681–690 of 1001 posts
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When I see a Jehovah’s Witness coming up to my door, I pretend to not be home. I’d really hate to be forced to have that same feeling at work, but be unable to escape it. If you can’t do your job without evangelizing your coworkers in some form or fashion, maybe you should reconsider your career choices.
Please don't equate human rights activism to a religious movement.
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.
Why would I want to talk about politics at work that don’t affect my job and what would it change? Why would I bring up BLM and how it relates to the justice system at work if my company can’t do anything about it? On the other hand, I would be more than happy to discuss having recruitment drives at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, expanding the hiring pipeline, equal pay at my company for equal work, ex…
My understanding of their new policy is that it bans everything you said you’d be happy to discuss FWIW. All of that sounds like political/societal discussion.
I've read everything DHH and Jason Fried have posted in the last few days, and my impression that politics directly related to the company and products are fair game for discussion. It seemed like DHH and Fried were forbidding people from connecting those discussions to larger social movements.
DHH was appreciative that people raised the issue of the Funny Names List, but he objected to people connecting it to the Atlanta shootings or genocide:
>I was dismayed to see the argument advanced in text and graphics on [Employee 1’s] post that this list should be considered part of a regime that eventually could lead to genocide. That's just not an appropriate or proportionate comparison to draw.
>Out of the 78 names listed on the last version we were able to recover, just 6 names appear to be Asian. So connecting this to the shootings in Atlanta, because the Asian victims of that atrocity had their names misspelled in news reports, is exactly the kind of linkage I'd like us to avoid when we analyze our mistakes together at work.
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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…
> My sense is that DHH is just a terrible boss. Interesting. I've read everything posted officially about this by the two founders as it unfolded and I've been super impressed by how well-considered these new policies are. As someone with several decades of experience as an employee, manager and then founder in both large and smaller orgs, I felt these changes were in the best interests of all stakeholders. With the…
However:
* I don't believe any enlightened leadership posts publicly about wide-spread and company affected policy changes before informing and/or discussing with your staff. That's disrespectful to the people you serve.
* no enlightened leadership leads to a situation where 1/3 of your staff leaves on contentious terms. If that leadership was that enlightened, they either wouldn't be leaving or would never have been hired. It's indicative of leadership problems, cultural problems, and possibly a hiring problem.
* I don't believe at all that enlightened leadership discards its values the moment that they become difficult to uphold.
* If the new policies weren't in reaction to the leader being called to be accountable to the people he served and the mission he told them they were on, I'd probably be more agreeable to your point. In a vaccuum a safe place for people of all politica and creeds (short of outright hate) to work together is what you want. What I don't want is an unsafe space where no one feels they can question the leadership or hold the company to its values.
That being said, I totally respect your coming at this from a different angle and I agree that there's certainly more than one way to look at this (as the reactions in this thread indicate).
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…
It’s, quite ironically, the height of privilege to be able to engage in distracting culture wars rather than working, be able to throw shade at your employers on Twitter and then leave with 6 months severance.
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I've noticed a lot of rather wishful thinking here and on Twitter along the lines of that the people who left are all woke layabouts or whatever and that this is some genius management move. No explanation of how to reconcile these ideas with the fact that so many of these people who left were in leadership positions.
I dunno. I could find a job in a few days or weeks. But, finding a job I want to do for many years probably takes a significant portion of that 6 month period. Now, if I was already half-way out the door? Or also felt strongly about the no-politics stuff? You bet I'm taking the money and not looking back.
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'm not saying such silencing doesn't have benefits, but ensuring people aren't silenced isn't a benefit of silencing people. Bombing for peace generally doesn't result in peace, just more bombing.
I really hope more companies declare their workplaces to be politics free. I am completely tired of the long march through the institutions ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_march_through_the_ins... ) that has culminated in corporations being weaponized for one-sided progressive political agendas. These departures really just give away the biases of the tech industry at large. As for Basecamp's leaders - I thi…
Unfortunately he won’t read them.