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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

#921

Post by thoughtstheseus »

thu2111 wrote: post #908
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, the vast majority of employees don’t want their workplace to become a political battleground. Even those who occasionally discuss politics at work and are mature enough to behave like adults about it. It’s tempting to think of this in terms of Democrats vs Republicans or right vs left, but that’s not really the domain of the most problematic employees. The most problematic employees are the ones who…

Paying to remove these people from a company makes a lot of sense I think most business owners would say this is not at all sensible. If someone is a troublemaker you don't normally pay them to leave. You fire them. Brian is being very generous here, almost inexplicably so except for the fact that they're based in the Bay Area. Most CEOs would tackle it in two phases: 1. Tell people they may not attempt to bring soci…

Paying people seems easier for a well funded company. If you fire people they get upset, sue, and create additional headaches. I’m sure someone crunched the numbers and paying people to leave made more sense.

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

#923

Post by helen___keller »

solidasparagus wrote: post #301
helen___keller wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My 2c: * Companies, like the rest of the world, are now hyperconnected. We have slack and email and so on. This makes it a lot easier for similar interests to connect across a massive organization, which is a boon for special interest groups, like anime, or magic the gathering. Or politics. * Companies muscle in on workers' identity. Workers respond to work over email/slack during their off hours. Workers pop open th…

> You are looking to hire a young, 25 year old computer scientist living in a big blue city who graduated from PresigiousUniversity. What politics do you think this person likely subscribes to? I think people too readily assume that these people are blue, but you have to remember that academia (and tech in general) tends to have strong social pressure to either be blue or hide your political beliefs. There is likely…

I don't assume anything about any particular person, but I was under the impression that, statistically speaking, someone with these demographics is much more likely to lean liberal. Perhaps I'm wrong about this.

> There is likely a very large contingent of closet republicans.

Whether the minority is outspoken or not, my point is just that it's a minority.

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

#924

Post by colejohnson66 »

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…

If the employee was finding ways to get upset at everything, it’s not unbelievable that they’d find a way to get upset about being given a bonus with their severance. The first thing to pop in my mind is: “they’re paying me because they don’t care and want me to shut up!” Not saying that they would’ve, but I could see it happening based on how you’ve described it.

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

#925

Post by colejohnson66 »

nullc wrote: post #780
Alex3917 wrote: post #466

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. 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…

Marin County California has banned billboards since 1935.

Individual counties can ban billboards, such as Marin County, but they’re not banned state wide AFAIK.

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

#926

Post by aixi »

young_unixer wrote: post #747
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.

Yep. I didn't know who she was before this twitter thread, so the impression it gave off was a typical teenager trying to burn someone.

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

#927

Post by kls »

umeshunni wrote: post #518
tlogan wrote: post #211

We live in a different world now. Today, apolitical pretty much means “I’m white. And probably male. But definitely white.”

As a non-white immigrant, I think it's mostly the other way. Most of us don't care as much for the US-style identity politics, but somehow it's all the white liberal upper middle class types who are always political and woke.

Malcom X gave a great speech on the dangers of these people and their use and co-opting of black and fringe causes. It's crazy to think that he gave that speech almost 60 years ago, and it sounds like he is talking about modern politics.

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

#929

Post by TheColorYellow »

CarelessExpert wrote: post #456
kkhire wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s there to admire? This is common sense and he should have set these expectations from the start. why are people discussing politics at work?

> why are people discussing politics at work? Probably because the work these companies do is frequently political. Let's be clear: What Coinbase is saying is, we the founders, who set the company's mission, and are doing so with a clear political view (rooted in libertarianism and so forth), are allowed to use the company to further our political ends. But the staff? Sorry, you have no voice. Maybe that's fine. The…

> Let's be clear: What Coinbase is saying is, we the founders, who set the company's mission, and are doing so with a clear political view (rooted in libertarianism and so forth), are allowed to use the company to further our political ends.

One hundred percent this. There is a reason Coinbase is one of the few companies to take a stance like this.

The company's foundational value is literally based on the notion of state-free finance. They have no incentive to do anything to allow their company to be steered into engaging with conventional politics. In fact, they benefit from taking strong stances that maintain the status quo if the status quo furthers their own mission.

So, yeah, Coinbase is indeed very mission oriented.

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

#930

Post by DenisM »

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…

> I suspect your comment isn't really being offered in good faith

Assume good faith https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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