[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.