A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

> Having 5% of your workforce quit over nothing more than messaging is a catastrophic failure in people management.

> I think the CEO’s refusal to take a stance on whether Black Lives Matter is a stance in itself. It’s hard not to assume that he doesn’t agree with the organization or the statement, even if that’s not the case.

I think you're right about the second part, but I disagree that it's "nothing more than messaging." Surely it must not be about "focusing on Coinbase's mission" but rather that the Coinbase leadership feels that the Black Lives Matter issue simply is not important enough to take a stance on and thus potentially alienate some people. I strongly suspect that Coinbase would take a stance if they deemed the issue to be important enough. Would Coinbase take a stance if there was a current prominent debate over whether Black people should be allowed to vote? Or is that not related closely enough to their mission? What if the prominent debate was over whether Black people should be allowed to have bank accounts, or purchase cryptocurrencies?

I feel like this confirms (although this could be confirmation bias, and would literally be a textbook case) my belief that this is indeed a tiny percentage of people at most tech companies that are really into social justice activism, and they are very, very noisy and disruptive.

My suspicion is that the percentage of folks who are into this is higher at companies like Google, who have absurdly overly bureaucratic hiring pipelines that weed out free thinkers in favor of academic elites who are strong conformists. Strong conformists from academia are the ones I see gravitating most to this form of activism. Add to that the fact that your typical Google engineer is massively overqualified for the actual work that they do on a daily basis (working on a cog in a gear in a giant system) and you get a lot of anxious, bored people trying to erase their guilt over being radically overpaid.

Another group of folks I've witnessed being into social justice activism (at an extreme level) are borderline Aspergers folks I've worked with who, on a good day, have a hard time navigating human relationships of any kind. I think the intersectional, hierarchal nature of these beliefs brings a Dungeons and Dragons, RPG like sense of order to humans that is comforting to them. The fact that it's mostly over-simplified and false escapes them.

Basically, Coinbase probably got rid of a lot of unproductive personnel and won't have to deal with this anymore.

I’m not sure that I would consider BLM to be that centralized anymore. It has far outgrown the opinions of its initial founders. The vast majority of people who identify with the movement are in no way Marxist or anti-capitalist. They’re just people who are tired of seeing different rules for different races.

From Wikipedia:

> The phrase "Black Lives Matter" can refer to a Twitter hashtag, a slogan, a social movement, a political action committee,[18] or a loose confederation of groups advocating for racial justice. As a movement, Black Lives Matter is grassroots and decentralized, and leaders have emphasized the importance of local organizing over national leadership

Again, as a company it’s not even hard to take a not-tone-deaf stance on the issue while avoiding directly supporting the original organization. It’s not hard to reassure your Black colleagues that you recognize their struggle and that you support them.

When you as a company say “we refuse to discuss this, you are forbidden from discussing this,” it’s inhuman and tone deaf.

Somewhat unrelated, but on the topic of severance: Back before I broke into the software field, when I was working a retail job, I was working for company that had an unwritten policy that they didn't hire any fulltime employees, all new hired were part time. There were, however a number of "grandfathered" full time employees who had been there quite a while. The company ended up trying to merge with two other companies and after that, decided that they would give remaining full-time employees a choice: be moved to part time employment, or take a serverance check and leave. To little suprise, a good many took option 2.

> What happened to the rule against politics and religion in polite society?

What rule? That's only ever been the case in idealized tv 'society', and mostly-homogenous comparatively rich/affluent folk who can afford not to give a shit about politics.