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

One of their iOS devs who left has been incredibly vocal about how he no longer felt like this was somewhere he could work because of this policy and its effects, so I think you're plainly wrong (or insisting that there's no way we could take a person at their word). https://twitter.com/georgeclaghorn

It's a lot more likely that the 1/3rd that left both left because they were unhappy with the policy, and because they thought they could get jobs elsewhere. I would bet there are some people who stayed behind who didn't believe they could find a job this good soon but who also disagreed with the policy. Which, I get it.

6 months free money is not as much as you'd think; a new job hunt takes 3, even for talented, in-demand people.

Not gonna provide my view on the politics side, but cutting benefits while at the same time making a controversial statement about workplace politics is a...bold move. The letter very noticeably says that they are providing compensation for these benefits for this year. That holds the clear implication that they won't keep compensating people for the lack of benefits. Also, providing a monetary value for benefits misses the fact that time is also worth money. If you're going to cut my benefits, you should also compensate me for the additional time spent replacing these benefits.

Doing such a clearly cost saving move and trying to frame it as keeping focus makes me feel like Basecamp is using "mission focus" as an excuse to make a bunch of unpopular decisions and bundle them together.

"My pronouns are she/her" is political when you have an audience who disagree with your right to choose them.

(And those disagreeing are wrong, but telling them that suddenly, by the logic of the "no politics" crowd, makes you the problem. Almost like all of this exists to reify a status quo that's good for the people currently high on the hog. Hm.)

Yes, and I am saying this is a weird thing for a human to do (the explanation here is that the person was the one contributing to the list, and is overcompensating).

Making of lists of funny names is not the first step to genocide. Genocide is horrendous, but the reasons for genocide are complex and the notion of a pyramid to genocide based only on jokes or whatever...is just wrong (again, that is what I said earlier about people not understanding history, I think it isn't coincidental that history/politics education in the US is of very low quality). That view is based on an extremely narrow, individualistic notion of human action/events that has no correlation with reality (living in a society where everyone accuses everyone else of being a genocidaire is also not fun for anyone, it is not inclusive, it is not diverse...I am sure lawyers would love it, no-one else would).

This is the kind of thing that you would hope people can appreciate through common sense...but, unfortunately, that isn't the case anymore.

Also, the issue isn't about someone being fired for promoting genocide...again, this is one of the subtleties of argumentation that you should learn at school...DHH's point was only about why the person was posting the pyramid of hate, self-evidently he did not believe that anyone in the office was attempting to organise a genocide (why does this needs to be said). His view on the list was clear: the list shouldn't have happened, it was bad, people who made the list should have not made it (rather than making it, and then attempting to over-compensate by saying the list was the first step to genocide).

...the stuff that people argue about on here is truly amazing. Again, the US underinvests massively in history/politics/philosophy...these are problems that just don't happen in some societies.