A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company • Hacker News Board

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

#341

Post by Rebelgecko » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 9:49 PM UTC

int_19h wrote: post #331

yeetawayhn wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everything is political, then nothing is.

One's preferred flavor of ice cream is apolitical. But anything that involves more than one person, and actual or potential conflicts between people, is political. Status quo, as a whole, is political. And that constitutes a much larger part of our lives than is traditionally acknowledged. Which is itself, also, a political matter, because designating a subset of actual politics as "officially politics", and then mar…

I don't think your comment is entirely true. For example I think a lot of purchases of the Bernie Sanders flavored ice cream from Ben & Jerry's had nothing to do with the actual taste of the ice cream.

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

#342

Post by LockAndLol » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 9:50 PM UTC

mpweiher wrote: post #233

jojo2333 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

same. I don't even think the severance is necessary. Just ask people who are interested in politics in the workplace to leave.

Just as a reference point: Germany is well-known for its very strong employee protection. However, activism at work is something you can actually legally lose your job over. That doesn't mean you can't express your political opinions, freedom of expression is protected, but no agitation/activism.

And that's exactly how it should be. It's a workplace, not a forum. Unless your job is political activism, it has no place at work.

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

#343

Post by Rebelgecko » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 9:51 PM UTC

Pils wrote: post #333

throwaway894345 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> one inconsistency is that Coinbase is based in SF That's not an inconsistency. > Would you consider "sorry, I didn't get a lot of sleep due to police sound grenades going off until 3am" a political statement? No, of course not.

> > Would you consider "sorry, I didn't get a lot of sleep due to police sound grenades going off until 3am" a political statement? > No, of course not. Awesome. So it follows that you would have no issue then with a coworker stating: "Police activity in SF has negatively impacted my ability to do work". Congratulations, you have a significantly broader definition of acceptable workplace speech than Coinbase.

Can you elaborate on how that's an unacceptable thing to say at coinbase?

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

#344

Post by hnracer » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 9:52 PM UTC

mtalantikite wrote: post #235

thedevil wrote: post #11

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.

“I personally am afraid to associate myself too publicly with a political stance, lest I be wrong and/or the environment changes.” I can understand this fear, but generally if you choose a stance based on compassion for all beings you’ll be in the right in the long run. This particular issue was sparked by Coinbase not taking a stance on Black Lives Matter, which they are wrong about. Standing for dismantling racism…

Standing for dismantling racism is always correct, but that's distinct from explicitly stating support for the Black Lives Matter political organization.

If you don't agree with some of their stated objectives, tactics, leadership, it should be OK to refuse to offer support, and that doesn't automatically imply a tacit support of racism, and it doesn't automatically imply resistance to lower-case black lives matter.

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

#345

Post by chipotle_coyote » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 9:55 PM UTC

disposekinetics wrote: post #193

yokaze wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To me, "everything is political" is a bumper sticker version of the assertion that what is and isn't "political" in the sense of "political statement" is often way more subjective than we sometimes recognize it is.

If a coworker talks about his husband, is that a political statement? To some people, absolutely, right?

How about someone mentioning a concert that they've gone to, for an artist that's outspokenly political one way or another? Just a concert, right?

What about talking about a great movie or TV show, if those are, I don't know, "Sorry to Bother You" or "Lovecraft Country"?

Can you mention that you went to a gun show, or a shooting range?

Can you recommend a Jordan Peterson book?

Can you put an NRA logo on your car?

What about a BLM logo?

What about on your T-shirt?

If a coworker goes through a gender transition, how does that get handled in a way that everyone, across the board, considers apolitical? Good luck with that: the very act of transitioning is, to a significant portion of the population, itself political.

So, I mean, sure, not literally everything is political, but if you give the statement a bit more of a generous reading than "Come on, are you saying ice cream is political? Harrumph!", you can see the point being made.

(Also, re: ice cream: what about Ben & Jerry's?)

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

#346

Post by vkou » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 9:59 PM UTC

knorker wrote: post #282

yokaze wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Only in a world where words have no meaning.

Politics is the process of determining the allocation and distribution of scarce resources, status, and power.

Unless you are living in a post-scarcity, post-status, post-power anarchist society, populated entirely by The New Soviet Man (or some other fictional relative thereof), everything that's meaningful is, indeed, political.

You can draw a contrast between personal politics and organizational politics. An organization can be explicit that it engages in organizational politics, but bars personal politics. That is what Coinbase is currently doing[1]. That's the CEO's, and the board's prerogative.

[1] It does, however, falsely claim that its organizational political activity is somehow apolitical. It's not.

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

#347

Post by shuckles » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 9:59 PM UTC

anoncareer0212 wrote: post #57

shuckles wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe COBRA is available for up to 36 months after your employment ends in California by law. As a result, I don’t know how to read “6 months COBRA” from the excerpt of the severance email besides “we will pay 6 months of employer premiums.”

COBRA means employees paying the employer premium, by guaranteeing COBRA, an employer is saying "We won't stop paying the health insurance company for _everybody else's insurance_, so you'll still have someone to pay" - it's a great PR jiu jitsu move, I didn't realize until this thread how confusing it is - I'm only familiar with it because sadly I had to sunset a company in California.

So are you saying the Coinbase CEO simply said something to the effect of “we will maintain our insurance plans for 6 months company-wide”? That seems disingenuous.

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

#348

Post by freeone3000 » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 10:03 PM UTC

f69281c wrote: post #221

ketzo wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...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.

To me this take rolls into the general "silence is violence" or "either you're with us or against us" refrain that has become background noise to me. It reads the same as someone telling me I'm enabling fascism by not posting a black square on instagram or whatever. I'm nearing the point of being aggressively dismissive towards this kind of attitude, because a lot of it doesn't even seem to be laid out in good faith.…

We control the information flow for billions. How the hell could that NOT be political?

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

#349

Post by novok » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 10:08 PM UTC

yokaze wrote: post #188

redm wrote: 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…

You only have so much time, money, energy and attention, and they are choosing that they do not want to actively spend that energy on active activism as a company outside of their company mission.

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

#350

Post by hnracer » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 10:08 PM UTC

Pfhreak wrote: post #145

krzyk wrote: post #123

Is "apolitical" stance a bad thing? Isn't it the default, safe? I lived in country where you had to be "political" to be in management, it didn't end up well (East Europe, Soviet Union), I always (naively?) thought that West countries were wiser. So I prefer companies to not mess with politics.

"Apolitical" is the default. It's another way of saying, "The way things are is fine". The problem is that this is, in itself, a political stance. An example could be climate change. If Coinbase is doing nothing to make energy more green (even if that's just writing amicus briefs or blog posts), then they are effectively saying, "The way things are is fine."

Having an apolitical workplace is not the same as that workplace saying that all things are fine. It just means that you keep discussion of political topics that are orthogonal to the mission of the company out of the workplace. A company is optimized around its mission and the usual hot button political issues can only serve to be a distraction that saps productivity and effectiveness.