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

#781

Post by bernie_simon » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 9:22 PM UTC

claudeganon wrote: post #696

simias wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There was all kinds of trade union opposition to the Vietnam War, which is really no different from tech workers protesting against collaboration with the military and other violent state forces. Many of the leading figures in the Civil Rights Movement also came from labor organizing backgrounds, and while unions like the AFL-CIO have mixed records, support from organized labor was crucial to it success. The cleavage…

I'm old enough to remember the Vietnam War and the AFL-CIO of the day was staunchly anti-communist and pro-war. Most of the opposition to the war before Nixon became president came from the pacifist left and student led organizations like the SDS.

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

#782

Post by notsureaboutpg » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 9:35 PM UTC

sushisource wrote: post #771

cactus2093 wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's tough to say that though. It's not like before Mr. Floyd's murder this employee was foisting things upon everyone else.

Everyone's morals are the driving force in their life. Whatever you want to say, this much is generally true. If your morals come into conflict with something new your company is doing, you either speak up (and face consequences) or stay silent (and fail in upholding morality).

That's not an easy choice. What would we do if we worked at IBM in the 1930s and 1940s for example?

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

#783

Post by notsureaboutpg » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 9:39 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???

As if purging was offering a generous severance package to employees who voluntarily quit...

As if all Black/Brown people believe that Coinbase's stance here is wrong...

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

#784

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 9:45 PM UTC

[deleted]

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

#785

Post by a1369209993 » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 9:48 PM UTC

chii wrote: post #140

wwright wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I (and many others) are of the opinion that you can’t truly be apolitical; claiming to be so is its own form of politics (and generally one that supports the status quo). Politics is ultimately about how we engage and collaborate with each other as a society, not just which “party” you like. The very act of being a company is very relative to the laws and regulations your country has, which are of course determined b…

> you can’t truly be apolitical; that's one of those "you're either with us or against us" type of deal - which is not the right way to deal with anything imho. You _can_ be apolitical - as in, you do not let your political views affect what you do. You keep your political views private. You do not try to change anyone else's political views as part of your job.

> that's one of those "you're either with us or against us" type of deal

And as the saying goes, if I'm either with you or against you, then I'm against you. It doesn't matter what your object-level goals or values are, because you have clearly stated that you care more about using those goals as a pretence to attack anyone who isn't willing to subordinate themselves to your particular movement than about actually achieving said object-level goals.

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

#786

Post by T-hawk » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 9:49 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…

It's not so much about locality - it's about competition. Locality is just the means to that.

Everyone wins when competitors try different things and find out what's efficient and what works well and what doesn't. Marijuana legalization and gay marriage started as experiments by states and localities, which could find and set the example to be adopted federally.

Everyone loses when an entrenched monopoly (here the federal government) can forcibly impose one way of doing things with no room for deviation.

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

#787

Post by smsm42 » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 9:56 PM UTC

hnmullany wrote: post #741

smsm42 wrote: post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Union's popularity has been falling for years and years: https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/480481-unions-decline-ag... and for a good reason - as soon as you don't force people to join, turns out not everybody wants to.

And the polarization of unions is far from a forced move. I do not think Republicans made this happen: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/democratic-socialists-am...

It's more like that centralized top-down economy is much more comfortable for the union leadership than chaotic horizontal competitive economy. It's much easier to enforce certain policy by the power of the government than negotiate it privately with each employer. That makes unions a natural ally of socialists. And of course there's nothing like government subsidies and regulations - which can be exchanged for votes and donations - to hide the inefficiencies of inflexible unionized setups and deflect the competitive threats from more agile and enterprising newcomers. Again, here the unions are the natural allies of centralized regulatory state. And the effects of this are pretty obvious: https://nypost.com/2018/08/25/why-nyc-is-priciest-city-in-th... https://www.nj.com/news/2018/06/money_for_nothing_working_th...

That's not Republican party's fault.

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

#788

Post by Traster » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 9:57 PM UTC

T-hawk wrote: post #786

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…

It's not so much about locality - it's about competition . Locality is just the means to that. Everyone wins when competitors try different things and find out what's efficient and what works well and what doesn't. Marijuana legalization and gay marriage started as experiments by states and localities, which could find and set the example to be adopted federally. Everyone loses when an entrenched monopoly (here the f…

Everyone doesn't win when competing localities of government try different things. What actually happens is Amazon shops around for enormous public subsidies for its HQ, bankrupting local and state govnerments. We're in a world of globalised companies and expecting some backwater county in Arkansas to negotiate with Huawei is just absurd.

For the same reason that Google tells Congress 'You need to let us run free to fight those Chinese giants', the US needs federal level regulation to play on the same level as those companies, if it had the guts.

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

#789

Post by sk5t » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 9:59 PM UTC

drak0n1c wrote: post #564

sk5t wrote: post #535

Never forget that calls that protests and political expressions aren't happening "in the right venue" or "in the right way" only help one side. Take for example NFL management telling the players not to kneel in solidarity. That is the players' most effective (and frankly, peaceful, and not particularly disruptive) way to send a message. But if you don't agree with their message, moving to shift it to a less visible…

That's the point. Why should a private business like Coinbase accommodate far-left ideologues against capitalism and its very existence? That seems incongruous.

Do you then agree that Coinbase is forcing a certain set of politics on its employees?

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

#790

Post by smsm42 » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 9:59 PM UTC

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 don't think people earning 5x-6x median wage, not counting stock incentives, are what Marx mean when he wrote about proletariat. Outside of Hollywood stars and top sportsmen, one would struggle to find a less oppressed category of workers.