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How Basecamp Blew Up

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Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#121

Post by fatbird »

rsanheim wrote: post #85
nate wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) :/

The way a company deals with really difficult things like lay-offs speaks volume about the character, empathy, and skill of leadership at the top. This is really sad hearing about how crummy DHH and Fried are at one central piece of management: having very hard conversations with people while still treating them with respect and dignity.

one central piece of management: having very hard conversations with people while still treating them with respect and dignity.

I'd like to highlight this. I'd like to frame it and tape it to the head of every founder and entrepeneur so they have to look at it constantly. Hell, everyone who ever has to oversee other people. This is absolutely the heart and soul of good management and being a good person, and everyone who thinks they're created a great workplace, but doesn't know this, needs to chant this 1,000,000 times.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#122

Post by predaking »

dang wrote: post #75
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

Fair enough! Thanks. I’ll edit! (or apparently I can't, but I'll note it for the future - feel free to take out my last sentence there if you have editing privileges!)

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#123

Post by evrydayhustling »

Barrin92 wrote: post #23
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…

>Is this just a generational thing? No, it's a class thing. Among unionised labour work has always been a political battlefield. What's new is that you know have a politically activist group of people within upper middle class white collar jobs who, traditionally were conservative in temperament because they were materially well off. Professionals whose values do not align with their management have figured out that…

100% this. Basecamp leadership just discovered that "stakeholder capitalism" isn't a choice made by management, it's something that happens to management because stakeholders are getting more empowered and organized.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#124

Post by Tainnor »

Honestly, in this story everyone looks like a big child.

I would maybe be more sympathetic to DHH if it wasn't the guy who was so opinionated he pushed through Rails features that everyone else disliked or co-wrote several books on company culture that are glorified ads for basecamp (although "it doesn't have to be crazy at work" is still a thought-provoking read, at least in part). I can only imagine that he might be similarly self-righteous in workplace situations.

I think that, no matter your political views, if a situation gets out of hand that bad over matters that aren't even really directly related to workplace concerns, something must have gone fundamentally wrong much earlier. These levels of tension and distrust don't just arise out of nowhere.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#125

Post by jariel »

fallenfromgrace wrote: post #14
baggy_trough wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t follow. Why would you be suspended for that?

It has hints of "reverse racism" and tends to dismiss that racism is an issue...and if it is an issue, racism against white people is the actual and bigger issue. That's closer to the camp of "white supremacist" or at the very least, a common defense used by white supremacist. Generally, this would be someone who is, in his position, at the very best, wilfully ignorant. I was not the one dismissed him, nor do I work…

"It has hints of "reverse racism" "

"That's closer to the camp of "white supremacist" or at the very least, a common defense used by white supremacist."

This kind of gaslighthing though.

"My opponent disagrees with me and is therefore a White Supremacist, or at least close to one!"

If one person says 'this org is racist because of white privilege' - it's possibly contentious, but not unreasonable to suggest that this statement is racist in and of itself.

Just because you might deny 'reverse racism' exists, doesn't mean that it's true, it's a denial, not a disagreement.

Also, indicating that 'this office is not a place of white supremacy' is not 'denying' someone else experience, or their position that 'racism exists'. It's an observation of the nature of the ostensible problem.

It's not 'wilfully ignorant' it's more like 'wilfully insensitive / disagreeable / inflammatory'

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#126

Post by nmfisher »

Trasmatta wrote: post #25
DiNovi wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

he had over 10 retweets and tweets the same day after this call. And did not use those tweets to thank his old team, just more "apple bad" stuff as if nothing had changed. Color me skeptical.

DHH has one of the most annoying Twitter feeds. He picks a hobby horse every few months and tweets incessantly about it, until something else grabs his attention. Surely they shouldn't have been surprised that many of the people they chose to hire would be likewise strongly opinionated, and not take kindly to those policy changes.

I had to unfollow him for precisely this reason. It’s just a relentless torrent of negativity. Maybe his feed isn’t a great indication, but he seems like a very unhappy person.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#127

Post by moduspol »

tomlockwood wrote: post #108
anon7725 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It has hints of "reverse racism" and tends to dismiss that racism is an issue...and if it is an issue, racism against white people is the actual and bigger issue. That's closer to the camp of "white supremacist" or at the very least, a common defense used by white supremacist. This is the problem with cultural Marxism / “wokeness”. It’s a sanctified, totalizing ideology that admits zero daylight between “100% agree…

I don't know, reading the quote you've included in this comment - it seems a lot less "totalizing" than you're saying, considering the quote itself uses the loose terms "closer to the camp of" or "a common defense used by". There's already nuance and wiggle room there, so, I'm not sure how you're immediately launching into a pretty sanctimonious and totalizing statement that "cultural Marxism" admits zero daylight be…

Not OP, but you'd have to have blinders on to not see the political left increasingly branding everyone they disagree with as evil / Nazis / white supremacists. That's what happened above, and you're rationalizing it here.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#128

Post by XorNot »

klyrs wrote: post #115
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 in the history of the US has racial inequality not been an inherently political topic? At its founding, the statement "all men are created equal" was highly contentious.

Also a massive lie of omission, seeing as how slavery was legal when that was written and would remain so until the Civil War.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#129

Post by [deleted] »

markhahn wrote: post #91

Definitions are everything. Consider someone for whom "white supremacy" means "it is right and appropriate to act deliberately to create and preserve white dominance of other races". Versus someone for whom it means "privilege exists in many, though often subtle ways, and advantages white, male, older, cis, het people". It's a lot like how "defund police" means radically different things.

[deleted]

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#130

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

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.

That's why Bob iger of Disney is such a good leader. We need more like him instead of the Elon musk's.
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