The thing that company founders and managers should understand is that discussing politics is intimately related to power.
Any power struggle inside an organisation can quickly turn into mutiny...
How Basecamp Blew Up
241–250 of 1001 posts
Re: How Basecamp Blew Up
#242I 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
I don't disagree with you, but I think it's a symptom of a much larger problem in the US that many people feel that their workplace is the only place where they have a voice and that the corporation they work for is their only avenue for political agency.
Obviously, you ideally want your job to be politically aligned with you so that your labor doesn't conflict with your beliefs. But today it seems like many feel so disconnected and disenfranchised from any communities outside of work they they put all their eggs in that basket, and that ultimately never goes well.
Re: How Basecamp Blew Up
#243"But Fried and his co-founder, David Heinemeier Hansson, had been taken aback by an employee post which argued that mocking customer names laid the foundation for racially-motivated violence, and closed the thread." Children understand that calling people names isn't the same as violence. At some point can we all admit that the most narcissistic, dramatic people are overly-indulged by this garbage? I'm at a startup n…
> Seeing good companies get torn to shreds by this campus idiocy reminds me of how insulated academia is from the real world.
What does this have to do with academia?
Re: How Basecamp Blew Up
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
How is that even a valid comparison? It is logical that making fun of people for characteristics related to race could be escalated to more serious racist behavior, and therefore should be discouraged. But where is the logical connection between criticizing inequality and committing genocide?
Re: How Basecamp Blew Up
#245There 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…
Yeah, a lot of us are missing the fact that there was real monetary value in these people going away, and so Basecamp paid them to do so.
Re: How Basecamp Blew Up
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it's you vs Merriam-Webster, I'll take Merriam-Webster https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/defund > : to withdraw funding from and "withdraw" does not mean "remove completely" https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/white%20supremacy > 1 : the belief that the white race is inherently superior to other races and that white people should have control over people of other races > 2: the social, economic, an…
>> : to withdraw funding from > and "withdraw" does not mean "remove completely" It certainly _can_ and usually _does_ mean remove completely. Examples: - "I'm withdrawing my student from this school" - "The peer review committee has decided to withdraw this erroneous paper from publication" - "I would like to withdraw $100 from my checking account" (It means the _whole_ $100) - "He is experiencing heroine withdrawal…
You are right! It can mean these things! But it can also mean other things, and (in my opinion) carefully parsing definitions distracts from the challenging and impactful work of understanding what others mean, not just the official definition of the words they used.
"Defund the police" can sound extreme, or counterintuitive, or downright confusing. But it seems urgently important (to me) to understand why so many Americans feel so strongly that they use such intense language, propose such radical changes, and demand something that doesn't make sense to me.
Clearly, there's something I don't "get". It's infinitely more compelling to me to try to "get it" and understand others' viewpoints, and uninteresting to understand why the words they used don't match a conventional definition.
Re: How Basecamp Blew Up
#247so 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.
What's always funny to me is this phenomenon generally has nothing to do with the actual people involved. It's just a story telling phenomenon. None of the people who know these thought leaders imbue them with qualities they don't have.
Re: How Basecamp Blew Up
#248I can't believe why this is so abuzz as it's their company, their rules - as long as they don't violate laws at any level, they can do whatever makes them happy at their own company! Employees get paid to do certain job, they don't do this for free. Basecamp is a business, it's not a charity or an activist collective - unless the owners want it that way! Employment is at will and can be terminated on either side at a…
Just because something might be legal doesn't make it a good idea to do it.
Re: How Basecamp Blew Up
#249"But Fried and his co-founder, David Heinemeier Hansson, had been taken aback by an employee post which argued that mocking customer names laid the foundation for racially-motivated violence, and closed the thread." Children understand that calling people names isn't the same as violence. At some point can we all admit that the most narcissistic, dramatic people are overly-indulged by this garbage? I'm at a startup n…
> Seeing good companies get torn to shreds by this campus idiocy reminds me of how insulated academia is from the real world. What does this have to do with academia?
It’s coded language.
Re: How Basecamp Blew Up
#250Honestly, 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…
https://twitter.com/thejoshtorres/status/1389623426688569345
Relevant excerpt from It doesn't have to be Crazy at Work.