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A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

blog.coinbase.com

191–200 of 774 posts

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#191
post #169

One thought: If you see a resume with Coinbase until October 2020, that's probably someone who prefers political activism in the workplace. That might be seen in a positive or negative light, depending on your stance. I personally am afraid to associate myself too publicly with a political stance, lest I be wrong and/or the environment changes.

Only a very foolish hiring manager would hold it against someone who left Coinbase. Or someone who stayed on. > I personally am afraid to associate myself too publicly with a political stance, lest I be wrong and/or the environment changes. This suggests you speak from a position of privilege. It is easy to implicitly endorse the status quo when it is beneficial to you.

Reddit is here, you seem lost: https://www.reddit.com/

In fact, being able to lavishly throw around internal capital and play with people's careers over their political opinions is the position of privilege. Leveraging multimillion dollar firms to hammer Cathedral dogma into people's heads is privilege.

Not wanted to berate people/be berated/get in political fights writing Selenium for a crypto startup is not privilege.

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#193
post #188
post #82

I feel like this is the start of a rising tide. I think Brian's stance is great, companies have missions, they should focus on those missions. Everything has become so political that your work, which occupies a large portion of your life, should not be divisive.

I see it the other way around. (Almost) everything is political. The mission of the company is not disjoint from the society it is embedded in. Things have become divisive by being able to ignore and blend out the opposing views. By not talking and listening to one another. This is just one more step in that direction. Funnily enough, I think it has been extrapolated by Neal Stephenson in Diamond Age. We will end up…

>(Almost) everything is political.

I'm curious what your definition of political is, because my gut feeling is that (Almost) nothing is political.

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#194
post #152
post #82

I feel like this is the start of a rising tide. I think Brian's stance is great, companies have missions, they should focus on those missions. Everything has become so political that your work, which occupies a large portion of your life, should not be divisive.

> ...your work, which occupies a large portion of your life, should not be divisive. I get that desire, I really do, but I think it's so important to recognize that your work is not apolitical. It doesn't matter what you're building. What you build does not exist in a vacuum, and the decisions you make around politics at work are themselves political decisions.

I see people replying this a lot, and those who do must have missed what Brian said about it this exact thing in his original post.

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#195
It’s unfortunate that CEOs / Founders think it’s appropriate to dictate the culture of the organization vs. learning to nurture the emergent values from within the team.

It’s a sign of limited leadership capacity to attempt to install culture as a top down mandate.

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Coinbase is using their business as a political platform[1]. [1] https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/?...

This is very interesting. The CEO said in his initial letter that Coinbase should only engage in politics that are relevant to their "core mission", but it's kind of interesting to reduce a candidate to "What can this candidate or party do specifically for our business?" and ignore other policies that a candidate or party may seek to enact. Pretending that you're unaware of or completely ambivalent about the conseque…

Companies aren't democracies. When you sign up to work for somebody else, the board and the executives have every right to make these decisions. Upset that you can't lobby for the rights of pink haired people in the office? Go start your own company and put murals featuring oppressed pink-haired people all over the walls. Until then, recognize that companies aren't set up as democracies, because no investor would be dumb enough to throw their money down a toilet where any muppet who can run a QA job or write a few lines of JS has equal input with someone who co-founded the enterprise.

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, if you see a resume with Coinbase through 2020-2021, that person probably prefers the opposite, which may also be seen in a positive or negative light, depending on your stance.

And so the sorting into apolitical and leftist companies can begin! It's probably for the best.

Isn't it interesting that the crowd fighting for liberation & equity are mysteriously up against... the apolitical crowd? When the dichotomy is ethical realism vs. pragmatism, you have to ask yourself who's actually operating like a religion, who's actually a dogmatist in liberator's clothing.

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#198
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it necessarily? Social media has amplified polarization. Is it really the case that everyone must support one or other of the poles?

IMO that's due more to first-past-the-post voting.

That’s another contributing factor, but social media is amplifying the extremes.

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#199
post #112
post #77

Of course, it's impossible to know now, but I wonder how many people would've still left if there was no exit package. It's possible some decided they wanted to work somewhere else and saw a way out.

I don’t know if they still do this, but I recall Zappos having a constant offer on the table to pay you to quit. I bet they didn’t have 5% turnover over some time-deaf email from the CEO. My guess: those 5% got sick of tone-dead all hands meetings/memos and saw their chance to bail out. I wonder what other companies during the Covid recession has 5% voluntary turnover?

It seems much more time-deaf to think that everyone wants to be involved in this highly stressful, chaotic game of identity politics. Some people just want to do their job. Personally, I want to focus on what I'm working on while at work, not have my boss preach their particular views at me. I bet the meetings/memos were not very tone-dead if you were there to work on what the company was doing.

My guess: 1-2% of those people are the loud, annoying group that demands everyone behave how they think they should, and the other 3-4% were people who saw an opportunity for a long paid vacation while they look for another role.

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#200
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It signals that a person did not want to be politically active at their workplace enough to lose/quit their job. I think that says nothing of a persons political views and is just self-preservation or even indifference. Hiring would have to make some very tenuous assumptions to consider that a signal.

Indifference to politics is a political view.

No, it is not. Politics apathy is present across all races, all classes, all genders.

Those who are politically possessed like to claim that “everything is politics” and that “it’s a privilege to not care about politics”, but every Hispanic and Filipino immigrant I’ve known (which is not a negligible number) care about family, hard work, and stability: not politics.

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