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Changes at Basecamp

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Re: Changes at Basecamp

#231

Post by nemo44x »

detaro wrote: post #225
nemo44x wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This entire article and thread and Twitter are people complaining that the boss just said “no stop pestering us about it”. You made my point?

If you don't see a difference between "don't talk about any political topics" and "stop pushing for the company to do something about your pet topic X", then yes, that is your point. But given you recognized a difference between "talking about your hunting" and "pushing for the company to support the NRA", I doubt that is the case.

The fable was about the slippery slope or w/e. Maybe not a Pynchon-esque metaphor here, but I’m not a writer.

But why is it different to pressure a company into publicly supporting 2a? It’s literally a right as sacred as speech or voting.

Why does that seem weird but other things not?

Re: Changes at Basecamp

#232

Post by bsima »

drewbug01 wrote: post #202
bsima wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because your spouse existing is a “political” concept The point is to explicitly not politicize these conversations and instead talk and relate on a human-to-human level

My point is that some people consider my equal participation in that conversation to be inherently political. My point is essentially that anti-lgbt folk will dehumanize the conversation under the guise of “no politics”. Or at least that they could, and that it sure used to happen an awful lot, and it wasn’t that long ago.

I think it’s more dehumanizing to be reduced to a label than it is to be approached face-to-face

Re: Changes at Basecamp

#233

Post by sokoloff »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #131
anm89 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. That's the whole list... Want to compile the 1000 page document that would be all the places who haven't unionized?

That's unnecessary. I'm simply demonstrating that unionization has occurred in businesses far larger and with arguably more difficult organizing environments than Basecamp (with a total of ~60 employees). 800 Google workers thought it important enough to join their union.

800 out of 135000 is 6 tenths of 1%.

A Basecamp union organizer who was the only one to decide to join their own creation of a Basecamp Workers Union would already be 3 times as successful as the Google union on a per-capita basis.

Re: Changes at Basecamp

#234

Post by Dylanlacey »

drewbug01 wrote: post #218
babesh wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked in tech over twenty years ago and I knew multiple same sex couples back then. It wasn’t an issue at all. This was the Bay Area. May have been different elsewhere. It is still not an issue in the Bay Area.

The Bay Area has always been a bit ahead of the curve there - but my point isn’t just an LGBT thing... that’s the example most relevant to me personally. People of color could probably talk about similar issues related to this kind of policy. Of note: Basecamp was at least until recently based primarily in the Midwest, in Chicago. Bay Area culture influences them in the same way it influences all tech culture, but th…

This^^ It's one of the gayest places on earth, of _course_ it's going to be more accepting.

Re: Changes at Basecamp

#235

Post by jakelazaroff »

bsima wrote: post #186
rtpg wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another basic example: imagine working at Basecamp and being like "Can we sponsor Django Girls?" (whatever the Rails equivalent is) Like maybe you want to have a more diverse team and this is one way of trying to recruit for it. Without these "oh politics is sin" things, the bosses saying no might require them to justify it. Instead they can now weasel their way out of this kind of stuff, and basically shield themsel…

> "Can we sponsor Django Girls?" Sure, just do it with your own money, not company money

To be clear: are you saying that corporations shouldn’t sponsor anything, or are you singling out Django Girls as a “political” sponsorship?

If the latter, you’re kinda proving GP’s point. Django Girls is an ostensibly non-political organization, politicized solely because it acknowledges an aspect of people’s identity.

Re: Changes at Basecamp

#236

Post by bsima »

rtpg wrote: post #196
bsima wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Can we sponsor Django Girls?" Sure, just do it with your own money, not company money

Should I pay for recruiter fees out of my own pocket if I want to send a recruiter to an HBCU while I'm at it? I'm not going to do a diversity spiel, but I have had the "would be nice for our team to have different kinds of people" discussion before, and part of solving that can involve more focused recruiting efforts (including stuff like sponsoring those kinds of events). It's totally a work-related thing. Why woul…

Recruiting is different than public outreach. I think the strategy in recruiting is to hire the best people you can regardless of identity. “Best” is qualified by the tasks of the particular role

Re: Changes at Basecamp

#237

Post by kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj »

swyx wrote: post #103
antidaily wrote: post #47

sam's pissed.

this was very relevant to me and something I didn't know - the employees found out at the same time as the outside world. Jason and DHH seem to not have bothered getting internal consensus first before going ahead with this thing. (confirmed with sam) live feed of employee reactions https://twitter.com/i/lists/1202647

[dead]

Re: Changes at Basecamp

#238

Post by hderms »

drewbug01 wrote: post #218
babesh wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked in tech over twenty years ago and I knew multiple same sex couples back then. It wasn’t an issue at all. This was the Bay Area. May have been different elsewhere. It is still not an issue in the Bay Area.

The Bay Area has always been a bit ahead of the curve there - but my point isn’t just an LGBT thing... that’s the example most relevant to me personally. People of color could probably talk about similar issues related to this kind of policy. Of note: Basecamp was at least until recently based primarily in the Midwest, in Chicago. Bay Area culture influences them in the same way it influences all tech culture, but th…

Chicago is pretty LGBTQ friendly. It's culturally more midwestern than say, NYC, but it's not like we're talking about St. Louis here.

Re: Changes at Basecamp

#239

Post by StanislavPetrov »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #191

There's a great blog entry I just read about this, "On Politics At Work". I think the author effectively hits on a real problem with a lot of these discussions. https://json.blog/2021/04/26/on-politics-at.html To some folks, "politics at work" means "endless battle royale political debates among coworkers in a Slack all day long; why wouldn't you be against that? But to others, "politics at work" means "are we paying…

>But to others, "politics at work" means "are we paying women and men the same for doing the same job?" and "are our recruiting practices leading to a non-diverse workforce and missing out on great people who should work here?" and "what problems does our company sole, and for whom?". These are really important questions. Why wouldn't you want to bring them up at work?

These are questions for people at work whose job description involves hiring, payroll, and the corporate charter. These aren't collective questions to be debated and answered by employees whose jobs are completely unrelated. If, for example, you are hired to be a programmer, then your job is to program - that's all. Its not up to you to decide what the company's mission should be, or, "whose problems we are trying to solve". While a programmer is debating these philosophical and political questions with other programmers, they aren't doing the job they were hired to do - program. Certainly if the ownership of a company decides that they want to hire people to not only program, but also opine on their political and moral beliefs, that is their right. But is also their right to decide they don't want to pay people they hire to opine and debate during work hours on issues that have no direct relevance to the job they were hired to do. Just as it is your right to refuse to accept a job at a company that hires you to exclusively do a job without bringing your political baggage into the workplace.

Re: Changes at Basecamp

#240

Post by drewbug01 »

bsima wrote: post #232
drewbug01 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that some people consider my equal participation in that conversation to be inherently political. My point is essentially that anti-lgbt folk will dehumanize the conversation under the guise of “no politics”. Or at least that they could, and that it sure used to happen an awful lot, and it wasn’t that long ago.

I think it’s more dehumanizing to be reduced to a label than it is to be approached face-to-face

It sure is. But “being reduced to a label” is one of the outcomes of such policies, and it’s exactly what I worry about when they’re enacted (because that’s how it used to work).

I’m not the one making it an identity politics / label issue; I’m saying “these policies are cover for mean people to reduce me to just a label and then weaponize that against me.”

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