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How Basecamp Blew Up

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Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#141

Post by Tainnor »

jensvdh wrote: post #113
seattle_spring wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hansson created Rails It sounds like the old adage, "the architecture of the company mimics the architecture of the software," applies very well here. In this case, the company's stance on politics scales about as well as Rails.

Shopify and Airbnb were able to become multi-billion dollar companies mostly by running on Rails before it became unsustainable. I'd say Rails scaled pretty well.

While true, I also remember watching a presentation about Shopify where they explained how they spent a whole year migrating to a newer Rails version.

Now, Shopify clearly has the capacity to pull this off. But a smaller company that initially bet on Rails and is now facing a mountain of tech debt might not. To be fair: it is possible to write Rails applications in a way that you don't couple every aspect of your application to Rails internals. But in certain crucial ways, Rails encourages doing exactly that - dragging the DB along your whole application, for example.

I've been a Rails developer for a couple of years and I left that ecosystem in no small part because a huge chunk of that community seems to treat "architecture" as a dirty word and monkeypatching as a solution for everything (and also indulges into making fun of PHP or Java a bit too much for my taste). Of course, everyone's experiences are different and you can do great stuff with Rails, but for me it's something I don't really want to go back to.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#142

Post by XorNot »

moduspol wrote: post #110
vore wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This dismissal of people as "unhinged", "cultish", and "lack of mental balance" at best unsympathetic and at worst callous. As others have pointed out, it's not really possible to compartmentalize yourself from "politics" unless you are represented by the majority and what is and isn't "politically acceptable" at work has always been fluid and changing. The fact that they have chosen these words to describe their fru…

It blows my mind that we're now so far down the list of transgressions that "list of funny sounding names poorly handled by management" is being touted as some egregious sin justifying claims of white supremacy at the company. It was a bad idea and it wasn't handled well. But geesh.

So you just missed that whole section which starts with - unprompted - the Head of Strategy deciding to go on a long rant about their own political views in a company meeting?

Like it really doesn't matter what led to that meeting, because I've not seen a version of events where somehow that becomes not a disaster on your "so anyway we announced a policy about you in a blog post where we insulted a whole lot of you recently..." meeting.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#143

Post by jokethrowaway »

jariel wrote: post #114
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.

That's not quite the right example though. CRT definitions of 'White Supremacy' are not about 'people acting deliberately' to support it. CRT laments that 'regular people' doing 'regular things' act unconsciously to support oppressive systems, hence 'White Supremacy'. Making a film about 'something' and hiring those people you know to make it, who by virtue of your social network might be 'mostly white' - would be an…

The problem lies in the assumption that we live in a society which is systemically racist.

The people not dismantling the system are not white supremacists, they just don't believe we have systemic racism.

I'm definitely not a white supremacist (I'm not even white) and I can't find a single instance of systemic racism.

Sure, I met a bunch of racist individuals, but that doesn't prove systemic racism.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#144

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#145

Post by at_a_remove »

anon7725 wrote: post #58
fallenfromgrace wrote: post #14

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. 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" 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…

And if someone sees you making an OK hand sign, that's a secret white supremacist gesture and you should be fired.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#147

Post by ceejayoz »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #143
jariel wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not quite the right example though. CRT definitions of 'White Supremacy' are not about 'people acting deliberately' to support it. CRT laments that 'regular people' doing 'regular things' act unconsciously to support oppressive systems, hence 'White Supremacy'. Making a film about 'something' and hiring those people you know to make it, who by virtue of your social network might be 'mostly white' - would be an…

The problem lies in the assumption that we live in a society which is systemically racist. The people not dismantling the system are not white supremacists, they just don't believe we have systemic racism. I'm definitely not a white supremacist (I'm not even white) and I can't find a single instance of systemic racism. Sure, I met a bunch of racist individuals, but that doesn't prove systemic racism.

> I can't find a single instance of systemic racism.

https://news.stanford.edu/press-releases/2020/05/05/veil-dar...

"The largest-ever study of alleged racial profiling during traffic stops has found that blacks, who are pulled over more frequently than whites by day, are much less likely to be stopped after sunset, when “a veil of darkness” masks their race."

> Creating that database enabled the team to find the statistical evidence that a “veil of darkness” partially immunized blacks against traffic stops. That term and idea has been around since 2006 when it was used in a study that compared the race of 8,000 drivers in Oakland, California, who were stopped at any time of day or night over a six month period. But the findings from that study were inconclusive because the sample was too small to prove a link between the darkness of the sky and the race of the stopped drivers.

> The Stanford team decided to repeat the analysis using the much larger dataset that they had gathered. First, they narrowed the range of variables they had to analyze by choosing a specific time of day – around 7 p.m. – when the probable causes for a stop were more or less constant. Next, they took advantage of the fact that, in the months before and after daylight saving time each year, the sky gets a little darker or lighter, day by day. Because they had such a massive database, the researchers were able to find 113,000 traffic stops, from all of the locations in their database, that occurred on those days, before or after clocks sprang forward or fell back, when the sky was growing darker or lighter at around 7 p.m. local time.

> This dataset provided a statistically valid sample with two important variables – the race of the driver being stopped, and the darkness of the sky at around 7 p.m. The analysis left no doubt that the darker it got, the less likely it became that a black driver would be stopped. The reverse was true when the sky was lighter.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#148

Post by seriousquestion »

white su·prem·a·cy; the belief that white people constitute a superior race and should therefore dominate society

de·fund; prevent from continuing to receive funds

Courtesy of the dictionary. This is not hard. Stop entertaining people who redefine words.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#149

Post by Tainnor »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #135
Tainnor wrote: post #124

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 b…

I've seen it happen in a company which was doing just fine. It happened randomly and completely out of the blue: one software engineer mentioned he didn't believe in the gender gap and he was promptly replied 1000 words essays by other leaders in the company shutting him down, to show that "we don't tolerate certain behaviour". Guidelines were created to avoid future political discussions in the workplace. No-one lef…

Maybe. But this is (was) a 60-person company. That's about the size of the company I'm currently working at. In other words, you should know everyone and interact with a sizeable chunk of these people somewhat regularly. It strikes me as very odd that you would suddenly so fundamentally distrust your co-workers with whom you share so much. But I'm also not in the US and maybe this is just the current climate over there.

(Or maybe it also shows that being a fully-remote company can have downsides, such as coworkers not socialising enough and therefore not trusting each other? Who knows. DHH certainly has championed the "remote work for everyone" approach countless times.)

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#150

Post by mfer »

pseudalopex wrote: post #117
baggy_trough wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is hard to argue that showing the pyramid of hate doesn't imply that laughing at names leads to genocide. That's very much the overt message - it's not even an implication.

Saying E comes after B doesn't mean inevitably B leads to E. And it seems likely the employee wanted to make a point about the level the company was at or the next level up. Not the top of the pyramid.

The employee putting up that pyramid didn't appear to have the outcome they wanted. It turned into much more. This should be a lesson learned.

I've read a fair number of books on helping things through change. The pyramid being put where it was seemed like a bad idea the moment I read it. The way it was responded to is something I would have expected.

There is a lesson here. If you want to bring about change in others it's about leading them rather than saying what you want to say.

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