Seems OP's reaction is like what is rife in Australia as 'tall-poppy syndrome' and cutting down prominent achievers. We collectively dislike promoters, but isn't doing something like writing a book to draw attention to your SaaS product exactly the sort of thing a founder should be doing? Especially given it worked in bringing them customers and attention. If you think they're too confident in their assertions, it's easy enough to ignore them.

That doesn't imply that I have to like his self-promotion book. After all, if I'm to read a book I want to get something out of it. As I already mentioned, the book has good parts, but it reads quite jarring in many places.

Also, I guess this is personal, but a little humility is good for everyone, IMHO, and doesn't necessarily contradict a healthy dose of self-confidence either. DHH seems to have little of it — at least judging from his books and also from his Twitter.

Just because someone isn't skilled at the traditional, mainstream Western methods of conveying empathy doesn't mean they actually lack empathy. This ought to be obvious when considering persons on the extreme end of the autism spectrum, but as time goes on we're learning that the spectrum might subtly encompass far more people than we ever realised.

(With no small amount of irony, I find that many "normal" people have a very hard time truly empathising with the ways in which people on the spectrum are different.)

But it doesn't even have to be something as categorisable as the spectrum. Just as people don't choose their genetics or initial brain chemistry, it's equally true to say that nobody chose their genetic parents or their upbringing. People are the product of their environment; we would do well to keep this in mind even when we (rightly) castigate people for their misdeeds.

> but as time goes on we're learning that the spectrum might subtly encompass far more people than we ever realised.

The autism spectrum is a continuum that fades into normality, with no clear boundary. Part of that continuum is individuals with broad autism phenotype (BAP), who have significantly more autistic traits than the average person does, but not enough to reach the diagnostic cutoff for ASD. That cutoff varies from clinician to clinician, and is moving over time, which renders the boundary between BAP and ASD particularly fuzzy.

> (With no small amount of irony, I find that many "normal" people have a very hard time truly empathising with the ways in which people on the spectrum are different.)

Damian Milton speaks of the "double empathy problem" – it is claimed that a defining trait of autism is deficits in empathy, and yet very many non-autistic people are at least as deficient in empathy for autistic people.

Thanks, an interesting response. I will look into Damian Milton.

Based on my own experiences (which are very limited) I don't see a deficit of empathy in people on the spectrum. What I do see is someone who sees the world differently (has a different kind of "filter" to distinguish signal from noise) which causes the response to stimulus to be different. If you see the world differently, your internal model of what another person is is different, and therefore the way one expresses their empathy is different.

Arguably this isn't so different to how concepts of honour and respect can vary greatly between cultures.

What does this have to do with my comment?

This: "co-wrote several books on company culture that are glorified ads for basecamp" just doesn't seem too questionable to me. The readership made them popular books. His job, in part, is to promote his products - my interpretation of your comment was that your thoughts on his plight were swayed by him writing something that promoted his business. I find him a bit over the top, so I don't follow him on Twitter. I haven't read their books. I've used but didn't continue to use their products. But that doesn't really sway my thoughts on this recent episode.

I think there's a lot of cross-purpose arguing about it all. It's likely that they're a bit painful to work for AND that as founders they'd have concerns about their paid staff getting distracted from their mission at work.

Anyone who has written more than one book on their own company culture has zero idea what their company's culture actually is.

We celebrate sports stars, CEOs from Atlassian/Canva/etc.

It's not about being successful. It's about not having an ego and acting like you're better than everyone else just because you are successful. Americans are much more willing to tolerate this behaviour than Australians.

To the credit of Americans IMO. Ego is quite common among high achievers and often beneficial as a motivator or confidence booster. Unexamined and disproportionate egos are self punishing as they directly harm chances of success. AFAICT any additional social stigma accomplishes nothing except perhaps the soothing of egos by less successful people. There are real disparities in ability & quality between people for which proven success is the strongest (and perhaps the only real) signal.

The idea that it is "his" workplace belongs in the Mad Men era of business.

If you want to attract and keep talent you need to listen to their views and involve in them defining the values of the company.

Is it possible that they were doing exactly that in trying to focus the staff on work itself? I'd guess I lean politically with the founders and their departing staff, and I don't love the "silent majority" that gets spoken of, but DHH talked about having people approach him who were uncomfortable with having a workplace they felt was politicised.

As a personal example, I work in a shared office space. If a vocal tenant talks loudly about politics, even if it's something I agree with, I cringe and worry that it creates a less welcoming space for anyone in the room that doesn't agree with the points. Seems reasonable that they should expect an office where they can work without feeling on edge.

> Is it possible that they were doing exactly that in trying to focus the staff on work itself?

A lot of the complaints or commentary I've seen across a few issues, leaving aside this more acute issue was that DHH and JF were entirely comfortable espousing _their_ opinions and feelings on things, but a lot less interested in hearing other people's.

In the sense that they are ultimately responsible for the business/brand, legal repercussions, etc. It's their baby - Jason's run it for 20+ years. Seems like they're effectively saying, by all means push your opinions on your private channels, and we'll do the same. Obviously if someone feels it's handled poorly, they bail (as some have), but I'm guessing the severance and political polarisation could be factors there?

If I'd founded something 20+ years ago (well, I have), and at some point a third of the business was putting work time into deciding HR policy that was alienating other staff, I'd be looking at resolving it too. I've worked for myself for 20+ years so can't be sure, but I haven't heard of anything like that equality-council from any friends working here in Australia. This situation might be more unique to current USA?

I think 20+ people leaving demostrates that it's not solely theirs. When trust and confidence in a company's leaders erodes far enough, the business can not function effectively.

They're also within their rights to say all employees will only make minimum wage, and that their products will now be marked up 1000%, but that doesn't mean employees or customers have to accept that.

You don't seem to be completely across the issue.

If it was purely about talking about politics at work then everyone wouldn't have resigned.

Perhaps not - asking honestly, What did I miss? Other than people saying they didn't love working for the founders (and that seems to predate this issue). I said that in another comment, that it seemed the internet beat up is at cross-purposes: employees not loving the employers and founders asserting control (with repercussions) are both reasonable positions.

I read the first third-party piece about this and nothing sounded outrageous. Read Jason and DHH's pieces, and then DHH's follow-up entry. I read Jane Yang's bit. And I read some Twitter threads from employees.

Obviously employees are well within their rights to want a workplace where they form HR policy and the founders can want another scenario if they think it's to the detriment of their product. Former can move on to another workplace. Founders can wear the blowback of their decision.

You have a problem. I know lets ask HR to get involved. You now have at least two problems.

IMO Cutting benefits is more unacceptable than cutting politics talk (which IDC about). Replacing it with an equal amount of money doesn't necessarily shore up because I'll need to pay income tax on any direct payments, and if they only give me the money that they would pay (companies get bulk discounts on gym memberships and the like) then I will be given less money than the service was actually worth.

eg. if Basecamp got bulk gym memberships at 20$/employee but each employee would have to sign up at 40$ per person, Basecamp paying each employee 20$ would not be the same as giving each employee a gym membership.

Unless you qualified for each and every benefit, replacing them all with money might end up being a gain instead of a cut. Anyone who doesn’t have a gym membership or isn’t currently paying tuition would come out ahead this year at least on their new plan.

Fair enough that it might not work so well in subsequent years due to taxes.

I think if you ask a lot of the people who were advocating for things like the DEI committee, the reason they were doing those things is because their lack of comfort with certain things (the name list is an example, but I'm sure there's others) made it more difficult to focus on work. They weren't looking to just argue about unrelated political topics.

If you came across a list that contained names that were being laughed at because of their ethnicity, and you shared that ethnicity, would you feel comfortable working with the people making those jokes?

It would depend on my perception of their intent, but then I live in a place where I am in the majority so ultimately it's hard to truly judge that. The recaps didn't make it sound like there was a targeted ethnicity though (the information I saw to go by: 6/78 names were Asian; English and Nordic examples were given and then it's suggested the bulk were like that - but it's ambiguous as to whether that meant Caucasian, or that they were collated because they were similar examples). Notable names come from all cultures, in my experience (I often watch film credits looking for interesting names).

Assuming that it wasn't malicious or targeted, I'd expect the managerial response to be "Hey - this list is not really showing respect to our customers on a couple of fronts, so please wipe it ASAP. I understand that you weren't aware of why it's truly problematic, but you're aware now and I don't expect to see something like this again."

As I've said elsewhere though, I don't live in a place that feels as politically polarised, so I'm sure that's a serious factor.

I'm not sure about that, after knowing people at Google who had to sit through HR bullshit like "how to respect your direct reports who sexually identify as Otherkin" the notion of a workplace with a hardline stance on none of this bullshit at work sounds highly appealing. Yes this new policy will cause some devs to avoid Basecamp. But there are many many devs who are sick and tired of woke culture infecting their workplaces who will likely flock to Basecamp and other such companies with similar policies.

> after knowing people at Google who had to sit through HR bullshit like "how to respect your direct reports who sexually identify as Otherkin"

Do you have sources for this, or anonymous blogs? Because I'd be concerned what "like" means here. It's obviously not literally this, otherwise it'd the word 'literal'. But to me, the ambiguity can be read (in bad faith) as "I think LGBTQ identities, broadly, are bullshit, and I shouldn't respect a direct report who identifies as bisexual, it's as ridiculous as someone who is believes they're a wolf sexually".

A little bit of disambiguity would do a long way here, as I genuinely can't tell if this is someone who thinks asexuals, bisexuals, etc. are bullshit not worth respecting (aka, a place of ignorance of the speaker), or if Google is literally saying that unheard-of sexual identities are part of its HR policies (which I've never heard of and would love to know to avoid working at Google in the future.)

I'm not going to out a friend who still works there, but yes I did see phone pictures of a power point presentation literally mentioning "Otherkin."

Although I'm also just some random stranger on the internet, so take this post as you will.

Thanks for clarifying! that sounds pretty pants-on-head.

That has nothing to do with the company being his. He's one of the larger share owners. The owners can shutter the company if they want, because it IS their company.

Or not hire entitled and self-absorbed americans

Not sure if I'm understanding you correctly but my criticism of the book is that, while it has interesting ideas, a large chunk of it reads as: "We do this thing at Basecamp. Most other companies don't do that. And because of that, Basecamp is an awesome place to work and other places suck.". Instead of, you know, giving a slightly more balanced account of certain things or acknowledging that even your own company has flaws (every company does).