This must feel harsh for those on the receiving end, but is the right thing to do. It is not effective to try and turn every company into a rights activism group just because it is a group of people. This may be a sign that it’s become increasingly hard to organize or take part in such activism outside of work. What happened?
If one were to engage with the works of leftist thinkers, one would recognize that the workplace is actually the central point for activism as it is where one seizes the means of production.
I may want to apply to coinbase. I am really fed up with 'activist' employees and the toxic environment they bring. All I want is to just focus on engineering and ship features/improvements. Bringing politics to the office(thanks Google!) has been one of the worst things to happen in the 21st century for tech companies. Interestingly enough google has been going through absolute hell with these cancerous employees an…
I concur, I suspect the influx of applicants to coinbase based on this will be larger than the potential loss of people taking the severance
> you can’t truly be apolitical; that's one of those "you're either with us or against us" type of deal - which is not the right way to deal with anything imho. You _can_ be apolitical - as in, you do not let your political views affect what you do. You keep your political views private. You do not try to change anyone else's political views as part of your job.
The view you just described is active support for the status quo. One fairly non-controversial part of the status quo right now is our dependence on fossil fuels and co2 emissions to keep our economy running. Saying "I'll keep my views private" means I'm giving an okay to what's happening now. If every individual shares the thinking at every company then it is impossible to even imagine how the most catastrophic clim…
It is not active support for the status quo. No one is saying to quit being political entirely. Just during work hours.
This is going to work great for Coinbase. It's very helpful for employers to select for conformists who can be told to shut up, and not stand up for what they believe (unless they believe in the status quo and the company, which is called non-political). Selecting for groupthink^W mission is pretty important in the business of cryptocurrencies. Reduces chances of anyone having a different moral stance that would push…
On the contrary, the conformists are the ones he's trying to oust.
> you can’t truly be apolitical; that's one of those "you're either with us or against us" type of deal - which is not the right way to deal with anything imho. You _can_ be apolitical - as in, you do not let your political views affect what you do. You keep your political views private. You do not try to change anyone else's political views as part of your job.
In January 2017, several of my coworkers were banned from reentering the country to go home to their families, while they were on business trips to visit other offices. How is anyone supposed to be apolitical in that context? How are the people who can't ever come home supposed to pretend everything is fine? A functional definition of privilege is that politics doesn't matter that much to you. No matter how it turns…
> A functional definition of privilege is that politics doesn't matter that much to you.
The more privileged a group is the more they tend to be involved in politics. So a better definition is that privilege is when you have time and energy to spend on politics.
I’ve never worked in the Bay Area, so could just be OOL but I’m genuinely surprised that this is such a big deal, or that this blog post got so much praise. Never discussed politics at any of the companies I’ve worked for, we were always too busy with...work!
But most company's work becomes political now. You only want to work on a feature for a social media platform? No politics there, right?
One can oppose the existence of something on the basis of its location while not being opposed to its existence generally. See: NIMBYs.
The mainstream "anti-immigration" position is about curtailing future immigration, rather than removing current immigrants. The objection isn't to the presence of the immigrants per se , but rather the consequences of continuing the flow of people on the labor market and on cultural cohesion.
Sure, and as a brown guy in Canada he's fine. But if he were in the US and it were all about "curtailing future immigration" you could easily turn off green cards and deport a quarter million Indians who have lived in America for ten years on temporary visas.
Yeah, it's all about the future thing there. Give me a break.
This is going to work great for Coinbase. It's very helpful for employers to select for conformists who can be told to shut up, and not stand up for what they believe (unless they believe in the status quo and the company, which is called non-political). Selecting for groupthink^W mission is pretty important in the business of cryptocurrencies. Reduces chances of anyone having a different moral stance that would push…
On the contrary, the conformists are the ones he's trying to oust.
a conformist is someone who conforms to a norm, there is no such thing as a conformist minority by definition. Are you thinking half of the employees are activists and he wants to kick them all out?
Just keep in mind Twitter is a piss poor reflection of society. There are some radical ideas on Twitter, but ask people in person what they actually think and everyone will sing a different tune.
This is one of the bigger problems I encountered when mentoring junior engineers: Many of them grew up consuming a firehose of hyperbolic Twitter and Reddit content, thinking that it was an accurate representation of the real world. Worse yet, some of them essentially learned their social skills from Twitter debates and Reddit threads, mistaking angry online arguments for normal adult conversation. Fortunately, most…
I was thinking about this recently. They're probably the first (?) generation where online social interaction consists of a very large part of their overall social interactions. The online world is place where people can be ignored/blocked/shadowbanned. Then they venture out into the real world for Uni and find they don't have these censorship tools at their disposal, and don't have the skills to handle it properly.
I agreed with what Brian Armstrong said in his blog post and thought it was admirable to publicly take that position, but now I have even more respect for his dedication. I don't know if the severance package is good or not, but it seems generous and it gives employees who aren't aligned with the company an easy way out.