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Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

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

#861

Post by tkel »

x3n0ph3n3 wrote: post #743
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.

Look at the race of the people who are unbanked, and tell me then that it isn't relevant

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

#862

Post by matthewdgreen »

x3n0ph3n3 wrote: post #743
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.

The degree to which you are taken seriously when you announce that a thing should happen because you care that “it will make the world better” is tightly related to your credibility as a person who cares about making the world better. When you announce that the only causes you support are those that directly enrich you, you’ll find that people are more skeptical of that claim. Agree or disagree, but it’s why PR has existed for decades (centuries.)

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

#863

Post by edouard-harris »

yourcousinbilly wrote: post #852
edouard-harris wrote: post #817

A few comments have asserted that if an existing company chooses to be apolitical, that may itself be a political act. This sounds clever, but it's not correct. At the highest level, a company is a group of people who get together to 1) set an impactful goal, and then 2) work very hard to achieve it. The first part — the setting of the goal — is the political act. Disagreements at this level are good, and broadly hea…

Political vs apolitical is just semantics. Will companies deciding not to be socially active have a political impact? Yes. Does not engaging in political activities support the status quo? Yes. Is a particular political group more affected by a ban on activism? Yes. And I agree focus on their goal is a great, abstract guiding principle for a company. But the better question is does a socially active company have a mo…

I disagree that political vs apolitical is purely semantics. Given an initial goal, there exists a policy to accomplish it that is truly apolitical. But I do broadly agree with your points on the status quo and dispersion of effect across political groups.

> But the better question is does a socially active company have a more positive impact on the world?

Your total impact tends to be greatest when all your effort is concentrated on a small surface area. An organization that optimizes for two things almost always has less total impact than it would if it optimized for either one alone. To maximize impact, you'd be better served starting a company that's 100% focused on solving the problem you wanted to solve in the first place.

> I doubt the cost of employee annoyance and loss of focus is more than the benefit of enacting minor policy and fund diversion that could positively impact millions.

Generally if you want to impact millions in a real and lasting way, it will cost you more than some minor annoyances and fund diversions — even at a company as big and successful as Coinbase. The tradeoffs here are real, and I strongly suspect Brian is speaking empirically when he talks about destruction of value.

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

#864

Post by matthewdgreen »

anm89 wrote: post #857
paxys wrote: post #723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of course only time will tell. I'm simply predicting that it was a wise move. Also the company is not claiming to be apolitical. They are saying they don't want employees individually engaging in politics while acting on behalf of the company. I'm sure coinbase has plenty of political objectives. On some level business is politics. Especially a crypto company, which makes it even more important not to have your emplo…

The company just extended a massive bonus and exercise extension to any employee that thinks they can get a better job. This is basically an invitation for the most talented people to exit the building ASAP even if they agree strongly with the Founders’ politics. This isn’t genius: it’s a mass layoff.

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

#865

Post by mc32 »

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…

Unfortunately what often happens is orgs take on a life of their own. They won't be happy with "mission accomplished, let's disband now" Nope, they will redefine what they are supposed to do in order to keep giving the members either purpose or salaries.

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

#866

Post by jacobwilliamroy »

I've always seen these attempts at "being apolitical" to be roundabout ways of discriminating against people who have left-leaning political beliefs. Despite claiming to be apolitical and neutral these kinds of places always seem to cater more to conservatives, neoliberals and white supremacists.

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

#867

Post by matthewdgreen »

ryandrake wrote: post #586
kleinsch wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked for companies on the east coast, then moved to SF and now work at a big tech company. The companies I worked for on the east coast were mostly B2B, so we were focused on making a good product for businesses so they’d pay us more money. Big tech companies recruited for a long time with the pitch that we’re changing the world. That has brought in a bunch of employees who joined bc they want their employment to…

I've worked on the east coast for the early half of my career, and no company has ever mentioned "making a positive change in the world" as a pitch for the job. I was hired to fix bugs and connect two API layers to each other so that a set top box could ship or so we could release the next version of a display driver. There was plenty of political diversity in the office: people from all across the political spectrum…

I also worked for an east coast company like that for several years, and I went to grad school because I couldn’t take it anymore. This wasn’t because of the politics, it was more because life should be better than plugging together two API layers so that a display driver can ship.

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

#868

Post by brippalcharrid »

ojnabieoot wrote: post #588
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 suspect your comment isn't really being offered in good faith, but can you name a specific example of a company where a coworker did one of these things: > leak documents, raise alarms about operations they don't understand, and generally draw the company into litigation and it was actually a case of misguided political activism rather than legitimate whistleblowing? I suppose maybe in slaughterhouses or animal tes…

Companies that are in industries which generally attract the attention of regulators because they're doing something new, exciting and potentially disruptive won't want to create unnecessary scope for controversy that will lead to a regulator feeling the need to clamp down on them (this shouldn't happen if the controversy is unrelated to the regulated activities, but people are irrational, and it does). Conversely, an activist employee will know that they will have a far more effective platform to spread their message if they do it in an environment that has more regulatory exposure, and as a result greater potential for media coverage.

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

#869

Post by matthewdgreen »

jiofih wrote: post #12

This must feel harsh for those on the receiving end, but is the right thing to do. It is not effective to try and turn every company into a rights activism group just because it is a group of people. This may be a sign that it’s become increasingly hard to organize or take part in such activism outside of work. What happened?

Why would it feel harsh? He’s giving the most employable people in the company a huge bonus to leave.
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