[fancyfish]

Exactly this. What people don’t realize is this move is hardly political. It’s all about building a better business. When work is a safe space free from political flame wars, employees can actually focus on the one thing they were hired to do, and be happier doing it: write code, manage projects, etc.

[gtaylor]

No, it's about DHH using politics as a stand-in for the actual issue: they mishandled this issue with the name list, they got called out and held to task for it, and they don't like that behavior.

The politics thing really amounts to "don't challenge me" and is a nice diversion from the actual issue.

[randomsearch]

Do you think that the name list was racist? Because it sounds to me like many people do, and it seems only if it was an act of racism would your comment be justified.

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.

[fastball]

What are Fried and DHH supposed to do, flagellate themselves?

[ashtonkem]

Not subtweeting their entire workforce on their extremely popular blog would probably be a good start.

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.

[fastball]

Basecamp as a company has always been about building in public. If you don't want things to happen in public you shouldn't have joined Basecamp.

[ashtonkem]

Disagree. There’s a difference between being transparent, and publicly implying that your workforce is problematic. Especially when there’s some issue that you’ve failed to deal with. That’s both inappropriate and unwise. This should’ve been an internal announcement, not an external one.

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.

[waheoo]

They pride themselves on being transparent..

[pm90]

Admit they made a mistake and address it, rather than institute a childishly overbroad ban on all "political conversation" specifically to shut down criticism related to their mistake.

[digitaltrees]

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.

[pm90]

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.

[fastball]

> 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

[fastball]

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.

[pm90]

“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.

[digitaltrees]

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.

[billybatson]

I would argue that a mandate to not have societal/political discussions/statements is in itself a societal/political statement.

[causality0]

The mistake was the timing. If they'd started the company off banning that stuff, they'd have been fine. If they'd waited until months after this controversy died down, they'd probably have less than 10% losses. Doing it now was a truly enormous screw up.

[nr2x]

With 1.5x more work for the remaining people they’ll need to be focused…or just find jobs that are 1x the work for same or better pay.

[staticassertion]

1.5x work today. Basecamp will backfill most of those roles, no?

Honestly, a bunch of people quitting probably works out just fine for Basecamp.

[fancyfish]

Yeah, seriously. It’s Basecamp. There’s a very deep bench of engineers and product people that would love to backfill the roles.

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.

[jakelazaroff]

If the response to this is any indication, they've just alienated a significant portion of that bench.

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.

[staticassertion]

If your goal was to get likeminded people who don't want to discuss politics into the company, and "pot stirrers" out, seems like the post succeeded. Maybe that wasn't the intent and they were naive enough to post something publicly like that and not expect resignations, I couldn't say.

[jakelazaroff]

Frankly, at this point I’m inclined to agree with OP that the politics rule was just a pretext to assert their power over the employees. (Partially because the employees learned about all this via the public blog post, which seems uncontroversially dickish no matter how one feels about the actual changes).

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.

[jolux]

I don't think they expected to lose 30% of their workforce. That doesn't seem like something you'd do intentionally except in dire circumstances.

[woofie11]

I think the loss of culture is the intended effect, and the loss of product knowledge is the cost.

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.

[hello_moto]

Only those who still cling to their cult (I mean their marketing gimmick). Many have moved on for a while...

[dylan604]

What happens when customers leave the platform in response?

[staticassertion]

FWIW I'm not saying this is a good thing, or purposeful, but just that if the goal was to eliminate dissent, a whole bunch of people quitting is probably more or less accomplishing the goal.

[predaking]

Person you're replying to was mentioning customers quitting, not employees (and I have seen a number of people mentioning they've cancelled their Basecamp or Hey subscriptions today).

[rightbyte]

Why do you assume the "activist" personality types left?

Maybe people that never discuss politics at work want the right to do ot too.

[thu2111]

Product managers are not exactly a time critical position. If the iOS app falls behind the Android app for a few months, will many users even notice?

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.

[brianwawok]

Or just ship less features. I doubt basecanp is feature constrained right now.