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

#661

Post by coryfklein » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 6:12 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…

There is a difference between being aware of the negative externalities of your work, and using your position in your company as a platform to accomplish your own partisan political goals. The former should be encouraged and the latter discouraged.

Much of the discussion here today is confused by the intermingling of so many concepts under the singular term "politics".

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

#662

Post by ironSkillet » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 6:12 PM UTC

tshaddox wrote: post #621

paxys wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

I think what they're saying is that will work to make the environment within the company as welcoming as possible. However, they will not try and solve that problem for society at large. Although you may disagree with the approach, it doesn't seem contradictory to me.

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

#663

Post by uoaei » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 6:13 PM UTC

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #499

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.…

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.

And what about when the business performed by the company you are working for has political consequences?

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

#664

Post by brightball » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 6:14 PM UTC

tshaddox wrote: post #575

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…

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.

By that logic, you can't separate church and state either.

And that's to say that you can and you should.

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

#665

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 6:14 PM UTC

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #401

another_sock wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The West Coast and its inhabitants live in a bit of a unique bubble and assume that the rest of the world see things in the very progressive manner they do, and expect that companies will march in lockstep with this sort of unique bubble. It's a very internalized unrecognized sort of expectation, but that's because so many companies have accepted these expectations completely. The rest of the country doesn't really c…

> " The West Coast and its inhabitants live in a bit of a unique bubble and assume that the rest of the world see things in the very progressive manner they do. " That's tarring with rather a broad brush. There are a lot of old school liberals on the west coast who strongly disapprove of the progressives and their behavior, including myself. The progressives' "You are either with us or against us" rhetoric is diametr…

> There are a lot of old school liberals

It's kind of funny to hear DLC/Clintonian Third Wayists described as “old-school liberals”, since when they rose to dominance “liberal” in American politics meant about what “progressive” is used for now and they were very much associated with the conservative wing of the Democratic Party, with an economic policy that synced up so well with that of the Republican Party that the period between their rise and the sharp rightward jump of the Republican Party that was a response to the resulting shift of the left edge of the Overton Window became known as the “neoliberal consensus” period in economic policy.

The real old-school liberals are the progressives.

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

#666

Post by mtalantikite » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 6:14 PM UTC

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…

Financial systems are political, though. To not realize that while working on a product like Coinbase would be very short sighted.

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

#667

Post by uoaei » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 6:14 PM UTC

Reedx wrote: post #569

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.…

If people don't want to bring the political battlefield into every venue, that's not only valid, but wise. You are not going to innovate or create anything if you're fighting all day, every day. Constantly distracted. The purpose of a company is to bring people together to CREATE something of value. To solve problems. Hopefully to improve lives on some vector. And you do that most effectively by rowing in the same di…

You've misrepresented the quote, and in the process invalidated your whole point.

The original quote is diplomacy is war by other means. And it had very specific connotations to explicitly adversarial political relationships. Politics is much larger than diplomacy, and indeed as Aristotle concluded there is nothing in a society that is not politics.

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

#668

Post by itsoktocry » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 6:15 PM UTC

kennywinker wrote: post #593

itsoktocry wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The issue with "activist" employees isn't so much that they want to bring politics to work (which I can see arguments for and against). It's that the new "activist" employees insist everyone's politics be the same, else yo…

Your logic is sound: politics are a distraction, so offices where politics are put aside will be more productive. But I know a lot of VERY smart people who wouldn’t sign up for that workplace. Especially if there are social and political ramifications to the product being built or the customers being served (there almost always are - hence the cliche “making the world a better place” goal of any startup).

>But I know a lot of VERY smart people who wouldn’t sign up for that workplace.

Sure, that's the trade-off.

In a vacuum we all want to "make the world a better place". Does cancelling academics who appear on Joe Rogan's podcast "make the world a better place"? Does having a coworker cancelled or fired because of a stupid joke "make the world a better place"? I don't know; I don't think so.

On the other hand, I think there should be internal political discussion regarding policy at a place like Facebook.

What are the politics relevant to your job? It's not easy to answer.

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

#669

Post by johnyzee » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 6:15 PM UTC

hackerfromthefu wrote: post #591

quotemstr wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also: don't miss that there are multiple pages of comments in this thread. Is comment pagination still necessary?

The pagination also breaks comment deep links that aren't on the first page - ie deep links to a comment after a 'more'

Sorry for the meta hijacking, but now that we're here, HN developers: Please penalize comments that jump the queue by responding to the top comment. There are frequently topics with hundreds of comments, where almost all are replies to the first comment, or the first comment of that comment, ad inifinitum.

Reddit does it right by auto-folding comment trees once they reach a certain depth vs. upvotes.

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

#670

Post by Zak » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 6:15 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…

> he wants to separate his engineering work from politics

So did Wernher von Braun. I've intentionally selected the most extreme example that came to mind readily to illustrate the point: designing rockets for the Nazis to be built by slaves and used to carry bombs to kill civilians has moral and political implications. It's reasonable to judge von Braun for knowingly participating in atrocities even if his only interest was in rocket science. It's not possible to separate the engineering from the politics.

Cryptocurrency has political consequences, though they're not as obvious as those of ballistic missiles. For a company to work on cryptocurrency trading and pretend to be apolitical is disingenuous because if the company is successful, its actions will have a political impact. I'm inclined to think that anyone engaging in acts with political consequences should be proactive about what those consequences will be. Most technological change comes with the potential for political consequences.

Of course, there's engineering work that's less political. Making incremental improvements to the efficiency of widely-used infrastructure is usually fairly neutral; it's good for everyone, but doesn't really change the balance of power.