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How Basecamp Blew Up

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Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#271
post #92
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. -…

> - Had a conservative senior employee go off about politics on the call discussing the new no politics policy. The article really doesn't tell us whether that senior employee just went off on a political tangent for no reason whatsoever, or he was responding to an earlier made political statement that he decided to disagree with. What the article does suggest is that that contribution by that senior employee was pre…

I'm not sure the context of the Singer's remarks matters much -- they were clearly against the newly announced policy that the meeting itself was about. And as a senior employee and member of the company's leadership, it was more incumbent on him than on others to follow the policy, in order to set the tone and be a good example.

(NB even David and Jason seem to have recognized this -- after the meeting, Singer was suspended; he's since resigned, but this is likely the only one of the several recent resignations that was not entirely of the employee's own volition.)

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#272
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you speak a little more about your impression of the company while you were there? I know you didn't want to talk about it after you left, but so many of us are/were curious, especially as to how Basecamp's private image compares to its public image.

It's tough to get it all down here in a comment. Maybe now this is all out I'll share more in some channels soon. I will say that last comment in Casey's article: “They don't want to deal with people, which is something you have to do as a manager … Jason and David just threw us away.” That could easily have been written from someone at Highrise. (It wasn't. But it could have been) We killed ourselves to turn that th…

I appreciate all the work you did at Highrise, but after DHH+JF announced they were going to sell it because it was a distraction & renamed 37 Signals to Basecamp, it was difficult to keep using the product… even when they decided they didn't want to sell.

The way in which DHH announced the _conversation_ he had with Salesforce was a thing of amazement all of its own.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#273
I am a member of a discriminated against minority in tech and I find this level of wokeness appalling. We will sometimes politically disagree with our co-workers and I don't want to have to argue with them. It's dreary and demoralizing. Most of the time there is no change in views as a result and frankly, it's not worth my time. That said, it's very problematic to go into this controversy because one of the senior management team said white supremacy does not exist. That is troubling because for employees who have been impacted by white supremacy, the amount of pain this obliviousness causes can be nearly unbearable. This exodus was a self-inflicted wound. It's a bad mistake to treat a topic which causes so much pain in this arrogant and dismissive way. So sorry Basecamp, but you really deserve the trouble you are in.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#274
post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Pointing out that cancel culture is toxic and that free speech still has a place in polite isn't a bad thing. Academia really has a problem with siloing those of a different opinion and apparently it is extending to tech companies as well. I mostly just refuse to talk about that stuff at work. If it's not work related or "guess what I did last weekend" I'm not really interested.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#275

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 ?

Essentially, the core disagreement is about what is or isn't white supremacy. There isn't one way to define this, but if you start asking for things like "disavow white supremacy!" in a conversation like this then you're essentially just chucking good faith out the window. The context here matters a lot.

I wouldn't have "denounced" white supremacy either. If these are the base conditions under which you're prepared to talk to me then quite frankly, fuck you. There is nothing to gain for me, and you're clearly not prepared to take anything I say in good faith. Okay, I might have in a leadership role to keep the peace as a matter of professionalism, but I'd also have started looking for a new job as this is not a healthy atmosphere. I don't want to work with people who think I'm secretly a white supremacist.

The problem is that I've seen many things being labelled as "white supremacy" that seem ... a bit of a stretch. For example people have argued that Alien (the film) is an example of white supremacy as the alien represents a stereotypical black women; "Black women have been portrayed in contemporary white social and political culture as super-fertile and indestructible breeders whose sexual reproduction must be controlled."[1]

When I first read that, it took me quite a while to realize this was even referring to the alien itself, rather than some character that got infected. It seems it purely based on the fact that the alien is black.

There are many, many examples of this, especially in the last year people have been going way to far in re-analysing everything through the lens of race, often with some very harsh words like "white supremacy". Sometimes this is a good thing, but often I find it's not. Either these are general problems that affect everyone (just black folks more, but that doesn't mean the core problem is racism), or it's outright nonsense like the above.

Now, I don't know what argument that person made exactly in support of "White supremacy existing at Basecamp", but if you make such a strong claim – which is essentially calling your leadership/coworkers white supremacists – then you better have some good arguments. I'm skeptical they existed; they're certainly not present in this article beyond wishy-washy "creating a space where people do not feel welcome".

And considering that this discussion left people "crying and screaming at the screen" it seems rather easy to make some people feel "not welcome".

The entire thing stinks; perhaps the leadership could have handled things a bit better here and there, but if you're not willing to take a somewhat nuanced disagreement in good faith then there's nothing you can do except nod and smile on every sort of nonsense they bring up, and anything else will upset people.

[1]: https://theconversation.com/how-hollywoods-alien-and-predato...

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#276

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…

This is exactly what I thought. None of this story makes much sense on an adult level.

You have a list of customer names that you mock? What kind of amateur, disrespectful operation are you running? Are you building a product or pledging a fraternity?

And how does any of that lead to talking about "White Supremacy". And how does voicing an opinion about such a subject seem like a good idea for the workplace regardless of if you think it exists or not?

For a company that has written a lot of books about how to build companies and cultures, this is...laughable.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#277
post #209

"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?

Academia is where this ideology originated. It's where virtually all of the terminology came from. It's also where these employees were taught that collective identity dwarfs individual identity.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#278
post #232

Do what I did in February: Quit. Life's too short to waste time at a company that's forgotten it's purpose. This ideology borders on cult like. A good sign that you are dealing with an irrational ideology is non-sensical, illogical and inconsisten rules. For example, in this article, "Black" is capitalized everywhere its mentioned, and "white" isn't. There's nothing logically consistent about this, because it's a bor…

it's completely religious - prophets, sacred texts, heresies.

Going to quit after vacation this summer by just not showing up. See how long that lasts

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#279

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 doubt most of the people who resigned resigned because of that employee. They probably resigned because DHH decided that, because the discussion had made him uncomfortable, no one should be able to discuss anything "political" at work anymore. That's a very "take your ball and go home" attitude which I wouldn't want in my employer either. And given that this seems to be pretty normal behaviour for him, it was probably the last straw for a lot of employees.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#280
post #191

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…

There is no such thing as "cultural marxism", it's a term manufactured by modern libertarians to distract people with a fake culture war while they're robbed blind by corrupt politicians. Like "virtue signalling". It's also a red flag that someone is racist and ignorant, and should be called out in the same way as flat earth, climate denial or any other range of denialist mindsets.

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