Changes at Basecamp

More importantly: who cares? The point of classical equal rights is the MLK, "my children won't be judged by the colour of their skin". The moment you ask a question like that, you are deliberately rolling back his vision by implying that a 100% male engineering group is a severe problem that needs a solution. It's not. It's an entirely expected statistical outcome given the demographics of people who study the profession. And it's inherently political to ask your question because by doing so, you're implying the answer matters, which is very much a political and left-wing stance. Whereas what's actually been encoded in law and up until very recently, culture, is that it's not even an allowed question to ask at all.

This blog post by Basecamp is excellent. What a fantastic company it must be to work for. It's too late now because I'm starting my own company and am fully dedicated to that, but part of the reason for doing so was the feeling that there weren't enough (any?) companies with these sorts of policies in the world. I'll add Basecamp to the small list of software firms I'd be willing to work at in future.

It's hard not to escape the conclusion that the goal of Basecamp's new policy is to quietly suppress or ultimately evict people who think like you.

There is no connection whatsoever between diversity and building product. Note: you haven't tried to explain your claim there is, just implied it's obvious, probably because you can't. I've seen people try to honestly intellectually defend a connection between employee diversity and product design before, and it's always a joke. You get anecdotes about face recognition not working on black people (reality: the software in question just had trouble with low contrast images and also struggled with white people's faces). And that's about it. I can't recall ever seeing someone actually argue that more women == better product because, well, that's a pretty sexist thing to believe isn't it? It implies men have no empathy, or that there's a universe of product requirements women will only tell to other women, etc.

If discrimination is happening against an individual and you work with the management chain to resolve it, that's not a political act, because you aren't attempting to radically remake the entire organisation for everyone (politics), but only address the specific problem that was actually observed.

I am not indifferent towards people who discriminate, whether that is positive or negative discrimination. But thankfully those people are a minority.

Most guys I know in the tech industry see it rather differently. The way they (we) see it is simple: there is rampant illegal discrimination in tech, and it's all against straight white guys like us. That's Europe. In the USA you'd probably include Asians too. Nonetheless I don't know a single guy who argues for affirmative action in favour of straight white guys: everyone argues for simply caring only about who does good work and damn the rest. That's not a position of indifference of course, it's a strongly held belief.

Look at this very thread. Just a few posts above this one is a guy who says he works at a firm where 40% of all recruitment efforts have to be for female engineers. Those sorts of policies are everywhere. That's actual, concrete discrimination. Firms put bonus pots aside for women, they set up competitions and career opportunities from which men are banned. Men are being barred from board positions and top executive roles all over the place.

At the last place I worked, after firing the head of sales the CEO announced at a company all hands that the next head of sales had to be a woman, and that's why the firm had been without one for so many months. It's of course illegal but the agencies that enforce these laws are run by people steeped in identity politics, so they aren't enforced. When one was finally located she turned out to be wildly incompetent. In the first management offsite she got up and said she had no idea why anyone bought our product. She didn't mean this in a "the product is bad, I'll shock them out of denial" way. She meant it in the sense that she really didn't understand what the product actually did (it was a rather obscure product for software developers). In a sales meeting with a customer she started trying to convince the customer not to use our product, apparently without realising she was doing so. The prior male head of sales had been fired simply for displaying low energy, this woman is of course un-fireable despite demonstrating repeatedly she has zero understanding of the companies products!

That same company invited a third party training company to use the offices at the weekend to run programming classes. These classes were open to everyone except straight, white men. I kid you not, that was the actual rule. If you were a white male you were expected to bring social media evidence that you were gay. Like, photos of you making out with other men or something like that. The justification for this was to keep the lessons "safe". Myself and my (gay) manager went to HR to complain, the head of HR spent 30 minutes trying to defend it. There was no apology and nothing was done about it.

This stuff is routine, it is daily life. It passes by without notice. If even one of these things happened in the reverse direction at a large company it'd make international news.

It's this kind of poisonous ideology that Basecamp are trying to expunge from their firm with this announcement, and what can the average man do but applaud? Who doesn't want to just come to work and have peaceful relations with their co-workers, regardless of race or gender? Only leftist activists, and which firms really need them? They're far more trouble than they're worth.