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Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

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

#631
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't possible to not take sides. It's only possible to support the status quo, either explicitly or implicitly, or else oppose it.

Even if you're right, it's the "I'm remaining apolitical/status quo" types who are at least permitting you to hold opposing viewpoints even if they personally disagree. It's the activists who are trying to remove all dissent.

>it's the "I'm remaining apolitical/status quo" types who are at least permitting you to hold opposing viewpoints even if they personally disagree. It's the activists who are trying to remove all dissent.

No, that's just partisan hyperbole. No one is "permitting" me to hold an opposing viewpoint, nor is anyone trying to "remove all dissent."

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

#632
post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I concur, I suspect the influx of applicants to coinbase based on this will be larger than the potential loss of people taking the severance

Certainly. If I was looking for a job, I would rank it very high because of this.

See how toxic the politically active (in the workplace) employees are: i am getting downvoted simply for saying that I would choose an apolitical company if I was looking for a job...

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

#633
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…

Wanting to separate engineering work from reality is precisely what Barrin92 is saying should not and can not be done. Engineering work isn't just some insulated game that gives you tokens to buy things you need in the real world. The engineering work is itself part of the real world.

I think this is all contextual to our times. We just have so much disagreement on what we are sure is moral/immoral.

If the different political sides had more balance, I think it'd make sense to permit a modest bit in the workplace.

But today the left is so sure of its position to the point where they think they are in the black & white moral right _and_ they are increasingly dominant and loud in our cultural institutions and many corporate institutions that it is substantially interfering with basic ability to think.

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

#634
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.

Yes, but have fun organizing anything meaningful when executives and large funds own enough shares to overrule any fraction of workers out of hand.

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

#635

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…

I wish that we collectively had become more political in the past decade and stopped being apolitical cogwheels of machines that have, ultimately, used to undermine democracy.

We all bear responsibility to what happens to this world, and we, collectively, are building systems that affect how people think and view the world, and hence how they act. We are part of this shared universe, and now more than ever, we are the ones creating it.

That's of course coming from a point of view where Democracy is the only moral political system, and the understanding that democracy dies if not defended daily by being political. First very slowly, then very quickly. There are obviously other points of view, and dictatorships have their supporters.

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

#636

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…

Weird point of view when most tech and engineering is used to generate political instability, misinformation and vote suppression. In the case of coinbase I wouldn’t be surprise if the « amazing engineering » is mostly used for tax evasion or to by-pass politic finance laws, corruption laws etc...

That's a pretty jaded view of the world. Most tech I would guess goes towards increasing value in the company: improving their offerings, making new technology which solves problems for people/companies, etc.

Very few people have the time and money to fund tech and engineering purely to influence elections. Most money coming in to tech is going to be from customers and investors, the latter being in interest of making money off of the business getting more customers.

Companies like Cambridge Analytica are a very very minute minority compared to the swaths of B2B, consumer tech, etc.

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

#637
post #535

Never forget that calls that protests and political expressions aren't happening "in the right venue" or "in the right way" only help one side. Take for example NFL management telling the players not to kneel in solidarity. That is the players' most effective (and frankly, peaceful, and not particularly disruptive) way to send a message. But if you don't agree with their message, moving to shift it to a less visible…

That's the point. Why should a private business like Coinbase accommodate far-left ideologues against capitalism and its very existence? That seems incongruous.

Weird how a social conscience or civil rights hurt certain businesses and get interpreted as anti-capitalist.

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

#638
post #513

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…

Are there no lines the op, or you, would not cross in the pursuit of your engineering work? Perhaps you're okay with Coinbase's mission specifically, but are you saying that you're okay with _literally anything_ in the pursuit of good engineering?

Perhaps you and the OP would be quite happy, say, writing code for a lab that makes novel fentanyl analogues for the express purpose of including them in black-market knockoff heroin powder, which in turn leads to a number of deaths (accurately cutting in your microgram-potent meds is hard, and sometimes your downstream supply chain makes a hit that's got too high a fentanyl analogue/cut material ratio, go figure!), or an industrial system that captures unsuspecting babies to then drown them, strip their flesh, and harvest their valuable bones (not really that realistic in our normal reality, but per http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=25967.0 it works great in Dwarf Fortress! or it did, anyway, until that got patched out because of said bone harvester), or hell, let's just Godwin on it and say you'd be perfectly happy writing automation tooling to make Treblinka 10% more efficient.

The respondent, whom you so readily chastise, has a quite valid point that we can't separate our engineering work from "politics" (ethics, really, but there does seem to be a side in this debate that prefers to say "politics", since that evokes more the admittedly annoying horse race electoraliasm and doublespeak-driven world of actual politics and takes away from the thrust of the issue, which is ethics, which happen to often overlap with politics but are very much their own thing) ever. That's an important thing to recognize, especially in an industry that has persistent issues with laying ethics aside in pursuit of "great inventions" (let's be pragmatic, it's mostly in pursuit of profit, with some good inventions as an occasional byproduct).

What I think the respondent may be getting at is that there is a significant population in the industry that probably does have some lines they won't cross, but is privileged and willing to cross a great many lines that won't affect them personally. You perhaps think that's a laudable stance, and you can hold that opinion if you wish, but you should do so with the recognition that there are a number of people that will see that less as a commitment to honorable professional detachment and more as a willingness to trod over the rights and wellbeing of the less fortunate so long as it doesn't injure you immediately. I'd argue that it's important thing to at least consider in an industry that often speaks of changing the world for the better--perhaps that was more it drinking the consultant kool-aid about what millenials value in their work and deciding it needed to work that into messaging, if not action, but hey, if it wants to say that, it ought to put its money where its mouth is.

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

#639
post #527

Reading these comments I feel like the root of the issue is the collapse of American democracy. It's a bit grandiloquent but that's definitely how it looks like. If workers trust that "We, the people" are still in charge on the big picture then it doesn't make sense to bring politics at work. Just vote. Now if you feel like your power as a citizen has dwindled and you can't meaningfully enact change through democrati…

> If workers trust that "We, the people" are still in charge on the big picture then it doesn't make sense to bring politics at work. Just vote. This is a bizarre, ahistorical sentiment. Go read about the history of labor struggle in the US. Even when everyone could vote, the organizing of workplaces and response by their employers was far more contentious and violent than anything that’s going on today.

Can you give an example of what you have in mind? I must admit that, being European, I don't really have a good grasp of the history of American worker struggles.

Here in France I can't quite think of something really similar to Silicon Valley activists. When I think about worker-led revolts I think of Germinal or Mai 68, when the proletariat (and, in the case of Mai 68, the students and then the proletariat) fought for better working conditions and more rights.

I don't think that's very similar to the time of activism we're talking about here. For one thing IT workers are not exactly the lowest dregs of the proletariat, it's a very privileged position with much better working conditions that most. Beyond that the fight is not usually for the direct benefit of said workers ("higher salaries!" or "fewer hours!" or "better food at the corporate restaurant!") but more ideologically motivated. An obvious instance of this is the very polarizing firing of Brendan Eich from Mozilla (that's still making waves all these years later). Doing that didn't directly change anything material for Mozilla's employee, it was motivated by ideology. The only thing that comes close I think is videogame devs complaining about their bad working conditions, but I don't think that's what we're talking about here.

Conversely the 1984's UK miner strike wasn't triggered because the National Coal Board had said something homophobic. It's just not comparable, IMO.

The lack of violence is also easy to explain: violence is the weapon of those that have no other way to be heard. Developers in the silicon valley can make themselves heard without having to burn their company-provided MacBooks and taking their managers hostage at the next SCRUM Sprint planning.

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

#640
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…

I was looking for a response in general to this and I think your comment nails it for me. If you want to drive societal change you need to get off the bench and commit, and please do because the world needs more people to be engaged.
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