Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

Re:Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortabl... by ojnabieoot on Wednesday September 30, 2020 @01:40PM (#24641359)

I suspect your comment isn't really being offered in good faith, but can you name a specific example of a company where a coworker did one of these things:

> leak documents, raise alarms about operations they don't understand, and generally draw the company into litigation

and it was actually a case of misguided political activism rather than legitimate whistleblowing? I suppose maybe in slaughterhouses or animal testing laboratories, but definitely not with tech.

> In a highly sensitive market like crypto, you don't want to gain unnecessary regulatory attention, and activists like this will be the first to testify against the company with their biased interpretation of internal operations.

It is very difficult to not read this as "sometimes crypto companies need to break the law to make that cheddar, and you really don't want any of these radical 'companies should obey the law' activists getting in your way."

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Re:Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortabl... by DenisM on Thursday October 01, 2020 @10:42AM (#24651362)

> I suspect your comment isn't really being offered in good faith

Assume good faith https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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Re:Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortabl... by thaeli on Wednesday September 30, 2020 @02:31PM (#24641978)

It's a very minority view on HN, but important to keep in mind that there are quite a few people who consider what Snowden did "a case of misguided political activism".

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Re:Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortabl... by blaser-waffle on Thursday October 01, 2020 @01:14PM (#24653522)

Weren't there a few at Google?

A conservative guy who generated headlines because of being discriminated against because he voted for the GOP?

Also some sort of whistleblower who got fired for speaking out against anti-union activity (but may have been a personal / non-union issue)?

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Re:Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortabl... by brippalcharrid on Wednesday September 30, 2020 @10:48PM (#24646766)

Companies that are in industries which generally attract the attention of regulators because they're doing something new, exciting and potentially disruptive won't want to create unnecessary scope for controversy that will lead to a regulator feeling the need to clamp down on them (this shouldn't happen if the controversy is unrelated to the regulated activities, but people are irrational, and it does). Conversely, an activist employee will know that they will have a far more effective platform to spread their message if they do it in an environment that has more regulatory exposure, and as a result greater potential for media coverage.

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