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.
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.
[1] https://basecamp.com/about