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“About one-third of Basecamp employees accepted buyouts today”

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Re: “About one-third of Basecamp employees accepted buyouts today”

#201

Post by mbreese »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #190
grumblestumble wrote: post #89

A lot of the conversation from the "no politics at work" crowd here is centered around "these folks were wasting company time and losing productivity protesting this". That entirely misses the point. The loss of productivity around this issue is entirely on the leadership team. They let this fester - they were complicit in allowing this dumb-ass list to be circulated around the company for years, and when it became a…

>They let this fester - they were complicit in allowing this dumb-ass list to be circulated around the company for years Edit: nm, answered in other comments. What list? I don't see anything about that in the tweet, or in Basecamp's blogposts the other day...

They had a list of “funny” customer names. Needless to say, “funny” wasn’t a good description. The existence of this list for many years (and a recent reckoning over it) was what precipitated this entire situation for Basecamp.

Re: “About one-third of Basecamp employees accepted buyouts today”

#202

Post by bumbastique »

deanCommie wrote: post #120
mark_l_watson wrote: post #105

I have a different take on this, different than most comments here: I think that the founders/owners knew what they were doing based on reading their book and lightly following them. I have never been a customer. I know that I am just guessing, but they might have been making the lifestyle decision that they wanted a smaller and more focused company that was more joyful to manage/run. Also, I have some sympathy for a…

> no one should be allowed to say or do anything at work that makes anyone uncomfortable in a personal way; Agreed. But frequently calling that out IS what is deemed "political" by the person who was "just expressing an opinion", and "i just have a different ideology from you" > ; no one should really care much about other peoples’ politics. Some people's politics is other people's human rights. Would you want to wor…

> Some people's politics is other people's human rights.

Yeah but this all started because some of the more hysterical employees started saying nonsense like: a list of funny customer names is the first step towards genocide. Some people's politics are just retarded.

Re: “About one-third of Basecamp employees accepted buyouts today”

#203

Post by pochamago »

baron816 wrote: post #181

What I think is lost in the conversation here is that people don’t really have organizations they can go to to advocate their political positions. People have their families, their jobs, and maybe a couple of friends and that’s about it. They need an outlet to push the ideas and causes they care about. The workplace is one of the few places where they can feel like they’re having an impact, but that’s not really appr…

I think for the people who are so passionate they can't imagine not engaging with politics at work should look for careers in NGOs. I don't feel any disdain for activists, I just don't really want to work with them, and I think we'd both be happier if they were engaged in work that had first order effects on their beliefs instead of second or third

Re: “About one-third of Basecamp employees accepted buyouts today”

#204

Post by matteotom »

hogFeast wrote: post #153
grumblestumble wrote: post #89

A lot of the conversation from the "no politics at work" crowd here is centered around "these folks were wasting company time and losing productivity protesting this". That entirely misses the point. The loss of productivity around this issue is entirely on the leadership team. They let this fester - they were complicit in allowing this dumb-ass list to be circulated around the company for years, and when it became a…

That isn't what they said. What they said was: people who created the list went off on some weird tangent about the list being the first step towards genocide, if you have a problem with the list, you shouldn't contribute to the list (the subtle point here is that people who tend to be most active about these things usually feel guilty, management said the list was bad, management said it shouldn't have happened...wh…

[1] is a useful overview. Somebody posted the ADL's "pyramid of hate"[2], which links biased views and actions as necessary (but not sufficient) preconditions to genocide. Some people saw this as going too far since "obviously" anyone who contributes to genocide should be fired, while the whole point of the pyramid is anybody can perpetuate these really early preconditions (and at the end of the day we should encourage people to learn from these smaller mistakes, and not punish them as harshly as firing).

[1] https://www.platformer.news/p/-what-really-happened-at-basec... [2] https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/pyramid-of...

Re: “About one-third of Basecamp employees accepted buyouts today”

#205

Post by danjac »

aaomidi wrote: post #23
danjac wrote: post #18

I wouldn't be surprised if this will become a case study in future in how to self-destruct a successful company with a single bad communication, much like Gerald Ratner (although this may be due to long-term grievances we're not aware of).

They had many opportunities to reverse that blog post. They didn't and doubled down.

That's very typical behaviour from the founders. I mean it's worked for them in the past, but perhaps they never learned the value of a little humility.

Re: “About one-third of Basecamp employees accepted buyouts today”

#206

Post by themolecularman »

koheripbal wrote: post #146
grumblestumble wrote: post #89

A lot of the conversation from the "no politics at work" crowd here is centered around "these folks were wasting company time and losing productivity protesting this". That entirely misses the point. The loss of productivity around this issue is entirely on the leadership team. They let this fester - they were complicit in allowing this dumb-ass list to be circulated around the company for years, and when it became a…

Our experience when we issued our "No Politics / No Religion" policy at work was very positive. The few people who had an issue with it, subsequently quit or were terminated, and many of their co-workers actually thanked us afterwards for it. We didn't have to pay them to leave. One tried to use the company social media accounts to advance her politics, so we fired her, and the other person became frustrated that she…

I'm hoping the company I work for will follow suit and ban discussions about this stuff in the workplace.

Two years ago we had Ibrahim X Kendi speak at our company, he's now considered by many to be a "neo racist". Within months our open Slack channel for Q&A was shut-down.

However we still have a lot of the internal activists.

Re: “About one-third of Basecamp employees accepted buyouts today”

#207

Post by ido »

toolz wrote: post #100
_jal wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any employer that abruptly told me I needed to watch what I said at work would lose me, too. I'm not saying I demand the ability to be rude and awful, or go on political tirades, or anything even vaguely like that. But I spend more time talking to people I work with than any other set of people. Telling me I have to avoid entire categories of normal conversation is itself authoritarian politicization of the workplace…

and neither you nor your employer would be in the wrong. There's absolutely nothing wrong with wanting no limits w.r.t. political talk in the workplace but people like myself very much prefer a workplace where I don't have to bite my tongue 24/7 simply because my political views aren't popular in the tech industry.

    prefer a workplace where I don't have to bite my 
    tongue 24/7 simply because my political views 
    aren't popular
It's not that cut and dry; There's a difference between disagreeing about what is the optimal rate of taxes on labor and capital, if marijuana should be legalized, how much public money should be spent on infrastructure and so on vs say if trans people deserve acceptance & healthcare, gay people should be able to marry, women allowed to get abortions, or that ethnic and religious minorities shouldn't have to assimilate the values of the majority group.

If the discussion is about the person you are talking to getting to enjoy the same basic rights everyone else does (or even just exist) that's not just any political discussion and it affects them very personally and directly.

As they say, "your liberty to swing your fist ends where my nose begins".

Re: “About one-third of Basecamp employees accepted buyouts today”

#208

Post by danieljacksonno »

Trasmatta wrote: post #123
baron816 wrote: post #90

The proposed changes are wholly reasonable, and definitely not that different from 99% of the companies out there. The real problem is that they’ve spent years hiring for a type of person where this sort of thing is anathema.

Yeah, DHH is very outspoken politically, and fairly progressive. Of course there was going to be a selection bias where they hired similar people. This shouldn't have come as a surprise to them, and they should have realized the backlash. Shockingly bad foresight.

It's not that long ago that hiring a progressive usually meant hiring a tolerant person who would go the extra mile to include everyone, also people they disagreed with.

It's only recently that parts of the progressive movement has radicalized.

Re: “About one-third of Basecamp employees accepted buyouts today”

#209

Post by brailsafe »

nailer wrote: post #187
grumblestumble wrote: post #89

A lot of the conversation from the "no politics at work" crowd here is centered around "these folks were wasting company time and losing productivity protesting this". That entirely misses the point. The loss of productivity around this issue is entirely on the leadership team. They let this fester - they were complicit in allowing this dumb-ass list to be circulated around the company for years, and when it became a…

From DHH at https://world.hey.com/dhh/let-it-all-out-78485e8e : > In fact, reviewing the original list in question, the vast majority of names on it fall into the category of the two specific examples above. It's not a list of, say, primarily Asian names. Out of the 78 names listed on the last version we were able to recover, just 6 names appear to be Asian. > So connecting this to the shootings in Atlanta, because t…

Seems like pretty innocuous lulz to me.
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