| 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. |
> 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).