861–870 of 1001 posts
Another way to look at this is... job openings are coming to Basecamp and people know the culture is a no politics at work place. I bet a lot of people will sign up for that. Enough to fill the openings.
I do love the idea of no politics at work. Politics is not intellectually interesting for me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, people are reacting to the policy. But it's definitely that the policy is a reaction to something as well. Probably, the founders believed that the toxicity of the internal culture had reached a point where it was extremely detrimental to the workplace. And, knowing DHH, it was probably not only a financial decision but a lifestyle one. He may have realized that the advocates that actively discussed and promoted…
I disagree, this reeks of cheap solutions and ill thought HR managements. To me banning politics from company chat feels vague and confusing at best. Another post from a few days ago got this from a worker[1]: > “How do you talk about raising kids without talking about society?” the employee said. “As soon as I bring up public schools, then it’s already political.” At worst it feels like you are being silenced. In te…
Interestingly the employees who left have the best career prospects. Entire iOS team, head of marketing and head of product team. The 6 months free money is hard for anyone entering a strong job market to pass up. A lot of comments seem to think 1/3 left because of the no politics policy. 1 / 3 left because it would increase their wealth or give them the summer covid took away last year. How many people would leave y…
Worth adding that the eng team has an even higher rate of departures. Cross-referencing basecamp.com/humans.txt with the list of people who left shows that nearly 2/3 of the Engineering team left, bring them from 15 to 6 (including DHH). That can't bode well for the company.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, people are reacting to the policy. But it's definitely that the policy is a reaction to something as well. Probably, the founders believed that the toxicity of the internal culture had reached a point where it was extremely detrimental to the workplace. And, knowing DHH, it was probably not only a financial decision but a lifestyle one. He may have realized that the advocates that actively discussed and promoted…
Yeah, honestly this seems like addition by subtraction. The last thing I would want at work is to navigate around ultra-sensitive trigger-warning micro-aggression seeking activists. Not that all the people leaving were that, but it sure sounds like a lot were. At work I just want professionalism and respectful behavior, along with people that have moderately thick skin and don't seek to find offense everywhere.
I have to admit there's a certain elegance in filtering out political people by banning public discussions of politics, though. I especially cringed at this bit:
> Jane Yang, a data analyst at the company, told me that restricting internal conversations would negatively affect diversity and inclusion efforts. For example, she said, the company’s profit-sharing plan gave more profits to people who have longer tenure — a group that is majority white and male. Making that discussion off limits internally could ensure that inequality in profit sharing becomes a structural feature of the company.
It's not like they had a rule that white males get more money, it's a seniority rule! It seems unreasonable to me to extrapolate that to systemic racism in the company.
What I think is lost in the conversation here is that people don’t really have organizations they can go to to advocate their political positions. People have their families, their jobs, and maybe a couple of friends and that’s about it. They need an outlet to push the ideas and causes they care about. The workplace is one of the few places where they can feel like they’re having an impact, but that’s not really appr…
Interestingly the employees who left have the best career prospects. Entire iOS team, head of marketing and head of product team. The 6 months free money is hard for anyone entering a strong job market to pass up. A lot of comments seem to think 1/3 left because of the no politics policy. 1 / 3 left because it would increase their wealth or give them the summer covid took away last year. How many people would leave y…
It's sad that the target for those employees' "political disruption" is Basecamp. One of the arguably nicest companies to work in, which treats employees well, has a sane work/life balance and advocates so, pays well, embraces remote work, gives back to open source (RoR, etc.), and has good products, with no shady anti-consumer practices, that people actually like and pay for (as opposed to somewhere where they sell…
If 1/3 of your company bolts at once you made a very poor leadership decision. Really, at that point, it has nothing to do with anything else
For me, here's a common thread going through everything that's happened to Basecamp in the last several days and in laser focus today. Today 1/3rd of the employees left Basecamp. Also today: DHH is back to tweeting and fighting with Apple like nothing of note happened and it's just another day. The original situation that sparked everything was brought about largely by dismissive and irresponsible leadership that dis…
The company got lots of free press from this. There will be many who will agree with Basecamp’s stance.
Basecamp will easily hire new people.
There are many who would love to work at a top SV company with strong values and a good culture where they do not have to worry about being cancelled by their fellow employees for not towing the progressive line.
Other companies would have similarly good results proposing similar measures I would expect.
There is a large contingent of SV developers who are just plain toxic. They make themselves feel better and avoid feeling with their own personal issues by targeting others.
They problem is they do great things for the software community because they have a drive sustained by trying to fix everything around them instead of things they can’t fix about themselves.
So we need them, and enable them, but suffer the consequences. Which is where I think DHH and Freid got cut by the double edged sword.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, people are reacting to the policy. But it's definitely that the policy is a reaction to something as well. Probably, the founders believed that the toxicity of the internal culture had reached a point where it was extremely detrimental to the workplace. And, knowing DHH, it was probably not only a financial decision but a lifestyle one. He may have realized that the advocates that actively discussed and promoted…
Yeah, honestly this seems like addition by subtraction. The last thing I would want at work is to navigate around ultra-sensitive trigger-warning micro-aggression seeking activists. Not that all the people leaving were that, but it sure sounds like a lot were. At work I just want professionalism and respectful behavior, along with people that have moderately thick skin and don't seek to find offense everywhere.
> every discussion remotely related to politics, advocacy, or society at large quickly spins away from pleasant. You shouldn't have to wonder if staying out of it means you're complicit, or wading into it means you're a target. These are difficult enough waters to navigate in life, but significantly more so at work. It's become too much. It's a major distraction.
https://world.hey.com/jason/changes-at-basecamp-7f32afc5
There's absolutely no reason to believe that there were any "ultra-sensitive trigger-warning micro-aggression seeking activists" at Basecamp among the employees. All we have is a blog post from someone who is overly sensitive to reasonable professional conversations and didn't want to deal with "unpleasant" conversations at work. It's a story told from that person's perspective and we shouldn't take it as absolute truth.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of their iOS devs who left has been incredibly vocal about how he no longer felt like this was somewhere he could work because of this policy and its effects, so I think you're plainly wrong (or insisting that there's no way we could take a person at their word). https://twitter.com/georgeclaghorn It's a lot more likely that the 1/3rd that left both left because they were unhappy with the policy, and because they…
> 6 months free money is not as much as you'd think; a new job hunt takes 3, even for talented, in-demand people. If you're a developer, that's enough runway to launch a side-business. After all, job-searching is hardly time-consuming (it takes so little time that people do it while already employed in a full-time position). Yeah, some folk will sit at home binge-watching netflix for 6 months. I can all but guarantee…
Super tangent on the thread but if you want a product that people are interested in you might think about using a process like Nathan Barry's Authority or 30x500. Not that those are the best or only ways to make a product, of course, but they're at least a direction to take to figure out what people want, need, and buy.