Changes at Basecamp • Hacker News Board

Re: Changes at Basecamp

#701

Post by marbletiles » Tue, Apr 27, 2021, 8:56 PM UTC

bingbingbong wrote: post #694

marbletiles wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an absolute wealth of connection between more diversity and better products: it’s not that a monoculture can’t make products for everyone, it’s that it’s easier for a team that has wider representation to do so: it’s a competitive advantage for them. Want examples beyond hand driers? Apple missed menstrual cycle tracking in the Health app. NASA offered to send 1,000 tampons with the first woman in space - an…

Is the implication here that Apple had no women working on the Health app, Google Photos has no black team members (and if they did, they would have explicitly checked this case?), Snapchat has no asians, etc? Or that some magic ratio would have caught these issues? There's some serious assumptions buried there that don't pass the smell test.

Yes, that is absolutely the implication. These mistakes are so egregious they're almost instantly obvious to people who know to look. For instance, the Health app tracked seemingly everything under the sun, including blood-alcohol levels. The reaction from women when it shipped was instant: where's the period tracker?

If there was a woman on that team it says even less good things about Apple that they shipped without it.

But: Apple's diversity report from then [1] says they were 80% male in tech, so while the assumption might be serious, I don't think it's unreasonable.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2014/8/12/5949453/no-surprise-apple...

Re: Changes at Basecamp

#702

Post by 1123581321 » Tue, Apr 27, 2021, 9:03 PM UTC

jonas21 wrote: post #179

lhnz wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's soft cancellation. Hard cancellation is when you get others to gang up on them and go to HR to try to get them fired. Afterwards, you publicise whatever got them fired offline in the hopes that they become 'radioactive' to employers and so that they and their family fall on hard times. I'm a little confused as to why people don't understand what "cancel" means in this context. Isn't it quite a popular topic no…

Your comment and the comment you're replying to gave two very different definitions of "cancel". And yet you're surprised that people find it ambiguous?

The question wasn't asked in good faith, as much as I appreciate the courtesy of the respondent. You can read that user's twitter and see that they were already familiar with the term and they believe only Nazis complain about it (they posted a graphic novel panel indicating this.) They were only asking for clarification in hope of getting an answer they could exploit in some way.

Re: Changes at Basecamp

#703

Post by skinkestek » Tue, Apr 27, 2021, 9:13 PM UTC

drewbug01 wrote: post #559

skinkestek wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we are in this mess because we are mixing up state and religion. Marriage was a religious thing. There is no reason any part of the state should mess with it. But, for a while it so happened that it was useful for the state to rely on marriage to mean "two people living together" for whatever that should mean in tax codes etc. With that came the rules that followed the mainstream religion at the time. Today t…

> Call the new thing what you want: around here it is something like "civil marriage" as opposed to "(implicit: religious) marriage". I think the major problem here is that most conservative Christians who propose it still want “religious marriage” to count as a “civil marriage.” Fundamentally separating the two isn’t actually a bad idea in my opinion, but in practice it seems like most people who suggested it (from…

Why make it harder than it is?

There's usually no problem with a religious marriage counting as a civil marriage, except for edge cases like religions who accepts polygamy etc since all the rules that are needed for civil marriage (and more) are typically also required by mainstream religions.

And religions mostly have no problem with civil marriage as long as nobody forces them to bless it. Exceptions: I guess WBC and a few others.

Re: Changes at Basecamp

#704

Post by skinkestek » Tue, Apr 27, 2021, 9:17 PM UTC

ck425 wrote: post #501

skinkestek wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we are in this mess because we are mixing up state and religion. Marriage was a religious thing. There is no reason any part of the state should mess with it. But, for a while it so happened that it was useful for the state to rely on marriage to mean "two people living together" for whatever that should mean in tax codes etc. With that came the rules that followed the mainstream religion at the time. Today t…

> Marriage was a religious thing Do you have sources to back that up? I'm genuinely curious. My understanding was that marriage was always a social contract, but that society and religion used to be more intertwined thus 'religious marriage'. I don't disagree with the idea of separating the religious and civil/cultural aspects of marriage. But I think you'll find non religious folk resistant to calling civil/cultural…

I guess you are right, in some places it might have been purely cultural.

That said I think my argument still stands if you replace "religious" with "cultural"?

Re: Changes at Basecamp

#705

Post by 1123581321 » Tue, Apr 27, 2021, 9:46 PM UTC

rexreed wrote: post #544

ativzzz wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typically you can either give everyone the same percent or say you set aside 10% of your profit and divvy it up proportional to people's salaries

Yes but how is it being done in this case?

It is entirely based on time employed, up to a cap:

"You’re eligible to participate in profit sharing after two years of working at Basecamp. You’ll accrue one share per month starting on your second anniversary at Basecamp, and you’ll max out your shares at 10 years. We calculate shares based on months of tenure so there’s no unfair cliff between being hired in December vs January."

Re: Changes at Basecamp

#706

Post by 1123581321 » Tue, Apr 27, 2021, 9:49 PM UTC

ryanbrunner wrote: post #596

sdf131 wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without RSUs/stock options, it's misleading. They might be paying a competitive _base_ salary but stock is frequently > 50% of Senior employees compensation package

Stock wouldn't make a lot of sense for Basecamp though, unless they started paying dividends or something. They aren't public and have no indication that they ever have any desire to be public, and the ownership of the company is small enough that I'd be very surprised if any ownership stake didn't come with a lot of conditions on how that ownership could be transfered. As a liquid asset, Basecamp stock probably isn'…

They said they'd split part of the sale proceeds, should it ever happen, with all the employees. There's no way the expected value from that would measure up to years of Amazon RSUs. But then, that's the case for almost every other company attempting to pay top of market.

"There are no plans to sell Basecamp or take the company public! But, in the slight chance of that happening, employees may be eligible to receive a portion of 10% of the value of the company if Basecamp is sold or made public. That 10% would be divided into shares, and shares distributed amongst employees based on their tenure at the time of the sale/offering."

Re: Changes at Basecamp

#707

Post by tcbasche » Tue, Apr 27, 2021, 10:10 PM UTC

randomsearch wrote: post #569

tcbasche wrote: post #339

Interesting; working at a company with a fairly high degree of psychological safety there is almost no heavy political fighting on Slack or other communication channels (except for the odd comment here or there). There is a high degree of focus on completing actual work and a level of professional behaviour that arguments like these would be very out of place. This is probably due to the size of the org; maybe with m…

Is your company remote or in-person? Because I think the problems that Basecamp might have been having (reading between the lines on twitter) is more likely to occur when people do not have to face each other on a daily basis.

It’s in-person but now a mix. That’s interesting because I think after a few months into the pandemic while being totally remote, I noticed an increase in confrontational behaviour... I wonder if that disconnect means it’s easier to forget you’re talking to a real person.

Re: Changes at Basecamp

#708

Post by ljm » Tue, Apr 27, 2021, 10:35 PM UTC

koonsolo wrote: post #546

motoxpro wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I think this is like saying it's O.K. to not care about climate change because we have done enough and it's not a problem anymore. i.e. It's way better than it was and it doesn't effect me so I can live my life however I want, I am not worried about the future generations that may have that problem because of my actions. In this situation, you are saying it doesn't effect you so you have the privelege of not…

You don't seem to get my point: everyone should care about the environment, and nobody should care about the color of your skin. Edit: let me be more specific. In a company, I don't want to hear "Are the women compensated the same as the men?", I want to hear "Is everyone fairly compensated?". There is a very big difference between the 2.

I see what you're getting at, and yeah that sort of just world would be nice. You could ask "is everyone fairly compensated?" now though, and many people would not think to consider the various disparities that exist - the current system, to their mind, is fair.

So you have to look at the data, gather the facts, and force the issue:

---

Is everyone fairly compensated?

Yes

But, it looks like a woman is paid 20% less than a man for the same position. Is everyone fairly compensated?

Yes. (Insert sexist reasoning here).

Are women compensated the same as men?

No.

Why is that fair?

---

You could repeat this same thought process for so many other examples, where the general concept of fairness is rooted in inequality, bias, and prejudice.

Re: Changes at Basecamp

#709

Post by drewbug01 » Tue, Apr 27, 2021, 10:51 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #677

drewbug01 wrote: post #675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite hard when people keep hearing "and now I want your Aunt to accept gay people, fully, in her heart" when all I keep saying is "some people might use this as cover to harass gay people, because that's historically what they've done." I also find the goalpost moving extremely frustrating, but we should be clear about who is actually moving that: the people reading calls for "acceptance" into discussion of a s…

I would have a personal problem relating to or associating with anyone who held anti-LGBT beliefs in their heart, the same way I'd never work with anyone who believed Black people were in any way inferior to other people. But this litigation of what's inside people's heads, when what they're publicly advocating for and voting for is the position we're asking of them in the first place, just makes me think we're surve…

> But this litigation of what's inside people's heads

Nobody is advocating that here, why do you keep bringing it up? This seems like something you feel is happening but that’s not what we are talking about at all.

> We’re not being asked to associate with anyone’s aunt here and I think we should try to keep to the topic at hand.

...you and other commenters brought up the Aunt. I don’t know if you’re confused, or what; but I didn’t bring the Aunt up in the first place. It arose spontaneously as a straw man up-thread.

Re: Changes at Basecamp

#710

Post by throwaway0xa » Tue, Apr 27, 2021, 10:53 PM UTC

ck425 wrote: post #488

koonsolo wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But to others, "politics at work" means "are we paying women and men the same for doing the same job?" and "are our recruiting practices leading to a non-diverse workforce and missing out on great people who should work here?" and "what problems does our company sole, and for whom?". These are really important questions. Why wouldn't you want to bring them up at work? I really detest such things, and the "problem"…

That's a position of privilege. Only people who aren't discriminated against can afford to take a position of indifference.

You have it backwards. The only people who can politicize anything and everything are "minority groups". Only people who aren't discriminated against can afford to take a position of politicizing everything. That's a position of privilege.