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

#741

Post by hnmullany » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 7:43 PM UTC

smsm42 wrote: post #719

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…

Well, democracy is not just voting. Most of it actually happens before voting. I mean Russia has voting, Belarus has voting, USSR had voting, Iran has voting, I'm not sure whether North Korea has voting but they certainly could have. To have properly functioning democracy you need the support system that leads to responsible, informed voting and that provided feedback mechanisms between the government and the populat…

You know ... there's a reason that US Unions are partisan, which is that the Republican party has been on a mission to destroy them since Reagan and has largely succeeded.

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

#742

Post by nwsm » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 7:47 PM UTC

rcfox wrote: post #714

Nacdor wrote: post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how often does it get triggered? That's my least favorite part of HN: There's zero transparency in the moderation and a lot of it is extremely subjective.

Here's how it works: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22159031 You can disagree with how it's implemented, but it's not subjective. dang does a way better job of addressing moderation issues as they're happening than anything you'll see on Reddit (besides perhaps tiny, niche subreddits.) And at least he's not surreptitiously changing people's comments. ( https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-ste…

> dang does a way better job than Reddit

How is that a relevant comparison? Reddit is orders of magnitude larger (looks to be around 100 times more active users) and allows users to create public and private subreddits that can easily become echo chambers.

HN moderation is not even in the same ballpark as what Reddit deals with.

To be clear I'm not defending Reddit or even saying they do a good job; I'm just saying the comparison is not fair or useful.

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

#743

Post by x3n0ph3n3 » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 7:48 PM UTC

kats wrote: post #736

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…

Well, it's also core to Coinbase's mission statement. Brian rightfully wants to keep Coinbase focused only on political issues that are part of the company mission.

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

#744

Post by Nacdor » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 7:49 PM UTC

rcfox wrote: post #714

Nacdor wrote: post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how often does it get triggered? That's my least favorite part of HN: There's zero transparency in the moderation and a lot of it is extremely subjective.

Here's how it works: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22159031 You can disagree with how it's implemented, but it's not subjective. dang does a way better job of addressing moderation issues as they're happening than anything you'll see on Reddit (besides perhaps tiny, niche subreddits.) And at least he's not surreptitiously changing people's comments. ( https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-ste…

I'm not just talking about the "flame-war detection", although that system alone is extremely crude an ineffective (in my opinion).

There are lots of other moderation features -- e.g. shadow bans and automatic vote penalties -- that are completely opaque but turn HN into a strong echo chamber.

I also disagree with your point about Reddit. At least on Reddit you can easily track what was removed (there are entire subreddits dedicated to tracking what's been removed by moderators) and many subreddits provide explanations of why content was removed.

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

#745

Post by frankish » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 7:51 PM UTC

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…

This is why I'm frustrated with the idea that we need to enact change and policies at the federal level. The federal government should just exist to protect our liberties and organize national defense. Everything else should be organized more locally at the community level where voters actually have some skin in the game.

It's the same idea as how modern agile companies run, small teams that work in the same environment, have more empathy/trust of one another, and are able to make compromises in order to have stability and direction within the team.

Additionally, we shouldn't be trying to put all of our eggs in one basket. Should we have single-payer healthcare nationally? No one knows if that's the most appropriate solution for all of the US, but why not let cities or communities try various localized healthcare strategies out for themselves. Each may try things differently. Some may work and some may fail. Other places can see how things worked elsewhere and either decide to improve, not implement, or take verbatim what another local government has done. You influence change by setting an example and letting others decide for themselves, not by trying to force the world to behave as a small subset of people want.

Having multiple baskets is essential for enabling different ideas and perspectives, especially if the bad ideas were to win out. I firmly believe humans are not meant to have such large scale societal structures where communities are expected to encompass an entire nation. You care more about and think more similarly to your neighbor than you do someone three thousand miles away.

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

#746

Post by ideal_stingray » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 7:53 PM UTC

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.…

As a member of several different marginalized groups, I want to be able to go to work and do my job without having to hear my coworkers argue about whether I get to exist. I’m well aware that politics doesn’t ignore me, but for my own sanity I don’t want to think about it any more than necessary, either.

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

#747

Post by young_unixer » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 7:55 PM UTC

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…

That speaks much worse about herself than it does about Coinbase.

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

#748

Post by lwansbrough » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 7:57 PM UTC

coryfklein wrote: post #661

lwansbrough wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is a difference between being aware of the negative externalities of your work, and using your position in your company as a platform to accomplish your own partisan political goals. The former should be encouraged and the latter discouraged. Much of the discussion here today is confused by the intermingling of so many concepts under the singular term "politics".

I feel that this is the same argument as the kneeling football players argument. People should be allowed to use their position of power - however limited or not it may be - as their platform for protest. If it becomes so burdensome that you have to put rules in place to prevent it, that's a very clear indication of an underlying problem with society. Creating policy to ignore the problems of society that impact your own workforce is going to leave you with a workplace filled with people who are largely unimpacted.

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

#749

Post by ideal_stingray » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 7:58 PM UTC

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…

“Do people like me get to exist in public life” is often a hot topic of political discussion, but it’s not a discussion I’m interested in having or even hearing about at work. Not sure I’d consider this “privilege”.

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

#750

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 8:03 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…

Based purely on the headline, it feels like the people who yell about it are the exact Twitter shitstorm party that tries to start a pitchfork mob everywhere, and if you just try to stay away from it, they'll form a mob against you for staying out of it.

In other words, exactly the toxic group of people that this is trying to remove from the company.