“Last week was terrible. We started with policy changes that felt simple, reasonable, and principled, and it blew things up culturally in ways we never anticipated,”
Because you’re an asshole. You’re the example of the out-of-touch jerkoff techbro that thinks they know better than anyone what’s right. Enjoy your visit to reality. Hope you take something worthwhile from it you dummy.
I don’t see how a third of a company’s work force leaving can be anything but an epic failure. I lead a fairly sizable team in my day job; if a third of them decided to quit over something I said, I would quit on the day. And not just because continuing to do our job with two-thirds the work force would be a complete nightmare. It’s quite simply evidence of a monumental leadership failure - no matter how generous the severance packages were.
I also don’t see how their making “political” talk off-limits isn’t a complete abandonment of their key values. Saying “no social justice talk” when there was very clearly serious issues inside the company (e.g., the now infamous list) isn’t standing up for straightforward talk, fairness, and generosity - all supposed “key values” of Basecamp.
To be clear, I take no joy in watching this trainwreck. I’ve read a lot of the stuff they’ve written over the years (including Singer’s book), and my current organization follows a lot of practices that are directly inspired by some of the principles and practices they champion. But it is a trainwreck.
That article on what happened is… something. It really doesn’t seem like management had really considered the possible consequences of their actions here.
This is a terrible take, though. People did not become enemies of Basecamp because they’ve written those books. Failing spectacularly to live up to those ideals is what has people being critical (and if the tone is toxic… well, that’s how Twitter is).
Just to underline the point:
Seems like he’s reaching in search of a gotcha for a few quick Twitter points, not honestly interpreting their words (then or now).
Saying “we’ve decided to keep political arguments out of company-wide chat” is in no way saying that people’s feelings don’t matter. In fact, the stated goal of the policy specifically aims at the emotional costs that the ongoing arguments are inflicting.
I dunno, if you offered everybody a 6 month severance to quit, I imagine quite a few would take up that offer at any job. Maybe not a third, though.
They did however say, in the policy change, that work should be “just about work”.
Basecamp is a fully remote company. When they ban these discussions from the company communication tool, it is the equivalent of another company banning such discussions from taking place anywhere on their premises. How is that reasonable for the company that wrote the above quote?
They are spectacularly failing to live up to their own ideals, and I believe much of the anger expressed is disappointment in that fact. Few eyebrows would be raised if the same thing occurred in some generic US workplace.
37Signals definitely had enemies. Probably more
from their blog and DHH Twitter than the books. And people hating Rails because developers love holy wars.
Lots of snarky scrum managers and whatnot out there trying to spin this as a validation of typical software dev bad management, as if it’s all or nothing with everything these guys ever wrote.
Again, whole thing is sad.
Why are you ignoring the part of the highlight which explains what they mean by that sentence?
That work “should be just about work”. That’s just ignorant. Humans are humans whether they are at work or at home.
And the effective consequence of the policy is to silence minorities. Because that is what happens when people can shut down objections to things like “funny” name lists by saying “that’s political”. Shutting down discussion is a policy which always - and only - benefits those in a position of privilege. Which - funnily enough - is exactly what Basecamp employees complained about in that conference call.
I can’t think of a single job I’ve had where I wouldn’t have done exactly that. No matter how much I admired or agreed with the leadership, it’s a lot of money to just leave on the table.
Yup. Much like requests to “stick to games” or “keep politics out of football”, silencing this kind of conversation is not an apolitical stance, it’s a de facto endorsement of the status quo. Minorities have no choice but to bring politics into work every day, because politics is their actual life.
That’s a paragraph about relationships and interpersonal feelings. It says so right in the first sentence. It’s an assertion that human emotions and human relationships matter just as much at work as they do elsewhere. Reading that paragraph as justifying a need for all employees to be able to argue politics at work is a huge reach entirely unjustified by the actual text.
Your twitterer, and apparently you, are arguing against a strawman that’s entirely unjustified by the words Fried and Hansson have actually used. They didn’t shut down discussion of the name list in the sense of refusing to deal with it; they admitted it was wrong and removed it. The “politics” they want to avoid is what they call “heavy political or societal debates unconnected to that work”. Extending from that statement and the other things they say to “we won’t allow you to call out racism at work” is a maximally hostile interpretation not justified by any evidence that I’ve seen.
If P&R turned up in my work Slack channels, I’d run for the fucking hills. I don’t want any part of those sorts of conversations when my working relationships, or even my job, might be at stake.
Too F’in right. I never talk politics at work.
The goal of the “we must be allowed to talk politics at work” people, in this context, is of course precisely that - to demand ideological adherence - or at least the appearance of it - and to threaten the jobs of those who do not comply.
Basecamp was less than 60 people - if you aren’t actively engaging with the “diversity agenda” it’s going to get noticed. And given the tone of such discussions nowadays anyone dissenting from the recieved wisdom might well have worried about the impact on their careers.
I’m with (most of) you guys - I don’t want to mix politics with work, but I’m also old, and have learned a lot of lessons about work/life balance. In general, I’m not looking to make best friends at work.
However, that wasn’t always the case, and I think this is also a generational issue in which millenials and younger approach things differently. I think these younger generations see less of a dividing line between the things you say to your friends and the things you say to your co-workers, and even the things you say to strangers.
So I think the reaction to the Basecamp kerfuffle isn’t easily ascribed to any one specific factor. You’ve got a number of things going on at the same time:
Anyway, all this to say that I don’t even disagree with Basecamp’s leaders who thought that political discussion at work is an unnecessary and divisive distraction, but I also think the way they went about trying to change their culture was super obtuse.
Oh noes, the reverse racism cancel culture is coming! Quick, hide!
Eh. It ain’t nothing. I’m pretty liberal, but I’ve seen vocal communities eat their own because someone wasn’t participating in the conversation du jour which was interpreted to mean that person agreed with the opposite stance.
Yep. A distant family member was an international student attending one of the small liberal arts colleges. During last years protests that reflared during the autumn, there was apparently super heavy “with us in totality or you’re against us” bullying going on on campus wrt protests and sitouts.
“Silence is violence!”
To be fair, in the past, the sort of watercooler conversations about politics that happened at work were usually variations of white-dude supporting a white dude Democrat vs. a white dude supporting a white dude Republican, all four of whom believed essentially the same shit.
Before 2016, nobody really gave a shit, really. A lot of people were politicized by that polarizing event.