> Why wouldn't you want to bring them up at work?
Imho companies that try to tackle the woke political issues are going to end up worse off and never make those few employees that keep bringing them up happy.
This blog post by Basecamp is excellent. What a fantastic company it must be to work for. It's too late now because I'm starting my own company and am fully dedicated to that, but part of the reason for doing so was the feeling that there weren't enough (any?) companies with these sorts of policies in the world. I'll add Basecamp to the small list of software firms I'd be willing to work at in future.
There are many good reasons to care. Off the top of my head:
* Having a diverse work force makes it less likely that you will be blind to problems caused by unintended side effects of your product that only affect certain groups.
* Having no women (or people of color, or people with disabilities, or...) on the workforce, will make you less attractive as an employer to talented people in these groups. Ultimately, you get to hire from a larger talent pool, if you make an effort to cultivate diversity.
* Making an effort to attract a diversity of people will make you uncover barriers of entry, that you might not have been aware of, and removing those has the potential to benefit everyone.
And finally, even if you believe strongly that your hiring practices are not the cause of the lack of diversity, and that the real problem is elsewhere (in the education system for instance), you can still choose to be part of the solution by providing proof that there is a desirable future to be had for a woman who chooses to go in to a STEM field.
The social justice diversity, equity and inclusion is a political stance that instead of seeing individuals see groups of "oppressed" and "oppressors" which is a recipe for a less productive work environment. These unchosen group identities are political tools and not descriptive of an individual.
Moreover, social justice uses activism to take over the organization to the point where it use as many resources as possible for activism. It is not unusual at this point for activist employees to ask a company to make bad business decisions for political reasons, so a policy putting political activism into the private sphere makes it clear that you are at work to create a long-term sustainable and healthy business.
Everything else being equal, sure.
and prefer to be hired and rewarded only for that reason.
Why would anybody who knew they were talented and got hired or promoted, assume it had to do with anything other than their talent?
The social justice diversity, equity and inclusion is a political stance that instead of seeing individuals see groups of "oppressed" and "oppressors" which is a recipe for a less productive work environment. These unchosen group identities are political tools and not descriptive of an individual.
It is possible to recognize that a certain groups of people on average face more obstacles and barriers, without equating individuals with the groups they belong to or vice versa.
Affirmative hiring, diversity quotas etc are actively aimed at identity based hiring and promotion. In addition to this a candidate in a favored identity group often go through different hiring and promotion procedures with involvement from the DEI officer.
> It is possible to recognize that a certain groups of people on average face more obstacles and barriers, without equating individuals with the groups they belong to or vice versa.
In a different working environment this may have been the case, but according to the silicon valley index more than 2/3[1] of silicon valley workers 20-45 are immigrants of asian descent so the woke assertion that its a white mans business is not accurate.
In addition to this there are official company policies that discriminate against white men, and there are policies actively working to give special consideration in hiring and promotion to BIPOC. Their aim is to create asymmetry between groups.
What if someone was judged by the color of their skin or their gender by the system? There are plenty of studies that show how the LSAT/SAT for example, is biased in favor of whites. The school may say they only admitted those with the highest scores and didn't look at skin color, but skin color ended up built into the score.
So while the system should correct for this eventually, companies are attempting to correct for this issue now.
The truth is that we don't know if the 100% male engineering group is a result of perfectly executed meritocratic interview process or a result of systematic bias. It's probably wrong to make blind assumptions either way, but if we're going to make assumptions anyways then we should lean towards the latter.
Firstly, hiring is actually irrelevant to this because the gender ratios of most software companies are the same as the gender ratios of CS graduates, which is what you'd expect on average in a meritocratic process. A few firms like Google have higher numbers of women which they achieve by a variety of means both fair and foul, but the average company does match.
The 100% male group is a hypothetical - I've only rarely been in such teams myself and only when they were small. It's clearly possible if the team is, say, 10 people. If you get to 100 and there are no women I'd be wondering if there's something odd going on, but it's still explainable by chance, and it's very dependent on sub-field. For example if you're doing embedded programming for the oil or nuclear industries, then those industries are themselves mostly interesting to men, so you get "interest in software * interest in industry" and you can get lower numbers than pure software companies. This is often the case for industries that are hyper-competitive or risky, for instance, I've seen 100% male engineering teams a lot in the cryptocurrency space.
So if there's any debate or action to be had here at all, it's actually by universities, not companies, because company demographics follow CS program demographics.
For example, although MLK Jr. espoused being a good Christian, he did not follow the principles of being a good Christian when he cheated on his wife with multiple different women.
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.
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)!
Then I have to ask, is it then a political and right-wing stance NOT to ask these questions?
Should a woman only be hired because they're a woman, even if they're a poor engineer? That seems way more sexist than the alternative.
Given their (in relative terms) failure, one could say that this is a complex problem, and addressing one issue is unfortunately not enough.
> even if they're a poor engineer?
This is not something GP wrote. They wrote they had significant issues because, in a sense, they created a problem (hiring methodologies) in order to solve one that didn't previously exist (gender bias).
The cliche is that tech companies are aiming to change the world. Software has real impacts on humans. Maybe the group of people "changing the world" should be a bit more diverse than just Dudes.
To be fair I would expect more female engineers to show a benefit in the retention rates of female engineers so I think this initiative could be net positive for the company but I also doubt the people pushing for this are being data driven.
Its also very funny that anyone would consider the contents of a question about a post to be "putting words in their mouth". I am absolutely authentically curious about why someone would take the extremely funny step of appearing to rail against politics being discussed at work - by complaining about a "political" issue that's happening at their work.
I really detest such things, and the "problem" is easily solved by "I don't give a fuck".
I don't give a fuck if you are male or female, or anything in between, if you are, black, white, yellow or whatever, neither do I care about your sexual preferences, or your religion. And neither should anyone else care.
I do care about how well you can do your job, how well you fit in our team, etc.
I helped hire most of our team members, and by luck they are very diverse in all of the above mentions traits. But who should care?
This is 2021, nobody should give a fuck about those things anymore. If you do, in either direction, you're part of the problem, not the solution.
I think some humility is in order. It's possible that one is a perfect, unbiased judge of character. On the other hand it's possible that one is just human, with a predilection for equating "like me and my friends" to "nice" or "professional".
Personally, there's a part of me deep down that does want to discriminate, and I have to kick that part's ass any time it rears its ugly head. Even being part of several marginalized identities is no guard against it.
I live in a country where the differences are handled almost the exact opposite to what is done in the US. Instead of spreading positive discrimination that reinforces the idea that we're all different and actually promoting communautarism, we believe that our differences are fundamentally a private matter and when we want to build something together we leverage our common interest and values. It's all idealistic but in practice our racism isn't as widespread and brutal as other places, which is why I'm convinced it is the right way to follow
The best example is that it is forbidden to have public statistics based on religion. Not because religion doesn't matter (it does), not because religion is irrelevant (it isn't), but because pointing out our different beliefs is the best way to pit people against each other
Not sure that’s such a good example. When something is painfully obvious to everyone, the suppressing statistics only leads to more resentment, conspiracy theories and political unrest (or support for far-something groups).
A good example is terrorism in Europe. You can be pretty sure that if the race/religion isn’t mentioned, it’s not white & atheist/christian.
This last part is crucial for not being indifferent or sticking your head in the sand. We ignore the differences, but we don't ignore the bastards that do take those differences into account.
I'm sure discrimination is banned at Basecamp.
Is kind of like a Credit Score, but determined by Twitter. The process is opaque and you cannot dispute it. You also can't get your Privilege Score beforehand, but you WILL be told your relative Privilege Position compared to other people if you say something wrong.
It doesn't make sense. You are essentially if you are non-minority, your opinion should be ignored unless its in-line with the opinion of those in the minority. How is that respecting an opinion as "valid"?
As if a social worker could only help out with problems s/he had experienced him/herself already.
> Hope that made sense.
A bit, not that much
> 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 we don't appreciate it when you talk over us, attempt to silence our voices, or, case in point, put words in our mouths and exaggerate our points beyond recognition.
Please try and engage this topic in good faith and not through pedantics and wordplay. If you fundamentally disagree that the victims of discrimination should have the loudest voice in the matter, I'd love to talk further.
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 looks quite different here where I live.
> put words in my mouth all day
Not sure what you have in mind, I still think that what you wrote, sounds weird (I hope you don't mind). As if someone who got bullied in school, automatically should know better how to mitigate such problems in school. (Be an expert?)
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.
No, I think not. Look here:
> When you form a student-led committee on anti-bullying but mysteriously exclude all the victims
That's, what's the right word, changing the analogy into madness.
I said like this: "Not only group X can have good ideas about something"
and you seem to believe that that means: "X must be silenced" -- that's weird, to say the least.
I never said that, and I don't think that, and I feel surprised, maybe a little bit ill, that you somehow misinterpreted what I wrote, that much.
> 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
I suppose there are such people.
> have been silenced and told to shut up
I feel sad for the cases when that's happened to you and others
> our voices do weigh much more than yours
That's odd, you start writing "our" and "yours" as if you now believe that I'm in some antagonist group, just because I said "not only X can have good ideas".
I'm happy that my friends who look different than me, different skin color for example, don't think like that. We think about each other as "we" together, not as "us" and "them".
I think it's good to end the conversation here. In any case I'm probably not replying any further. And if you did reply to this, I think that that reply would misinterpret something I wrote, but I wouldn't reply and point out what that misunderstanding was about.
And for the sake of clarity - Yes, anyone can and will conjure up great ideas and solutions. No, I'm not calling for such an ideas to be discarded just because the source is "wrong".
For your convenience, let me paste my original comment that you had a beef with:
> Your opinion is valid regardless of your privilege. 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. Hope that made sense.
I thought it was clearly implied that the voice of the discriminated be priotitized over others 'in the events of clashing opinions'. If that wasn't the case, then I apologize for my weak writing. English is obviously not my first language.
Lastly, when you engage in a discussion with a minority person in matters regards to treatment of minority groups, do not be surprised that terms like "we" "us" and "your" get thrown around. It's simply how conversations naturally flow around such topics, and not indicative of the speaker's bias towards identity politics. You might be shocked to find that my close friends of diverse backgrounds don't see me as the strawman you described. And that's not even mentioning my wife and her family.
Have a good week mate!
Ok, I definitely agree with you about that
> No, I'm not calling for such an ideas to be discarded just because the source is "wrong".
Oh ok. I first got the impression that you did, thanks for replying and explaining
About the quote:
> When it comes to discussing specific experiences that minorities face,
I read that as having ideas about what to do about it, whilst you seem to have referred to what has happened to minority people in the past.
I'm thinking that "discussing" here is a bit ambiguous and I'm sorry that I didn't realize I had interpreted it differently from what you meant
> English is obviously not my first language.
Not my first either :-)
(btw I'm a bit surprised, I was guessing that you had grown up in the US in a primarily English speaking part of the country)
> You might be shocked to find that my close friends of diverse backgrounds don't see me as the strawman you described.
I'd think we would be good friends if we met
Have a good week & summer you too
In this situation, you are saying it doesn't effect you so you have the privelege of not caring.
Totally fair! Wish everyone were in that position.
Edit: let me be more specific. In a company, I don't want to hear "Are the women compensated the same as the men?", I want to hear "Is everyone fairly compensated?". There is a very big difference between the 2.
So you have to look at the data, gather the facts, and force the issue:
---
Is everyone fairly compensated?
Yes
But, it looks like a woman is paid 20% less than a man for the same position. Is everyone fairly compensated?
Yes. (Insert sexist reasoning here).
Are women compensated the same as men?
No.
Why is that fair?
---
You could repeat this same thought process for so many other examples, where the general concept of fairness is rooted in inequality, bias, and prejudice.
Look at this very thread. Just a few posts above this one is a guy who says he works at a firm where 40% of all recruitment efforts have to be for female engineers. Those sorts of policies are everywhere. That's actual, concrete discrimination. Firms put bonus pots aside for women, they set up competitions and career opportunities from which men are banned. Men are being barred from board positions and top executive roles all over the place.
At the last place I worked, after firing the head of sales the CEO announced at a company all hands that the next head of sales had to be a woman, and that's why the firm had been without one for so many months. It's of course illegal but the agencies that enforce these laws are run by people steeped in identity politics, so they aren't enforced. When one was finally located she turned out to be wildly incompetent. In the first management offsite she got up and said she had no idea why anyone bought our product. She didn't mean this in a "the product is bad, I'll shock them out of denial" way. She meant it in the sense that she really didn't understand what the product actually did (it was a rather obscure product for software developers). In a sales meeting with a customer she started trying to convince the customer not to use our product, apparently without realising she was doing so. The prior male head of sales had been fired simply for displaying low energy, this woman is of course un-fireable despite demonstrating repeatedly she has zero understanding of the companies products!
That same company invited a third party training company to use the offices at the weekend to run programming classes. These classes were open to everyone except straight, white men. I kid you not, that was the actual rule. If you were a white male you were expected to bring social media evidence that you were gay. Like, photos of you making out with other men or something like that. The justification for this was to keep the lessons "safe". Myself and my (gay) manager went to HR to complain, the head of HR spent 30 minutes trying to defend it. There was no apology and nothing was done about it.
This stuff is routine, it is daily life. It passes by without notice. If even one of these things happened in the reverse direction at a large company it'd make international news.
It's this kind of poisonous ideology that Basecamp are trying to expunge from their firm with this announcement, and what can the average man do but applaud? Who doesn't want to just come to work and have peaceful relations with their co-workers, regardless of race or gender? Only leftist activists, and which firms really need them? They're far more trouble than they're worth.
This is a huge insult to any woman that is good at their job.
In my team we hire the best. That means that any woman in my team is on average as good as any man in my team.
If we had quotas, that would mean that the men in my team are on average better than the women, since they pick the best of both segments, but one segment has way less candidates. How do those women feel to be places into the bucket of "filling seats"? How do project managers select who they want on their team? And then they cry that people are getting discriminated. Self fulfilling prophecy.
The scope of creating a workforce with more representation is not small and probably requires long term planning, constant feedback, and buy-in from stakeholders on all fronts. Companies who only want to appear inclusive are bound to take unilateral, drastic measures in order to meet an observable target without considering the higher order effects.
Basecamp’s approach is just avoiding the problem by pretending it doesn’t exist. Employees who felt unwelcome at work won’t suddenly be happy when they can’t even talk about it. Power to make changes will be concentrated at the top with people apparently determined to keep the status quo.
People who practice positive or negative discrimination should get with the program.
Is it really difficult to admit that we don't yet live in a perfect society?
Any western civilization has equality of individuals as one of their core values, next to democracy, separation of powers, freedom of speech, etc.
> Is it really difficult to admit that we don't yet live in a perfect society?
We will never live in a perfect society. That's why I say people should get with the program. Anti-asian violence is a crime that can and should be prosecuted.
Asking the questions you are asking is political. Discussing people’s membership in groups like cis or Native American or whatever else IS an unwanted political act. Those group identities are fundamentally political tools. Treating people as anything other than individuals is a political act.
Discrimination happens against an individual. If you see discrimination happen against an individual, and you privately and discretely address it with the appropriate people (could be with those directly involved, with superiors, with HR, whatever seems appropriate in that situation), that is not a political act, it is a moral act of taking care of a coworker.
pssst those two things are connected
> Discrimination happens against an individual.
This is just weirdly wrong?
> If you see discrimination happen against an individual, and you privately and discreetly address it with the appropriate people (could be with those directly involved, with superiors, with HR, whatever seems appropriate in that situation), that is not a political act
This is an incredibly political act.
There is no connection whatsoever between diversity and building product. Note: you haven't tried to explain your claim there is, just implied it's obvious, probably because you can't. I've seen people try to honestly intellectually defend a connection between employee diversity and product design before, and it's always a joke. You get anecdotes about face recognition not working on black people (reality: the software in question just had trouble with low contrast images and also struggled with white people's faces). And that's about it. I can't recall ever seeing someone actually argue that more women == better product because, well, that's a pretty sexist thing to believe isn't it? It implies men have no empathy, or that there's a universe of product requirements women will only tell to other women, etc.
If discrimination is happening against an individual and you work with the management chain to resolve it, that's not a political act, because you aren't attempting to radically remake the entire organisation for everyone (politics), but only address the specific problem that was actually observed.
Want examples beyond hand driers? Apple missed menstrual cycle tracking in the Health app. NASA offered to send 1,000 tampons with the first woman in space - and had to abandon its first all-woman spacewalk for bad planning in kit availability. Google Photos tagged black people as gorillas. (Regardless of the cause, it shipped). SnapChat shipped a yellowface filter. Google Translate delivers highly gendered results when translating from gendered languages into English. Google Home is 70% more likely to recognise male voices because of training set bias. Women are 49% more likely to be injured in car accidents because the seating position for crash testing is designed for men. And - yes! - Pinterest has struggled to reach men as users apparently because of its SEO strategy.
Want more examples? Ask any passing woman what app she uses that clearly didn’t think about women.
Diverse teams make better products. The stats are out there.
Trying to argue this highly political. We wouldn’t even be able to talk about your point at Basecamp. Does that not worry you? Don’t assume they will always agree with your politics just because they’ve done this.
The examples you give are mostly product examples (i.e. the product lacking features or not correctly addressing its target audience). Therefore I think it would be appropriate to discuss those in the workplace, but NOT as a function of e.g. the gender make-up or racial make-up of the team, but rather as a function of competence in addressing those issues.
In particular, imagine a hypothetical scenario where we are building a product, and we receive the feedback that many women find it difficult to use, and we want to fix that by hiring an expert.
The goal is to hire someone who understands marketing this type of product to women. Although it's maybe likely the most suitable candidate for this would be a woman, it could also possibly be someone else - and we would be looking for experience/evidence toward competence in that area, regardless of the candidate's gender or other characteristics.
To make the conversation apolitical, it would be about specific competencies and lacks of the team or product, NOT about the team itself having "not enough short blue-eyed Turkish women over 50" or some other group.
Also, to keep the conversation apolitical, the conversation would not extend to broader social questions outside of the specific product or problem. It would not stray into generalizations about groups. It would not appeal to emotional arguments like "safety."
People bring politics and emotion. If your customers or staff are people, it is more effective to be able to discuss their issues directly without contorting yourself into a "just focus on the work" correctness.
> Women are more likely than men to suffer adverse side effects of medications because drug dosages have historically been based on clinical trials conducted on men, suggests new research from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago.
There's some serious assumptions buried there that don't pass the smell test.
If there was a woman on that team it says even less good things about Apple that they shipped without it.
But: Apple's diversity report from then [1] says they were 80% male in tech, so while the assumption might be serious, I don't think it's unreasonable.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2014/8/12/5949453/no-surprise-apple...
Like, at its core, I agree with the statement that having women on the team would not decrease the probability that these sorts of mistakes don't happen. But its positive impact has to be non-deterministic (or else getting into some implications about <identity> as a group which I can't get behind).
[1] https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/11/13/18079458/menstrual-...
So you admit it's nothing to do with diversity, then, just an ambient assumption that the needs of women should automatically trump the needs of men and women combined?
The simplest explanation for Apple's decision is not that they're all raging sexists who need to be forced to hire more women by activists, but rather that when adding features to an app they are ranked by how useful they'd be to the entire userbase. Feature development is a zero sum game - adding that means not adding a different feature. Any feature exclusively for women will have half utility by that obvious metric and lose automatically to features useful for everyone. So the real question is why would anyone expect a general purpose health app to have a period tracker? Isn't that a pretty grotesque sense of entitlement by a small handful of women?
As for the others, come on. That's exactly what I mean by ridiculous arguments. Any photo app should have a black team member who is tasked to spend all day taking selfies and not, say, fixing bugs or adding features? If some company was dumb enough to actually do that, they'd just get criticised in other ways, because such black-testing jobs would be menial low wage jobs, not highly paid and respected software engineering positions. Some of those examples aren't even oversights, like Apple's straightforward prioritization decisions or the fact that Google Translate uses gendered language when translating languages that use genders pervasively. They're just stuff a small minority of activists have chosen to get faux-offended over. And the few that remain are clearly not caused by lack of diversity awareness given you chose to cite Google Home (I'll take your word for it on the stat), a product from one of the companies most visibly committed to filling the ranks with women. They even hired a black female AI ethics researcher, so obviously it's not lack of diversity that caused the training set problems.
In other words none of the examples you cite have anything to do with "diversity" and cannot, because as you admit, you have no idea what the demographics of those teams is. You're just assuming that they must be all made up of un-caring men who never think about others, which is exactly the sexist assumption underlying all identity politics that I highlighted!
Is it a "pretty grotesque" sense of entitlement at work when a man looks for a urinal in a public building? Or when a disabled person looks for the wheelchair ramp? These things have half utility at best by your "obvious metric".
Take this further: imagine architecture firms were staffed mostly (80%+) by women. They keep getting complaints because their doorways are only 5'11" high (ideal for 99% of women's bodies), they don't provide urinals and so on.
Is it a wild assumption that having more men – or, god, "experts in catering to men (who might be men but also women)" - on their teams would help address these repeated own goals? Or do we need to spend years getting the data that shows us the real, mysterious, non-political underlying cause of this gender bias in buildings?
But I don't think all those groups of people need to take part in the construction work.
It'd be nice with more diversity in tech. So please don't misunderstand. I just think that there are other better examples of how diversity is good.
(Usability testing: Testing early prototypes I suppose -- it's not that easy to redo, say, a car, once it's in production.)
> keep getting complaints because their doorways are only 5'11" high (ideal for 99% of women's bodies),
That thought makes me feel upset! (Although I'm not a human. But I am tall) Thanks for a good example
When making a product, have you ever given your feedback on it? Or are you just a "warm chair" churning out code that was instructed to you?
Absolutely, but so is treating them as individuals.
Unwanted by whom?
But it’s a valid question more broadly as well, and some of the other answers have been dismissive.
In general it is unwanted by people who prefer to be treated (and to treat others) as individuals rather than group members. People who want to interact with others based on individual qualities and merits, irrespective of group associations (especially immutable characteristics like height, skin colour, hair colour, etc).
I believe this (for now) still represents the majority of people in the US, and probably in some other countries as well.
I don't understand why would any company want employees to openly discuss "are we paying women and men the same for doing the same job?" This is a terrible question for any specific company to answer. Calculate the average wage of male and female employees? Very likely it won't be equal. And run regression to control different variables (experiences, skills)? If this is not inviting unnecessary internal fight, I can't think of anything else. Not any sane person would want to do this its own company.
"are our recruiting practices leading to a non-diverse workforce and missing out on great people who should work here?" Same spirit, if you don't believe it, nobody can prove it.
"what problems does our company sole, and for whom?" not sure what's the point here.
That's the point; companies don't want to discuss it but oppressed employees do.
Politics is life, it doesn't have to be toxic.
Discussing career related political activism at work - such as unionization, or fair pay, because it actively affects you in the workplace - is fine to me.
However, woke politics, like gender equality, abortion, or some other trending topic that is unrelated to your workplace, should be discouraged. Things like that are more akin to religion - it's private, and should be kept off the workplace. Do it in your own private time, with people who also want to do it in their private time.
HN’s ban was intentionally a short term reboot/cooldown, during a particularly hot time - not a broad and indefinite ban.
Society is hard. I think it’s good to experiment, and when you’re explicit about a timeline, it seems like the stakes are reasonable.
I'm not, especially as the post then moves straight into dissolving the DEI committee and moving its responsibilities to HR.
I'm not sure if it was an unspoken agreement or just lucky, but we made damned sure not to bring it up at work ... and we managed to work effectively together.
My gut here is that the founders just botched the delivery of these policies, but I'll keep thinking about it.
Thank you!
Think of it as the tech-liberal backlash. Tech has been wrestling with representation and diversity for a while now, indeed more visibly than many industries, and some limited progress has been made, maybe not as much in raw numbers than in qualitative stuff like less-hostile workplaces. But it is far from the _worst_ industry for diversity.
Meanwhile, it gets harder and harder to hire engineers, and the dominant class isn't going away anytime soon. If you can figure out how to signal to them that "hey, Basecamp/Coinbase/MyCo is a place you can just be you and chat about games and gear without worrisome questions about equal pay" then you potentially achieve a short-term recruiting advantage.
I say "short-term" because of course, it's short-sighted. But worse, it's cynical, as it wants to halt the minimal progress that has been made behind a smokescreen of civility and fairness. And given that it's being openly pushed by white male leadership, it's fully reactionary, and white-male supremacist. It's a harsh term to use but we haven't really uncovered a more accurate one.
The question is, why make a big blog post about it in the first place? They can't claim innocence, since they followed Brian Armstrong pretty much to the letter, and have the walkouts to boot. So we can assume the attention was calculated.
Just look at how many posts on HN are now like "I want to work there!" Recruitment signalling accomplished.
The backlash is real, and to me the interesting part is it's semi-liberal tech dudes leading the charge.
BTW do you mean to say that bringing up issues of equal pay justify overt censorship as a "business decision"? Just asking because that was the issue I mentioned above.
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?
Whilst this is reasonable and well-intentioned, the unfortunate truth is that wokeness is used as tactic for gaining power. And in a company power struggles are bad for the company.
I find it odd that no one even speaks about questions like: "Is this company a net-win for society? Are we perhaps making the world a worse place?". For example is it not important if you work at Uber to discuss how far "disrupting" is allowed to go? When does "disrupting" become eroding workclass rights? Shouldn't you discuss if it is ethical to get a large group of people to work below minimum wage? Or in case of Apple if it is acceptable that the supply chain becomes time and again "contaminated" with suppliers who use forced labour?
Because if you have data(like Google had) that women are paid more for same skillset or try to argue that the company is focusing too much on diversity at the expense of talent, do you think it doesn't count as politics. Honest question, I don't have strong opinion in these topics, but I know people who have.
These are questions for people at work whose job description involves hiring, payroll, and the corporate charter. These aren't collective questions to be debated and answered by employees whose jobs are completely unrelated. If, for example, you are hired to be a programmer, then your job is to program - that's all. Its not up to you to decide what the company's mission should be, or, "whose problems we are trying to solve". While a programmer is debating these philosophical and political questions with other programmers, they aren't doing the job they were hired to do - program. Certainly if the ownership of a company decides that they want to hire people to not only program, but also opine on their political and moral beliefs, that is their right. But is also their right to decide they don't want to pay people they hire to opine and debate during work hours on issues that have no direct relevance to the job they were hired to do. Just as it is your right to refuse to accept a job at a company that hires you to exclusively do a job without bringing your political baggage into the workplace.
Also, we're talking about tech workers who get stock compensation, right? They literally own (part of) the company.
What if you do like them and so you want more of them? Maintaining culture doesn't happen on its own.
Note everyone's job is making hiring decisions, most companies don't have central hiring like Google does (and do they really?).
NO GOSSIP
NO POLITICS
YOU WERE NOT HIRED TO HAVE OPINIONS OF YOU OWN
JUST CODE
See what happens if you spend more than any trivial time on the job doing something else other than what you were hired for!
The Basecamp policy is now that you can't discuss politics (or anything controversial) on any company platform, including e.g. in the break room, on the discord chat or whatever on your commute, out of office hours, etc. And they are officially removing any feedback mechanisms from company structures, figuratively salting the earth to prevent anyone discussing anything.
Obviously everyone could move to a platform in the cloud for discussions, but the writing is on the wall.
While this may well be a gross violation of labour laws, US employee rights are so weak it doesn't matter: say anything and you're canned.
You have been canceled for "tone policing".
> Note that we will continue to engage in politics that directly relate to our business or products. This means topics like antitrust, privacy, employee surveillance. If you're in doubt as to whether something falls within those lines or not, please, again, reach out for guidance.
I would read this to mean that political issues that are tied to business decisions (like pay equality and recruiting practices) are in-bounds for discussion at work.
[0]: https://world.hey.com/dhh/basecamp-s-new-etiquette-regarding...
It's not clear that they deserve the benefit of the doubt, if we are to believe Casey Newton's article, "What really happened at BaseCamp":
> Employees say the founders’ memos unfairly depicted their workplace as being riven by partisan politics, when in fact the main source of the discussion had always been Basecamp itself.
> “At least in my experience, it has always been centered on what is happening at Basecamp,” said one employee — who, like most of those I spoke with today, requested anonymity so as to freely discuss internal deliberations. “What is being done at Basecamp? What is being said at Basecamp? And how it is affecting individuals? It has never been big political discussions, like ‘the postal service should be disbanded,’ or ‘I don’t like Amy Klobuchar.’
> Interviews with a half-dozen Basecamp employees over the past day paint a portrait of a company where workers sought to advance Basecamp’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion by having sensitive discussions about the company’s own failures. After months of fraught conversations, Fried and his co-founder, David Heinemeier Hansson moved to shut those conversations down.
https://www.platformer.news/p/-what-really-happened-at-basec...
EDIT: formatting
Because there is only one accepted answer. Anyone who drifts from that into the opposing side will be reprimanded, scarred for their remaining tenure at the company, and/or fired. Good luck objecting to your company having N number of positions literally reserved for only certain races. Source: company X recruiter.
People can't even see politics anymore they're so steeped in it.
You'd probably be angry at their prejudices. But I'm sure you'd understand, because groupthink is bad.
And there is an effective white guy target at many workplaces: all but one. People choose other people like themselves.
The preposterous nature of your contention is that I would be passed over for being too white? Well, I would simply take one of the many other jobs my strategic class and race positioning allows me to take.
The issue of anti-asian quotas at major american universities is absolutely a legitimate one that needs addressing.
Here's why it's a little bit more complicated than just: "Let's just remove all criteria for university admission besides high scores. That won't discriminate against asians and be a true meritocracy".
Because then, the amount of poor people getting into university would absolutely plummet, and the socioeconomic divide between the classes in the US would only grow further. Being able to do well on tests is a privilige based on having time to study, the money for tutors, and other factors. There is obviously a pure raw talent aspect, and the geniuses of the world might get in regardless of their race or poverty level. But there is not enough geniuses in the world. Most University student bodies are average and slightly above average humans. There has to be some way to promote balance in the student body - racially, economically, culturally. And right now, Asians are disproportionately pay that burden. It should be worked on, and improved.
But you should in no way conflate this problem with university admissions with "pink quotas" for hiring diverse groups of talent. The companies that are the most promoting the idea of improving their diversity through initiatives are the largest and richest tech companies. They do so not just because it's beneficial to the bottom line, but also because they can AFFORD to be choosy.
Joe Blow Software Co and Fizz Buzz Sandwiches aren't putting in diversity goals in their hiring strategy. They wait for people to come in to apply for jobs, and hope that they can get someone to cover a shift before the end of the week that isn't a drug addict.
Google and Facebook and Amazon and Microsoft do it because they know that on any given day for any given position they're going to get 100 resumes, and they have what can only be described as a "loosely scientific" approach to weaning them out to 40 that can be phone screened, 5 that will come onsite, and 1 that will be hired. (Numbers are made up but are close to the real ratios).
Everything from the phone screen onward is data driven, meticulous, and kept to a strict quality bar. But the intake process has a lot of randomness, a lot of flexibility, and THAT is where the companies focus to say "Why don't we actually try to interview more women, and minorities for a change. What's the worst that can happen? We phone screen 50 people instead of 40, and so our "onsite efficiency ratio" drops from 12% to 10%.
There is no quota. There are goals to improve these numbers. But there is no quota in the professional world.
My point is more that, it should be ok to question current practices; both those propagating societal issues, and those attempting to solve them. Currently on many topics, even slightly questioning the current remedy risks getting one labeled negatively.
You're simply misinformed on this. I have direct primary source information from recruiting personnel in "Google and Facebook and Amazon and Microsoft" that there are significant specific quota'd positions. These programs leaking to non-woke press is going to be an outrage.
This is frequently misunderstood by people outside these companies (and frequently by people inside them too without integrity).
You're supposed to meet goals without compromising on integrity or quality. e.g. you can't ship buggy messes.
And you can't hire substandard employees. There are mechanisms ("bar raisers") in place to do this, at least at Amazon.
I suppose I can't speak for Google, Facebook, or Microsoft. But I'm pretty sure that it's exactly the same and what you're getting is a game of broken telephone where an ambitious goal in a high stakes environment gets re-interpreted as a quota.
BTW, you're supposed to fail ~20-30% of your goals at Amazon, or you didn't set ambitious-enough ones.
Then you have companies like Twitter that literally say on their hiring boards:
"Our vision for the future is clear.
50%.
At least half of our global workforce will be women.
25%
At least a quarter of our US workforce will be under-represented minorities."[0]
Key word "will", not "would like." How do you interpret that as a goal as opposed to a clear quota?
Honestly I can't wrap my head around how Twitter believes 45% men / 55% women is the ideal and 55% men / 45% women would be unacceptable.
Also, if your takeaway from “at least half the employees will be women” as a goal, at a time when the breakdown is 43% women, and has been a lot lower for the past decade, is that “55% women is ok but 55% men is not”, it’s pretty obvious you’re arguing in bad faith.
It’s pretty obvious that’s a goal that at least half the workforce will be women in fewer than 4 years. What that actually means is that Twitter is likely gonna barely cross the 50% mark, if they are even gonna meet it.
The reality is that the moment they hit 50% they will ease off on the effort to recruit more women than men, which, thanks to structural factors that have led to the current unbalanced distribution of employees, will only make their hiring easier ans allow them to continue hiring equitably.
But not "Our future is clear, there will be ...".
There is a big difference.
> How do you interpret that as a goal as opposed to a clear quota?
They explicitly say it's a vision (goal).
(Still, goals and monetary incentives can have the same effect, it seems, looking at what thu2111 wrote nearby, about Google.)
But the goals were incentivised with money and what happens when you do that? The system was bent in all sorts of creative but illegitimate ways to try and get there. Women would fail interviews and be passed to the next stages anyway. They were given the best interviewers that were preferred by the hiring committees, and men who were mis-interviewed were simply dropped on the floor instead of re-doing the process or filtering the bad interviewers out. I was told they were doing this by the recruiters themselves. They organised hiring events from which men were forbidden from taking part. And so on.
More problematically post-hiring there were no real controls, so women were unfireable. Women who caused so much trouble their team rejected them weren't fired like the men were, but rather were endlessly moved around between teams. Hiring isn't perfect so if you filter out the bad men and leave the bad women, it's the same as lowering the bar for women - the bar lowering just happens at a slightly different place.
But that was some years ago. Tech firms became much more extreme since then. A recruiter leaked YouTube's instructions to do biased hiring previously, and nothing happened. Firms have been given carte blance to discriminate against men by western governments, they're constantly attacked by an activist class who insist they do so - what do you think happens? Of course they are discriminating. How else could they achieve their goals? "Encouragement" is a fantasy, there aren't huge pools of women who are inexplicably refusing to apply to major tech firms.
"Women would fail interviews and be passed to the next stages anyway." sounds like it but the next stage isn't an offer - it's the onsite interview. If Google's process is anything like Amazon's, there is a screen-OUT stage and a screen-IN stage.
The screen out stage is primarily there to make sure not to waste the time of the full onsite interview loop. It's highly subjective and you are SUPPOSED to err on the side of letting people go through. You're SUPPOSED to have the most senior engineers on the team do these screens. But people frequently don't. They introduce their own biases, and managers use phone screens as practice for their most junior interviews. The outcome is qualified candidates sometimes don't even get a chance to prove their worth in an onsite loop.
So is it fair that some semi-qualified man didn't get a chance to prove their worth onsite but some semi-qualified woman did? No, but there is no way to make this process truly fair at the scale that FAAMNG hires.
So long as the FINAL process is fair, that's all that you can really do and ensure you don't hire unqualified people.
> They organised hiring events from which men were forbidden from taking part. And so on.
That sounds so much more insidious than it actually is. This is no more discriminatory than Women's Only universities. Or HBCU's. Amazon also does "women's only" hiring events. They have lower hire ratios because there is a pipeline intake problem too in our whole industry. But that's okay.
> More problematically post-hiring there were no real controls, so women were unfireable. Women who caused so much trouble their team rejected them weren't fired like the men were, but rather were endlessly moved around between teams. Hiring isn't perfect so if you filter out the bad men and leave the bad women, it's the same as lowering the bar for women - the bar lowering just happens at a slightly different place.
I have serious doubts of the reality of this statement. PEOPLE are essentially unfireable. It's extremely hard to get fired from a FAAMNG company once you're in. What you describe happens to all employees (being moved between teams).
> Firms have been given carte blance to discriminate against men by western governments
Just what way are you being discriminated against or oppressed? Making it easier for women to apply does not make it HARDER for Men. All the initiatives we discussed are IN ADDITION not INSTEAD OF.
You're interpreting this the way you want to. If given an identical interview a man would fail and the woman automatically gets interviewed more, that is bar lowering. If given identical behaviour the man is fired and the woman is promoted, that is bar lowering. What do you think the point of interviewing or firing people is? And for sure the only person who ever generated reactions in my teams of the form "how the hell did this person get hired and why aren't they fired yet", was a female engineer who was the darling of the manager's manager, another female engineer who thought getting more women into tech management was a high priority.
Now, again, that was years ago. There are plenty of people since who came forward and said yes, Google and other tech firms use quotas in hiring. Recruiters, people who would know.
So is it fair that some semi-qualified man didn't get a chance to prove their worth onsite but some semi-qualified woman did? No
It's good you admit this, because that's the core of the issue. Not if hiring can be made truly, perfectly fair (whatever definition is used), but if it's actively being made unfair by gender-biased policies. To which the answer is an absolute yes.
That sounds so much more insidious than it actually is. This is no more discriminatory than Women's Only universities
You claim it's not insidious and then say, well, this type of discrimination goes unpunished elsewhere so it's OK. That doesn't make it not insidious. It just proves the underlying argument: that our society is by this point systematically biased against men despite the theoretical existence of equality laws. Do you think male-only hiring events would be tolerated? Surely not.
I have serious doubts of the reality of this statement. PEOPLE are essentially unfireable
I understand why you might think that, but that certainly wasn't true when I was there and IMHO it clearly still isn't true. There were at least two guys who I directly worked with who got fired for being unproductive. I knew quite a few others who were put on PIPs for various reasons. Google did, maybe still does, operate a policy of "up or out" in which being fired is automatic if you don't get promoted. It was very much possible to get fired there, unless you were a woman, in which case HR would have preferred to sacrifice a goat than fire a woman. Remember, the firm had "goals" to keep the female:male ratio as high as they could, and it was explicitly phrased as a moral issue.
And of course, look at James Damore. Fired and viciously publicly attacked for spelling out the reality of the situation: these firms discriminate horrendously in favour of women and against men, and yet it's not working, that approach doesn't generate a torrent of happy women in tech. It generates angry men who, rightly, feel they're being treated unfairly for genetic reasons.
Just what way are you being discriminated against or oppressed?
I just gave you a list but maybe repetition will help:
- Men are being banned from senior executive roles.
- Men are being banned from board seats, in some parts of the world, by law.
- Men are being banned from recruiting events.
- Men are being banned from training programmes (e.g. https://www.peoplemanagement.co.uk/news/articles/bbc-defends...)
- When women make an accusation against a man, they are automatically believed and their identity is protected. The same is not true for men. Again, in many parts of the world, this principle is enshrined in law: the law itself in unequitable.
- Men who point out obvious demographic truths backed by plenty of research are fired, like "women are less interested in computers than men". If women make claims directly contradicted by plenty of research, like "women are paid less than men due to discrimination", they are praised and rewarded.
- Men who want fair treatment of other men are routinely banned from "diversity committees", e.g. https://fortune.com/2015/01/23/diversity-work/ (but I saw this at my previous employer too). That's why the concept of diversity is so widely treated with derision. They want an absolute diversity of people who all hold their extremist beliefs.
- Beyond prizes in hiring-related competitions, there are bonus pots at firms set aside exclusively for women. This has been true at least since the early 90s at Microsoft.
- Job assessment is routinely biased against white men in ways that are obviously illegal, but again, men have no protection and SJW activists are so confident about this they actively boast about it in public. Consider this quote from an interview with someone at Atlassian on their new HR policies:
"A huge component for us was de-biasing the assessment process. There’s been a lot of talk and testing on de-biasing and we worked closely with our design team to remove bias from the process. What we realized were that systems weren’t designed to be anti-racist, for example, which isn’t the same as non-racist. We wanted to be actively conscious, for example, of being anti-racist"
This sort of list could go on all day. I know you really don't want to believe that because it undermines so many other beliefs that go along with the whole package, but women are lionised in our industry, men are second class citizens and the sexist/racist discrimination that occurs is all done by people who most loudly announce themselves as "anti-sexist" or "anti-racist". One day this whole ideology will be recognised by all as the dark evil it truly is. Until that day we have to point out its hypocrisies, every day.
I fundamentally live in a different world from you if you believe that men are second class citizens in our industry.
I don't really think that is unfair, but then I think the whole system of elite university admission is a total disaster for equity.
Yes, it objectively is. No matter how you will try to paint it using colourful phrases and invocation of "justice" - this is discrimination.
This is specifically trying to be fair, rather than trying to make access equally difficult. I don't know why that is hard to grasp. I don't think 'righting injustice' is bad way to explain it.
Harvard is also discriminating against Asians because there are 'too many'. This seems quite likely but is a separate issue. The historical injustice is present, but cannot be said to have the same character. I don't think criticism of other minority AA programs is justified, but you can have your own opinion.
https://www.businessinsider.com/the-ivy-leagues-history-of-d...
Again, I'm not questioning your heart, but I do think that words are powerful and words are how the society group think evolves.
Asians do (on average) score higher. Asians were discriminated against due to this.
For reasons folks may or may not agree with, most elite schools look at a wider range of factors than just scores and grades. Does this lead to there being room for discrimination? Yes. Does it guarantee that discrimination is happening? No.
Just as a simple example, there are plenty of non-Asian folks with high scores and high grades that get rejected too, often for similar reasons — namely, being narrowly focused on academics and not even being world-class at that.
1. How elite school applicants are rated. Most folks seem to think it’s just test scores and maybe grades. It’s not.
2. What successful applicants at elite schools look like on paper. Most people think that elite school student bodies are just a bunch of brainiacs with near perfect grades and scores. While grades and scores are certainly high, the defining characteristic of the core admits are that they have done something of note at the regional, national, or international level (not always true of fringe admits, but that’s a different story). Sometimes these people don’t even have near perfect test scores or grades (frankly, some come across as not terribly smart at all), but they are able to get compelling things done.
I recommend reading Cal Newport’s book on elite school admissions to get a better idea of how to get in.
Also, it seems like two courts have said that Harvard in particular did not discriminate against Asians.
https://www.npr.org/2020/11/12/934122462/appeals-court-rules...
Opposing the explicit carve out of 25% of a recruiting pipeline specifically for HBCU candidates, for example, does not imply one is racist.
HBCUs have significant underrepresentation in tech -- despite graduating many talented individuals, they never seem to get hired. A company could see a competitive advantage in recruiting there, where competition for talent is less. The mgmt might also think that the resulting diversity of thought is beneficial. Other potential employees might be attracted to work at such a forward looking company.
What basis would you have for believing that such a goal is bad for a software company? Is it your job to bolster the hiring practices of the past?
Reply to reply: You're arguing for the status quo, against setting targets for HBCU grads. Why? What is the basis for believing it is any better, when it pretty clearly disadvantages minorities?
I only made one contention: graduates of HBCUs are under-represented in tech. If this is a misapprehension please correct me.
I'm not, and this is a real problem with the kind of thinking in this area these days. Opposition to a quota system is not the same as support of the status quo.
"I only made one contention: graduates of HBCUs are under-represented in tech."
> The mgmt might also think that the resulting diversity of thought is beneficial.
The implication that diversity in ethnicity, gender, etc., is the same as diversity of thought is not a good quality assertion. It certainly isn't uniformly true.
> work at such a forward looking company.
"Forward looking" is certainly an assertion, here. Not everyone would agree that quotas are "forward looking."
"Is it your job to bolster the hiring practices of the past?" is a particularly good example of what I referred to in my comment, actually. You're essentially shutting down any rational conversation by asserting that disagreement is necessarily in support of "hiring practices of the past."
Managment may think many things, but that presuposes that diversity of thought comes from the diversity of skin. I can practically guarantee that if your company hired a diverse mix of races, but they were all of technical background and straight HS to college to work then you would not get the diversity of thought you would get if you focused your spare hiring capacity on hiring retiring US marines, radar techs, prisoners, people close to retiring age or any other group that is typically left out (or persevered to be left out) of the typical high tech startup.
In some ways I agree; we're all shaped by adversity and experience. But I don't think you can ignore the incredible lack of people from black or hispanic backgrounds in tech either. The goal of increased diversity in entry level hiring is advanced by the suggested HBCU recruitment drive. Supporting it doesn't preclude recruiting from other talent pools.
That isn't at all what the commenter argued. They argued that diversity in ethnicity/race is not the same as diversity in background. The commenter did not provide a superlative or other qualifier.
If you hire a former gang-banger who is a wiz with eletronics, then you will have some real diversity.
Tech is often focused on the minutiae of our machines, but even then information and learning is not evenly distributed. I've worked with various minority engineers and also Indian/Chinese/Persian/etc and they've all had really different views on how to approach things, how to manage conflicts, and different mathematical backgrounds too.
This is the issue I have when discussing these matters with certain people. When everything is presented in such stark black-and-white terms there's little room for discussion.
Defiling work communication channels with political opinions only serves to distract, deride, and divide.
Surely you must be joking.
The employee:HR relationship is fundamentally adversarial over here. HR's job is to protect the company, including from its own employees. They will throw you under the bus if it benefits the company.
Most people won't run into issues with them, but if you think that someone important to the company's bottom line is behaving inappropriately and you go to HR about it, how would you expect them to react? It's a matter of incentives.
Well of course they are. And just like irredeemable relationships, you need to move on and improve your judgement to avoid a repeat. Bemoaning on Slack achieves nothing.
This is an HR responsibility. You either trust them to avoid and eliminate discrimination or you don't.
No, HRs responsibility is to make sure that legal liability for unlawful discrimination does not get imposed on the company, consistent with other corporate goals.
Actually mitigating discrimination may sometimes be the mechanism for that. Helping management create a smokescreen around acts of discrimination and find pretexts to force out people likely to discredit that smokescreen are also sometimes ways HR does that.
Mistaking HR for your advocate rather than management’s is a dangerous mistake.
At a minimum, they’d need to stop accepting employee referrals (how can they tell if the referrals biased?) and take over the technical interview process.
Also, what happens when an exec elsewhere in the company discriminates against someone? Will HR have the power to unilaterally fire the exec? The CEO? The chairman of the board? How would they even detect the discrimination?
Sadly, declaring that one division of a company will eliminate discrimination doesn’t work. You need the whole company to pull together, though realistically, that won’t work either.
Society as a whole has to decide to solve the problem. Looping around to the article, one of the political parties passed hundreds of bills to disenfranchise minority voters; arguing that minorities should have basic rights is (in the US, at least) politically controversial.
Charitably, I hope the goal is to force my values on the employees, and silence dissent (no bigoted discussions at work).
Invoke Godwin’s Law, and… Done.
If your goal is to "force my values on the employees, and silence dissent (no bigoted discussions at work)", then go start your own company (although your demands best describe a cult).
Of course now that we all live in Covidland, we've had horror stories of whole business units just getting a pre-recorded message that they no longer work there.
As a European person, I'd say keep the political discussion to your union. Unions also often have much better political affiliation and can make things happen on a broader scale.
This is just so alien to me. Maybe it's an American thing but I've never been in a workplace where this has been a thing. I've never seen these "quickly turning unpleasant" conversations in the workplace.
> 'm giving Basecamp the benefit of the doubt and assuming they're trying to stave off the former. But it's not that easy to do that without also affecting the latter
In 2021, I think we've moved past the point of benefit of the doubt. DHH and Jason Fried and (supposed) to be smart switched on people who recognise their own privilege. They (should) know that you cannot ban the former without impacting the latter and genuinely hurting people.
who then got paid for said value.
The way I see it is that profit occurs because the value of the end product is greater than the sum of its parts.
To me that's just sensible leadership. To keep the company productive, you have to let the leaders make decisions while the subordinates focus on doing the work.
> Giving Basecamp the benefit of the doubt is impossible
But maybe the only way to solve the problem of polarization is for all of us to give each other the benefit of the doubt more than we might be comfortable doing.
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 women and men the same for doing the same job?" and "are our recruiting practices leading to a non-diverse workforce and missing out on great people who should work here?" and "what problems does our company sole, and for whom?". These are really important questions. Why wouldn't you want to bring them up at work?
I'm giving Basecamp the benefit of the doubt and assuming they're trying to stave off the former. But it's not that easy to do that without also affecting the latter, because if you ask questions that boil down to is our company discriminating, even unintentionally and do our LGBT and minority employees feel as safe and valued as our straight cis white employees, someone will be super upset that you're "bringing politics into the workplace." (I guarantee someone reading this is thinking "ugh, 'cis' is a slur, why you gotta be so political," and, bang: somebody has just made recognizing the existence of trans people into something inherently political, and now we get to argue over whether that somebody is me or the cis-is-a-slur guy.)
Here's a thought: if your goal is to try to keep company Slack channels civil and focused on work, then don't say "don't be political." Say "keep company Slack channels civil and focused on work."