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

#771

Post by sushisource » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 8:52 PM UTC

cactus2093 wrote: post #540

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…

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…

> I still very much believe nobody was in the wrong here

This just doesn't strike me as reasonable. The employee was in the wrong. Clearly. Just because the thing you support is a moral and good thing to support doesn't mean you get to foist your activism upon everyone else around you. I care about endangered species conservation - but if I did what this person did and held the organization hostage to my demands I'd be looked at sideways, and rightfully so.

It's not that there's no place for activism in the workplace, it's just that the line should be drawn at the point where it starts harming the organization as a whole.

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

#772

Post by bhupy » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 8:59 PM UTC

prions wrote: post #769

frankish wrote: post #745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 environm…

> 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. You'd think that after months of "locally led" covid responses in the US that this naive take…

None of this is unique to the US — the EU is similarly "interconnected", as is Switzerland. Subsidiarity and decentralization aren't new ideas, and are generally the prescribed solution to unlock governance in a large & heterogenous polity.

> from roads

The Interstate Highway System, while technically impressive, essentially entrenched the US as a car-centric society from the top-down.

> public health

The vast majority of our healthcare problems can be attributed to the fact that it's tied to employment, which was caused by Federal policies.

> even the Internet

DARPA falls under "organize national defense". The EU also has EU-level agencies that work on space research (ESA). Advanced research can also be organized among the States in a CERN-like model.

On the flip-side, US States are larger than many nations. The State of Massachusetts has more people than Norway, and enjoys a similar HDI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

Insofar as "localities" are ill-suited to governing, the States are a sufficient mechanism for top-down control.

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

#773

Post by pm90 » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 9:01 PM UTC

prions wrote: post #769

frankish wrote: post #745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 environm…

> 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. You'd think that after months of "locally led" covid responses in the US that this naive take…

Exactly this.

The libertarian "Minimize the federal government" is an extremely misguided fanatical view which is devoid of any fact-based reasoning. Federal investments have lead to transformative change in most sections of the US economy. Federal Reserve keeping the interest rates low and providing unlimited liquidity is whats keeping the stock market from tanking today. Federal investments will be key to de carbonizing the US economy and reducing income inequality (e.g. by increasing the minimum wage).

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

#774

Post by flyinglizard » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 9:05 PM UTC

itsoktocry wrote: post #603

vmception wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> "The path to an IPO is to purge Black and Brown people from Coinbase ... this is very unbecoming of a federal contractor" Do normal people actually believe stuff like this???

Depends on where you're from. US appears to be quite a bit more embracing of that viewpoint than people from other countries who aren't so well tuned to US societal sensitivities (which can be very difficult to navigate).

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

#775

Post by jlokier » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 9:07 PM UTC

SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #731

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.

"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."

- Brian Armstrong, 2 weeks ago

Seems to me that's not at all a hard right-libertarian stance.

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

#776

Post by saagarjha » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 9:09 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…

Not surreptitiously (at least to my knowledge, but of course that would be an oxymoron anyways), but the moderators do have the ability to edit comments and do so on occasion.

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

#777

Post by AmericanChopper » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 9:10 PM UTC

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #158

pornel wrote: post #56

This is going to work great for Coinbase. It's very helpful for employers to select for conformists who can be told to shut up, and not stand up for what they believe (unless they believe in the status quo and the company, which is called non-political). Selecting for groupthink^W mission is pretty important in the business of cryptocurrencies. Reduces chances of anyone having a different moral stance that would push…

Is being apolitical really being a conformist? 20 years ago yes, but in the age of social media where every brand from banks to ice cream posted their stance on the BLM protests it would appear being political in the workplace is conformity. If what Brian Armstrong is saying here was considered the norm, this article wouldn't even be on the front page.

I think the parent comment is just quite typical of modern political extremism. Where every actor must take a position on every issue, where failure to take the correct position is heresy, and where failure to take any position amounts to taking a position against the one of the extremist who is demanding that you take one (and is therefor also heresy).

The role of an employee is to deliver value to the employer during their working hours. The role of the employer is to provide an income to the employee. It’s insane to think that the role of the employer should be to further the political objectives of the employees. By that rationale, having any interaction with any party who’s politics are different from yours in any way is conformism.

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

#778

Post by saagarjha » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 9:10 PM UTC

quotemstr wrote: post #541

dang wrote: post #454

The thread on the original blog post is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24610267 It got relatively little discussion because it set off the flamewar detector ( http://hnrankings.info/24610267/ ). Normally we'd turn that off in such a case, but we missed that one. Also: don't miss that there are multiple pages of comments in this thread. That's what the More link at the bottom points to. Or click: https://n…

> Also: don't miss that there are multiple pages of comments in this thread. Is comment pagination still necessary?

I believe there is an explicit goal to remove pagination once the site can handle it. There was a couple days earlier this year where pagination was turned off.

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

#779

Post by pm90 » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 9:11 PM UTC

bhupy wrote: post #772

prions wrote: post #769

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. You'd think that after months of "locally led" covid responses in the US that this naive take…

None of this is unique to the US — the EU is similarly "interconnected", as is Switzerland. Subsidiarity and decentralization aren't new ideas, and are generally the prescribed solution to unlock governance in a large & heterogenous polity. > from roads The Interstate Highway System, while technically impressive, essentially entrenched the US as a car-centric society from the top-down. > public health The vast majori…

> The Interstate Highway System, while technically impressive, essentially entrenched the US as a car-centric society from the top-down.

Its been effective. It achieve the goals it set out to do. We discovered that focusing on highways and cars was ultimately not very good. But it achieved the goal it set out to do, so I don't get what your point is.

> The vast majority of our healthcare problems can be attributed to the fact that it's tied to employment, which was caused by Federal policies.

This is an absurd argument. What are you even trying to convey? That the Federal Government should take charge of providing healthcare? OK then.

Medicare/Medicaid/ACA are all Federal policies and provide healthcare to millions who wouldn't get that otherwise.

> DARPA falls under "organize national defense". The EU also has EU-level agencies that work on space research (ESA). Advanced research can also be organized among the States in a CERN-like model.

Again not sure what your point is. EU has Federal agencies too, yeah, so what?

> Insofar as "localities" are ill-suited to governing, the States are a sufficient mechanism for top-down control.

Hard disagree. While States have been great for introducing and experimenting with new ideas, spreading those ideas across the country requires Federal Investment and oversight. Obamacare traces its origins to Romneycare in Mass, but it required Federal dollars to bring it to the rest of the country.

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

#780

Post by nullc » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 9:13 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…

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