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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

#791
post #772
post #769

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is why I'm frustrated with the idea that we need to enact change and policies at the federal level. The federal government should just exist to protect our liberties and organize national defense. Everything else should be organized more locally at the community level where voters actually have some skin in the game. You'd think that after months of "locally led" covid responses in the US that this naive take…

None of this is unique to the US — the EU is similarly "interconnected", as is Switzerland. Subsidiarity and decentralization aren't new ideas, and are generally the prescribed solution to unlock governance in a large & heterogenous polity. > from roads The Interstate Highway System, while technically impressive, essentially entrenched the US as a car-centric society from the top-down. > public health The vast majori…

> None of this is unique to the US — the EU is similarly "interconnected", as is Switzerland.

I live in Switzerland, and the response here to the virus and most other incidents are far more federally managed than the cantonal system would imply to someone accustomed to US states, in my opinion. If forced at gunpoint to generalize, the simplest explanation I would use having lived in both countries is that in Switzerland the cantons have more independence in execution, while in the US they have more freedom in legislation.

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

#792
post #742
post #714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's how it works: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22159031 You can disagree with how it's implemented, but it's not subjective. dang does a way better job of addressing moderation issues as they're happening than anything you'll see on Reddit (besides perhaps tiny, niche subreddits.) And at least he's not surreptitiously changing people's comments. ( https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-ste…

> dang does a way better job than Reddit How is that a relevant comparison? Reddit is orders of magnitude larger (looks to be around 100 times more active users) and allows users to create public and private subreddits that can easily become echo chambers. HN moderation is not even in the same ballpark as what Reddit deals with. To be clear I'm not defending Reddit or even saying they do a good job; I'm just saying t…

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

#793
post #76

The blog post he made, which was a whole lot of words to say "We're not going to say Black Lives Matter, so stop asking", was really something else. I see a lot of people praising the "not taking sides" thing. This presumes a false two-parties dichotomy that is endemic in the discussion of US social issues. Really though, you can choose the status quo of widespread human rights abuses in the US, or you can choose to…

Take a step back here, what are the widespread human rights abuses? Very few people are against human rights, that would be truly uncontroversial. The issue seems to be when what are labeled as human rights aren't actually human rights, or they are bundled together with divisive add-ons or an overall political stance.

https://www.reddit.com/r/2020PoliceBrutality/

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

#794
post #772
post #769

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is why I'm frustrated with the idea that we need to enact change and policies at the federal level. The federal government should just exist to protect our liberties and organize national defense. Everything else should be organized more locally at the community level where voters actually have some skin in the game. You'd think that after months of "locally led" covid responses in the US that this naive take…

None of this is unique to the US — the EU is similarly "interconnected", as is Switzerland. Subsidiarity and decentralization aren't new ideas, and are generally the prescribed solution to unlock governance in a large & heterogenous polity. > from roads The Interstate Highway System, while technically impressive, essentially entrenched the US as a car-centric society from the top-down. > public health The vast majori…

>None of this is unique to the US — the EU is similarly "interconnected",

The EU gave us the Greek and Irish financial crises and Brexit.

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

#795
post #689

I see this as strategically genius whether you agree with it or not. He's totally neutered the ability of employees to take strong political stances within the company going forward and he's made it clear where the company stands in away that makes it very hard for people to come back later and defend staying if they were interested in these kinds of politics. If you want to stay focused on building a company and not…

I agree. Further, I think this is a giant signal to what I suspect is a majority of the industry who are really exhausted about the politicization of everything, and simply want to work toward a goal they find interesting. Those of us who want to focus on actual work and not solving the totality of global problems (or at least those problems visible to wealthy, highly-educated knowledge workers concentrated in a handful of American metro areas) will have a strong incentive to look at companies like Coinbase.

I'm curious to see if Spotify management might copy this.

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

#796
post #773
post #769

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is why I'm frustrated with the idea that we need to enact change and policies at the federal level. The federal government should just exist to protect our liberties and organize national defense. Everything else should be organized more locally at the community level where voters actually have some skin in the game. You'd think that after months of "locally led" covid responses in the US that this naive take…

Exactly this. The libertarian "Minimize the federal government" is an extremely misguided fanatical view which is devoid of any fact-based reasoning. Federal investments have lead to transformative change in most sections of the US economy. Federal Reserve keeping the interest rates low and providing unlimited liquidity is whats keeping the stock market from tanking today. Federal investments will be key to de carbon…

Careful criticizing libertarianism on here. This is the hive.

A lot of survivorship bias on here and folks who want to think everyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, get rid of taxation and large government etc etc

It completely neglects marginalized people.

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

#797

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot of value in removing political activists from your company, and so it's worth paying them to leave. Aside from the combative toxic environment they generate, they are also often the source of disgruntled rogue employees that will generally behave improperly, misrepresent coworkers, leak documents, raise alarms about operations they don't understand, and generally draw the company into litigation. In a…

I saw this firsthand in May/June in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing. It was a pretty small company and there was one employee in particular who was very much an activist, though a number of employees of course felt very strongly about what was going on. The company genuinely tried to do their best to support them, encouraged this person to take a week off for mental health and from my perspective was making…

Do you think the outcome would have been different without COVID and WFH?

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

#799
post #454

The thread on the original blog post is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24610267 It got relatively little discussion because it set off the flamewar detector ( http://hnrankings.info/24610267/ ). Normally we'd turn that off in such a case, but we missed that one. Also: don't miss that there are multiple pages of comments in this thread. That's what the More link at the bottom points to. Or click: https://n…

the flamewar detector seems interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23280488 how often does it get triggered?

A few times a day. We get notified each time, but we're not always online.

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

#800
post #689

I see this as strategically genius whether you agree with it or not. He's totally neutered the ability of employees to take strong political stances within the company going forward and he's made it clear where the company stands in away that makes it very hard for people to come back later and defend staying if they were interested in these kinds of politics. If you want to stay focused on building a company and not…

You will build a less diverse and necessarily worse company this way.
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