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Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

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Re: Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

#511

Post by Barrin92 »

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #499
Barrin92 wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>All I want is to just focus on engineering and ship features/improvements. Yeah if there wasn't the pesky world around all the engineering and we could all just stare at our stock options while we sit in our gentrified neighbourhoods and pretend the world doesn't exist. You can ignore politics but politics doesn't ignore you. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil is an unworthy attitude for a democratic citizen.…

GP never said to ignore politics. You are the one that brought that up. They said to leave them out of the office. There is plenty of time for politics before and after work. Bringing your politics in to work just makes for an uncomfortable work environment for you co-workers.

'the office' or the firm today, is for better or worse our primary means by which we can exercise influence. That is why tech workers are bringing politics into the firm in the first place, because they realise, rightly, that it is one of the most potent channels to actually exercise change, and that's why so many people want to keep politics out of it. The workplace is the one space where your political opponent can't simply escape from politics, and has to be confronted with your views, which is after all the actual point of political life.

People realise that rather than the local town hall, the large internet platforms, their workplace, and their social media feed have become the public space of ideas. That's why the free speech debate focuses so much on internet platforms, and why 'it's privately owned' has long lost meaning to anyone in the debate.

Keeping politics 'out of the workplace', at least in our environment today, is basically to say to keep politics out, period. It's not the apolitical position, it is the 'idiotic' position because it intents to keep politics out of the one place that actually matters the most in this day and age.

Re: Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

#512

Post by erik_landerholm »

thelock85 wrote: post #453
erik_landerholm wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean next step? You can process anyone’s money, it good for business. Name one money processing entity that’s ever taken a stand against...anything?

Apologies if I'm missing the mark on your question. If the first step is "apoliticism or we'll help you find the door" then isn't a potential next step "amorality or we'll help you..."? Again not arguing that any CEO should nurture activism (though I personally might like it), but healthy dissent is important for solving hard problems, and not every hard problem is purely logical. If my company's mission is to create…

Sorry, I probably wasn't clear. Coinbase is saying it is an amoral middleman. In my mind there is no next step. And if you look at the history of money processors, this is the default and probably the only way they ever operate.

Re: Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

#513

Post by ptero »

Barrin92 wrote: post #483
subsubzero wrote: post #465

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…

>All I want is to just focus on engineering and ship features/improvements. Yeah if there wasn't the pesky world around all the engineering and we could all just stare at our stock options while we sit in our gentrified neighbourhoods and pretend the world doesn't exist. You can ignore politics but politics doesn't ignore you. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil is an unworthy attitude for a democratic citizen.…

The comment author does not advocate ignoring the world, he wants to separate his engineering work from politics and thus wants to look for employers who do not push a particular political program on him. Which seems a perfectly valid (and attractive to me) view.

You cannot ignore your dreams, your health, your family, social ills, the air quality, politics and a myriad of other things in the world around you. But if you focus on all of those all the time you will achieve nothing. Imagine a great inventor, scientist, engineer or artist working on his next idea. Do you really want to make him jump and go demonstrate for/against your list of hot button topics?

Re: Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

#514

Post by CarelessExpert »

smooth_remmy wrote: post #464
CarelessExpert wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why are people discussing politics at work? Probably because the work these companies do is frequently political. Let's be clear: What Coinbase is saying is, we the founders, who set the company's mission, and are doing so with a clear political view (rooted in libertarianism and so forth), are allowed to use the company to further our political ends. But the staff? Sorry, you have no voice. Maybe that's fine. The…

There's a group you forgot to consider: the investors. What do the investors think? They are free to usurp the founders if they feel that Coinbase is not paying proper homage to social justice.

Certainly true, though to me that only reinforces my point.

Investors invest in companies based on their perception of the value of a company, and that perception is of course coloured by political views.

Heck, we have an entire financial movement called Socially Responsible Investing, something which is nakedly political and a clear acknowledgement that politics cannot be, and has never been, divorced from business.

I find it infinitely more strange to think that workplaces can be apolitical at all. Choosing to work for Palantir or Coinbase or The Gates Foundation or Amazon is (in part) a political decision. It may not be a conscious or intentional political decision, but it's a political decision nonetheless.

How could anyone think otherwise?

Re: Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

#515

Post by Pils »

nootropicat wrote: post #387
monoideism wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s far beyond politics and more a religion than anything. I believe this is a result of the fact that Americans have turned away from organized religion in recent years (note: I'm not religious myself). There seems to be something deep inside of most people that requires a shared spiritual experience. Wokism has emerged to fill that need.

I think this article is going to interest you: https://gist.github.com/jart/b73868081a5e1a1c5cf0 >Finally, our parasite will employ a strategy of politicization, insisting that everyone in a society be involved in the contest for political power. Since our memetic parasite is already bound to one or more political factions, politicization leaves no one with the option to ignore it, and simply live their lives. Neutra…

Obviously the solution to workplace politicization is...dissolving the federal government and appointing Eric Schmidt the CEO of a newly founded business-state?

> One day in March of this year, a Google engineer named Justine Tunney created a strange and ultimately doomed petition at the White House website. The petition proposed a three-point national referendum, as follows:

1. Retire all government employees with full pensions.

2. Transfer administrative authority to the tech industry.

3. Appoint [Google executive chairman] Eric Schmidt CEO of America.

https://thebaffler.com/latest/mouthbreathing-machiavellis

Re: Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

#516

Post by makuto »

JeremyBanks wrote: post #497
eddof13 wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[flagged]

I think the original blog post made a very important point: We may all agree that there are issues, but there is a lot of disagreement in how problems should be solved. For example, some think that you should solve problems with the system, through elections, bills, etc., while others think a violent revolution and communism is the only way forward.

Your position regarding thinking everyone who isn't political at work is naive or evil is not helping the problem. This is only alienating people who already find such aggressive and exaggerated statements wrong.

Re: Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

#517

Post by whymauri »

lwansbrough wrote: post #500
subsubzero wrote: post #465

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…

A lot of harm has been done by humans “just doing their job.” The world needs people who are willing to stand against those who take no interest in weighing the morality of their work. For example, AGI will be built either by accident or intentionally by sociopaths at Google, etc. All decisions at a certain scale are inevitably political, and choosing to ignore the politics in those contexts is in itself a political…

>A lot of harm has been done by humans “just doing their job.”

For a deeper dive on this, look at Arendt's "Report on the Banality of Evil."

Re: Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

#518

Post by umeshunni »

tlogan wrote: post #211

We live in a different world now. Today, apolitical pretty much means “I’m white. And probably male. But definitely white.”

As a non-white immigrant, I think it's mostly the other way. Most of us don't care as much for the US-style identity politics, but somehow it's all the white liberal upper middle class types who are always political and woke.

Re: Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

#519

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #506
subsubzero wrote: post #465

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 think each side needs to have sympathy for each other. I totally understand not wanting to hear about politics. I'd love for the world to be boring enough that work could stay work. But on the flip side, a lot of people have skin in the game, so to speak, and can't disentangle politics from their life. Being able to ignore politics right now is a very privileged, very lucky position. I have no doubt that if you sur…

People can be as politically active as they want, on their own time and on their own dime.

Ironically, the people preaching activism in the workplace would be livid if a religious believer proselytized their faith at the workplace, despite the believer having as strong a belief in their ideas as the activists do in theirs. Quite the double standard.

Re: Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

#520

Post by seneca »

JeremyBanks wrote: post #497
eddof13 wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[flagged]

> I'm sure there will be many applicants, but they'll all be sociopaths.

This is the exact kind of tone Coinbase is ejecting from their company. You thinking this is the wrong move is exactly the point. People don't want to work around people who call them "sociopaths" over not wanting to debate at work.

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