How Basecamp Blew Up • Hacker News Board

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#281

Post by thrownaway564 » Wed, May 05, 2021, 1:39 AM UTC

cleandreams wrote: post #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 ma…

You - "one of the senior management team said white supremacy does not exist"

article - "he questioned the existence of white supremacy at the company"

Not the same

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#282

Post by trentnix » Wed, May 05, 2021, 1:40 AM UTC

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…

> it also makes me face the reality that I would not want to work with many of the people that resigned

I totally get it. Toxic people tend to clump. And they eventually aim their toxicity at each other. You don't want them in the workplace or really, in your life at all.

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

Not only is it absurd, the whole demand to say such a thing was a Kafka trap to begin with.

> I realize that my lack of political fervor is a liability. I wish I cared more about these things, I really do, but I don't.

It's not a liability, at least not in the long term. The time when being 'woke' is beneficial to advancement will come to an end. Because if the fervor one has for politics is what a company values, then they'll get increasing fervor until the place is too toxic to be productive.

Your inability to generate a constant stream of passion for your opinions and hate for contrary opinions is a sign that you are normal. That you are reasonable. And that you are dependable. It's nothing at all to apologize for.

There will always be companies that have employees with different political, religious, and social opinions who will find common ground in their desire to build cool shit and provide value. Go find one of those places and be happy.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#283

Post by shard972 » Wed, May 05, 2021, 1:40 AM UTC

dools wrote: post #191

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…

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.

@dang, cleanup on ilse flamewar

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#284

Post by 6AA4FD » Wed, May 05, 2021, 1:40 AM UTC

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 think based on other discussions in the thread, that just pulling out definitions will not be so helpful, so I just want to directly inquire, what sort of problem (since there is obviously a problem with this) do you think causes things like the "war on terror" and "war on drugs"? Do you think that these sorts of political actions would be acceptable to the voting public if they only affected white people?

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#285

Post by threeseed » Wed, May 05, 2021, 1:41 AM UTC

prawn wrote: post #224

threeseed wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that it is "his" workplace belongs in the Mad Men era of business. If you want to attract and keep talent you need to listen to their views and involve in them defining the values of the company.

Is it possible that they were doing exactly that in trying to focus the staff on work itself? I'd guess I lean politically with the founders and their departing staff, and I don't love the "silent majority" that gets spoken of, but DHH talked about having people approach him who were uncomfortable with having a workplace they felt was politicised. As a personal example, I work in a shared office space. If a vocal ten…

You don't seem to be completely across the issue.

If it was purely about talking about politics at work then everyone wouldn't have resigned.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#286

Post by michaericalribo » Wed, May 05, 2021, 1:42 AM UTC

x3n0ph3n3 wrote: post #267

michaericalribo wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. The onus is on both parties to communicate effectively and find language that removes ambiguity. Unfortunately, I think some degree of sophistry is occurring to use ambiguity as a motte and bailey.

Respectfully, I disagree. There's no onus here at all, on either side—this isn't some intellectual debate with formal rules, this is a struggle to make marginalized voices heard.

Effective communication is nowhere near the same as using transparent / effortless language. "The medium is the message"—phrases like "defund the police" and "Black Lives Matter" arrest the attention in ways that "we should reconsider the financial resources allocated to law enforcement" and "I value the lives of Black Americans as equal to those of White Americans and, moreover, those Black lives have historically been undervalued and oppressed" simply do not (and I can't even make a claim that that's what those phrases mean—you'd have to ask someone, and try to understand what they meant).

The effectiveness of communication is nontrivial. There's a reason for the long history of poetry as a way to communicate emotions, a way that tends to transcend the effectiveness of plain language to convey intense emotion in an intuitive form; and that reason is decidedly not that artful use of language removes ambiguity.

Ambiguity highlights precisely the points at which we fail to understand one another, and point to the most critical opportunities to clarify what we mean to each other.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#287

Post by nate » Wed, May 05, 2021, 1:42 AM UTC

kondro wrote: post #272

nate wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thank you. Oh for sure. (for people not familiar) So we took Highrise over a bit after that announcement, and that was almost an impossible thing to overcome. It was hemorrhaging customers. It was always a turnaround project. Our biggest task for the first couple years was just trying to erase the "marketing" that we had shut down already.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#288

Post by itsdrewmiller » Wed, May 05, 2021, 1:42 AM UTC

azangru wrote: post #92

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. -…

> - 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…

The discussion of the "funny names" list including the pyramid of hate discussion was what led to the "no politics" rule - it didn't happen in violation of it.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#289

Post by mpyne » Wed, May 05, 2021, 1:42 AM UTC

JPKab wrote: 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…

> Children understand that calling people names isn't the same as violence.

This isn't the argument actually being made here, so if that's what DHH thought when he shut the thread down then that might explain part of the outcry.

The argument is simply that the behavior everyone claims to decry (e.g. racial violence) starts somewhere, far below violence. "Funny names" turn into off-color jokes. Off-color jokes turn into jokes with a darker edge. Then it turns into "just asking questions", and before too long your organization is acting as much as a group radicalization effort as it is a business.

This still isn't "cause and effect", where anyone who chuckles at a funny name is fated to be building the next Stormfront unless stopped by an intrepid band of culture warriors. But we've known since Ben Franklin that an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure, so under the 'pyramid of hate' argument, a company trying to foster a safe workplace for all workers should strive to keep potential racism from turning into a problem by enforcing standards of workplace conduct that don't wait for actual racism.

Just like we build secure software by building security in early into the release process.

Just like we build functional and well-integrated software by building the testing early into the release process.

Just like we avoid pest infestation by keeping the food off of the tables and floors. On and on it goes.

The standard we walk past is the standard we accept. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRQBtDtZTGA

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#290

Post by lghh » Wed, May 05, 2021, 1:43 AM UTC

xenophonB wrote: post #187

darkwizard42 wrote: post #99

Earlier 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.

That's because there is a strategic difference between talking about inequality and making fun of someone for having a name that's different than yours. One has an upside, the other doesn't.