DHH literally said it was a systematic failure of the whole company but ultimately his responsibility, apologized and asked to move forward. Part of healthy dispute resolution is accepting an apology and moving forward with good faith forgiveness. If an apology isn’t good enough the cycle of conflict just resets because there can be no accepted resolution.

He literally said none of that publicly.

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.

> The long-running existence of the "Best Names Ever" list that [employee 1] described yesterday represents a serious, collective, and repeated failure at Basecamp. One that we need to learn from together by transparently tracing its origin and history.

> 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.

https://world.hey.com/dhh/let-it-all-out-78485e8e

Have you read DHH's blog? It sounds like they did exactly that, and the instigating employees were unwilling to let things go and insisted on continuing to escalate things.

“Instigating employees” really?

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.

Read his words. They offer a respectful measured tone. They acknowledge and seek to make amends. It is a case study in healthy communication and dispute resolution, and that is saying something for someone like DHH who is prone to bombastic trolling generally. DHH never said instigating employees he merely requested that the apology be accepted and the team move forward. Then he asked everyone to consider the degree of severity of the problem and not give in to the temptation to bring slippery slope arguments into the debate because it actually undermines any possible progress by inflaming the debate, making people’s opinions more intractable and destroying any possible resolution.