[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.

[staticassertion]

30% is like ~a dozen employees

[jolux]

Twenty so far, actually. Including Sam Stephenson, who seems to have been their longest-tenured developer. Also their head of design, head of marketing, and head of customer support. And their entire iOS team.

[staticassertion]

Yeah, sounds like a pretty big fuck up then on Basecamp's part. Weird that they didn't see this coming, I can't imagine being so out of tune with a large portion of senior, long-standing employees.

[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.

[staticassertion]

Common sense, I guess.

[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.