How Basecamp Blew Up

There is a great supporting argument for keeping discussions of politics, race, religion, etc out of the workplace to begin with.

It's not possible to call it from outside, but there was no actual racist behavior cited, apart from the list of funny customer names, which is not really racist (more culturalist - if that were a thing), but it is a terrible idea anyway.

It sounds like a bunch of people got upset and quit over white privilege and the usual similar nonsense. Good riddance, why would you want activist employees like that?

I think these comments were the main reason:

> “I strongly disagree we live in a white supremacist culture,” Singer said. “I don't believe in a lot of the framing around implicit bias. I think a lot of this is actually racist.”

so they:

- Announced a new company policy publicly before telling the staff

- Deleted internal threads that would go against their narrative of why they did so

- Had a conservative senior employee go off about politics on the call discussing the new no politics policy.

- refused to reprimand said employee on the call

- had one founder take this extremely sensitive call from his bed with his camera off and on mute.

- After the employees resigned, did not send any sort of public message thanking them for their time at the company.

Can't believe only 21 employees walked. What idiots these founders are. There is no way to defend this poor management even if you agree with the rule they tried to put in

When they DHH+Jason laid the 7 of us off from Highrise (the Basecamp CRM spin-off) no one even showed up online to say anything to us on our last day. Just the Head of Devops to turn off our access to things. (That guy at least apologized for no-one else being there) :/

"To a manager, the exchange that led to Singer’s departure could lend credence to the idea that addressing social injustices on company Zoom calls is bound to be disastrous."

Yes, reading this entire exchange between Singer and the unnamed employee shows exactly why there shouldn't be political talk in the workplace. Disastrous indeed.