18 votes

A third of Basecamp’s workers resign after a ban on talking politics

5 comments

  1. [3]
    cfabbro
    (edited )
    Link
    It should be noted that the NYT article doesn't really go into details about the probable reason behind the ban; silencing internal company critics. From Casey Newton: What really happened at...

    It should be noted that the NYT article doesn't really go into details about the probable reason behind the ban; silencing internal company critics. From Casey Newton:

    What really happened at Basecamp - How a list of "funny" customer names triggered an internal reckoning

    The controversy that embroiled enterprise software maker Basecamp this week began more than a decade ago, with a simple list of customers.

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

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

    Discussion about the list and how the company ought to hold itself accountable for creating it led directly to CEO Jason Fried announcing Tuesday that Basecamp would ban employees from holding “societal and political discussions” on the company’s internal chat forums.

    Fried’s memo was revised and updated several times; co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson followed with one of his own. Together, they are two of the most outspoken leaders in the entire tech industry on issues related to company culture, remote work, and collaboration. The company has published five books, one of which was a New York Times bestseller.

    But both of their posts avoided discussing the actual series of events that had led up to the policies, which were related directly to the workplace. In fact, the events all took place on Basecamp’s own software, which it sells to other companies on the promise of improving cohesion and reducing stress in the workplace.

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

    “At least in my experience, it has always been centered on what is happening at Basecamp,” said one employee — who, like most of those I spoke with today, requested anonymity so as to freely discuss internal deliberations. “What is being done at Basecamp? What is being said at Basecamp? And how it is affecting individuals? It has never been big political discussions, like ‘the postal service should be disbanded,’ or ‘I don’t like Amy Klobuchar.’

    Interviews with a half-dozen Basecamp employees over the past day paint a portrait of a company where workers sought to advance Basecamp’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion by having sensitive discussions about the company’s own failures. After months of fraught conversations, Fried and his co-founder, David Heinemeier Hansson moved to shut those conversations down.

    Whole thing is worth reading though.

    14 votes
    1. Akir
      Link Parent
      That does make this story a whole lot more understandable. I can completely understand wanting to leave a company that does this. It's basically impossible to talk to people without talking about...

      That does make this story a whole lot more understandable. I can completely understand wanting to leave a company that does this. It's basically impossible to talk to people without talking about things that are political in nature. We are living in a time where just about everything has been politicized, from the way we talk to the way we think.

      9 votes
    2. feigneddork
      Link Parent
      Reading about this from other places, it has been super frustrating as lots of people got hung up over the whole "Bandcamp is rejecting politics at work" when really what was going on was...

      Reading about this from other places, it has been super frustrating as lots of people got hung up over the whole "Bandcamp is rejecting politics at work" when really what was going on was "Bandcamp is suppressing criticism about past mistakes, including outright rejection of committees and 'no more lingering or dwelling on past decisions".

      Like, I get it - there are conversations to be had about professional conduct when continuously bringing up politics to the point where it impacts relationships with coworkers in a negative way (this gives me flashbacks of a contractor with very strong conservative opinions who kept trying to talking about politics - at its worst I had to listen to her talk negatively about trans people - I had a headache for the remainder of the day) but this isn't that conversation.

      Everything about the Changes at Bandcamp blogpost was - at least after reading Casey Newton's incredible article - designed to suppress criticism about past bad behaviours, at the very least the list.

      And this wouldn't be so interesting if it wasn't for a few things:

      • DHH & JF are very outspoken about political stuff or at least when it comes down to Basecamp's business interests.
      • Very specifically, JF has spoken out about Basecamp's poor diversity, and DHH is (or was) incredibly active on Twitter about social/political issues.

      For all the talk about professional conduct about politics in the workplace, nobody seems to question the professionalism of keeping names of customers with "funny" names. I get that when customers wind us up or if we are having a bad day, we might say some things behind closed doors, but to go so far as to keep a list of names of customers is just a tad bit much for "blowing some steam".

      But it seems like JF & DHH only care about the optics of keeping such a list, rather than resolving the issues of how a list like that could have been curated and maintained for years.

      Was that worth a third of Basecamp's employees, including nearly the entirety of the iOS team though?

      7 votes
  2. [2]
    skybrian
    Link
    If you want to read original sources, the story broke via a Verge article and one of the founders wrote a response to it that quotes some internal documents. Edit: I guess the platformer article...

    If you want to read original sources, the story broke via a Verge article and one of the founders wrote a response to it that quotes some internal documents.

    Edit: I guess the platformer article is the same reporter. Not sure why some of it is published there and some on Verge.

    3 votes
    1. cfabbro
      (edited )
      Link Parent
      You actually linked to the same article I already did. ;) Casey Newton broke the story, and wrote that article for both Verge and Platformer. Platformer is his own publication, which he started...

      You actually linked to the same article I already did. ;) Casey Newton broke the story, and wrote that article for both Verge and Platformer. Platformer is his own publication, which he started after leaving Vox Media/Verge last year. He still posts some of his articles on his old full-time employer's publications though, just as a freelance contributing editor now.

      4 votes