Interesting. I've read everything posted officially about this by the two founders as it unfolded and I've been super impressed by how well-considered these new policies are. As someone with several decades of experience as an employee, manager and then founder in both large and smaller orgs, I felt these changes were in the best interests of all stakeholders. With the myriad potentially conflicting sensibilities in today's workplace the only fair and sustainable approach is to focus on the work and the customers.

As an employee, these policies would make me feel more respected and safe. I guess the fact that you see it as a sign of a "terrible boss" and I see it as a sign of enlightened leadership is an indication how divided perspectives on workplace etiquette currently are.

However:

* I don't believe any enlightened leadership posts publicly about wide-spread and company affected policy changes before informing and/or discussing with your staff. That's disrespectful to the people you serve.

* no enlightened leadership leads to a situation where 1/3 of your staff leaves on contentious terms. If that leadership was that enlightened, they either wouldn't be leaving or would never have been hired. It's indicative of leadership problems, cultural problems, and possibly a hiring problem.

* I don't believe at all that enlightened leadership discards its values the moment that they become difficult to uphold.

* If the new policies weren't in reaction to the leader being called to be accountable to the people he served and the mission he told them they were on, I'd probably be more agreeable to your point. In a vaccuum a safe place for people of all politica and creeds (short of outright hate) to work together is what you want. What I don't want is an unsafe space where no one feels they can question the leadership or hold the company to its values.

That being said, I totally respect your coming at this from a different angle and I agree that there's certainly more than one way to look at this (as the reactions in this thread indicate).

To be fair to them the world has changed a lot in the last few years.

I used to talk politics with friends and family but I've have had to stop over the last couple years because because of how divisive it's gotten. I now avoid those conversations because I don't want to lose family or friends. I'm center left and people who preciously were slightly left of me would probably consider me a nazi, and people who used to be slightly to the right of me would consider me a communist.

I could see the same changes happening at work. And conversations that used to be ok escalating into insanely heated situations.

Perhaps this is not an enlightened view, and I would not have used the word “serve,” but employees serve the leadership, not the other way around. This is a company, not the government. As a citizen, the government serves me. As an employee, I serve my employer.

Leadership is all about serving the people you're shepherding. There is a responsibility and a stewardship that comes with wearing the crown, and it's not always for everyone. =)

If you've never experience a spittle-inflected rant disrupting a meeting, because some individual felt it their duty and privilege to engage with everyone on their particular viewpoint ... you simply don't know how disconcerting this can be. I have. I don't care much about my co-workers political views. I'm always happy to have a beer and discuss things after work (well, virtually these days).

But making people uncomfortable because you feel entitled to push your world view at work, makes you more of a liability to the company than an asset. Which in the case of Basecamp, the owners may have addressed well for all concerned.

Didn't that used to be the point?

White/male/straight is the social default. Just consider movies and games: if a character is a woman, non-white, or non-straight, let alone trans, that's considered the director/developers making a political statement. And it only gets worse if they don't at least "behave" like white/male/straight characters.

The same is true for workplaces. A woman in an otherwise all-male team is far more likely to be accepted if she masks her femininity and acts like "one of the guys". A Black person will be more accepted if they "act white". Queer folks better just not mention anything related to their sexuality even if it would be normal for straight/cis folks. And if they get any jabs targeted at their identity they better just laugh it off and not "cause a scene" and upset anyone.

Rather than focusing on the differences we could focus on common ground and the value of inclusion. It’s not necessary to focus on differences and vilified existence of white/male/strait people.

Some people are LGBTQ+, and some people are political

Some people are non-binary/femme, and others are political.

Having engagement people who's idwntity is political is valuable when you consider how much of the population is non-white, non-straight, people of color.

See, we can both play this game. It doesn't nothing for us. It's literally the core reasoning behind Basecamp's "no politics at work" move.

Another thought I had was that they wanted to slim the company down. In that case, you look at what you want to keep and what you want to lose. You make it easy for those who you want to leave to make that decision. If there was a faction that loved a hypothetical free breakfast, and these folks caused discontent and discomfort among others, elimination of that breakfast, and a way for them to bow out gracefully, thinking that they took the W, would be 4D chess for the stakeholders.

You may lose some people you'd prefer to keep, that's always a risk. But if you have a way to cluster the people you are reasonably happy about parting with, by noting common behaviors (the hypothetical breakfast model above), lowering their interest level for staying (removing the thing they like), while providing an incentive to leave (a pretty good severance/buy out), this is a win for most people.

I've seen various really bad takes on Twitter, that miss almost all the (fairly obvious) nuance of these moves. The bad takes seem to cluster about the "attack" on peoples "rights" to talk societal and political issues at work. And some sort of joy at seeing a company "suffer".

I don't think these are even in the right ballpark. There's lots of missing information, and we can speculate about it, in a way that resembles blindfolded dart playing.

However, the management response is pointed, and as they seem to be fairly specific, one could (likely far more accurately) speculate what caused them. And why they are being considered.

The bans on political/societal talk likely originated from conversations that made some folks quite uncomfortable, or unhappy. They were likely sustained after being advised to stop. Rather than allow such talk to disrupt the organization, the owners had to make a decision. So they did, and provided a mechanism for the most vocal folks to ease their way out.

Or at least it looks this way to me.

Hmm... Does (or should) "Disagree, but then commit" contain a corollary of "...and let's look at it again in X months/years"?

I mean, if you do argue for something, say some particular technical solution, but the decision goes against you, and you do actually accept and commit to the outcome... Is this commitment eternal?

If, say, you're still convinced the programming language / framework / style you originally advocated would be a better fit for your team / department / company, are you bound to shut up forever or can you raise it again at some point in the future? And if you can re-raise it, then when -- is there some general waiting period for stuff like this, or should it perhaps be an explicit addendum to every decision?

N.B: Not asking for myself, just a hypothetical that I find interesting... OK, come to think of it, perhaps actually asking for myself after all: I haven't been turned down on any such suggestion... Yet, but am thinking about raising one. And if I get a "No" at first, how long do I go on nagging / wait before I remind everyone of it?

You mean the company who is flailing in the market, losing employees and generally considered a bad place to work?

>"See, I told it wouldn't work" is about the most immature and unhelpful attitude to have - no matter how correct it may be.

Blame free post mortems are vital for an organization to grow and improve with time. If you cannot review past bad decisions and learn from then then you will be forced to repeat the same mistakes while your competitors evolve.

>but it undermines everything if someone keeps harping on a prior decision.

If accepting a mistake was made and then publicly coming up with a plan to not have it happen again undermines your ability to lead then you are a horrible leader.

We're seeing shortages of chips made on everything from 30 year old processes to cutting edges fabs and that demand is likely to be relatively sticky going forward. Intel's going to have to try even harder than it is now to fail and it's going to take decades for the dust to settle, if it ever does (hello Intel Business Machines).

Even if I kind of disagree with how it unfolded, I still sympathize with leadership if they've given people options, generous out-terms etc..

Then why where a significant portion of their employees - the only stakeholders (apart from literally Bezos) - extremely vocal in their disappointment the minute it went out?

If you have a group identity that does not match the founders, these policies will feel as if they are trying to silence you and your input when new policies arise that don't take your group identity into account.

The only fair and sustainable approach is to see humans as entire beings and not robots on a production line.

That doesn't mean the work and customers are forgotten, in fact it's exactly the opposite.

Short version is that the 6 month salary, even the 3 month salary offer is quite nice. I can understand why so many took the offer up.

Woke environments can, and often are toxic to those not interested in engaging in such discussions. I worked at one of those before, where one had to tread carefully, lest some "colleagues" be triggered into spittle-inflected rants about the president at the time ... thus wasting everyone's time and energy. That was actively frustrating and annoying.

It sounds like there was a self appointed DE&I committee that had proposals for every area of the business. That doesn’t strike me as a healthy dynamic.

There’s a reason successful employee co-ops are rare and kibbutzim don’t exist anymore in anything close to their original form.

To the extent that "A long-standing group of managers called "Small Council" will disband — when we need advice or counsel we'll ask individuals with direct relevant experience rather than a pre-defined group at large."

To me this reads like a game-of-thrones-esque political maneuver, to make sure there are no loci of power that might challenge the bosses. The bosses will talk to you one-on-one if they think your opinion matters, you have no reason to be talking to your peers about anything, just keep your head down and do what you're told.

How you distinguish between "a group of people getting together to collaborate on something of importance to the company" (which the owners said DE&I was!), vs "an unpermitted committee"... I don't know if "no collaborating across reporting lines" is an intended or an unintended thing here, unclear.

If THAT strikes you as a healthy dynamic, I hope you get to experience it and find out sometime, and if it works for you, good on you. It didn't for 1/3rd of basecamp though -- I don't think it's about one specific policy, it's about this attitude toward employee involvement.

The reason they gave for removing these was that peer reviews were overly positive to the point of pointlessness. You could still give feedback to your boss without 360 degree reviews.

Not all the people who left worked for DHH, who is the CTO.

OTOH, if the CTO is a terrible boss, there’s a very good chance that the rest of the C-suite is suboptimal, since executives generally aren’t picked at random, so there is probably some correlation across the group. And, then, down the chain of management, for the same reasons.