[vwampage]

In 2021 Basecamp (same company) communicated a new policy on internal communication by posting a public blog post.

In the following weeks 1/3 of their employees left as a direct result of this.

I lived in Chicago at the time and other companies scooped those jumping ship up really quick. https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/4/22419512/basecamp-politica...

[caskstrength]

If 1/3 of their employees quit over innocuous "no politics at work chats" policy, then it seems to me that the problem is in the hiring process and not communication.

[darthrupert]

Yeah, if I had been looking for a job, Basecamp due to that mess would've been on my top 5. Seems like they got rid of some toxicity.

[stephc_int13]

From what I've read, this is the best thing that could have happened to this company.

They were on the verge of mutiny, and they managed to stop it just in time.

[sensanaty]

Framing it this way also ignores the extremely generous exit package anyone leaving would be getting. I'm extremely happy with my current workplace, but if they dangled the kind of offer Basecamp was dangling I'd quit willingly on the spot as well.

[cj]

This seems irrational.

1/3 of the company actually quit because they were discouraged from talking about biden/trump/jan 6/etc on slack? If that were happening I could see why a ban would be beneficial. That sh*t's distracting and there's never a winning side to the argument.

I mean it's supposed to be a company, not a political cult.

Edit: After more reading, sounds like the policy was sparked by an employee reviving threads about Basecamp's diversity, inclusion, etc.

[_heimdall]

It was irrational. While I agree that the new policy could have been rolled out differently, and likely led to a few of the bullets in this blog post, employees and the public very much over reacted.

Company leadership deciding that political discussion/debate is too distracting to go in the remote team's official communication platform seems totally reasonable. They didn't say you can't talk about it with anyone at all, they just said don't do it in the chat rooms that are used by everyone at the company.

I'm not sure when the norm changed but it had to be very recent, I've never worked in a place where it was acceptable to debate politics in a company-wide platform.

[nutrie]

Couldn't agree more. It's disgraceful how some companies these days try to ride whichever, often short-lived, political direction is prevalent at any given moment, just to convince people they are a valid participant in the public discussion. They are not. They're there to make money, period. 37signals aren't perfect, but unlike the majority of other companies, their leaders seem to know when it's time to apologize, even when they decide to stand their ground.

[keiferski]

I honestly don’t get how discussing politics would even allow for work to get done, at least in any company that has international employees. I work with people from California, a conservative part of Florida, the Midwest, India, Pakistan, and a half-dozen other countries. Introducing and encouraging political debate would result in absolute chaos.

[anal_reactor]

Discussions, as painful as they are, allow us to bridge gaps, and see each other as human beings. Not discussing certain things only makes us silently hate each other and leads to misunderstandings compounding one on top of another.

Obviously, corporations have zero incentive to improve the society as a whole, it's easier to just tell everyone either they get along or they're fired.

So I smile and wave towards everyone. They'll never know I'm whatever-ist, and I silently vote for politicians that take away rights of certain social groups I'm prejudiced about.

[keiferski]

Not talking about politics doesn’t “make me hate” my coworkers. If anything, it makes me like them more, as we bond over human things, like food, not issues pushed by the media.

[krapp]

Politics is a human thing. People don't care about issues just because the media tells them to.

[mfru]

the issues exist anyways. the difference is the media gets to choose which issues most people should get angry about in the interest of their investors.

[SebFender]

100% and I would also add many other topics I profoundly don't understand why they're being addressed at work... I can count on one hand the numbers of emails I have about work work compared to many other subjects lol

[chris_wot]

You should look at the motivation and reasons why people people went to work for 37signals.

[j45]

This isn't really clear, please provide details?

[ilumanty]

What are you insinuating?

[rchaud]

Probably that it was an independent s/w company not beholden to VCs or the politics involved there.

[tedivm]

The policy was sparked by employees complaining about horrible behavior, and then rather than deal with the horrible behavior they decided to ban discussions about it.

> Around 2009, Basecamp customer service representatives began keeping a list of names that they found funny. More than a decade later, current employees were so mortified by the practice that none of them would give me a single example of a name on the list. One invoked the sorts of names Bart Simpson used to use when prank calling Moe the Bartender: Amanda Hugginkiss, Seymour Butz, Mike Rotch.

> Many of the names were of American or European origin. But others were Asian, or African, and eventually the list — titled “Best Names Ever” — began to make people uncomfortable. What once had felt like an innocent way to blow off steam, amid the ongoing cultural reckoning over speech and corporate responsibility, increasingly looked inappropriate, and often racist.

> Discussion about the list and how the company ought to hold itself accountable for creating it led directly to CEO Jason Fried announcing Tuesday that Basecamp would ban employees from holding “societal and political discussions” on the company’s internal chat forums. The move, which has sparked widespread discussion in Silicon Valley, follows a similar move from cryptocurrency company Coinbase last year.

As other employees said-

> Employees say the founders’ memos unfairly depicted their workplace as being riven by partisan politics, when in fact the main source of the discussion had always been Basecamp itself.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22406673/basecamp-politic...

Trying to act like this was simply a "no politics" rule, when it was actually a "don't criticize the leaders of our company" rule, show they either weren't paying attention to this when it happened or that have an agenda to push.

[vwampage]

They were banned from talking about any sort of politics. Be that personal identities, political figures, etc.

It was handed down by public announcement with zero discussion or warning.

If my boss pulled nonsense like that I would consider quitting too.

[nomdep]

They were banned from talking about any sort of politics in the internal chats, not outside. That is something It was consider basic work polite behavior until very recently. Ironically, now that many people only can see some topics as "good vs evil", is when it is needed the most.

[micromacrofoot]

it came shortly after employees complained about a list of “funny” names they had internally (which surprise, turned out to be racist)

[nutrie]

Do you get paid to discuss political beliefs at work, likely via channels provided to you by your employer? In most western countries, it is in fact against the law to misuse the company's resources for private reasons. Unless your employer lets you, which is fine and very common these days, yet not a right nevertheless.

[ricardobeat]

Is it acceptable for you to start a political discussion, for example on anti-china sentiment, in your company’s main channel? Has anything like that happened before in your work?

[Zetobal]

If our lib for Chinese translation would be called "Ching Chong" I hope so.

[d-z-m]

They expected some amount of employees to leave(not sure it was 1/3 though). This was during a time when the country was in the midst of some very contentious social issues. I believe the public communique was perhaps to provide precedent for other companies who wanted to make the same move, but were not courageous enough to do so on their own.

I also heard that they offered very generous severance packages(6 months salary), so there may have been other factors contributing to the exodus.

[worddepress]

If you have just got your first job, this is what the old era was like, when the Federal Reserve was going brrrrr. You just quit and find another job, do the leetcode, get 4 offers, get your 500k-1M TC. Apparently.

[alberth]

HN 3-years ago | 1965 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998127