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

#721

Post by qchris » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 7:10 PM UTC

ryanisnan wrote: post #580

ptero wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is impossible. When the very technology you work on is employed in entirely political ways (i.e. dragonfly), you cannot separate work from the world.

Hey, I've been writing on planning an article discussing some components of open-source and ethics, and I would really love to use a (variation) of your sentence. Would you mind if I did that, and if so, would you like me to include some form of direct attribution to you? You can find my email in my profile.

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

#722

Post by exolymph » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 7:11 PM UTC

ptero wrote: post #513

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.…

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…

> Do you really want to make him jump and go demonstrate for/against your list of hot button topics?

Sadly for many people the answer to this is an unequivocal yes.

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

#723

Post by paxys » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 7:13 PM UTC

anm89 wrote: post #689

I see this as strategically genius whether you agree with it or not. He's totally neutered the ability of employees to take strong political stances within the company going forward and he's made it clear where the company stands in away that makes it very hard for people to come back later and defend staying if they were interested in these kinds of politics. If you want to stay focused on building a company and not…

Whether it is a strategically genius move or not will depend on the eventual outcome. No tech company, especially one in the bitcoin/fintech sector, can pretend to be completely apolitical. So putting out public blog posts and setting strict policies that apply to employees may not fly well when the company or its leadership/executives themselves don't follow them down the line.

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

#724

Post by itsoktocry » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 7:13 PM UTC

newobj wrote: post #653

itsoktocry wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you so sure you're on the "right" side here?

You ever wonder why "politics at work" has flared up so much in the last 4 years? Have you completely lost sight of the timeline of events, or do you refuse to acknowledge it? Do you think it's a reaction to something? Or did it just spontaneously instigate itself one day? Just uppity libs getting bored? People are speaking up because people feel existentially threatened. Because people are being existentially threat…

>You ever wonder why "politics at work" has flared up so much in the last 4 years? Have you completely lost sight of the timeline of events, or do you refuse to acknowledge it?

No, please, fill me in. What has changed in the last 4 years that has suddenly made people existentially threatened at work? It sounds like you're trying to implicate 'Donald Trump' as the start of all of these issues, and yet I'm not sure how the 2016 US election matters for me, in my country.

Accusing people who want to only do their job at work as "violent"? Your comment is a perfect demonstration of why apolitical work environments will be appealing to a lot of people.

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

#725

Post by maxwelljoslyn » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 7:15 PM UTC

Alex3917 wrote: post #466

koheripbal wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> There is a lot of value in removing political activists from your company, and so it's worth paying them to leave. Your company should be 100% political activists, but (at least during work hours) they should be focused on advancing the mission of your organization. Even within activist groups you have the exact same problem that Joe is talking about, e.g. at some point in the 90s Adbusters went from lobbying again…

For an organization wishing to preserve its specific mission, I wonder if one positive step would be clearly defining the point at which the organization would say "mission accomplished" and pack itself up. Riffing on your example, suppose an anti-ad organization said, "We want to achieve a goal of 20/50 states banning highway ads. Once we get there, our organization will be wound down [in some way.]"

There are reasons that might work badly, though. Without the org continuing to generate political pressure, public awareness, or money, the originally-achieved goal state could backslide. But ... change is inevitable. Perhaps at that point you try and get the org back together,; if you can, you can, otherwise you accept the world has moved on.

Easier said than done.

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

#726

Post by 392c91e8165b » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 7:15 PM UTC

WJW wrote: post #641

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.

There seems to be an obvious counterexample in the rest of the Western nations (ie Canada, Australia, most of western Europe) that have experienced a similar reduction in organized religion but have not seen a corresponding rise to political division. Certainly not to the degree that the USA has.

Good point. My explanation for the discrepancy is that Canada, Australia and western Europe are more homogenous racially and ethnically than the US is, which makes them less vulnerable to the excesses of an ideology or religion-substitute that revolves around race and ethnicity.

On some of the troop carriers going to Vietnam, soldiers starting fighting each other along racial lines; in response, the US military started a major initiative to promote racial tolerance in their training of soldiers and in their personnel policies. Similarly, according to my theory, the leaders of the other major institutions of the US realize that the performance of their institution depends on the different races getting along or at least not openly fighting each other, so they will exhibit a weaker tendency to push against a radical belief system that prioritizes racial tolerance than their counterparts in more homogenous countries will.

Also, starting with the Puritans of England, the western Europeans that chose to emigrate to the US were on average more religious than those who chose to remain in western Europe.

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

#727

Post by joshuamorton » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 7:16 PM UTC

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #717

joshuamorton wrote: post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't agree. In all the places I've worked, even the most apolitical ones, someone would be viewed quite negatively if they walked into the break room and tried to break up a private political discussion.

So then someone who was attempting to enforce the CEO's mission would be viewed negatively? This feels self-contradictory.

You can't say "We won’t: Debate causes or political candidates internally" (quoting Armstrong) but simultaneously say that anyone who attempts to enforce that would be viewed negatively. That would imply that Armstrong would view himself negatively for enforcing his own rule.

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

#728

Post by Aunche » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 7:18 PM UTC

claudeganon wrote: post #544

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…

> 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.

Part of Coinbase's purpose is to provide its workers with a safe environment and fair compensation, even if it's not explicitly written in their mission statement. As such, protesting dangerous work conditions and collectively asking more pay is directly related to a company's mission. What happened at Coinbase was that workers walked out because their CEO didn't want to Tweet about the latest social issue du jour. It's very difficult to imagine what anyone seeks to accomplish with this.

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

#729

Post by sokoloff » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 7:18 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…

> The workplace is the one space where your political opponent can't simply escape from politics, and has to be confronted with your views

It is for this exact reason that many people object to politics being overtly brought into the workplace against people's will.

If someone wants to discuss politics (or religion or sexuality or anything else that makes us all human) with you, have at it. If they don't want to, you need to stop.

No means no here as well. The fact that they can't leave imposes a higher burden on consent, not a lower one, IMO.

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

#730

Post by ascorbic » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 7:22 PM UTC

disposekinetics wrote: post #489

albedoa wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Coinbase are more attractive to people who are worried about being "deplatformed" for their ideology, then they are selecting for that group. You write "no matter my ideology" when you mean "despite my ideology".

As a supporter of radically free speech, I'm selecting for the widest possible grouping. That's tolerance.

A supporter of radically free speech is attracted to a company because it bans political speech.