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How Basecamp Blew Up

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Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#71

Post by cozuya »

tha0xa1 wrote: post #69
cozuya wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the strawman? What is the whataboutism? I'm talking directly about your statement: "No one sane opposes racial equality, conservative or liberal." Tucker Carlson, one of the most popular "conservatives", opposes racial equality and promotes white supremacy. You can call him "not sane" if you want, but he has millions of viewers every day and his views are absolutely mainstream Republicanism in 2021. There are…

>What is the strawman? "No one sane", and then you build the Tucker Carlson strawman, and continue to use him, after we both conclude he's not "sane". > What is the whataboutism? Bringing up right-wing examples here when they were immaterial to my OP. These are textbook examples of strawmaning and whatabouting. >Tucker Carlson, one of the most popular "conservatives", opposes racial equality Where did he oppose racia…

You're just playing word games to refuse to back down on your ridiculous statement, which, again, was:

"No one sane opposes racial equality, conservative or liberal."

Do you think Americans and the world really don't remember the past 5 years? Do you think we don't remember The Former Guy coming to relevance specifically because of the racist "birtherism" movement, or calling Mexicans rapists? Are those the actions of someone interested in promoting racial equality?

Lets try a different tact:

Name some mainstream Trump-supporting Republican who has said "I believe in racial equality", or otherwise promote racial equality.

If you can't, don't bother replying, and we can all conclude what we all already know:

The Republican party is the party of white supremacy.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#72

Post by dang »

tha0xa1 wrote: post #59
Threeve303 wrote: post #13

This story is so strange. First of all, it has been considered unprofessional to talk about politics at work for as long as I can remember. It's odd how you would need a rule implemented about that. Is this just a generational thing? On the other hand, when did racial equality become an inherently political topic? Especially racial equality inside the workplace. This also doesn't mean that the Basecamp founders are r…

>On the other hand, when did racial equality become an inherently political topic? Especially racial equality inside the workplace. When acronyms became "white supremacy culture"[1], public magnet schools became "systemic racism"[2], showing up to work on time and objective thinking became "whiteness"[3], etc. "racial equality" became just another Motte and Bailey in the hyper-polarized toxic political world we live…

First, please don't take HN threads straight into ideological flamewar hell.

Second, since you've been using HN primarily for that, we've banned the account. We ban accounts that use HN primarily for ideological battle, regardless of which ideology they're battling for, because there's nothing more destructive of the intended use of the site. Not to mention its intended spirit, which is gratifying curiosity, not smiting enemies.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#73

Post by dang »

eloff wrote: post #41
DiNovi wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it is a common tactic to back away from an initial claim and pivot after people call you out, but he already let the genie out the bottle.

Or he clarified a position that he didn't think needed it originally. Because who's so dumb as to caricature his argument as saying there's no white supremacy anywhere? People are just looking for someone to lynch, irony intended.

Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. That includes omitting gratuitous flamebait.

I realize this thread has all sorts of such things going on in it, but this was a noticeable step hellward.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#74

Post by dang »

DiNovi wrote: post #7

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. -…

Please don't copy-paste comments on HN. It lowers signal/noise ratio. It also makes merging threads a pain.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#75

Post by dang »

predaking wrote: post #44

DHH was “so sick” that he was barely present for the most important meeting of his career. Fortunately he was able to post on Twitter several hours later storming at Apple, then going on a twitter blocking spree. What a “miraculous recovery”. I wonder what things will be like for him when he becomes an adult.

Please don't cross into personal attack and name-calling. You may not owe (or feel you owe) $person better, but you owe this community better if you're participating here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#76

Post by StavrosK »

ashtonkem wrote: post #51

The through line for all of these disasters seems to be a thirst for attention and adulation. Fried and DHH have always been super excited to tell us how to work, but it turns out when a crisis came to their company, they managed to mess it up to an unbelievable degree. Fried was so thirsty for attention that he told us how to manage a crisis like this before he’d even bothered to handle it himself or even tell his o…

Maybe this is just the first crisis we're hearing about. Alternatively, if they only hit one crisis in decades of running a company, they must be doing something right.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#78

Post by neom »

Amazon has over 50,000 results for "change management" in the books category for a reason.

If you're curious to get going on this subject so as to not make these mistakes, "HBR's 10 Must Reads on Change Management" is a great resource.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#79

Post by alostpuppy »

ashtonkem wrote: post #48
DiNovi wrote: post #6

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. -…

It seems like most of these attention hungry founders have extremely poor impulse or emotion control. I’m increasingly of the opinion that a “thought leader” CEO or founder is a red flag for a company, as tales of these people’s greatness always seems to diminish with distance.

I’ve always thought of Elon Musk as DHH 2.0.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#80

Post by mfer »

ashtonkem wrote: post #46
Threeve303 wrote: post #13

This story is so strange. First of all, it has been considered unprofessional to talk about politics at work for as long as I can remember. It's odd how you would need a rule implemented about that. Is this just a generational thing? On the other hand, when did racial equality become an inherently political topic? Especially racial equality inside the workplace. This also doesn't mean that the Basecamp founders are r…

I think this is badly missing the point. I think two very specific things happened here: First, the executives absolutely clamped down hard on a discussion about workplace behavior . I think their attempt to cast this as “political” is deeply cynical; discussing how people behave at work will always be in bounds, even if it touches up against issues that are politicized. The initial trigger here was a discussion abou…

> First, the executives absolutely clamped down hard on a discussion about workplace behavior.

The current state of politics bled into this. There is a fair amount already written on it but the insinuation that laughing a names leads to genocide ended up in the picture. It wasn't about what was appropriate or not and then handling it. The discussion went far beyond that.

> Second, they did an end run around the employees.

This was really surprising to me. I thought they would have posted publicly after all the employees had learned about this. This is poor change management within the company and a lesson I hope they learn.

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