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by champagnois 1636 days ago
It is important people feel accepted and such, but reality requires everyone participate in the meritocracy of struggling through the economy.

A company that can afford to do identity-politics based hiring initiatives is a company that has more money than they know what to do with. Companies in the earlier stages that will go on to be successful are going to be lean and meritocratic.

FWIW, I really like how the Coinbase CEO handled the toxic woke employees they got burdoned with.

2 comments

"Meritocracy" in the workplace is a myth perpetuated by those in power to justify their position. The Coinbase CEO got raked over the coals for his handling, and rightly so.
That was not my impression at all of the reception. An extremely small segment of the workforce left, despite generous exit packages. The impression I got from my coworkers and peers was mostly a sigh of relief and wishing their own companies would follow suit. The opinions of a vocal minority on Twitter are often not the opinions of the workforce.
> FWIW, I really like how the Coinbase CEO handled the toxic woke employees they got burdoned with."

I haven't heard of this, is there a good source I can read up on it?

Summarizing the event from memory, it seemed during the BLM virtue signalling craze -- he told his staff, "Coinbase exists to make money and not to be political. If you are unhappy about the lack of political expression and you need to leave because of discomfort over this -- the employer will apologize with a parting gift of a large sum of money."

Essentially, he bribed the toxic political radicals to leave and take the payout.

It's kinda strange that coin base would choose such a political sphere to make money in if they don't want to be political.
Perhaps they want to limit their corporate position on political issues to the ones directly relevant to them, so as to not repel people who disagree on an unrelated issue.

Their original memo (https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-is-a-mission-focused-comp...) puts it this way:

> We don’t engage here when issues are unrelated to our core mission

They walk a very fine line. It seems like a difficult balancing act of compliance with regulators while appealing to users who expect hyper inflation and envision a libertarian utopian future.
I believe it's a reference to this open letter:

https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-is-a-mission-focused-comp...