“About one-third of Basecamp employees accepted buyouts today” • Hacker News Board

Re: “About one-third of Basecamp employees accepted buyouts today”

#231

Post by fortran77 » Fri, Apr 30, 2021, 9:59 PM UTC

John Warnock once said at an Adobe company meeting "when an employee leaves a company it's like taking your hand out of a bucket of water -- it doesn't leave a hole."

This was in response to a similarly contentious issue -- moving from Mountain View to San Jose. People said they were going to quit. John Warnock said, in effect, "good riddance." And the company started growing very rapidly after that move.

(This doesn't detract from the fact that I think DHH is a fool and often mean-spirited.)

Re: “About one-third of Basecamp employees accepted buyouts today”

#232

Post by nikisweeting » Fri, Apr 30, 2021, 9:59 PM UTC

oezi wrote: post #167

_jal wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any employer that abruptly told me I needed to watch what I said at work would lose me, too. I'm not saying I demand the ability to be rude and awful, or go on political tirades, or anything even vaguely like that. But I spend more time talking to people I work with than any other set of people. Telling me I have to avoid entire categories of normal conversation is itself authoritarian politicization of the workplace…

Well, but isn't there a big difference between talking on the company slack which is archived for eternity or do it in your private buddy group. I think most companies wouldn't be very fond of large scale political discussions (which might easy hurt and offend) on company media. But since everybody is flex time/remote anyway that doesn't stop you from it anyway on different media.

Why not just have dedicated opt-in channels for political discussions at work? Thats how the Recurse Center does it and it seems to work well. If you don't want to engage, you don't have to, and political discussions outside of those channels are actively redirected by everyone with a nice reminder to keep those chats in the dedicated channel.

Re: “About one-third of Basecamp employees accepted buyouts today”

#233

Post by kboom » Fri, Apr 30, 2021, 9:59 PM UTC

didibus wrote: post #170

quadcore wrote: post #144

Can someone explains a bit more what it's all about for outsiders so we can understand whats intellectually interesting in that news?

Seems like there was internal chatter about the fact that some Basecamp employees had kept a list of funny customer names over the years as a joke. And people were discussing how this happened, what they could do to change the internal culture so it doesn't happen again, how it portrays on their internal inclusivity, etc. And it looks like the founders were annoyed by all these discussions about it, so they made a po…

Dont know their products well but customers names should clearly be disclosed on a need-to-know basis - if ever. I believe they did the right move (just my opinion). I just agree. Harassement is a bigger subject we think it is. I think harassment is our population regulation mechanism. I think human-to-human violence is always based on harassement. It's our alpha male fight. It is wired in our brain. It is also suffering. With innovation, we may escape the need for population regulation and then suffering goes down (while suffering is everywhere in the animal kingdom, we make it go down, it's fundamental to life innit). I dont have understood it yet completely but trully, it goes well beyong the concept of a school bully. A list of funny names? Population regulation is at play again, beneath the surface.

Re: “About one-third of Basecamp employees accepted buyouts today”

#234

Post by achenatx » Fri, Apr 30, 2021, 9:59 PM UTC

I run a small politics forum. I was able to get down to one rule that seems to work.

No ad hominem or insults of any groups, people, or policies. People can talk about why they like things or why things will or wont work.

People continually try to work around them and sometimes there are comments that are borderline. Most people are very respectful and libs and conservatives can debate.

An example of trying to bypass is someone calling trump a Nazi. this is obviously meant as an insult. The person claimed it was a statement of fact. Trump has never identified as a nazi and therefore it isnt a statement of fact but is simply an opinion meant as an insult.

Once the insults were removed the group functioned well.

Re: “About one-third of Basecamp employees accepted buyouts today”

#235

Post by themolecularman » Fri, Apr 30, 2021, 9:59 PM UTC

bachmeier wrote: post #185

mfer wrote: post #159

Another way to look at this is... job openings are coming to Basecamp and people know the culture is a no politics at work place. I bet a lot of people will sign up for that. Enough to fill the openings.

There'll likely be a big pool of applicants that want to work there because of this policy.

Yea I considered looking into Coinbase when they announced a similar policy - but I've got some equity keeping me at my current job. If that weren't the case I may jump ship.

Re: “About one-third of Basecamp employees accepted buyouts today”

#236

Post by JamesBarney » Fri, Apr 30, 2021, 10:00 PM UTC

grumblestumble wrote: post #89

A lot of the conversation from the "no politics at work" crowd here is centered around "these folks were wasting company time and losing productivity protesting this". That entirely misses the point. The loss of productivity around this issue is entirely on the leadership team. They let this fester - they were complicit in allowing this dumb-ass list to be circulated around the company for years, and when it became a…

> they refused to take any action on it

Is this true? My understanding is they said this was unacceptable and apologized for not stopping their employees from disseminating this list earlier. I guess people wanted a stronger disciplinary response to people who contributed the list and they refused?

Re: “About one-third of Basecamp employees accepted buyouts today”

#237

Post by PragmaticPulp » Fri, Apr 30, 2021, 10:00 PM UTC

ipaddr wrote: post #152

Interestingly the employees who left have the best career prospects. Entire iOS team, head of marketing and head of product team. The 6 months free money is hard for anyone entering a strong job market to pass up. A lot of comments seem to think 1/3 left because of the no politics policy. 1 / 3 left because it would increase their wealth or give them the summer covid took away last year. How many people would leave y…

> The 6 months free money is hard for anyone entering a strong job market to pass up.

Surely some of the employees left for ideological reasons, but 6 months of salary just for changing jobs is a difficult incentive to ignore.

Anyone who was considering changing jobs would have a hard time saying no to 6 months of free pay. The publicity of this situation also makes them attractive targets for other companies looking to hire out of the situation.

Re: “About one-third of Basecamp employees accepted buyouts today”

#238

Post by jshen » Fri, Apr 30, 2021, 10:00 PM UTC

deanCommie wrote: post #120

mark_l_watson wrote: post #105

I have a different take on this, different than most comments here: I think that the founders/owners knew what they were doing based on reading their book and lightly following them. I have never been a customer. I know that I am just guessing, but they might have been making the lifestyle decision that they wanted a smaller and more focused company that was more joyful to manage/run. Also, I have some sympathy for a…

> no one should be allowed to say or do anything at work that makes anyone uncomfortable in a personal way; Agreed. But frequently calling that out IS what is deemed "political" by the person who was "just expressing an opinion", and "i just have a different ideology from you" > ; no one should really care much about other peoples’ politics. Some people's politics is other people's human rights. Would you want to wor…

I think eating a lot of red meat is one of the greatest moral problems in our society today from climate change, factory farming, and habitat destruction.

I don’t think I should be haranguing people at work about it.

Re: “About one-third of Basecamp employees accepted buyouts today”

#239

Post by pantulis » Fri, Apr 30, 2021, 10:00 PM UTC

pantulis wrote: post #175

ipaddr wrote: post #152

Interestingly the employees who left have the best career prospects. Entire iOS team, head of marketing and head of product team. The 6 months free money is hard for anyone entering a strong job market to pass up. A lot of comments seem to think 1/3 left because of the no politics policy. 1 / 3 left because it would increase their wealth or give them the summer covid took away last year. How many people would leave y…

Some of them are also world-class Ruby developers. They seem to be mostly north americans (i could be wrong).

I should have written: all of them are world-class developers, otherwise they would not be having a job there.

Re: “About one-third of Basecamp employees accepted buyouts today”

#240

Post by 40acres » Fri, Apr 30, 2021, 10:01 PM UTC

From what I understood this wasn't a "we want to talk about Trump and BLM all day" situation but a "owners/leaders refuse to reckon with a toxic aspect of our internal culture".

At some point the two mixed, the "pyramid of hate" is definitely out of the SJW playbook and probably went a bit too far for some people's taste. But shame on the leaders who for years have written books and blogs about how awesome their culture is to have 1/3rd of your workforce (so far) leave because of that aforementioned culture.