Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Basecamp Blew Up

platformer.news

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 1001 posts

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#341

Post by tomlockwood »

anon7725 wrote: post #314
tomlockwood wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, reading the quote you've included in this comment - it seems a lot less "totalizing" than you're saying, considering the quote itself uses the loose terms "closer to the camp of" or "a common defense used by". There's already nuance and wiggle room there, so, I'm not sure how you're immediately launching into a pretty sanctimonious and totalizing statement that "cultural Marxism" admits zero daylight be…

> Could you help me understand why you feel "cultural Marxism" is so, totally, totalizing? It simply means that the ideology won’t stop until it has transformed all of culture. The progress thus far has been academia -> journalism -> tech companies. It’s coming for the rest of society. There is no area of life or society that this ideology does not claim to address. You missed “sanctified” - the ideology resists crit…

> It simply means that the ideology won’t stop until it has transformed all of culture. The progress thus far has been academia -> journalism -> tech companies. It’s coming for the rest of society. There is no area of life or society that this ideology does not claim to address.

So let me get this straight: You're railing against an ideology that you claim has progressed through a large section of society, and you think it is bad, and you think, presumably, that society ought to not be like that, at least in these many areas. And your criticism of that ideology is that it claims to address many areas of society?

> You missed “sanctified” - the ideology resists criticism. Do you not see that this is the way religion used to be?

You missed the bit where I used the word "sanctimonious".

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#342

Post by sagichmal »

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 agree for the most part there. Less so the founders,

How anyone can look at this debacle and think of the employees as anything but victims, and the founders as anything but reactionary blowhards, is absolutely incoherent to me.

The founders are obviously the ones in the wrong here, and obviously come out with shattered reputations.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#343

Post by Tainnor »

arp242 wrote: post #332
seattle_spring wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Airbnb has also been vocal about the multi year slog to dig themselves out of their Rails hole.

On the other hand, it probably also enabled them to get up & running with a MVP fairly fast and low-cost. No one knew it was going to be the big success from the get-go, and most new companies fail. In hindsight, it was probably a bad choice. At the time however, it was probably a good one. Besides, things like AirBnB are the exceptions. Most sites don't get anywhere near the traffic they get, and Rails is often a go…

> Is it imperfect and are there trade-offs involved? Of course, but there are with anything.

No disagreement here. But the argument was made that Rails "scales pretty well" and I believe this is wrong — and I don't even mean in terms of performance (that probably too), but also in terms of architectural complexity. All these problems are solvable of course, but Rails makes it IMHO harder than some other technologies.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#344

Post by FooBarBizBazz »

throwaway789256 wrote: post #210
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…

This dynamic is playing out in thousands of companies and startups across the US. Many people in the US, the woke, have redefined "white supremacy" and "racism" to mean most inequalities and behavior that they don't like: They do not accept non-racist environments, only anti-racist ones. They do not accept that businesses be politically neutral. Businesses must take political stances internally and publicly. To do an…

> The irony, of course, is that Hansson and Fried built a reputation around righteousness and wokeness, and then it came for them, because they were two white guys with power.

That's extremely predictable at this point.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#345

Post by tomlockwood »

anon7725 wrote: post #298
dools wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Marxism is a basis for critical theory. The critical theory that made a species jump from academia to the mainstream has its roots in the ideas of Gramsci and Marcuse, among others. I call it “cultural Marxism” because unlike plain old Marxism, it has relatively little to say about the redistribution of wealth and other economic interests. In this way it’s made itself innocuous to corporate America, which would other…

What's Marxist about it, then?

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#346

Post by [deleted] »

gowld wrote: post #194
seriousquestion wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a twitch partner, just earlier today, illustrating how DEI is racist. Expect to see a lot of this; "Kinda sad, found out I was accepted into a twitch team because of my skin colour so that “diversity” can be preached & not for my values or the blood, sweat n tears I’ve put into my work. Plus then being left out of everything & watching from the sidelines continuously..." https://twitter.com/Sharesee/status/138…

It's weird to cite someone complaining about not being included, as an example of inclusion being bad. Sure, fake-DEI is bad, because it's not DEI! Also weird for someone to complain about "because of my skin colour" when she identifies herself on Twitter as "Bajan and British" first and foremost, not anything about her "values or the blood, sweat n tears".

[deleted]

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#347

Post by MattRix »

[deleted] wrote: post #339
MattRix wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

any time I find someone like you complaining about “getting cancelled” or “cancel culture”, I just replace “cancel” with “consequences”, since that’s what it really is. They wanted to protect employees from the consequences of their words and actions.

[deleted]

I don’t get it.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#348

Post by sagichmal »

arp242 wrote: post #275
threeseed wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

You're describing the critical perspective, which is just a framing that motivates discussion. There are versions of it for essentially every sociological phenomenon. The hypersensitivity to it among certain demographics is what's remarkable, much moreso than the thing itself.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#349

Post by nemothekid »

didgeoridoo wrote: post #330
mpyne wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

> The argument is simply that the behavior everyone claims to decry (e.g. racial violence) starts somewhere, far below violence This is just a rehash of broken-windows theory, whether its proponents know it or not. The Hutus and Tutsis didn’t start with some off-color ribbing and escalate from there. There is zero evidence behind the “pyramid of hate” — it makes a shallow kind of sense, but has no basis in the real w…

>An equally valid hypothesis is that harmlessly blowing off low-level steam prevents the atrocities higher up in the “pyramid”. Things only really get bad when people are encouraged to form and defend identities around characteristics like race, religion, national origin, etc.

I'm sorry - I need help in understanding how this "equally valid". To me this seems like a justification ex post facto to defend "jokes", but it seems to fly in the face history. I find it hard to reconcile that post-slavery attitudes about race in America came about because people were no longer allowed to make jokes. Alternatively this kind of explanation hand waves away the cultural history that makes those jokes funny in the first place.

To note, I believe that DHH handled this situation horribly which has caused the situation to escalate to epic proportions. The adult thing to do when you come across a rather juvenile list of "funny" names to accept that you were wrong and move on. To try and defend this kind of juvenile behavior leads to nonsensical arguments about why it's someone's right to make lavatorial jokes during standup.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#350

Post by mumblemumble »

listless wrote: post #276
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…

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 regardles…

> And how does any of that lead to talking about "White Supremacy".

Perhaps one step at a time, over the course of repeated conversations that keep dredging up more and more deep-seated resentments that have probably been festering for years and years, because of a longstanding social convention that we're not supposed to openly talk about these sorts of things at the workplace.

Or perhaps, if it's the kind of company where a list like that could continue to exist for so long, there was enough pressure built up that it was more like a levee breaking.

Post reply on HN