Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission • Hacker News Board

Re: Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

#621

Post by tshaddox » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 5:55 PM UTC

paxys wrote: post #610

ptero wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comment author does not advocate ignoring the world, he wants to separate his engineering work from politics and thus wants to look for employers who do not push a particular political program on him. Which seems a perfectly valid (and attractive to me) view. You cannot ignore your dreams, your health, your family, social ills, the air quality, politics and a myriad of other things in the world around you. But if…

While it isn't possible to separate engineering from politics in general, the sentiment is doubly hilarious when your goal is to enable a new global monetary system.

The Coinbase blog post is directly self-contradictory. First it lists some things that they focus on in order to accomplish their mission. One of those is this:

> Enable belonging for everyone: We work to create an environment where everyone is welcome and can do their best work, regardless of background, sexual orientation, race, gender, age, etc.

Then, just a few short paragraphs later, they list things that they focus minimally on, because they are "not directly related to the mission." One of those things is this:

> Broader societal issues: We don’t engage here when issues are unrelated to our core mission, because we believe impact only comes with focus.

It doesn't get more blatantly contradictory than that.

Re: Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

#622

Post by ardy42 » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 5:55 PM UTC

ptero wrote: post #513

Barrin92 wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>All I want is to just focus on engineering and ship features/improvements. Yeah if there wasn't the pesky world around all the engineering and we could all just stare at our stock options while we sit in our gentrified neighbourhoods and pretend the world doesn't exist. You can ignore politics but politics doesn't ignore you. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil is an unworthy attitude for a democratic citizen.…

The comment author does not advocate ignoring the world, he wants to separate his engineering work from politics and thus wants to look for employers who do not push a particular political program on him. Which seems a perfectly valid (and attractive to me) view. You cannot ignore your dreams, your health, your family, social ills, the air quality, politics and a myriad of other things in the world around you. But if…

> The comment author does not advocate ignoring the world, he wants to separate his engineering work from politics and thus wants to look for employers who do not push a particular political program on him. Which seems a perfectly valid (and attractive to me) view.

A lot of engineering work is inherently political. For instance, an engineer designed the gas chambers at Auschwitz and by doing his engineering work he supported the politics of the holocaust since his work and those politics are inseparable. In most cases, the connection is not so obvious and clear cut, but it's still there.

Re: Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

#623

Post by ketzo » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 5:55 PM UTC

That's my problem with all of this. Purely mission-focused companies sound great -- in a vacuum. A totally apolitical workplace could only exist in a vacuum.

Politics is not something that happens twice a year in a voting booth, or even something that happens on TV; it's how you and I engage with civic society at large, and to say that the workplace should, or even could be divorced from that seems almost silly.

Coinbase doesn't walk to talk about politics at work? That's neat, and sounds nice. But they're making that statement in a time where "not talking about politics" is something that very much works in favor of some groups and against others.

I know that we're engineers, and we want to spend our days building and shipping. I wouldn't ever fault anyone for that desire. But we have to acknowledge the fact that neutrality favors, and will always favor, one side of a debate. To protest that politics are something that "doesn't happen here" is to bury one's head in the sand.

Re: Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

#624

Post by spicymaki » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 5:55 PM UTC

Impossible wrote: post #598

j4nt4b wrote: post #542

If employees want to influence a company's political stance, then they've already lost, because employees are not shareholders. It's not their call to make. They would have a leg to stand on if they were part of a worker's cooperative, because then they'd be owners. The juicy job market for tech workers may obscure this fundamental fact, but when the rubber hits the road any overpaid engineer is still considered hire…

Uh aren't most employees shareholders in most public tech companies? I've definitely been a shareholder in every public company I've worked at.

This is true but in reality the percentage of ownership is so tiny that most regular employees have no say. This really just leaves billionaires, institutions or the C-suite with the power to control large companies.

Re: Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

#625

Post by Apocryphon » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 5:57 PM UTC

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #583

C1sc0cat wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect its only some activists that Mr Armstrong want's rid of.

If someone went around the Coinbase office demanding that the company speak out against abortion, I'm pretty sure Armstrong would want to get rid of that guy too.

No one's disputing that.

Re: Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

#626

Post by hackerfromthefu » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 5:57 PM UTC

cblconfederate wrote: post #159

kkhire wrote: post #65

I’ve never worked in the Bay Area, so could just be OOL but I’m genuinely surprised that this is such a big deal, or that this blog post got so much praise. Never discussed politics at any of the companies I’ve worked for, we were always too busy with...work!

I often wonder about the other side: Why do people who work in SV seem so militant on political issues? After all they live in a very privileged space (or "bubble") which is severely disconnected from the reality of most of the Earth, and even nearby american cities. I don't know enough about the demographics of the region and what can drive this behaviour but it is full of contradictions. For example, while they all…

A combination of factors .. here's some ideas

A cognitive limitation that it's hard to see the bubble we are in.

Being smart at the things in our bubble makes us over-confident about things we really don't have deep nuanced experience about.

We don't know what we don't know, but we think we do .. until we gain enough experience to appreciate life's complexity and our own limitations.

Re: Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

#627

Post by gambler » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 5:57 PM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #511

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GP never said to ignore politics. You are the one that brought that up. They said to leave them out of the office. There is plenty of time for politics before and after work. Bringing your politics in to work just makes for an uncomfortable work environment for you co-workers.

'the office' or the firm today, is for better or worse our primary means by which we can exercise influence. That is why tech workers are bringing politics into the firm in the first place , because they realise, rightly, that it is one of the most potent channels to actually exercise change, and that's why so many people want to keep politics out of it. The workplace is the one space where your political opponent ca…

You haven't really provided any arguments for why converting companies (entities providing goods and services) into mini political parties is a good idea. Anyone can yell about "status quo" and "change". In reality, "status quo" is frequently an ill defined concept and the benefits of change depend entirely on what kind of change it is.

When I work for a company, I provide my labor in exchange for payment. I am then free to use my money to support an activist organization or a cause. So are all other employees.

Corporate activism, on the other hand, is inherently degenerate. It means your employer withholds resources from improving the business or paying higher salaries. They instead apply those resources to some causes of their choosing. Any employee who doesn't agree with the cause is effectively coerced into supporting it unless they quit. So is every customer. The goods and services become inherently tangled with an ideology of some sort.

Why should a model where everyone is free to pursue their personal activism be replaced with a model where people are coerced to pursue activism "approved" by corporate execs?

Re: Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

#628

Post by luckylion » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 5:57 PM UTC

lwansbrough wrote: post #500

subsubzero wrote: post #465

I may want to apply to coinbase. I am really fed up with 'activist' employees and the toxic environment they bring. All I want is to just focus on engineering and ship features/improvements. Bringing politics to the office(thanks Google!) has been one of the worst things to happen in the 21st century for tech companies. Interestingly enough google has been going through absolute hell with these cancerous employees an…

A lot of harm has been done by humans “just doing their job.” The world needs people who are willing to stand against those who take no interest in weighing the morality of their work. For example, AGI will be built either by accident or intentionally by sociopaths at Google, etc. All decisions at a certain scale are inevitably political, and choosing to ignore the politics in those contexts is in itself a political…

> A lot of harm has been done by humans “just doing their job.”

I'd say most harm was done by humans who did not just do their job, but thought they knew how everyone else has to do their job, live their lives etc, by political activists.

You might think of activism only as what those do that you're politically aligned with. What are those on the opposite side who work just as hard to bring about their ideas of society?

What serves the public better, a utility company that "just does its job", or a utility company that snoops around people's garbage, identifies dissenters and then stops supplying water to them (because otherwise you'd be aiding the enemy)?

Re: Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

#629

Post by eli » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 5:58 PM UTC

manigandham wrote: post #291

eli wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forbidding debate is taking an implicit stance in favor of the status quo.

No, it's just stating that the workplace is neutral. It's not for or against anything. You can do that on your time instead.

Blocking even the discussion of change is the definition of conservatism. It's explicitly against change and implicitly for the status quo.

Re: Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

#630

Post by chillwaves » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 5:59 PM UTC

skinkestek wrote: post #523

paulgb wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last night he was given the chance to unequivocally condemn the Proud Boys and instead told them to "stand back and stand by", which the group themselves has taken as a rally cry. Just like how after Charlottesville, white supremacists took his ambiguous response as a sign of approval. He doesn't condemn, he validates with just enough deniability that people can make lists like the one you posted, while everyone who…

Did you follow that debate closely? Because it seems like a lot more nuanced than the media put it.

Trump speaks in code, so it's hard to take any of his words at face value. This could be interpreted as "nuance" or, in context with a pattern of behavior, it can be seen as an sly sort of encouragement -- which is how the Proud Boys are taking his comment.

If the way the comment was received is incorrect, then it is up to Trump to correct it. Obviously, he will not be doing so.

You can draw your own conclusions.