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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”

#801

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, DHH is very outspoken politically, and fairly progressive. Of course there was going to be a selection bias where they hired similar people. This shouldn't have come as a surprise to them, and they should have realized the backlash. Shockingly bad foresight.

I don’t know about progressive, but he’s definitely something. Here’s his last in-person RailsConf keynote: https://youtu.be/VBwWbFpkltg He’s promoting anarcho-communism in a RailsConf keynote.

Odds are if the conference told him to keep it on topic... he would decline to show up ever again!

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

#802

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

DHH is the guy who defended porn as a suitable metaphor for a CouchDB talk. I don't think professionalism is his north star.

So it's impossible to be a professional programmer who works for pornhub?

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

#803
post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This pretty much nails it. The "politics" angle has been revealed to be a red herring by the subsequent accounts of everyone involved. The same contentious discussions would have happened had this policy already existed! I guess you could say the policy gives the founders a ban hammer to swing to end discussions they don't like. Separated from their justification, the 6 policies represent an assertion that Basecamp l…

1/3 of the staff that believes in things like that the “It doesn’t have to be crazy at work” title is ableist (see the Jane Yang post). Even when refers to a situation and not to a person. How radicalized you have to be to lose your capacity for critical thinking like that? If anything, Basecamp is a much better place to work now, without them

I used to use the word "crazy" all the time, until it became apparent to me that it's not particularly kind to use a word that primarily exists to disparage severely mentally ill people. There's no positive way in modern English to call a person "crazy".

As a younger person, I made a similar change regarding my use of the word "retarded" to refer to situations I thought were nonsensical or illogical. I'm now embarrassed to have used that word so thoughtlessly, even though it was pointed out many times that it was an unkind thing to do.

Call it radicalism if you want, but I think it's just a matter of stepping back and reevaluating behaviors I took for granted. You know, literal critical thinking.

We're not yet at the point where people look at the word "crazy" as being wildly inappropriate in the same way as "retarded", but I think it's completely reasonable for people to raise the point that putting it in the title of a book that represents the whole company is not a good idea.

You're fooling yourself if you think Basecamp will be improved by losing 1/3 of its staff, including some department heads and long-tenured employees, as well as its nearly universally positive reputation.

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

#804

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>no more 360 degree reviews (no way to formally give feedback to your boss) The reason they gave for removing these was that peer reviews were overly positive to the point of pointlessness. You could still give feedback to your boss without 360 degree reviews.

Sounds like trust was already severely lacking in that case, if people felt uncomfortable raising issues in their reviews.

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

#805

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 if you live in North Korea.

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

#806

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…

What I think I’ll take from this is how a lot of organizational policies have simple human emotional reasons behind them.

Reading the official company stances, they all look like reasonable, well meaning changes. But then 1/3 of your organization quits? There must be more to this! And in fact its just a normal human squabble, with broken promises, public dressing downs, power assertions.

It can kind of put into perspective a lot of big policies in general. That almost certainly what we know today as pillars of reasoned thought, has originated by some basic human desires, and what we’re reading is only their rationalizations.

I mean it’s obvious of course, but this here is a _really_ good clear cut example of it.

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

#807
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no direct insight, but I'm getting a bit of a 'tip of the iceberg' feeling, like maybe there's some other stuff going on.

You can read the twitter thread from Casey. One of the issues was that one of the activist employees tried to link "making fun of customers' names" to "genocide". That was a big yike. And definitely a convo I wouldn't want to have.

They linked this: https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/pyramid-of...

I don't see what the big yikes is about that.

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

#808
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of their iOS devs who left has been incredibly vocal about how he no longer felt like this was somewhere he could work because of this policy and its effects, so I think you're plainly wrong (or insisting that there's no way we could take a person at their word). https://twitter.com/georgeclaghorn It's a lot more likely that the 1/3rd that left both left because they were unhappy with the policy, and because they…

That’s not my experience watching friends go through the full cycle. The tech employment market for talented programmers appears to be the hottest I’ve ever seen and I worked through the late 90s tech boom where literal used car salespeople were being hired into tech only to be back selling cars by summer of 2000.

Talented people will also have higher standards (want large compensation package, or interesting work, or something else), and figuring out whether a job opening is up to that standard takes time. The result is that even for developers in high demand it takes a lot of time to find a new job.

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

#809

The problem with no religion and no politics is that it’s impossible to draw a line on what is politics or religion. Let’s say you hire a gay employee, there very existence is political. Are they wrong for mentioning that they are gay (no), but to some at the company that may be trying to advance their gay political agenda. Idk what the solution is, but just blanket “No religion/no politics” is just a way to say you…

Oh come on. I thought it was a given that "no P/R" means "no ugly P/R" – e.g. don't shit on your co-worker for being Muslim, don't shame your co-worker for voting for Trump. But it is fine to mention that you are fasting for Ramadan. Basically I think they should've just used HN's commenting guidelines instead of saying no politics.

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

#810

It's very hard for me to take all the talk of the pros and cons of talking politics at work seriously when it seems like this issue was about a list of 'funny names' of customers, including a number of names from people of different cultures. Then someone posted this one page PDF: https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/pyramid-of... And DHH seems to have taken that pdf wildly out of context, calling it the…

That's a stupid pyramid.
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