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Changes at Basecamp

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Re: Changes at Basecamp

#811

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can put words in my mouth all day but here is exactly what I wrote. > When it comes to discussing specific experiences that minorities face, however, you should defer to the experts in the area who have lived their entire lives being in the seat of discrimination. We all appreciate attempts to understand and empathize with us. You can go very far by talking with us and trying to place yourself in our shoes, but w…

> should defer to the experts in the area There is not always such a thing as "the experts". People who look the same, grew up in the same place, have the same parents, can still have the opposite opinions. Then, who is the expert -- when they disagree with each other, the complete opposite. (Real world example from where I live.) I'm not in the US though, actually things seem a bit weird over there. The history look…

When you form a student-led committee on anti-bullying but mysteriously exclude all the victims, the bullied kids will beg and plead you to reconsider and listen to their voices instead. Not because everyone else's opinions are invalid, but because they are the ones who can speak the clearest about issues that others are blind to.

I'm playing along with your analogy here, but I actually think it's a terribly weak analogy. Racial discrimination is often so ingrained in the culture that its perpetrators aren't always hulking bullies menacingly taking lunch money from people. They are more dangerous because they often see themselves as kind, empathetic and intelligent - often believing that they can detect and solve deeply complex, emotion-rooted problems such as racial discrimination simply by thinking about it for a bit when it's convenient for them. They can't fathom that the experience of the discriminated may be so vastly different than their imagination permits, simply because they haven't experienced it firsthand.

Too many of us have been silenced and told to shut up both explicitly and implicitly. When it comes to racial discrimination, we will not go unheard. In this instance, in this matter, our voices do weigh much more than yours and that's simply the fact you'll have to live with.

Re: Changes at Basecamp

#812

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More importantly: who cares? The point of classical equal rights is the MLK, "my children won't be judged by the colour of their skin". The moment you ask a question like that, you are deliberately rolling back his vision by implying that a 100% male engineering group is a severe problem that needs a solution. It's not. It's an entirely expected statistical outcome given the demographics of people who study the profe…

I care deeply. With a 100 percent male workforce comes a 100 percent male mindset. Say I am creating a site for maternity clothes, I am not sure if I can turn a blind eye to the trade offs all the male engineer may make even though they have the best interests at heart. They may not be significant to the male engineer but it will very much be caught by a female engineer. Unless you are selling shaving kits or male gr…

To reframe this on race, there's been a couple of (from an engineering perspective) gobsmacking demos of how non-diverse developers end up making something that just does not work for people who don't look like them.

The soap dispenser that doesn't recognize dark skin:

https://gizmodo.com/why-cant-this-soap-dispenser-identify-da...

Facial recognition systems that don't work well on dark-skinned people:

https://www.wired.com/story/best-algorithms-struggle-recogni...

I can't find it now but there's another demo of the simple face detection algorithm (not recognition, just highlighting that "here is a face") simply not detecting a dark-skinned person til she lifts up a white mask to her face, and then it detects a "face" immediately.

Something as simple as soap dispenser not detecting dark skin, would that have made it out into production if they'd had a dark-skinned person on the team? Something as basic as, "Hey this doesn't work on Jim, maybe we should tweak the sensor a bit."

That's where some diversity matters, just so that your products work on everyone out there.

Re: Changes at Basecamp

#813
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can there ever be a non-work related conversation between employees that is not a "societal and political discussion"? If you're tendentious enough, you can make anything political. But if you start talking about the post-colonial geopolitical implications of your coworker's son's new chocolate chip cookie recipe, expect everyone to roll their eyes and walk away.

Add small talk, banter, and shooting the shit into that. And, maybe, becoming friends or at least more acquainted. There's a whole breadth of interpersonal communication and humanity that exists outside of the realm of politics, society, and activism. It's self evident, otherwise what do you expect to achieve from talking politics and activism except to be able to talk even more about politics and activism?

[deleted]

Re: Changes at Basecamp

#814

There's a great blog entry I just read about this, "On Politics At Work". I think the author effectively hits on a real problem with a lot of these discussions. https://json.blog/2021/04/26/on-politics-at.html To some folks, "politics at work" means "endless battle royale political debates among coworkers in a Slack all day long; why wouldn't you be against that? But to others, "politics at work" means "are we paying…

I disagree. Discussions about diversity and equality are absolutely political debate. It's even boringly trending I must say.

It's barely a 30seconds discussion between founders, not a company-wide debate. You follow it up with a yearly report on actual diversity vs real world distribution. That is, if you're big enough a company to be compared to it.

For example: if you have zero women in tech, there is a problem, and you have people to remove from recruiting roles. If you're close-ish to the median of your recruiting pool, you're fine. What need do you have for ceaseless internal discussions about it?

Re: Changes at Basecamp

#815

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loved everything about what I read here. I'm not surprised at the backlash as most of the Ruby community in the west has been extremely political.

#ruby-lang is famous for K-lining people who say "guys", for example.

What's #ruby-lang?

Re: Changes at Basecamp

#816
I'm super late to this thread and not that anyone cares what my opinion is, but why are so many folks against this new policy and are quitting Basecamp (as employees) over this?

From the looks of it you can still openly talk about whatever you want on your personal Twitter and other social media accounts.

It seems reasonable IMO to not talk country politics at work on a work account with other employees, especially on a medium where it's posted online, persisted and mixed in with other work related things as opposed to a private casual conversation in the parking lot or in a break room with no one else there.

I didn't look into this beyond Jason and DHH's blog posts but I saw Sam Stephenson quit Basecamp[0] a few hours ago over this change. He mentioned working there for 15 years and it's his life work. I don't get it, why would someone quit over this alone?

[0]: https://twitter.com/sstephenson/status/1388146129284603906

Re: Changes at Basecamp

#817

There's a great blog entry I just read about this, "On Politics At Work". I think the author effectively hits on a real problem with a lot of these discussions. https://json.blog/2021/04/26/on-politics-at.html To some folks, "politics at work" means "endless battle royale political debates among coworkers in a Slack all day long; why wouldn't you be against that? But to others, "politics at work" means "are we paying…

I suspect that this represents a practical consolidation of power by leadership in tech. While you can't come out and say "hey, we want to corner the market in white male nerds", you can say things like "Mean people suck, why can't we all just get along, no politics on slack, we're good right?" Think of it as the tech-liberal backlash. Tech has been wrestling with representation and diversity for a while now, indeed…

Not everything is racially motivated. They are just making business decisions in a small business. The whole reason they are doing it is probably ridiculous and cynical takes like this.

Re: Changes at Basecamp

#818
post #816

I'm super late to this thread and not that anyone cares what my opinion is, but why are so many folks against this new policy and are quitting Basecamp (as employees) over this? From the looks of it you can still openly talk about whatever you want on your personal Twitter and other social media accounts. It seems reasonable IMO to not talk country politics at work on a work account with other employees, especially o…

"No politics at work" to me is a crazy rule. It will almost always boil down to "Don't discuss what makes management unhappy". There are no clear rules at all. For example - let's say I don't like how Amazon treats open source and I say we should use more AGPL. Is that political? I would think so - copyright law and the DMCA have been political issues for years for many creators. Obviously I would think most people on this forum wouldn't consider AGPL vs MIT "political" even though the very subject of the matter is how the government should respect copyright law. So for most, AGPL vs MIT would fly under the political radar. What is really being said is "don't discuss the issues pertaining to minorities" and how people don't view that as insane is worrisome. There was an uproar last year about how Zoom would shutdown your stream if you talked about uyghur muslims. Can you imagine how different the reaction to this news would be if DHH implemented a no politics rule after some employees were discussing uyghur muslims?

Re: Changes at Basecamp

#819
post #812

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I care deeply. With a 100 percent male workforce comes a 100 percent male mindset. Say I am creating a site for maternity clothes, I am not sure if I can turn a blind eye to the trade offs all the male engineer may make even though they have the best interests at heart. They may not be significant to the male engineer but it will very much be caught by a female engineer. Unless you are selling shaving kits or male gr…

To reframe this on race, there's been a couple of (from an engineering perspective) gobsmacking demos of how non-diverse developers end up making something that just does not work for people who don't look like them. The soap dispenser that doesn't recognize dark skin: https://gizmodo.com/why-cant-this-soap-dispenser-identify-da... Facial recognition systems that don't work well on dark-skinned people: https://www.wi…

Diversity doesn't matter in practice if management doesn't want to spend the resources to engineer for diverse use cases. I've been over-ruled too many times when I've pushed for "fringe" use cases - including once with exactly your example of a product not working on Black people (different product, but same ethnicity-based issue). My team intentionally sought out (internal) diversity to test the prototype on. And guess what? When I said this was a big problem and we needed to fix it, I got over-ruled (by my non-White company president) because we were already late shipping the product. (Then product got canned for other reasons later - after I left the company shortly after this decision).

I'm not sure how to fix this broader problem - or what else I could/should have done there (other than leave for greener pastures)!

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