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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

#511

Post by pseudalopex »

rafale wrote: post #489
joshuamorton wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The slogan is only divisive if you make it so. It certainly isn't "intentionally" divisive. > Since Biden was elected for example Looking at Google trends, there's basically no correlation between Bidens election and "Black Lives Matter". You're reaching to creating a narrative that doesn't fit the facts. > even if I support the general idea that our police force and judicial system need reform to infuse them with mo…

> Looking at Google trends, there's basically no correlation between Bidens election and "Black Lives Matter". https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge... There is a perfect correlation. > Do you support any group or organization that does policeor criminal justice reform? It's not the issue here. I am not even trying to say you are wrong about BLM. My point is it's one of those issues where 2 rea…

The chart shows a large spike in June 2020. Then a sharp decline between June and the election. Like the protests. Then a slow decline after the election with small spikes in 2021.

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#512

Post by pseudalopex »

proxyon wrote: post #483
whymauri wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Acknowledging discrimination in our industry is distracting, so to stop being distracted I'm going to focus on writing on how un-distracted we are because we're _mission focused._ I'm going to do this several times.' I can't be the only person feeling a sense of irony, here. A big argument you see a lot is that people who raise concerns around equitable treatment only do it for clout, the ever popular 'virtue signal…

What you've said makes no sense. Coinbase offered a bunch of employees the change to quit gracefully with an exit package rather than fire them. That's not virtue signaling, that's material reality.

Companies do it all the time without seeking publicity.

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#513

Post by joshuamorton »

rafale wrote: post #489
joshuamorton wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The slogan is only divisive if you make it so. It certainly isn't "intentionally" divisive. > Since Biden was elected for example Looking at Google trends, there's basically no correlation between Bidens election and "Black Lives Matter". You're reaching to creating a narrative that doesn't fit the facts. > even if I support the general idea that our police force and judicial system need reform to infuse them with mo…

> Looking at Google trends, there's basically no correlation between Bidens election and "Black Lives Matter". https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge... There is a perfect correlation. > Do you support any group or organization that does policeor criminal justice reform? It's not the issue here. I am not even trying to say you are wrong about BLM. My point is it's one of those issues where 2 rea…

> There is a perfect correlation.

Erm, no. If there were some sort of correlation, looking at that graph you should be able to tell me where on the graph Biden either won the election or took office (Nov 4th or Jan 21st). You can't. What you do see is a wonderful bit of exponential decay from an event that wasn't related to Biden: the death of George Floyd on May 26. That's the vertical line. And then an expected exponential decay.

If you look at https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2020-01-01%202..., for example, Election, Joe Biden, and Trump are all strongly correlated. Heck, Trump and Black Lives Matter are briefly correlated, but Election and Black Lives Matter aren't.

> Strawman fallacy.

No, you literally made an, if we want to get technical, argumentum ad antiquitatem. Pointing that out isn't a fallacy. It's what you did.

> Which in turn allow people with different ideologies to work together effectively in a safe non-toxic environment.

People who disagree with you would claim that often they do not feel the environment is safe and non-toxic. They aren't comfortable with the status quo, hence their attempts to change it. That you are unaware of the toxicity and lack of safety doesn't invalidate their experiences. In fact, its an example of the challenges they have to overcome to achieve the safety and non-toxicity you enjoy and presume.

> My only argument is that work environment shouldn't be politicized.

No, you said, and I quote:

" It's not like the issue is so obvious and simple (i.e. all people have equal rights, women should be able to go to school, ...) that it's okay employers take a side." Your opinion is that employers can clearly take a side sometimes, but only in cases where some norm (the constitution as it is today) dictates. If that's not what you intended, please clarify, but that's precisely the argument you made, and again, it wasn't a strawman for me to point that out.

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#514

Post by moosedev »

muench wrote: post #391
KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Companies with great policies can sometimes retain employees on that basis alone! So I recently quit a FAANG and they sent me a COBRA notice with the cost of their insurance benefit. You can get great FAANG insurance for about $10k a year, which is peanuts for a Silicon Valley engineer. We need to dispel the myth that Silicon Valley engineers are working for health insurance.

COBRA means you’re still getting insurance through your (former) employer. How much does the same insurance benefit cost if you buy it fully on your own? In my experience you can’t even buy a similar plan as an individual. And definitely not at the same price.

This matches my recent experience. I researched plans on Washington state's health marketplace and found that while the available plans were generally much cheaper than COBRA, their coverage for out-of-network or out-of-state care was limited (e.g. "emergency" care only, where the definition of emergency is vague and up to the insurer). And even if you are careful to get taken to an "in-network" hospital, there are plenty of horror stories about inadvertently getting treated by an "out-of-network" provider while inside and being on the hook for the entire bill.

I couldn't find a marketplace plan that didn't give me real doubts about the possible financial impact of traveling to other states(!) so I decided to suck it up and pay for COBRA for peace of mind. Of course, COBRA will run out after 18 months, but I plan to get another corporate job before then.

TL:DR if you have (or recently left) a fancy corporate job here, you have access to a group plan with nice coverage. If you have to buy an individual plan, it seems you cannot get the same level of coverage even if you're willing to pay for it, and the available coverage leaves you with the risk of huge medical bills if you suddenly need healthcare while simply traveling within the country.

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#515

Post by throwawaysea »

olegious wrote: post #121
fleddr wrote: post #71

Just want to say how ridiculous this is from a European perspective. I know nothing better than for any company to be mission focused. You go to work to do work. And you do so with a degree of neutrality, as you can't pick your colleagues, yet still need to cooperate with them. This doesn't mean you can't say anything at all, it means you shouldn't be overly divisive or confrontational. A company isn't your personal…

Having worked in both (EU and US) I have seen both sides. I saw the trend (identity based politics) starting to appear in tech in Europe, for example "we shouldn't try to win business from company X due to their stance on issue Y" came up multiple times in company all hands (500 person company).

That’s disappointing but I suppose it is to be expected since the Internet allows cultural exports at light speed. I am reminded of the recent warning from the French education minister (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/09/world/europe/france-threa...):

> French politicians, high-profile intellectuals and journalists are warning that progressive American ideas — specifically on race, gender, post-colonialism — are undermining their society. “There’s a battle to wage against an intellectual matrix from American universities,’’ warned Mr. Macron’s education minister.

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#516

Post by pseudalopex »

downWidOutaFite wrote: post #305
EastSmith wrote: post #293

PG's note on the thread is very interesting: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1445305326820020227

I didn't find that interesting. "Twitter opinion" is a laughable stereotype. Is the idea that the right-wing "red pilled" don't form online mobs?

Maybe they thought Paul Graham trafficking in laughable stereotypes had interesting implications for Y Combinator and Hacker News.

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#517

Post by refenestrator »

doopy1 wrote: post #486
pcthrowaway wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1% of global energy consumption is hardly a rounding error. I'm massively excited for the potential of cryptocurrency, but there's a reason ETH is moving to PoS, and newer PoW projects aren't getting the same kind of traction.

The most aggressive estimates I've seen are below 1% (maybe around half), which is quite literally a rounding error. Don't get me wrong I agree it's a lot, but it's a drop in the bucket on the global scale. What about the fact that china is pumping out something like 1/3rd of the world's emissions? What about excess livestock? FWIW - I do agree that PoW is not ideal and will largely be phased out, but there are lower…

In the neighborhood of 1 percent of all energy consumption, for literally nothing, is a colossal waste.

Try to think of it in tons of coal. You proud of that?

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#518

Post by remarkEon »

plorg wrote: post #499
remarkEon wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I take it most people don't see your existence, as you are, as a political problem? I want to point out that this is a perfect example of how absolutely mind numbing and toxic it is to interact with a lot of these "woke" types. OP made an benign comment ("I want to work at work, not worry about the political opinions of my coworkers.") and its taken in the maximally worst way possible . There's no nuance, and no roo…

If a trans person walked into my office their existence would be a political problem, because none of my coworkers or company leadership accept the legitimacy of trans identity. It isn't that the person's physical safety is in danger (necessarily), but merely being present makes them the subject of politics. And those politics are generally hostile. I have a trans friend who was qualified for an open position, and I…

Frankly, none of what you said is relevant to my point. What I have a problem with is the immediate reversion to the most caustic framing possible of a person who disagrees with you.

> If a trans person walked into my office their existence would be a political problem

Maybe my problem with this is a semantic one, since I’m a student of language, but describing it in this way is legitimately insane to me. Insane in the sense that I don’t think the word “existence” is being used in a way that means what is meant by e.g. OP in this case.

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#519

Post by vkou »

remarkEon wrote: post #327
vkou wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It must be nice to have the privilege to not need to worry about the political opinions of your coworkers. I take it most people don't see your existence, as you are, as a political problem?

>I take it most people don't see your existence, as you are, as a political problem? I want to point out that this is a perfect example of how absolutely mind numbing and toxic it is to interact with a lot of these "woke" types. OP made an benign comment ("I want to work at work, not worry about the political opinions of my coworkers.") and its taken in the maximally worst way possible . There's no nuance, and no roo…

Your response, ironically, is in the exact same vein of what you criticize. You interpret what I said it in the worst possible, and particularly politically slanted way.

What about my post makes you assume I wasn't talking about the experience of a conservative in a tech firm? Much ink has been spilled on the subject of people of that political orientation not feeling welcome in those workplaces. People who are trans experience this. People who are gay experience this. People who are people of colour experience this. People who are conservative, or Christians experience this. When any of those people push back on this, they are bringing politics into the workplace. James Damore's fifteen minutes of fame were not some strange kind of apolitical performance from his end, but I think we both know that he's not the kind of person you're thinking of, when you are complaining about people expressing a victim mentality.

Seeing yourself as a victim is not limited to any one particular group in this space - but you are incorrectly assuming that only the 'woke' crowd is responsible for it.

What I see is a pretty clear pattern - where when the outgroup feels uncomfortable, we call their grousing 'identity politics', but when our ingroup feels the same way, we call their complaints non-political.

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#520

Post by remarkEon »

vkou wrote: post #519
remarkEon wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I take it most people don't see your existence, as you are, as a political problem? I want to point out that this is a perfect example of how absolutely mind numbing and toxic it is to interact with a lot of these "woke" types. OP made an benign comment ("I want to work at work, not worry about the political opinions of my coworkers.") and its taken in the maximally worst way possible . There's no nuance, and no roo…

Your response, ironically, is in the exact same vein of what you criticize. You interpret what I said it in the worst possible, and particularly politically slanted way. What about my post makes you assume I wasn't talking about the experience of a conservative in a tech firm? Much ink has been spilled on the subject of people of that political orientation not feeling welcome in those workplaces. People who are trans…

I appreciate a good round of gaslighting now and then, but you and I both know exactly what you meant in your original post.
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