Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission • Hacker News Board

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

#531

Post by hackerfromthefu » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 5:10 PM UTC

erik_landerholm wrote: post #395

thelock85 wrote: post #342

This won’t end well. The moment Coinbase articulates anything remotely related to an underlying set of values or business ethics, the accusations of politicization (and hypocrisy) will come flying. I believe that corporations are not governed or regulated to support activism writ large, but there has to be room for dissent (even if it ends in separation). How else do you arrive at a shared definition of “economic fre…

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?

In the last few years cancel culture and pc overgrowth has locked entire industries out of the major online money processing networks ..

Visa, paypal, stripe .. etc

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

#532

Post by claudeganon » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 5:10 PM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #511

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

It’s always been this way in the west, post industrialization. People treating it as some novel development are just ignorant of history. Why do you think so many democracies have “labor” or “workers” parties? Myriad progressive movements and political parties were born out of and materially supported by workers organizing their workplaces.

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

#533

Post by s1artibartfast » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 5:11 PM UTC

vmception wrote: post #493

flyinglizard wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The guys who’d go on public platform to denounce Coinbase probably intersect with the type of people Coinbase wants to rid itself of. I fully support what Coinbase is doing. It seems very fair to all sides.

It doesn't change my stance on what I would prefer companies do but it seems like a multilayered issue on the tides to pay attention to here and at the very least makes me not want to espouse my own thoughts about "Yeah! mission focused companies!" publicly. Here are quotes from my feed: "The path to an IPO is to purge Black and Brown people from Coinbase ... this is very unbecoming of a federal contractor" "Over a d…

Do the people making the statements you quoted have more context/information, or are they just more vocal.

In my experience, there has never been a shortage of people with practically no information communicating very strong opinions online?

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

#534

Post by whymauri » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 5:12 PM UTC

makuto wrote: post #528

xoxoy wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

perhaps take a step back and realize that the HN demographic of young white males is exactly the type that would have the least issue with this policy...

Fight racism and stereotypes with more racism and stereotypes, that'll work.

Where is the racism in the GP comment?

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

#535

Post by sk5t » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 5:13 PM UTC

Never forget that calls that protests and political expressions aren't happening "in the right venue" or "in the right way" only help one side.

Take for example NFL management telling the players not to kneel in solidarity. That is the players' most effective (and frankly, peaceful, and not particularly disruptive) way to send a message. But if you don't agree with their message, moving to shift it to a less visible place is absolutely a political attempt to neuter it.

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

#536

Post by stateofnounion » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 5:14 PM UTC

koheripbal wrote: post #346

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #3

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.

There is a lot of value in removing political activists from your company, and so it's worth paying them to leave. Aside from the combative toxic environment they generate, they are also often the source of disgruntled rogue employees that will generally behave improperly, misrepresent coworkers, leak documents, raise alarms about operations they don't understand, and generally draw the company into litigation. In a…

> They're just poison.

This. And like another commenter pointed out, it's not unique to one side or the other. Anyone who defines their entire existence in this left/right dichotomy is suffering from media-induced mental illness.

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

#537

Post by quotemstr » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 5:15 PM UTC

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]

> If you choose to join Coinbase now, expect to be "mysteriously" rejected for a lot of jobs in the future.

Fortunately, these days, it's possible to make a whole career out of working at companies that don't subscribe to this neo-McCarthyism.

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

#538

Post by freeone3000 » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 5:16 PM UTC

cblconfederate wrote: post #163

kleinsch wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked for companies on the east coast, then moved to SF and now work at a big tech company. The companies I worked for on the east coast were mostly B2B, so we were focused on making a good product for businesses so they’d pay us more money. Big tech companies recruited for a long time with the pitch that we’re changing the world. That has brought in a bunch of employees who joined bc they want their employment to…

I wonder what % of SV employees actually did move there for "making a better place blabla". It always souded as a pure marketing signal , like those old Benneton ads. I can understand that people who work for wikipedia do it, but not the big tech sector. It's particularly hard to believe it considering the cynicism of the current "total compensation"-oriented generation of tech crowd.

A large group of people, maybe even a majority, believe in the general idea that technology can help solve social problems. Then you have a company that says they make the world a better place. Of course you're going to get some people who legit want to do that, and believe the scale and scope of the operation allows this to actually happen! Then they're very upset when, for instance, their spreadsheet software is used to track how to steal refugee children from their parents and sell them to adoption services. It's going to take some adjustment to convince these people that the company that says they're making the world a better place is simply constantly lying, and only exists for profit.

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

#539

Post by GoblinSlayer » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 5:16 PM UTC

matthewdgreen wrote: post #378

solidasparagus wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are looking to hire a young, 25 year old computer scientist living in a big blue city who graduated from PresigiousUniversity. What politics do you think this person likely subscribes to? I think people too readily assume that these people are blue, but you have to remember that academia (and tech in general) tends to have strong social pressure to either be blue or hide your political beliefs. There is likely…

It's one thing to be a closet Republican, another thing to be against putting up even an anodyne corporate statement about BLM/racial intolerance.

That's doubtful in polarized conditions.

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

#540

Post by cactus2093 » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 5:17 PM UTC

koheripbal wrote: post #346

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #3

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.

There is a lot of value in removing political activists from your company, and so it's worth paying them to leave. Aside from the combative toxic environment they generate, they are also often the source of disgruntled rogue employees that will generally behave improperly, misrepresent coworkers, leak documents, raise alarms about operations they don't understand, and generally draw the company into litigation. In a…

I saw this firsthand in May/June in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing. It was a pretty small company and there was one employee in particular who was very much an activist, though a number of employees of course felt very strongly about what was going on. The company genuinely tried to do their best to support them, encouraged this person to take a week off for mental health and from my perspective was making a real effort to be understanding and support this person and also to express support for the BLM movement as a whole.

There was one manager in particular who really tried to do the right thing in supporting this employee. The manager convinced the marketing folks to make a pro-BLM post on LinkedIn, but then this employee got upset that it had not gone far enough and was too weakly worded. A good friend of the employee and former coworker at this company actually called out the company in the comments of the post on LinkedIn for not taking a stronger stand. The manager also convinced the executives to have the company donate money, and this kicked off a broader giving back initiative where they wanted everyone to vote on causes that the company could support in various ways. This caused even more backlash, because it had now lost site of the BLM focus and become a broader thing.

By the end, the company was just cluelessly walking on eggshells with no idea how to not make things worse in their attempts at support. The employee was extremely frustrated, struggled to regain any level of respect for the company and stopped really performing in their job and ended up leaving a couple months later. I still very much believe nobody was in the wrong here, nobody involved was a bad person or even an insensitive person. It just proved to be very difficult to navigate this situation, there were too many ways for it to go wrong and the company didn't handle everything absolutely perfectly and so they just made things worse.

Anyway, in the end I'm very convinced that everyone, including the activist employee, would have been much happier under the model as stated by Coinbase. And even if this person left or had never joined this company to begin with because of that policy, the result would have been very similar in the end, but without the weeks of frustration and stress and lost productivity all around.