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1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

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Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you know about OP? What if OP is an extremely productive programmer who lives to build product and has a huge impact, but also cares about black people or LGBTQ+ people? So he's worthless to coinbase? Thats insane.

False dichotomy. You can have political opinions and simultaneously not feel the need to express them at work.

> You can have opinions and simultaneously not feel the need to express them.

I have a ton of opinons, fully formed, in formation, and very occasionally the polar opposite of opinon I held strongly a few hours earlier that have never seen the light of day.

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#422

The thing I hate about this line of thinking is the supposed "distractions" of being mission-focused are nearly all related simply to basic rights/dignities for marginalized groups. I don't think anyone is saying companies need to take a strong stance on every political issue, but merely saying "we as a company believe the lives of our Black employees matter" or "we as a company welcome and accept our LGBTQ+ employee…

> merely saying "we as a company [...] don't tolerate anyone who doesn't [share our political stance]" are just... basic things you need to do in 2021

> Anyone who doesn't fully and unambiguously support [our political stance] simply does not belong in polite, modern society

That's extremely divisive and intolerant. Also, it's a cheap rhetorical trick to replace [political stance] with "doesn't want black people to be indiscriminately murdered". Literally no-one is arguing that black people should be indiscriminately murdered. Some people just want to do work at their workplace instead of engaging zealots in political debates that might lead to being cancelled at book burnings. That doesn't mean they want to genocide black people. You should learn to tolerate people who have political opinions different from yours.

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#423
post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because "the right of black people to not be killed randomly" is the motte, and supporting the movement Black Lives Matters and all that it stands for is the bailey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy . I'll add that people "randomly killing black people" are mostly killed by black people https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-... .

Unless I’m missing something the root comment did not mention BLM. That’s a whole different sentence. Please, if the only purpose of your comment is derailing, keep it to yourself.

The root comment was:

> The thing I hate about this line of thinking is the supposed "distractions" of being mission-focused are nearly all related simply to basic rights/dignities for marginalized groups. I don't think anyone is saying companies need to take a strong stance on every political issue, but merely saying "we as a company believe the lives of our Black employees matter" or "we as a company welcome and accept our LGBTQ+ employees and don't tolerate anyone who doesn't" are just...basic things you need to do in 2021. They aren't a distraction, I would say not saying them is a distraction.

The context is people asking the Coinbase CEO to make a statement about BLM. You can read about it here:

https://www.wired.com/story/turmoil-black-lives-matter-polit...

This is the start of the first paragraph of that article:

> IN EARLY JUNE, a week after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police, employees at Coinbase gathered, virtually, for an emotional meeting. In the previous few days, mirroring workplaces elsewhere, the company’s Slack channels had been filled with comments about the nationwide protests and demands for more support for Black employees. In the background hovered a specific question: Would Coinbase and its CEO, Brian Armstrong, make a public statement about Black Lives Matter and the racial justice movement, as so many Silicon Valley companies had?

I think it's fair to say here that the root comment changed the goalposts from "make a public statement about Black Lives Matter and the racial justice movement" to "merely saying "we as a company believe the lives of our Black employees matter"". Which, in that case, would fit my characterisation of that comment as a motte-and-bailey fallacy.

I appreciate your intent in keeping the discussion on topic, however in that case I think I was on topic.

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a straw man that doesn’t actually address my question. What do you do in an apolitical workplace and you’re going to engage in controversial medical intervention to align your body with your believed gender?

> What do you do in an apolitical workplace and you’re going to engage in controversial medical intervention to align your body with your believed gender? You just do it? In an apolitical workspace that isn't a political act, what you do in your free time is up to you. And if you change your legal name people should update how they call you. Nothing of that is political. If people make a fuzz they are dragging politi…

The way you picture politics as a wholly separate thing unrelated to the amount of consideration/kindness toward LGBT people or minorities is alien to me.

Twenty+ years ago, being visibly gay in a workplace was much less popular, to the point that many people made the choice between hiding that about themselves or facing a more hostile workplace. Things are very different today in many places. Did society just get overall kinder, or did it go through a political change?

In the past, asserting a visibly gay person warranted more consideration and kindness was definitely "political". Was there some point it wholly stopped being so?

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#425
post #404

Love that Armstrong did this at Coinbase. I want to work at work, not worry about the political opinions of my coworkers.

Work, including who you work for, is an inherently political act. The set of coworkers you have is a result of their and your political opinions. He didn't simply ban politics at work, however: he just refused to acknowledge the Black Lives Matter movement. Prior to that Coinbase had Black History Month events they conducted; now they don't.

> Work, including who you work for, is an inherently political act.

Are you arguing that for instance working for a machine tooling company such as MAG is an inherently political act? If so, how?

What about working on a farm. How is that political?

What about working as a contractor for building homes. How is that political?

> The set of coworkers you have is a result of their and your political opinions.

I know many in silicon valley that disagree with critical social justice (CSJ) that work at companies that have been successfully taken over by critical social justice activists to push the CSJ doctrine.

Are you arguing that those people work with their woke colleagues and a woke company for political reasons? If so, how?

> He didn't simply ban politics at work, however: he just refused to acknowledge the Black Lives Matter movement. Prior to that Coinbase had Black History Month events they conducted; now they don't.

A lot of enterprises are regulated by politicians, so of cause they have an interest in better regulations, but what we are referring to here is radical activism for a social revolution.

Activist employees turning companies into vehicles for doing activism for a radical social revolution like critical social justice is rather new. Most agree that this is inappropriate and disruptive to the core company mission. Most of us are tired of our woke colleagues and their constant focus on politics over the company mission, always whining. I understand that you disagree with this.

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#426
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to be mean, but I'd say that Brian Armstrong took the actions he did to weed out people like you from working at Coinbase.

"People like [the OP]" are in my experience consistently better at what they do than the sort of folks which Coinbase is now apparently soliciting.

In my considerable experience, I have seen true outliers on both sides of the specturm; truly high perfomers to total fuckwits.

There is 0 correlation.

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#427
post #406
post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are talking about is Microsoft in the Balmer years. No focus on delivery, no focus on perfection, churning out half assed products. See where it got them? Lost out on mobile, lost out on Cloud, Playstation is still a better gaming console, etc. Leaders inspire, letting things slide is bad for the culture of succcess.

From GP: > if you're in the right industry, you can be the worst manager on the planet and your company can still do okay. Has Coinbase ever had a culture of success, or were they just in cryptocurrency during the cryptocurrency explosion where everyone made money?

Is that statement even falsifiable, or is it just an observation on the random nature of company success?

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#428
post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Work, including who you work for, is an inherently political act. The set of coworkers you have is a result of their and your political opinions. He didn't simply ban politics at work, however: he just refused to acknowledge the Black Lives Matter movement. Prior to that Coinbase had Black History Month events they conducted; now they don't.

> Work, including who you work for, is an inherently political act. Are you arguing that for instance working for a machine tooling company such as MAG is an inherently political act? If so, how? What about working on a farm. How is that political? What about working as a contractor for building homes. How is that political? > The set of coworkers you have is a result of their and your political opinions. I know many…

> but what we are referring to here is radical activism for a social revolution.

It's not radical any longer, and it's nowhere near a revolution that is being asked for.

This is a straw man.

Millions are in the streets for basic human rights. This isn't a fringe position ("radical") and it's not an unreasonable demand ("revolution").

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#429
post #56

I wrote this in an email turning down a chance explore opportunities at Coinbase. > To me, diversity and social justice are critically important. I have the luxury of being selective in where I put my time and energy and it is important those values align with my career. I appreciate aspects of being "mission focused" but I think that there is a gulf between my personal values and Coinbase's values such that I would…

Sounds like their policy of discouraging wokes, who want to use their job as a cudgel for their own political views, from applying to their company is working.

That's not a fair interpretation of their comment. There are lots of middle ground between "wokes, who want to use their job as a cudgel for their own political views" and the people that Coinbase wants to recruit. Pretending that there is no middle ground is a tactic often used by the people you describe as "wokes". They were reasonable in their answer to Coinbase, I don't see why you need to peg them as an extremist.

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The folks pulling the late nights on projects and delivering great results - normally the issue is to get them to stop talking about work all the time (happy hour?!) - not to get them to start talking about a social justice issue around microaggressions or whatever!

I’m not sure why you think people who care about justice draw that energy from the same pool that motivates their work, as if it’s a zero-sum calculus. It isn’t. People who think about things systemically tend to apply that perspective in all of their practices. And that’s the value.

You're assuming that everyone that think about things systemically end up with the same views. I don't think that's true.
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