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.
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.
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 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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
>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.
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.
Readit News
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24721734&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24721734&p=3
The severance also included 6 months of health insurance. (Source: https://www.coindesk.com/coinbase-severance-apolitical-missi... )
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.
What kinda of things are people talking about?
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Bitcoin isn't hurting, either.
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 want to engage with politics at work.
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.
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'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".
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.
Only in a world where words have no meaning.
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.
Perhaps less Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age, and more Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe:
https://craphound.com/category/est/
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.
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.
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.
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I'm curious what your definition of political is, because my gut feeling is that (Almost) nothing is political.
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 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 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
spare me.
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?
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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).
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.
Their position is pretty straightforward and sensible, even if it is not entirely straightforward to implement in an even handed way.
[1] https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/?...
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I and a lot of my colleagues just want to do our work without being forced to participate in regular struggle sessions.
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.
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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 :)
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.
That's not quite how it actually works. https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organiz...
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!
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
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That might be seen in a positive or negative light, depending on your stance.
I personally am afraid to associate myself too publicly with a political stance, lest I be wrong and/or the environment changes.
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 for the best.
Taking the package can be seen as a strong stance, not taking it... not really.
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.
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.
"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
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=ptb;c=ptb;...
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.
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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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
So I prefer companies to not mess with politics.
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."
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.
You can still be very politically active on your own time.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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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?
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"
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/03/facebook-...https://popular.info/p/the-republican-political-operatives
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.
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"
Not in tech. If you're not actively competing to be more woke than the next guy, then you're a literal nazi and your silence is violence.
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.
It’s intentionally designed to deceive you.
Dead Comment
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.
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.
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."
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?
Frankly, giving the non-offended but unsatisfied employees a ready out is probably good for Coinbase in the long run.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Just ask people who are interested in politics in the workplace to leave.
However, activism at work is something you can actually legally lose your job over.
That doesn't mean you can't express your political opinions, freedom of expression is protected, but no agitation/activism.
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.
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.
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.