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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

#701

Post by infamouscow »

cbHXBY1D wrote: post #554
simias wrote: post #527

Reading these comments I feel like the root of the issue is the collapse of American democracy. It's a bit grandiloquent but that's definitely how it looks like. If workers trust that "We, the people" are still in charge on the big picture then it doesn't make sense to bring politics at work. Just vote. Now if you feel like your power as a citizen has dwindled and you can't meaningfully enact change through democrati…

>I guess an other possibility would be to have proper unions but for some reason I don't see that happening in the USA any time soon... I think this will happen sooner rather than later. As the market gets flooded with more and more engineers, tech workers will continue to get more and more proletarianized. Unionization will be the natural avenue for workers to get a slice of the pie.

I wonder if that eventually leads the software industry into having professional licensing.

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

#702

Post by sbmthakur »

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…

The argument of ethics always exists. As far as I understand the parent comment, they are talking about scenarios where a political position does not necessarily align with the ethics. For example, ending racial discrimination is a right thing to do. But ending racial discrimination by running a campaign on Social Media isn't something that everyone will agree with.

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

#703

Post by ghgdynb1 »

human_person wrote: post #565

Erica Joy (Director of eng at Github) had an interesting take on this. https://twitter.com/EricaJoy/status/1311178025275289600 "coinbase engineers walked off [in June] because brian wouldn't say "Black Lives Matter," he posted it so they'd get back to work, now he's having an executive "YOU AREN'T THE BOSS OF ME!" meltdown* about it" and "this looks a whole lot like the play certain advisors tell CEO's to run when th…

Although I think we differ in terms of our sentiment, I'm really glad to see a plausible hypothesis about the proximate motivation for Brian's decision posted.

Erica's theory that this is a way of trimming payroll while eliminating personnel Brian sees as problematic seems to fit all the facts about the pressures Brian and Coinbase are feeling right now.

While I'm not sure this will turn out to be a bad thing for the world, it's a lot clearer why now & why Coinbase with this in mind.

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

#704

Post by ok_coo »

simias wrote: post #639
claudeganon wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If workers trust that "We, the people" are still in charge on the big picture then it doesn't make sense to bring politics at work. Just vote. This is a bizarre, ahistorical sentiment. Go read about the history of labor struggle in the US. Even when everyone could vote, the organizing of workplaces and response by their employers was far more contentious and violent than anything that’s going on today.

Can you give an example of what you have in mind? I must admit that, being European, I don't really have a good grasp of the history of American worker struggles. Here in France I can't quite think of something really similar to Silicon Valley activists. When I think about worker-led revolts I think of Germinal or Mai 68, when the proletariat (and, in the case of Mai 68, the students and then the proletariat) fought…

A good example would be to take a look at the Pinkertons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_(detective_agency)

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

#706

Post by dragonwriter »

cwkoss wrote: post #694
paulgb wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What happened? I'm partial to Aaron Levie's take on this[1]: > An alternative take on the importance of companies taking a stand on critical social issues that impact our employees and communities: when there's a vacuum of leadership from the government in dealing with these topics, businesses often need to lead more than ever. When we have had presidents who were willing to condemn white supremacy, we tended not t…

Makes me think of "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power"

Note that “corporate power” here actually refers to primarily to labor unions which operated in coordination with capital of the Catholic corporatist social doctrine, which was a major ideology of the late 19th and early-to-mid-20th century, competing against both capitalist opposition to labor organization and socialist approaches to labor organization.

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

#707

Post by bradlys »

simias wrote: post #527

Reading these comments I feel like the root of the issue is the collapse of American democracy. It's a bit grandiloquent but that's definitely how it looks like. If workers trust that "We, the people" are still in charge on the big picture then it doesn't make sense to bring politics at work. Just vote. Now if you feel like your power as a citizen has dwindled and you can't meaningfully enact change through democrati…

> But in the end if you're dissatisfied with your company and you know that there's a fundamental ideological incompatibility it probably makes more sense to just quit, especially when you're a software dev and you can probably find some other job fairly easily.

While true that you could find "some other job" - it likely won't be a job that pays as well or has some other detestable attribute. If you have a pathological disagreement with companies collecting lots of data - you're going to have a hard time finding a company paying you $400k+/yr as an IC software dev.

If you're not wealthy (bought real estate before the big boom) or come from a family of wealth (they bought you a house) - you're going to have hard time in many cities only going with companies that you can find almost no ideological incompatibility with. And, turns out, a lot of these major cities that are very expensive also happen to have most of the job listings. God forbid you move to BFE and the few places that hire ICs stop hiring. You'll have to upheave your entire life and move - or pray you can find a suitable remote job.

Like most of us - you sacrifice your ideology because it isn't compatible with living in a capitalistic world and you've decided you're also not ready to be a martyr. You stand to lose a lot in the developed world (as you start with a lot more than those in less developed places) - martyrdom isn't worth it then. Only when you're independently wealthy can you truly make decisions based on your ideology. Making the presumption here that everyone wants a middle class to upper middle class American lifestyle (SFH, 2 cars, live in a somewhat desirable area, kids, retirement savings, etc.).

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

#708

Post by quadrifoliate »

Seanambers wrote: post #169
onion2k wrote: post #29

I wonder if this is a way for Coinbase to push politically engaged employees out of the company in order to reduce the possibility of anyone pushing for internal change like people who want worker's rights groups or unionization. Operating with a workforce who only want to turn up and write code and never discuss anything that affects them as a group puts Coinbase in a very strong negotiating position because there's…

The activism displayed in U.S tech is damaging both from a organizational point of view, but also its a competetitive disadvantage. Imagine having employees who refuses to do work because 'they feel they shouldn't'. Or organizes walkouts, protests and are actively lobbying for changes in company policy to reflect their own personal values. Or protests against certain customers of the company, because they are evil in…

I hate to be the one triggering Godwin's Law at this depth in the discussion, but oh well.

> Imagine having employees who refuses to do work because 'they feel they shouldn't'. Or organizes walkouts, protests and are actively lobbying for changes in company policy to reflect their own personal values. Or protests against certain customers of the company, because they are evil in some perceived way or form. It's smart to do what one can to get rid of these types of employees basically because they are only trouble, they add nothing with their activism in the workplace.

I think the world would have been collectively grateful if engineers at IBM and Dehomag would have refused to do some work because they felt they shouldn't [1].

Remember, politics is out there in the world. If a large enough number of people at your company are being affected by it, there's likely something wrong that's much greater than your company. History can teach us some lessons about this.

---------------------------

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

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

#709

Post by joshuamorton »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #583
C1sc0cat wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect its only some activists that Mr Armstrong want's rid of.

If someone went around the Coinbase office demanding that the company speak out against abortion, I'm pretty sure Armstrong would want to get rid of that guy too.

However if someone went around the office demanding that people self censor any speech deemed "political", that person would be celebrated.

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

#710

Post by dragonwriter »

skinkestek wrote: post #523
paulgb wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last night he was given the chance to unequivocally condemn the Proud Boys and instead told them to "stand back and stand by", which the group themselves has taken as a rally cry. Just like how after Charlottesville, white supremacists took his ambiguous response as a sign of approval. He doesn't condemn, he validates with just enough deniability that people can make lists like the one you posted, while everyone who…

Did you follow that debate closely? Because it seems like a lot more nuanced than the media put it.

Yes, I watched it and his “stand back and stand by” direction to the Proud Boys wasn't nuanced at all.

In fact, the media tends not to report on the added emphasis on the “stand by”, which served to minimize the “stand back”.

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