A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company • Hacker News Board

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

#621

Post by 0-O-0 » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 11:10 AM UTC

ISL wrote: post #457

thedevil wrote: post #11

One thought: If you see a resume with Coinbase until October 2020, that's probably someone who prefers political activism in the workplace. That might be seen in a positive or negative light, depending on your stance. I personally am afraid to associate myself too publicly with a political stance, lest I be wrong and/or the environment changes.

As a way of reply to, " I personally am afraid to associate myself too publicly with a political stance, lest I be wrong and/or the environment changes. " "Well, whatever life is, you’re going to die. So if you’re going to make things better for yourself or for those you care about, you had better become an activist while you’re still alive." -- Will Provine https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=ptb;c=ptb…

Becoming an activist is also a path for making things worse for yourself or for those you care about, I'd like to avoid that.

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

#622

Post by GoblinSlayer » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 12:18 PM UTC

yokaze wrote: post #188

redm wrote: post #82

I feel like this is the start of a rising tide. I think Brian's stance is great, companies have missions, they should focus on those missions. Everything has become so political that your work, which occupies a large portion of your life, should not be divisive.

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…

Activists never planned to try to talk and listen and went too far in this direction. If it keeps going, at some point it becomes untenable and needs to stop. It's not business' job to teach activists how to live, they must figure it out by themselves.

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

#623

Post by moltar » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 12:37 PM UTC

mola wrote: post #575

notSupplied wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I certainly agree that the mission of a company can (and preferably) be more than just for profit. However, "to be political" is still a pretty wide range of possible missions. Who calls the shots about what you're going to be political about, and which side you take? And when a group of employees disagree with the shots being called, what kinds of reactions are appropriate or not? I'll take a shot: - I think compell…

Companies that have a mission "to change the world" attract employees on the basis of activisism in the world. Heck this company is trying to overhaul the entire monetary system. If succeeded this will effect the lives of billions of people. Recruiting people with this premise, and then telling them actually, you don't have any say in what the company actually does, and the ways it changes the world, that actually it…

Actually in his original statement he said that they will be involved in politics that helps their mission.

To be involved in any and all politics is just absurd.

Even personally if you want to change something you have to have a very narrow focus. You can’t change everything.

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

#624

Post by jariel » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 12:40 PM UTC

yokaze wrote: post #586

jariel wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" (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…

What I understand from what you are saying, and with what I can agree is, that not everything you do, has to be or should be a political statement. But the point I trying to make is, that "apolitical" is not the absence of political. It is a political choice. Here a definition of apolitical: "not interested or involved in politics" > Serving coffee is not political. Which coffee do you serve? If you don't care, you a…

You're reaching too hard.

Choosing coffee is not child labour, bad jokes can happen anywhere, Huawei/Not Huawei is a security choice not a political one ... and for god's sakes we're picking our caprenters based in their bumpers stickers? No. I don't care what bumper stickers my carpenter has, and although I personally hate Trump, I don't care one bit that he has such a bumper sticker, and nobody else should either.

99.99% of Google content is mundane and not political.

They're not banning a lot from Google search other than really illegal stuff.

'Choosing the SaaS vendor based on price' is not just 'going with the status quo.

I get what you are trying to say, I just don't agree.

I don't even think that workplaces embracing popular social issues directly that much, what matters is addressing the social issues directly, not as a matter of populism.

Saying "our company doesn't hire black people, that doesn't seem fair, can we think about that" is 100% reasonable, but making public statements about BLM etc. is more political, less pragmatic.

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

#625

Post by jariel » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 12:43 PM UTC

nilkn wrote: post #485

jariel wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Isn’t there a pretty clear power imbalance if one side is being given a platform to espouse these views in front of hundreds of employees while they get endorsed by HR and company leadership?

Are you really comparing the 'power of someone to say something at work in 2020' with things like 'Black people were not allowed to have mortgages until one generation ago'?

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

#626

Post by AlexandrB » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 1:03 PM UTC

sparkie wrote: post #168

AlexandrB wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If BLM was just that, most people, even on the political right, would have no problems with it. Let's get real. People on the political right have been yelling about kneeling in the NFL since that particular form of protest began. And it has few/none of the associations you describe. > I'm a fan of racial equality, and by that I mean completely eliminating racism quotas, making hiring based purely on merit and not…

> Sounds great in theory. Now try to ascertain if someone made a hiring/promotion decision based on merit or on melanin without some kind of Star Trek era brain scan. I'm of the opinion that business owners should be the sole arbiters of who is hired and promoted anyway. The State should mind its own business. A good business owner will promote the best talent which will make their company grow. If they start filteri…

> However, the common "diversity quotas" which are commonly employed now want a different outcome. They want to see at least 50% of hires from BAME, even if BAME are only 20% of the demographics.

I'm pretty sure this is a straw man. 50% quotas are common for women (50% of the population), but otherwise I could find no evidence of 50% quotas based on race.

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

#627

Post by etangent » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 1:21 PM UTC

sprt wrote: post #265

etangent wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For an action to be "political" in a strong sense, its performer it needs to be consciously thinking about their political alignment. Majority of people are economically motivated and do not engage in in-depth analysis of their actions or inactions and thus describing their actions as "political" is quite tendentious.

Respectfully disagree. You're essentially arguing that they're not politically motivated in staying at/leaving their job. That's fair. Nevertheless their actions translate either support, inaction, or opposition. The implication which MLK argues is that inaction is harmful to the movement.

You are taking a consequentialist stance, deciding that if something has political consequences, then it is political. But literally anything could have political consequences. A solar flare could have political consequences. A fly landing on someone's hair could have political consequences. This does not mean that flies are political!

If everything is political, then the moniker "political" is meaningless.

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

#628

Post by davorak » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 1:29 PM UTC

throwaway894345 wrote: post #533

davorak wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like a reasonable interpretation in my experience. I have definitely seen people told not to talk about what you might call controversial because it is political. Don't talk about your abortion and how it made your life better or worse. Don't talk about your birth control. Don't talk about how you were explicitly told by an authority figure you were not worthy of a job because of your sex/gender. Easy for me to…

I’ve never heard anyone told not to talk about those things because they’re political , but I could believe they were told not to talk about them because they’re controversial .

The phases I use in my response above explicitly often explicitly use the word politics. The people saying that are not being narrow with their definitions like you are here.

So if people live their life having people around them using the word politics like in my phrases above they will also start using the word that way. A way that does not match up with your definitions.

> You’re confusing “controversial” with “political”.

So when you say things like the above it comes off to me as unreasonable/uncharitable. Since the people you are talking to are using a set of definitions that are relatively common in my experience.

edit: unreasonable -> unreasonable/uncharitable

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> I’ve never heard anyone told not to talk about those things because they’re political, but I could believe they were told not to talk about them because they’re controversial.

Knowledge and understanding of a topic is required before reasoned action is taken. If you can not talk about abortion, birth control, sexual/gender discrimination, gay marriage, and more because it is controversial then we might be getting in to an area where speech is so restricted that it impedes knowledge transfer and understanding on those topics.

In order to have an informed populace then need to be exposed to things, sometime controversial. If you remove a reasonably large mechanism for that, conversation at work, it will have political consequences.

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

#629

Post by etangent » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 1:31 PM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #405

etangent wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For an action to be "political" in a strong sense, its performer it needs to be consciously thinking about their political alignment. Majority of people are economically motivated and do not engage in in-depth analysis of their actions or inactions and thus describing their actions as "political" is quite tendentious.

you don't need to be actively aware of gravity to not float off the ground. You can act politically without being aware of that fact, that just means you're not conscious of what's driving your decision making. Most politics and also culture expresses itself tacitly. By requiring some sort of conscious intent you're actually ignoring what is arguably the vast majority of political interaction. For example casual sexi…

You are taking a "consequentialist" stance implying that if something has political consequences, then it is political. There are several problems with this.

First, literally anything could have political consequences, from a solar flare to a fly landing in someone's hair. This logic easily devolves into absurdity. Famously, Chinese government under Mao declared sparrows "public animals of capitalism" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign

Second, when anything could be political, the moniker "political" (like any other inflated moniker) loses a lot of its meaning. And yet real politics is still done by real people with real consequences.

Third, raising everything to the status of political is an example of politicization. This is typical of totalitarian regimes. Totalitarian regimes are in fact characterized by the fact that literally everything is raised to the realm of political, the realm of rule by the regime. By pressuring others to be political, you are creating a totalitarian environment, a very unpleasant environment for most people to be as we already know from some very bitter 20th century lessons.

Fourth, politics is about having political enemies. When political enemy (opponent) does not exist, there is no politics as such. By insisting that people act politically, you are simultaneously insisting that they have enemies. There are profound moral problems with this, whether you are Christian or even not religious at all.

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

#630

Post by jiuahweruihawi » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 1:45 PM UTC

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #593

nitrogen wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the framing of everything in good vs evil, monochromatic terms that actually increases divisiveness and prevents deescalation of conflict. Forcing people to take one's side or else "be on the wrong side" in a multifaceted environment is not appropriate for a workplace, where people expect to be able to set aside differences to work together on work itself.

I mean it’s absolutely appropriate to take a side on certain issues. I've always refused to work on military hardware for example. If my employer started working on military hardware, I’d refuse to contribute and I would try to encourage others to refuse as well. But actually we all have things we would refuse to do. Usually it’s not an issue because both management and the workers feel the same way. Most people woul…

The situation with Coinbase is the opposite of what you describe. Coinbase isn't moving into new territory that its employees find objectionable, e.g. by starting to develop crypto for the military. The activists at Coinbase are angry because the company isn't moving into their demanded new territory.