Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

blog.coinbase.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 774 posts

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

#371

Post by thundergolfer »

sequoia wrote: post #173
Pfhreak wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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."

> "Apolitical" is ... another way of saying, "The way things are is fine". I disagree strongly & think you're dead wrong here. Apolitical in the workplace is saying "we come to work to align on & collaborate in working towards shared goals and those goals are what we should be focused on at work. People who share this goal (coinbase, make money, promote crypto whatever) may vote R, D, or not vote at all. We can all s…

The work you do together is political. It of course isn’t necessarily directly engaged with USA national politics, but it’s directly engaged in politics.

Politics is a very broad and encompassing concept. It isn’t synonymous with some nation’s representative political system.

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

#372

Post by gnicholas »

titanomachy wrote: post #338
TedShiller wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I think there are only two options for a company: 1) don't allow any activism in the company 2) allow ALL types of activism in the company Right now, it seems most companies only allow liberal activism but not conservative activism. This is a recipe for problems because it's arbitrary and not democratic.

Do companies have an obligation to be democratic? Are democratic companies common? Protected classes aside, if I start a company I can choose to hire or exclude whomever I choose. I could start a company that only hires registered Republicans, or only people who can't stand the taste of bananas. If this turns out to be a bad business decision (which it probably is), the market will punish me and I'll eventually lose…

> I could start a company that only hires registered Republicans

This might be illegal in California, which considers political activity to be a protected class.

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

#373

Post by sneak »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #46

I am beyond sick of political activists in the workplace, so I hope this trend catches on.

It’s a bummer that Coinbase’s ploy to intentionally conflate not supporting the Black Lives Matter movement (that is, a clear implicit endorsement of the status quo) with generalized left/right-political-activism-at-work seems to have worked, at least for a lot of people who aren’t paying attention.

This isn’t about office politics, or political activism at work. This is about Coinbase making an explicit vote for the status quo of American racism, and trying to deflect the heat they’re taking for that by confusing people into thinking that this is about standard political discussion.

It makes me really angry that they would do this.

It makes me really sad that it worked.

I guess with that much money you can hire really good PR people to shape the narrative into exactly what you want, and dupe tons of people who are rightfully tired of the american culture war into thinking that this has anything to do with that.

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

#374

Post by throwaway894345 »

kelnos wrote: post #312
dingaling wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> work are themselves political decisions But those political decisions are ones relevant to the mission of the company. Coinbase probably shouldn't be involved in politics around police reform, fracking, climate change or the Second Amendment because they are orthogonal to its mission. Insert other topics as you see fit. And hence its employees should leave their opinions of such matters at the door. Coinbase should…

I'm sympathetic to this argument because on the face of it, it seems correct and should be the way we ideally do things. But many things in the world that should not be politicized are, in fact, politicized. Perhaps Coinbase wants to hire a more diverse bunch of people, and starts an internal initiative to do so. Perhaps they do this not out of any political motivation, but because they genuinely believe (as they sho…

I'm not coinbase, so I can only speculate as to their meaning. While it's possible to define "political" so abstractly that it becomes all-encompassing, it's pretty clear to me that they probably mean to prohibit political debates that are unrelated (or only very tenuously related) to their core mission.

"We should hire a more diverse workforce because diversity improves our collective judgment, thereby furthering our mission" is on its face a fine subject for discussion provided you're evaluating the claim on its merits and not sneaking in overtly political implications like "we have a moral responsibility to hire diverse candidates". One could envision a fruitful, dispassionate discussion about how much return on investment the company could expect from a diversity initiative, how that ROI stacks up against other opportunities, how to measure the ROI and make sure the initiative is meeting expectations, whether or not it runs afoul of anti-discrimination law, what kind of diversity (race, gender, viewpoint, etc) is most likely to yield the highest ROI, etc.

Of course, it's prudent to stay away from these kinds of charged topics altogether because it's very likely that you have employees that will take this as an opportunity to pollute a potentially productive conversation with their overtly political opinions.

That some things are easily abused by bad-faith employees doesn't mean that we should let bad faith employees have free reign.

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

#378

Post by mattparcens »

thundergolfer wrote: post #362
nunja wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too. I can't see why staying in my comfort zone is regarded as political. One solution is to just get comfy. No politics involved, just plain survivalism, nothing wrong.

It’s political because a number of hugely important issues call us all to action (child poverty, climate change, homelessness) and those issues are and will continue to put vulnerable people in danger of death and suffering. Staying in your comfort zone is likely an expression of indifference to them as vanishingly few people are comfortable when tackling these problems. You might adopt a political position that your…

So who gets to decide which issues to get involved in? Does everyone have to get involved in every issue?

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

#379

Post by advisedwang »

vonmoltke wrote: post #135
heavyset_go wrote: post #25

It's interesting to hear Coinbase management insist that they're apolitical when the company makes significant political contributions itself[1]. [1] https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/?...

Something is off about those listings. The majority of the transactions went to "Brian Forde for Congress" and have the memos like " .03533216 BITCOINS SOLD VIA COINBASE - PURCHASER UNKNOWN". I don't think these are contributions by Coinbase, but Bitcoin contributions that went through Coinbase. There is probably some byzantine election funding rule that allowed or forced these recipients to list Coinbase as the"sour…

There's not supposed to be "anonymous" donations, that's the entire point of reporting requirements. If Coinbase is hiding political donors, that's gotta be against election law?

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

#380

Post by coffeemaniac »

rednerrus wrote: post #330

My company is becoming increasingly political and it's terrible. I'd gladly go work at a company where I didn't have to engage with endless political activism. If I want to hear everyone's opinions on everything, I'd find their facebook page or the HN usernames and follow them.

Yeah, but it would probably also be pretty terrible to work next to people you're pretty sure are okay with (say) police murdering people of your skin color. In America, this is the default position, as evidenced by both major political parties largely supporting police despite this behavior. So in order to say "we aren't okay with that opinion in this workplace" and to have a pretty good idea your coworkers don't want you dead, you have to say it -- it isn't assumed.
Post reply on HN