For reference, the severance package was 4 months of salary for employees with <3 years of tenure, or 6 months of salary for >=3 years of tenure at Coinbase.
What percentage of employees at Coinbase are actively interviewing for other jobs at any given time? 5%? If someone has one foot out the door already, taking a bonus equivalent to half a year of your salary is a cherry on top of changing jobs. I'm surprised only 5% of the company took this opportunity.
I think you underestimate how many people are fed up with overly politicized workplaces. I’ve quit a couple of jobs due to it. I’d definitely stay somewhere where I can just work without having to listen to unrelated BS constantly, even if it meant passing on a sweet severance package.
I haven't worked anywhere that ordinary politics was discussed. I'm in uk though. I'd find it rude for someone to shove their political views in my face. It's fine for friends to discuss as I choose my friends not my colleagues.
Imagine if you had lunch with your coworkers, and one of them started complaining about Boris Johnson trying to kill the minorities with his fascist COVID policies. You personally don't like Johnson, and think his policies are far from optimal, but you think calling his policies "fascist", or implying he wants to kill anyone, is clearly over the top. However, instead of protesting, you nod your head and keep quiet, because defending Johnson's policies means that you're a fan of Johnson, and so basically a fascist, and you fear the general opprobrium among your colleagues, and would prefer to avoid anonymous HR complaints of your person.
This is the reality of working for large tech companies in the US, just with Trump instead of Johnson.
It's unfortunate discussions can't be kept over ideas and policies instead of veering towards persons. While I believe Trump is the worst president the US has had in recent history that doesn't mean I'd be unwilling to entertain a discussion of anything he may have done that people think it was a good thing. I suspect in most cases we'll end up with "we agree to disagree" which is fine.
That said, one thing we have to consider is the environment in which the discussion takes place. At work people shouldn't have to get stressed with non-work related things, that's not in the interest of the company nor of the employees. So even if you know you can have respectful deep conversations of controversial current day politics with your colleagues, a better question would be, should you even have those conversations at work?
I feel for people that suddenly need to discuss such topics, it means that they probably don't have IRL friends or friends outside of work if they really feel that they have to talk about no-work related issues at a work lunch. It's sad.
> It's unfortunate discussions can't be kept over ideas and policies instead of veering towards persons.
I don't think it's a matter of ideas vs persons. Already I hear that speech and ideas are violence, and violence requires fighting back (by complaining to HR that you made them feel unsafe). Of course, you cannot keep quiet either, because "silence is violence" too.
> It's unfortunate discussions can't be kept over ideas and policies instead of veering towards persons.
This is a sensible expectation, and I think that's what reasonable people should be able to do. However, my experience tells me that there's nothing to win by having such conversation in work environment, so I'd prefer them to be avoided altogether. However, both the company as an institutions, and many individuals working on it, are insisting that the employees have these discussions, no matter how irrelevant it is for the actual job. This is the reality on the ground in most big US tech corporations.
> I feel for people that suddenly need to discuss such topics, it means that they probably don't have IRL friends or friends outside of work if they really feel that they have to talk about no-work related issues at a work lunch. It's sad.
I don't think that this is the case. In my experience, it's the more social people who are insisting on having these conversations. I think this is because the more social people are better at gauging social climate, and the purpose of these conversations, often purportedly about diversity and inclusion, is to enforce uniformity and exclusion of people with alternative views.
To me this might be the best example of a 'meme', in Dawkins' sense of the word, that I'm aware of.
- It's short
- It rhymes
- It gives new territory to a powerful word
- It creates an in-group signal
- It's self-amplifying, and most importantly
- It's ridiculous
It's absolutely destined to go far beyond it's own merit by outcompeting everything in its domain on 3+ metrics.
It also helped me understand one possible reason why so many broken slogans are rising to the top. There are many factors in totality of course, but the ones that are ridiculous drive engagement from everyone, the proponents to echo and the opponents to mock.
That's the difference. For a lot of Californian tech companies, the whole company meetings revolve less around strategy and mission and more about racial inequality and Trump. As an outsider, I can't understand how strong the bubble is and how lacking in context these people are.
Well, I do work for one, and yes, last time I participated in an all company call the majority of the time the management spent talking about racial equality, completely unrelated to our business?
I seriously doubt that. Most companies are pushing internal "respect your coworkers" rules that can be linked with politics but that's not really discussing Trump. I suspect that even Coinbase with their newly declared "apolitical workplace" rules does have plenty of anti-discrimination, harassment, etc rules, for one because lacking those can result in very bad consequences for the company in a trial.
This assumes all roles at the company are equally able to exit the company in the midst of a global pandemic and find opportune work with the same growth opportunities, salary, and locality.
I was recently laid off in tech and I flipped the "I'm looking for work" switch on linkedin and got literally dozens of messages from recruiters every day. I ultimately got a job that paid 10% better than my previous job, and I rushed the decision because I had only a small fraction of the severance that coinbase employees are receiving. Even with the "looking for work" switch toggled off, I get several messages from recruiters every day. No doubt our industry is affected by COVID, but there's no shortage of high-paying work.
I work in analytics so have a wide range of customers - it's definitely up and down depending on the industry and I'd argue it's net down, but not if you are experienced / have a specialization.
Ecommerce is booming, but you're not likely to get a job in support/services which is likely already filled with experienced folks at most companies, and isn't likely to churn in a pandemic.
There are a lot of pockets like this, but they mostly benefit software engineers and more experienced roles. It's pretty common on HN for folks to assume that everyone has the role/job fluidity as your average tech person, or worse, your average software engineer.
Lots of folks "in tech" aren't really deeply into tech, so it's even more difficult for them to navigate a chaotic time.
I have definitely been seeing a decrease in some FAANG spots. Things may have started to ramp back up, but I believe there were several companies who put blanket freezes hiring for certain levels.
We tried to make it clear to employees that the package was only intended for folks who weren't aligned with this new direction. If folks were interviewing elsewhere, or just feeling burned out, and wanted to take it, but they were still aligned with the direction of mission focused, then we discouraged them from taking it. Of course, people can always lie about their intentions, but we're counting on the honor system preventing most of that.
This is what I love about Hacker News - it's the only forum I've ever read where the topic of discussion frequently shows up in the comments.
Brian, I've never given two shits about crypto, but this announcement seriously increases my desire to work at Coinbase. You have far more support than will dare to speak up, and I hope more companies start following your lead.
I hope they provide some follow-up data on how many people took that package. My assumption is that it will be a small group. I think a lot of other companies could learn from the outcome.
I feel like this is the start of a rising tide. I think Brian's stance is great, companies have missions, they should focus on those missions. Everything has become so political that your work, which occupies a large portion of your life, should not be divisive.
I see it the other way around. (Almost) everything is political. The mission of the company is not disjoint from the society it is embedded in. Things have become divisive by being able to ignore and blend out the opposing views. By not talking and listening to one another.
This is just one more step in that direction.
Funnily enough, I think it has been extrapolated by Neal Stephenson in Diamond Age. We will end up having parallel societies which define themselves not by geographic boundaries, but by affiliation. A North Korean community could be your neighbour.
The mission of the company isn’t completely disjoint from the broader political context, but relevance isn’t a binary proposition. If Google’s mission is to make the world’s information more accessible, and it stopped everything and put all of its efforts toward (for example) minimizing unjust police killings, how much closer to its mission would it be than if it focused on making search better (even if we assume all Google employees have exactly the same idea about how to achieve it)? I would argue that investing in search is an astronomically better investment with respect to Google’s mission. Never mind how unproductive that effort would certainly be, considering how divisive this topic has become (to be clear, the division is about whether or not unjust police killings are strongly racially biased, not whether or not unjust police killings are ideal).
I agree that our divisiveness is caused by an unwillingness to listen to one another, but I don’t think avoiding discussion in the workplace is making us less willing to listen. People have lots of opportunities to listen to opposing views outside of the workplace, and yet many positively pride themselves on ignoring dissenting opinions—ostracizing one’s family for wrongthink is a veritable badge of honor in certain ideological communities. I don’t see how bringing that divisiveness into the workplace is going to soften those people.
If someone is deeply committed to ignorance and divisiveness, allowing them to proselytize at work doesn’t seem fruitful (everyone who is not committed to ignorance has likely already considered their views) and is very likely going to be harmful. On the other hand, there is a chance that by ignoring politics at work, people might have a chance to build relationships with reasonable people (who they otherwise would have written off or persecuted for heresy) which might have a deradicalizing effect (if you look up to someone who is charitable, honest, and open minded, you are probably more likely to emulate those qualities yourself).
I think a lot of governments would be much quicker to regulate companies like Google and Facebook if they weren't also fighting for these political issues. At the end of the day, these political stances help further the companies original mission.
This comment doesn't make much sense to me. I'm not sure if you're talking about political stances that are meaningfully related to the company's mission, and in either case how that would affect governments' willingness to regulate those companies. Are you simply arguing that governments would be more willing to regulate Google if Google didn't spend so much lobbying against regulation? In that case, obviously (this is pretty much tautologically true), but how does that relate to what we're discussing? If we're talking about political stances like "police shootings are unjustly biased against black people", then that's about as unrelated to Google's mission as one could imagine. It seems like mental gymnastics either way.
I certainly agree that the mission of a company can (and preferably) be more than just for profit. However, "to be political" is still a pretty wide range of possible missions. Who calls the shots about what you're going to be political about, and which side you take? And when a group of employees disagree with the shots being called, what kinds of reactions are appropriate or not?
I'll take a shot:
- I think compelled activism is inappropriate. You know, the "silence is violence" stuff.
- I think expecting to have power to set a company's political agenda and expressing anger when you don't get your way is inappropriate. That power belongs to the board. Employment and stock-options are not "fractions of board seats".
Companies that have a mission "to change the world" attract employees on the basis of activisism in the world. Heck this company is trying to overhaul the entire monetary system. If succeeded this will effect the lives of billions of people. Recruiting people with this premise, and then telling them actually, you don't have any say in what the company actually does, and the ways it changes the world, that actually it was all a joke, and so just shut up and do what the board says because they own all the power and rights is pretty disappointing.
I never believed the whole "change the world" SV nonsense, and always knew it was nothing more than cynical marketing. But at least in places like Google the employees who were brought on that premise, fight to achieve it, and make it real.
Coinbase is still hypocritical, and I wouldn't expect much more.
But this whole, "you are only a serf and the whole of power morally belongs to the board" reveals an unsettling feudal mentality.
Serfs are (were) bound to their feudal overlord. Their children were bound as well. They couldn’t quit. They’ve had no political power. In many places they were even denied access to courts — they were forced to arbitrage through their lord. There was nothing they could do to improve their or their children’s lives.
I don’t think it compares, even as a hyperbole, to Coinbase employees.
> I never believed the whole "change the world" SV nonsense, and always knew it was nothing more than cynical marketing.
It certainly is.
But I like to believe, there is an underlying reasonable philosophy behind it.
Every company tries to make a difference, that is its value proposition. If your value proposition has a negative social impact, it is not a sustainable business model. Legislation will eventually render your business untenable. (Even if it takes centuries or decades like tobacco, or fossil fuel).
So, considering your social impact makes business sense.
To quote Paul Drucker:
"Responsibility for social impacts is a management responsibility — not because it is a social responsibility, but because it is a business responsibility. The ideal is to make elimination of such an impact into a business opportunity. But wherever that cannot be done, the design of the appropriate regulation with the optimal trade-off balance—and public discussion of the problem and promotion of the best regulatory solution — is management’s job."
It would be entirely possible to 'change the world' just by transforming the monetary system though, would it not? Yes, that is in itself a goal with political undercurrents and ultimately would clearly involve political decisions, but they are not at that stage yet and therefore I think it's quite reasonable to want to stay apolitical, where possible.
> Employment and stock-options are not "fractions of board seats".
i agree that employment is not "fractions of board seats. But stock options (when converted to stock) holds voting power, and thus _do_ represent "factions of board seats". Very little amount, but an amount nonetheless.
I would argue that the board wouldn’t exist without the people that make up the company. I would also argue that with monied interests and lobbyists in Washington, one of the last places that people can really effect societal change is at the work place. Companies have become the power center in American politics, so of course activism is going to rise up there.
As far as compelled activism goes, I feel that silence _is_ violence.
“The Only Thing Necessary for the Triumph of Evil is that Good Men Do Nothing” (JFK, Burke, Mill...)
It's the framing of everything in good vs evil, monochromatic terms that actually increases divisiveness and prevents deescalation of conflict. Forcing people to take one's side or else "be on the wrong side" in a multifaceted environment is not appropriate for a workplace, where people expect to be able to set aside differences to work together on work itself.
I agree. But that's not a problem inherent in bringing political issues to the work place.
This is a whole different problem which exists regardless of the work place.
It's the zeitgeist, it's the result of attention economy, and massive social media.
I mean it’s absolutely appropriate to take a side on certain issues. I've always refused to work on military hardware for example. If my employer started working on military hardware, I’d refuse to contribute and I would try to encourage others to refuse as well. But actually we all have things we would refuse to do. Usually it’s not an issue because both management and the workers feel the same way. Most people wouldn’t want to create a product designed to murder people for example.
The issue comes when some people are uncomfortable with work being done and others aren’t. Those who are uncomfortable are probably going to want to have discussions about it. If I was asked to contribute to a system that put people (any people) in to cages I would refuse. But that’s precisely what ICE is doing in the USA. If such a contract came up you can bet it’s something I’d want to talk about with my coworkers!
The situation with Coinbase is the opposite of what you describe. Coinbase isn't moving into new territory that its employees find objectionable, e.g. by starting to develop crypto for the military. The activists at Coinbase are angry because the company isn't moving into their demanded new territory.
Millions of Americans are unemployed, hundreds of thousands are dying from a pandemic, tens of thousands are in lines at food banks, there are children in cages, women being given forced hysterectomies, and there are literally neo-Nazis that the President refuses to disavow.
If you’re not going to take a stand now, when will you?
So what about Twitter flagging Trump’s tweets? Do you think that happened without a politicised workplace discussion? With the amount of power that tech wields over society these discussions _have_ to happen.
That doesn't require a politicized workplace. Only a mission-focused one. One of Twitter's mission could very conceivably be to attach warnings to misinformation, irrespective of what political agenda it is intended to advance.
An argument could be made that this mission is politicising freedom of speech, in that a tech company is now determining what is misinformation and what is not. This very topic was a point of contention in the congressional antitrust hearings.
A company operates in a political environment, whether or not people want to acknowledge that. Workers have real power and can advance their goals whether or not management wants to accept it. Politics in the workplace isn’t something to shy from, but to embrace. Any company that tries to refute politics will find themselves behind the curve on something they should very much so try to stay ahead of.
I don't see how a tech company being the final arbiter on what is deemed misinformation on its own platform is politicizing free speech.
Yes you could stretch any argument to categorize anything as what you want, but I think under a reasonable interpretation of 'politicized workplace', Twitter could institute a policy of adding warnings to content it deems misinformation without politicizing its workplace.
As for workers having power, yes, but the company has the right to dictate what the worker does in their capacity as workers, if they choose to stay employed at the company.
Maintaining a mission focused company that doesn't allow employees to turn the company into a vehicle to advance a political cause unrelated to that mission is good for productivity.
I am operating on an underlying principle that others may not share, but this could help elucidate why I disagree with many fellow liberals on this front:
I'm trying to solve for how decision making power is allocated without making assumptions about which side is right or wrong. In other words, the argument that "The company must do XYZ because this political cause is simply on the RIGHT side of history!" is not acceptable to me, even though I often personally agree that the cause really _is_ right.
I tend to treat politics and religion as subjects best dealt with on my own time. The company is paying me to get results for the company, not the larger society. If I somehow disagree with the perceived politics, I’m free to seek other employment. Implicit in this position is that the company doesn’t get to dictate either politics or religion handled in my personal time.
So if you have a job you like, at a company that up to now has been only making products that you have no problem with, and they started working on something that you found morally reprehensible and assigned you to work on it, either you would work on it without bringing up your concerns or you would quit?
The problem is almost never an issue of the ethical nature of the company's own product or service. The "politicization" problem is largely around social activism that is adjacent to the company's mission.
Which is why Coinbase is saying specifically there are politics which are central to their mission that they still must naturally engage with.
I think any engineer who has a moral quandary about the work the are doing should absolutely take it up with management, up to including whistle-blowing or resigning. Professional Engineers put their license on the line with this, mere computer engineers may not have so much at stake professionally but are equally ethically bound.
> you would work on it without bringing up your concerns or you would quit?
let me reverse this, and present a different scenario. You are doing your job, but you feel strongly about a certain political movement (be it BLM or abortion rights, or whatnot). You tell your boss that you are going to spend some work time to talk to other employees and may be convince them to join your cause. What should the boss do? Let you work on it without bringing up their concern? Or fire you?
Well, in my case, that situation would never arise (see previous comments). But, if I were the boss, I would advise the employee to either do that on their own time, or seek other employment. Again, I believe strongly that a work environment is not the place for personal politics or religion, unless that is the purpose of the business (the one concession I’ll make).
If I worked for a toy maker who suddenly decided to make land mines disguised as teddy bears, then I would absolutely have to quit, if we were in a disagreement over why this should happen.
If I knew that they manufactured these land mine bears before I started, I wouldn’t be there anyway.
Except that isn't what's happening at Coinbase. Coinbase is still making the same product it made six months ago. It's the activists who want Coinbase to start working on something else.
I think the relevant distinction that Brian makes is not "political vs not-political" but "relevant or not relevant to the business". It seems they are comfortable engaging on political issues that are directly related to what they are doing. For example, affirmative action is arguably a political topic, but it would be on the table for discussion at Coinbase because it's relevant to how they hire.
Serving coffee is not political. Planning the network installation is not political. Code reviews, cleaning your office, optimizing the VM, getting a bandwidth deal, negotiating the SaaS pricing, choosing ingredients for the new dish, figuring out how many loads of gravel are needed for the landfill, picking a guy to fix the fence ...
It's 99% not political.
Google search is barely political, ads are a little bit.
Social Media is political and not that-that much more.
It's 100% fine for you to 'work on something consistent with your political views' but at the same time just 'pick the place' instead of 'making the place' inherently political.
Google is making everything political with its "Machine Learning Fairness" initiative. Like when you google image search "european art" or "white men".
You'd think European art was 50% black person portraits and that 50% of white men were criminals or black.
Search for "american mathematician" on Google and the first six images that come back with the search results are of black mathematicians, 3 of them women.
That is political.
Nothing wrong with female or black mathematicians, the more the better, but that's not how it went down.
If I worked at Google and they asked me to code that, I would have said, "Sure, I can do that", which would be a non-political decision, but whoever decided on how that should be implemented was making a political decision.
What I understand from what you are saying, and with what I can agree is, that not everything you do, has to be or should be a political statement.
But the point I trying to make is, that "apolitical" is not the absence of political. It is a political choice.
Here a definition of apolitical: "not interested or involved in politics"
> Serving coffee is not political.
Which coffee do you serve? If you don't care, you are apolitical, but you can either serve coffee with child labour or not.
> Planning the network installation is not political.
So, it will include equipment from Huawei? Or Cisco?
> Code reviews,
If someone puts in there a "joke", do you address it? Should you?
> cleaning your office, optimizing the VM,
Yeah, probably not.
> getting a bandwidth deal, negotiating the SaaS pricing, choosing ingredients for the new dish,
To which standard do you hold your suppliers? Are they subscribing to any social corporate responsibility standard? Are you? Are you trying to make a vegan dish or not? (Not that I care, I am apolitical there, but I do not think, it is not political)
> figuring out how many loads of gravel are needed for the landfill,
Probably not.
> picking a guy to fix the fence ..
Are you rejecting the guy who has a MAGA bumper on his truck?
> Google search is barely political,
Really? There was just recently a case of republicans complaining about how they are ranked. What about Google in China? Or Hong Kong?
> It's 100% fine for you to 'work on something consistent with your political views' but at the same time just 'pick the place' instead of 'making the place' inherently political.
Here I think, I can understand that you want to say, that all the points I just made, are likely to be unproductive to be discussed at the workplace. And I would agree.
You may say, you are tired of hearing those issues, and I can understand.
But I would say, one doesn't make a place inherently political, it is. Being apolitical doesn't make it go away, that decisions have an impact on the public affairs of a country. In a small and intangible way probably, but so does a vote.
Choosing coffee is not child labour, bad jokes can happen anywhere, Huawei/Not Huawei is a security choice not a political one ... and for god's sakes we're picking our caprenters based in their bumpers stickers? No. I don't care what bumper stickers my carpenter has, and although I personally hate Trump, I don't care one bit that he has such a bumper sticker, and nobody else should either.
99.99% of Google content is mundane and not political.
They're not banning a lot from Google search other than really illegal stuff.
'Choosing the SaaS vendor based on price' is not just 'going with the status quo.
I get what you are trying to say, I just don't agree.
I don't even think that workplaces embracing popular social issues directly that much, what matters is addressing the social issues directly, not as a matter of populism.
Saying "our company doesn't hire black people, that doesn't seem fair, can we think about that" is 100% reasonable, but making public statements about BLM etc. is more political, less pragmatic.
What's funny is that traditional media has just as much issues with misinformation and bias, yet the whole discussion around how content related to the election might not be straight and honest revolves completely around tech companies.
For some reason it's just the west coast tech companies where information or search is political, but with traditional media it's not?
Don't newspapers report on masks? Are they political as well? Doesn't TV? Why is all the politics revolving around these west coast tech companies?
Could it be that it's actually not that political, it's just that these companies are filled by extremely left wing west coast people who want to make it political?
Of course newspapers are political. I don't understand how this is even a point you're confused about, unless you believe in a truly extreme form of cultural relativism.
You obviously have an axe to grind against a particular political spectrum, so I will pose a more direct example that does not involve it.
Is Russia Today political? Is choosing to display it prominently in a search result political? Is choosing to display a 'this is state sponsored news' tag on it political? Is not choosing to display that tag on a link to the CBC, or NPR not a political decision?
If you don't think RT is political, I can go down the list until we find something that is. Zero hedge? QAnon? The International Council of Communism? The newsletter published by your local KKK chapter? BLM?
The reason the work of tech companies is political is because they've installed themselves as gatekeepers of political information. If they were dumb pipes, this wouldn't be an issue. They aren't, though.
You didn't actually consider the fact that I might have an axe to grind towards everyone who makes the workplace political, and toxic by alienating people with minority view points?
Would you consider it possible I'm a liberal myself? And that my liberalismi is exactly the reason it's difficult for me to accept this sort of behavior?
You only have so much time, money, energy and attention, and they are choosing that they do not want to actively spend that energy on active activism as a company outside of their company mission.
What meaning are you using then? Even the most basic dictionary definition of "politics" is something like "all the activities involved in determining the policies and actions of an organization or government."
If everything is political, including building a table ("because people can sit at a table") or breathing ("it's literally a life and death situation"), then "it's political" has no useful meaning. If a descriptive term doesn't serve as a means of distinguishing things, it's not a descriptive term.
In this conversation I think it is fairly clear we're talking about government politics. And I would say the majority of things you do in your life do not (and should not) involve government politics. Obviously "apolitical" in this context does not mean Coinbase will lack "office politics".
That's an uncharitably pedantic way of looking at it. I think the parent meant that (almost) every endeavor will have some element of politics in it. That doesn't mean the word "politics" has no meaning.
> I think the parent meant that (almost) every endeavor will have some element of politics in it
This is textbook pedantry. Obviously "don't discuss politics in the workplace" means "don't discuss divisive topics, especially when they're not particularly relevant to your work".
Of course everything is "technically political", but that's not how anyone uses "political" except when they're trying to argue in bad faith (specifically engaging in tautology).
Gay marriage is a divisive topic in the USA. A gay man talking about his wedding around the water cooler is political. A straight man talking about his wedding around the water cooler is not political. The only non-political choice is not allowing either to occur. Because if you allow both, that is a political statement. If you only allow one, that is too.
The funny thing about politics is: a company doesn't get to choose what topics are divisive. People do. All it takes is one person to strongly hold a belief in the office to make it political.
> Gay marriage is a divisive topic in the USA. A gay man talking about his wedding around the water cooler is political. A straight man talking about his wedding around the water cooler is not political.
Talking about one's wedding around the water cooler is not political, irrespective of the speaker's orientation OR the audience's opinions about gay marriage. Similarly, an argument in favoring or opposing gay marriage would be political irrespective of the speaker's sexuality or the audience's opinions. This seems perfectly straightforward to me. It seems like you're trying to make a problem where none exists.
While that's true now, it wasn't true 10 (or even 5 in some places) years ago. It's arguably not even true in some places today. Just this week, the Supreme Court denied cert on a lawsuit about same sex marriage (Kim Davis).
You’re confusing “controversial” with “political”. Someone’s marriage may be controversial to someone, but talking about it isn’t political (at least not in the sense we’re discussing here). It becomes political when someone is arguing for or against gay marriage.
Seems like a reasonable interpretation in my experience. I have definitely seen people told not to talk about what you might call controversial because it is political.
Don't talk about your abortion and how it made your life better or worse.
Don't talk about your birth control.
Don't talk about how you were explicitly told by an authority figure you were not worthy of a job because of your sex/gender.
Easy for me to imagine someone being told not to talk about their gay marriage under similar circumstances.
I think commonly used phrases are "its not for polite company", "keep politics out of it", "don't bring your politics here", etc.
It is obviously selective enforcement of the rules, but that is a common and unfortunately often effective shield.
Luckily I have heard/see less of the above over the last 10 years than the 10 years before that.
I’ve never heard anyone told not to talk about those things because they’re political, but I could believe they were told not to talk about them because they’re controversial.
It is possible for a subject to be both political and controversial.
I think the fact that there are two sides to US politics, and those two sides split cleanly along almost every controversial topic, is causing the confusion. Because it's both.
Abortions are controversial because some people believe they should not be allowed to happen, while others belive women should be in control of their own bodies. Abortions are political because the Republican party has a publicly-stated policy of wanting to legislate against abortion. The Democratic party has a publicly-stated policy of wanting to maintain women's ability to get an abortion if they need one.
Thus a controversial topic is also political. Any discussion of the topic will inevitably reduce to a political discussion because the two political parties are so closely aligned with the two sides of the conversation.
Because of the way that US politics has been so data-driven, focus-group informed, every controversial topic is being used as a method of creating political traction. So everything controversial is becoming political. Even something as banal as wearing a mask during a pandemic is turned into a political statement.
> It is possible for a subject to be both political and controversial
I didn’t claim otherwise. I believe that people are told not to talk about their abortion because it’s controversial, but not because it’s political barring perhaps a few people who aren’t educated enough to understand the distinction.
> Abortions are political because the Republican party has a publicly-stated policy of wanting to legislate against abortion.
The Republican party’s political advocacy is obviously political, but it doesn’t follow that any given account of an abortion is political. Both are controversial, however.
> So everything controversial is becoming political.
Controversial things frequently are political, but that doesn’t mean any particular speech about a controversial topic is political speech. You seem to be confusing a prohibition about politics with a prohibition against any topic that has a political aspect. So at coinbase, a gay man could talk about his marriage despite that gay marriage is also a political subject (and also a controversial topic in some spheres, albeit probably not the SV spheres), but he (and any employee for that matter) couldn’t advocate for or against gay marriage policy or norms.
The phases I use in my response above explicitly often explicitly use the word politics. The people saying that are not being narrow with their definitions like you are here.
So if people live their life having people around them using the word politics like in my phrases above they will also start using the word that way. A way that does not match up with your definitions.
> You’re confusing “controversial” with “political”.
So when you say things like the above it comes off to me as unreasonable/uncharitable. Since the people you are talking to are using a set of definitions that are relatively common in my experience.
edit: unreasonable -> unreasonable/uncharitable
---
> I’ve never heard anyone told not to talk about those things because they’re political, but I could believe they were told not to talk about them because they’re controversial.
Knowledge and understanding of a topic is required before reasoned action is taken. If you can not talk about abortion, birth control, sexual/gender discrimination, gay marriage, and more because it is controversial then we might be getting in to an area where speech is so restricted that it impedes knowledge transfer and understanding on those topics.
In order to have an informed populace then need to be exposed to things, sometime controversial. If you remove a reasonably large mechanism for that, conversation at work, it will have political consequences.
>Knowledge and understanding of a topic is required before reasoned action is taken. If you can not talk about abortion, birth control, sexual/gender discrimination, gay marriage, and more because it is controversial then we might be getting in to an area where speech is so restricted that it impedes knowledge transfer and understanding on those topics.
And you can research and discuss those topics outside of work.
You're not being paid to show up to work and form PACs. You're not being paid to show up to work to virtue signal about the most fashionable wedge issue of the day. You're not being paid to show up to work and sow discord by assuming moral high ground and vilifying the other side. etc., etc.
>In order to have an informed populace then need to be exposed to things, sometime controversial.
The political culture status quo at Bay Area companies is that this is an alt-right talking point.
>If you remove a reasonably large mechanism for that, conversation at work, it will have political consequences.
Conversation at work absolutely should not be a large mechanism for political discussion. It's work. If there are political consequences because workers are no longer allow to virtue signal all day, then that speaks more about their weak mental state than it does about politics.
> And you can research and discuss those topics outside of work.
In my experience in the USA it is common for conversations at work to be about family, kids, life experiences(good and bad), current events, etc. It is something people bond over and use to help form a common company culture.
Different companies vary what is allowed and or encouraged and experience different benefits and consequences.
> You're not being paid to show up to work and form PACs. You're not being paid to show up to work to virtue signal about the most fashionable wedge issue of the day. You're not being paid to show up to work and sow discord by assuming moral high ground and vilifying the other side. etc., etc.
I do not see anyone in this thread advocating for anything that extreme.
>>In order to have an informed populace then need to be exposed to things, sometime controversial.
> The political culture status quo at Bay Area companies is that this is an alt-right talking point.
I am not in the know about bay area culture but that does not match my limited view from the outside.
> Conversation at work absolutely should not be a large mechanism for political discussion. It's work. If there are political consequences because workers are no longer allow to virtue signal all day, then that speaks more about their weak mental state than it does about politics.
My focus on for this comment was not politic conversation in the work place but on how removing a large mechanism of knowledge and understanding transferal in the work place would have political consequences for society.
>In my experience in the USA it is common for conversations at work to be about family, kids, life experiences(good and bad), current events, etc. It is something people bond over and use to help form a common company culture.
None of which are politics, so we agree.
>I do not see anyone in this thread advocating for anything that extreme.
Did you by chance not RTFA? Employees are literally planning virtual walkouts because they felt that Coinbase didn't virtue signal enough.
>I am not in the know about bay area culture but that does not match my limited view from the outside.
Your limited view is in total contrast to reality. I've lived in the Bay Area for the past 8 years, and attempting to consider outside viewpoints that may be controversial might as well make you a Nazi sympathizer. https://www.cnn.com/2017/09/14/us/berkeley-ben-shapiro-speec...
>My focus on for this comment was not politic conversation in the work place but on how removing a large mechanism of knowledge and understanding transferal in the work place would have political consequences for society.
This is a non sequitur. No one is suggesting removing knowledge transfer and communication at work. People are suggesting limiting the amount of political activism at work that's outside of the scope of what you were paid to do (the company's general mission).
> This is a non sequitur. No one is suggesting removing knowledge transfer and communication at work. People are suggesting limiting the amount of political activism at work that's outside of the scope of what you were paid to do (the company's general mission).
I did not suggest anyone here was advocated for that in this thread. I provided examples above where people are told not to talk about, abortion, contraceptives, discrimination based on gender/sex, conversations about a gay marriage because they are "politics". Hence why some people are objecting to removing political conversations from work.
It was part of back and forth conversation with throwaway894345.
Being open about something that can land you in jail in some countries is taking a political stand. If I am an Atheist and I keep that to myself, I can travel to places I wouldn't be able to safely go if I were open about my religion.
And before anyone says anything, when religion informs lawmaking, it becomes political.
Ah, another "everything is political" argument. Strangely, the "everything is political" crowd seems the most concerned with Coinbase's no-politics stance. It's as if they fear the policy will have a real impact. But shouldn't they know better? After all, the policy doesn't even make sense since everything is political.
Of course, I'm asking rhetorically. They know perfectly what it means and they don't like it.
To answer your question, no I don't believe "gay man talking about his wedding" will fall under what's not allowed to be discussed around a water cooler at Coinbase.
> A gay man talking about his wedding around the water cooler is political
Not like "we need to put gay marriage banners on our home page" is political.
I really think people should start respecting the difference.
> All it takes is one person to strongly hold a belief in the office to make it political.
No. It requires them to act on it. To engage in political activity.
It's not political to be a communist at work. It's political to use this belief to steer how the job is done or how the company should perform its mission, or indeed to try to change its mission.
Politics is the process of determining the allocation and distribution of scarce resources, status, and power.
Unless you are living in a post-scarcity, post-status, post-power anarchist society, populated entirely by The New Soviet Man (or some other fictional relative thereof), everything that's meaningful is, indeed, political.
You can draw a contrast between personal politics and organizational politics. An organization can be explicit that it engages in organizational politics, but bars personal politics. That is what Coinbase is currently doing[1]. That's the CEO's, and the board's prerogative.
[1] It does, however, falsely claim that its organizational political activity is somehow apolitical. It's not.
Missions are often in pursuit of political goals. (It's a political stance that promoting the use of cryptocurrency is good, and not one I share.)
But, this doesn't mean an organization has to take a position on every hot-button political issue. Even the Biden campaign, a a political organization if there ever was one, needs to focus on getting their candidate elected, and not on things that divide Democrats.
To agree on a mission doesn't mean people on the organization need to agree on everything. Putting aside any differences on stuff not related to the mission is important in being able to work together as a team.
But that's not what is being addressed. Not getting involved in "every hot-button political issue" is clearly advisable, but Coinbase is preemptively deciding that all political conversation is off the table while they run a highly unregulated multi-billion dollar currency exchange.
There are going to be political issues that involve Coinbase, and if they're deciding already to ignore any role they play in society, we need to be highly critical of every decision they make moving forward.
Coinbase is far from unregulated, they're subject to and enforce the same KYC rules that banks do, go ahead and try to buy some BTC there anonymously and see how far you get.
One's preferred flavor of ice cream is apolitical. But anything that involves more than one person, and actual or potential conflicts between people, is political. Status quo, as a whole, is political.
And that constitutes a much larger part of our lives than is traditionally acknowledged. Which is itself, also, a political matter, because designating a subset of actual politics as "officially politics", and then marginalizing that subset, is one way to slow down further political developments in that department.
I don't think your comment is entirely true. For example I think a lot of purchases of the Bernie Sanders flavored ice cream from Ben & Jerry's had nothing to do with the actual taste of the ice cream.
That's like saying that if everything is physical, then nothing is. "Everything," by which we mean many things, is political in the sense that it has political aspects that should be recognised, but those aspects are very different from one thing to another. Political means pertaining to the distribution of power and resources in a society. But what kind of power/resources, which society and what form of distribution vary greatly. That many things have a colour doesn't mean the concept of colour is meaningless, nor that it draws its meaning from things that don't have a colour, because colour is an aspect with many hues. In short, "everything is political" means learning to look at the political aspects of things. The goal is not to distinguish between the political and apolitical, but between the many different shades of the political.
> "Everything is political" is literally the working definition of totalitarianism.
No, its not.
"Everything must be directed by the coercive power of the state" is. The former does not imply the latter (the scope of the coercive power of the state is, itself, a political issue.)
Certainly not, because the question of whether a government ought to be involved in some interaction is, clearly, a political question, and asking that question is clearly not equivalent to saying that the government ought to be involved in all interactions.
>and asking that question is clearly not equivalent to saying that the government ought to be involved in all interactions.
Yes, actually it absolutely is. Putting everything up for grabs for state (or in modern day; the mob) control is literally totalitarianism. People who "don't understand" this are either abysmally stupid or are power mad imbeciles who are pretending not to understand for Machiavellian reasons.
Saying "everything is political" is putting everything up for grabs for state (or mob) control whether you said it aloud or not. Doesn't matter if it's a tyranny by some generalissimo or amorphous mob of twitter gibbering nitwits or tiki torch bearing numskulls.
If "everything is political" there is no room for private life, which is the only life that matters.
No, as I said, the statement "the government should not be involved in your private life" is very clearly a political statement, because it relates (directly!) to the policies and actions of the government. And that is, of course, the opposite of totalitarianism.
If you define “political” in such a way that nothing can be “apolitical” then the word “political” completely loses its meaning. The whole point of any adjective is to distinguish between things. It’s a tautology.
> Funnily enough, I think it has been extrapolated by Neal Stephenson in Diamond Age. We will end up having parallel societies which define themselves not by geographic boundaries, but by affiliation. A North Korean community could be your neighbour.
Perhaps less Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age, and more Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe:
> The mission of the company is not disjoint from the society it is embedded in.
If it cannot be disjoint, then it seems like it has become a requirement for it to be aligned in only one acceptable direction - hence why Coinbase's move is apparently controversial. Failure to actively support the standardized and approved message is apparently not acceptable!
> This is just one more step in that direction.
One more misstep. The combination of this effect with polarization means it's only a matter of time before someone realizes there's actually going to be a market for legitimately countercultural companies that reach out to those who don't walk the new party line. Since there's enough of them to elect a president, it's probably high time for some brave company to take you up on your suggestion that everything be political.
You can make a connection between the work you do and society at large without getting into unproductive arguments on company time. Think that sort of thing has value? That's fine: do it outside of the time the company carves out for you to perform your normal duties.
Activists never planned to try to talk and listen and went too far in this direction. If it keeps going, at some point it becomes untenable and needs to stop. It's not business' job to teach activists how to live, they must figure it out by themselves.
I think people are talking past each other with the word 'political'. Some may define it as the execution of governance, and others may define it as partisan gamesmanship, and of course lots around and in between.
Do you have an example where in a political company both views were heard?
Typically the whole discussion around overly political workplaces revolves around west coast tech companies, which are a monoculture of liberalism. Republican views are definitely not heard or dealt with.
1. relating to the government or public affairs of a country.
Not the one the parent probably means:
2. (DEROGATORY) done or acting in the interests of status or power within an organization rather than as a matter of principle.
Whatever a company does, it relates in some way to the public affairs of a country.
Either in what you offer, or what you need to produce your offer. Your company is hopefully affecting the public affairs of your country in more than one way.
And that I think had very much a place at work.
The delineation between public affair and private matter seems to be quite arbitrary at times.
I would say abortion is a private matter, or who you marry or which combination of sex chromosomes you have, but all those things are very high on the list of things being discussed.
Here I have to say, I'm more likely to give the point, that those topics are not professionally relevant, but neither is sports.
It's safe to say that a company can impact the public affairs of a country by creating economic value without taking an official speculative stance on e.g. the racial distribution of unjust police killings. It's pretty obvious to me when people talk about "leaving political topics out of the workplace" they mean "topics which are unrelated to one's work".
Arguments like "abortion is highly related to site reliability engineering" are pretty overtly disingenuous in a very clear-cut fashion.
> Here I have to say, I'm more likely to give the point, that those topics are not professionally relevant, but neither is sports.
Sports don't cause the same degree of strife in the workplace. No one is demanding anyone's termination because they like a different sports team or because they were caught in a photograph gesturing in a way that looks vaguely like the hook 'em horns gesture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hook_%27em_Horns).
Even deciding what is political or not is political. If you try to limit the definition to something putatively objective like "directly relating to the function of government agencies" a great many topics are immediately ambiguous: institutionalized racism? marriage? the environment? the economy?
> Even deciding what is political or not is political
No, the distinction is not whether somebody _decides_ if a topic is political or not, but that the conversations' intension is to convert the other party that your point of view is correct for society. I.e., you have to undertake political activism towards something for the topic to be political.
It's like religion as a topic of conversation, vs religious conversion. Two people can be talking about religion, but if neither is trying to "convert" the other, then this is not a religious conversion.
But if one party is talking with the intent to convert the other party to said religion, then it's a religious conversion. And the argument is that this should not happen in the workplace.
That's totally fair, I hadn't considered it from that perspective. In my mind politics are things like the tax rate. So a social issue could never be political.
To me, "everything is political" is a bumper sticker version of the assertion that what is and isn't "political" in the sense of "political statement" is often way more subjective than we sometimes recognize it is.
If a coworker talks about his husband, is that a political statement? To some people, absolutely, right?
How about someone mentioning a concert that they've gone to, for an artist that's outspokenly political one way or another? Just a concert, right?
What about talking about a great movie or TV show, if those are, I don't know, "Sorry to Bother You" or "Lovecraft Country"?
Can you mention that you went to a gun show, or a shooting range?
Can you recommend a Jordan Peterson book?
Can you put an NRA logo on your car?
What about a BLM logo?
What about on your T-shirt?
If a coworker goes through a gender transition, how does that get handled in a way that everyone, across the board, considers apolitical? Good luck with that: the very act of transitioning is, to a significant portion of the population, itself political.
So, I mean, sure, not literally everything is political, but if you give the statement a bit more of a generous reading than "Come on, are you saying ice cream is political? Harrumph!", you can see the point being made.
To me, the deciding criteria is the intent of the person undertaking said action. Are they taking an action to express their allegiance to a political movement? Are they taking action to attempt to convince/recruit people to a cause they believe in?
Or are they taking action not for such purposes? For example, a gay person talking about their spouse to a colleague without the intent to change any political beliefs of anyone around them?
Do you believe end to end encryption is political? Do you believe that companies should disable E2E encryption in order to be "apolitical" in the eyes US's attorney general?
How do you believe Coinbase, a cryptocurrency corporation, will remain "a political" in the design of their systems given the changing political climate around crypto? Does that just mean bowing down to whatever the administration says? Do you believe Coinbase will remain "apolitical" is the US begins to enact policy that causes Coinbase users to find alternatives?
Do you believe Coinbase employees will have no opinion on the way the justice department handles cryptocurrency?
But you're deliberately avoiding the point that coinbase wants to make - which is that if the topic is relevant to the business (as determined by the owners of the business), then it's considered on-topic for work place political discussion and activism.
But if it's unrelated to the business, then the business is no place to undertake such activism.
> I'm curious what your definition of political is, because my gut feeling is that (Almost) nothing is political.
Politics is more than just the rituals of government officials or what gets written about in the politics section of the newspaper:
> Politics (from Greek: Πολιτικά, politiká, 'affairs of the cities') is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations between individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics)
For instance, this effort to create an "apolitical workplace" could probably be understood as political project to stamp out elements of bottom-up democratic political culture in favor of a more autocratic political culture. At work we keep our heads down and follow the edicts (mission) of our leaders.
This does seem to be the standard Libertarian worldview, but no matter how much you intend to ignore the world around you, it exists and you're a part of it, and you answer to your neighbors.
> This does seem to be the standard Libertarian worldview, but no matter how much you intend to ignore the world around you, it exists and you're a part of it, and you answer to your neighbors.
One clever way to deeply entrench a political decision is to convince others that it's not a political decision at all. If you're successful, you've erected a barrier against your opponents by interfering with their ability to even conceive opposition to your position. It's sort of like the concept of Newspeak.
The opposite strategy is to talk about politics constantly, so that it's painfully obvious who's in the minority.
Which is better for a gay man in Saudi Arabia? A company where people only talk about work, or a company where everybody is expected to take a stance on homosexuality?
> The opposite strategy is to talk about politics constantly, so that it's painfully obvious who's in the minority.
> Which is better for a gay man in Saudi Arabia? A company where people only talk about work, or a company where everybody is expected to take a stance on homosexuality?
You're talking about something completely different. What I'm talking about is basically falsely depoliticizing a political decision, so people think it's something that cannot be changed, like nature or something. The reference to Newspeak, which was imagined as a way of dismantling the mental machinery of political opposition, should have made that clear. That you missed it is ironic given your username.
If you want to map the experience of a gay man in Saudi Arabia onto what I was talking about, he would marry a woman and not even think things could be any different.
The objection you and others are making to TFA is that you can't choose to be apolitical, because everything is political. Your contribution is to propose that people might claim things are apolitical to prevent people from realizing the truth about how political they actually are.
Your appeal to newspeak is pretty pointless, as it applies only inasmuch as it does to anyone who might claim that something is its opposite, for example the slogans "the personal is political" and "silence is violence".
Sure, if you accept lies like that, you may lose the ability to think about the true nature of those things.
But you haven't really contributed anything to the conversation. You're just saying "ah, but what if they're /lying/! To /trick us/!"
> The objection you and others are making to TFA is that you can't choose to be apolitical, because everything is political. Your contribution is to propose that people might claim things are apolitical to prevent people from realizing the truth about how political they actually are.
You're still not really getting what I was saying. Directly claiming something is apolitical won't actually create the state I was talking about. To do that you actually have to get a bunch of influential people to talk about some political idea like it was obviously some kind of natural or social law or something.
Not everything is political, but many people are ignorant of the political nature of many things.
> Your appeal to newspeak is pretty pointless, as it applies only inasmuch as it does to anyone who might claim that something is its opposite, for example the slogans "the personal is political" and "silence is violence".
You're thinking about the slogans like "freedom is slavery," which weren't Newspeak and would have been unexpressible in it.
> But you haven't really contributed anything to the conversation. You're just saying "ah, but what if they're /lying/! To /trick us/!"
I'm not sure I'm contributing the the conversion that you want to have, which makes it a little baffling why you're engaging with me and not one of "the others" who seem to be who you really want to engage with.
HTTPS is political (see attorney general of united states). Do you use HTTPS on your websites? (a step against the U.S. government position) Have you turned HTTPS off in your browser? (a step towards the U.S. government position) Do you implement forward perfect secrecy for HTTPS connections? (more against U.S. government position) How do you weigh it's threat to national security against it's protection from criminals for individuals and companies?
All of these actions can be viewed as political statements. Everything is political.
How should I properly demonstrate my wokeness while pooping? What about when I'm walking my dog? If everything is political I don't want to be seen as one of those complicit through silence while doing the dishes types of people.
If I could separate myself from certain segments of our society and never have to deal with them ever again, I'd gladly do that. However I don't keep my fingers crossed. They are too dependent on my money to implement their policies, I doubt they will ever leave productive members alone
The only people who could think that are people who do not have to deal with people different to them in their daily life at all. Having three shades of skin tone on software developers that all went to Stanford does not count for your difference quota.
Money is money, and the money of a jew, nazi, gay, christian, muslim or pedophile are all equally good. Anyone rejecting money because they don't agree with where it comes from is either lying or about to be eaten alive by someone who doesn't.
There is a reason why everyone in China is trying to escape to our system, while they have invented personal money - in the form of your social score.
I hope so. I enjoy talking about politics and social issues and think the discussion is important, but not at work. It's a distraction and it is alienating to employees who do not share the majority opinion.
> ...your work, which occupies a large portion of your life, should not be divisive.
I get that desire, I really do, but I think it's so important to recognize that your work is not apolitical. It doesn't matter what you're building. What you build does not exist in a vacuum, and the decisions you make around politics at work are themselves political decisions.
But those political decisions are ones relevant to the mission of the company.
Coinbase probably shouldn't be involved in politics around police reform, fracking, climate change or the Second Amendment because they are orthogonal to its mission. Insert other topics as you see fit.
And hence its employees should leave their opinions of such matters at the door.
Coinbase should be focused on politics around global financial regulation. And its employees should focus their workplace political energy on those matters.
Also, it's generally just polite and respectful to your coworkers to provide a non-political, non-partisan workplace.
I'm sympathetic to this argument because on the face of it, it seems correct and should be the way we ideally do things.
But many things in the world that should not be politicized are, in fact, politicized. Perhaps Coinbase wants to hire a more diverse bunch of people, and starts an internal initiative to do so. Perhaps they do this not out of any political motivation, but because they genuinely believe (as they should!) that having a more diverse workforce will help them make better decisions about their product.
But of course there will be some (many?) who will decry this as Coinbase "being political". You just can't win, really.
I'm not coinbase, so I can only speculate as to their meaning. While it's possible to define "political" so abstractly that it becomes all-encompassing, it's pretty clear to me that they probably mean to prohibit political debates that are unrelated (or only very tenuously related) to their core mission.
"We should hire a more diverse workforce because diversity improves our collective judgment, thereby furthering our mission" is on its face a fine subject for discussion provided you're evaluating the claim on its merits and not sneaking in overtly political implications like "we have a moral responsibility to hire diverse candidates". One could envision a fruitful, dispassionate discussion about how much return on investment the company could expect from a diversity initiative, how that ROI stacks up against other opportunities, how to measure the ROI and make sure the initiative is meeting expectations, whether or not it runs afoul of anti-discrimination law, what kind of diversity (race, gender, viewpoint, etc) is most likely to yield the highest ROI, etc.
Of course, it's prudent to stay away from these kinds of charged topics altogether because it's very likely that you have employees that will take this as an opportunity to pollute a potentially productive conversation with their overtly political opinions.
That some things are easily abused by bad-faith employees doesn't mean that we should let bad faith employees have free reign.
No stance means just that. Redefining terms and imposing a will is the overtly irrelevant and aggressive political posturing that these policies are trying to avoid.
If the outcome of society would be the same if you exist or not then you are not political. For example if you don't vote and don't support any political causes, then the people who take the time to get involved decides everything and you had no influence.
There are 4 levels of competence. For all the people who know they are incompetence and therefore abstain from voting there are a lot of people (possibly more) that don't know their incompetence and decide to vote regardless. If you're not voting because you're uninformed, you're probably much more informed than many of the people who are voting.
> don't know their incompetence and decide to vote regardless
That's a very wrong way to understand what democracy means. If you're incompetent, you are still afforded a vote. And you sleep on the bed you make.
and in any case, the incompetence voter implies that they could be voting "wrong". This is a deep and insidious implication because implying something can be wrong also implies the other "competent" voters are "right". The very notion that one side is "right" is very anti-democratic.
If one million people don't care about changing the status quo and 50 do, the status quo will won't change. If one person doesn't care and 50 do, it's much more likely. The status quo exists in everyone who does nothing to change it, even if they don't move to actively affect things.
Isn't 'no stance' just the 'null stance'? Similar to how one must reject the null hypothesis to accept another, one must reject the null stance to take another.
That is a mis-characterization. My no-stance stance is not that I support that status quo, it's that I'll try to care about myself and my friends and family no matter what you political idiots do. Communism? Sure. Fascism? Whatever. I'd rather that you didn't, but it's more productive to mitigate it for myself than to get involved either way.
Is it selfish? Probably, and I'm open and proud about that.
Yeah, the same way atheism is a religion and "off" is a TV channel.
Individualism as a political philosophy would be smth like advocating for libertarianism/adjacent stuff, etc.
The apolitical stance is the apolitical stance. I do not engage in politics unless it's a minimum-effort activity like the default mail-in voting (WA). Sure, I may know approximately what the best way to organize society is, and if aliens landed and put me in charge I'd become political; but as it is, I do not care, mostly because it's not productive, but in no small part because actively caring about how to organize society is heavily correlated with being very wrong (IMHO).
>Coinbase probably shouldn't be involved in politics around police reform, fracking, climate change or the Second Amendment because they are orthogonal to its mission.
It's impossible to not involve yourself in politics that effect your employee's everyday lives.
To me this take rolls into the general "silence is violence" or "either you're with us or against us" refrain that has become background noise to me. It reads the same as someone telling me I'm enabling fascism by not posting a black square on instagram or whatever.
I'm nearing the point of being aggressively dismissive towards this kind of attitude, because a lot of it doesn't even seem to be laid out in good faith. People are just addicted to being mad, addicted to being right, addicted to the idea that they can channel their anger through pop politics and get validation for it as a bonus.
I have an extremely low opinion of the people and groups who follow along with whatever pop social issue is trending today because they don't want to get in trouble, and IMHO those people aren't really worth interacting with because again, it's more about landing a spicy dunk on the bad guys (tm) and collecting heart icons than whatever issue they're using as a weapon today.
>your work is not apolitical. It doesn't matter what you're building
And the large majority of people at FANG have about as much control over the flow of information as a plumber has over the flow of shit from a city. They just keep the system running, they don't influence it.
This is really a noxious idea. It's like saying that because we all breathe the same air, everything I do affects you. No, not in the vast majority of cases.
Everything you do does affect the environment around you. For example if you take a Bahamas trip, you are paying to generate tons of CO2. If you buy a diesel car, or just driving one, you're affecting the shared air as well.
Yes that is true in a pedantic sense. It is also true that my gravitational force affects everyone in the world as I move about. But not enough to matter.
If you want to have such a broad definition of political, then why restrict the whole fight to tech companies? Why aren't on the barricades about the fashion industry or traditional media?
Are you sure this isn't just an excuse to make things political in these west coast companies that are full of young, hot-headed, extremely left wing people?
Personally I would like it if the workplace became a whole lot more political, seeing as the status quo is that you have no say in how the company is ran or what it does with its profits, and if you don't like it you can starve. Ignoring politics doesn't make it not exist.
> status quo is that you have no say in how the company is ran or what it does with its profits
that is the rights of ownership, and is a capitalist ideal. To change it is to strip these rights from ownership and give it to those who do not currently have ownership (and is basically what communism is).
Unfortunately I think politics is unavoidable in some (many?) businesses. A financial services company that deals with new currency instruments that aim to supplement or supplant fiat currency is going to be neck-deep in politics pretty often.
Coinbase will have to make political decisions, and it's natural that people within the company will have differing opinions -- informed by their personal politics -- as to the course those decisions should take.
Coinbase says they want to be political insofar as it relates to and advances their mission. But political activism that is outside this scope is a distraction and what they are barring from company premises. I assume they also oppose political initiatives being taken without the approval of management.
Their position is pretty straightforward and sensible, even if it is not entirely straightforward to implement in an even handed way.
But he’s still being political when he bothers to look at numbers of non white employees or talks about “diversity in tue workplace”. All these are political agenda by another name.
My company is becoming increasingly political and it's terrible. I'd gladly go work at a company where I didn't have to engage with endless political activism. If I want to hear everyone's opinions on everything, I'd find their facebook page or the HN usernames and follow them.
My last company was trending in a similar direction. They would allow one ideological group to post completely unsubstantiated political claims, but opposing views were not allowed to be presented at all, even if they were thoroughly researched (this wasn't "official" policy, of course). Note that while I'm not a lawyer, I suspect that these permitted ideological viewpoints were sufficiently sexist and racist as to open the company up to some legal liability.
Increasingly aggressive activism of this sort started ramping up at my employer a couple of years ago. Several outspoken activists started complaining and demanding all-company meetings, which were granted by HR and company leadership. In these mandatory meetings, which were attended by hundreds of employees, all sorts of contradictory accusations were lodged by the activists. For example, in the first meeting, one of activists complained about being (accidentally) mis-gendered by a new employee. In another meeting, a different activist complained about an employee apologizing for mis-gendering them. Apparently this made the activist feel awkward, so they'd have preferred no apology at all. It was at this point I realized there is no reasoning with activists such as these. Their demands weren't coherent. They were just a bunch of people complaining about hurt feelings. These meetings must have cost the company millions of dollars and huge amounts of lost development time. And they certainly didn't resolve anything.
I and a lot of my colleagues just want to do our work without being forced to participate in regular struggle sessions.
Everyone who is interested in the current wave of hyper-politicization should learn about struggle sessions. These originated in Maoist China and were a bullying tactic used by red guards to humiliate anyone who had any opposition to the radical ideology being imposed at that time.
An acquaintance of mine worked for a company that stocked tampons in the men’s restroom because someone lobbied for it despite the company having no female->male trans employees. My acquaintance, who is male->female trans, was baffled.
A separation here is that these facilities are inherently unequal due to the existence of gendered signs declaring one restroom "Men" and the other "Women". In this existing framework, it doesn't make as much sense to go to the expense of stocking an item 99.99..% of users won't use.
Instead, the signs could be changed to simply state "Restroom". Sure, one might have urinals and the other a tampon dispenser, but anyone can use either and everyone could agree to be adults about it.
The fact that these activists were being unreasonable does not mean they cannot be reasoned with.
I imagine transitioning is a very emotional and vulnerable thing to happen. Hence it being awkward that someone apologized for misgendering isn't unreasonable at all. Advocating that no-one should even do that would be unreasonable. But just presenting "this happened, this is how it made me feel" is a very natural thing.
From such a presentation general rules cannot always be derived. That is not the point of such a presentation. The point is for someone who is having feelings to have those feelings heard and recognized. Maybe that can lead to a bit more understanding for people who were never in such situations.
It seems like a waste of time to make these meetings all-hands company wide. But don't dismiss these activists just because they pushed for an all hands meeting. It wasn't a good thing to push for, but people get things wrong sometimes. Having been wrong is not the same as always being wrong.
My gut feeling is that allowing this at a workplace is a (rather perverse) variation of the "employee of the month" nonsense. I.e. instead of rewarding your subordinates monetarily, you give them a power to bully their peers, but not to compete with yourself.
It is also useful in pushing out "troublemakers". People that will not call BS on the unsubstantiated political claims are also less likely to call out corruption/nepotism/inefficiency of the middle management.
In the long term the company will stagnate and die, but we live in such a wonderful time of government bailouts, low interest rates and desperate investors, so it may take a long time to unravel.
It was instructive to hear the discussions in a Russian-speaking developer community about this... how the current stuff going on in the big companies reminded the older generation of the performative ideological cheering going on at their workplaces back in the late Soviet times.
Think about it this way - sometimes, you have to be on call and stay up till 5am because of some crappy code you didn't write, and it sucks. Sometimes, you have to go to the May 1st workers parade and help carry a banner you disagree with, and it sucks. Sometimes, you have to go to a silly training session and explore the feelings you don't have, and it sucks. It's all part of the job - it was all fun activities, they wouldn't pay you to do it :)
The problem is that they are going for our kids at schools. Trying to hammer into their heads that instead of shooting for the stars, they should hate themselves for being White and spend most of their life yielding the way to the poor oppressed minorities. That's child abuse if you ask me.
I know many people will find your comment alarmist and hyperbolic, but you're understating it. I follow this issue closely and some of the crap that's being fed to schoolchildren in the US at the moment is jaw-dropping. Check out the site whataretheylearning.com for the tip of the iceberg.
If you're a parent of a child in K-12 schooling right now, you have a lot of reasons to be worried.
You could consider working for a 501(c)(3) charity, where employees are forbidden by law to make most types of political statements (including in private) using company equipment or channels. The actual laws around this are nuanced and don't cover all types of political speech, but it covers enough to where the average employee will be wise to think twice before saying just about anything political at work. The IRS has zero tolerance for this.
I worked at a 501(c)(3) for a long time and my coworkers followed the IRS rules about politics in the sense of electoral advocacy. That does not mean that they refrained from airing their social views at work or saying what people, groups, or ideas they thought were good or bad.
Your advice would be great for people who are uncomfortable mainly about coworkers using an employer mailing list or chat to ask people to vote a certain way. Otherwise, not so much, I think.
My impression is that restrictions on 501(c)(3)s' political activity are grounded in something like campaign finance concerns.
You could consider working for a 501(c)(3) charity, where employees are forbidden by law to make most types of political statements (including in private) using company equipment or channels
I work for a 501(c)(3). IIRC from the company meeting we had with an attorney who specializes in this subject, taking a political stance can fall under the category of indirect participation in a political campaign. If you're using company channels to make a statement, you're effectively campaigning under the official badge of that company, even if you're only talking to one other person who happens to work for that same company. You don't want to provide any ambiguity, however slight, to allow regulators to make a case for removal of the charity status. That can be the death of the company in many cases. What sounds reasonable to a layman and what sounds reasonable to a lawyer can be miles apart here.
I am with you on this one. The definition of a having a non-political mission must mean all but mentioning a candidate's name.
You can transparently see that some 501(c)(3)s are mostly political groups. As this becomes more common I expect politicians will use them to bypass campaign finance election laws.
They will create charities that 'educate' voters about how bad their opponent is without naming that opponent.
Yeah, that's exactly much what I was thinking, that when you take a look at their activities, it's clear that the definition of what's considered political here is fairly narrow.
Re: your hypothesis, after learning about 501c4s from Jeff in this thread and reading about for 10 seconds on Wikipedia, it seems that those actually serve that purpose quite well ("super PACs" are apparently 501c4), so I don't think the 501c3s are highly likely to get used in that way.
Maybe workplaces (and the public in general) should adopt the same rules as to what constitutes political discourse and then we'd stop having threads around "everything is political" statements...
Those organizations (if they are 501(c)(3)) are permitted to discuss politics within the narrow scope of the organization's mission. As I said, the laws are nuanced.
> My company is becoming increasingly political and it's terrible.
IMHO, this is not the problem. The problem are the managers of the work. One doesn't need to micromanage to stop this from happening. Nor does one need to limit free speech to prevent this.
Companies aren't working enough, that's the problem and managers aren't keeping people focused on the actual challenge at hand.
P.S. I feel this is a white-collar problem. These soft skills are paramount but also come from leadership. Restricting speech doesn't really deal with the people that the decision affects. Instead, one needs to become a better manager/leader to get 'buy-in' from the workers and then work!
No, the problem is really about politicization and more specifically the fact that in most US tech companies there is an enormous bias towards those on the political left, and a believe that those who lean left are more “scientifically educated” or intelligent or well-read, etc.
As one example you can see it in the way you can make hostile comments about “straight white males” and nobody says anything, but if you were to make a hostile comment for a perceived racial or sexual minority you’d be fired before even finishing your sentence
I don't think it's a numerical bias. Rather the extreme left are just hyper-aggressive in ways other parts of the spectrum aren't, especially libertarians are not aggressive and they were traditionally a big bloc inside tech firms.
As for the belief that the left are intellectually superior, that's not specific to tech firms. You get empty slogans about being "reality-based" from the left in all walks of life. It's why the left are struggling so much with COVID and lockdown: it's been chaos and incoherence from scientists/academics from day one so people who define themselves as superior due to their higher faith in "the science" have been taking a self-image beating. Or simply have gone into denial about it.
> As for the belief that the left are intellectually superior, that's not specific to tech firms.
IMHO, I feel this is an organic collusion of messaging. Like the boomers felt a little envious to Leftist ideas and it shows in how boomers are teaching future generations. I don't think this is intentional but there does seem to be an implicit shift in the writings that teach the youth. I grew up in the public education system and various books almost assume that Leftists are more critical thinkers. It could be a phrasing of a topic or a popular narrative that has taken root in the culture. Compound this overtime, you have a new generation that assumes the indirect messaging that they've been conditioned on.
In conclusion, I think you're getting a lot of downvotes for two reasons. 1. You're making grand/general statements without supportive points. 2. You are contrarian to the current zeitgeist. I happen to agree with your main points (sheep are sheep and wolves are making sheep frantic). I wish more people were critical thinkers.
Thanks. Having had many years of being downvoted on HN I can assure you it doesn't matter how specific you are, if you aren't leftist here then leftists will downvote you as much as they can. Sometimes an especially aggressive leftist will go through your comment history and downvote every single comment as well in retaliation, which is how you can get a series of technical posts about technical topics that were upvoted at the time suddenly going to -1 after an unrelated later post on a topic the left cares about.
This is why I call the left aggressive. I've never seen those sorts of tactics from libertarians and I have years of experience of them, or even conservatives. I have seen people who claim to be libertarian suddenly turn out to be totalitarian and start behaving in ways that are totally opposite to their prior stated positions once they got hold of some power, though. So I think there are some people out there who self-identify as libertarian because they came to associate it somehow with critical thinking or other positive qualities, yet never truly adopted the world view. But this is rare. Most people who claim to be libertarian act in ways that are relatively consistent with that claim.
I agree that leftists push hard the idea that leftism is the same thing as critical thinking. This confusion can be especially seen in universities, which regularly claim to be teaching students critical thinking yet in which leftists have steadily pushed out anyone not aligned with them over the decades. People truly trained in critical thinking would ask what justifies the claim that universities teach critical thinking, but of course none of them ever seem to do this. It's just taken as given.
We can see the results: academia is filled with groupthink, in which people's worth is based on vague groupthink-oriented concepts like "reputation".
You're speaking from a personal experience. I'm not minimizing your experience with my comments.
But if you have time to browse Social Media or enough time to get into extended hostile discussions (about ANYTHING), then your manager isn't doing their job. Full-stop.
> But if you have time to browse Social Media or enough time to get into extended hostile discussions (about ANYTHING), then your manager isn't doing their job. Full-stop.
What you describe is a sweat shop, not knowledge work. You can have downtime while still getting your work done and acting like an adult with colleagues. If you don’t have this skill set, make the effort to cultivate some tact and decorum.
This is where you might be misunderstanding. Downtime shouldn't be to engage in more stressful mental activity. Think about it. Go to the gym. Study for a big exam. Are you really engaged on the goals of a gym? Are you really engaged in getting a good grade on an exam? If you are, you are finite and I highly suspect that the high performers aren't going to try and add more stress on their lives (political or anything else). I'm suggesting they aren't sweating enough at the gym. I'm suggesting they aren't working hard enough. I'm not suggesting that they're a slave. I'm not suggesting they are a wage slave.
I'm suggesting they are more likely to be working in a half-assed way and don't have a 'buy-in' to the company's objectives. Which tends to be true based on numerous business management studies (since at least the 1970s that I've read).
Hard workers want enjoyable leisure. Not pissing off a Karen. Or dealing with a Greg. This is a toxic mindset that doesn't make any sense.
P.S. There is also another variable. That some people are closed minded but, imho, that can be overcome with good soft skills of a good manager/vision/buy-in.
> I think you're underestimating how much _fun_ some people find this sort of recreational trolling.
It doesn't matter if it's fun. It doesn't matter if someone paid them money to sabotage another company. The blame for allowing this excessive behavior in a business environment, lays with the leadership, full stop. Management is typically to blame and since CB is tiny, then it lays with the CEO.
One could look at even the positive aspect of it. Say a group of coworkers are very close friends (either through work or prior) then they are excessively talking about something. Well, then that situation is the responsibility of their bosses.
P.S. I've said my peace. If y'all still don't get it. Go read a few leadership or business management books.
Alternatively, if you see a resume with Coinbase through 2020-2021, that person probably prefers the opposite, which may also be seen in a positive or negative light, depending on your stance.
Which, as your parent seems to not realize, is also a political stance. This dichotomy is exactly what MLK refers to in the Letter from a Bermingham Jail (i.e. positive vs negative peace).
What does this mean? If this is yet another “if you’re not for us you’re against us” argument (e.g. if you don’t discuss police violence in the workplace then you necessarily support police violence), then this is false on its face. If this means “the decision to not discuss politics—especially politics unrelated to one’s work—at work is itself a political decision” then fine, but what’s the point? Is the idea that it’s a self-inconsistent position? If so, how? One can discuss even the policy not to discuss politics at work without discussing e.g. police violence.
one inconsistency is that Coinbase is based in SF. Would you consider "sorry, I didn't get a lot of sleep due to police sound grenades going off until 3am" a political statement?
> > Would you consider "sorry, I didn't get a lot of sleep due to police sound grenades going off until 3am" a political statement?
> No, of course not.
Awesome. So it follows that you would have no issue then with a coworker stating: "Police activity in SF has negatively impacted my ability to do work". Congratulations, you have a significantly broader definition of acceptable workplace speech than Coinbase.
> Awesome. So it follows that you would have no issue then with a coworker stating
Of course I wouldn't have an issue (ignoring for the moment that you're apparently conflating me with coinbase), because this isn't a political statement.
> Congratulations, you have a significantly broader definition of acceptable workplace speech than Coinbase.
The issue was never about people expressing their political opinions, but their demands that _Coinbase_ express political opinions and get mired in what police in SF may or may not be doing.
I think this is a very simplistic take. The reason we’re seeing a crackdown on this is not because companies are making a political move to support the status quo. It’s because they’re trying to weed out and get rid of legitimately problematic and toxic people who abused the previous culture.
For instance, there was an instance not too long ago at Facebook where one engineer publicly attacked another completely peaceful coworker on Twitter because the latter declined to put a BLM statement on the landing page of an open source project they maintained. The former employee was eventually fired. These kinds of antics are deeply divisive and destructive to the workplace.
> For instance, there was an instance not too long ago at Facebook where one engineer publicly attacked another completely peaceful coworker on Twitter because the latter declined to put a BLM statement on the landing page of an open source project they maintained. The former employee was eventually fired. These kinds of antics are deeply divisive and destructive to the workplace.
It is unclear from your comment which employee was fired, unless "former" is intended in the ordinal sense (ie. "first") rather than temporal (ie. "prior"). Can you clarify?
My wife works for a huge social media company that you've definitely heard of, and some of her higher-ups have told her they're worried that the rise of employee activism is going to tear the company's culture apart. I told her she should tell them to follow Coinbase's example.
For an action to be "political" in a strong sense, its performer it needs to be consciously thinking about their political alignment. Majority of people are economically motivated and do not engage in in-depth analysis of their actions or inactions and thus describing their actions as "political" is quite tendentious.
you don't need to be actively aware of gravity to not float off the ground. You can act politically without being aware of that fact, that just means you're not conscious of what's driving your decision making.
Most politics and also culture expresses itself tacitly. By requiring some sort of conscious intent you're actually ignoring what is arguably the vast majority of political interaction. For example casual sexism and systematic mistreatment of women was just "normal" but nonetheless political. Of course the people doing the subtle discriminating don't like to think of it as political, because that implies responsibility for action.
You are taking a "consequentialist" stance implying that if something has political consequences, then it is political. There are several problems with this.
First, literally anything could have political consequences, from a solar flare to a fly landing in someone's hair. This logic easily devolves into absurdity. Famously, Chinese government under Mao declared sparrows "public animals of capitalism" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign
Second, when anything could be political, the moniker "political" (like any other inflated moniker) loses a lot of its meaning. And yet real politics is still done by real people with real consequences.
Third, raising everything to the status of political is an example of politicization. This is typical of totalitarian regimes. Totalitarian regimes are in fact characterized by the fact that literally everything is raised to the realm of political, the realm of rule by the regime. By pressuring others to be political, you are creating a totalitarian environment, a very unpleasant environment for most people to be as we already know from some very bitter 20th century lessons.
Fourth, politics is about having political enemies. When political enemy (opponent) does not exist, there is no politics as such. By insisting that people act politically, you are simultaneously insisting that they have enemies. There are profound moral problems with this, whether you are Christian or even not religious at all.
The solar flare isn't political obviously, but the response to it is. human disaster usually is the consequence of bad responses to catastrophes which have been declared inevitable. (see the current American covid response). Something that actually is in the realm of politics is shoved into the category of thoughts and prayers.
>Third, raising everything to the status of political is an example of politicization. This is typical of totalitarian regimes
Politicisation isn't bad and the only thing your post is any evidence of is the typical midbrow "no politics or gulag" logic that every conservative American who is afraid of engaging in political conflict has been repeating ad nauseam. You may think you appear smarter if you complain about tribalism every five minutes and act like you're above the fray, but you are not. It's just a silly straw-man made by people who are afraid of political change.
Respectfully disagree. You're essentially arguing that they're not politically motivated in staying at/leaving their job. That's fair. Nevertheless their actions translate either support, inaction, or opposition. The implication which MLK argues is that inaction is harmful to the movement.
You are taking a consequentialist stance, deciding that if something has political consequences, then it is political. But literally anything could have political consequences. A solar flare could have political consequences. A fly landing on someone's hair could have political consequences. This does not mean that flies are political!
If everything is political, then the moniker "political" is meaningless.
It signals that a person did not want to be politically active at their workplace enough to lose/quit their job.
I think that says nothing of a persons political views and is just self-preservation or even indifference. Hiring would have to make some very tenuous assumptions to consider that a signal.
It's probably not a great signal for anything. How many Coinbase employees leave the company in an average month? And how much did this severance offer cause would-be future departures to cluster in October to take advantage of the payout?
> I think that says nothing of a persons political views
Rubbish - we all know what type of political activism is tearing these companies apart and we all know what political views are the only ones that can be safely expressed.
No, it is not. Politics apathy is present across all races, all classes, all genders.
Those who are politically possessed like to claim that “everything is politics” and that “it’s a privilege to not care about politics”, but every Hispanic and Filipino immigrant I’ve known (which is not a negligible number) care about family, hard work, and stability: not politics.
Getting involved in politics makes your life more unstable, which is why mostly privileged people engage in it. For example extremely few people from below median homes are politically active in USA, while home owners are among the most active. Ergo people are mostly politically active to defend their privileges and not to fix injustices.
I'm not sure how anyone can think that being politically active would make your life more stable.
Edit: An example of this is that black people are much less likely to vote than white people. Is this because black people support the status quo while white people want to change things? No, it is because black people don't have the time and energy to spare to vote. And no, this isn't about voting disenfranchisement, black people are less likely to vote even in very blue states.
Possibly by observing the actual changes implemented and interpreting them in their own context (i.e. IRS changes tax forms, but all the numbers stay the same when filling it out). Not being convinced that their fundamental right to attempt existence is threatened by imaginary what-ifs.
I'm not sure why an opinion being commonly held across race/class/gender would make it not political.
Your statement that the immigrants you know care about x and y and not politics doesn't actually make sense in response to the concept 'everything is political'. You are responding from the perspective that politics means elections, or some similarly narrow set of topics. But 'everything is political' explicitly rejects that perspective. It means that a Filipino immigrant thinking about whether their uncle and cousins will be able to visit them is political because it's harder for them to get a visa than my English cousins. It means that a Hispanic immigrant talking to her friend in a restaurant after dropping the kids at school should not risk being detained by ICE because speaking Spanish makes some dropkick immigration officer decide they must be illegal immigrants, which happened in Montana.
Staying in a job and supporting yourself and you family for a temporary time doing a normal job is not indifference. It is putting food on the table, perhaps literally.
Isn't it interesting that the crowd fighting for liberation & equity are mysteriously up against... the apolitical crowd? When the dichotomy is ethical realism vs. pragmatism, you have to ask yourself who's actually operating like a religion, who's actually a dogmatist in liberator's clothing.
Nah. I’m one of the “apolitical” crowd. I have all sorts of weird, controversial opinions, but I simply leave them at the door and do the job I’m paid to do.
Most people don't worry about all aspects of the world's problems, and many people find themselves convinced that the status quo is more comfortable than the alternative. It's not at all surprising to me that a lot of political issues would have a "thought about it, realized the problems, and trying to fix it" position and a "apolitical, don't like thinking about it, don't want to consider changes to the status quo" position that end up butting heads. I don't see how you can go from that to "anyone arguing with 'apolitical' people is following a religion". (Obviously there are bad variants of this scenario like where someone misidentifies a problem or misidentifies the fix, but that doesn't seem necessarily like religious thinking either.)
This is nonsense. There is no "the alternative;" there are no "apolitical" people. This is a circumstance of organizations, for whom being apolitical is the best way to alienate the fewest people. However, if you do indeed believe you have objective truth in your nonsensical dogmatic worldview, then hypothetically you'd be countered by somebody with a contrary truth. However this does not happen. The only opposition that these dogmatists get is from the new ethical relativists, i.e. people who advocate for apolitical organizations.
Any circumstance in which someone is looking at that is a circumstance in which they could also be treating you like a specific individual; aka, if it matters to them, you're there to ask.
Ironically / IMHO, the irritant at the center of the pearl that is many of these ('social justice') issues is people treating other people as a member of an imagined group rather than a specific human they can talk to.
Asking specific people about their political views during the hiring process (even general questions like "do you think tech workers should be politically active in the workplace?") is dangerous even if not necessarily illegal. Making hiring decisions based on the applicant's experience and employment history is pretty much best practice.
> If it's a problem that they're political or apolitical, then it's already a part of your hiring process.
Definitely not. Unconscious bias is a huge issue in interviewing. Blinding your interviewers to political orientation, or any other factor, is far more effective than telling them just to ignore it.
Hmm. I'd expect directly addressing it - instead of either attempting to ignore it or blinding - to be the most effective. IMO it's not just about hiring, it's also about whether or not they'll succeed once hired, and I would expect any unconscious bias to impact that.
Altho TBC I do think you're right that blinding is better than attempting to ignore.
Or they joined during the crypto euphoria era and have been disappointed by the general state of the market, and decided it was a good deal to give them some runway to find something that excites them more.
I would not go further than associating an October exit date as someone who took a buyout, and anyone with an exit date in the first half of 2021 as a sucker.
do people really read this much into resumes? I mostly just look to see if they have any relevant experience and/or impressive projects. aside from raising an eyebrow if I see a bunch of short stints at different companies, I don't try to ferret out their life story or political views by carefully analyzing their hire/leave dates.
If I see a bunch of short stints, let's say 3 or 4 tenures in a row that didn't make it past 1 year, I would definitely ask for some details during an interview.
I have some on my own resume and I don't mind explaining that here the company was acquired, here we ran out of money, here I had to move to be with family, etc etc.
It's just normal due diligence for a hiring manager.
As a way of reply to, "I personally am afraid to associate myself too publicly with a political stance, lest I be wrong and/or the environment changes."
"Well, whatever life is, you’re going to die. So if you’re going to make things better for yourself or for those you care about, you had better become an activist while you’re still alive." -- Will Provine
Viewing activism as a binary—the only choices being "I am an activist" and "I am not an activist"—glosses over a wide spectrum of dispositional diversity that people inhabit.
Put differently: There is a difference between advocacy and activism, between holding political opinions and being comfortable with them as a central focus of your life, or as a central characteristic that you wish people to see in you.
Not necessarily. Everybody knows the best way to move up in tech is to switch. Depending upon your options taking this offer and moving to another company where you make more is the best possible path you could take. Throw in the desire right now for people to leave SF and it gets even better.
Technical interviewing is so extremely biased. This sentiment of “Coinbase October resume is activist” is a prime example of where false negatives come from, even when the candidate correctly inverts the binary tree on the whiteboard in C.
“I personally am afraid to associate myself too publicly with a political stance, lest I be wrong and/or the environment changes.”
I can understand this fear, but generally if you choose a stance based on compassion for all beings you’ll be in the right in the long run.
This particular issue was sparked by Coinbase not taking a stance on Black Lives Matter, which they are wrong about. Standing for dismantling racism is always correct.
On the other hand working with crimecurrency is always wrong, so already there we can say that every coinbase employee who stays is evil.
> Standing for dismantling racism is always correct.
As opposed to standing against it, yes. As opposed to "we're just building a juicer, man", no.
Not every group of people "must" take an active stance on every social issue. If they did then they would do nothing but that.
This is why I'm hesitant to invest in Silicon Valley stock at the moment. If this trend continues they'll spend 100% of their time "making a stand", and not innovating or trying to fulfil their stated mission.
I have a responsibility to keep my own house in order. To make sure I'm not racist, homophobic, etc... I don't have a responsibility to spend my life on a cause you select for me, even if that cause is just.
If I were to pick a cause it would be that the central organization for a leading religion is actively harboring and protecting child rapists from international law enforcement. But still I would not, like you, say that every organization that doesn't march under that banner are "wrong about" that.
Companies are not "supporting status quo of child rapists" if they don't put up banners on their website. They're just not. That's nonsense.
You can't condemn me for not marching with you. That's fascism.
Funny, I don't see anyone complaining that Fruit Gushers hasn't taken a stand on child pornography?
I will disagree somewhat with the people who say that companies never have a place for political stuff. If you are any company involved in South Africa during apartheid you should choose a side on apartheid and voice that position.
If BLM means just the simple definition of what the words imply (that black lives matter), there's no point in saying it. Because there's literally no one on the other side. I suspect that's not what it means, because saying a broader statement "All Lives Matter" seems to be considered a kind of slur.
So "Black Lives Matter" means something deeper. More like "Black people are killed indiscriminately by police in this country. The cops get away with it, and it's a huge problem." That is full of assumptions and political beliefs that reasonable people can disagree about. And I don't see why every company should take a side on that issue.
> Funny, I don't see anyone complaining that Fruit Gushers hasn't taken a stand on child pornography?
Child pornography, from what I can tell, is not a controversial issue. Most companies haven't made statements about their views on murder, theft, and slavery either. But if the nation were prominently split over whether murder, theft, slavery, or child pornography are good things, I would hope some companies would make a statement.
Actually child pornography is a controversial issue, because it’s often use as a “think of the children” excuse to censor the internet or ban cryptography.
The nation isn't prominently split over whether racism is bad or whether black lives matter.
It is, however, prominently split over whether the specific, contentious version of "anti-racism" though promulgated by the likes of Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo - "Critical Race Theory", to call it by its academic name - is the One True Anti-Racism that it claims to be, or whether it's counterproductive, divisive, anti-liberal and on track to set race relations back by decades.
Companies have as much moral obligation to state support for CRT as they do to state their support for Trotskyism or Randian Objectivism.
Standing for dismantling racism is always correct, but that's distinct from explicitly stating support for the Black Lives Matter political organization.
If you don't agree with some of their stated objectives, tactics, leadership, it should be OK to refuse to offer support, and that doesn't automatically imply a tacit support of racism, and it doesn't automatically imply resistance to lower-case black lives matter.
> but generally if you choose a stance based on compassion for all beings you’ll be in the right in the long run
I like capitalism and the free market because I think it's the best system to give most prosperity to a broad spectrum of society. I believe that I take this stance based on compassion but I can assure you that this view is not popular among other people who are in the compassion camp.
You can disagree about the methods to achieve the thing while still agreeing about what the compassionate stance is. We would likely agree that moving people out of poverty is a compassionate thing, even if we disagree about what the best way to do that is.
No one is asking Coinbase to take a stance and say that the police must be abolished, or that the way forward for Black liberation is X policy. They were simply asking them to acknowledge that racism exists and Black lives do in fact matter.
Standing for dismantling racism might always be correct, but burning down predominately black neighborhoods doesn't seem to relate to that in a positive way. You can't dismantle racism by causing devastation in the name of black people.
Is "apolitical" stance a bad thing? Isn't it the default, safe?
I lived in country where you had to be "political" to be in management, it didn't end up well (East Europe, Soviet Union), I always (naively?) thought that West countries were wiser.
Fellow Eastern European immigrant here. It's hopeless, dude. It's USSR 2.0 being built in our lifetimes. People here didn't see where this road ends, so they've got no idea what awaits them.
Count me as well. It is horrifying how otherwise well intentioned people are busy pushing the society we were escaping to into the society we were running away from.
"Apolitical" is the default. It's another way of saying, "The way things are is fine".
The problem is that this is, in itself, a political stance.
An example could be climate change. If Coinbase is doing nothing to make energy more green (even if that's just writing amicus briefs or blog posts), then they are effectively saying, "The way things are is fine."
> "Apolitical" is ... another way of saying, "The way things are is fine".
I disagree strongly & think you're dead wrong here. Apolitical in the workplace is saying "we come to work to align on & collaborate in working towards shared goals and those goals are what we should be focused on at work. People who share this goal (coinbase, make money, promote crypto whatever) may vote R, D, or not vote at all. We can all still work together on our shared goal."
It means people with different views can work together on stuff they do agree on rather than "I can't work with anyone who doesn't vote the same as me" which is what social-justice-in-the-workplace seems to lead to, for better or worse.
It is NOT an endorsement of the status quo, it's a recognition that you and I might both oppose the status quo for completely different reasons that have nothing to do with work.
The work you do together is political. It of course isn’t necessarily directly engaged with USA national politics, but it’s directly engaged in politics.
Politics is a very broad and encompassing concept. It isn’t synonymous with some nation’s representative political system.
Right, so we can say "we both think that better backup software primarily targeting the enterprise and government market is good for society" (and as you say that is a statement with political ramifications) and still disagree on just about everything else. For instance we don't have to agree on whether or not abortion should be legal, the president should be impeached, taxes should be raised on rich people, or how gun control should be implemented (if at all).
Yes, you can do that. That's how things work in a pluralistic society. The only point being made though is that that "we" it not acting 'outside of politics' or 'avoiding politics' or being apolitical.
When I go to work I focus on things to the exclusion of other things. That's fine, but we shouldn't think that on entering the office of my employer corporation I am somehow exiting the political realm. That would be engaging in a blindness to the politics of my employer's business practices, and the politics of my office workplace.
Wouldn't your compensation imply that the employer is paying you for your time and expertise so that you further their business? If you disagree with what they're trying to do and management disagrees, then shouldn't you just quit?
I'm not sure what politicization of the workplace is intended to lead to. At some point people have to put their differences aside to work on a shared goal. If you disagree with the shared goal then why join in the first place?
> I'm not sure what politicization of the workplace is intended to lead to.
Statements like this make me think we're not on the same page here. The workplace is always political. It can not be politicized in the sense of changing from apolitical to political.
"Politicized" has to mean then that political conflict has escalated or the political dimension of the workplace has become more visible.
In this sense what politicization of the workplace is intended to lead to is political change, that is, a change associated with the decision making in groups, or change in other forms of power relations between individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status.
> If you disagree with the shared goal then why join in the first place?
Political conflict in the workplace is in the vast majority of cases not like this. When thinking "politics in the workplace", the typical issues are around worker safety, worker compensation and benefits, the status of lgbt employees, or sexism.
A little while ago Github employees protested the involvement of their company with the ICE department of the USA government. In that case, could you simply say to the protesting employees, "Well, you must just disagree with the shared goal of the company and so you should quit". I think it's obvious that would be a ridiculous response given the complaints of the employees.
I mixed up two types of politics in the workplace in my other comment.
What I generally understand as "politicization of the workplace" is more around employees talking about issues they care about unrelated to what the company is doing and creating an hostile environment for dissenting views to theirs. If you think an issue unrelated to what you're doing is more important than having a good working environment to work on that shared project, then I still think you should just quit since you're not fulfilling your obligations as an employee.
As for the other kind:
>A little while ago Github employees protested the involvement of their company with the ICE department of the USA government. In that case, could you simply say to the protesting employees, "Well, you must just disagree with the shared goal of the company and so you should quit".
I believe you should tell them exactly that if they voiced their concern to management but they still decided to go forward with the deal. What else are you going to do? Sow a negative/divisive work environment because your political views are more important than the product everyone is working on?
Politics are quite diverse, if every employee were to bring in negativity over every deal they disagree on, you wouldn't have collaboration and your product would not exist.
Being apolitical in the workplace is a way of making it possible to work together for a common goal with people who are very different than you and have very different opinions.
You can still be very politically active on your own time.
You've misunderstood. Not all politics belong in work, but all work is political.
You cannot escape politics in work, because every workplace is making decisions about benefits, wages, their use of energy, who they hire, who they donate to, how accessible their products are, etc. All of which have a political component.
An aluminum smelter, for instance, uses lots of electricity. How they choose to source that electricity is absolutely a politically linked decision.
Just because I don’t bring up politics with my barber, doesn’t mean that either of us don’t care about political issues. The proposal here is to compartmentalize.
If I don’t know someone’s political stance, my default isn’t to assume that they think “things are fine”, my default is to assume that they have some set of beliefs that are irrelevant to that particular interaction with them.
You, I, and Coinbase are all doing nothing to promote Joe Danna's campaign for sheriff of Harris County, Texas. Does that mean that we're effectively endorsing the status quo and the incumbent Ed Gonzalez? Or does it just mean that the Harris County sheriff's office has nothing to do with us?
You've made a strawman. I didn't say that all politics must exist in the workplace.
Work is inherently political. There's no escaping that your workplace is making decisions about wages, benefits, access to their products, how they spend their donation dollars, if they support candidates, who they employ, etc. etc. etc. All of these are political decisions that (I believe) are inescapable and also that workers should have input into.
A web design shop could be a co-op or it could be a standard llc with a founder on top. It might make price services to be accessible to everyone or exclusively focus on enterprise software. They might donate to a local politician. Or rent in a particular area of town. Or purchase carbon offsets for their energy use. Etc. etc.
All of these are inherently political decisions. There's no such thing as an Apolitical workplace.
I wouldn't deny, and Coinbase didn't deny, that employees should be able to discuss decisions about wages, benefits, products, employment, etc. If you'd like to use the word "political" to refer to anything that affects society in any way, by all means go ahead, but you have to recognize that other people who say they're "apolitical" aren't using your definition. They just mean that they're not engaging in arguments like "we've gotta elect suchandsuch candidate!" or "we've gotta embrace suchandsuch slogan!"
Companies aren't, and shouldn't be, superPACs. Getting Coinbase to use green energy is the job of government regulations and incentives, not political crusades from Coinbase's management. If the government isn't doing this, it's a problem to solve with different policy makers, not by trying to force all companies to have party platforms.
The problem with this view is that it is hopelessly uncomprehensive. When you start on the politics stuff, where do you stop?
Should Coinbase have a political opinion on native rights in South Australia? What about the status and social standing of Burakumin in Japan? What about the Indigenous goups in Taiwan: the Ami, Atayal, Paiwan, Bunun, Puyuma, Rukai, Tsou, Saisiyat, Tao (Yami), Thao, Kavalan, Taroko (also Truku), and Sakizaya?
I think Coinbase should have said "we are a deeply political company concentrated on a single issue to the exclusion of all else. If you want to work where there is more than a single political focus, we are not a good fit".
You can't optimise in all directions, and being clear about what is in scope and out of scope is vital, not just in tech but in life.
> An example could be climate change. If Coinbase is doing nothing to make energy more green (even if that's just writing amicus briefs or blog posts), then they are effectively saying, "The way things are is fine."
You think every single company that isn't writing amicus briefs or blog posts about climate change is taking a political stance against fighting climate change?
No, but coinbase is a company that thrives on carbon intensive technology. If they are not doing what they can to shift the scales of cryptocurrency toward more sustainable proofs, while at the same time promoting cryptocurrency, they are accelerating carbon pollution.
Having an apolitical workplace is not the same as that workplace saying that all things are fine. It just means that you keep discussion of political topics that are orthogonal to the mission of the company out of the workplace. A company is optimized around its mission and the usual hot button political issues can only serve to be a distraction that saps productivity and effectiveness.
So no, this is definitely not true within this context.
You have life outside of work where you can be political.
I believe it's the job of companies to be 'good citizens' and only to be active politically if it's either really part of the mission statement - or - unavoidable, perhaps in the case of NFL, they had a huge communications issue.
Beyond that, protest at your hearts content, just not at the office.
Finally - you can make a political choice in your work if you want merely by choosing disciplines/companies. If you really want to 'push green' then getting into that industry might be a good personal choice.
Nope. It means: I came here to program, not to listen to you drone on and on about why Trump is the greatest candidate ever. (I quit a job partly because of someone doing this constantly.) I also quit a subsequent job because of a leftist guy who was simply unbearable. I get paid to write software. When I go to work, that’s what I want to do. If you want to annoy me with unrelated trivia, work is not the place.
I think you misunderstand. I'm not saying all politics belong at work, but that all work involves politics.
I, likewise, am not interested in discussing presidential candidates with my coworkers. But every employer makes decisions about wages, benefits, donations, access to their products and services, energy consumption, their local communities, support of political candidates, etc.
No workplace is an island, and if a workplace is going to engage in those things, I want to be able to discuss how my particular workplace interacts with them. (E.g. if I worked in a factory, maybe I'd want to talk about how the factory sourced energy.)
There's nothing apolitical about forbidding employees from talking about certain sensitive topics at work, especially where what's "sensitive" is a subjective decision by management.
This has been discussed extensively in the previous threads on Coinbase, but banning the discussion of certain topics in the workplace is itself a political stance. Very much so.
It's as political as banning goofing off at work. You aren't hired to spend the working day debating politics with your co workers, just like you aren't hired to blow off the day playing Halo in the back room with your coworkers. You are hired to do the tasks described in your job and that alone.
this “just do your job” talk only comes out when we’re talking about activism. the rest of the time y’all are saying “we’re a family of co-owners trying to change the world”
Is banning discussion of religion in the workplace a political/religious stance?
Or is it just an attempt to be decent and get people to do the thing they were hired to do, which is to make their investors more fucking money? As a shareholder in several tech companies, I don't like the idea of people having discussions like these on my dime. How many bugs that were never fixed with Youtube Music, for example, could have been fixed if there weren't shit heads sitting around having flame wars on my fucking dime?
> Is banning discussion of religion in the workplace a political/religious stance?
(Please forgive any flawed logic below - I assure you it's an oversight. I'm posting this in good faith.)
I'd say yes, but basically in the same way Coinbase's band on political speech in the office is a stance.
Consider religious people whose theology holds that they should attempt to convert everybody in their circles, even their professional circles.
It seems to me that banning that is tantamount to saying either (a) their theology is wrong, or (b) it's not wrong but the employer is resisting it regardless, or (c) the business has no place for employees holding those beliefs.
Have they banned the discussion of certain topics entirely? Or have they just said that they don't want the company as an entity to get involved with these topics?
There's a difference between saying "we don't think it's appropriate for us to take an official stance on X, but feel free to discuss X on your lunch breaks like you would any other topic" and "thou shalt not mention X in any context while an employee of this company"
My wife is mostly liberal from a US political perspective, but happens to be opposed to abortion. I happen to disagree in nuanced ways with her on this topic. My business.
According to my coworkers, who discovered this because they saw her bumper sticker when she picked me up one day, this is because she is "ignorant and doesn't know the facts" and "if she knew the facts she wouldn't think that way" and that I "need to talk to her and explain them."
They think that, due to their profession, they are intelligent, and therefore anyone who disagrees with them about a complex topic is either less intelligent or uninformed. It's the epitome of youthful arrogance. Naturally, none of them have kids and really don't see the nuance of the issue. It's insufferable, and at one point I was getting ready to clobber a guy who I am 100% positive has never been hit in his life.
Politics should be left out of work. And yes, by convincing a broad spectrum of the American public that Trump won the election because of a few facebook ads bought by Russian assets, instead of simply saying that they had a shitty candidate, the Democratic party has essentially pressured tech companies to have political filtering on their staff. If Facebook had Republicans working at senior levels in their company, they would have been subjected to even more harassment from Dem leaders who scapegoated them for their loss in 2016. Facebook has former Democratic party operatives at high levels in their company. They don't and can't have anyone from the Republican party. They get unending amounts of shit for Thiel being on their board.
But you're completely wrong. Facebook does have Republicans at senior levels in their company - Republicans as in "Joel Kaplan, vice-president of global public policy at Facebook, manages the company’s relationships with policymakers around the world. A former law clerk to archconservative justice Antonin Scalia on the supreme court, he served as deputy chief of staff for policy under former president George W Bush from 2006 to 2009, joining Facebook two years later."
I don't like her bumper sticker either, and I find political bumper stickers to be annoying.
However, if I worked at an oil company, and had tons of very conservative co-workers, would you think it was ok for them to do the same thing to me if my wife pulled up and had rainbow/equality stickers on her car, or pro-choice stickers? I'm curious if you have a double standard on this topic due to prejudice against my wife's viewpoint (which my coworkers clearly have).
To me it's not about the political point. But about the hypocrisy of one person pushing their political views and then getting annoyed when others respond.
That's his personal property he can do whatever he wants whether you agree to it or not. It's different from literally speaking to your coworker about it.
You and me both man. I HATE that she has that sticker, because it does nothing to persuade anybody, and does plenty to invite harassment. Actually got into a big argument with her one day about it after a highly aggressive, angry driver was road raging on her.
I think it is a bit more nuanced than that, and that the line is really hard to draw.
If you wife for example got a manager that thought the females had no place in the workplace and should be a stay at home wife and was open about this, would that be ok?
If you are gay, and your manager loudly say that being gay is a sin, would that be ok?
I get that it can feel like the other way too, it probably feels hostile to be conservative in a fairly liberal company. But being open and supportive of all your employees seems like good and understandable business decision. That of course includes being welcoming to conservative people. If you think your coworkers are a disgrace, no matter the reason, I think it would be smart to not make this known.
Why is the manager talking about religion and sinfulness of certain private preferences at work? They are unprofessional and I would ask them to stop such conversations. Should they persist, I will raise it and if need be - start thinking about working elsewhere.
If the first manager fires her because of her gender, we can take him to court for unlawful dismissal.
There are many mean individuals out there. That’s because we all have capacity for discrimination and ultimately violence. The call to stop discussing politics at work might result in fewer such frictions and keep us focused on the job at hand. A more productive and socially cohesive outcome in my opinion.
it's not apolitical, it's just giving yourself a formal policy note to point to for any future need to tell people to "shut the fuck up and get to work"
See, this is intentional. They’re squishing the widespread (and somewhat bipartisan) support for the Black Lives Matter movement, a protest movement against police abuse, into the phrase “political activism”, which isn’t entirely untrue.
The problem is that “political activism” also encompasses the ongoing american culture war, which indeed does not belong at work in any capacity. Reasonable people don’t want to engage with the culture war at work, and, increasingly, ever.
They want you to think the latter when they mean the former, and support them. The problem is that the “activism” they’re complaining about isn’t the culture war, it’s the fact that there was a widespread social movement to protest racist police abuse, and Coinbase management didn’t feel it important enough for them to participate. Many of their staff took an issue with that, which has absolutely nothing to do with the sort of “who are you voting for?” thing that springs to mind when you think of “political activism at work”.
Don’t get me wrong, advocating for human rights is indeed political activism, which is why their technique is so effective.
> “I’m worried that the severance package was too good”
Yeah... I'm genuinely curious how many people actually quit over the "apolitical" stance, vs employees that were just unhappy with the job in general and took this convenient opportunity to leave with a pretty sweet deal.
Remember that this is a press release, not independent journalism. This press release tries hard to position it as "people left because of the severance was really good" because that narrative is in Coinbase's interest. That may be true, but it's also possible most of 60 people quit through this program because they were upset about it.
In an ideal world a reporter could answer your question by talking to many of the people who quit and ask what motivated their decision, but the severance package almost certainly came with an NDA that would make doing so impossible.
So we'll likely never know. Probably one should assume that the answer doesn't look great for Coinbase's narrative; if they thought it would, they might have done a survey and published data from it.
Independent journalism (or really any journalism) is also narrative-optimized, it's just that the optimization incentives are different from corporate comms. In neither case — in no case — are you getting the unvarnished truth. That's simply not available, however much we'd like it to be.
> Yeah... I'm genuinely curious how many people actually quit over the "apolitical" stance, vs employees that were just unhappy with the job in general and took this convenient opportunity to leave with a pretty sweet deal.
Getting people who are unhappy (politics aside) to leave sounds more like "the severance package was a nice move" than "the severance package was too good."
Hmm that's a pretty interesting way of thinking about it, I didn't even consider it from that angle.
Might be a silly idea, but I wonder if more companies would benefit from doing something like this on a semi-regular basis, i.e. giving unhappy employees the opportunity to leave with a decent "severance" package?
Netflix takes the stance 'adequate performance gets a generous severance package.' You can read more in their culture doc that made the rounds a few years ago.
The problem with this is adverse selection: the employees who are worth the most elsewhere relative to their current comp would be the quickest to leave.
They obviously wanted to make sure it was a sweet enough deal to serve its purpose. I would imagine there were employees that took the deal for non-political reasons. It would make a heck of a bonus, if you were already heading out the door.
Frankly, giving the non-offended but unsatisfied employees a ready out is probably good for Coinbase in the long run.
Somewhat unrelated, but on the topic of severance: Back before I broke into the software field, when I was working a retail job, I was working for company that had an unwritten policy that they didn't hire any fulltime employees, all new hired were part time. There were, however a number of "grandfathered" full time employees who had been there quite a while. The company ended up trying to merge with two other companies and after that, decided that they would give remaining full-time employees a choice: be moved to part time employment, or take a serverance check and leave. To little suprise, a good many took option 2.
That employee is distanced enough from the idea that people would genuinely want to leave that I kinda laugh when I read their quote. COBRA alone would eat up most of the severance.
Either people managed to get through a _whole interview process_ in a week, or they're fine with the idea of being jobless during the worst economy in 12 years, or they price the benefit of not being there fairly high.
Which then leads us to how the whole argument is blinkered. It reduces decisions to a cost benefit analysis where a significant part of the benefit doesn't have a market price. Then, it questions if the benefit was too large, but by definition the arguer is still at the company and thus believes the unpricable part of the benefit isn't worth enough enough to leave.
A single software engineer paying for full price for high premium plan on COBRA would be spending around $400[1], over the whole 18 months of doing that it would be $7,200 which would be less than one month's paycheck on a $160,000 salary.
A cursory look at h1bdata.info shows that Coinbase pays plenty of H1B's that much, on the low side.
Your view is a little exaggerated.
There isn't a downside here. If you were there a very short amount of time, just remove it from your resume and have a gap. Its inconsequential for software engineers. If you were there for over a year, take your vested shares, leave it on your resume, and still coast. If you were already interviewing and had another offer, do the same.
[1] To my surprise, people are paying WAY more for health insurance. Are they San Francisco/Bay Area residents? Unknown. Are they individuals or paying the family rates? Unknown. Are they using the most competitive providers? Unknown. Is Coinbase still covering health insurance for people on severance as if they were employees with COBRA starting after the severance period is over, adjusting all of our math? Unclear.
I also want to share that I paid for COBRA $1,660 a month for for my family coverage (spouse + 2 kids) so $400 is probably not true in many cases even if single it seems really a low estimate
The one time I was on COBRA, under 3 years ago, I paid close to $700/month, and I was the only person included in my coverage. Health insurance premiums have very likely gone up since then, and family sizes above 1 (such as even I have now) would cost meaningfully more than that. Smaller companies than that employer might also have higher total premium cost per employee, if they aim for good coverage.
This was NYC and was high quality and inclusive coverage.
Kaiser Permanente is from what I've heard an unusually good deal without anything comparable in NYC or most of the rest of the US, though not without their own weaknesses in areas like mental health coverage and dispute resolution.
You're right, if you don't have a family and don't have _any_ paycheck deductions, don't pay _any_ taxes, and use numbers 33% below the average cost, it seems small.
Survey of purported 2019 data shows $570 * 12 = $6,840 for individual, $19,000 for family (for some reason, no monthly cost there)
So lets say you only pay the feds income tax, and don't bother with medicaid, social security, state income tax, 401K, any other witholdings whatsoever - you'll earn 85% of $160,000, or $136,000. Divided into 26 paychecks, $5230 biweekly.
If you're single, yearly premium would be covered by 2.6 weeks of work, or 11% of your severance. If you have a family, 7.26 weeks of work, or 30% of your severance.
> If you're single, yearly premium would be covered by 2.6 weeks of work, or 11% of your severance. If you have a family, 7.26 weeks of work, or 30% of your severance.
yeah this is a better metric than my napkin math above.
it is also important to elaborate that we are talking about 4 months of payment with continued health insurance included, and calling that savings for an additional 12 months of paying for health insurance.
Software seems to be doing okay, jobs-wise. The number of recruiters showing up in my inbox hasn't changed. I think health insurance is included in the severance.
I haven't seen the details here, but I've been laid off twice in the last two years, in both cases when "the employer provided COBRA" they meant they are paying my COBRA premiums. This showed up as a cheque, on top of my severance pay, for the expected cost of COBRA premiums plus an appropriate amount to pay for the taxes on that payout.
I believe COBRA is available for up to 36 months after your employment ends in California by law. As a result, I don’t know how to read “6 months COBRA” from the excerpt of the severance email besides “we will pay 6 months of employer premiums.”
COBRA means employees paying the employer premium, by guaranteeing COBRA, an employer is saying "We won't stop paying the health insurance company for _everybody else's insurance_, so you'll still have someone to pay" - it's a great PR jiu jitsu move, I didn't realize until this thread how confusing it is - I'm only familiar with it because sadly I had to sunset a company in California.
That is the most convoluted interpretation of offering COBRA, and is almost certainly incorrect. You're referring to the fact that an employer can technically terminate COBRA by ending all health insurance plans. But Coinbase would have to stop offering any health insurance to all their current employees for this to occur. If that happens (I'm virtually certain it won't), there would be an actual employee riot/exodus and the tech media would be all over that story.
So are you saying the Coinbase CEO simply said something to the effect of “we will maintain our insurance plans for 6 months company-wide”? That seems disingenuous.
Agreed. I think there are only two options for a company:
1) don't allow any activism in the company
2) allow ALL types of activism in the company
Right now, it seems most companies only allow liberal activism but not conservative activism. This is a recipe for problems because it's arbitrary and not democratic.
It’s way worse than that. Even centrists and liberals are silenced by the vocal mob for merely questioning the validity of certain policies or initiatives that claim to have some righteous sounding goal, even when there is evidence that the proposed policy is more likely to be harmful than helpful. For example, it should not be controversial to debate the merits of Black Lives Matter, but since the alternate reality that certain people want to project doesn’t hold up well against facts and data, it’s easier just to brand you a racist (or whatever-ist, depending on the topic) instead. There is a ton of self-censorship and coercion by these activists asserting their supposed moral authority, which is not a good road to go down.
In an industry full of data scientists and engineers, it amazes me how people go along with this narrative that disparate outcomes among members of arbitrary group identities is evidence of discrimination. We know that is not a valid application of statistics, yet people who know better still keep repeating it.
Not only will you be viciously attacked for questioning BLM, but an open source maintainer at Facebook was publicly attacked by coworkers for politely declining a request to put a BLM banner on the website for an open source project (he stated he wanted to remain apolitical, without giving an opinion).
Social advocacy is a spiritual replacement to religion and supporters are even more fervent.
It depends on if your use of BLM means "lives of those of African-decent matter" or "the Black Lives Matter movement/group".
Personally i would expect the former to have more widespread support in America. The latter stands for many things that could be more controversial in the states. A DuckDuckGo for "blm demands"[0] returns the following NPR piece[1] from DC-based interviews. It lists BLM demands as:
- Defund Police
- No New Jails
- Decriminalize Sex Work
- Police-Free Schools
- Drop Charges Against Protesters
- End Cash Bail In Maryland
- Ban Stop And Frisk
That any race matters more than any other race. If someone put "X Lives Matter" on a t-shirt, where X is any other race, they would be attacked, or at least fired from their job.
Similarly, you can go to work wearing a blue Biden hat, and nothing would happen. However, if you went to work wearing a red Trump hat, it might be your last day at work.
THIS is why it’s so insidious. BLM is a well funded political organization with self-described marxist founders. It has about as much to do with black lives as the Nazi party had to do with “national socialism”.
Nobody thinks black lives don’t matter. This is very different from supporting BLM, however. Many prominent black public figures have come out denouncing BLM, and it isn’t because they think their own lives don’t matter.
The name is purely orwellian PR trickery that you can’t argue with, just like “antifa” is. It’s a remarkably effective tactic because most people assume it just means what the words say.
Do companies have an obligation to be democratic? Are democratic companies common?
Protected classes aside, if I start a company I can choose to hire or exclude whomever I choose. I could start a company that only hires registered Republicans, or only people who can't stand the taste of bananas. If this turns out to be a bad business decision (which it probably is), the market will punish me and I'll eventually lose to smarter competitors. Right?
I didn't realize that, you are likely correct! I could start such a company in my state, but I'd have to be very careful with jurisdictions. In practice most companies I'm familiar with have official policies banning political discrimination across the board, which makes sense considering the importance of California in tech.
I actually find it quite curious that you’re not allowed to discriminate based on religion, but allowed to discriminate based on political views, throughout the West.
One is a freely chosen personal belief, and the other is a freely chosen personal belief.
You can't discriminate against certain protected classes, but yes, it boggles my mind a little bit that someone could think "a corporation" is anything other than one of the most authoritarian, top-down governance structures ever devised.
If it's voluntarily formed, it's not authoritarian.
When a political faction deems that those who refuse to pay half their income for a highly benevolent social program, will face punitive legal consequences, that is authoritarian. I only bring this up because I suspect you are in support of these kinds of programs.
Man recoils from trouble, from suffering; and yet he is condemned by nature to the suffering of privation, if he does not take the trouble to work. He has to choose, then, between these two evils. What means can he adopt to avoid both? There remains now, and there will remain, only one way, which is, to enjoy the labor of others. Such a course of conduct prevents the trouble and the satisfaction from preserving their natural proportion, and causes all the trouble to become the lot of one set of persons, and all the satisfaction that of another. This is the origin of slavery and of plunder, whatever its form may be - whether that of wars, imposition, violence, restrictions, frauds, etc. - monstrous abuses, but consistent with the thought which has given them birth. Oppressors should be detested and resisted - they can hardly be called absurd.
Slavery is disappearing, thank heaven! and, on the other hand, our disposition to defend our property prevents direct and open plunder from being easy.
One thing, however, remains - it is the original inclination which exists in all men to divide the lot of life into two parts, throwing the trouble upon others, and keeping the satisfaction for themselves. It remains to be shown under what new form this sad tendency is manifesting itself.
The oppressor no longer acts directly and with his own powers upon his victim. No, our conscience has become too sensitive for that. The tyrant and his victim are still present, but there is an intermediate person between them, which is the State - that is, the Law itself.
Why is it a fact? I'm independent, so I usually let the other two sides battle it out among themselves, while I stand by and am usually quite impressed by the sophisticated and clever arguments going both ways. I have yet to be swayed either way. Still, it's interesting!
In a way it's an optimization. My hope is that one day, when the two sides have finally come to a conclusion as to which one is right, I can join that one, and save myself a lot of trouble in the meantime ;)
Where do you draw the line on what is political? Is wearing a mask political? What about calling someone by their preferred pronoun, or recognizing gay marriage?
Me too. I can't see why staying in my comfort zone is regarded as political. One solution is to just get comfy. No politics involved, just plain survivalism, nothing wrong.
It’s political because a number of hugely important issues call us all to action (child poverty, climate change, homelessness) and those issues are and will continue to put vulnerable people in danger of death and suffering. Staying in your comfort zone is likely an expression of indifference to them as vanishingly few people are comfortable when tackling these problems.
You might adopt a political position that your privileged position of safety and comfort is not subject to any particular obligations to engage with others and become involved in society’s problems, but that would be politics all the same.
I actually agree with you. My comment was provocative in the sense that I would surely immediately become engaged politically if I was out of this comfort zone.
This is getting down-voted but honestly I agree. Silence is a professional courtesy when it comes to certain ideas. For instance, I don't talk about how I find certain parts of 4chan incredibly hilarious. As a black man, I'd definitely have co-workers blow up if I mentioned this at work - granted they feel more than entitled to talk about all sorts of things that I wouldn't even talk about if I was at a bar with friends (fringe lefty politics and sexually explicit things).
I feel this. As someone who grew up in the 4chan hey-day, the internet I fell in love with was extremely inappropriate and anarchic. Shooting the shit about whatever inane thing 4chan was going on about were the source of hilarious and open conversations we used to have amongst friends. Don't get me wrong, 4chan is wrong, messed up, socially deviant and not something to look up to. But all the people I know who used to browse that crazy site ended up being normal, well adjusted people. The social climate is so tense nowadays I would never think to talk about good old 4chan openly.
It’s a bummer that Coinbase’s ploy to intentionally conflate not supporting the Black Lives Matter movement (that is, a clear implicit endorsement of the status quo) with generalized left/right-political-activism-at-work seems to have worked, at least for a lot of people who aren’t paying attention.
This isn’t about office politics, or political activism at work. This is about Coinbase making an explicit vote for the status quo of American racism, and trying to deflect the heat they’re taking for that by confusing people into thinking that this is about standard political discussion.
It makes me really angry that they would do this.
It makes me really sad that it worked.
I guess with that much money you can hire really good PR people to shape the narrative into exactly what you want, and dupe tons of people who are rightfully tired of the american culture war into thinking that this has anything to do with that.
The reality is thar vast majority of those who do not support the BLM movement are not at all racist. I believe that this movement has made our society more racist and divided than it was before.
I’m responding to “I believe that this movement has made our society more racist and divided than it was before.”
Effectively this means the parent thinks that no movement should be made at all, ergo the status quo should continue.
You can debate the merits of the demands that BLM puts forth but how on earth is this not implying that the protests in response to police killings are making society more racist?
>This is about Coinbase making an explicit vote for the status quo of American racism, and trying to deflect the heat they’re taking for that by confusing people into thinking that this is about standard political discussion.
One of my favorite things about this new type of political activism is that words no longer mean what we all understood them to mean in ages past. "Explicit" would mean something along the lines of Coinbase or Armstrong saying "we support the status quo of American racism", as you have alleged. Alas, I've read all these blog posts and there is no sentence that matches or even could be remotely construed to resemble the one you have wrote.
Context matters. When you say to someone, for example, that you're going to do X unless they object, and they stand silent, then their silence is, in that instance, interpreted as explicit consent for you to do X in many legal circumstances.
A good example recently from current events was the US president being asked in a press conference to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, "win, lose, or draw". He responded with "we'll have to see what happens". In the context of the question being posed, that's a clear and explicit failure to commit, given that context.
Context can entirely invert the meaning of two identical statements, and, in the right context, a failure to do a certain thing, or even remaining silent, can indeed be an explicit statement.
Another case comes from 2013, Salinas v Texas, when the police were questioning a murder suspect who suddenly became quiet during questioning when the topic turned to the murder. They were able to use this sudden silence as incriminating circumstantial evidence, given that specific context. This resulted in silence in the face of questioning by the government having to be explicitly invoked as such to not be potentially incriminating, which is an odd state of affairs and probably not the best outcome, but you can however tell that those judges weren't completely insane. Silence after saying "I affirmatively invoke my right to remain silent" is very different than silence after you were just answering police questions voluntarily, until they asked you about a murder they thought you committed.
Silence can speak volumes, explicitly, given the circumstances preceding and surrounding that silence.
Desmond Tutu, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, once said:
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”
Of course context matters, but you're still conflating or redefining words here. Each of your examples is an example of implicit agreement, not explicit, because of the context provided. That's what context does ... it allows you to make an inference about how people are feeling or thinking about a certain topic when they don't explicitly say so. Your inference may be right, but it may also be wrong.
If in your parent comment you had accused Coinbase/Armstrong of implicitly supporting the status quo (as you define it) I would've said "yeah, sure, if I squint hard enough and wash it through the 'silence is violence' filters I can see how you'd think that".
Another troubling thing I want to point out here is your comment is part of an accelerating trend where people, particularly from but not limited to those on the left, consistently attribute maximum malice of intent to peoples' comments (said and unsaid) or their actions. That is, imo, one of the reasons these environments are so toxic, because people are immediately put on the defensive.
I think this very view is likely what made the coinbase workplace so toxic and uninviting. "Black lives matter" is a statement that everyone already agrees with. "Black Lives Matter" is a political organization with political objectives, including the de-emphasis of the nuclear family, socialist economics, and explicit financial funnelling to the Democrat party.
It's a moral "package deal." The idea being that if you reject BLM for its bad politics, you reject that black lives matter. And if you accept it, you also accept a bunch of other shit you're not actually for.
BLM should be recognized for the moral "package deal" that it is, and vehemently rejected. It's dishonest.
It's not Coinbase that is conflating anything, BLM itself is a conflation of ideas.
Oh come on. Have you ever tried to find one person who actually, literally believes that the lives of black people do not matter?
You'll certainly find 11-year olds in Call of Duty who will say it for shits and giggles to control you; you won't find anybody who actually believes it.
I personally know dozens of people who don't care at all about black lives one way or the other. I've seen hundreds more that I don't know personally demonstrate that belief publicly, many of them police officers.
The disparities in policing, application of police violence, and prosecution are well-documented.
This is why the movement exists. It's a real problem, whether you personally have experienced it or not, whether you personally wish to acknowledge it or not.
There are many people out there who simply do not think that it matters whether or not black people live or die. Many of them are in uniform.
When a group of employees demand that their employers engage in political activism, what they are asking for is the ability to commandeer the resources of the company, whether it be its reputation, money, or labor to advance their political objective. They want to amplify their impact beyond what they can accomplish with their personal resources. I wonder how these same people feel about the political contributions of companies from the opposing end of the spectrum. Would they say "Get corporate power out of politics!"?
While I agree, I think you have it ultimately backwards. The push for politicizing the workplace is being driven from the top. Jeff Bezos is just one of many wealthy Americans who own large stakes in both media and tech companies. Their media companies promote diversity because they think it will produce positive global social effects, but their tech companies resist it presumably because they think it creates negative local economic effects (why else wouldn't Google be %15 Black and 25% Hispanic?) Assuming the positive global effects, its a "tragedy of the commons" situation where ironically the strongest pressure on individual companies comes from employees who consume the media being produced by the owners of those companies instead of those owners directly.
This argument is always brought up. But it's insincere, because you're just arguing that the nazies are bad, not that IBM was bad for helping the nazies.
Because if you were, you should also argue that during WW2, any companies that helped the Allies should also befall the same criticism (that of being politically aligned rather than be neutral).
It's true that IBM sold unit record (punch card) equipment to the Nazis, but we can be pretty damn sure IBM didn't sell them computers, mainframe or otherwise, because they didn't exist.
"The Nazis used Hollerith equipment that IBM's German subsidiary during the 1930s – Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen GmbH (Dehomag) – supplied... As did hundreds of foreign-owned companies that did business in Germany at that time"
Something is off about those listings. The majority of the transactions went to "Brian Forde for Congress" and have the memos like " .03533216 BITCOINS SOLD VIA COINBASE - PURCHASER UNKNOWN". I don't think these are contributions by Coinbase, but Bitcoin contributions that went through Coinbase. There is probably some byzantine election funding rule that allowed or forced these recipients to list Coinbase as the"source" of anonymous Bitcoin donations.
There's not supposed to be "anonymous" donations, that's the entire point of reporting requirements. If Coinbase is hiding political donors, that's gotta be against election law?
Coinbase isn't hiding anything. It's the campaign's responsibility to identify donors in compliance with campaign finance laws. If a campaign is accepting donations of Bitcoin, it's their responsibility to find out who owns the wallet. Coinbase only knows, and can only know, the donor's wallet address. Coinbase doesn't even know what the transaction is for. That was one of the points of Bitcoin.
Right, lobbying is super valuable for a company whose business is in a legally questionable position on the boundary of the highly regulated banking industry.
This "apolitical" move would be a compelling choice if their only goal was optimizing shareholder value -- it's in their interest to maximize their ability to effectively lobby both American political parties to ensure any future cryptocurrency regulations benefit them.
That's what didn't sit right with me about the Coinbase stance. It seems somewhat elitist to suggest that the board are allowed to hire lobbyists and make donations to campaigns but the rank and file are not to discuss politics in the office.
I wanted to find an example for my response to this article, and I can't. I was looking for the sites like GitHub, Go Docs, Cloudflare, Hashicorp, and others what splashed a "#BlackLivesMatter" header on across all their sites. I remember a lot of places slapping banners or changing their headers black in support of the movement, and now I can't find any examples of that happening. They all seem to have been removed by this point.
So- what was accomplished? I don't remember which companies supported "the cause." All I know is that the companies that I thought I did no longer do- or at least don't show support any more. Which stands out to me more then their support.
Tells me that two things happened.
1. The companies wasted time figuring out how they should show their support, implementing those features, and all the associated work with making major changes to frontends. Spend hours figuring it out, most likely had meetings to discuses how to do it and what they should say.
2. The stopped showing supporting it after a point in time, which tells me they don't actually care. They just want to show they do.
I'm guessing they showed support for two reasons. First is some sort of genuine support for the cause, but the 2nd is a fear of internal backlash for not showing support.
Good on Coinbase for removing the elements inside their company that would get pissed if their company didn't take an active stand on flavor of the month political issues. When I go to work, I'm there to do my job and get paid. I don't want to have to deal with people fighting over what political stand the company should take a position on this month. I don't care that my programming language's maintainers voiced support or not. I don't care that program X or Y slapped a banner on their products for the month.
The fact that there was visible support for for Black Lives Matter that was removed a month later is a lot more telling then their support. You want to be apart of the movement without actually doing anything to fix the issues.
If you want to be political as a company, quietly donate money to the causes you support. Provide resources such as technical help or free/discounted services to the causes you support. That's infinitely more productive and helpful then letting your employees fight over what token gesture they want the company to show.
For what it’s worth, the Kubernetes project still has their banner up on every page of the site, front and center. They are serious about it even if the rest of the CNCF and Google aren’t.
It was largely a fashion trend among executives as well as a fear of being singled out as being not onboard with BLM. It's better to be with the crowd, at least you are immune to specific criticism.
We saw a similar fashion trend in company cancellations of Facebook ads, multiple companies cancelled their ads for a short duration at the same time (each cancellation catalyzing the next) and we've heard nothing about that since.
If a corporation posted a black square on its Instagram earlier this year, that doesn't tell you anything about whether the corporation cares about racism. It only tells you that the corporation cares about its own self-preservation.
Of course, it's impossible to know now, but I wonder how many people would've still left if there was no exit package. It's possible some decided they wanted to work somewhere else and saw a way out.
That's just what I was thinking: if I were in a job I was on the margin of leaving anyway, and an exit package were offered, that might be sufficient to make me make the move.
6 months of pay as severance. I could find another job in a couple weeks and I am not that skilled or experienced a software engineer. It would be quite tempting.
My only question is what are employees proposing CoinBase takes a stance over? If you want something like cryptocurrencies to thrive you can't be overly policing them, that's not your job as a company.
Your job is not a political platform unless you work with politicians on their campaigns or are a politician / other form of politically affiliated / influenced company.
Politics can make people feel extremely uncomfortable especially if they feel suppressed and as a minority are bullied by other employees.
I made another longer comment about it on this thread.
The gist of it is that a competent HR department can make a statement without directly committing support to any particular organization or group that they aren’t comfortable with.
Saying “I refuse to comment and you’re not allowed to comment” is the worst way to go about it, literally anything would be better.
There are also ways to train on empathy, bias, and general employee-to-employee communication that can guide employees through those conversations with colleagues.
Regarding bias training that you mentioned, the Heterodox Academy did a literature review and concluded that there isn't adequate evidence to conclude efficacy and if anything the effects are deleterious on workplace cohesion.
It seems much more time-deaf to think that everyone wants to be involved in this highly stressful, chaotic game of identity politics. Some people just want to do their job. Personally, I want to focus on what I'm working on while at work, not have my boss preach their particular views at me. I bet the meetings/memos were not very tone-dead if you were there to work on what the company was doing.
My guess: 1-2% of those people are the loud, annoying group that demands everyone behave how they think they should, and the other 3-4% were people who saw an opportunity for a long paid vacation while they look for another role.
Like other comments, I am skeptical 5% are actually quitting due to this overblown twitter melodrama, instead of just taking a sweet deal.
Furthermore, what political mission did these people falsely believe they were joining when they got hired?
Coinbase is literally an app designed for the sole purpose of helping 22 year old kids lose money by speculating on the now deflated crypto bubble.
For a while, coinbase was allowing kids to “invest” using credit cards. I’m not kidding.
How could there be such a disconnect with that many people about what the company actually does—-especially from the inside where you can literally see how they actually make their money?
I think is one of the greatest decisions I’ve seen from a SV CEO in a long time. The expectation around this recent bout of social activism is that if you aren’t actively campaigning the cause you are against it.
I hated working at one of previous jobs because there were 600 different issues talked about in the workplace. The underlying assumption was that you were always onboard. Many times I wasn’t and it.
Seeing Armstrong voice this policy makes me much more interested in working at Coinbase. I’m convinced that I won’t be cornered into jumping on the latest cause de jour because that’s what’s expected of me. Where any deviation from the cause’s line would put my job at risk.
I don't think it can be understated how much saying 'no politics' is a political statement. Supporting the status quo is a political statement. And supporting the status quo in this political climate is a strange hill to plant your flag on.
> I don't think it can be understated how much saying 'no politics' is a political statement.
I disagree, and I think you're grossly overstating it.
I can see how you could characterize their stance as "supporting the status quo". But, there are varying degrees of "support", and this is pretty much the lowest degree of "support" imaginable.
Put another way, you're painting this as "with us or against us" when in reality there's a spectrum of support. Coinbase is standing just SLIGHTLY off center in one direction.
> And supporting the status quo in this political climate is a strange hill to plant your flag on.
Why do you think it's strange? The vast majority of employees prefer a work environment that is stripped of political conversation. And, such an environment is more conducive to focus and productivity.
> The vast majority of employees prefer a work environment that is stripped of political conversation
While I generally agree, I think there is a tacit assumption that Armstrong's actions will work exactly as intended. 5-8% of workforce is...honestly I don't know if it's high or low, but is certainly non-trivial. These weren't strategic layoffs or restructurings, so certain business-critical projects might be delayed due to headcount issues/loss of senior staff. If we hear about another walkout at Coinbase 6 months from now, this might just look like a catastrophic management blunder.
Literally firing the walkout organizers would probably have led to a worse media cycle, but likely fewer staff quitting in protest (Google firing the walkout organizers seemed to have little to no effect).
This idea of "everything is political" is why the discourse went to shit, now nobody can catch a break from politics, and if you had enough and don't want to take part then you instantly gets attacked for "supporting the status quo".
I prefer to not be lectured on political issues by my orange juice brand. Their mission should be to sell high quality orange juice and make a profit.
I think in prior times when we didn't have all the information we have available at hand: sure that's fine.
But what if your orange juice brand of choice was actively contributing to the destruction of the environment, lobbying politicians to make them exempt from environmental regulations, and destroying competition in nefarious ways?
That's an extreme but if that's information you have and you still support that orange juice brand then you are supporting everything that is public knowledge about that brand.
If 95% of the people at the company don't care, but you're the person who won't stop bringing up the need to change orange juice vendors, to the point that it's disruptive and annoying to the 95%, maybe they don't want to work with you any more. And maybe it's not the right company for you, either. Why would you want to work with a bunch of people who are indifferent to environmental destruction when there are literally thousands of companies out there who actively embrace your orange juice opinions?
If 95% of the company doesn't care then you should change orange juice vendors. Making it turn into an ongoing issue would be a very strong sign that people at the company care very strongly about keeping the current vendor. Which means that perhaps you should leave, but you should leave because people are actively opposing your politics and not because that 95% is not political.
By "don't care" I mean they don't perceive the current situation as a problem, and they view the cost of switching vendors to be too high. But either way, yes.
I think one problem with the concept of "everything is political (including supporting the status quo)" is that it provides no principled mechanism for determining what counts as "too far" (costly) for any given political cause. The nice thing about having a dictator (CEO) in this regard is that it provides a fixed point.
Why stop at Karl Rove? Tribalism is an inherent primal instinct in our species. We are all directly descended from brutal tribes at odds with other tribes over competition for limited resources. It's rooted in nearly all of our thinking, and you have to take active steps in your thought processes to avoid being biased by this inherent biological preference you have for the success of your kin versus the kin of others.
Is it really an attack though? Supporting the status quo (by objecting to discussions about changing it) is the perceived state. Is it an attack, to observe this?
I understand folks feel uncomfortable talking about systemic bias. Especially if they don't suffer from it. But that's exactly the issue of status quo vs change - getting folks to notice/discuss it. So there can be change, which requires the comfortable to change too.
I think it's intended as an attack, but even if it's not it's just a terribly unfair characterization. If you host a meeting to review a design document, and I start talking about the Syrian Civil War in the middle, are you really supporting the status quo when you ask me to stay on topic?
Great! Because it's totally non-political to influence international trade policy to give yourself an advantage in buying your oranges and labor in waaaaaait it totally is.
IMO Coinbase is "doing it pretty well", not by saying "we'll be apolitical", but by saying, "we're going to be political ONLY about X & Y".
My read is that they're not discouraging their employees from being political (unclear to me ATM if they're still doing donation matching regardless), and they're not stopping work-place diversity programs... they're just limiting their lobbying to, you know, their own issues.
But the life of a black trans woman? That's political by its very nature, in today's climate. One party doesn't want her to be allowed to exist, the other does.
Believing it's possible to be "apolitical" in any time of polarization is a privilege of those who benefit from the status quo.
I think there are definitely people who don’t want her to exist but there are also ones like me, who get called Nazis for it, but whose perspective is largely 1) OK 2) please pay for your own costs related to your choices and 3) I’m not being an asshole to you because you’re a black trans woman, I’m being an asshole to you because I am an asshole and my white male friends say “oh Xxx is such as asshole.” So don’t take it personally
> whose perspective is largely 1) OK 2) please pay for your own costs related to your choices
In your example, the black trans woman has no choice about being black and no choice about their cisgender.
Technically, they have a choice about whether they transition, but the alternative is living with the emotional pain of extreme gender dysphoria.
Would you deny someone medical care for a physically painful but not life threatening medical condition (say arthritis, or psoriasis), or tell them that treating it is their choice and responsibility?
How about mental conditions such as clinical depression, or bipolar disorder?
Would you relax the requirements on businesses to provide reasonable accommodation for wheelchair access to parking and restrooms? After all, it is their choice to go out in public.
Would you allow discrimination for employment or a mortgage based on these conditions?
This isn't really that complicated. Gender dysphoria is a real thing, and while the choice to transition (with or without gender reassignment surgery) is a personal one, and likely never an easy one to make, it should be an option that society supports and simply does not allow discrimination against.
> 3) I’m not being an asshole to you because you’re a black trans woman, I’m being an asshole to you because I am an asshole and my white male friends say “oh Xxx is such as asshole.” So don’t take it personally
I thought this deserved to be broken out to a separate reply.
I actually used to be in that camp. In my case I used to say some extremely heteronormative patriarchal objectifying bullshit ironically (typical examples would be "barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen" or "get me a beer, bitch". This started pretty darn early, like 10 years old. My mom's friends all thought it was hilarious when I was asked what piece of chicken I wanted and I answered with a deadpan "well, I'm usually a leg man, but..."). In other words, I was pretending to be a misogynist asshole for purposes of humor.
It turns out that as an adult, many of the people closest to me couldn't always tell I was being ironic, despite the obvious (to me) extreme contrast between these statements and my everyday persona.
And that's entirely aside from the fact that this sort of humor is painful to people who regularly encounter the real thing when it is meant to hurt them, even if they completely understand that I don't mean it that way. I was essentially using their pain as a prop for my humor.
So, I could have responded with some variant of "fuck 'em if they can't take a joke", but that would have left me associating only with people who a) got my sense of humor and put up with it, as well as b) people who didn't but approved of the literal interpretation and were encouraged by it. That wouldn't have been a good outcome for me.
To give a less pointed example of my sense of humor, I once horrified a co-worker who brought to my attention a severe defect that would have caused a user security issue if it had been deployed to production by responding "Well, we certainly couldn't allow that!" with heavy sarcasm. I was using sarcasm ironically. Since I immediately escalated the issue I would have thought that it was obvious that I was taking the issue very seriously, but I had misjudged my audience.
It is incumbent on me to communicate clearly, even or especially when using humor. And my sort of weapons-grade irony and sarcasm can't be handled too carefully.
Now, what you're talking about isn't quite the same thing (since I actually try to not be an asshole), but in your case it really is incumbent on you to communicate clearly as well when you're being an asshole that you are not being an asshole to a black trans woman because they are a black trans woman, and also that you aren't being an asshole to them as a black trans woman. And you have to somehow do it without a bunch of "I'm not a racist etc., but..." qualifiers. The latter point is so subtle, you're never going to be able to get it right, except perhaps one-on-one with someone you know very well (eg. my spouse thinks a "get me a fuckin' beer, woman" demand from me is hilarious, but that's in part because she knows I don't like beer, and rarely swear. Even with her I would be pretty careful about asking for anything else that way). You certainly won't get it right while still using racist and transphobic rhetoric.
So, you have a stark choice similar to mine: stop being an asshole to black trans women, or end up associating only with people who think doing that is excusable, normal, or even desirable, behavior.
No idea what you’re talking about. Someone comes to me with a dumb idea. I tell them it’s a dumb idea and am not nice about it. If they are a minority group they could feel that I am acting this way to them because I’m a x-ist. But it’s actually because I’m an asshole.
Since, as a member of a minority group, they probably get more negative feedback than average, and since probably most of that negative feedback is due to x-ism, why shouldn't they assume you're an x-ist?
And that's completely leaving aside whether there exists any sort of stereotype that members of group x aren't as smart or capable as non-x folks that you may be playing into.
It's really on your shoulders to indicate or demonstrate that you're just an asshole and not an x-ist asshole. Because, as far as the various x-folk are concerned, isn't it simpler to assume that a non-x is being an asshole to them because of x-ism? Odds are that they're right.
In other words, given the rates of poverty among Black trans women, you don't want her to be allowed to exist.
Your view is not above regular politics. It is a view that's firmly embedded within the right wing of regular politics. I personally wouldn't consider it "Nazi" but would definitely consider it deeply transphobic, and exclude you from my friend circle. If I met someone with your view at work, I would avoid any interactions with them other than the minimum necessary to perform my job.
Good. People experiencing the social consequences of expressing bigoted views, and being a little more afraid as a result, is how the world moves forward. A term sometimes used for it is the "democratization of discomfort".
> You’re not wrong... but remember that the voting booth is another anonymous forum.
Sure, and the implication that letting discriminatory behavior remain normalized can be a strategy that lets you court voters at the margin isn't new.
In a sense, it is a strategy that grants political power but denies a mandate to do much of anything meaningful with it to combat discrimination. It also cedes the initiative to the opposition who can easily retreat or just run (and then continue to portray your compromised proposals as just as extreme as ever).
Not using your business as a political platform is not the same as supporting the status quo. The "if you're not with us, you're against us" stance is definitely polarizing and is not making things better.
This is very interesting. The CEO said in his initial letter that Coinbase should only engage in politics that are relevant to their "core mission", but it's kind of interesting to reduce a candidate to "What can this candidate or party do specifically for our business?" and ignore other policies that a candidate or party may seek to enact.
Pretending that you're unaware of or completely ambivalent about the consequences of shifts in political power (so long as it benefits you financially) doesn't really qualify you as "apolitical." You're still involved in the political process even if you stick your fingers in your ears and chant "nananana I can't hear you."
I hate to sound incisive, but it kind of seems like the position that Coinbase's leadership has taken is "The board and CEO will decide what qualifies as 'apolitical' and as such will dictate the ongoing political activity of the company, which they have no desire to stop being involved in."
Or just "the board and CEO will decide what political activism is relevant to the core business of the company, and the political positions the company should take". Which seems exactly within the remit of the board and CEO.
This is absolutely true, and appears to be the stated policy in no uncertain terms.
The issue that I intended to address is the interesting usage of language to sidestep making political contributions and supporting candidates and parties as being political acts.
Companies aren't democracies. When you sign up to work for somebody else, the board and the executives have every right to make these decisions. Upset that you can't lobby for the rights of pink haired people in the office? Go start your own company and put murals featuring oppressed pink-haired people all over the walls. Until then, recognize that companies aren't set up as democracies, because no investor would be dumb enough to throw their money down a toilet where any muppet who can run a QA job or write a few lines of JS has equal input with someone who co-founded the enterprise.
I think that's too strong a statement in support of the current default, which is the largely feudal corporation.
First, company structures are pretty clearly being pushed in a more democratic direction, and have been for quite a while. Silicon Valley is the poster child for flatter organizational structures, "good ideas can come from anywhere", increased freedom of movement for workers between companies, as well as sharing the financial gains more broadly (at least, that is the ideal that SV represents to the outside world).
You look at a typical SV corporation and see a rigid hierarchy. Most of the rest of the world sees an insanely freewheeling mess that can't possibly work.
There are also today already companies that are explicitly structured as democracies (in some cases a bit more like constitutional monarchies, and in other cases more like minarchist collectives). Not all of these experiments are successful, nor should we expect them to be.
But I certainly don't expect this overall trend to reverse, stop, or even slow down. If anything, I expect it to accelerate, as existing companies continue to try to pick out and graft on the parts and tools that seem to be working for other organizations. Even when these grafting attempts are unsuccessful (which is often), they just draw attention to the orgs that are succeeding (inspiring attempts at analysis of what is different), which leads to more such experiments.
"In recognition of his work, Brian was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and one of the ten most influential people in bitcoin and blockchain"
That’s a very paranoid way of looking at things.
Signalling support for the status quo would involve something more active, eg “wooo, go status quo!!” on a banner.
Maybe they have different priorities than you and just want to make money. Not everything is political.
Just wanting to make money is political because it means the environment has been configured in such a way that you can do so. If you make money in the position of a manager or boss, it is even more strongly political as you are using the configuration of the political system to direct societal resources at your whim to make money.
Just playing the bongos is political because it means the environment has been configured in such a way that you can do so. If you play the bongos in the position of a manager or boss, it is even more strongly political as you are using the configuration of the political system to direct societal resources at your whim to play the bongos.
Not at all. While there is a tiny bit of truth to your bongo example, money in particular is highly political though it has been rhetorically stripped in order to make it appear as though it is not so the wealthy can make money in peace. Controlling the distribution of resources in society is a highly political question.
Who makes more money at work for example? The low level employee or the boss? Who controls what, why, and how things are produced? What the schedules are? These are smaller questions than national policy, but they are political in nature. Of course, the socialist movement sees all workplaces' workers united together as a national political project. When you swim in water all your life, you can't see it easily unless someone points it out.
Another reason "just making money" is political is because so many people can't. In a society with levels of inequality that approximate ancient kingdoms, the lowest people in society have little opportunity to "just make money" and their invisibility is a political artifice.
Put another way, what is political is the ability to _not care_ when others are suffering. People are being deported, attacked in the streets, dying of disease, etc. so keeping your head down _and make money_ during such a time is something won by virtue of class. Other people can't ignore it because politics is life and death. While exhaustion is a valid excuse to rest (I'm super tired myself), what is being asked is for solidarity and to exhibit positive humanity towards other people. A primary site of conflict and domination is the workplace -- it's just that so many of us are used to losing or out competing each other that we don't band together to win.
"you must become a member of the Party" is a horrible situation for any country to be in. Full stop. There are too many examples in history of where that leads to claim naiveté or propose that their consistent outcomes won't apply here.
No, it's possible to support changes to the status quo while simultaneously maintaining an apolitical workplace. I most certainly support changes to the status quo, and I would simultaneously take the same stance as Coinbase with regards to politics in the workplace. I've never seen a workplace embrace political activism without creating a hostile workplace environment for a significant segment of workers.
This is kind of the same kind of fallacy as people who try to say that atheism is a religion. No, it's the absence of religion. In the same vein, an apolitical workplace isn't support for the status quo. It's the absence of any political, either for or against the status quo.
There is a difference between explicitly supporting the status quo and simply saying we aren't going to actively work to change the status quo within this organization.
Something being a political statement doesn't necessarily mean it is directly in support of one pole or the other. It's still political.
Saying "my business supports whatever the current US government's stated opinion is on all issues" is a political stance. It may not be partisan, but it absolutely is political. Those aren't synonymous.
Saying ‘we don’t want to be an activist organization beyond our business goals, therefore we want to keep political discussions out of the workplace’ is not the same thing as saying ‘my business supports whatever the US government’s stated opinion is’.
Correct, but both are political statements. "We don't want to be involved in the political discussion" is just as political as "we want to be involved in the political discussion".
You are correct in your "understatement" claim, though I suspect unintentionally so. Yes, "avoiding politics" cuts into time you could be spending advancing progressive politics. So does writing software. So does watching a movie with your spouse. So does sleeping. So does every single thing that isn't literally "advancing progressive politics."
"No politics = politics" is an utterly vacuous statement.
He's not passively stating no politics he's actively discouraging any politics. There is a slight difference.
If you become friendly with a person in the workplace you'll eventually learn their politics, right? Either through how they act or what they say. How do you limit how much a person reveals about themselves at work?
The CEO is saying Coinbase won't take political stances. That's fine in theory but in practice it's not. The whole idea of cryptocurrency itself is political.
There is a difference in being passively apolitical and actively apolitical for sure.
The rules aren't as strict as you're thinking. As the article describes, Armstrong's made it clear that there's no rule requiring employees to just pretend politics don't exist, and employees are still free to discuss politics with each other or create political discussion Slack channels.
The stance "I am now and forever apolitical regardless of the state of the world or how political decisions affect me or others" is true no politics.
The stance "I am avoiding politics because there's nothing worth my time to be an activist about but I would if that changed and political decisions started seriously affecting me, my family, or my friends" is "the status quo is fine."
The stance "I'm avoiding politics because it's bad for my metal health or $any_criticism" is an act of protest! Super political.
I have genuinely never met someone in the first camp.
There are lots of reasons, good and bad, to avoid politics. But to claim that doing so is inherently political... isn't saying anything. To the extent it's true, it's trivially so. And to the extent it's non-trivial, it's completely false.
The reason that you can't require people to vote in the US is because the act of not voting is considered protected political speech. Why is not participating in politics any different?
Hell, refusing to engage with certain types of politics isn't just political, it's an act of protest!
Have the people you've met specifically told you this is their stance? I'm worried you may be misunderstanding. I and almost all apolitical people I know fall in the first camp; I don't think the status quo is fine, but I also don't think that engaging in politics all the time improves it.
All businesses that want to survive are political. Whether they admit it or not.
How many defense contractors are there? These people do have a vested interest to vote for candidates that increase govt contracts with the private sector. This is a massive industry.
Now that govt is getting more involved in health care, we're seeing that too.
These are trillions of dollars we're talking about.
This is also valid for small businesses too. How taxes are done in a given community. Etc.
I can't emphasize enough the vested interest a business has to be selfish. I'm indifferent on if this is a drawback.
I just wish there was more competition/choices for everyone and like you, I wish people would be more upfront (or self aware) of what they're doing.
P.S. When it comes to Coinbase. What stops them from backing a racist KKK member whom backs Bitcoin/crypto? What stops them from backing an anarchist whom backs Bitcoin/crypto? Etc...etc... This silencing of discussion...it a bit disgusting.
Coinbase didn't say "no politics" or "we support the status quo". They just said that the company is focused on cryptocurrency, and won't engage in political causes other than supporting cryptocurrency.
As someone else pointed out, they seem to have no problem in donating to political candidates as a corporation so this is the height of hypocrisy. Individual employees don't get to have a say in the direction of the company's politics.
I don't see the hypocrisy. Like I said, the company's been quite open about the fact that they will continue to engage in cryptocurrency-related politics.
Bob grows chickens and Alice grows corn. They trade via barter. We'd probably agree this isn't political in any meaningful sense.
One day, Alice has a clever idea: she can create a digital representation of money. Both Alice and Bob agree to accept these "tokens" in lieu of barter.
Big mistake. CarelessExpert announces to Alice and Bob that their creation obligates them to join in bitter arguments about abortion, climate change, and LGBT rights.
So do you normally spend a lot of your time online standing up straw men and knocking them down? Or is today a special case?
My point, since apparently I need to clarify it, is that Coinbase claiming to have an "apolitical" workplace while a) operating in a business that's driven by libertarian and anarchist philosophy and b) spending time and money lobbying politicians in Washington in support of said values is, at best demonstrative of a total lack of self-awareness, and at worst represents rank hypocrisy.
If the Coinbase guys were lobbying for "libertarian and anarchist philosophy," broadly construed, you'd have a point. But they're not. They're pushing for narrow financial regulation. There's no principled reason to think they're doing this in furtherance of their personal politics, as opposed to, say, making their customers' lives easier.
As such, I don't see the hypocrisy. Now, I'd be more inclined to agree if the "politics ban" covered activism around crypto policy issues. But of course, then management's position is very easy to see. They hired developers to implement their vision, not to fight it.
>I don't think it can be understated how much saying 'no politics' is a political statement.
This is often presented as obvious self-contradiction, but in fact the definition of "politics" here changes from first use to the second. In other words, this is a cheap rhetorical trick to make something sound irrational and self-contradictory, while int fact it isn't.
My cynical take on this is Coinbase is preparing for Democrats to take control of the US gov't in a few months and sees Republicans suddenly becoming very concerned about gov't / central bank failures and buying cryptocurrency as a hedge. Don't want to be seen a leftist company when your user growth will come from the right.
That is definitely an interesting take but I think any right-winger that goes that far is more likely to be caught up in a grift than going to Coinbase where they have to send in their government-issue ID and link their account to a US bank that reports to government if they notice suspicious activity.
If by "status quo" you mean "Donald Trump is President", does your view change if Biden wins? Will the status quo be ok, and will it therefore be ok to ban political activity in the workplace?
The problem with the view that activism is ok if the current administration is objectionable is that the "status quo" changes from cycle to cycle.
Presidential politics is only a very small part of political activity in the US (though it is the most visible). What if your frame of reference is state and local politics? Is political activism in the workplace ok if you don't like the local school board?
I've seen plenty comments saying 'everything is political'. I don't doubt that, but not every political issue, important maybe, should be the top priority for every company, there are a lot of NGOs created just for that. A company should notice the importance of politics, but should also not forget the reason of its existence, which is to provide services or produce commodities of some kinds.
As citizens and organizations, we surely deserve our right to engage in politics, but that doesn't mean it should what we discuss about on every nights' dinner table. A large fraction of those conversations will be, as it should, devoted to what's going on in the lives of our own and people around us. It's easy to lose focus in the mountains and seas of all those issues that matter, things just won't change in a blink, but we simply can not afford to let those issues to be the entirety of our lives, no matter how important they are, as much as one hope for otherwise. Call it the downside of democracy, but we just don't yet live in a time where everyone can devote all parts of their lives to discussions on fairness and justice, regardless how beautiful it sounds.
> but we simply can not afford to let those issues to be the entirety of our lives,
I agree. The comments I have spent my time on in the comments seem to be taking things too far and complaining the issue is with the people on the other side rather than the people who are acting in extreme ways(preferably with concrete examples of what is extreme and why).
[In response to the original headline that 5% of employees took the severance:] Good. The company will be stronger for it and the employees will be happier with the generous severance and a new job at a company that suits them better.
The idea that a company which spent $200000 on political lobbying last year[1] is somehow above taking a political stance is utterly laughable. Coinbase is an intensely political company. From where I’m standing this all looks like a move to make sure everyone in the organisation is ideologically aligned so they can all carry on pretending that their actions have no effect on the broader world (beyond those areas where they’ve decided they’re going to change the world). The whole thing whilst entirely predictable also beggars belief in its incredible double-think.
I'm curious to know how many of these exits were in engineering – those with the privilege to know another engineering job is immediately available somewhere else – versus other roles in the company.
If I had an equivalent offer, I would take the severance (4-6 months paid leave) plus that offer in a heartbeat, regardless of any political statement or non-statement.
We had a problem where political conversations were emerging in the office that may be inconsiderate of the views who may be listening.
I proposed a simple rule that you should seek consent from others in the room before bringing up (partisan) politics. This simple "Hey can we talk about the debate last night..." allows for people to skip out before they get dragged into something they may not be interested in.
Many people have their key social group at work, and a lot more energy is tied up in politics in the US at the moment. I think it's important that people can move this energy with their colleagues and others.
This began over something that doesn't feel "political" to me. For me, and perhaps many others, BLM is primarily about injustice. Is taking a stand against injustice political?
I would say standing against injustice is not political. But there comes a point where in order for change to occur and prevent future injustices, the stand must become a walk (to keep the metaphor). Some will say it should be a jog, others a sprint, some will think continued standing is fine. And that's just discussing the pace. There will be ideas and opinions on route, and whether or not to stop for breaks, and whether water should be supplied, or what impact people walking will have on the roads, the list goes on. I think when the time comes to give direction or motion to a stand against injustice, it then becomes political. It's not bad that it becomes political, it's the natural course of change in society, but it does mean that some of the unity derived from standing must be sacrificed, as people choose the mechanism for change they support. The key is to sacrifice as little of the unity as possible.
"Abortion is about a woman's right to chose, who's against that?"
"Abortion is about killing children, who supports killing children?"
Everyone generally supports equality, and something like 95% of Americans including huge majorities of Republicans etc. accept that racism exists and is a problem.
Almost universally Americans want 'equal pay for equal work'.
... the question is the means, the underlying issues, social conditions, solutions, lack of recognition for other groups, the 'racial lens' that we now seem to use for everything, the double-edges sword of affirmative action, double-standards and of course accepting bad behaviour as part of the cause (i.e. riots) etc..
You’re right on its face, but the american electoral-politics-based culture war likes to appropriate and subsume any rift or disagreement and alias it onto the existing two brawling sides. It’s a real bummer, not the least of why is because of how startlingly inaccurate it is.
These narratives that fuel the culture war “decide” that certain groups are in or out. It’s entirely inaccurate but that’s what the popular narrative dictates.
BLM is, under this system, on the “left” side, along with other made-up narrative entities in this fictional drama such as “antifa”. To the culture war brawlers, entirely disconnected from the actual happenings, they alias to the same thing, the same people, the same group.
Coinbase has leveraged that system to cover for the fact that their silence on the matter of justice and human rights is extremely loud.
A few years ago when bitcoin was going up in value so much Coinbase was one of the best places to be, now I dont see much upside for the company, I imagine a bunch of people there are happy to leave.
Is this something where there needs to be a bright-line rule? It feels like having a rigorous formal definition for "be nice to your coworkers" - a healthy company can resolve these kinds of disputes informally, and an unhealthy company will struggle no matter how clear the rules are.
> It was reassuring to see that people from under-represented groups at Coinbase have not taken the exit package in numbers disproportionate to the overall population.
I figured as much. Coinbase sounds like a great place to work if this works out.
No, we stand for accomplishing the mission and for creating a great place to work."
My god, you're a business, you're entire existence is predicated on making a profit, don't delude yourself into thinking you're chasing some higher purpose, if that was truly the case then you'd be offering your services at a loss or giving away your product for free.
> No, we stand for accomplishing the mission and for creating a great place to work."
> My god, you're a business, you're entire existence is predicated on making a profit, don't delude yourself into thinking you're chasing some higher purpose, if that was truly the case then you'd be offering your services at a loss or giving away your product for free.
Hey now, there are other options besides "solely driven by profits" and "non-profit solely focused on the mission"
For one thing, it is a fiction that public for-profit companies have a fiduciary duty to be monomaniacal profit seeking entities that must do everything legal to achieve that end, and anything illegal where the profit exceeds the risk-adjusted cost of getting caught is at least on the table.
Second, there are plenty of structures for encoding specific missions into a company's charter that are binding. I'm kind of curious to see if Coinbase will follow through on the rhetoric and do something such as becoming a b-corp.
The problem is that companies can have huge impact in the US due to a lack of effective regulations + legal corruption (lobbies). Large companies are pretty much the source of many executive decisions. Without that power, an employee should be able to just join or not join a company based on what the company is doing (ethically moral or not).
I don't work in a Silicon Valley tech company, so maybe my perspective is out of touch with what's going on in SV.
But I thought it was generally understood that there were certain topics you really ought not to talk about at work including religion, politics, disclosing your salary, etc.
Has this changed? Or am I misunderstanding something?
Ironically, now that the Coinbase CEO has politicized quitting, I wonder how many people wanted to take another job but now are afraid to because they'd be labeled 'activists' by reactionary hiring managers.
I think Coinbase will now attract/retain fewer conscientious employees. The kind of employees who definitely won't leave are the ones with careerist/mercenary personality types. If that becomes a vicious cycle ( per the 'like attracts like' thing https://youtu.be/wTgQ2PBiz-g?t=75 ), the culture could lead to wide-spread ass-covering and fraud.
Then again, this isn't an area in which I have some particular expertise. Maybe it will work out perfectly.
I think the opposite. The employees who stay are the kind who agree with the mission and want to focus on it. The kind who leave were focused on something other than advancing the company's goals. The company will be more effective at achieving its goals with a workforce that is all pointed in the same direction with less distraction. And the CEO mentioned that the people who left were not disproportionately underrepresented, so they are not losing diversity, just increasing focus.
My thinking is that it takes a certain personality type to whistle-blow, or push back against SOP for moralistic (or customer-focused) reasons. I don't want to overplay my hand here — I don't know for certain — but Coinbase's current messaging strikes me as off-putting to that sort of personality type.
“The kind who leave were focused on something other than advancing the company's goals.”
I’m not sure that’s what happened here. This was started because employees were upset that the company wasn’t taking a stance to support the Black Lives Matter movement. If my employer decided to be apolitical around something as basic as saying racism is a thing and Black people shouldn’t be killed by the police I’d certainly leave too.
Another possibility that occurs to me is that some employees are very conscientious, but have value systems that are looked down upon in mainstream Silicon Valley culture.
I could imagine such employees being more willing to stay with Coinbase when that potential source of strife is removed.
Don't think that people tho don't want to bring their politics to work are 'less conscientious' - this is in fact almost a form of bigotry. "Oh those people who don't want to bring politics to work just 'don't care'". Not true.
Life is complicated, we have a lot of things to focus on, most people like to do work at work, not get tangled in what might be suppressive or irrelevant social webs.
My bet is that 70% of people would prefer apolitical, 20% 'moderate' and only 10% activism - of course - only if it's specifically their view of activism.
Brian seriously misunderstands what apolitical means and cannot tell the difference between Black Lives Matter and Black lives matter. The race and gender of his employees are not a political statement.
Is requests from employees to support Black Lives Matter what triggered this whole discussion?
Some employees wanted to support BLM, while others thought it was off-topic or didn't like it?
And Brian / the CEO then decided to not allow such discussions at the workplace? noticing that some employees got upset at each other, when talking about it?
Well it is either this or artificial consensus where bickering is curbed by enforcing a company wide position on every divisive issue. Pick your poison
The broader trend here is that power is becoming more concentrated in companies and institutions and away from individuals and local groupings. These differences in beliefs, ethics, morals, etc. are difficult to work through in any large grouping of people. The array of approaches to government is an example of trying to solve this coordination problem.
I feel like this confirms (although this could be confirmation bias, and would literally be a textbook case) my belief that this is indeed a tiny percentage of people at most tech companies that are really into social justice activism, and they are very, very noisy and disruptive.
My suspicion is that the percentage of folks who are into this is higher at companies like Google, who have absurdly overly bureaucratic hiring pipelines that weed out free thinkers in favor of academic elites who are strong conformists. Strong conformists from academia are the ones I see gravitating most to this form of activism. Add to that the fact that your typical Google engineer is massively overqualified for the actual work that they do on a daily basis (working on a cog in a gear in a giant system) and you get a lot of anxious, bored people trying to erase their guilt over being radically overpaid.
Another group of folks I've witnessed being into social justice activism (at an extreme level) are borderline Aspergers folks I've worked with who, on a good day, have a hard time navigating human relationships of any kind. I think the intersectional, hierarchal nature of these beliefs brings a Dungeons and Dragons, RPG like sense of order to humans that is comforting to them. The fact that it's mostly over-simplified and false escapes them.
Basically, Coinbase probably got rid of a lot of unproductive personnel and won't have to deal with this anymore.
> who have absurdly overly bureaucratic hiring pipelines that weed out free thinkers in favor of academic elites who are strong conformists
That’s just anecdotal but the people I know at google are the less conforming and the most “weird” (not in a pejorative sense) people I know. They also have no connection to academia and in fact all of them failed their studies for years because they were spending their time doing other crazy things.
Yes. They conform to their peer group by embracing politics and ideas from the SV bubble, which includes being disruptive for the reasons which their quasi-religion dictates.
Separate from the merits (or not) of Coinbase's stance, 5% of employees taking a 4-6 month severage package to leave doesn't /seem/ high to me. It's less than what %age churns naturally in 6 months at a tech company historically.
> What happened to the rule against politics and religion in polite society?
What rule? That's only ever been the case in idealized tv 'society', and mostly-homogenous comparatively rich/affluent folk who can afford not to give a shit about politics.
Companies aren't generally supposed to be political. Is the story here that Coinbase is offering a severance for employees that feel the company should be doing more? Seems like an incentivized quit.
This is incredibly naive. Companies hire lobbyists, make political donations, give seats on the board to former politicians, setup fake grass-roots campaign groups, play states off against each other for tax-breaks. It happens all the time.
I'm guessing now they're apolitical Coinbase wont be doing any of that.
Of course companies play politics to tilt the market in their favor. What I mean is that companies don't often take political stances like "we encourage all our employees to vote X" or "we believe candidate y is the right fellow" or even "we support z ballot initiative" as a company position. Companies might do that one hand removed, but almost never do it directly as a company policy. An example too would be "we support black lives matter". Some companies do, vast majority do not.
Every company and university needs to address code of conduct issues related to politics and activism. It's unavoidable now. The operational risk of not doing so cannot be ignored.
So, if the government bans crypto, does Coinbase remain apolitical?
It's not a hypothetical. Satoshi created Bitcoin as a (particularly ineffective) act of insurrection, and the only reason why governments haven't responded to it like so is a matter of political and judicial economy. Existing money-laundering and securities laws likely already ban Bitcoin, we just haven't seen them fully enforced. Using Bitcoin is inherently a political statement (which I don't entirely agree with); the apolitical choice would be to wind down Coinbase as an ongoing concern.
Is this a uniquely Amerian debate? I live outside America, and I don't really understand the subtext of these Coinbase posts.
What does are some concrete examples of a company being political or apolitical? What are the kinds of things the Coinbase used to do and no longer does, which employees might leave over? Is it about the company donating to political compaigns, or openly participating in community debates and having a position on social issues (same sex marriage, abortion, Black Lives Matter, Trump, gun control, etc)?
> Cryptocurrency start-up Coinbase recently sought to restrict political speech by employees, a move many interpreted as a shift to the right because it came in reaction to internal discussions of Black Lives Matter.
That makes it sound like the Coinbase thing is less about the company holding a public political position, and more of a "leave your politics at home" thing.
Sounds like the corporate version of the recurring debate about whether open source projects should reject contributions from those with objectionable political views.
I mean, I usually look for another job every year or two. If someone is also willing to pay me lavish amounts of money to do that and take a trip across Europe in between, please sign me up.
My longest stay at one job as been 2.5 years. By changing jobs, I get a lot more experience in a lot of different things. I've worked in five different markets:
I know people who've been at the same job for 6~7 years and they are totally getting paid way under market. A company might give you a 2~3% cost of living increase, or a $5k promotion every few years, but switching jobs let's you ask for $10k or more.
On the downside, I would NOT recommend anyone else change jobs almost yearly like I did. My job loyalty is shit and it's hard for me to take on other jobs when people are concerned I could just leave.
That being said, the good jobs with good pipeline engineering, tests and CI/CD flows allow people to flow in and out; quickly pick up things and move with fast/good deploys. Those shops are the best, but they are rare. They tend to not care as much weird resumes because they want to hire people who are innovative.
You're forgetting the options gain value as the company grows (due to your own hard work which is the whole point!)
You're awarded $100k but then it grows to $200k by the time you start cashing it in. When you switch company you get $100k again, not the $200k you threw away.
That's a fair point, we'd have to compare projected growth vs. expected salary of new job. Certainly the benefit of working at large tech companies or rocketships.
My experience with smaller startups, was that it's impossible to determine if the options would be worth $0 or $$$.
Consider it similar to diversifying your stock portfolio. By switching jobs every year, you're effectively hedging your portfolio. You're increasing your lottery chances of a unicorn exit, which is where the Big Money is.
I think an optimal time within a project in between 3 to 5 years, and the reason is to get deeper understanding of problems rather than surface. My YoY compensation growth is between 20% and 30% compounded.
It's the (usually 1-year) cliff that is more important when considering leaving. Once an engineer hits the RSU/bonus cliff, they're not losing _past_ benefits for leaving, only future benefits - and presumably the other job opportunity has better future benefits.
At least in finance (I realize HN is FAANG/SV focused), the signing bonus typically vests in 12-18 months. Finance also offers cash bonuses instead of RSUs. Finance also typically has paid leave built into the contract as a noncompete.
Typically the signing bonus vests over 12 months in tech, and the RSUs vest over 4 years. There are also usually cash bonuses in addition to the above.
YMMV depending on the company. Netflix is an obvious outlier in that they offer no RSUs and just pay very high salaries.
Which may or may not be worth anything. The rule of thumb is to value stock options at 0 for a reason. As opposed to RSUs, which are liquid upon vesting.
Not every company offers RSUs (at least outside US).
E.g. in my case only my third offered it, and I was like "What is that?", in my case it started vesting after 1 year (linear). So at that point one can think of looking for new job.
I think it's not uncommon for years 2 and 3 to be the highest earning years though, due to the 25% cliff, and to retention grants you get in years 1/2.
if you leave after the initial cliff you're only losing out on future RSU / options vesting, same as future salary you haven't yet earned. Unless your initial equity has gone up a lot in value you're not really leaving anything behind as presumably in the new company you'd be getting similar or higher value grants.
If there's rising fascism in a country, then a "neutral" position in effect is supporting it indirectly. There are sometimes you just shouldn't stand on the sidelines for. If the brownshirts and jackboots are filling the streets, silence is tacit approval.
Additionally, I find it real strange that a cryptocurrency company is pretending to have an 'apolitical' mission. Cryptocurrencies were created for political reasons. A lot of the pre-cursor developers (and suspected inventors) and early proponents are anti-government libertarians/crypto-anarchists. Even before Bitcoin, cypherpunks were heavily invested into digital cash techniques, that although used centralized servers, were nevertheless, blinded and federated, again with the desire to have untraceable cash like transactions that could be sent through unbreakable channels, and untouchable by government taxation and regulation.
I think this story takes on a particular valence because it involves a libertarian-inflected business in supposedly left-leaning SV. Certainly most of the HN commentary has jumped to the assumption that this is the result of pushy SJWs etc.
But I don't think this is a good way to approach political speech at work. Coinbase is aligned very closely with libertarian politics for a variety of reasons that complement each other. I would be very surprised if there wasn't rampant libertarian-inflected speech being traded by employees. Indeed, a policy against engaging in political speech unrelated to the company's goal will almost certainly amplify that particular type of political messaging.
I work for a company with very conservative leadership, who contribute, individually, to very conservative causes. I contribute to and participate in a Pride event being held in my town. Last year an outside political group protested the event, and it led to the City, via the city council, chaired by the CEO of my company, creating de novo restrictions on usage of City property specially for that event, and my boss showing up to film that event. Later, the same political group ran a political candidate for mayor explicitly on a ticket of shutting out Pride from City facilities (which, obviously, is legally dubious). It was a rancorous election in a deeply conservative community, even though the challenger got nowhere near the votes required to win.
My company's official policy is that, in the interest of respecting others, we should refrain from discussing politics at work. In the context of this election, my coworkers, with whom I share a pod, were discussing how the city should just be able to kick out Pride, because it's fine if people are gay, we just don't want them in our community. These same coworkers often waste their time quoting Steven Crowder and similar political talkers. My manager, who works in the same pod, initiates conversations every week about, how was your weekend, what did you do. I find them uncomfortable, but my manager sees them as valuable for team building.
Generally I find my team fairly collegial, though they almost certainly don't share my political or, in some cases, religious convictions. During the week of Pride I mentioned I had attended the event with my wife, and I received cold looks from the entire office.
I am frequently looking for work elsewhere, for a variety of reasons. And if I were offered a buyout this generous I would definitely take it.
The part of the original statement that seems inconsistent to me is this. Armstrong says that one of the things that helps Coinbase achieve their mission is:
> Enable belonging for everyone: We work to create an environment where everyone is welcome and can do their best work, regardless of background, sexual orientation, race, gender, age, etc.
Great. So Coinbase believes that critical to their mission is enabling everyone to feel welcome and do their best work regardless of their background or identity. And then the very next part is:
> We focus minimally on causes not directly related to the mission [such as] policy decisions: If there is a bill introduced around crypto, we may engage here, but we normally wouldn’t engage in policy decisions around healthcare or education for example.
Ok. So to pick an obvious example, two related issues that would clearly fall into the “not directly related to the mission” bucket are gay and transgender rights. Without getting at all into the issue of where you (Dear Reader) stand in terms of these particular issues, it seems to me that by saying “we explicitly will not lobby to make sure transgender people have equal rights, because that’s outside of our mission” is at direct odds with saying “we believe a core part of our mission is making sure transgender people feel welcome and can do their best work”.
The only conclusion I can come to is that Armstrong believes that people who have to fight for their rights can “feel welcome” and “do their best work” just as easily as those who don’t have to fight those same battles — and that seems, at best, a little naive/head-in-the-sand.
Adding on to that, as many people pointed out in this thread, Coinbase does make political contributions — it’s just that their interpretation of this sentence
> If there is a bill introduced around crypto, we may engage here
Seems to be (from a cursory glance at those listed contributions) that they are willing to support any politician that promotes their stance on crypto, regardless of any other stances that politician may take on any other issue. So continuing with the example above, Coinbase may be perfectly willing to support a politician who actively opposes gay marriage, as long as that politician actively supports crypto.
They’re obviously free to do so, but it seem disingenuous to do so while at the same time claiming that one of their core values has to do with enabling everyone to feel welcome and do their best work. At a guess, they are taking an extremely narrow view of “feel welcome while sitting at their office desk” — as in, they promote respectful communication in the office — but I question how “welcome” someone can feel when they know their employer contributes money towards the campaign of a person who (for example) is actively working to remove their right to be legally married.
>>Ok. So to pick an obvious example, two related issues that would clearly fall into the “not directly related to the mission” bucket are gay and transgender rights. Without getting at all into the issue of where you (Dear Reader) stand in terms of these particular issues, it seems to me that by saying “we explicitly will not lobby to make sure transgender people have equal rights, because that’s outside of our mission” is at direct odds with saying “we believe a core part of our mission is making sure transgender people feel welcome and can do their best work”.
Unless some law is interfering with the ability of Coinbase to provide a welcoming workplace to employees who are gay/transgendered, gay/transgender social causes have nothing to do with Coinbase's goal of providing a welcoming workplace that maximizes its ability to advance its mission.
You can't shoehorn every 'social justice' issue into the goal of providing a welcoming workplace. The latter statement is not meant to be interpreted in such an all-encompassing way.
The kind of absolutism that premises your perspective/position would engulf everything in politics.
I see many comments about: The company internal culture being political vs. apolitical as a place to work, what kinds of stands the company makes in public (or doesn't), or with regard to inclusivity for diverse views at work, or simply about productivity and what kind of place people like.
I'd like to mention something I haven't seen in other comments:
Coinbase's mission to produce a new global financial system is itself a kind of political activism.
One that some people believe will make the world a better place for people.
When designing something as fundamentally underpinning as the future of money, that can only work if it is able to underpin the activities of just about everyone.
Rather like cash money today only works because everyone knows it behaves the same regardless of who you vote for, and bank money (for the most part) also behaves the same regardless of your political views.
This analogy is a stretch, because employees at a card services firm aren't the same as users of a card services firm. But let's try it:
Imagine what the country would be like if, say, Visa and Mastercard (and all other payment infrastructure providers) required you to agree, and keep showing you agree, to support a particular collection of present-day political stances and voting affiliations before you could even spend any money on a card.
By that, I don't mean imagine "Visa Democrat Support" card requires you to show your affiliation. I mean, imagine if all Visa card services of every kind, and all the other services, all required the same affiliation.
Unless you're happy with that affiliation, you'd have to lie just to use ordinary services. You'd be at a significant disadvantage in life, and what people say in public would be very different to what they believe.
Some might say at least just causes would be supported. But it's quite an Orwellian prospect.
It's the sort of thing many people associate with China and too many other "less democratic" countries, where (it is said; I don't know for sure) you have to basically pretend to agree with the Party line, keep political views to yourself, and there's no democracy to speak of.
A healthy democracy needs a strong underpinning of common infrastructure, of which cash and money are part, which are available to everyone in a more-or-less apolitical manner, enabling people to hold and express a range of conflicting, divisive views layered "on top" of those basic life-supporting services.
(You could say cash and money, and payment services, are inherently political, as is capitalism, but that's not what I mean here. What's meant here is that a healthy democracy needs to provide some common infrastructure upon which everyone can depend regardless of affiliation. Otherwise it won't be much of a democracy for long.)
Now, I said it was a stretch of an analogy, because users of a company's services aren't the same as employees.
But still, imagine the chilling effect on trying to build up "a possible future of money, strong and unbreakable, available to everyone for the common good" if it was well known that the companies underpinning that future money all displayed public activism along strongly partisan-aligned views, or campaigned on big issues on which it's thought about half the population disagrees.
I've said all this, even though I personally see money itself as rather political, and that's because it doesn't have the innate properties which are commonly assumed. It's possible to engineer types of money to have different properties, and if adopted, these engineered properties have a profound effect on people's lives as well as aggregate behaviour and the economy at large. So I'm not necessarily personally aligned with an "apolitical" stance on a design of future money.
Nonetheless, I can see, and respect, why someone trying to build what they see as "the future of money for a better world for people" might feel that a firm, consistently "apolitical" public stance is an essential ingredient to perform their mission. To ensure the service is not just available to all who want in, but also seen as reliably available, now and in future, to all people regardless of their political affiliations.
(I don't know if Coinbase or its CEO holds this view, but I thought it was a relevant idea worth sharing, having noticed other comments tending to focus only on internal culture and productivity.)
Not to mention confusing. The "reverse" of "racism" would certainly be "equality", so why should "reverse racism" mean "more racism"? This is pretty elementary logic--something can't be its own opposite.
I buy that reasoning standalone (albeit it's still prone to misinterpretation), but in context its advocates appear to believe it is congruent with or equivalent to 'equality'.
In mathematical terms it might be similar to lay persons confusing inverse for converse.
“Reverse” is not the most precise word for the term, but so long as there is no compiler error when a person uses the wrong word, human natural language will continue to be sloppy. Let’s stop being overly pedantic — that is one of the guidelines of this site
It’s not pedantry. People think that because the word is “reverse” or “anti” that it means “the opposite of racist”, but it doesn’t. The distinction is fundamental to our national race conversation.
The intersectional view is that 'real racism' requires a power imbalance - which is actually a fair point.
It would be unfair not to recognize that some groups have considerably more power than others.
That said - it's still racism one way or another, discriminatory etc. and in 2020 it's getting really hard to talk about individuals as being a function of their race.
So while it's worth reminding ourselves of the intersectional issue ... it doesn't really justify bad behaviour one way or another.
> The intersectional view is that 'real racism' requires a power imbalance - which is actually a fair point. It would be unfair not to recognize that some groups have considerably more power than others.
I could get down with this if whites behaved as a class, working for their own mutual interests; however, such whites are few and far between and generally powerless.
The Democratic Party has a lot more wealthy people, a lot more of the 1%, and a lot more six figure earners, than the Republican Party does today. It's not remotely a close comparison.
That's why Democrats (comically) fought so hard to preserve the SALT tax break for higher income earners - so many Democrats earn six figures in locations like SF, LA and NYC. It's comical because it put the Democrats in a position of fighting for tax breaks for people earning high incomes.
The notion that the Republican Party is the party of the rich is no longer accurate. The voting foundation of the Republican Party today is the middle class that the Democrats have increasingly abandoned over the last 30 years (which is entirely what got Trump elected; white, educated women are what cinched Trump's election, and the middle class voters in critical states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin).
The Democratic Party is largely hyper bifurcated between wealthier white people and poorer miniorities, heavily coastal in location. The Republican Party largely consists of the lower middle class up to the lower upper class, and is largely centered in so called fly over or red states, non-coastal, and almost entirely white. These are generalities (ie there are exceptions), however they are broadly correct.
Democrats dominate to an extreme all the high-wealth locations in the country, including nearly every major metro (which is where most of the high wealth individuals live in the US). Those metros include: Seattle, NYC, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Jose, Austin, Denver, Washington DC, Boston, and so on. There is only one Republican mayor among the top 10 largest US cities, with Republicans only having the mayorship of 13 of the 50 largest cities.
The richest people also tend to be Democrats: Gates, Zuckerberg, Buffett, Bezos, Bloomberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, MacKenzie Scott, Steve Ballmer, Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Laurene Powell Jobs.
It doesn't get any more elite and money-representative than that list. Nine of the ten richest people in the US are Democrats. It's hilarious that the Republican Party is supposedly the party of the rich, and those people are all Democrats. I say all of this as someone that has never voted Republican in my life. I don't care for the party, however the old propaganda narrative that they represent the rich is false today.
Isn’t there a pretty clear power imbalance if one side is being given a platform to espouse these views in front of hundreds of employees while they get endorsed by HR and company leadership?
Are you really comparing the 'power of someone to say something at work in 2020' with things like 'Black people were not allowed to have mortgages until one generation ago'?
First, I feel you misrepresented my comment. “Saying something at work” doesn’t quite convey the same thing as “given a platform in front of hundreds of employees at a formal event with full support and endorsement by HR and company leadership.” The latter sounds a lot more like actual discrimination because it’s backed up by explicit and established power structures.
Second, you’ve selected examples separated in time by decades. When you grant yourself the power of time travel, it certainly does become a lot easier to come up with examples. The world is changing fast nowadays. The landscape is completely different today than it was even 10 years ago.
Your comment makes sense only if you're conflating "racism" with "racial discrimination". Per the APA:
Individual racism is a personal belief in the superiority of one’s race over another. It is linked to racial prejudice and discriminatory behaviors, which can be an expression of implicit and explicit bias.
Institutionalized racism is a system of assigning value and allocating opportunity based on skin color. It unfairly privileges some individuals and groups over others and influences social institutions in our legal, educational, and governmental systems. It is reflected in disparities in, but not limited to, wealth, income, justice, employment, housing, medicine, education, and voting. It can be expressed implicitly or explicitly and occurs when a certain group is targeted and discriminated against based on race.
US labor law doesn't actually use the word "racism", it's "racial discrimination" that's illegal in the workplace, which neatly avoids any argument about the definition of "racism".
The behavior you're describing is amplified in technology corporations, and while I do agree that there is nonsense, there are also real social issues that are worth solving for.
The most polarizing and extreme voices will often be the loudest or most visible, but rarely will they be representative of a group at large.
Why would this stance be surprising? A company managed by the federal gov cannot take stances on politics.
Coinbase was started and is run by the feds.
I can’t think of a worse way to handle this situation.
Sure, I’m not sure what the answer is. Then again, I’m not a professional HR person who is supposed to be trained in handling these issues.
Having 5% of your workforce quit over nothing more than messaging is a catastrophic failure in people management.
Outright political speech bans at companies may be perfectly justified, but it’s usually the case that work environments that have a habit of outright banning things are stifling to be a part of. I’m sure this isn’t the first time that employees have heard tone-deaf messaging from corporate, and being offered some money to leave on the heels of some more time-deafness must have been appealing.
It’s not hard to have policies and training rooted in being empathetic and respectful toward others. That way you don’t have to ban difficult topics. Conversations between coworkers being excessively policed never feels good.
Asking people to always be work robots is completely unreasonable - lifelong friendships and marriages happen with coworkers. We are human, social creatures. Things happen in the world and we spend most of our weekday life at work, so we often need other people at work to talk with about them.
I think the CEO’s refusal to take a stance on whether Black Lives Matter is a stance in itself. It’s hard not to assume that he doesn’t agree with the organization or the statement, even if that’s not the case. And while the movement is in some way political, in most ways the organization and the phrase simply stands for the idea that, well, Black Lives Matter. It’s simply a marginalized group seeking equal treatment, and there really shouldn’t be anything political about being treated as an equal.
Of course, the reactionaries in our world always demand that we think otherwise: that we should be considerate of their views on keeping women, certain races and ethnicities, the differently abled, or people with the “wrong” faith as second-class citizens. They want us to consider these fundamentally flawed views as if they are on equal plane as a valid “other side” of the coin, as if it’s simple political disagreement. In reality, their viewpoints were never acceptable, we’ve just had to suffer through them.
There’s nothing political about telling someone through words and actions that they matter, and treating those people with equal protections and rights in the criminal justice system.
As an anecdote, my employer had no problem proclaiming support for Black lives. We have Black employees, of course we should agree that Black Lives Matter. And of course we can have difficult conversations among our coworkers, as long as we know how to listen to each other. This is where HR comes in to help train and guide around keeping those conversations productive and beneficial to everyone, because people grow by having their viewpoints challenged and expanded - and that can happen at work!
This comment is a perfect example of why banning political speech in the workplace is a very good idea. Every workplace that I've worked in that tolerated political speech ended up with a highly vocal segment of people making statements that parallel this comment: proclaiming that only a certain stance on controversial issues is acceptable, and implying (or stating outright) that divergence from this orthodoxy amounts to an affront to human dignity. This kind of rhetoric creates a hostile and toxic work environment, and companies are right in putting a stop to it.
> only a certain stance on controversial issues is acceptable, and implying (or stating outright) that divergence from this orthodoxy amounts to an affront to human dignity
There are a variety of controversial issues where one position is a literal affront to human dignity (i.e., a deliberate act of disrespect).
> This kind of rhetoric creates a hostile and toxic work environment
This is a privileged view of the situation.
As a simple example, imagine you have three coworkers: Alex, Blake, and Taylor.
Alex believes that Taylor should not have been allowed to have married their current spouse, and posts on their personal Twitter account advocating that the decisions which allowed that to be possible be repealed.
Alex hasn't shared their beliefs in a work setting, but did tweet something about the company and as a result Taylor saw the other tweets and learned how Alex felt.
Taylor believes that Alex's position is a deliberate act of disrespect. Taylor fears a decision that would result in no longer being married to their spouse, which would lead to problems with medical insurance, child custody, finances, etc. Taylor doesn't feel safe working with someone who actively wishes to destroy a meaningful part of their life.
Taylor asks the company to make a statement supporting their right to have married their partner.
Blake says that Taylor is creating a hostile and toxic work environment.
Is Blake right? Or is Taylor acting in self defensive, in response to an already-hostile and already-toxic work environment? Is the discomfort felt by Blake acceptable "collateral damage"?
Do your answers change if the hypothetical scenario is not about a same-sex couple in 2020 following Obergefell, but an interracial couple in California in 1950 following the ruling of anti-miscegenation laws as unconstitutional?
Statements that genuinely are an affront to human dignity are already prohibited under anti-harassment rules. Such positions are also rarely controversial: most people do not want to disrespect human dignity.
A substantial segment of people have realized that they can shut down any conflicting opinions on controversial issues by proclaiming that divergence from their orthodoxy amounts to an affront to human dignity. Over the course of my employment I've seen people claim:
* All positions must pursue at least 50% female representation, and anything less than that amounts to misogyny.
* Voting for the current president of the United States amounts to an act of overt racism.
* Opposing affirmative action amounts to overt racism.
* Supporting affirmative action amounts to overt racism.
These positions are not affronts to human dignity. Maybe some people genuinely do believe that it does, but their views are disconnected enough that it's no excuse:
* Say an anti-abortion activist genuinely does believe that terminating a pregnancy amounts to murder. I'm sure such a person would be deeply offended by someone who supports a woman's right to do so, and would see it as an affront to human dignity. Say they posted on Facebook to this effect, that abortion is murder and should be banned. A co-worker who has had an abortion complains to HR saying a co-worker accused them of murder because of their contraceptive decisions. No HR person worth their salt would take action in this case, since it's effectively firing ~30% of the population because of their political or religious beliefs. If you don't want to be exposed to your co-workers political views, don't friend them on Facebook and don't follow them on Twitter.
* Say Bob makes a tweet supporting affirmative action in hiring and promotion, and Lin (who is Asian and opposes affirmative action) sees this. She finds it an affront to her dignity and amounts to asking organizations to deprive her right to equal opportunity. Does Lin have grounds to ask the company to sanction Bob for openly espousing discrimination against her? If these statement were made in the workplace, maybe, but otherwise Lin should just not view Bob's out-of-work communications. The company's policy is to give equal opportunity to all races, and Lin has no proof that Bob brought his views into the workplace.
Crucially, though, these two examples occurred outside of the workplace. Had they occurred inside the workplace ,then they now have much stronger cases. Your co-workers are captive audiences, in the context of interactions in the office. If Bob says this to Lin in the office, Lin can't just block him.
As far as your example goes, If Taylor doesn't want to see Alex's political views Taylor should block Alex on Twitter. They're not a captive audience in this situation: there's zero reason why these two people need to see each other's tweets to do their job. But if Alex said this inside the office, then there'd be better grounds for taking action against Alex. That's why offices are increasingly telling co-workers to keep their politics out of the office.
> proclaiming that only a certain stance on controversial issues is acceptable, and implying (or stating outright) that divergence from this orthodoxy amounts to an affront to human dignity.
Are you suggesting that all stances on all controversial issues are acceptable, and that it is impossible to hold a stance which is an affront to human dignity? Or are you merely saying that these issues are relatively unimportant compared to one's labor at their place of employment, and should thus be ignored?
Stances that genuinely are an affront to human dignity are already prohibited under harassment rules. Banning politics in the workplace has no bearing on this.
Other political issues may very well be important to people, and they're free to act on them in their own time. Your co-workers are a captive audience, and it's not appropriate to abuse that relationship for political activism. People who want to be politically active can do so on their own time. I would not take issue with, say, a Mormon co-worker who goes door to door on weekends and takes PTO to go on missionary trips. I would however, take issue with proselytizing to co-workers. I regard politics the same way.
And while the movement is in some way political, in most ways the organization and the phrase simply stands for the idea that, well, Black Lives Matter
That's just wrong. "Black lives matter" encompasses at least three separate categories of claims:
1. The lives of black people are inherently as valuable as the lives of others.
2. The US and western civilization in general is based on white supremacy at its core, and all disparities that disfavor minorities are solely due to present-day racism.
3. Radical change is necessary in order to solve the problems of racism, including reparations, abolishing the police, and ending capitalism.
BLM often ends up being a motte-and-bailey where anyone who isn't totally on board with #2 or #3 is accused of denying #1.
This is where HR comes in to help train and guide around keeping those conversations productive and beneficial to everyone, because people grow by having their viewpoints challenged and expanded
I suspect there are certain viewpoints that can be challenged and others than cannot.
I hoped that it was obvious by my word “mostly” that I was trying to distill the idea.
#2 is objectively true, ask any historian.
#3 is making a whole lot of assumptions about the goals and beliefs of an extremely large tent.
There are absolutely viewpoints that aren’t allowed to be challenged at work. But what you’re getting close to alluding to is the flawed idea of all ideas being equally acceptable.
The idea that Black Lives Matter is not on equal plane with the inverse. Those against the idea over technicalities are on the wrong side of history and human decency.
> I think the CEO’s refusal to take a stance on whether Black Lives Matter is a stance in itself. It’s hard not to assume that he doesn’t agree with the organization or the statement, even if that’s not the case. And while the movement is in some way political, in most ways the organization and the phrase simply stands for the idea that, well, Black Lives Matter. It’s simply a marginalized group seeking equal treatment, and there really shouldn’t be anything political about being treated as an equal.
If BLM was just that, most people, even on the political right, would have no problems with it. The trouble is, BLM the organization is run by Marxists, is openly racist in itself (black exclusivity), and their aims are much more than racial equality.
Their leaders have made statements regarding dismantling capitalism, have attended rallies with Nicolas Maduro, and have had their funding organized by ex-convict Susan Rosenberg, who was part of the terrorist May 19th Communist Organization.
I'm a fan of racial equality, and by that I mean completely eliminating racism quotas, making hiring based purely on merit and not melanin. I will have nothing to do with the organization BLM.
> If BLM was just that, most people, even on the political right, would have no problems with it.
Let's get real. People on the political right have been yelling about kneeling in the NFL since that particular form of protest began. And it has few/none of the associations you describe.
> I'm a fan of racial equality, and by that I mean completely eliminating racism quotas, making hiring based purely on merit and not melanin.
Sounds great in theory. Now try to ascertain if someone made a hiring/promotion decision based on merit or on melanin without some kind of Star Trek era brain scan.
> Sounds great in theory. Now try to ascertain if someone made a hiring/promotion decision based on merit or on melanin without some kind of Star Trek era brain scan.
I'm of the opinion that business owners should be the sole arbiters of who is hired and promoted anyway. The State should mind its own business. A good business owner will promote the best talent which will make their company grow. If they start filtering talent based on skin color, they're hurting their own pocket.
You can't ascertain whether individual hiring decisions are based on merit or not, but you can make a statistical guess at what percentage of each ethnicity would be promoted based on the demographics where the hiring is taking place. If the population is 10% black and 90% white, you'd expect an organization to be 10% black and 90% white on average, if no racial screening is occurring.
However, the common "diversity quotas" which are commonly employed now want a different outcome. They want to see at least 50% of hires from BAME, even if BAME are only 20% of the demographics. There's a term for this. It's called racism.
> However, the common "diversity quotas" which are commonly employed now want a different outcome. They want to see at least 50% of hires from BAME, even if BAME are only 20% of the demographics.
I'm pretty sure this is a straw man. 50% quotas are common for women (50% of the population), but otherwise I could find no evidence of 50% quotas based on race.
I’m not sure that I would consider BLM to be that centralized anymore. It has far outgrown the opinions of its initial founders. The vast majority of people who identify with the movement are in no way Marxist or anti-capitalist. They’re just people who are tired of seeing different rules for different races.
From Wikipedia:
> The phrase "Black Lives Matter" can refer to a Twitter hashtag, a slogan, a social movement, a political action committee,[18] or a loose confederation of groups advocating for racial justice. As a movement, Black Lives Matter is grassroots and decentralized, and leaders have emphasized the importance of local organizing over national leadership
Again, as a company it’s not even hard to take a not-tone-deaf stance on the issue while avoiding directly supporting the original organization. It’s not hard to reassure your Black colleagues that you recognize their struggle and that you support them.
When you as a company say “we refuse to discuss this, you are forbidden from discussing this,” it’s inhuman and tone deaf.
> Having 5% of your workforce quit over nothing more than messaging is a catastrophic failure in people management.
> I think the CEO’s refusal to take a stance on whether Black Lives Matter is a stance in itself. It’s hard not to assume that he doesn’t agree with the organization or the statement, even if that’s not the case.
I think you're right about the second part, but I disagree that it's "nothing more than messaging." Surely it must not be about "focusing on Coinbase's mission" but rather that the Coinbase leadership feels that the Black Lives Matter issue simply is not important enough to take a stance on and thus potentially alienate some people. I strongly suspect that Coinbase would take a stance if they deemed the issue to be important enough. Would Coinbase take a stance if there was a current prominent debate over whether Black people should be allowed to vote? Or is that not related closely enough to their mission? What if the prominent debate was over whether Black people should be allowed to have bank accounts, or purchase cryptocurrencies?
It's the same as saying "Don't discuss religion at work." A religious fundamentalist would take issue with the mere fact that they are being told not to discuss their religion. That's what we have with virtue signalling types. They are religious fundamentalists, and their religion is Statism.
The problem with politics- and religion-like conversations is that it's like walking on the edge of a sword–it's quite easy to get into debates. Debating with your work colleagues about politics is something one would better avoid.
And not even “don’t discuss it at work” (although that would also be a fine rule). More just that the company itself isn’t going to be in the business of lobbying for any particular politics.
Generally speaking, dead weight know they're dead weight / have an easy gig, and are the last people you would see taking such a deal because they usually prefer to keep coasting.
By definition most of them do not have strong principles (they're okay with mediocre work representing them), so i don't picture them leaving on principles
Brian Armstrong is a phenomenally capable and committed CEO who has an accurate gauge on the importance of financial inclusivity. Perhaps there is no greater opportunity to advance humanity and uplift the world's population than to proliferate decentralized financial technology and thereby empower the people of every country to secure their right to control their own wealth.
It’s unfortunate that CEOs / Founders think it’s appropriate to dictate the culture of the organization vs. learning to nurture the emergent values from within the team.
It’s a sign of limited leadership capacity to attempt to install culture as a top down mandate.
It's unfortunate that people who run companies... run companies? Do you understand how deluded you sound when you're indignantly concerntrolling over a crypto startup not abiding by the hyperintense political environ that you personally prefer? This is installing a culture. It's installing a culture that doesn't leech into either
a. Areas they can't focus on primarily, or
b. Areas that would directly make 10, 15, 25% of their human capital feel attacked/engaged in a hostile environment.
I’m not sure where you got that I prefer a hypertense climate.
I’m referring to the hubris of a ceo who thinks they can dictate the culture in any meaningful way with top down mandates vs. actual leadership which is developing leaders and nudging culture via language and relationship structures.
It's a business. Not a kindergarten. Though in Silicon Valley (having worked there) I know many employees don't understand this.
It's like that person who screamed "we're trying to build a home here!" at a university when someone was to be cancelled. What? No... that's not what a university is.
Emergent values and culture? A CEO should just start paying people and hope that a business emerges? What? It's literally the job of the leadership to steer the company.
But note "Leaders nudge people and the tribe to the next stage". In this case the leader sees where the tribe is going and is steering away from that sinkhole of unhappiness (constant workplace politicking doesn't make anybody happy, even when perceived progress is being made) and unproductivity that is workplace activism.
Putting a fire extinguisher on that self-destructive behavior seems like the leader's job. It's not something you should be nurturing.
You may disagree about it being self-destructive, but that would be a different issue.
But thanks for the book recommendation. Adding it to my list.
Depends on the organization and the type of leaders within it.
At the higher levels of organizational leadership, it’s exactly emergent mission, vision and culture.
This is why Tony From Zappos gives away Dave Logan’s book on Tribal Leadership for free.
Stage 3 leaders try to tell everyone in the company what the culture is; Stage 4 leaders create a culture based on actual shared values (not something from a mission statement or poster on the wall or offsite activity).
Most cultures are still at stage 3, but the greatest ones are stage 4+.
I’ve seen this in my work over the past 20 years working with founders from some of the most successful companies (as a personal coach and advisor).
Debate causes or political candidates internally that are unrelated to work
Why limit yourself to the 40-50h you spend at work. Let's just ban political debate everywhere. It's so divisive! At maximum, you should debate causes or political candidates with people who think exactly like you. But even this may lead to unexpected frustration, it's much better to just rest assured that everybody thinks exactly like you.
I'm still shocked by the support over this policy. Having no stance on a topic is taking a stance on a topic. I'm surprised they didn't have more people leave. It's looks like from the article they have lost 5% so far and haven't finished talks with all employees.
> Having no stance on a topic is taking a stance on a topic.
Semantically perhaps, but not in practice. On most issues there are those who support, those who oppose, and a lot of neutrals who do not want to be involved and do not want to be caught in the middle of the fighting.
I'm not surprised that it's only 5%. I think it's worth keeping in mind that this is a cryptocurrency company and so that already are within a culture that has strong libertarian leanings. The people that took the severance are very likely just bored with their job and wanted a vacation.
Some of the comments in this thread make me pretty sad. There is a lot of nuance, obviously, but generally speaking when people say work is too "political" and make complaints that "people are allowed to insult straight white males, but insulting other groups is off limits", it doesn't take much reading between the lines to see what is going on. I hope everyone can take a second and appreciate how underrepresented certain demographics are in tech and that we should all work to change this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24721734&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24721734&p=3