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How Basecamp Blew Up

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Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#181

Post by thrownaway564 »

Tainnor wrote: post #149
jokethrowaway wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

The culture here is getting bad. We have an "inclusion council" that hands out these diktats. The word ban list (not blacklist!) is approaching 100 words including husband, housekeeping, normal, hacker and meritocracy. Worse part is we're a security company

edit: "here" is okta, not basecamp

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#182

Post by mk81 »

throthro111 wrote: post #160

I feel bad for everyone involved. This story made me realize that working at Basecamp is not something I would want to do in the future, primarily because DHH and Fried are so egotistic. However, it also makes me face the reality that I would not want to work with many of the people that resigned. Resigning over a random employee refusing to say that "white supremacy exists" is absurd. I imagine myself working at som…

I don't wish I cared more about this BS, and I don't.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#183

Post by arp242 »

seriousquestion wrote: post #148

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.

Dictionaries don't define the meaning of words; they record the usage.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#184

Post by dools »

baggy_trough wrote: post #5
peterthehacker wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.”

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

Because anyone who claims reverse racism exists is a defacto racist (even if they would deny it) becaus they obviously don't understand how racism works.

If I had someone saying that shit in my company on a Zoom call, I would excuse myself, remove them from the call, schedule a 1 on 1 meeting with them, and explain to them that they need to take training on what racism is and how it is perpetrated, or leave.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#185

Post by threeseed »

throthro111 wrote: post #160

I feel bad for everyone involved. This story made me realize that working at Basecamp is not something I would want to do in the future, primarily because DHH and Fried are so egotistic. However, it also makes me face the reality that I would not want to work with many of the people that resigned. Resigning over a random employee refusing to say that "white supremacy exists" is absurd. I imagine myself working at som…

> Resigning over a random employee refusing to say that "white supremacy exists" is absurd

It's not a random employee though. It's someone who is part of the Senior Leadership Team.

If you deny that it exists then how can you be trusted to do something if an issue does comes up ?

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#186

Post by thrownaway564 »

moduspol wrote: post #180
Tainnor wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

We also may be reading a lot into how large this committee was. If I were at a company of ~58 people, and ~20 of them were forming a DE&I committee to evaluate the company's vendor relationships, speakers, etc., I'd be tempted to join just to get the potential target off of my back. They're not going to fire 1/3 of the workforce, after all.

Our group has hours of meetings every week. One coworker was PIPd and he immediately joined the group. Less work and off pip now!

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#187

Post by xenophonB »

darkwizard42 wrote: post #99
mfer wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 emplo…

Laughing at names did not lead to genocide and no one implied that. What someone did was share why it was important to treat this seriously and not let it slide... lest the offending behaviors continue to escalate. An example was shared from social science on a pyramid of normalization where such behavior eventually gets normalized. Classic and indisputable example might be Germany in WW2. It wasn’t like citizens wok…

Yeah, weirdly this ludicrous standard is never applied to leftist politics, for example suggesting that any criticism of inequality could "escalate" into the Holodomor or the Killing Fields of Cambodia, so therefore its important not to "normalize" such behaviour.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#188

Post by dosethree »

throthro111 wrote: post #160

I feel bad for everyone involved. This story made me realize that working at Basecamp is not something I would want to do in the future, primarily because DHH and Fried are so egotistic. However, it also makes me face the reality that I would not want to work with many of the people that resigned. Resigning over a random employee refusing to say that "white supremacy exists" is absurd. I imagine myself working at som…

"Resigning over a random employee refusing to say that "white supremacy exists" is absurd"

The founders effectively took everyone's voice away. I think that's a very consistent way to get people to leave - especially people who for whom having a voice is more important than working at basecamp

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#189

Post by Tainnor »

kbenson wrote: post #178
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…

> Honestly, in this story everyone looks like a big child. I agree for the most part there. Less so the founders, I think there sin runs more along the lines of being extremely naive (but in a way a lot of people might be, especially when the alternative might be to accept you're screwed). > something must have gone fundamentally wrong much earlier. These levels of tension and distrust don't just arise out of nowhere…

> I think there sin runs more along the lines of being extremely naive [...]

which would be maybe more excusable if it didn't come from the guys who wrote several books about how awesomely they run their company. I guess that's why my sympathy for their situation is somewhat limited.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#190

Post by prepend »

thrownaway564 wrote: post #181
Tainnor wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

The culture here is getting bad. We have an "inclusion council" that hands out these diktats. The word ban list (not blacklist!) is approaching 100 words including husband, housekeeping, normal, hacker and meritocracy. Worse part is we're a security company edit: "here" is okta, not basecamp

Why hacker?
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