I find this hard to imagine without someone getting reprimanded. Not disbelieving the person's quote, but not accepting it as fact either. Seems like it would be easy to get corroborating witnesses for a situation that inappropriate.

The only group I've seen it be permissible to make stereotyped observations about in the last decade in an SF tech office is european/indian/chinese workers. FWIW I don't think that's okay either; we should be striving to make an inclusive workspace for everyone.

People treat you with contempt and ridicule if you complain about being unfairly treated. They hide behind objective processes that give cover to be biased. If process A, B, and C are objective, A+B+C can still yield terrible, biased outcomes. Witnesses and data simply doesn’t matter without empathy and understanding.

A lot of people traffic in blatant stereotypes in the guise of some kind of positive statement, which makes reprimands less likely. I once had a speaker tell us - in a diversity seminar! - about specific racial groups he thinks are too timid to speak up for themselves.

Our execs have short text guides on how to work best with them and everyone on my team has been encouraged to share similar. The default assumption is everyone should be working together to accommodate on how we can all work best together.

I've been in environments where certain communications styles are labeled more correct or ideal. So I've really loved this guidebook + accommodation approach.

I went into this article with an open mind about there possibly being toxicity I haven't witnessed w/i the company. But tbh the evidence comes up short and just doesn't match with what I've seen. I have interviewed at companies where some level of toxicity was easy to pick up on during the onsite (eg Uber during peak growth years).

My fear is that this article might scare away diverse folks from Coinbase, and possibly even crypto at large given some of the descriptions about the industry at the end. CB is a really great company for any curious nerd to join. I'd also say the Ethereum community and associated startups+labs are especially welcoming and friendly.

>CB is a really great company for any curious nerd to join.

Not if they're black or brown, apparently. I have no idea how you could say this is a 'great' company after reading this article. Like my mind is actually blown.

I work on a diverse team at CB that has engagement scores through the roof. And you don't need to know the survey data to know that; just join us for lunch. We're curious, we care about each other, and we care about the mission.

The NYTimes is like the Daily Prophet for muggles. Don't over-index on a hit piece.

You mention diversity. Do any black folks work on your team? Do you think it’s possible that black engineers are treated well and black CX are treated poorly?

On my direct team nope. I can imagine folks being treated differently in Eng vs CX at other companies, and have seen that. I have trouble imagining that at CB, but anything's possible.

CB stands out in my career for the number of good human beings I've gotten to meet and work with. And my read when I see Brian, Emilie, Surojit, and Manish speak at weekly AMAs is they genuinely care about everyone in the company. It's a gut instinct, and so far I have no personal experience or anecdotal from within my circles to the contrary.

My sister used to work in CX (outside of tech) and it was really damaging work for her. It'd be devastating for me to learn our folks are not supported.

> Not if they're black or brown, apparently.

You are wrong, apparently. 4 out of 7 members of the exec team have last names indicating they are people of color. Check yourself: https://www.coinbase.com/about

If the head of product and the head of engineering are brown people, I am very confident that CB is a great place to join for brown nerds since culture flows from the top.

Really missing the forests for the trees, here. It's clear that there are under-represented groups at CoinBase that are routinely discriminated. It is unthinkable to me for HN readers to defend that, but here we are regardless.

Maybe I should have used the term 'under-represented minorities,' because I don't see a single black or latino person (admittedly, this is what I meant as 'brown' since I'm Hispanic).

> It is unthinkable to me for HN readers to defend that

> admittedly, this is what I meant as 'brown'

I mean, if you are going to use 'brown' to exclusively refer to latinos when half the world (or more?) is brown, then obviously you are going to sow confusion on forums like HN with participants across the globe.

I think it’s much less an issue with people who have relocated and spent a few years adapting to us, but to succeed with foreign cultures you have to know how directly they prefer to communicate. Dave Barry tells this story:

(Beth) “… and then we want to take a plane from Point A to Point B.”

(Japanese travel agent) “I see. You want to take a plane?” “Yes.”

“From Point A?” “Yes.”

“To Point B?” “Yes.”

“Ah.” “Can we do that?”

“Perhaps you would prefer to take a train.” “No, we would prefer to take a plane.”

“Ah-hah. You would prefer to take a plane?” “Yes. A plane.”

“I see. From Point A?”

This mystified his wife but apparently between Japanese this is virtually screaming “THERE IS NO PLANE, YOU ZITBRAIN!”

Yeah, for working with non-American employees this kind of training would make a lot of sense. This guy in particular was talking about American Latinas, though.

Being timid is strongly connected to your upbringing, your upbringing is strongly connected to culture and culture is strongly connected to race.

Sure, saying "X are too timid" is a stereotype, but pointing out at a diversity seminar that you should be extra observant around X because they tend to not speak up for themselves is just good advice. Many cultures value being quiet and doing your job a lot more than others, and those values get passed down by parents for at least a few generations after immigrating. If that group doesn't have a good support structure (no BLM equivalent), that only adds to the fear of speaking out.

If you're a manager that gets many complaints from group Y but very few from group X, knowing that might lead you to do some more investigating and discover group X is being treated even worse, they're just not reporting it. Using a heuristing to optimise your search given imperfect information, if you will.

> culture is strongly connected to race.

In another context this statement would be seen as overtly racist.

See, that's the kind of thing I've never understood - how could it not be connected? Race has been historically mostly a geographic thing. You'd see Asian people in Asia, African people in Africa, etc. Anyone else had to have immigrated, or is the child of an immigrant however many generations ago. Culture is also very geographic. Immigrants tend to bring their culture with them (which is a good thing!) and parents usually want to raise their children at least partially in their culture.

So what am I missing?

Eh, I'm not sure what point I was trying to make, and to be clear I don't think your comment was racist.

Culture is obviously correlated with race in some respects. It's when you start talking about the reason behind some of those correlations that you risk (rightly or wrongly) being called a racist.

> The only group I've seen it be permissible to make stereotyped observations about in the last decade in an SF tech office is european/indian/chinese workers.

As a South Asian minority, this is also my experience. The racism, stereotyping and stigma against South Asians feels more acceptable and totally unrecognized.

So do you believe that all the white employees just laughed about this? Did any of them corroborate the allegations?

I work at a FAANG and a massive percentage of employees are rabidly anti-racist, and wouldn't stand for anything like that. Are coinbase employees just cut from a different cloth?

Absolutely. Look at their CEO statements. They seem to hire very anti-establishment, anti-pc (in their view). It’s easy for a culture to then not hire people who don’t fit that mold.

> I work at a FAANG and a massive percentage of employees are rabidly anti-racist, and wouldn't stand for anything like that.

I get nervous when I make a comment about Zoom being insecure because it's Chinese around Chinese coworkers, and I can at least point to its bad track record on security and how Five Eyes members are treating Huawei.

I'm not sure I fully understand your point, but it might be worth adjusting your language a little bit to account for a quirk of our language(in that Chinese could refer to the nationality, or the government): I assume your problem with Zoom is its association with the CCP, and not just that it is merely Chinese.

Conspiracy theory time: That's not a quirk with our language, there's a deliberate lack of distinction between the country and the people. During the Cold War, you could say "Soviet" instead of "Russian" to clearly demarcate between the nation and the nationality. We don't have a modern equivalent for the PRC, and that's because someone wants it that way. It'd be trivial for a new term to be pushed through media, but it's not being done, even though we clearly need one.

> During the Cold War, you could say "Soviet" instead of "Russian" to clearly demarcate between the nation and the nationality

That's not what that distinguished. It distinguished whether you were talking about things pertaining to the USSR and those specifically having to do with Russia; the same rough difference as between “American” and “Californian” (or, perhaps a better analogy would be “British” and “English”.)

> We don't have a modern equivalent for the PRC

Mostly because China didn't conquer a bunch of neighbors and create a name for the resulting state distinct from “China”, which remains as the name for the absolutely dominant component.

But, again, while the Soviet/Russian distinction did exist, it did not serve the purpose you describe, and we didn't have any linguistic distinction that did.

You've got a bit to learn about Tibet, HK, Xinjiang ( a muslim region), and soon Taiwan

> You've got a bit to learn about Tibet, HK, Xinjiang ( a muslim region), and soon Taiwan

Or, you've got to read to the end of the sentence:

> Mostly because China didn't conquer a bunch of neighbors and create a name for the resulting state distinct from “China”

That last part matters.

You know China doesn't refer to themselves as China, right? China is Portugese in origin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_China

China definitely refers to themselves as China when speaking English just like the United States refers to itself as 美利坚合众国 or just 美国 when speaking Chinese.

> you could say "Soviet" instead of "Russian" to clearly demarcate between the nation and the nationality.

The demonym for the people who lived in the Soviet Union was “Soviet.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union

Sure, but if you had neighbors who immigrated to the US from Moscow in the late 80s, would you refer to them as "Soviet" or "Russian"?

Jews, who formed such a large part of the emigration from the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s to the USA, often bristle at being called "Russian". Yes, their language is now Russian after Eastern Europe's Jews have shifted away from Yiddish, but they still don't consider themselves Russians. For example, my own mother-in-law is a member of this emigre demographic and insists on being referred to as "a Jew from the Soviet Union".

That's a good point: it's specifically CCP involvement, and language doesn't differentiate that well. It doesn't help that the CCP is the only game in town. It's hard not to be involved with the CCP in China.

It seems possible that a much smaller company could have a sizable number of employees who claim to be anti-racist, but fail to behave that way in practice. Particularly one with a concentration of libertarian "crypto bros" who are often at odds with employees who might be described as "rabidly anti-racist".

>less experienced white employees

A job in a competitive industry is probably the first area where a lot of people first see social promotion end as younger more capable people surpass them. This is going to be especially true for people who have received the benefits of affirmative action up until this point in their lives.