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

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

#521

Post by hpcjoe »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #459
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…

I think it would depend on how much I liked my job. My sense is that DHH is just a terrible boss. Note the "changes" [1] are not just "no politics" but also "no more committees" (of any kind at all; that is, no authority or responsibility except individually along line-of-report hieararchy), no more 360 degree reviews (no way to formally give feedback to your boss), and no more bringing up past decisions you disagree…

I left one company without such an incentive. The relationship between management and me had become toxic, and I needed to get out for my own sanity. After leaving, I did get the bonus I was previously due, which wound up being about 1.5 months salary. Didn't know about it before leaving. I was optimizing for sanity. I suspect that those who left Basecamp are performing a similar optimization, and the money helps lower the activation energy required for making that decision.

Short version is that the 6 month salary, even the 3 month salary offer is quite nice. I can understand why so many took the offer up.

Woke environments can, and often are toxic to those not interested in engaging in such discussions. I worked at one of those before, where one had to tread carefully, lest some "colleagues" be triggered into spittle-inflected rants about the president at the time ... thus wasting everyone's time and energy. That was actively frustrating and annoying.

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

#522

Post by FFRefresh »

Kye wrote: post #438
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…

Quite a few who left said the policy was the reason when they posted about leaving on Twitter.

The social incentives are certainly aligned for that to be the case.

A couple scenarios:

1) Employee A leaves Basecamp and says "I'm leaving for the severance package, not the policy change", and actually takes the severance

2) Employee B leaves Basecamp and says "I'm leaving because of the policy change, not the severance", but actually takes the severance package.

Employee B will both get the social virtue points of standing up for something AND collecting on the nice severance package.

Employee A may experience social blowback if they explicitly stated they weren't incensed by the policy change.

I would expect to see more Employee B's than Employee A's publicly.

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

#523

Post by ethnt »

coldtea wrote: post #331

It's sad that the target for those employees' "political disruption" is Basecamp. One of the arguably nicest companies to work in, which treats employees well, has a sane work/life balance and advocates so, pays well, embraces remote work, gives back to open source (RoR, etc.), and has good products, with no shady anti-consumer practices, that people actually like and pay for (as opposed to somewhere where they sell…

Well, you say that it's one of the nicest companies to work in, but clearly not if 1/3 of their employees are willing to leave over a policy decision. Some of the employees that left had been there for over 15 years — it used to be a good place to work, but this made it untenable for them.

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

#524

Post by [deleted] »

jimmaswell wrote: post #370
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…

To me the world's gone crazy where the word "deplorable" is unironically attached to some people making fun of some names. Unprofessional is the furthest I'd take it. Something you get a finger wag for. As a customer why would I even care if someone on the other end thought my name was funny as long as my shipment arrived? This generation truly is absurdly sensitive.

[deleted]

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

#525

Post by dragonwriter »

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…

> Interestingly the employees who left have the best career prospects.

The people who can most afford to not put up with are always those with the best career prospects. If you aren’t certain that you can get a job somewhere else that matches even the newly-worse conditions of your present job within the cushion provided by the offered buyout, then a buyout isn’t attractive.

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

#526

Post by rodgerd »

digitaltrees wrote: post #499
grey-area wrote: post #479

I don't think this is really about making fun of people's names, or holocaust references. It's about power. The managers at basecamp were unhappy that their employees asserted power over them in the workplace, and decided to assert their own power in turn over what they view as their personal fiefdom and retract some of the freedoms they had so graciously granted their workers, because those ungrateful workers actual…

I disagree. It’s about professionalism. Flame wars at work create a hostile environment where quiet voices are silenced. It’s the same reason HN bans political flame wars.

Professionalism like... mocking customers' names? On company time? Using company assets to do so?

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

#527

Post by julianmarq »

Assuming this is true, all this tells me that this is a great time to apply at Basecamp. Not only they promise a politics-free environment—a huge bonus by itself for me—but they're likely to be laxer than usual in their standards, for a while anyhow.

I'll give it a try.

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

#528

Post by secondcoming »

krrrh wrote: post #393
mhneu wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” -Elie Wiesel Choosing to not discuss politics is fine. But if you do that, you’re making a choice: you’re choosing to take the side of those who prefer political decisions to be made by a small elite, without feedback from people like us. You’re choosing not to weigh in.

Comments like this make me worry that a lot of people don’t have lives outside of the office or their work identity. Or maybe people keep their friend groups so tightly curated by ideology these days that the only chance they have to argue about politics is at work?

Possibly true. Back during the election you'd read about people disowning family members. Probably hyperbole, but still insane

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

#529

Post by christophilus »

danjac wrote: post #18

I wouldn't be surprised if this will become a case study in future in how to self-destruct a successful company with a single bad communication, much like Gerald Ratner (although this may be due to long-term grievances we're not aware of).

I’ll take the other side of that bet. You just got rid of a bunch of folks who clearly didn’t want to be there anymore. You also probably put an end to those obnoxious, unproductive political debates that seemed to have been getting more pervasive. After a bit of hiring, your profits are up. Morale is much improved. Productivity is up.

Time will tell which prediction turns out to be the outcome.

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

#530

Post by grey-area »

digitaltrees wrote: post #499
grey-area wrote: post #479

I don't think this is really about making fun of people's names, or holocaust references. It's about power. The managers at basecamp were unhappy that their employees asserted power over them in the workplace, and decided to assert their own power in turn over what they view as their personal fiefdom and retract some of the freedoms they had so graciously granted their workers, because those ungrateful workers actual…

I disagree. It’s about professionalism. Flame wars at work create a hostile environment where quiet voices are silenced. It’s the same reason HN bans political flame wars.

I think most would agree more professionalism would be nice, in fact getting rid of a list of funny customer names (as employees suggested) would be more professional, not less. But again, that's not really what the core disagreement is here - that's not IMO why people are quitting - it sounds like most of the company agrees that is a good idea.

They are quitting because the founders decided to assert their power nakedly and without restraint, to berate employees, shut down their organisation and discussions and attempt to dictate terms to them in a humiliating public way, that is to break the social contract between employee and employed. In doing that they declared that they alone decide the rules, they alone decide what is acceptable to say and what is not.

Every workplace has some subtle set of rules about behaviour but these rules are negotiated between employer and employee, and if as a manager you lose sight of that, you'll lose your best employees as they decide they don't really want you to decide everything about their waking hours without consulting you.

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