As it stands, the kernel of Coinbase's defense here is "we paid for a secret report and it says we're great". Reasonable people can find that response unpersuasive.
The HN community appears to be no more rational or evidence-based finders of fact than those found in the comments section of Fox News or the New York Times.
What hope do we have if the creators and maintainers are prone to the same proclivities as the users?
Are you thinking of a specific example? I don't recall ever seeing this apart from sometimes a short statement on an outcomes (which Coinbase has given us - they found the complaints baseless [0]).
> ...but they can certainly commission a new one that they can disclose.
I did mention law but this isn't fundamentally a legal argument. I was just saying I'd expect there to be a law, given what releasing a detailed report would entail about employee privacy. I'd be ropeable if someone did that to me after I complained to HR and the story got international attention.
Companies have no role at all in airing internal dirty laundry of employees to Hacker News. Coinbase's position is an employee made a baseless claim - in my book it would probably be a very poor precedent for them to start broadcasting details globally. Best case, utterly unfair because of the power imbalance between a company and an individual employee. Worst case, a smear campaign. All cases, unhelpful except for the enjoyment of pundits Hacker News comment threads.
[0] EDIT Rather than replying - "all of whom found no evidence of wrongdoing and concluded the claims were unsubstantiated" https://blog.coinbase.com/upcoming-story-about-coinbase-2012...
I don't know where this "baseless claim" thing comes from; the only foundation you have for that belief is that Coinbase said so. The point of an external report is not having to take Coinbase's word for it. What's funny is paying for an external report, then not showing it to anybody, or even disclosing who did it, and relying on that external report as evidence.
Here's a reasonable question: is the reason Coinbase won't disclose the external reports they commissioned because they can't, because their investigators won't allow them to, because neither are willing to stake their reputations on the interpretation Coinbase drew from them? If not, how do you know that?
And that was investigating stuff Susan Fowler had already attacked them publicly on. I'm not going to try and look up all the details but it is probably a different set of circumstances.
[0] https://www.uber.com/newsroom/covington-recommendations/ and then https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1s08BdVqCgrUVM4UHBpTGROLXM...
The 60 people who left makes it clear this is not agreed upon. HN has already played out this debate on the original post so I'll save going into it here, but it's disingenuous to say that Russ didn't quit because of race-related policy, whether or not you think the policy is race-related.
That said, putting out that "apolitical stance" in the direct wake of George Floyd/BLM is unavoidably tied. As others have said, timing is key. If they had the policy from day 1, they might have a leg to stand on. It seems likely in context with this article (and frankly, to many before this) that Coinbase's apolitical stance is not a rejection of all politics but a tacit rejection of George Floyd/BLM. No one should be surprised about a diversity problem in such a company.
This "what else can they do?" question stems from a criminal judicial standard of guilt and conviction, but that is not where this discussion exists. To think that Coinbase must be innocent and needs to prove that over many former employees being on the record + clear statistical issues that all align with the narrative the company has set with previous actions shows a central flaw in the tech community's approach to racism and politics.
I realize the question does not direct say that they must be innocent, but the implications and assumptions here are important to note, and certainly lean in that direction.
Did all 60 people leave because of Coinbase's political stance, or did some leave because of the generous severance package of 4-6 months pay that the CEO offered in September?
I know that if I were looking to make a life change, I'd seriously consider that offer even if I liked the politics.
But forget number speculation, we have concrete proof of this in the article:
> another employee who left in October was John Russ, the head of marketing and the company’s highest ranking Black employee, who had been hired three months earlier.
> In a brief phone interview, Mr. Russ would only say that he disagreed with Mr. Armstrong’s new position and left as a result.
We can, but we can only do this because people in the comments are independently informed. The NYT repeatedly emphasized 60 people leaving (across two articles) but never mentioned the severance.
The George Floyd spark very much "outed" Coinbase here, because it became an issue you couldn't avoid taking a side on. That's just the state of the world and you're right that they couldn't have anticipated it, but they chose to make a clear stance rather than trying to ride the thin line, and they became less diverse for it. I don't know why anyone would be surprised their prior actions match that recent stance.
Again, I'm trying to avoid the philosophical "Should companies be political" debate that's already been hashed, but simply stating how their actions translate in the current landscape.
You said this so casually. It's an axiomatic truth that everyone has to 'take a stand', implying that you have to call it out, and in a context moreover where not a single person applauded the murder of Floyd. How disingenuous for you to call it a stand, implying that there's a debate. Instead what you mean is, sign up to a calling out of the police. What betrays the problem at hand, why companies cannot feasibly all be political by nature, is that there a zillion possible social causes that one could rationally argue are impossible to call out, from shootings domestically (1100 in my city this year so far), to corporate malfeasance (sweat shops overseas, finance fraud), to foreign policy (bombings of middle eastern countries).
If you and I worked together and you stood up and demanded everyone call out the Floyd thing, outed as you call it, you and I would be debating the above points in front of everyone.
THAT is why companies should allow for an apolitical space.
And can you explain to me why one is absolutely required to publicly vocalize their stance on the George Floyd issue? How is not wanting to speak on the topic in the workplace equivalent to being racist?
Vox (among others) wrote a piece on it: https://www.vox.com/2020/6/3/21278245/antiracist-racism-race...
I'm equivocal on both of these.
In the case of (1), why should the act of fighting injustice pause by some notion of decorum at work? Where should our priorities and values lie?
In the case of (2), many people have good reasons to find the prevailing leftist/progressive rhetoric distasteful. But right now the groups who espouse that rhetoric are also the most active and most effective groups taking action right now. If you aren't with them, who exactly are you with? Or so the rhetoric might go.
It was, after all the first time he was pressured that way.
I've made this comment elsewhere, but I really would love to know why people are digging in so hard here. Let's just call a spade a spade.
Pretty sure there’s only one “side” anybody’s actually ever taken there.
What most don't condone is burning down buildings and attacking and harassing diners.
BLM is the ultimate motte and bailey.
Note that I am Black too.
It's a uniquely American thing that the academic grifters with nothing better to do are desperately trying to import here as well.
I don't think that he would have taken that public stance if he didn't feel that the company was being distracted internally by racial justice issues. It being a fair response is highly dependent on those internal conversations.
And the NY Times reports that prior to this conversation there was a public meeting where Black employees brought up difficult experiences at Coinbase. Being told that people should leave politics at home or leave the company is a horrible response to complaints about discrimination.
Now I'm happy to agree that the retention rate of black people at Coinbase raises some questions. But the NYT, having asked those questions, came up with no particular evidence of racism.
The major piece of evidence that these issues are substantially due to race is that the NYT felt it warranted a hit piece. That is weak evidence. Being passed over for promotion and feeling unappreciated - which they lead with - isn't evidence. Most of us have been passed over for promotion plenty of times. Most people are unappreciated too.
Starting with the assumption it is a pretty normal company, that is a list mostly of stuff that nobody should care about.
If someone can articulate what the HR complaints are about then that might be evidence. But complaints to HR are expected - that is why HR gets hired. They are there to deal with HR complaints. And read resumes.
> including an instance where the Black members of a team were required to relocate while a non-Black member wasn't
This one is stupid. Am I meant to believe they are revealing their racist ways by hiring black people then asking them to relocate, racistly? This is bog standard sucks-to-work-in-support activity. Miserable working conditions, but nothing to do with skin colour. A similar thing happened to my father back in the day. He certainly wasn't black.
The existence of slavery in the past isn’t driving the current race issues in the US so much as fallout from much more recent segregation policies. Nobody alive today was a (or was born to) a slave and the majority of the states that make up the United States were not even part of the country during the civil war.
To claim racism is endemic now because of slavery is lazy. Racism is endemic because segregation didn’t end until approximately the same time as TCP/IP was being invented!
The existence of slavery and the view that Black people could be treated as livestock are why we had segregation policies.
The existence of slavery fueled white anger towards the idea that the "livestock" were suddenly being allowed to go to the same places and use the same services as white people. The generations of people who owned slaves raised the generations of people that enforced segregation, and those generations raised the people today who enforce racial discrimination and oppose racial justice.
And like you said, this isn't far-back history, segregation in the US was recent. People have this flowery view that racism just went away and that slavery just suddenly stopped mattering. But the effects are still very much with us today. A few generations isn't enough to eliminate a culturally pervasive, harmful ideology.
It's important to keep in mind that Black communities (and a lot of other marginalized communities) as a group don't really have these debates as much, because it's completely obvious to them that they aren't being treated equally.
If you'd like to better understand that, I'd suggest you read Kendi's "Stamped from the Beginning", who gives an intellectual history of America's racist ideas. I also think you're mistaken to lay the current troubles at the feet of formal segregation policies, which were only active in one part on the US. Maybe go read "Sundown Towns", which shows that all across America we had towns with de-facto segregation without formal policies. And it takes only a glance at modern maps showing race to see we haven't solved the problem.
One could plausibly debate the level of it. But to sweepingly declare there's absolutely no evidence isn't so much a claim of fact as a declaration of willful ignorance. Which, unfortunately, is part of why racism is still endemic. See, for example, Loewen's "Sundown Towns", where the later chapters show how America's ongoing de-facto segregation, which was born out of the Nadir, both depends on and creates the sort of refusal to see the obvious that you engage in here.
That also isn't the strongest evidence. It's just one of the easiest to understand. But given that you're going to strain at gnats and swallow camels even with the pretty basic ones, I'll leave finding the rest as an exercise to the reader.
You ignore the evidence showing unarmed black Americans are 25 times less likely to be shot by police than unarmed white Americans in a given interaction with similar circumstances, because it doesn't fit your victimhood narrative.
You've done nothing but lob ad hominem at me for not agreeing with your completely baseless and unscientific quackery/dogma.
In none of those examples is there proof of racial bias.
when most of your black employees leave because of what they feel is racism in the workplace that’s harder to ignore
They weren't ignoring it. Some of these people weren't even saying they felt that way to Coinbase - one of the people who claims she was bullied also claims nobody told her how to make an official complaint and that's why Coinbase have no record of her views. Complaining to HR has to be the easiest task in any modern corporation; if she couldn't figure out how to do even that then we probably found the explanation for why she felt unappreciated: maybe she just sucked. Or maybe she's made up this supposed racism after she left, as part of achieving other ends (like getting in the NYT).
That is extremely vague. Is it a red flag? Yes. Does it imply racism? No. It doesn't even guarantee there is a problem or a systemic trend for that matter.
If there are 3 red flags and some actual evidence of racism then that is one thing. But there isn't. Even the number of black people quitting - what is the expected retention rate in that team? Most people quit due to dodgy managers, so people quitting points to a dodgy manager before it points to racism.
We know that Alysa Butler felt unappreciated. I'm hesitant to believe the NYT is even representing her opinions fairly. If you read what they've written about carefully, the article doesn't have her accusing Coinbase of any sort of racism, the NYT is just weaving her experience into a story that they construct elsewhere (normal practice in newspapers). A 'diversity problem' is different from racism. 25 year olds being ignored in meetings is not a new phenomenon either in my experience.
Yeah, I am completely ignoring that. "My presence in the workplace was excessively celebrated" isn't a complaint. There is nothing there to respond to.
If you want to argue that could technically be racist behaviour I agree, but typically when people talk about racism they are actually going to serious issues like money, power or personal safety. Photos taken for promotional material is not something that needs a defence - it is a frivolous thing to argue about. Any company might do that.
I don't know the details of the story, but the thing is with baseless accusations of racism is that it's a perfect slander, one can never prove innocence once proclaimed guilty.
this is a self-evident conclusion being hawked as a premise, and the rest of the comment doesn't do much to mold this premise into an argument
> If Russ had a reason for quitting that was race-related then the NYT didn't uncover it.
There's an unfalsifiability in this rhetoric, because someone leaving for race-related reasons in an industry that either: a) has "subtle racists" b) is funded by "subtle racists" c) functionally aids and/or abets "subtle racists" through inaction
would be incentivized to not specify these things, as these industries (finance and crypto) optimize for relationships almost as much (if not ==) to the amount they optimize for merit. And that's not even getting into clauses baked into employment termination contracts. So you have a scenario where you can't actually "prove" race was a primary motivator for quitting because: a) if it were a "subtle racist" co-worker, they're probably using euphemism a2) if they're a "not subtle racist" co-worker, it would embarrass the employer for keeping that person on the book swhen the reputational cost exceeds the cost of sourcing and hiring someone who's not a not subtle racist" b) If the person wants to work in tech again, relationships will likely be burned as a direct or indirect result of airing out a company's dirty laundry c) Could be sued for violating non-disparagement clauses (prices out anyone who doesn't have the security to burn the bridge between them and a growth industry)
If the point of your comment was to use a number of premises that aren't empirical, and border on dogmatic, then I misunderstood, and apologize for trying to search for rhetoric where it was not intended to be found.
If the purpose of the statements above where to be rhetorical or logical, then we're getting into a place where we're asking for evidence that would be difficult for someone with said evidence to do without them, say, being financially and occupationally secure enough to burn the bridges between them and: - Coinbase - Coinbase's Investors - Coinbase's Investors' LPs - Coinbase's Investors' companies - Every other company that either doesn't question whether they are less meritocratic than they believe, or doesn't question whether or not they can replace the problematic superstar employees
Many of the "issues" bought up in this article aren't even problematic. It says John Russ left because Armstrong took public stance that he wanted Coinbase to focus on crypto space stuff.
Coinbase's stance there is fair, reasonable and moral. It is desirable that some companies just do what it says on the tin. If Russ had a reason for quitting that was race-related then the NYT didn't uncover it.