Casey Newton is at least partly responsible for this. Before Basecamp "blew up", he wrote two articles that were argued about for days on Hacker News and Twitter. That absolutely must have heightened tensions among the Basecamp team.
How Basecamp Blew Up
391–400 of 1001 posts
Re: How Basecamp Blew Up
#392"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…
Had to quit a company last year due to bigotry. Constant bashing of white men on company calls. Exceptions if you were openly non straight. They also loved talking about how inclusive they were. Constant mocking of customer base, who was mostly traditional white people. I figure out quick I was hired only because they were desperate for someone with experience. Which sadly meant hiring an undesirable. At some point i…
I really tried not to take the bait here, but come on, dude, that last bit was especially rancid. You do get that we’re real human beings with rich internal lives like everyone else and not shallow, opportunistic crossdressers, yeah?
I’d be mortified if I worked with someone who thought like this, and I’m glad I don’t.
Re: How Basecamp Blew Up
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hear you. It can be counterproductive to use a totally unfamiliar jargon, especially if it trips the audience up and limits mutual engagement in favor of linguistic squabbling. That said, I respectfully disagree that it’s “just as unhelpful.” Pedantry over definitions distracts from the underlying issues, while new and inventive and nonstandard usage of language can spur critical analysis and jolt us out of our fam…
> Pedantry over definitions distracts from the underlying issues, while new and inventive and nonstandard usage of language can spur critical analysis and jolt us out of our familiar understanding. I understand that that’s the intention behind this strategy, but in practice it actually comes off as a shock-and-awe guerrilla tactic to argumentation that alienates rather than invite collaboration. Again, if the goal is…
> shock-and-awe guerrilla tactic…that alienates rather than invite collaboration
That’s a good point, and I’m not sure I have a good answer to it! I believe rhetorical guerrilla warfare is an intentional and important tactic. My gut tells me part of the goal is precisely to make me and others like me feel uncomfortable: I generally have the freedom to not feel alienated, but that’s not a privilege afforded to vast swaths of our society who are historically disadvantaged. I can only imagine the alienation I would feel as a Black engineer—but as a White engineer, I feel right at home on my team of other White engineers, and alienation is something I can just choose to walk away from. Not so for others…
Still, I know that’s not a satisfying answer / response to your comment. You’re right that feeling alienated doesn’t make me more inclined to have open minded / collaborative discussions, in general. But given the structural imbalances at play, I emotionally feel that the graceful and “right” way for me to engage is by listening despite my discomfort, as a tool for learning the perspectives of others not just theoretically, but experientially.
:shrug: None of this is easy…but it’s important to me to pursue mutual care and understanding with as much good faith as I can muster, even when it’s uncomfortable for me.
Re: How Basecamp Blew Up
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't believe in a lot of the framing around implicit bias. I think a lot of this is actually racist. So yes, the article does claim that he said this. Obviously he contests this, but it appears to be just his word alone against other people who were on the call. The balance of evidence does not appear to be on his side, here.
Except none of them are stepping forward from what we can tell. It's all an anonymous patchwork of he-said-she-said except for Singer. His evidence is the only evidence because the rest is completely unverifiable.
Feels a bit too close to “fake news” for my comfort.
Anonymous sources are the norm in all kinds of reporting; there is no real reason to be surprised that no ex employee is volunteering for the kind of harassment that signing their name to this story would draw in, especially now that Breitbart and a variety of alt-right grifters have decided to take big, public pro-Basecamp and anti-“woke” worker stance. It’s easy to say “if it’s real they would say so publicly”, but honestly the vast majority of us here, myself included, would not do so if it meant getting harassed by the Breitbart crowd.
This of course does not mean that this is real. Just because I could imagine myself being an anonymous source in such circumstances does not mean that such sources exist. But in this case we can be savvy media consumers and look at the official pushback from Basecamp and those named, and the pushback is incredibly small in the number of contested details. Singer corrected literally one quote on the record. This implies to me that Newton is largely on the money in terms of factual events.
Also, the flip side is also true; we don’t seem to have a lot of current of former Basecamp employees coming out to defend the company and decry these articles as being wrong. Instead we have ... silence. Now everything I said above about wanting to be anonymous is still true for these hypothetical people as well, but if you’re going to complain about the lack of people on the record attacking the company, then surely the lack of people defending the company (executives excluded, natch) on the record should also be a data point, should it not?
Re: How Basecamp Blew Up
#395"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…
> Nor did he see the irony in the fact that holding a person responsible for horrible action of people who look like them is the same way of thinking that leads bigots to blame all Arabs for the actions of the 9/11 hijackers. I like to do the "Muslim test" on these things: replace "white people" (or "men", or any other group) with "Muslims" and see how it sounds then. If it sounds yikes then it's probably not a good…
Muslims are adherents to a religion. Using "Arab" might be more relevant.
Re: How Basecamp Blew Up
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the BLM co-founders and current directory of the BLM non-profit is one of those "few anarchists" who proposed to outright abolish the police.[1] That article also proposes to abolish prisons, the military, borders, capitalism, and includes phrases such as "U.S. [and its] fabricated borders" and calls to "fight the U.S. state". If you had told me this was written by some troll to make BLM look bad then I'd beli…
The BLM organization and the movement are two different things. You’d be lucky to randomly be able to find a single black person who knows any of the founders of the org or any of their principles except to reduce police brutality.
Yes, and people keep saying this, and people keep being confused by this.
I don't understand why people are so resistant, or even outright hostile, in making the social justice movement (including the sentiments BLM expresses) more effective. If you truly care about social justice then being as effective as possible should be the #1 priority, no?
I don't care much for BLM not because I don't care about their goals, but because I don't think it's very effective for a number of reasons. Yet every time I raise this it's either dismissed like your comment does, or met with a surprising amount of hostility. Aren't conversations on how to best affect these kind of changes super-duper important? It appears not, and it seems BLM has become the goal, rather than the vehicle to get at the goal.
Re: How Basecamp Blew Up
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
The buck stops somewhere. I get that it's super easy to just claim white supremacy is everywhere, but implicitly the claim is that someone put it there and is perpetuating it. At a company of 58 people, you're pointing at a very small group of people as the ones responsible for all of this supposed white supremacy. Unless everyone swallows the Kool-Aid and apologizes for being so racist, someone in leadership will ev…
Alternatively, you exhibit the kind of people skills that should be a baseline qualification for a senior leader. You don't draw lines in the sand, you don't internally frame this as an them-vs-me thing, you certainly don't try to give your staff condescending mini-lectures about basic topics in social criticism such as how framing works. Brinksmanship isn't going to lead anywhere good, and someone has to take the fi…
How do you avoid being framed as “us vs. them” when you are being openly called a white supremacist?
What you’re describing is “appeasement.” Presume they’re operating in good faith and that maybe they’re kind of right. So you cut a compromise, and sure enough, the white supremacy is still there! And what do they recommend? More appeasement.
I agree it was a management problem, but the problem is it wasn’t identified and nipped in the bud sooner.
Re: How Basecamp Blew Up
#398Earlier 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…
> The Hutus and Tutsis didn’t start with some off-color ribbing and escalate from there
Perhaps it didn't "start" with "off-color ribbing" but the usage of 'jokes' (see: Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines) to desensitize people to hatred towards the Tutsis is well documented.
It was unpopular to speak out against this sort of thing, and certainly was something that got worse over time.
Further, racial violence in the Americas didn't start with jokes either, it started with the genocide the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and continued with the trans-Atlantic slave trade ...
Re: How Basecamp Blew Up
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Humor has a long history as use as a coping mechanism for difficult situations.
Both hypotheses are extremely difficult to prove or disprove and most likely, neither is strictly true. Human society is complicated / varied and I find it quite possible that there are times where hatred progressed both directions on that pyramid. There are also probably times where good natured blowing of of steam help prevent difficult situations from devolving and times where it inflamed hatred.
I don't understand what would make one theory "ex post facto" and the other not since both have similar temporal positioning...
But I don't think the point was to justify the jokes, I think the point was to call into question the epistemic justifications.
> To try and defend this kind of juvenile behavior
What defense was offered? This list was openly acknowledged as unprofessional, inappropriate, and something that should have been caught sooner.
Re: How Basecamp Blew Up
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Is it possible that they were doing exactly that in trying to focus the staff on work itself? A lot of the complaints or commentary I've seen across a few issues, leaving aside this more acute issue was that DHH and JF were entirely comfortable espousing _their_ opinions and feelings on things, but a lot less interested in hearing other people's.
In the sense that they are ultimately responsible for the business/brand, legal repercussions, etc. It's their baby - Jason's run it for 20+ years. Seems like they're effectively saying, by all means push your opinions on your private channels, and we'll do the same. Obviously if someone feels it's handled poorly, they bail (as some have), but I'm guessing the severance and political polarisation could be factors there?
If I'd founded something 20+ years ago (well, I have), and at some point a third of the business was putting work time into deciding HR policy that was alienating other staff, I'd be looking at resolving it too. I've worked for myself for 20+ years so can't be sure, but I haven't heard of anything like that equality-council from any friends working here in Australia. This situation might be more unique to current USA?