They are quitting because the founders decided to assert their power nakedly and without restraint, to berate employees, shut down their organisation and discussions and attempt to dictate terms to them in a humiliating public way, that is to break the social contract between employee and employed. In doing that they declared that they alone decide the rules, they alone decide what is acceptable to say and what is not.
Every workplace has some subtle set of rules about behaviour but these rules are negotiated between employer and employee, and if as a manager you lose sight of that, you'll lose your best employees as they decide they don't really want you to decide everything about their waking hours without consulting you.
> you'll lose your best employees as they decide they don't really want you to decide everything about their waking hours without consulting you.
the company is actually saying they want to not talk about anything outside of work. They don’t want you consulting them, they want you doing your job during work hours. That’s a pretty reasonable trade for money.
The politics thing really amounts to "don't challenge me" and is a nice diversion from the actual issue.
Looking at the reported details, it does _not_ seem to be an act of racism. It was reported very few names on the list were Asian, for example, and the only (not fully revealed) examples I read were European names.
Even if they decided to go with a “no politics” rule, doing it publicly was unbelievably shitty to their employees. Such policy changes really should’ve been done in private, especially since it was clear based on the phrasing that this was in response to a specific incident.
Maybe in a year after things have calmed down they could do a “we banned politics at the office and it was great” post, but the timing was guaranteed to create a fiasco for them.
As a metaphor, what they did is closer to disparaging someone’s work performance in an all hands. It might be “transparent”, but it’s also unprofessional.
His public response was to post a blog about forbidding politics from work.
Part of healthy dispute resolution is recognizing how to apologize correctly and to the right people. Token apologies do not work for complex situations.
Additionally: he apologized for the list but not for his appalling behavior against an employee who pointed out issues with the list and was childishly dressed down very publicly in the company’s chat.
> Not only was it disrespectful to our customers, and a breach of basic privacy expectations, but it was also counter to creating an inclusive workplace. Nobody should think that maintaining such a list is okay or sanctioned behavior here.
> Furthermore, Jason and I should have caught this list. We are ultimately responsible for setting the tone of what's acceptable behavior at Basecamp, and in this instance we didn't. I'm sorry.
People were hurt by a very obvious instance of the company failing to live up to its stated values, so they attempt to bring it up to its founder.
He’s painted the situation as “troublemakers out to get my skin” whereas from all the reporting it appears that he’s been the one to needlessly throw a childish and very public temper tantrum.
Honestly, a bunch of people quitting probably works out just fine for Basecamp.
It will still be damaging short term because they lost a lot of depth in cultural and product knowledge, with the marketing and product leads gone. Not easy to replace someone who’s been living and breathing the products for over a decade.
Basecamp seems very profitable, so it may not be fatal. But my guess is that it cuts far, far deeper than Jason and DHH intended. There may well be another wave of resignations next week.
I’m sure they expected attrition — hence the severance — but I’d wager they thought it would be closer to Coinbase’s 5% when they announced a similar policy, not 30% and counting.
I'm not going to argue about which culture is better, but the split between people who wanted to get their jobs done and make a good product, and the people who wanted to use their job as an avenue for social change/partisan warfare (depending on which side of the split you're on) sounded toxic.
I suspect there will be a lot of highly-qualified people who will want to go to work at Basecamp who wouldn't have wanted to work there before. We're in the middle of a culture war:
* A lot of people like wokeness.
* A lot of people hate it.
Most SV companies have gone for the woke side of the current culture war, and so my perception is that there are a lot of people who hate it and don't have good places to go. From a purely supply-and-demand perspective, running a non-woke firm seems the way to find good employees. Conversely, being a woke employee seems the way to find good jobs.
To be clear, I'm not advocating employees be overly woke -- this is all more about social signaling than actual advocacy.
Maybe people that never discuss politics at work want the right to do ot too.
And it won't take them long to re-fill these roles. There's a ton of unmet demand to work at a place that's purged the activists. You aren't gonna see them much on Twitter but Basecamp just gave themselves a massive recruiting advantage that FAANG cannot/will not match, and they already had a good reputation. Lots of people read DHH's blog post and thought "excellent, that's what's needed". Any impact on the firm will be transient at best.
I would not envy being a hiring manager at Basecamp right now.
I do agree with others, though, that I'll bet Basecamp is a better place to work now than it was a week ago. If people want to quit because they'd rather engage in struggle sessions than focus on the work, I won't be sad to see them leave and take their distracting socio-political griefer wokeist cloud with them.
Stop politicizing tech. We are in the technology industry, not the humanities faculty lounge and our jobs should be free of virtue signalling and cancellation.
I completely disagree about Basecamp being better after this. Attrition, no matter the cause, is awful for company morale. Finding out that several teams are just gone without any notice or time to transition is going to make life kind of suck for those who remain. Sure hope their docs are good.
As far as stopping the politics in tech; Basecamp got a glowing write up in Breitbart. “No politics here” is political. There are good and bad ways to handle such things, but blanket bans and “here’s the door if you don’t like it” is hamfisted and clearly bad for retention.
Definitely this has trashed their reputation with people on the left. Some of my friends have been posting on Twitter that they wouldn't work for Basecamp now, whereas they used to aspire to work there.
But it is far from clear to me that my friends are in a majority. Many people on the right, or people who are apolitical, or people who just don't like politicisation in the way that has been reported, may be perfectly fine with this.
In terms of reputation, it wouldn't surprise me if this is a net win for Basecamp.
For sure losing a third of employees is an existential risk, but I suspect senior management would have accepted that risk.
(I consider myself to be left wing, but not woke).
The issue is not the new policy. The issue is the way it was rolled out; in an extremely public way that was basically a subtweet of their entire workforce, all while they knew there was a ton of internal drama they’d failed to control. That was unbelievably bad leadership, and I think anyone focusing entirely on whether or not the specific policy is good or bad, to the point where it makes them want to join or not, has been fighting the culture war way too much for their own good.
I’d be fine with a no politics policy, I would not be fine with the blog post, especially if I felt that the internal problem hadn’t been dealt with and instead I’d been crapped on publicly by my boss.
If you're in the business of "changing the world" or "changing peoples' lives" then your business is political. Politics reflect how people feel about things.
You're using tech as a shorthand for "technology company" -- companies are also organizations of people with feelings. People function best when they are treated with respect and given psychological safety. People need to have room to discuss how they feel about things, so you can build better policies that make people happy and motivated to succeed at the mission. Sometimes those things are lumped into what a company might consider "political" and it's not an easy line to draw.
For example, gender imbalance is one of the most important "political" things that I think every healthy company needs to look long and hard at; how do you do that if you clamp down on that as "political discussion?" Similarly if racial injustice is impacting a segment of your workforce more than others, don't you think it's worthwhile for management to do things like make statements of support, check in on their employees, and basically be a bit human and accommodating? Or wait is that political discussion?
Folks like you who say employees should just "focus on the work" dismiss the idea that people shouldn't just be viewed as cogs in these money-making machines. Tech, where company profit margins are fat and where actual productivity is not measured in SLOC but in the ability to generate ideas and focus on how those ideas affect users, is actually one of the only market segments we can actually point at and say "you have the means to do better." It's really sad when founders like Fried and DHH give their employees the impression that they are no more than pieces of a money making machine after clearly fooling a lot of them into thinking there was some semblance of a social contract there. So no it's definitely not a better place to work now than a week ago.
By the way, people aren't stupid for thinking that there's a social contract, especially at small companies. There's always a loose contract -- and one of the powerful things about equity and its presence in SV companies is how it aligns the incentives for management and labor. But trust is also a component of that alignment force; trust is one of the things that has always made silicon valley magical. So it's really disappointing when that trust is violated.
If you're Apple or Microsoft, that would apply. But Basecamp is a company that makes office productivity apps.
On side note, sadly in my (unpopular) opinion, north americans are focused too much on being politically correct in speech instead of being correct in action and thoughts.Hope this will not be their downfall.
I don’t know, if my week at work concluded with one of the founders going on a blocking spree and leading the Rails community to start discussing disassociating itself from him, I wouldn’t consider that “better”. :)
Or, since I know that the common retort here is “they’re better off without the troublemakers”; good leaders don’t build organizations where 1/3rd of the organization is troublemakers; that’s a failure of hiring.
There really is no way to spin this in a way that makes them look good. The PR hit is really just the cherry on top of losing so many people, and paying 6 months of salary for the privilege to boot.
And even if they couldn’t, having a smaller but more productive workforce might be a win.
Irregardless, I think they’re going to have an increase in job applications and do very well in the future
I wouldn’t want to work for a company that somehow managed to get dragged down by 20 people. If losing those people is making the company better, then it sounds like leadership is deeply incompetent and let things fester for way, way, way too long. Keep in mind that some of those people worked there for 12 years; if losing them is a net positive why weren’t they fired a decade ago?
I also think the idea that the remaining workers will be more productive is laughable. Events like these crush morale, even if you ultimately agree with the policy decision being made. Never mind what happens when you lose so much knowledge, including entire teams and directors, with basically no warning or opportunity to transfer knowledge.
Hope their docs are world class, or their replacements are gonna have a bad time.
I’d wait until you hear about customers quitting before you assume that they’re in trouble, and I don’t think it’ll happen.
Personally, while I’d find the list of “funny” names offputting, I wouldn’t cancel. I however would take the buyout if I worked there; leadership there seems genuinely incompetent, and it’s not like remote jobs are rare anymore.
A company I'm involved with fired their lead developer and it really was cartoonish how everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Others are stepping up, discussions don't take forever because that person needed to be at the center of everything etc. They've picked up a lot of velocity since then, simply because a problem-employee is gone.
Even after the dust settles, will you trust that DHH and Jason will keep their promise of no politics? What a company says about its culture and the reality are often quite different.
That’s an oddly mechanical way of expressing that a third of the company didn’t stay. If an asteroid hit the planet and a third of the population died, it would be very weird to say “most of the population survived”.
This looks like a fatal blow, not a place someone would want to work. I’m sure they’re hiring though so you could probably get a job there and ride it out to the end.
I doubt that, most companies could not care less about the internal affairs of their tools' companies, unless it impacts the tools' performance and featureset, something we still await to see regarding Basecamp, whether they can successfully plug the employee hemorrhage wound and get new employees working on the product.
No evidence of this whatsoever. A bluecheck on Twitter loudly proclaiming that he's not going to pay $99/yr for email (HEY) or never using Basecamp again doesn't count. Citation needed.
Most might be broad. Lots of companies absolutely care about the interal workings of their vendors. They can and do make decisions on these kinds of factors, especially if a large contract is on the line or they are looking for that last thing to separate 2 viable candidates. All companies doing manufacturing in places like Asia are constantly being looked at by human rights organizations to ensure the employees are being treated as humans. Personally, I won't do business with companies like Uber (even with new leadership), Wal-Mart, etc based on things reported about them.
When I was a kid my best friend called my sandy toes because my last name was Santos.
If my name sounded like a Swedish curse word I wouldn’t be mad because a Swede laughed at my name.
Maybe part of healing division as humor and laughter. If we can’t take a joke we can’t share the connection of humor with others.
As an adult that has spent their entire life hear the same old tired jokes about their name, I could easily see/sympathize with them for no longer being amused by something that would make a 10 year old boy chuckle.
In addition, if they are so easy to one's name, it is likely that they will try to look for other sources of fun: accent, looks, type of issue.
I would count myself as someone who would simultaneously be thrilled with management's decision to ban political discussion at work but also quit to get the six months pay.
Which is defined as "Psychological contracts are defined by the relationship between an employer and an employee where there are unwritten mutual expectations for each side. A psychological contract is rather defined as a philosophy, not a formula or devised plan."
So I don't know what happened at Basecamp but here is how breaking a psychological contract feel to the employee from my experience: A leader representing the company does something, an action, takes a decision. You, the employee, feel that a wrong was done to you, even if the rules, law and contract says the one who took the action has the right to do it.
And in the beginning no amount of explanation about the action will alleaviate this feeling. Logically you will agree that they can do what they did, but emotionally (psychologically) at the end of every meeting or discussion you will still feel that somehow a wrong was done to you, a balance is unbalanced ...
Shortly you lost the trust in the company that what they will do has your best interests at heart.
It takes a big amount of effort and trying to put yourself in the shoes of your leader to try to understand how they got to that decision/action and if indeed was done in good faith you might overcome this. If not, then the best is to leave.
True leaders realize the importance of cultivating those underneath them, and adapting their direction to pushback or input.
Hire good people, give them goals, and the resources they need, then get the fuck out of their way. Let them make their own processes, rules, norms, even mistakes. Most organisations have a prevailing culture, so they'll operate in context anyway; create boundaries by application of Conway's law. Intervene by guidance and with pertinent and impertinent questions, not with directives and fiat. Authoritarianism is the death-knell of ingenuity.
Brian Epstein made lots of decisions without the bands opinion and many more when they disagreed.
I'll make N-way decisions between conflicting ideals when I'm invited to adjudicate, but refrain otherwise. My guidance would be to workshop apparently dissimilar preferences extensively, because 99% of the time there is a synthesis to be found, and creating a focus for conflict tends to encourage loud voices to get louder, drowning out alternatives. I'll treat any administrative decision-making as being on behalf of the team, i.e. as having been delegated the authority to do so from the members. I learned years ago that governing by consent of the governed is the only form of respectful leadership, and this extends to organisations and corporations, and it's never more apparent than when a manager switches jobs and people follow to the new gig because they liked working with you.
The most important function, in this management style, is hiring, and in some organisations, talent acquisition has been half my workload. Regarding which I was once told, "hire people smarter than you"; the only issue with this maxim being the corollary, viz. that the CEO is, by induction, the company dunce.
Why is it that you avoid possessiveness?
I am not asking from judgement but genuine curiosity.
I think there are some valuable ideas in your post. And I generally agree with your perspective. I also think nothing about governing with consent of the governed alters the existence of an actual power structure unless you would resign in the face of a team member not consenting to your decision.
Yes. The primary meaning of "my" is the individual possessive. The secondary meaning of association, or membership, is something one cannot reliably communicate, even to oneself.
> Why is it that you avoid possessiveness?
I don't own people. They have individual agency.
> resign in the face of a team member not consenting to your decision
That's bonkers. It's still thinking in terms of a command authority. It's not me that has to consent, it's the rest of the team. Or more precisely, don't make decisions on behalf of a team if it hasn't agreed to recognising their validity in advance. The most important consent to obtain in this regard is hiring (nuance: compensation/levelling is best left to a separate corporate organ), followed by seating (yes, really) and allocation of day-to-day work.
Frankly, a manager whose team doesn't recognise the validity of their decisions, or who can't handle being challenged to qualify and explain their thinking, should go. Continuing the earlier analogy; if the band is unhappy with their manager, they can get a new one.
Command authority is for temporary dictators in situations required real-time skilled decision making, like a surgeon in the OR, or the emergency controller for a downtime incident. It is not for deciding which continuous delivery tool we'll use, whether we're including SSO in the next release, or buying standing desks, or who gets to sit next to the window, or has to refactor a problematic query.
The hardest thing to do in this context is fire someone, but then, it always is.
The easiest thing to do is actually extinguish the team, because the quid pro quo is that it spends company resources.
Sure, ending a relationship is disruptive. But moving on is perfectly feasible.
And the thought here is not novel -- it was taught to me as part of an Organizational Psychology class in b-school
One's ability to lead is only as good as their ability to get followers to follow their lead. Hence why so many people use fear to keep others in line -- it's the easiest and simple way to ensure compliance
Considering that most b-school students go on to become MBAs, I would hope they teach some leadership skills
Leaders make decisions but good leaders take account of the views of their teams.
If we say that employees should be smart enough to autonomously do their jobs well, wouldn't their collective intelligence be better at running the business in its entirety? Why isn't it smarter and more financially sound to run a business like a democracy?
I know I'm wasting my time here but here is the first three definitions of totalitarianism I was able to find :
(emphasis mine)
> Britannica: Totalitarianism: *form of government* that theoretically permits no individual freedom and that seeks to subordinate all aspects of individual life to the authority of the state.
> Google : relating to a *system of government* that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state.
> Dictionary.com : of or relating to a *centralized government* that does not tolerate parties of differing opinion and that exercises dictatorial control over many aspects of life.
A business is not a government and you are using the term in a meaningless context so you are going to have to forgive everyone else for pointing out that what you are saying makes absolutely zero sense.
Yes it is, hence the existence of concepts like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_governance and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy
Employers have a great deal of authority of their employee's lives - to that extent they govern their employees. This is all straightforward, conventional usage of these words and terms.
Government also makes the rules about how businesses operate (property law, contract law, and so forth), and give businesses the right to enforce them - in this way, businesses are an extension of government in the control they have over our lives.
All you're doing is question-begging the exact premise I'm critiquing in the first place: That the workplace is in a magic separate dimension where principles usually agreed to be good (democracy, equality) are no longer desirable or even applicable.
I'm not sure why this has made you angry - perhaps you've become irrationally attached to certain ideological beliefs, and my pointing them out has triggered you.
>Yes it is
Some things reach a point of idiocy where no one is going to be convinced and you just need to call things what they are. And that is fucking moronic. So let's just stick with that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government
Emphasis mine:
> A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, *generally* a state.
> While *all types of organizations have governance*, the term government is *often* used more specifically, to refer to the approximately 200 independent national governments and subsidiary organizations.
So you are simply ignorant of the broader meaning of the term. I look forward to your apology. But do please try to interact with more humility and politeness in future, and be familiar with the very basics of a topic before debating it.
You left off "if you want your boss to give you gobs of money every two weeks".
Particularly in the context of a workplace, where the workers are the ones actually doing all the work.
This is a value judgment not shared by everyone. One/few person rule can be quite efficient in certain tasks such as rapid development and deployment of resources, because you can cut through red tape. At the same time, it can be inefficient in other tasks.
Well actual contract is do your job and get paycheck. People try to ignore other stuff you do until it becomes mess.
> In doing that they declared that they alone decide the rules, they alone decide what is acceptable to say and what is not.
Well legally yes as long as they dont brek any law. If you read correctly they consult labour lawyer for their words
> you'll lose your best employees as they decide they don't really want you to decide everything about their waking hours without consulting you
You're honestly exaggerating situation. Nobody want you to consult with them for anything. They expect you to work in office hours.
If anything, I see everyone who is leaving as being the professional ones in this situation.
However, if DHH’s verbatim quote of his response is accurate, it sounds like things had gotten out of hand with this company’s culture.
If a leader says “this is unacceptable - we will do better going forward”, that should be enough in this kind of situation. But apparently it wasn’t for the employee that you allude to.
A third of the company had joined some D&I committee and that committee apparently felt that its scope extended to the entire operations of the company. It sounds incredibly disruptive.
Oddly, according to the coverage, the owners had previously said publicly and internally that they thought it was important.
The owners had previously been very publicly and assertively taking very "liberal" and "progressive" positions. They have been on the "wrong" side of the "culture wars" for those who think it's "off the rails" to be spending signficant time and effort on DE&I. "Hansson had encouraged employees to read Between the World and Me, a memoir by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and The New Jim Crow... Both founders are also active — and occasionally hyperactive — on Twitter, where they regularly advocate for mainstream liberal and progressive views on social issues."
I wonder how it will feel to them to become the darlings of people very opposed to those positions they had been taking, as seen in these threads. I wonder if the owners will become born-again to the right-wing side of the "culture wars".
Speaking as a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, right wingers are not the only people opposed to woke insanity.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's a 2D plane of opinions: liberal/conservative on one axis, moderation/extremism on the other.
If that sub were defining things, you would be right. But the people they're making fun of are defining things. My vote for the new axis goes to individualism vs. collectivism.
The only difference between me and you is that you think it means something when you say you've been left-leaning all your life. It doesn't. You're in the outgroup, just in denial about it.
> Oddly, according to the coverage, the owners had previously said publicly and internally that they thought it was important.
No owners would publicly say D&I are not important.
> I wonder how it will feel to them to become the darlings of people very opposed to those positions they had been taking, as seen in these threads.
I'm sure these decisions only came about after some hard looks in the mirror.
These well-meaning D&I enthusiasts are pushing on a rope -- and then, when another innocent man gets killed by the cops the next week or whatever other newsworthy thing happens, they push harder. That's not how ropes work.
A few reasons:
* They weren't hired or asked to do that
* It doesn't bring more value to the business
* It contributes to a toxic working culture
And it's especially bad in a small company, because you're no longer looking at high level statistics. With only 58 people, you're not saying, "we've got too many white men, statistically." You're implicitly saying, "Mike and Jeff shouldn't have been hired. We should have found people of the race / sex I want to see more of." And, implicitly, "We're going to have to really lean on them to not hire another white guy." Now hiring managers are hesitant to do what's best for the business out of fear of being called -ist.
This idea that employees are entitled to organize privately on company time to try and leverage the company to focus on some unrelated special interest at the expense of being as successful as possible as a business is not as widely accepted as some here seem to think.
It express the reality that having good intentions may have nothing whatsoever to do with outcomes and that misalignment can be exacerbated under more pressure.
The issue at Basecamp and every other socially minded startup is obviously that people don't realize they are pushing on rope, and they lament anyone pointing out the fact as some kind of obstacle.
The clear majority of these kinds of 'social blow ups' are happening at companies where leaders and staff tilt way over to the Left/Liberal and Libertarian/Openness side of things, which should give pause for people consider that maybe those 'pushing back' aren't remotely trump-loving alt-righters, in fact probably the opposite.
The very nature of these threads is exhausting and frankly if I had to work at once of these places I would take respite in not having to deal with it. If there were some kind of pervasive evil that needed to be dealt with, then of course we'd have to do that, but I strongly doubt that this is the case.
You realize those who think it's important don't think that's what it is, right?
If 20 employees were on the "social" committee planning a holiday party, would you consider that as "off the rails", because you are paying them (some here unspecified number of hours) to throw a damn party? I doubt anyone would get that up in arms about it.
I get it, you think DE&I is a mistake, (unless you think coming up with new ways to tell people to stop being racist is not a mistake? But I think you were clear), so the more people involved in it, the bigger the mistake. But if someone thinks it's important, perhaps even more important than a holiday party, then the more people involved in it the better, and having a large portion of the company involved in it is not a mistake. That's it.
The party planning committee would presumably not try to dictate which vendors the company deals with and which speaker is at the next all-hands meeting.
There's no other way for 20 out of 58 people to spend any significant length of time focused on D&I of the company they work for.
1 out of 58? Maybe. But 20? There's only one way this thing can end.
> If 20 employees were on the "social" committee planning a holiday party, would you consider that as "off the rails", because you are paying them (some here unspecified number of hours) to throw a damn party? I doubt anyone would get that up in arms about it.
A party planning committee is not targeting the rest of the company.
> I get it, you think DE&I is a mistake,
I didn't say it was a mistake. I said 1/3 of a small remote company focused on it shows it was off the rails.
Maybe they should have just joined in. Each of the 58 employees could be brainstorming ways the other 57 employees can be less bigoted. Just hope they could find some time to write software, too.
Sounds like a pretty lame party if they're not inviting the rest of the company.
Also, that you think discussing how to make a workplace more diverse, equitable, and inclusive is somehow "targeting" the other employees says a lot about your stance on those things.
Wonder how that balances out.
> 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.’”
Well, of course! If you are working for a private company then this is exactly what you are signing up for.
If my team spent months debating these issues I would be concerned as well.
Tell me again how this is “about professionalism.”
We have lots of difficult, sometimes racialized discussions at BigCo. It makes us better at engaging with the world outside our walls. It’s not unnecessary or distracting from our work because our customers live in the same world we create products and services for, it’s part of our work.
Look at Apples stance on privacy, that’s based on a lot of difficult political discussions that culminate in corporate policy. If we did away with politics, we couldn’t have come to some of the decisions we have until forced by legislatures or our competitors.
Who’s professionalism might be, though.
Edit: reading some of the comments below, it does also say they banned discussion of certain past decisions. It’s not just politics. Interesting.
I find this statement idealistic in the US, as so many issues, political or not, are turned into good-vs-evil moral confrontation. Universal care is taking freedom from citizens. Taking vaccine is big pharma's conspiracy. Wearing masks is eroding civil rights. The left is not better. J.K Rowling is already a Nazi. Any Trump supporter should be hunted and punished. Questioning Faucci is anti-science. Questioning Biden is supporting Trump. Asking a person not to graffiti on my house means losing my job for opposing the right movement. And how much hate did Bari Weiss get from her staff for an editorial decision?
Sometimes, yes. For example, if your company is riven by endless flame wars over tabs vs spaces or where curly braces go, it can make a lot of sense to publish a style guide and cut off further discussion.
As an example, when I first joined Twitch, it was an uphill battle initially to get buy in for automatic code formatting, however through questioning and understanding their past decisions the team came around to implementing it, as well as numerous other improvements I still have engineers reach out to me thank me for years later. If they had this policy, it’s possible I would not have been around long enough to actually champion the improvements.
I don’t say there’s no upside, only that sometimes the downside outweighs the upside (and sometimes it doesn’t.)
As an example, I was in charge of deploying the website the day we hosted a Trump rally. I made it well known to my team and manager that I did not like this, as did others, but I did my job anyways, and there were no flame wars, nor did anyone get fired. Although I disagreed with Emmets wishes, I still hold the utmost respect for him. The same cannot be said for Armstrong or DHH.
Should an employee have to accept ideological points for his company at face value even if it goes against his sense of workmanship or integrity? What about vice versa (companies vis a vis employees)?
How much does (or should) anyone's say diverge at Twitch especially from the dominant ideological creed (whether such a creed was employee-fostered or company-fostered)?
Where does one's technical achievement end and "the cause" begin?
My key point here is that in companies that allow discussions, I can ask questions of the policies I disagree with to understand what motivates the policies. I can propose alternative viewpoints. Often, via having open uncensored discussions I find that it is much easier to disagree and commit
In the Emmet / Trump example, he explained the reasoning (we are a platform) and allowed us to grumble. Had there also been a policy that anyone complaining would be terminated, I’m not so sure I would have deployed the website that day.
Hope that answers your question
In your opinion as a professional, what should Armstrong and DHH have done without kowtowing to their employees?
And while I still have your attention on Twitch, what is with the company's hypocritical stance on scantily-clad women (a la Alinity) and copyright abuses while claiming that it isn't allowed? Your employment seems to have been contemporaneous with those episodes, so it seems like you would know a few things.
I’m not convinced Armstrong and DHH had such a drastic flame war problem, for example after banning politics, Armstrong made several public political rants including endorsing Kanye West - http://modernconsensus.com/politics/ceo-of-apolitical-coinba...
Perhaps they should have done what most other companies do, and ignore the “problem” if employees are otherwise productive, and if not then replace unproductive employees with productive ones. Whether an employee is productive is tangential to their political beliefs, and an employee who is causing waves over politics will just cause waves over something else if you ban politics.
I would work for someone who I disagreed with, but if an employer tries to silence me and turns around and advocates for their own political candidate, it seems to me the employer is being narrow minded, underhanded, and hypocritical
It’s one thing to say someone is acting unprofessionally. It’s another thing altogether to accuse them of being on a path to genocide. If I did that to someone when it was so clearly uncalled for, I would be an asshole and my relationship with that person would be strained from that point forward.
If you don’t like that strain in your workplace, you try to draw a line on speech. It’s not something I’d want from the government, but it seems appropriate for a workplace.
I’m led to understand the graphic in question was about how long-term tolerance of micro aggression can lead macro-aggressions over time, the ultimate form of which being genocide.
To share such a graphic isn’t to make a point that “your actions lead to genocide”, it’s to highlight the important of being diligent about not allowing micro aggressions to become commonplace and accepted within a culture. Because the long term society-wide effects of that can be genuinely terrible.
The employee wasn't accusing anyone of supporting genocide, even though DHH clearly took it personally.
Huh, sounds like the "broken windows" theory of policing. Did not expect that.
The list was clearly unprofessional and made some people uncomfortable, that is enough for it to be gone. It would be worthwhile to discuss explicitly what was wrong with the list, opening people's eyes to perspectives they hadn't considered and to take a little time to foster shared ideals for the workplace culture. Even alluding to genocide is wildly over the top and I can understand if it offended some people, regardless of whether they had anything to do with the list.
If he's disavowed and apologized for the list then this genocide point is just a big waste of time and a distraction. I can't see how it would achieve anything productive.
I just think it's sanctimonious, a total waste of time and a distraction to throw such incendiary and flamebait things out into the workplace's communication channels, especially if it's been apologized for already.
Going from "someone posted an ADL infographic about the pyramid of hate" to "we're cancelling all external benefits, DEI discussion group is cancelled, and nobody can talk about politics anymore in our office ever" is an insane overreaction.
I agree.
On the other hand, it does sound as though basecamp is actually just a lifestyle company for the benefit of the founders, and once everyone realized that is the true 'mission', many left.
I don't think that Basecamp had an issue with "flame wars", I don't think that the company tried (or succeeded) in banning them, and I don't think the company's actions represented (or increased the level of) professionalism at Basecamp.
So while in general, yes, sure, professionalism is great and we should try and stop destructive flame wars, if you dig into what actually happened at Basecamp, and the timeline, and, eg, the exact reason DHH was reported to HR internally, it becomes rapidly clear that this was something else entirely, in my view.
The policy change was not triggered by people behaving unprofessionally or having a flame war, it was not tailored to prevent unprofessional behaviour or flame wars, it was executed in an unprofessional way, and it has now itself caused flamewars. In short, I think your argument is correct, but is a damning indictment of Basecamp/DHH, not a defense of them.
They were not political in the sense of being about politicians or political parties. They were political in that they were motivated by the agenda and language of the activist left.
A subtext in many responses from said activists is that this is “not politics”, but something more essential or “above” politics. I agree insofar as they are treating their ideas more akin to a religion now.
I'm not saying such silencing doesn't have benefits, but ensuring people aren't silenced isn't a benefit of silencing people. Bombing for peace generally doesn't result in peace, just more bombing.
In college you debate and explore ideas. Different contexts. Different purposes. Different rules.
Has nothing to do with "politics", or at least those that were trying to be banned.
And if it's about professionalism, you probably shouldn't communicate your policy change to your employees through the personal blog of an executive...
The company leadership is framing those changes as a ban on political speech, but clearly there's disagreement about what the changes really are.
Edit: I was too aggressive, have rephrased in grandchild comment.
One of the most valuable investment I’ve made in my life is counseling focused on functional, healthy communication and dispute resolution. It has allowed to respectfully resolve areas of disagreement and reach consensus on difficult issues.
P.S. thank you for engaging. I found your follow up comment helpful and important. I think it is critical we as a society build companies that can engage in difficult debates and take normative positions to improve society. Your example of Apple is an excellent example and I think added something important to this thread.
For posterity, birdy told me to go back to smoking my digitaltrees.
Separated from their justification, the 6 policies represent an assertion that Basecamp leadership are the sole arbiters of all things Basecamp. I don't think that's an awful thing in itself, but the way it was announced was clearly felt to be completely demoralizing for employees who assumed their judgment on the direction of the company was valued.
And the result seems likely to be catastrophic. Basecamp has had their pick of the litter for talent for years. Sure, they'll hire new folks who are aligned with their new way of running the company, but you don't go back to being a beacon of the industry when you lose 1/3 of your staff in a week over an ego trip.
How radicalized you have to be to lose your capacity for critical thinking like that?
If anything, Basecamp is a much better place to work now, without them
I continue to be amazed how strong the options of people who have no real insight into any of this continue to be.
As a younger person, I made a similar change regarding my use of the word "retarded" to refer to situations I thought were nonsensical or illogical. I'm now embarrassed to have used that word so thoughtlessly, even though it was pointed out many times that it was an unkind thing to do.
Call it radicalism if you want, but I think it's just a matter of stepping back and reevaluating behaviors I took for granted. You know, literal critical thinking.
We're not yet at the point where people look at the word "crazy" as being wildly inappropriate in the same way as "retarded", but I think it's completely reasonable for people to raise the point that putting it in the title of a book that represents the whole company is not a good idea.
You're fooling yourself if you think Basecamp will be improved by losing 1/3 of its staff, including some department heads and long-tenured employees, as well as its nearly universally positive reputation.
That's how you see it. Many other people do not see it in such a poor light.
Except it's really not clear how this is going to shake out, because people are quite divided on the issue.
Just a different politics than the one people have been suggesting?
Absolutely spot on. I think they had an implicit contract with their team which they broke in a fundamental way.
Notable that DHH's twitter hasn't seen any expression of regret or thanks to the people who have worked hard to build Basecamp and now feel they have to go.
Its really sad. He misunderstood a comment about a pyramid and instead of investigating a bit more about the meaning he decided to assert managerial power.
When he finally gets to the point where he realizes his mistake, I wonder how he'll spin it (subconciously) into a rant about how awesome he is that he realized his mistake.
Nobody was implying actual genocide. In fact the ground level of the pyramid, where you do absolutely nothing wrong, is still necessary to build it. (i.e. to make any sort of mistakes you first need humans).
If he understood it he could've just said "Yep you're right, we have to make sure we're not building the foundation for worse things" and be done with it. In fact he already agreed with that. I have no idea what he was thinking.
But why bring it into the conversation?? If you're not implying any link from jokes to genocides, why is it relevant? I agree that bringing the concept of genocide up in a conversation about insensitive jokes is absolutely escalating.
We can talk about the direct harm of insensitive jokes. That conversation can stand alone.
Those are debatable points. But they're relevant if someone else says belittling jokes are harmless.
Did the employee say anything about genocide actually? Or did they just expect people to focus on the relevant parts?
Basically a bit over a decade ago, DHH was aware of and explicitly condoned a NSFW image in a Ruby conference talk's slides.
At least 1/3 of staff, when offered either 3 or 6 months of salary just for switching employers, accepted it.
I feel like you'd get similar rates, potentially higher, at any employer recent incident or not. If you have the career power to quickly slot in to an equivalent job elsewhere, you just cut years off of your retirement date.
I don't think any "its really about" take can ignore that.
Remember, Basecamp pays the 90th percentile of San Francisco rates + profit sharing kickbacks for a company that's fully remote. Regardless of position.
If you're looking to cash in on a unicorn, you are almost always better off working somewhere else that will pay you the most in cash and using that cash to make your unicorn bets.
But the allure of partaking in massive success in a revolutionary startup is pretty significant. Less so if you have a steady salary perhaps, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a few of these people use the safety net of savings and a solid technical rep to try some riskier innovation.
I really can't believe I'm explaining startup allure on HN.
You can still partake in the massive success of revolutionary startups with your cash. In fact, you're in a much better position to, because if you're making a lot of cash, odds are you are senior and connected in your field. You have better odds of picking winners and investing in them.
There's also opportunity to buy pre-IPO shares.
Being a qualified investor (which you can get to from zero in as little as 4-5 years if you're making FAANG cash) helps a lot.
They thought this was just another instance of them having a stroke of thoughtleadership brilliance and everyone else is wrong.
The company doesn't think that 'name calling' is appropriate, rather, they don't believe that this activity is the beginnings of some kind of 'race war' and object to language such as 'leads to genocide' as hyperbolic.
"unhappy that their employees asserted power over them in the workplace,"
Yes, if your staff are exerting that kind power, that's in most cases an unhealthy thing, unless there is considerably legitimacy in the assertion of that power. The 'argument' is over the legitimacy.
"over what they view as their personal fiefdom"
This is not the appropriate language: it's their company, and their responsibility. It's not a 'personal fiefdom'.
"expected them to live up to their words about openness and owning mistakes."
They did. The company doesn't support the right of individuals to 'make fun of people's names'.
It's unreasonable to believe that excessive fear-mongering such as language regarding 'leads to genocide' should be accepted at face value.
"t least 1/3 of the staff, when confronted with their true relations with their management, then decided to quit."
This is clearly not true, because 1/3 of most Americans literally today, might opt to take 6 months of severance in order to leave their jobs. I probably would.
The companies language may have been lacking in self awareness and possibly tone-deaf, but none of their policies are unreasonable.
I think it was handled poorly, but just because it was, doesn't absolve the antagonists as having perfect legitimacy.
I think from a policy perspective, things are fine, but from a 'populism' perspective, no so much. It does make me question a little bit either side, as though I'd want a lot more information to determine how bad things are either way.
I don't see anything in this article as draconian or even excessive on the part of he executive team.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22406673/basecamp-politic...
I used the word deliberately. They mistook their relationship with their employees for a feudal one, they have now discovered it was not.
It's unreasonable to believe that excessive fear-mongering such as language regarding 'leads to genocide' should be accepted at face value.
I imagine gentle disagreement with this graphic would have been completely fine and appropriate coming from the manager - it's ok to disagree at work, many people wouldn't want to take part in that sort of discussion (also ok), but it's not ok for minor disagreements like this or a complaint to HR to lead to massive retaliation from management and a major restructure of the company to attempt to shut down any future complaints.
Feudalism:
"the dominant social system in medieval Europe, in which the nobility held lands from the Crown in exchange for military service, and vassals were in turn tenants of the nobles, while the peasants (villeins or serfs) were obliged to live on their lord's land and give him homage, labor, and a share of the produce, notionally in exchange for military protection."
Got it. Wait. No, lost it.
Does this square with offering people half a year's salary if they wanted to leave rather than continue working there?
You don't do something you expect to lead to a third of your company leaving. Even if you were actively planning a round of redundancies, you wouldn't do this as you risk losing your best performers.
The cost they'll face in fixing this loss of company knowledge, hiring and training replacements will be several times the cost of just the severance.
This kind overly dramatic rhetoric demonstrates the lack of perspective on the part of the antagonists which is possibly at the root of the problem.
There is no reason for leadership to risk the company and all of their time and investment over 'fake rhetorical wars over the meaning of words' which have very little substance on either side.
Of all the ways for a company to fail, having internal resurrections over nothing is at least something that can be avoided.
They company executives acted as though they were owners managers of the company - which they are - and gave their staff an option, which some of them took.
That's it.
" gentle disagreement with this graphic would have been completely fine "
It wasn't just a disagreement over a graphic, it was a group of people forming an alliance to shape the nature of the company in their social view.
That's going to require some restructuring.
Aside from the tone of the communications, the company did what any other company would do, and now they're more or less situated as most other companies.
A lot of people are here in for a rude awakening in life; questioning some actions the company is making and having them addressed is reasonable, but forming alliances, challenging the leadership is suicidal unless there's a high degree of legitimacy, which there isn't.
If the company refuses to stop dumping chemicals, then yes, you can form an alliance. If you're worried the company has a doc floating around with crude jokes - but they stopped it ... and you want to restructure the company in your social terms because you think there's something existential at foot ... you're going to be fired.
Even if the tone was off, the company acted within reason.
The only time employees at any company don't do this is when the status quo serves them just fine.
I suggest that the status quo at Basecamp was probably in any reasonable reality just fine. The movements to 'eradicate systematic racism' seem to be afoot mostly in the places that are already the most self-aware and tolerant.
This is the interesting paradox and it's why I believe that the social organizers at most of these already tolerant places are antagonists out to enforce the worldview they 'read in a book' in the workplace, out of a misguided attempt at moral justice.
Contrast this with blue-collar union formation, which is almost always in good faith in the sense we would expect, not that unions are perfect either.
I don't doubt those trying to start a union at Amazon, but I do doubt highly paid white collar workers thinking we all need some kind of 'major overview' of workplace conditions to ensure their view of the world is put in place.
I'm sure there is always a kernel of truth in demands (i.e. no making fun of names!) but that doesn't necessarily justify broad social action.
> Hansson’s response to this employee [that apologized for participating in the list] took aback many of the workers I spoke with. He dug through old chat logs to find a time when the employee in question participated in a discussion about a customer with a funny-sounding name. Hansson posted the message — visible to the entire company — and dismissed the substance of the employee’s complaint.
(From The Verge article[1])
In summation an employee participated in the list and wanted BaseCamp to change its ways on diversity. DHH took to publicly bullying this person and shutting down discussion.
1 - https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22406673/basecamp-politic...
However, I have to say that if I had stated "Yes, I'm embarrassed that we didn't put a stop to this list far earlier." and then some employee kept objecting, referring to the pyramid of hate and genocide and all that and I knew that said person had participated in the making fun of names themselves, I would be tempted to call that out as well.
That does not make it right and it certainly shouldn't have happened publicly but I don't think it reveals quite the character flaw that some seem to think it does.
I think they realized the boss didn't respect them and wouldn't tolerate dissent, and that therefore they didn't respect the boss.
More than about "talking about politics at work".
Back in the day when you forked a repo on Github, it said "intense forking action". Sometimes people don't TRY to be offensive, they just want to be funny. Mix in immaturity and stir. But, given my example, should we never ever use Github again?
Let’s take a recent polarizing topic: whether trans people should use the bathroom corresponding to their gender identity. Which bathroom do trans employees use? How can Basecamp possibly avoid that issue?
People are upset about the policy because it gives cover to treat people’s identities (such as using they/them pronouns) as forbidden political speech.
I mean, it's a workplace, not a school. You don't get to choose how you call other people, period. Other people's pronouns and names don't really matter to your day to day job, just call them whatever they want and go on with your life.
Someone saying that name/pronoun choice is "shoving a lifestyle down their throats" is not being reasonable and is being an unreasonable asshole on purpose just to make a point. At this point you tell this person to shut the fuck up or get the fuck out.
Telling someone how you should be called is not unreasonable. You're still allowed to roll eyes in your head, but calling them anything else is behaving like a petulant schoolchildren. There's no place for that in a professional environment. Just accept and move on with your life.
Imagine that a coworker keeps misgendering you, and that commenter is your manager. Your workplace has a “no politics” rule. Who do you think will be told to stop being “political”?
I also don't think that someone politicising something makes the "other side" political automatically.
If Basecamp hired a retrograde sexist that called unmarried women "whores" in the hallway, the women would have all the right to complain, and it wouldn't be a political discussion. It would be just be (in a perfect world) HR vs Asshole.
EDIT: Also I'd like to say that I'm not condoning banning politics at work. We probably agree on most things. I'm just saying that co-workers, managers and the company being reasonable makes way more difference than politics/no politics. Unfortunately there's no perfect solution to the problem of people being unreasonable, other than those sociopaths ceasing to exist.
The retrograde sexist thing sounds obvious because public opinion there is so one-sided. But that's not true for all issues. It was legal to fire employees simply for being gay or trans less than a year ago.
I think we're mostly on the same page here. I agree that ultimately, assholes will find a way to be assholes regardless of the policies in place. But we should still be wary of policies that give them cover to do so.
What I am saying is that someone forcing an issue doesn't make "both sides" political by decree. A person being misgendered can still bring the issue with HR without it being political in a way that's against any kind of political conversation.
Or at least, there have always been those who think that their belief system is obviously basic human decency and those of their opponents pure evil outside the bounds of civic discourse. Then they can pat themselves on the back and have their liberal pluralist cake while eating it too. Usually these people exist on both sides of a given topic simultaneously!
Telling someone who you want to be called in terms of a name, is reasonable. But asking them to reconsider what gender you are, what pronouns to use, etcetera is asking them to participate in an ideology or religion. Rather than asking people to blindly obey pronouns but “roll eyes in your own head”, we could just as easily ask those demanding different pronouns to “keep it in your own head”. What makes one stance more legitimate than the other?
I believe trans people deserve safety and legal protections but I don’t see altering genders or pronouns as being the same as being guaranteed basic rights. I would say the neutral position for a workplace might be that someone can claim a different gender or pronoun for themselves, but others could choose whether to go along with it or not, per their own individual choice and ideology. Neither side should let that deter from their work responsibilities.
Gender is completely meaningless when it comes to do real work. This should be similar to filling a form with preferred title "Mr", "Ms", "Mrs", "Dr", whatever. It doesn't make a difference in the final output of my work.
It's the same as religion, for example. Someone wearing a Hijab or a Kippah, or a Dastar shouldn't and doesn't affect anyones capacity to work. And it doesn't. I don't need access to the hair of my co-workers.
Even if you dislike someone's life choices, you're not being asked of anything other than to behave as neutrally and as professional as possible. You don't need to love them or spread their gospel. You're just being asked for a bare minimum of respect.
Just because some people want to turn this into a political crusade doesn't mean that the trans people or religious people are. They are just living their own lives and those things we're discussing so far are completely harmless.
But having political discussions is also not a panacea, and I've seen it also being weaponised in the name of the same oppression. For instance a very publicly racist CTO I worked under was kept because the CEO claimed "we want diversity, even diversity of opinion". Of course it was bullshit and both of them were ousted by the board.
I guess I'm just trying to be pragmatic and say we should solve the pronouns issue in a more pragmatic and humane manner (HR) rather than let people weaponise it with alt-right politics (or by claiming that trans people are being political).
Honestly I just wish those people had other hobbies other than picking on others.
In the workplace, respect for others is an expected part of the role of each person. If a person asks to be identified by a particular name, or by the use of particular pronouns, then no other person in that workplace has the right to argue that they can't/won't because of their personal beliefs.
I find it hard to emphathise with someone making a big deal out of that.
I can sort of see how you’d like to be called differently if you are changing your gender, but at the same time I cannot really blame the person calling a boy a boy.
I’d try to, but probably find it exhausting to try and keep track of how people want to be called.
Do you keep track of people's names? Their partners' names? Their jobs?
Did you ever think someone was a different gender when you first saw them? What did you do after you realized?
I don’t. But generally, by the time someone is legally allowed to change their gender it’ll be fairly hard to call them anything else, so most of the issues come from the transitional phase.
> Do you keep track of people's names? Their partners' names? Their jobs?
Fair point, though the answer is somewhere in between. I suck at remembering names too :)
I don’t think I’ve ever had to deal with it, which is probably part of the reason I find it hard to imagine.
For what it’s worth, literally everyone I’ve ever met that requests specific pronouns is fine with occasional slip-ups as long as you make a good faith effort to get it right.
Again, the point is that banning "politics" creates space for the company to say "leave the pronouns at home; engage in social issues on your own time".
Consider if the conflict was over one employee insisting on using racial slurs instead, and the victim being moved rather than the aggressor disciplined.
To me a stance like that would make me quit as a matter of principle, and I'd also avoid doing business with a company if I was aware of such a policy.
Good point about a racial slur. But invert that. Should I be forced to call some by a racial slur because they are reclaiming the word if it makes me uncomfortable?
These are not easy issues. We are talking about the mutual rights of others and the ability to force people to act. A posture of good faith compromise is warranted.
If I was being transferred due to a transgression someone else did, I'd consider suing or leaving the company as a matter of principle. The outcome of a policy that involves transferring someone rather than dealing with abuse is you over time get left with those who are fine with maintaining an abusive workplace.
If someone is trying to force you to use a slur, they're being abusive. A pronoun is not a slur.
But again, being able to even have that discussion about what is and is not acceptable is a political discussion. That Basecamp has now banned.
I for one would never consider applying to Basecamp after this because they've made it clear employees can not safely discuss issues that may affect them at work.
More importantly, I'd consider a place that cared so little about victims of abusive behaviours a horrible place to work that'd be worth leaving regardless. I'd start thinking about leaving such a please even if I just observed it happen to others, because it says something about the lack of fundamental respect for employees.
2 is frankly a terrible solution. You're keeping a "missing stair" employee whom you need to carefully ensure doesn't interact with any coworkers they'd misgender. If someone can't respect a coworker, especially after being directly told to, they should be let go.
It isn’t necessary to fire every employee because a dispute is intractable. If an employee makes a good faith effort to adapt but makes innocent mistakes that are very poorly received they may not be at fault.
Why must it be me who gives up my beliefs to accommodate the other?
Why is mutual respect not the other person understanding this is my religion?
Anyone wondering "how can a ban on politics be used to hurt marginalized people?", here is your Exhibit A.
However, the rest of the company openly discussing another employee's bathroom dealings probably crosses lines outside of politics. I would be highly uncomfortable if that came up at my employer about some new hire.
Look, I really don't want to be confrontational, but I would like to know more about this evidence. Can you provide me with some sources?
My religious beliefs prevent me from accepting the frame of reference of the person requesting unconventional pronouns.
Their frame is “my identity is different to what society imposes on me, I will ask that you treat me in the way I request, not using the societal default”.
My frame is “God has made Adam and Eve, a man and a woman. They are not interchangeable, by asking me to accept interchanges, you are asking me to go again my religious beliefs and commit sin”.
I am asking this sincerely. Why must I give in to accommodate the other instead of the other way around?
Why must I commit sin instead of the other accepting my religion prevents me from indulging the request?
As a concrete example: if a woman gets married and takes her husband’s name, it would be inappropriate for a coworker who believes her religion’s marriage is immoral to continue referring to her by her pre-married name.
You mention “societal defaults”, but you must know that in the west those norms are heavily influenced by Judeo-Christian (especially Protestant) values. So frankly, it’s frustrating when a presumably Christian person asks why they should respect deviation from those norms. It kind of feels like playing a game with someone who has made up house rules to give themselves an advantage, and accuses others of unfair play for choosing not to follow them.
There is also the example with the married woman changing her name. I think it’s a very good argument. In fact this is perhaps the best argument I have seen so far surrounding the pronoun debate. In the example you give, I would agree completely, the judging person refusing to use the new name is in the wrong.
But, this argument makes a hidden assumption. One cleverly hidden in the parallel. You are assuming the two scenarios ( marriage name change and trans pronoun change ) are the same category, and thus it follows those two should be traded in the same way.
Here is why I believe the two are distinct categories. The marriage name change is language neutral while the pronoun name change is language altering. Language in part exists to establish labels for categories in order to facilitate communication. You cannot “hunt mammoth” if you don’t know what “hunt” and “mammoth” is and you cannot substitute different words expecting the same result. “Hunt mammoth” is not the same as “Hunt deer”. Categories are important. They make communication possible. In the example you give, the woman changing her name does not alter the language in any way. In the pronoun side however, the request makes an implicit language change. The request involves altering the category of men or women. “He”, and “she” loose their meaning if they are applied on request.
The discussion to be had at this point is weather those are categories worth having. But that is a separate discussion. For this discussion I don’t feel like the parallel holds.
> You’re free to retain your beliefs, but you can’t vocalize them in the office.
Why can’t we apply the same logic in reverse? The person believes they are a gender or a sex and they would like to be treated in accordance with their beliefs. They can retain that belief but can’t vocalise it in the office.
> Just as it would be disrespectful to publicly judge a coworker’s religion
But, here is the crux of it. By asking me to indulge the pronoun request, they are publicly judging my religion. My religion forbids me from accepting the interchangeably of men and women. They are judging this aspect and attempt to force me to change it. How do we handle this conflict in a way agreeable to everyone? And if we can’t find a way agreeable to everyone, why should one camp give in to the other?
> in the west those norms are heavily influenced by Judeo-Christian (especially Protestant) values
This is an irrelevant point. As a side note, I don’t believe “Judeo-Christian” is a thing. This is a strange, made up category originating from the bizzare melding of politics and religion in the souther US. This concept is devoid of any meaning outside the US. It’s certainly something foreign in Europe and other broadly Christian nations like those in South America. But, regardless, this point is irrelevant. If we were in an Arab country, the influence would be Islamic. In India it would be Hindu, in every place there are influences from the past.
Let me turn on the head your assumption, because again I feel like you are making unstated assumptions.
Why should the expectation be neutrality and not conformity to the historical norm? Why should the historical norm give in to new trends?
The point about Judeo-Christian (or just Christian, if you’d like) norms is actually the root of the matter here, if you’ll bear with me for a moment. It seems like we can agree that there is a significant Christian influence in the laws and culture of the US, so let’s go from there.
That influence is the lens through which we have to view your notions of “language neutral” and “language altering”. Language naturally evolves to accommodate human necessity, including culture and norms. The state you’re referring to as neutral is a norm that was created by Christians specifically to accommodate Christian beliefs. So asking to respect the norm in cases of conflict isn’t really “neutral”, at all — you’re actually asking to revert to a state that was created to privilege your belief system.
You’re right about an influence being present in any country, and we can probably find similar examples elsewhere. For example, some Muslim-majority countries harbor negative views about women in the workplace. Imagine a man saying that working with women is an affront to his religious beliefs, and why should the historical norm give in to new trends?
Ultimately, though, no one is being forced to change their beliefs — just to be accommodating of those who don’t share them. This brings us back to figuring out who must acquiesce to whom. But here’s another place where we seem to be on the same page: the pronoun issue and the marriage example are equivalent if we ignore the status quo.
Should the status quo matter? Here (and in most cases) I think the answer is no — definitely not without considering who created it and whom it benefits.
First, working remotely solves that problem for Basecamp. You use the bathroom at your home.
Second, if you are designing for an office, you have private, individual bathrooms. What happens behind a closed bathroom door, and what someone looks like behind a closed bathroom door, is nobody's business.
Which is what made some employees realize the boss didn't respect them and wouldn't tolerate dissent, so they didn't respect the boss anymore, so they took the buy-out (which was in fact very kind).
Unisex bathrooms?
Also, the very idea that any company is “above politics” is patently absurd. Is labor organizing political? It’s certainly about the workplace. Is advocating for a tax shelter in Delaware and Ireland political? How about advocating for removing the tax shelters? That’s certainly about the company.
Nah, banning “politics” is just a way to enforce the CEO’s politics and place them above question.
And well, sure, such as it ever was. They usually try to put a fancier face on it, because when you make it so blatant, well, people who have options will leave.
Edit: Like even ignoring for a moment how the employees felt about this how do you think customers and prospective customers felt? It's completely inappropriate no matter how you slice it, and DHH and Jason picked this as the hill to die on. Ridiculous.
> current employees were so mortified by the practice that none of them would give me a single example of a name on the list. One invoked the sorts of names Bart Simpson used to use when prank calling Moe the Bartender: Amanda Hugginkiss, Seymour Butz, Mike Rotch.
> Many of the names were of American or European origin. But others were Asian, or African, and eventually the list — titled “Best Names Ever” — began to make people uncomfortable. What once had felt like an innocent way to blow off steam, amid the ongoing cultural reckoning over speech and corporate responsibility, increasingly looked inappropriate, and often racist. [1]
[1] From the link dang shared, above: https://www.platformer.news/p/-what-really-happened-at-basec...
Unfortunately when lancing that boil they also lost some people who decided that 6 months pay at the hottest market in years is too good to pass up.
Reading the official company stances, they all look like reasonable, well meaning changes. But then 1/3 of your organization quits? There must be more to this! And in fact its just a normal human squabble, with broken promises, public dressing downs, power assertions.
It can kind of put into perspective a lot of big policies in general. That almost certainly what we know today as pillars of reasoned thought, has originated by some basic human desires, and what we’re reading is only their rationalizations.
I mean it’s obvious of course, but this here is a _really_ good clear cut example of it.
The managers at basecamp were unhappy that their employees asserted power over them in the workplace, and decided to assert their own power in turn over what they view as their personal fiefdom and retract some of the freedoms they had so graciously granted their workers, because those ungrateful workers actually expected them to live up to their words about openness and owning mistakes. At least 1/3 of the staff, when confronted with their true relations with their management, then decided to quit.
I did find it amusing they announced this new policy of no personal/political stuff at work on his personal blog on hey.com, not on a company blog, and DHH continues to rant on twitter about a very political and public fight with Apple, one he chose to enter on behalf of the company.