[virgilp]

Genuinely curious, why is "the mess they caused" a primary reason to leave the service? It feels like "even if the service was wonderful you'd still consider leaving because of <the mess>". What exactly makes you feel like that? (to clarify, it's not entirely clear to me what did DHH do wrong [+], let alone "so wrong that one would want to avoid Basecamp like the plague").

[+] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27003221

[nindalf]

We’ve been taught as consumers to vote with our wallets. I want to “vote” for the service that gives me the most satisfaction. And my satisfaction is impacted by financing people whom I dislike. Best part about this is that you can tell me I’m wrong and that I should only consider features and UX and what not but I don’t need to listen. I’ll vote the way that satisfies me.

It’s a similar dynamic with voting for politicians. You might find a politician who promises to fulfil all your policy desires … while being an abhorrent person. Some might “hold their nose” and vote for this politician anyway, others might not. Neither is wrong. They’re both maximising their own satisfaction.

[Lazare]

Not the person you asked, but in my view:

1. There's a lot of products and teams out there, and your purchasing decisions help ensure some products and teams stick around and have more resources to keep doing what they're doing, and that other's don't. Imagine you want to buy a custom gizmo, and three vendors all seem equally good, but you notice one of them is also a contributor to an open source package you love. Why wouldn't you buy the gizmo from that guy? But the flip side of that is, if a vendor seems to be a jerk, and there's other equally good options...

2. Even beyond that, investing in a product, tool, platform, workflow, whatever has costs. If there's any signs that the people behind it are about to get acqui-hired and shut the product down, or are idiots who are running the product into the ground, or are terrible at security and are likely going to have a major breach...again, why wouldn't you jump ship? And here, we have a small company who just ran face first into a brick wall, picked themselves up, and then did it three more times, parleying a PR disaster into a bigger PR disaster, 1/3 of the company including tons of senior staff jumping ship, and then a another PR disaster as they got tarred in the court of public opinion as soft on white supremacists. They say that there's no such thing as bad PR, but I'd rather not watch a company who makes a tool I rely on test that theory. And certainly my estimate of Hey being around - or getting the resources it needs to keep improving - is a bit lower now than it was six months ago.

3. Also, the HR failures you are discussing in your linked comment are, I think, extremely clear. Is it actually wrong for the CEO to dig through archives to play gotcha games with staff members in order to publicly humiliate them in front of the whole company? ...yes. Yes it was. What was he supposed to do? ANYTHING BUT THAT. I don't think this is really a complicated question.

[virgilp]

Thank you for the long answer. The person I asked made it clear that the "HR failure" was a significant driver in the decision, so it felt like it goes beyond the points 1+2 that you discuss (+)

On 3, no the HR failure is *honestly* completely unclear to me. Having read DHH's actual answer (and not people rephrasing it), do you still believe that "ANYTHING BUT THAT" was the answer? I can respect that, though to be honest I don't understand it, at all. I consider his answer quite good, and the alternative I jokingly presented (acknowledge the employee's message, and fire them on the spot) would be in my mind clearly worse; DHH was trying to be kind AND at the same time teach the person something (don't be such a harsh judge, people evolve and improve, sometimes mistakes of the past don't represent what you are now).

(+) Actually upon further reflection I completely understand point 2, "I don't trust that they'll be in business for long so don't want to tie a critical service to them", but I just didn't consider _that_ was the reason; if that was it, then this answers it for me.

[Lazare]

DHH's retelling of the incident is less bad than some others made it sound, yes. (Although I wouldn't necessarily assume his account is entirely accurate or includes all relevant context either!)

But even taking it entirely at face value, I think he clearly describes a poorly handled situation. It wasn't the right time to be having that argument, he wasn't the right person to be doing it, it wasn't the right venue for it, and I don't think the way his argument was made or framed was at all helpful.

Because what seems to have happened is something like:

Employee: Hey, event X was super, super bad!

DHH: Well, it wasn't that bad. Medium bad, at most.

Employee: How can you be defending event X?

Was DHH right? ...maybe. Again, we're lacking a ton of context. But let's assume he's correct in every regard! By jumping in, now he's on the side of saying that event X was relatively good. He is, objectively, defending it. And to what end? He's the CTO; he can win the argument. What does he get for winning?

Why not, I dunno, nod, agree, and then implement some new policies around preventing event X, where the policies are based on the idea that event X is only medium bad, not super bad?

Much of what makes this so dumb is that it's all so needless. You suggest DHH was trying to teach the person something; maybe that should be taught in a 1:1 with their manager or HR? You suggest DHH's alternative was firing them on the spot, how about "starting a process that leads to the employee being let go three months from now"?

You - and DHH - seem to feel like this was some sort of crisis that required immediate, public action. I remain mystified why that seemed relevant. None of the goals that DHH has claimed to have, or that his defenders have imputed to him, seem to require (or to have been achieved) by the actions he took here.

TL;DR: A manager's goal (especially a C-level exec or a co-founder) shouldn't be to win arguments, it should be to achieve organisational goals. These actions did not achieve any obvious organisational goals, and I cannot believe a reasonable observer would have predicted they would achieve any goals. Therefore, I label it a failure. Thus, for ethical and practical reasons, I would tend to avoid a company that seems so poorly led.

[virgilp]

Thank you, again. Now I understand where you come from, much better; and I see which of my assumptions may be wrong. I think this is where we fundamentally both agree and disagree:

> A manager's goal (especially a C-level exec or a co-founder) shouldn't be to win arguments, it should be to achieve organisational goals

Agree: this should be the C-level goal. But ("disagree") I also think that's _exactly_ what DHH was doing.

My reading of the kerfuffle is this: Basecamp somehow managed to established a toxic work culture, where employees were discussing internally contentious social issues and it got so bad that it was breaking the team apart and impacting business performance; something had to be done. So JF+DHH issued the directive "no internal activism". Seen through this lens, everything else makes sense (you can't tolerate internal activism if you already established it's hurting you badly, because that would negate your efforts to curb it; and you're willing to buy out the "activists" so that you get rid of them - yes losing employees is bad, but it's "chemotherapy bad": it hurts you but may help you survive. Painful, but required). Time will tell if my reading of the events was correct, I guess.

[side note]

> Although I wouldn't necessarily assume his account is entirely accurate or includes all relevant context either!

He claims it's a copy-paste (with some anonymization). To my knowledge, nobody called him out as a liar (and lots of people had reasons to).

[prezjordan]

Two reasons for me! The first is the moral one, which I would not necessarily prescribe to anyone here.

The other is just business: a third of the company left so far. Among those people are the individuals who built the trix editor, Action Mailbox, and Hey's k8s setup. I fully expect more bugs, and more time to resolve those bugs. Make no mistake, a third of a company leaving is not resizing or business as usual - this will have downstream effects on the product.

[jrek]

Without re-litigating the events at Basecamp, surely you're fully aware that other people have a different view to you (i.e. that in their opinion DHH did do something wrong), and surely from that starting point it's hardly mysterious why people would choose not to use the service.

I think the question becomes not 'is the conduct bad enough to stop using the service, despite how good it is?', but 'is the service so good that I should continue using it, despite the conduct?'

[virgilp]

My question was perhaps unclear. I'm fully aware other people have a different view, I haven't received yet the answer to "what exactly was wrong in what DHH did" - and not just in the 'maybe he could have handled this better' way, but in the 'so wrong that I want to avoid this company in the future' way.