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A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

blog.coinbase.com

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Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#461

Post by john_moscow »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #365
rednerrus wrote: post #330

My company is becoming increasingly political and it's terrible. I'd gladly go work at a company where I didn't have to engage with endless political activism. If I want to hear everyone's opinions on everything, I'd find their facebook page or the HN usernames and follow them.

My last company was trending in a similar direction. They would allow one ideological group to post completely unsubstantiated political claims, but opposing views were not allowed to be presented at all, even if they were thoroughly researched (this wasn't "official" policy, of course). Note that while I'm not a lawyer, I suspect that these permitted ideological viewpoints were sufficiently sexist and racist as to o…

My gut feeling is that allowing this at a workplace is a (rather perverse) variation of the "employee of the month" nonsense. I.e. instead of rewarding your subordinates monetarily, you give them a power to bully their peers, but not to compete with yourself.

It is also useful in pushing out "troublemakers". People that will not call BS on the unsubstantiated political claims are also less likely to call out corruption/nepotism/inefficiency of the middle management.

In the long term the company will stagnate and die, but we live in such a wonderful time of government bailouts, low interest rates and desperate investors, so it may take a long time to unravel.

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#462

Post by throwaway894345 »

thephyber wrote: post #404
throwaway894345 wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I buy that reasoning standalone (albeit it's still prone to misinterpretation), but in context its advocates appear to believe it is congruent with or equivalent to 'equality'.

In mathematical terms it might be similar to lay persons confusing inverse for converse. “Reverse” is not the most precise word for the term, but so long as there is no compiler error when a person uses the wrong word, human natural language will continue to be sloppy. Let’s stop being overly pedantic — that is one of the guidelines of this site

It’s not pedantry. People think that because the word is “reverse” or “anti” that it means “the opposite of racist”, but it doesn’t. The distinction is fundamental to our national race conversation.

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#463

Post by beaned »

sneak wrote: post #373
lawnchair_larry wrote: post #46

I am beyond sick of political activists in the workplace, so I hope this trend catches on.

It’s a bummer that Coinbase’s ploy to intentionally conflate not supporting the Black Lives Matter movement (that is, a clear implicit endorsement of the status quo) with generalized left/right-political-activism-at-work seems to have worked, at least for a lot of people who aren’t paying attention. This isn’t about office politics, or political activism at work. This is about Coinbase making an explicit vote for the…

I think this very view is likely what made the coinbase workplace so toxic and uninviting. "Black lives matter" is a statement that everyone already agrees with. "Black Lives Matter" is a political organization with political objectives, including the de-emphasis of the nuclear family, socialist economics, and explicit financial funnelling to the Democrat party.

It's a moral "package deal." The idea being that if you reject BLM for its bad politics, you reject that black lives matter. And if you accept it, you also accept a bunch of other shit you're not actually for.

BLM should be recognized for the moral "package deal" that it is, and vehemently rejected. It's dishonest.

It's not Coinbase that is conflating anything, BLM itself is a conflation of ideas.

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#464

Post by throwaway581029 »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #365
rednerrus wrote: post #330

My company is becoming increasingly political and it's terrible. I'd gladly go work at a company where I didn't have to engage with endless political activism. If I want to hear everyone's opinions on everything, I'd find their facebook page or the HN usernames and follow them.

My last company was trending in a similar direction. They would allow one ideological group to post completely unsubstantiated political claims, but opposing views were not allowed to be presented at all, even if they were thoroughly researched (this wasn't "official" policy, of course). Note that while I'm not a lawyer, I suspect that these permitted ideological viewpoints were sufficiently sexist and racist as to o…

Increasingly aggressive activism of this sort started ramping up at my employer a couple of years ago. Several outspoken activists started complaining and demanding all-company meetings, which were granted by HR and company leadership. In these mandatory meetings, which were attended by hundreds of employees, all sorts of contradictory accusations were lodged by the activists. For example, in the first meeting, one of activists complained about being (accidentally) mis-gendered by a new employee. In another meeting, a different activist complained about an employee apologizing for mis-gendering them. Apparently this made the activist feel awkward, so they'd have preferred no apology at all. It was at this point I realized there is no reasoning with activists such as these. Their demands weren't coherent. They were just a bunch of people complaining about hurt feelings. These meetings must have cost the company millions of dollars and huge amounts of lost development time. And they certainly didn't resolve anything.

I and a lot of my colleagues just want to do our work without being forced to participate in regular struggle sessions.

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#465

Post by throwaway894345 »

jariel wrote: post #434
monoideism wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why use a special term? Just "racism" works very well. The idea that only certain races can "qualify" for racism is Orwellian.

The intersectional view is that 'real racism' requires a power imbalance - which is actually a fair point. It would be unfair not to recognize that some groups have considerably more power than others. That said - it's still racism one way or another, discriminatory etc. and in 2020 it's getting really hard to talk about individuals as being a function of their race. So while it's worth reminding ourselves of the int…

> The intersectional view is that 'real racism' requires a power imbalance - which is actually a fair point. It would be unfair not to recognize that some groups have considerably more power than others.

I could get down with this if whites behaved as a class, working for their own mutual interests; however, such whites are few and far between and generally powerless.

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#466

Post by pinewurst »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #387
droopyEyelids wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who knows if official numbers are kept for our industry, but I haven't noticed a decrease in the pace of hiring. Bitcoin isn't hurting, either.

I was recently laid off in tech and I flipped the "I'm looking for work" switch on linkedin and got literally dozens of messages from recruiters every day. I ultimately got a job that paid 10% better than my previous job, and I rushed the decision because I had only a small fraction of the severance that coinbase employees are receiving. Even with the "looking for work" switch toggled off, I get several messages from…

What buzzwords do you have in your profile that so attract recruiters? I’m not having anything like that happen to me.

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#467

Post by gnicholas »

decafninja wrote: post #210

I don't work in a Silicon Valley tech company, so maybe my perspective is out of touch with what's going on in SV. But I thought it was generally understood that there were certain topics you really ought not to talk about at work including religion, politics, disclosing your salary, etc. Has this changed? Or am I misunderstanding something?

At many companies, employees are encouraged to "bring their whole selves to work". This most definitely includes politics.

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#468

Post by zaroth »

tzs wrote: post #460
drivingmenuts wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to treat politics and religion as subjects best dealt with on my own time. The company is paying me to get results for the company, not the larger society. If I somehow disagree with the perceived politics, I’m free to seek other employment. Implicit in this position is that the company doesn’t get to dictate either politics or religion handled in my personal time.

So if you have a job you like, at a company that up to now has been only making products that you have no problem with, and they started working on something that you found morally reprehensible and assigned you to work on it, either you would work on it without bringing up your concerns or you would quit?

The problem is almost never an issue of the ethical nature of the company's own product or service. The "politicization" problem is largely around social activism that is adjacent to the company's mission.

Which is why Coinbase is saying specifically there are politics which are central to their mission that they still must naturally engage with.

I think any engineer who has a moral quandary about the work the are doing should absolutely take it up with management, up to including whistle-blowing or resigning. Professional Engineers put their license on the line with this, mere computer engineers may not have so much at stake professionally but are equally ethically bound.

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#469

Post by celdon25 »

protomyth wrote: post #446
celdon25 wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could consider working for a 501(c)(3) charity, where employees are forbidden by law to make most types of political statements (including in private) using company equipment or channels. The actual laws around this are nuanced and don't cover all types of political speech, but it covers enough to where the average employee will be wise to think twice before saying just about anything political at work. The IRS h…

You could consider working for a 501(c)(3) charity, where employees are forbidden by law to make most types of political statements (including in private) using company equipment or channels That's not quite how it actually works. https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organiz...

I work for a 501(c)(3). IIRC from the company meeting we had with an attorney who specializes in this subject, taking a political stance can fall under the category of indirect participation in a political campaign. If you're using company channels to make a statement, you're effectively campaigning under the official badge of that company, even if you're only talking to one other person who happens to work for that same company. You don't want to provide any ambiguity, however slight, to allow regulators to make a case for removal of the charity status. That can be the death of the company in many cases. What sounds reasonable to a layman and what sounds reasonable to a lawyer can be miles apart here.

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#470

Post by vkou »

jariel wrote: post #436
yokaze wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see it the other way around. (Almost) everything is political. The mission of the company is not disjoint from the society it is embedded in. Things have become divisive by being able to ignore and blend out the opposing views. By not talking and listening to one another. This is just one more step in that direction. Funnily enough, I think it has been extrapolated by Neal Stephenson in Diamond Age. We will end up…

" (Almost) everything is political. " Serving coffee is not political. Planning the network installation is not political. Code reviews, cleaning your office, optimizing the VM, getting a bandwidth deal, negotiating the SaaS pricing, choosing ingredients for the new dish, figuring out how many loads of gravel are needed for the landfill, picking a guy to fix the fence ... It's 99% not political. Google search is bare…

> Google search is barely political.

In 2020, the answer that google search gives to the query "Do masks protect you from COVID" is political.

Whether or not google search even works in, say, Russia... Or Australia is political.

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