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Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

theblockcrypto.com

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

#731

Post by SquishyPanda23 »

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…

Meh it's not strategically genius. The crypto community is hugely political and right-libertarian leaning. He's just signalling that he's not going against that trend.

> He's totally neutered the ability of employees to take strong political stances

He absolutely has not. I'm sure they will continue to take hard right-libertarian stances that are common in the cryptocurrency world.

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

#732

Post by drstewart »

eli wrote: post #600
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…

Sorry. Your work is political whether you choose to acknowledge that or not.

I notice that Industry Dive doesn't have a message supporting BLM on its website.

Can you share why you've failed to support this social cause on your front page? Silence is violence, and Industry Dive has clearly taken the stance that it does not support BLM.

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

#733

Post by Aunche »

joshuamorton wrote: post #709
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're assuming ill intent. The goal is to minimize workplace hostility, not to censor anyone. Let's say someone goes around snooping into people's conversations and overhears two coworkers casually talking about attending a protest and reports this. I'm guessing that person snooping around will be the only one who will be reprimanded.

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

#734

Post by x3n0ph3n3 »

uoaei wrote: post #663
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.

And what about when the business performed by the company you are working for has political consequences?

Brian Armstrong pretty clearly stated that position:

> Policy decisions: If there is a bill introduced around crypto, we may engage here, but we normally wouldn’t engage in policy decisions around healthcare or education for example.

Are there other "political consequences" around crypto that you'd have Coinbase engage in?

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

#735

Post by theptip »

dwardu wrote: post #8
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.

Brian should have said we don't mix politics and activism in our company, if you don't like it, leave. Which should have ended like that. On the other hand, it's a good move because it keeps things neutral. These annoyed employees should just take it and leave.

The problem with taking such a hardline position is that there is a significant switching cost borne by the employee when they leave, and so at the margin you'll have employees that don't buy in to the mission statement, don't like your new/restated position, but need the job/dislike job-hunting even more.

So now you've created/agitated a population of disgruntled employees; this will tend to cause problems. Paying a generous severance is enough to lift most of these employees over the "activation threshold" and is (in my opinion) the correct good-faith way of managing the situation; it's saying "no hard feelings if you don't agree with this direction, and we respect/value your contributions thus far."

Regardless of whether you agree with the object-level mission statement, I think that, having made the decision, this is a good example of strong leadership; it's important that everybody is bought in to the company mission, and you need to proactively filter out folks that aren't. But at the same time, you need to do so with respect; it's not necessarily a black mark for someone to no longer be a fit for the company or role, as both company and individual can change over time.

This is the same sort of idea as when you part ways with an exec after a strategy shift (e.g. pivot from B2C to B2B; replace your consumer-facing head of sales with a B2B veteran). It's not necessarily the case that they aren't doing a job, just that they aren't a fit for the role as it now stands.

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

#736

Post by kats »

Two weeks the same CEO campaigned against Apple's App Store policies on Twitter, and totally made it out to be a moral issue when it benefitted him.

https://mobile.twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/1304490208...

"There are many unbanked and underbanked people in the world who have no ability to get a loan to buy a home, or start a business, so this kind of technology has enormous potential to improve the world over time, even if it is still early days."

"I greatly admire Apple as a company, and think they build amazing products, but their restrictions on the app store, in particular around cryptocurrency, are not defensible in my view, and they are holding back progress in the world."

The way that Coinbase puts pressure on Apple is the same as what Coinbase's politically-active employees are doing.

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

#737

Post by andrew_ »

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…

Makes me wish I had the skillset necessary to apply. Sounds like a phenomenal place to work.

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

#738

Post by seneca »

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…

> Now if you feel like your power as a citizen has dwindled and you can't meaningfully enact change through democratic means, it makes sense to try and "weaponize" your job, especially if you work for a powerful company and you're a valuable highly skilled worker.

I think you're close, but not quite right. I think what has happened is that ideas well outside the Overton Window have become popular with a couple small, but very vocal, groups. Their ideas aren't very popular with most people, so they can't achieve their desired outcomes democratically. They therefore try to "weaponize" their jobs in influential institutions, like Software companies, to gain influence over the rest of society.

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

#739

Post by lukeschlather »

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…

> I don't think that's very similar to the time of activism we're talking about here.

I think that was exactly the OP's point. The kind of activism we're talking about here is low-key activism by privileged people. I can't think of any examples either - that didn't mean they didn't happen, it just means they weren't important enough to make the history books because they were settled without any violence.

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

#740

Post by x3n0ph3n3 »

dogman144 wrote: post #400

An interesting part to this is Coinbase's mission is, if it actually works out, absurdly counter-culture and near revolutionary. Yeah, it's an exchange, trade w/o mainstream adoption will likely go on for a while, and there are a lot of caveats I'm not mentioning. A mainstream Coinbase with mainstream cryptocurrencies, which will include Bitcoin (assuming a multi-currency future, not just BTC dominance), implies some…

> It's interesting that in exchange for not taking a stance on one set of issues, their very aggressive stance in another extremely societally profound area is getting overlooked.

It's not overlooked, it's explicit in the call to focus on the mission of the company and not unrelated politics.

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