[HN Gopher] A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company
___________________________________________________________________
A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company
Author : gyre007
Score : 106 points
Date : 2020-10-08 17:51 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.coinbase.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.coinbase.com)
| calcsam wrote:
| As a comparison, when Zenefits offered two months of severance
| and four months of COBRA (less than Coinbase), 10% of the company
| took it.
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/20/zenefits-ceo-says-about-10-p...
| [deleted]
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Zenefits does not seem to have the best company culture.
|
| https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/losing-job-offer-quora-uber-v...
| beervirus wrote:
| The policy seems pretty reasonable to me. Surprising that 60
| people would quit because the company wants to make money instead
| of virtue signal.
| sparkie wrote:
| 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.
| beervirus wrote:
| 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.
| andreygrehov wrote:
| 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.
| decafninja wrote:
| 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?
| elektor wrote:
| Not talking about your salary only benefits the employer and
| allows them to deflate workers wages.
| lykr0n wrote:
| 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.
| hnracer wrote:
| 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.
|
| I find it quite interesting honestly.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| For non-US HN readers, or those not current on BLM:
|
| - to unpack your superficial post would take a 200-page book
| because it touches on multiple overlapping and non-overlapping
| issues
|
| - but the short story is that the US public, and peaceful
| protesters, agree with the concept of improving black legal
| system rights, but the organizers and rioters behind the arson
| attacks are Marxist fronts, apparently funded by the CCP.
|
| Their goal is anarchy, not BLM reform - literally they want to
| make the US ungovernable so they can field their own political
| structure built upon the rubble they created.
|
| - the original problem was police unions and captive DAs, which
| has been lost in the noise, and would take an extreme focus to
| fix even in the best of times. I don't think peaceful protests
| can solve a problem that entrenched at all, but neither can
| foreign-incluenced Marxists
|
| We know now that the National Guard should have been called out
| in downtown areas, and arsonists should have been shot. Many
| moved from city-to-city, burning as they went.
|
| Regarding your comment about web site banners, it's likely that
| when the Marxists started to burn downtowns, companies wondered
| what exactly they were supporting. They got a clue well ahead
| of the Democrats - it took Pelosi 2 months to denounce the
| riots, which really meant the party supported it.
|
| You can learn more about the CCP involvement by watching recent
| Youtube NTD/Epoch Times channel videos. They have experienced
| China-watch reporters on staff researching CCP inroads into the
| US.
| stonogo wrote:
| 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.
| DevKoala wrote:
| > 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.
| easton wrote:
| 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.
| jseliger wrote:
| 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.
| dangus wrote:
| I don't know if they still do this, but I recall Zappos having
| a constant offer on the table to pay you to quit.
|
| I bet they didn't have 5% turnover over some time-deaf email
| from the CEO.
|
| My guess: those 5% got sick of tone-dead all hands
| meetings/memos and saw their chance to bail out.
|
| I wonder what other companies during the Covid recession has 5%
| voluntary turnover?
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| 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.
| dangus wrote:
| 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.
| hnracer wrote:
| 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.
| stagger87 wrote:
| Zappos will pay _new_ employees (reportedly 4k USD) to quit.
|
| Coinbase's offer was 4-6 months severance with benefits over
| that timeframe.
| nscalf wrote:
| 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.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| 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.
| arnvald wrote:
| I think this is also true from the other side - probably more
| people would leave if we weren't in a recession.
| x87678r wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| bioinformatics wrote:
| I am not a mathematician, so don't quote me, but it seems 5%
| are happy to leave.
| raiyu wrote:
| As they make money on each trade of Bitcoin they are doing
| quite well financially even if Bitcoin prices aren't shooting
| to the moon.
| bdamm wrote:
| 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.
| mnd999 wrote:
| 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.
| bdamm wrote:
| 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.
| CarelessExpert wrote:
| > Companies aren't generally supposed to be political.
|
| I honestly don't understand how you could believe that.
|
| Every oil and gas company or tobacco company has been
| historically engaged in politics.
|
| IBM and BMW famously enabled the Nazi regime during WWII.
|
| Union busting and strike breaking throughout the 70s and 80s
| was entirely political.
|
| Silicon Valley, in general, _heavily_ invests in political
| lobbying, including Coinbase itself!
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| 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.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > 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.
| generationP wrote:
| "We are the 5%" will make a great political slogan.
| aksss wrote:
| Yeah, that was already taken decades ago:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-Percent_Nation
| redm wrote:
| 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.
| ketzo wrote:
| > ...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._
| f69281c wrote:
| 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
|
| spare me.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| We control the information flow for billions. How the hell
| could that NOT be political?
| dingaling wrote:
| > 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.
| kelnos wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| 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.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Taking "no stance" on a political issue is itself a
| political stance for the status quo. It is impossible to
| not be political
| username90 wrote:
| 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.
| xmprt wrote:
| 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.
| bluntfang wrote:
| >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.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| 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.
| ErikBjare wrote:
| I see people replying this a lot, and those who do must have
| missed what Brian said about it this exact thing in his
| original post.
| choko wrote:
| 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.
| yokaze wrote:
| 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.
| claydavisss wrote:
| "everything is political" = "people who agree with me can be
| as loud as they like"
| drivingmenuts wrote:
| 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.
| disposekinetics wrote:
| >(Almost) everything is political.
|
| I'm curious what your definition of political is, because my
| gut feeling is that (Almost) nothing is political.
| SolarNet wrote:
| 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.
| RIMR wrote:
| The DOJ just today announced that they are drafting new
| regulations on Cryptocurrency markets.
|
| Coinbase is intrinsically political. They're a financial
| institution. Their product is subject to both laws and
| public scrutiny.
| SolarNet wrote:
| Absolutely, which is why their apolitical stance is
| absurd.
| RIMR wrote:
| 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.
| disposekinetics wrote:
| >you answer to your neighbors
|
| Fundamentally, this is our disagreement.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| That's like not agreeing that water is wet
| ardy42 wrote:
| > 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.
| femto113 wrote:
| 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?
| disposekinetics wrote:
| 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.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| 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.
|
| (Also, re: ice cream: what about Ben & Jerry's?)
| nemothekid wrote:
| 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?
| ardy42 wrote:
| > 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: Politika, politika, '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.
| yokaze wrote:
| From entering "define political" in Google:
|
| 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.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| 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).
| [deleted]
| skybrian wrote:
| 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.
| RIMR wrote:
| 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.
| samatman wrote:
| This has been explicitly contradicted by several of their
| communications, including the one which launched this
| thread.
| yokaze wrote:
| Exactly: Being "apolitical" is a political decision. In
| this case: Don't question what we are doing (in the
| larger picture) or what our impact is.
| yeetawayhn wrote:
| If everything is political, then nothing is.
| scottlocklin wrote:
| "Everything is political" is literally the working
| definition of totalitarianism.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > "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.)
| int_19h wrote:
| 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.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| 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.
| zorpner wrote:
| Could you clarify what you mean by this?
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| 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.
| maximente wrote:
| one can also think of what it means if almost everything
| is unique, or almost everyone is smart, etc.
| novok wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| 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).
| xmprt wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| 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.
| knorker wrote:
| > (Almost) everything is political.
|
| Only in a world where words have no meaning.
| vkou wrote:
| 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.
| kelnos wrote:
| 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.
| samatman wrote:
| That's an uncharitable way of looking at it.
|
| I think the parent meant that the more you use the term
| "political" to refer to everything, the less meaning
| "political" has.
|
| That only means the word "politics" has no meaning at the
| limit.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > 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).
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > 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.
| knorker wrote:
| > 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.
| titanomachy wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| kelnos wrote:
| 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.
| uniqueid wrote:
| I could see this working out badly.
|
| 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.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| 6 months of severance when you can probably get a job in a few
| weeks is not something a careerist would take?
| uniqueid wrote:
| Ha, good point! Maybe the balance of those who have already
| quit is the inverse of what I assumed.
|
| To my point, though, I'm envisioning a longer-term culture-
| shift.
| modeless wrote:
| 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.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| "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.
| uniqueid wrote:
| 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.
| DoofusOfDeath wrote:
| I'm also interested to see how it works out.
|
| 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.
| onetimemanytime wrote:
| Isn't 5%, a normal, healthy turnover for a company in that field?
| dangus wrote:
| 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!
| manfredo wrote:
| 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.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > 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?
| manfredo wrote:
| 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.
| sparkie wrote:
| > 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.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > 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.
| sparkie wrote:
| > 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.
| dang wrote:
| Please let's not take HN threads further into
| political/ideological flamewar.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?query=generic%20ideolog%20by:dang&da.
| ..
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| dangus wrote:
| 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.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > 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?
| orangecat wrote:
| _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.
| dangus wrote:
| 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.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| 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.
| abalaji wrote:
| The answer to this question is in the blogpost. The answer is
| no.
| haukilup wrote:
| With a severance package that good, I could be tempted to take
| this as an opportunity to switch jobs.
|
| I suspect that many of these employees aren't motivated by
| politics, but instead by money.
| morsch wrote:
| _We won't:_
|
| _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.
| lawnchair_larry wrote:
| I am beyond sick of political activists in the workplace, so I
| hope this trend catches on.
| sneak wrote:
| 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.
| jojo2333 wrote:
| same. I don't even think the severance is necessary.
|
| Just ask people who are interested in politics in the workplace
| to leave.
| mpweiher wrote:
| Just as a reference point: Germany is well-known for its very
| strong employee protection.
|
| 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.
| LockAndLol wrote:
| And that's exactly how it should be. It's a workplace, not
| a forum. Unless your job is political activism, it has no
| place at work.
| nunja wrote:
| 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.
| thundergolfer wrote:
| 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.
| mattparcens wrote:
| So who gets to decide which issues to get involved in? Does
| everyone have to get involved in every issue?
| TedShiller wrote:
| 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.
| titanomachy wrote:
| 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?
| TedShiller wrote:
| They do not have an obligation. However, employees will
| feel it is unfair if their side is not heard as much as the
| other side.
| gnicholas wrote:
| > _I could start a company that only hires registered
| Republicans_
|
| This might be illegal in California, which considers
| political activity to be a protected class.
| lawnchair_larry wrote:
| 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.
| linuxhansl wrote:
| I am beyond sick of folks in the workplace who silently accept
| the status quo, so I hope this trend does not catch on.
| disposekinetics wrote:
| Silence gives us the ability to work together, without
| silence you get to hear my hardcore religious ideas all day.
| Silence is our truce.
| batt4good wrote:
| 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).
| spollo wrote:
| 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.
| mithr wrote:
| 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.
| rlewkov wrote:
| Our company, our rules, if u don't like it here's some cash - buh
| bye
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
| codezero wrote:
| 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.
| joecot wrote:
| Maybe not, but are at least 5% able to do that?
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| Who knows if official numbers are kept for our industry, but
| I haven't noticed a decrease in the pace of hiring.
|
| Bitcoin isn't hurting, either.
| noitpmeder wrote:
| 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.
| codezero wrote:
| 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.
| ummonk wrote:
| Yeah it's weird so few took it up given how low median tenure
| in tech tends to be.
| rednerrus wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| 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.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Let me guess that you are referring to "reverse racism"
| here
| voxl wrote:
| Hammer? Meet nail.
|
| It's not a surprise that conservative viewpoints are
| biased against reality. They have been for a long time. I
| have no issue being partisan online, in work, or out of
| work, my job is not as important as stopping an American
| Hitler.
| tlear wrote:
| It is just racism
| monoideism wrote:
| Why use a special term? Just "racism" works very well.
| The idea that only certain races can "qualify" for racism
| is Orwellian.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| 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.
| t0mmyb0y wrote:
| Fuck you coinbase. You are just a piece of shit federal
| government cover company.
| modeless wrote:
| [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.
| thedevil wrote:
| One thought: If you see a resume with Coinbase until October
| 2020, that's probably someone who prefers political activism in
| the workplace.
|
| 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.
| djsumdog wrote:
| I dunno. I wonder how many people they lost, not because they
| were political, but they wanted a break for 4~6 months.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Of course, anyone who were about to quit for any reason would
| take the offer.
| awinder wrote:
| 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.
| dmode wrote:
| Or it may mean that they just took advantage of a severance
| offered and found another job
| leetcrew wrote:
| 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.
| dudul wrote:
| 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.
| eli wrote:
| Only a very foolish hiring manager would hold it against
| someone who left Coinbase. Or someone who stayed on.
|
| > I personally am afraid to associate myself too publicly with
| a political stance, lest I be wrong and/or the environment
| changes.
|
| This suggests you speak from a position of privilege. It is
| easy to implicitly endorse the status quo when it is beneficial
| to you.
| arawnx wrote:
| Reddit is here, you seem lost: https://www.reddit.com/
|
| In fact, being able to lavishly throw around internal capital
| and play with people's careers over their political opinions
| is the position of privilege. Leveraging multimillion dollar
| firms to hammer Cathedral dogma into people's heads is
| privilege.
|
| Not wanted to berate people/be berated/get in political
| fights writing Selenium for a crypto startup is not
| privilege.
| shiado wrote:
| 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.
| RangerScience wrote:
| 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.
| dmurray wrote:
| 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.
| RangerScience wrote:
| I mean - If it's a problem that they're political or
| apolitical, then it's already a part of your hiring
| process.
|
| Whether you talk to them (or not) about it doesn't change
| that - just means you're hiding that part of the process or
| including them in it.
| dmurray wrote:
| > 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.
| RangerScience wrote:
| 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.
| xoxoy wrote:
| a lot of people might have just taken this opportunistically
| and did not have anything to do with politics. i don't think
| you can really read into it.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| "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.
| [deleted]
| Kiro wrote:
| > 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.
| hnracer wrote:
| 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.
| knorker wrote:
| 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.
| knaq wrote:
| 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.
| tuna-piano wrote:
| 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.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| That's if people even remember. Which means maybe the next 6-12
| months, and after that it'll be forgotten.
| sroussey wrote:
| Or it might mean a hostile work environment. Who knows.
| paulgb wrote:
| 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.
| choppaface wrote:
| 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.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| 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.
| sprt wrote:
| 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).
| etangent wrote:
| 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.
| sprt wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| 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.
| Pils wrote:
| 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?
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > one inconsistency is that Coinbase is based in SF
|
| That's not an inconsistency.
|
| > 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.
| Pils wrote:
| > > 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.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This is a pretty obvious straw man argument.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Can you elaborate on how that's an unacceptable thing to
| say at coinbase?
| x3n0ph3n3 wrote:
| 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.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| And so the sorting into apolitical and leftist companies can
| begin!
|
| It's probably for the best.
| arawnx wrote:
| 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.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| 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.
| libria wrote:
| 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.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Indifference to politics is a political view.
| stale2002 wrote:
| If it is a political view, then it is such a common
| political view as to be banal.
|
| A whole lot of people in the world are actively
| indifferent to politics.
|
| Those apolitical people vastly outnumber all the hyper
| political "your with us or against us" group.
| kmonsen wrote:
| 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.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| I agree. I think you may have meant to address this to
| the comment that I was replying to.
| kmonsen wrote:
| I misunderstood you, but I probably read it wrong. Super
| tired today. Thank you for clarifying.
| dlivingston wrote:
| 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.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| I don't see how this refutes anything. Plenty of people
| from all races, classes, and genders make the political
| decision to avoid politics.
| throwaway4715 wrote:
| How does one ensure "stability" without getting involved
| in politics?
| jimmygrapes wrote:
| 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.
| username90 wrote:
| 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.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| 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.
| pembrook wrote:
| 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?
| asdfman123 wrote:
| 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.
| rllearneratwork wrote:
| why? typically RSUs/signing bonus vest over 4 years period
| emidln wrote:
| 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.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| 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.
| dyeje wrote:
| Many companies, like Coinbase, don't have RSUs.
| chris11 wrote:
| Coinbase does offer stock options though.
| dyeje wrote:
| 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.
| krzyk wrote:
| 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.
| kemitche wrote:
| 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.
| djsumdog wrote:
| 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:
|
| https://battlepenguin.com/tech/tech-culture-shock-from-
| ameri...
|
| 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.
| mathgladiator wrote:
| 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.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > but switching jobs let's you ask for $10k or more
|
| Right... but aren't the options you're throwing away worth
| 10x that? How can it possibly be worth it?
| djsumdog wrote:
| I've never worked at a place that gave me stock options.
| slow_donkey wrote:
| Why wouldn't you be obtaining the equivalent amount of
| options at the next job?
|
| Let's say your vesting schedule is 4 years w/ 1 year
| cliff, it's only necessary to stay 1 year. Thereafter
| you're not 'losing' options by leaving.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| 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.
| slow_donkey wrote:
| 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 $$$.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Ah right - I'm used to public companies where stock
| options are cold hard cash as soon as they vest.
| servercobra wrote:
| Sure, but likely, more of those $100k options will be
| worth $0 than $200k. If you spread it around, you're more
| likely to hit big.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Do the vast majority of jobs in these companies actually
| give you stock options?
|
| Most places I know of do not
| bluntfang wrote:
| 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.
| yibg wrote:
| 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.
| notJim wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| 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
| blastonico wrote:
| Very interesting, more than 90% prefer to keep Coinbase's core
| values. If they were able to keep the best employees it's worth
| it.
| devtul wrote:
| Let's say you don't even have a new job lined up but you feel
| capable enough to switch jobs, why turn down a severance like
| that. Free money.
| blck wrote:
| 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.
| heimatau wrote:
| 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.
| potta_coffee wrote:
| 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.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| But Coinbase is using their business as a political
| platform[1].
|
| [1] https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-
| contributions/?...
| newbie789 wrote:
| 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."
| dmurray wrote:
| 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.
| newbie789 wrote:
| 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.
| JPKab wrote:
| 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.
| kmonsen wrote:
| They appear to mostly support one candidate that is very
| pro bitcoin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianforde
|
| "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"
| beervirus wrote:
| No, probably not.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24722941
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| I hope they get a lawsuit over this if they continue giving
| to candidates.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Or they're just bribing, er lobbying, politicians to
| achieve the company's goals, regardless of the affiliation
| of said politicians.
| cltby wrote:
| Logically, it is. Just not in a way that's meaningful or
| interesting.
| tofuahdude wrote:
| 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.
| cltby wrote:
| 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.
| Spivak wrote:
| 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.
| cltby wrote:
| 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.
| Spivak wrote:
| 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!
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| 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.
| blck wrote:
| 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.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| 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.
| rjldev wrote:
| 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.
| tehjoker wrote:
| 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.
| cltby wrote:
| 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.
|
| You might be proving too much here.
| tehjoker wrote:
| 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.
| gambler wrote:
| _> 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.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| 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.
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| 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.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| 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.
| CarelessExpert wrote:
| Cryptocurrency is an _explicitly_ political cause.
| cltby wrote:
| 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.
| CarelessExpert wrote:
| 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.
|
| I tend to suspect it's the latter.
| devtul wrote:
| 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.
| danaris wrote:
| Your life may not be political.
|
| My life may not be political.
|
| 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.
| ponker wrote:
| 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
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| 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.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| 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?
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Maybe that's a strawman...but I see your point.
| gnusty_gnurc wrote:
| It's precisely the type of messaging that happened after 9/11
| too.
|
| "You're either with us or against us."
|
| Leave it to the woke crowd to take a page out of the Karl
| Rove handbook.
| blck wrote:
| 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.
| defen wrote:
| 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?
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| 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.
| defen wrote:
| 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.
| RangerScience wrote:
| 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.
| twmahna wrote:
| > 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.
| Pils wrote:
| > 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).
| ccleve wrote:
| 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?
| manfredo wrote:
| 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.
| Negitivefrags wrote:
| I really dislike this argument.
|
| Anyone using it is just saying "If you are not with us, your
| against us".
|
| It's simply a way to force a divide of the world into black and
| white and that sucks.
| [deleted]
| aksss wrote:
| "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 naivete or
| propose that their consistent outcomes won't apply here.
| zepto wrote:
| Is it necessarily?
|
| Social media has amplified polarization.
|
| Is it really the case that everyone must support one or other
| of the poles?
| joshuamorton wrote:
| 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.
| zepto wrote:
| 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'.
|
| Nobody supports the status quo.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| 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".
| zepto wrote:
| True, but your two statements in this comment aren't
| really representative of anything being discussed here.
|
| The statements we were talking about upthread don't
| reduce to these ones.
| RangerScience wrote:
| IMO that's due more to first-past-the-post voting.
| zepto wrote:
| That's another contributing factor, but social media is
| amplifying the extremes.
| fullshark wrote:
| 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.
| blck wrote:
| 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.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| It's no so strange. A lot of people are perfectly happy with
| the status quo, while recognizing that there's _always_ room
| for improvement.
| t0mmyb0y wrote:
| 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.
| nameless912 wrote:
| [citation needed]
| Dan_JiuJitsu wrote:
| Seems 5% attrition is a very small price to pay to weed out the
| bad apples.
|
| Looking at this through another prism, fully 95% of the company
| decided that being apolitical at work is reasonable.
|
| What happened to the rule against politics and religion in polite
| society?
| fao_ wrote:
| > 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.
| ada1981 wrote:
| 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.
| arawnx wrote:
| 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.
| tofuahdude wrote:
| Literally the job of executives is to define mission, vision,
| and the cultural approach to pursue that mission.
|
| Emergent mission, vision, and culture is a recipe for
| bankruptcy.
| knorker wrote:
| 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.
| curclerobber wrote:
| 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?
| jefe_ wrote:
| 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.
| plorg wrote:
| 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.
| krzyk wrote:
| 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.
|
| So I prefer companies to not mess with politics.
| libraryatnight wrote:
| When you come out with a policy like this as a response to this
| https://www.wired.com/story/turmoil-black-lives-matter-polit...
|
| 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"
| eli wrote:
| 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.
| JPKab wrote:
| 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?
| DoofusOfDeath wrote:
| > 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.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| "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."
| Miraste wrote:
| 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.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| No, they are effectively saying "Those issues are outside the
| scope of the purpose of our organization". That's _not_ the
| same thing.
| sequoia wrote:
| > "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_.
| thundergolfer wrote:
| 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.
| eli wrote:
| 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.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| 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.
| hnracer wrote:
| 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.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| 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?
| JPKab wrote:
| 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.
| kmonsen wrote:
| 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.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| 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."
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/03/facebook-.
| .. https://popular.info/p/the-republican-political-operatives
| beervirus wrote:
| > Isn't it the default, safe?
|
| 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.
| ccktlmazeltov wrote:
| 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).
| dmode wrote:
| If I had another offer, I would also take severance over
| Coinbase's "apolitical" stance
| beervirus wrote:
| 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.
| JPKab wrote:
| 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.
| dgellow wrote:
| > 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.
| CJefferson wrote:
| So these people you don't like (sjas) are both disruptive and
| conformist?
| JPKab wrote:
| 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.
| chairmanwow1 wrote:
| 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.
| libraryatnight wrote:
| It doesn't feel like this is about being 'apolitical' - it feels
| very political, particularly when you read
| https://www.wired.com/story/turmoil-black-lives-matter-polit...
| aaron-santos wrote:
| > Armstrong said in the memo he recognizes that what counts as
| politics is "a blurry line."
|
| Good luck dealing with disagreements on this when it's so poorly
| defined.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| 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.
| areichert wrote:
| > "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.
| majormajor wrote:
| > 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."
| areichert wrote:
| 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?
| paulgb wrote:
| 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.
|
| It would be great for those employees, though!
| greggyb wrote:
| 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.
|
| Original deck:
| https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664/
|
| Up to date statement: http://jobs.netflix.com/culture
| tabbott wrote:
| 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.
| anoncareer0212 wrote:
| 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.
| ahelwer wrote:
| 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.
| anoncareer0212 wrote:
| It isn't, the generosity is allowing you to pick up COBRA
| patrickyeon wrote:
| 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.
| shuckles wrote:
| 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."
| anoncareer0212 wrote:
| 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.
| shuckles wrote:
| 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.
| vmception wrote:
| > COBRA alone would eat up most of the severance.
|
| 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._
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _A software engineer paying for full price for high
| premium plan on COBRA would be spending around $400_
|
| Last time I continued health insurance via COBRA, I paid
| nearly $2k a month in premiums alone.
| vonmoltke wrote:
| I just estimated mine, and I would pay about $700/month.
| A stiff increase to be sure, but easily manageable if I
| was getting six months salary.
| duked wrote:
| 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
| anoncareer0212 wrote:
| 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.
| vmception wrote:
| > 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.
| jkaplowitz wrote:
| 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.
| shuckles wrote:
| Healthcare was also part of the severance package, and the
| market for software engineers in the Bay Area remains strong.
| anoncareer0212 wrote:
| It wasn't
| dudul wrote:
| What do you mean? It's one of the headline items. COBRA
| paid for 6 months.
| the_only_law wrote:
| 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.
| protomyth wrote:
| 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.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| It's interesting to hear Coinbase management insist that they're
| apolitical when the company makes significant political
| contributions itself[1].
|
| [1] https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-
| contributions/?...
| travisoneill1 wrote:
| I think they only claimed to be apolitical in matters that
| don't affect the company's core business.
| tabbott wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| mnd999 wrote:
| 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.
| vonmoltke wrote:
| 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.
| advisedwang wrote:
| 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?
| mplewis wrote:
| 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.
| jojo2333 wrote:
| Quite possible this could blacklist you from many other
| companies.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| The army of recruiters they have in their inboxes would turn
| them away now that they are available?
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| How? Maybe a short list of fintech or cryptotech companies
| but outside of that?
| altdatathrow wrote:
| There are literally thousands upon thousands of companies
| hiring software engineers today.
| [deleted]
| donatj wrote:
| Honest gut impression - they were probably dead weight anyway?
| Talking politics at work rather than, you know, getting work
| done.
|
| I've certainly worked with a number of the type.
| syspec wrote:
| 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
| rocketpastsix wrote:
| I highly doubt they walked in the door, spent 8 hours talking
| politics and collected their paychecks every month.
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| That seems to describe about 40% of Twitter users, so...it's
| not implausible.
| donatj wrote:
| Dude, you need to meet our old PM. It was politics, loudly
| with anyone who would listen, briefly interrupted by making
| our job harder.
|
| I was actually sad she left on her own rather than getting
| fired. She actually moved to a bigger company.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Seems like a really expensive way to get rid of them if they
| were dead weight in the first place.
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