I think if Basecamp had been clear about the funny names list in their hiring process, their candidate pool would be a bit different.
People vent, and they do so without thinking too much because they spent every single customer interaction censoring themselves and thinking deeply about how not leave a bad impression.
DHH did the right thing: they owned up to the problem, finished it, and moved on.
If you're going to complain about every possible grievance and unsavory behavior you're not gonna be a person that will get along with peers.
Also, I'm not seeing evidence that the Basecamp employees that had an issue with this behavior were "going to complain about every possible grievance".
I've not extrapolated it to every position, but I've worked with enough industries to know that there many have very difficult customers and it takes a toll.
> Also, I'm not seeing evidence that the Basecamp employees that had an issue with this behavior were "going to complain about every possible grievance".
DHH alluded to certain analogies in the discussion of racial and ethnic prejudices triggering needlessly emotional responses, and frankly I totally agree that a lot of contemporary framings of certain discussions don't allow for tolerating disagreement. And if you're going for those discussions that are going to draw such strong lines, yeah, either you rein in the discussion soon or you allow your teams to be fragmented needlessly.
And the same thing happens with management. Management isn't going to be willing to entertain every single discussion. To me it was clear from the start that they had limited energy to discuss the topic and once that was up it was time to move on. They may be right or wrong, but being clear on it is better than being ambiguous or allowing the thing to continue.
If the response to that situation was to have a discussion with that employee / group of employees about the need to move on and come to a resolution, instead of blasting publicly that politics and committees, and basically everything other than DHH and Jason having absolute authority is no longer accepted, we wouldn't be having this conversation in the first place.
You either put a sock on it and move or you allow this discussion to go on forever.
And yes, as the owners and founders they are entirely within their rights to run the company as such. It hurts some people to remember that companies aren't committees where everyone's word matters the same. That's just the way it is.
This isn't objective at all - and illustrates the problem perfectly.
And the difference between management making those decisions and staff is that management is ultimately where the responsibility for those decisions, right or wrong, lies.
On subjective policies a lot of things will come down to personal judgement calls. The founders have spoken as such; and frankly if staff considers the decision to egregious, at this point, they're free to assess whether their values are compatible or not.
From the article:
"That confusion is compounded by the fact that, for a small company, Basecamp has taken an outsized number of political stances — all of which employees are encouraged to discuss. Most prominently, the company and its founders have been vocal critics of Apple’s 30 percent tax on in-app purchases. But it has also involved itself in politics at a much lower level: in 2018 Basecamp let a candidate for Chicago mayor use its office in the West Loop as a campaign headquarters.
Basecamp employees are encouraged to discuss the company’s own political positions — or, perhaps more accurately, the founders’ political positions — as much as they like. Keeping track of which issues of the moment are up for discussion thus becomes one more chunk of mental overhead for employees who are already struggling."
There's no clarification here - since they've banned political discussion and this is a subjective boundary - nothing has been adequately clarified.
And saying they're just banning the "needlessly emotional responses" is again, not clear.
But I'm not demanding clarity. I'm saying it is impossible to provide clarity on a subjective topic like this.
But having someone actually _telling_ you "yes" or "no" is infintely better than a boss that sits in the sidelines or tries to please everyone fruitlessly.
You can't have functional organizations where there aren't some common values about what's important and what isn't and where discussions, even about culture, aren't aggressively prioritized.
The greatest example I've seen is in grassroots organizations run by activists with "flat" organizations. Assemblies on everything, discussions about everything, rehashing and revisiting the same points over and over again, ridiculously petty feuds, incredible amounts of energy lost and just a handful of people actually doing the real work, because it turns out that everyone would rather fight their pet internal cause unless you have strong leadership that's willing to put a sock on it to actually _do_ things.
It's clear to me that the founders have extremely strong opinions about certain topics and that's where they put their energy for change and analysis and where discussions can be had with depth. Their values lie there, and for most other things they want things to run smoothly so they can focus on their most important values. It is extremely unlikely that a challenge to those values will go smoothly unless it is absolutely paramount in importance.
Would you go to work at Apple if you're a Free Software activist? Would you work at Exxon if you're a vegan environmentalist? At some point certain accomodations are not reasonable.
Some staff have basically encountered that, effectively, they don't share all of the values that management has. They can either: live with it, quit, or try to graciously let some air in the room to reraise the conversation with cooler heads and understanding that this just might not work out.
DHH's point on certain arguments making for toxic conversation are very, very real. I've seen it in several organizations. And strong leadership means sometimes drawing lines. What others do with said lines is up to each person.
Another political and NGO analogy that I have some familiarity with: if you're a third-wave progressive feminist militant, it is _extremely_ unlikely that you would allow TERFs (trans-exclusionary feminists, ie: people who consider trans women to not be "women") into your organization, because while they may consider themselves "feminist", their value system is just too different to get meaningful consensus on extremely important topics. That's just the way it is.