ok, so long as it is not the government that is doing it.
    - gnicholas 3y ago
      > If it became the norm, politicians wouldn't need to encode it into law - they'd have 'won' already. This was the norm until recently. Would you say that these politicians (who are they, by the way?) had already won during that time?
- pessimizer 3y ago
  I seriously doubt it. I don't know of anything interesting that has come from discussing non work-related politics at work. What needs to be preserved is the ability to discuss work-related politics at work, which can currently easily get you fired (but for a made-up reason.) As for companies not talking about politics, I don't care what companies have to say. They're the mouthpieces of their owners. As can be seen in this case, when the owner dictates that the company doesn't participate in politics unrelated to its business. Should companies have the right to speak about arbitrary subjects, but not the right to silence? How can an employee feel like they'll be treated fairly if they don't agree with the company line (issued yesterday) about apricots in Africa? I'd go farther and say that the list of subjects that a company opines in public about is the same as the list of subjects an employee can feel like they're not free to have an opinion on that anyone at their job could hear about without risking their livelihood. The fact that DHH goes on and on about politics in his personal life but keeps it away from the company is a positive indicator that it's not opinions that are being suppressed, but opinions about business-unrelated political matters on internal systems. edit: I feel that a priority for any sort of socialism, or civilization for that matter, is to figure out how to work productively with people you don't like or agree with. And psychologically, not being able to cooperate with people who differ from you is an issue of autonomy and boundaries.
  - somewhereoutth 3y ago
    Whether it is through law, custom, or company policy, anything that stifles political debate weakens our democracy. To be clear, that does not include or allow hate speech or incitement, which are identifiably different. Of course we should balance this with the needs of the business in keeping company communications 'on topic' as it were, and to avoid damaging professional relationships.
- dghlsakjg 3y ago
  Good thing that’s not what happened here! This was voluntary, and there is no evidence that it was anything but internal. Do you have something that would point to a specific politician or party being involved? As a counterpoint, the liberalization and allowing of corporate lobbying and speech has made it much easier to manipulate political agendas, and remove agency from the population.
nickjj 3y ago
Seems normal to me to avoid it. Honestly I can't even imagine chatting about anything political in public within a company's chat channels. I have zero interest in politics, if I had to mentally filter dozens of lines of chat about XYZ political topic when I'm trying to find something technical that would bother me. It wouldn't offend me but it would have a negative affect on productivity due to spending more time finding things. If a group of folks with a common interest want to talk about politics privately that seems reasonable to me. That would be comparable to going out for lunch in a non-remote setting, chatting in the parking lot or an empty conference room during a break.
- charlotte-fyi 3y ago
  I think the issue is that forms of workplace organizing and labor disputes that might fall short of protected union activity under the NLRB are dismissed as being "political", rather than there being too much chat about political news on Slack.
CalRobert 3y ago
When I worked in San Luis obispo around the time of proposition 8 banning marriage equality we all opposed prop 8 except for one guy who insisted on bringing it up all the time and said we'd be discriminating if we stopped him. It seems like a sensible rule to me.
ghaff 3y ago
My, perhaps unpopular, opinion is that email/chat/even lunchtime workplace discussions can easily escalate to something contentious/distracting, will make at least some people uncomfortable, and are probably sensibly approached by either keeping your mouth shut or voicing generic assent with the reigning political ethos in the organization. By all means, talk among your friends circle after work at the bar. But I don't have a lot of interest in engaging with a lot of political conversation that I may or may not agree with.
macNchz 3y ago
Personally I've been split on this since I first read about it: I get a weird feeling from the way it was decreed to be not allowed, but I also don't think it's totally unreasonable to tell people to take it elsewhere (how hard is it to make a group chat on another platform these days?), particularly given the increasing polarization and vitriol in American politics in recent years.
- gnicholas 3y ago
  I think the decree was a bit ‘loud’ because it was uncommon at the time to take that stance. But I think if a company nowadays wanted to have the same stance, they could just nonchalantly say “we have the same policy as coinbase and basecamp regarding politics at work”.
nshunter 3y ago
The issue is they set the line for what's political and that line is based in leaderships own believes about identity. It telegraphs what kind of company it is based on what it classifies as political under an abstract definition based on who runs the company at the time.
ensignavenger 3y ago
It may come down to how they define "politics". Given a reasonably broad definition, it would be nearly impossible to avoid some discussion of political things. If it is used as a weapon to prevent discussing of topics that management doesn't want discussed, while promoting topics they like, it becomes simply a policy of control. As an example, recently the topic of remote work has become of interest in political debates.
skywhopper 3y ago
I think the danger of such a policy is that it's easy for those in charge to declare that any complaint or POV they don't want to hear is "political" while the discussions and opinions they approve of are not. In other words, if people of a particular subgroup of the population were to complain that the company's policies or culture were harmful to them, that might get shut down based on this policy. An example I could see happening is a company with a handful of Deaf employees who ask in the #general Slack channel that anyone running a Zoom meeting could please enable captioning when setting up the meetings. If few people honor this request, maybe the complaints escalate and the Americans with Disabilities Act gets mentioned. Suddenly it's "political" and the Deaf folks are causing a distraction. But really, they are just asking to be put on a more even playing field so that they can actually participate and contribute to the work, but if the wrong person got their feelings hurt, suddenly it's a "political" issue and no one can talk about it, and before you know it, all the Deaf employees have left for greener pastures, and now maybe there's no more "politics" in the shared channels, but the company is worse off for letting themselves become a hostile work environment for those folks.
- gnicholas 3y ago
  Is this sort of thing alleged to have happened at Basecamp? My understanding was that it was more politics-first activism, not a response to employees being held back by ADA violations. As someone who works in the field, I don't hear about ADA compliance being treated differently based on partisan affiliation. The ADA was signed by a Republican president, and there are many pro-accessibility folks on the left and the right. I do understand your general point that it can be difficult to draw lines. I just think that issues like the one you raised would be handled through HR if a friendly "hey can we turn on captioning" message didn't get enough support. I've also never heard of anyone getting their feelings hurt about zoom captions. But you're right that the people at the top will be the ones deciding what is deemed "political" and what is not. If their definitions don't match up with what the remaining employees think, there could be issues. I haven't heard of any drama since the original incident. Has there been any?

somewhereoutth 3y ago

If, as a politician/party, you wanted to exert complete control over a population, then banning talk about politics at work (where lets face it the majority of people spend the majority of their lives), and ensuring companies don't talk about politics themselves either, would probably be an essential step.

sparklingmango 3y ago
Additionally, DHH somewhat regularly blogs about political things. While I understand it's his "personal" blog, can you really have a personal blog separate from work when you're the CTO of the company and the creator of Rails?
- ghaff 3y ago
  It's complicated if you have personal but identified channels and are also a somewhat public figure in the context of various communities, including companies and tech projects. I guess my take is that if you want to have a truly personal blog or social media channels, it should be as anonymized as possible. (Which has pros and cons.) Certainly, there are a ton of things I wouldn't write on a public channel even if I weren't technically violating any company policy because they would bite me. When I was an analyst, I would absolutely not write anything about a CxO that differed from what I would put in a research report.
- jen20 3y ago
  I don't see why not - and notably they don't seem to attempt to ban other employees from having personal blogs or engaging in activism outside the workplace either.
charlotte-fyi 3y ago
Right, it's an explicitly political stance. I think there are plenty of ways to speak to the need for collaboration, kindness, respecting difference without drawing artificial boundaries around what is and isn't politics. It's pretty clear that DHH is doing politics all the time, just that his politics are conditioned on understanding itself as "not political."
gnicholas 3y ago
It would be very concerning (and in violation of the First Amendment) if the government forbade you from talking about politics at work. But this is not that — it's a company saying that at their company, they don't have political debates on their internal communication systems. This is different in both degree and kind. Are you concerned that if too many companies take this approach, it will become the norm, like it was before about 10 years ago, and that then there will be attempts by politicians to codify it into law?
- somewhereoutth 3y ago
  If it became the norm, politicians wouldn't need to encode it into law - they'd have 'won' already. The question I suppose really is to what extent society (through the agency of the law and elected representatives) can police (or more precisely in this case to prevent the policing of) private forums like company internal communication systems. I'd argue that simply being privately owned does not put up a perfect barrier to society, and that society does have a legitimate interest in how such forums are run. There seems to be this idea in the US that any form of tyranny and oppression is ok, so long as it is not the government that is doing it.
  - gnicholas 3y ago
    > If it became the norm, politicians wouldn't need to encode it into law - they'd have 'won' already. This was the norm until recently. Would you say that these politicians (who are they, by the way?) had already won during that time?
pessimizer 3y ago
I seriously doubt it. I don't know of anything interesting that has come from discussing non work-related politics at work. What needs to be preserved is the ability to discuss work-related politics at work, which can currently easily get you fired (but for a made-up reason.) As for companies not talking about politics, I don't care what companies have to say. They're the mouthpieces of their owners. As can be seen in this case, when the owner dictates that the company doesn't participate in politics unrelated to its business. Should companies have the right to speak about arbitrary subjects, but not the right to silence? How can an employee feel like they'll be treated fairly if they don't agree with the company line (issued yesterday) about apricots in Africa? I'd go farther and say that the list of subjects that a company opines in public about is the same as the list of subjects an employee can feel like they're not free to have an opinion on that anyone at their job could hear about without risking their livelihood. The fact that DHH goes on and on about politics in his personal life but keeps it away from the company is a positive indicator that it's not opinions that are being suppressed, but opinions about business-unrelated political matters on internal systems. edit: I feel that a priority for any sort of socialism, or civilization for that matter, is to figure out how to work productively with people you don't like or agree with. And psychologically, not being able to cooperate with people who differ from you is an issue of autonomy and boundaries.
- somewhereoutth 3y ago
  Whether it is through law, custom, or company policy, anything that stifles political debate weakens our democracy. To be clear, that does not include or allow hate speech or incitement, which are identifiably different. Of course we should balance this with the needs of the business in keeping company communications 'on topic' as it were, and to avoid damaging professional relationships.
dghlsakjg 3y ago
Good thing that’s not what happened here! This was voluntary, and there is no evidence that it was anything but internal. Do you have something that would point to a specific politician or party being involved? As a counterpoint, the liberalization and allowing of corporate lobbying and speech has made it much easier to manipulate political agendas, and remove agency from the population.

nickjj 3y ago

Seems normal to me to avoid it. Honestly I can't even imagine chatting about anything political in public within a company's chat channels. I have zero interest in politics, if I had to mentally filter dozens of lines of chat about XYZ political topic when I'm trying to find something technical that would bother me. It wouldn't offend me but it would have a negative affect on productivity due to spending more time finding things. If a group of folks with a common interest want to talk about politics privately that seems reasonable to me. That would be comparable to going out for lunch in a non-remote setting, chatting in the parking lot or an empty conference room during a break.

charlotte-fyi 3y ago
I think the issue is that forms of workplace organizing and labor disputes that might fall short of protected union activity under the NLRB are dismissed as being "political", rather than there being too much chat about political news on Slack.

CalRobert 3y ago

When I worked in San Luis obispo around the time of proposition 8 banning marriage equality we all opposed prop 8 except for one guy who insisted on bringing it up all the time and said we'd be discriminating if we stopped him. It seems like a sensible rule to me.

ghaff 3y ago

My, perhaps unpopular, opinion is that email/chat/even lunchtime workplace discussions can easily escalate to something contentious/distracting, will make at least some people uncomfortable, and are probably sensibly approached by either keeping your mouth shut or voicing generic assent with the reigning political ethos in the organization. By all means, talk among your friends circle after work at the bar. But I don't have a lot of interest in engaging with a lot of political conversation that I may or may not agree with.

macNchz 3y ago

Personally I've been split on this since I first read about it: I get a weird feeling from the way it was decreed to be not allowed, but I also don't think it's totally unreasonable to tell people to take it elsewhere (how hard is it to make a group chat on another platform these days?), particularly given the increasing polarization and vitriol in American politics in recent years.

gnicholas 3y ago
I think the decree was a bit ‘loud’ because it was uncommon at the time to take that stance. But I think if a company nowadays wanted to have the same stance, they could just nonchalantly say “we have the same policy as coinbase and basecamp regarding politics at work”.

nshunter 3y ago

The issue is they set the line for what's political and that line is based in leaderships own believes about identity. It telegraphs what kind of company it is based on what it classifies as political under an abstract definition based on who runs the company at the time.

ensignavenger 3y ago

It may come down to how they define "politics". Given a reasonably broad definition, it would be nearly impossible to avoid some discussion of political things. If it is used as a weapon to prevent discussing of topics that management doesn't want discussed, while promoting topics they like, it becomes simply a policy of control. As an example, recently the topic of remote work has become of interest in political debates.

skywhopper 3y ago

I think the danger of such a policy is that it's easy for those in charge to declare that any complaint or POV they don't want to hear is "political" while the discussions and opinions they approve of are not. In other words, if people of a particular subgroup of the population were to complain that the company's policies or culture were harmful to them, that might get shut down based on this policy. An example I could see happening is a company with a handful of Deaf employees who ask in the #general Slack channel that anyone running a Zoom meeting could please enable captioning when setting up the meetings. If few people honor this request, maybe the complaints escalate and the Americans with Disabilities Act gets mentioned. Suddenly it's "political" and the Deaf folks are causing a distraction. But really, they are just asking to be put on a more even playing field so that they can actually participate and contribute to the work, but if the wrong person got their feelings hurt, suddenly it's a "political" issue and no one can talk about it, and before you know it, all the Deaf employees have left for greener pastures, and now maybe there's no more "politics" in the shared channels, but the company is worse off for letting themselves become a hostile work environment for those folks.

gnicholas 3y ago
Is this sort of thing alleged to have happened at Basecamp? My understanding was that it was more politics-first activism, not a response to employees being held back by ADA violations. As someone who works in the field, I don't hear about ADA compliance being treated differently based on partisan affiliation. The ADA was signed by a Republican president, and there are many pro-accessibility folks on the left and the right. I do understand your general point that it can be difficult to draw lines. I just think that issues like the one you raised would be handled through HR if a friendly "hey can we turn on captioning" message didn't get enough support. I've also never heard of anyone getting their feelings hurt about zoom captions. But you're right that the people at the top will be the ones deciding what is deemed "political" and what is not. If their definitions don't match up with what the remaining employees think, there could be issues. I haven't heard of any drama since the original incident. Has there been any?