"The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone."
April 28, 2021 9:37 AM   Subscribe

Basecamp bars political talk at work. Today's social and political waters are especially choppy. Sensitivities are at 11, and every discussion remotely related to politics, advocacy, or society at large quickly spins away from pleasant. You shouldn't have to wonder if staying out of it means you're complicit, or wading into it means you're a target. These are difficult enough waters to navigate in life, but significantly more so at work. It's become too much. It's a major distraction. It saps our energy, and redirects our dialog towards dark places. It's not healthy, it hasn't served us well. And we're done with it on our company Basecamp's public announcement

From the article: "The moves, in both cases, were met with a mix of admiration and criticism, with supporters saying the policies are good for business and detractors arguing that choosing to abstain from politics is inherently political and probably impossible to enforce."
posted by mecran01 (132 comments total) 23 users marked this as a favorite
 
To wash your hands of political talk is not neutrality. It is explicitly, actively siding with the powerful and against the powerless.
posted by sourcequench at 9:46 AM on April 28, 2021 [149 favorites]


“Every discussion remotely related to politics, advocacy or society at large quickly spins away from pleasant,” Jason Fried, Basecamp’s chief executive, wrote in a blog post. “You shouldn’t have to wonder if staying out of it means you’re complicit, or wading into it means you’re a target.”
This was causing mild discomfort for some of the management, so we made it so you don't have to wonder any longer, peons.

You're all complicit, now get back to work.
posted by Nerd of the North at 9:46 AM on April 28, 2021 [52 favorites]


Chicken shits. It's impossible to not be political. When you refuse to take a side it just means you're siding with the status quo.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 9:46 AM on April 28, 2021 [32 favorites]


What Really Happened at Basecamp
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.
Middle school clowns in charge of tech companies, chapter 3342.

A broader insight for tech employees is that if you want to make the world better while at your job, don't expect to do it through an HR-sanctioned diversity committee because as soon as it calls for something that makes the bosses uncomfortable, it will get shut down. Organize a union instead.
posted by Space Coyote at 9:47 AM on April 28, 2021 [62 favorites]


additional context about what drove the decision.

an open letter from a current employee, jane yang:
But there were also some yellow flags. Whiffs of smoke that I was starting to pick up on. Your disproportionate, chilling response to a retrospective that you asked for. The whispers of how you had handled a prior company discussion when someone raised the able-ist language in the title of a recently published company book. The continued mourning years later of an executive who had centered the employees as her job, and then was summarily fired for not living up to the additional expectations of working miracles in marketing. The quiet departures of women and people of color, all of whom held their heads up high and left a better place behind than they found it.
twitter thread from a current employee, conor muirhead
Almost all political and social discourse happened within 2 totally opt-in places: 1) Our “Civil Solace” social space, and 2) our newly formed (like in the last 2-3 months) DEI council project.

(Civil Solace space is now closed and archived, DEI has a 2-week timer to wrap up.)

...

Occasionally “political” or “social” issues bled into broader company discussions, like when some objected to titling Jason & David’s most recent book using the word “crazy”, or when folks shared thoughts on how mocking people’s non-anglo names is a stepping stone towards racism
twitter thread from another employee, navid afshar
I work at Basecamp and I co-spearheaded the DEI Council formation. I’ve seen people ask what the DEI Council did to warrant such a response. The answer is _nothing_. We formed in February and we’re still getting ourselves organized.

...

And the reason we have a steering committee is because 21 of our roughly 58 employees joined the council. About one third.
posted by i used to be someone else at 9:47 AM on April 28, 2021 [20 favorites]


My guess, based on this:
Yesterday, we offered everyone at Basecamp an option of a severance package worth up to six months salary for those who've been with the company over three years, and three months salary for those at the company less than that.
(source)

It makes me guess that there's something that's going to come to light, either in terms of the company, or in terms of leadership, that would result in layoffs or trying to get ahead of ... something ... that makes this truly bizarre, public move make sense to those in power.
posted by xingcat at 9:47 AM on April 28, 2021 [22 favorites]


Basecamp's Rework Podcast is now going dark; the official page had it up yesterday, but it's been removed.
posted by i used to be someone else at 9:51 AM on April 28, 2021 [2 favorites]


LOL, the photo says it all.

Good luck once the legal challenges hit you fucking assholes. The fact that employees can "talk politics" when in favor of legislation that is supported by management, and that they intend to "ban committees" is defintily helpful evidence if anyone decides to bring an NLRB charge for quashing concerted activity.
posted by latkes at 9:53 AM on April 28, 2021 [4 favorites]


My friends adjacent are reasonably sure it's a combination of SV tech bro narcissism/sociopathic behaviour and some kind of funding event that would higher value for the founders if it had fewer employees. So like, "what's the easiest way for us to pare down without breaking any laws, I know, let's become social pariahs to everyone except sociopathic white dudes like us."
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:55 AM on April 28, 2021 [1 favorite]


I would guess that this is a bit like the pretense of a flat/no-hierarchy organization, which just makes the actual hierarchy less legible. And that Basecamp is about to find out that this is also a political position -- arguably a metapolitical position, maybe even right for some organizations, but still a political position.

Politics is just what happens when people disagree. That remains true if what happens is studied disengagement or silence or if it's noisy efforts at dialogue or persuasion. A truly apolitical organization is probably impossible.

There is something to be said for recognizing that some orgs aren't good at both doing what they were created for and being a general political venue, and I've worked for some places where I would have been pretty glad to have, say, Michael Savage discussion banned, but even that could be productive in its own way.
posted by weston at 9:58 AM on April 28, 2021 [3 favorites]


Soo.....anyone have any good recommendations for alternatives? We use it and essentially only like it for its abilities to set up projects with granular permissions that you can interact with entirely via email...
posted by Hutch at 10:00 AM on April 28, 2021


Totally separate of Basecamp's internal issues, this is something that's going to keep happening, especially now that we're in the "let's go back to brunch" phase of the American political cycle. I don't think you can separate out any of this, but if you're going to try for whatever f'd up reasn, you’ve got to either ban all non-work talk or not.

It’s a very short hop from banning “societal and political discussions” and “can you not talk about your gay husband at work?”, and that hop existed in a lot of our professional lifetimes and is still the unwritten rule in too many places.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 10:01 AM on April 28, 2021 [42 favorites]


Well, this makes sense because every second the worker units at this productivity software company talk about politics is a second where they aren't maximizing their productivity.
posted by The Card Cheat at 10:02 AM on April 28, 2021 [2 favorites]


I can't even imagine working at a place where the question "is this long standing practice that started with good intentions actually problematic in a way we hadn't been considering?" leads to a total ban on questions of that nature and broader discussions of any related topics. What a fall from grace for the sake of petty tyranny.
posted by feloniousmonk at 10:03 AM on April 28, 2021 [5 favorites]


Good heavens, the bit that jumped out at me from Space Coyote's link above:
In a response to Hansson’s post, one employee noted that the way we treat names — especially foreign names — is deeply connected to social and racial hierarchies.... The point was that dehumanizing behavior begins with very small actions, and it did not seem like too much to ask Basecamp’s founders to acknowledge that.

Hansson’s response to this employee took aback many of the workers I spoke with. He dug through old chat logs to find a time when the employee in question participated in a discussion about a customer with a funny-sounding name. Hansson posted the message — visible to the entire company — and dismissed the substance of the employee’s complaint.
Seriously, their response to someone saying "we can do better" is to say, "well, here's a time you didn't do better, neener neener, so your point is automatically invalidated"?
posted by jackbishop at 10:05 AM on April 28, 2021 [54 favorites]


Some important context, for people outside of tech, is that it's basically impossible to overstate the extent to which the Basecamp leadership is obsessed with their sense of themselves as "thought leaders" on many subjects, but especially on how to run a business.
posted by Ragged Richard at 10:05 AM on April 28, 2021 [42 favorites]


So I'm pretty sure people at Basecamp can't talk about where to get a vaccine. Because that's political now. No talk about what precautions to take in public during a pandemic. Political now. No talk about where to get an ID. Political now.

Every. Fucking. Thing. Is political now. Because the bad faith brigade politicized Every. Fucking. Thing.
posted by tclark at 10:07 AM on April 28, 2021 [57 favorites]


Do I misread the thing or could they just have avoided everything by saying "Yes, the list is stupid and insensitive, let's delete it and do better from now on." and just going back to their saunas and racing cars?
posted by dominik at 10:09 AM on April 28, 2021 [23 favorites]


Previously: Coinbase pulls the same stupid move.

We're in an unprecedented era of companies applying pressure on political issues, particularly ones related to social justice. Companies are actually standing up to, say, the state of Georgia and saying Black votes matter, Black lives matter. Climate change matters. Economic equality is important. Etc, etc. The major trend is towards huge companies like Coca Cola or Delta taking some mildly progressive political positions. It's disappointing that a couple of tiny tech companies can't be bothered.
posted by Nelson at 10:10 AM on April 28, 2021 [5 favorites]


They did this in such a way that banning political discussion is almost a pretense covering for the structural change, which seems to be eliminating any means of questioning leadership's decision making process. It reads as if one of the founders had some emotional stake in the list and took the questions about it personally and decided to make it so their decisions couldn't be questioned in that way again.
posted by feloniousmonk at 10:11 AM on April 28, 2021 [6 favorites]


Some important context, for people outside of tech, is that it's basically impossible to overstate the extent to which the Basecamp leadership is obsessed with their sense of themselves as "thought leaders" on many subjects, but especially on how to run a business.
Yeah, the (apparently) now defunct Rework podcast billed itself as "a podcast by the makers of Basecamp about a better way to work and run your business."
Do I misread the thing or could they just have avoided everything by saying "Yes, the list is stupid and insensitive, let's delete it and do better from now on." and just going back to their saunas and racing cars?
I get the sense that the precipitating event was not so much the dispute over the funny names list as the simultaneous formation of a DEI committee, which meant that getting rid of that one list wouldn't stop the ongoing discussion of their corporate culture.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 10:12 AM on April 28, 2021 [5 favorites]


Man, if I worked there I would turn into the Politics Police overnight. Are you talking about what you watched on television last night? THAT'S POLITICAL! Are you planning what to eat for lunch? THAT'S POLITICAL! Saying "Good morning?" THAT'S POLITICAL! ALL TIMES OF DAY MATTER!
posted by Faint of Butt at 10:12 AM on April 28, 2021 [23 favorites]


It’s a very short hop from banning “societal and political discussions” and “can you not talk about your gay husband at work?”, and that hop existed in a lot of our professional lifetimes and is still the unwritten rule in too many places.

And, “hey this thing in our company publication reads as racist; maybe we want to change that before the bad PR” is a work discussion! I have a lot of conversations like that at my institution because it’s part of my job to make sure my institution doesn’t show its ass!
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:15 AM on April 28, 2021 [46 favorites]


I would love to ask the Basecamp leadership how they would have handled James Damore's posts.
posted by PhineasGage at 10:17 AM on April 28, 2021 [2 favorites]


These two very subtweety link posts from John Gruber are disappointing but unsurprising.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 10:35 AM on April 28, 2021 [9 favorites]


I've been following this latest story with interest, I remember when 37signals started off as design company of 4 back around 1999, and people mainly knew them from their blog, just posting random crap, very much like a little website we all know and love. Even back then, there was always this whiff of arrogance, they were the smart ones, not the other idiots.

Then Fried met Hansson and they started up Basecamp, it became successful and this theme of arrogance was actively embraced. Exhibit A, this gushing Wired article from 2008 where David Hansson is quoted:
"Arrogant is usually something you hurl at somebody as an insult," Hansson said. "But when I actually looked it up — having an aggravated sense of one's own importance or abilities' — I thought, sure."
From this same 2008 article the duo of Jason Fried and Hansson are described "...as close as we get to demigods online." and Hansson has "boyish good looks, precocious self-possession". They are also referred to as "geniuses" and "the opposite of everything corporate".

You get the picture. And that was in 2008, maybe they've evolved from demi-gods to gods by now!

That same Wired article ends with some foreshadowing if you swap out the word "software" for "my company":
Call it arrogance or idealism, but they would rather fail than adapt. "I'm not designing software for other people," Hansson says. "I'm designing it for me."
So does it surprise me that they've waded knee-deep into this shitshow? Nope, not at all.
posted by jeremias at 10:36 AM on April 28, 2021 [23 favorites]


"I'm not designing software for other people," Hansson says. "I'm designing it for me."

Who do you sell it to? How is that a business plan?
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:39 AM on April 28, 2021 [3 favorites]


I so wish I had enough fuck-off money to work somewhere that decreed this, just to see how far my white male privilege could take it before I got fired.

Everything is political, and I'd gum up the gears of the machine so fucking fast. This kind of policy is just ripe for malicious compliance.
posted by explosion at 10:42 AM on April 28, 2021 [17 favorites]


Some years ago I was working for a company, and there were some jokes in source code comments, and the department lead said something like "Yeah, it's funny. Don't do that; any code can become a string, and any string can end up shown to a user."

As I read about the "list of names", I'm reminded that leaders doing gentle guidance like this is important to company culture.
posted by straw at 10:42 AM on April 28, 2021 [24 favorites]


The fact that a company that makes business communication software is being torn apart because of the shit they self-documented within their own business communication software blows my mind.

I've never understood the desire to have co-workers just browse through vast historical changelogs of internal company communications.
posted by a complicated history at 10:44 AM on April 28, 2021 [3 favorites]


I am really appreciating this response from a white guy explaining to base camp leadership why there wrong snd why they should shut up.

https://breen.tech/post/cringe-camp/
posted by bilabial at 10:45 AM on April 28, 2021 [13 favorites]


You shouldn’t have to wonder if staying out of it means you're complicit, or wading into it means you’re a target.

Neither barring nor allowing these discussions will quell those worries. One political party just tried to overthrow the government, and the pandemic is politicized. We’re all soaking in it in the US, twenty-four seven.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:48 AM on April 28, 2021 [5 favorites]


https://breen.tech/post/cringe-camp/ From bilabial's post above.

This is an amazing thread, thanks to everyone for all of the deep context, depressing as it is.
posted by mecran01 at 10:52 AM on April 28, 2021 [4 favorites]


Jesus, never heard of this company before but I would hate to work there. There's more here to unpack and shit on than I care to do for some garbage company I'm only hearing of for this obtuse shit they're pulling. I think I laughed out loud though at the "no more benefits" section that they tried to word positively. I reckon I might work out if my job paid for gym or trainer or something, but no way in hell I'd go to the gym if they just gave me more money equivalent to the cost. Hell, technically money I get isn't even mine, I have more years of student loan debt than I will ever possibly live.
posted by GoblinHoney at 10:55 AM on April 28, 2021 [1 favorite]


I have added “can you tell me a bit about your workflow?” to my questions about a company when interviewing this week if it doesn’t come up organically. Workflow being - how are tasks recorded, assigned, and tracked. Base camp has a product that is used in this way by many teams.

Hiring folks are falling all over themselves to bring up their Jira ticketing when it’s relevant, as well as highlighting what the org is doing proactively about D&I (diversity and inclusion) efforts.
posted by bilabial at 10:59 AM on April 28, 2021 [1 favorite]


This twitter thread got linked to elsewhere, and is a pretty good one. A particularly guitar-solo bit from it:
One other observation - sometimes the job of a leader is to shut the fuck up and eat it. It doesn’t always matter what you think. Why run off about escalating? Why not just recognize that the list caused problems, acknowledge it, acknowledge the obvious complicity, and move on?
posted by Drastic at 11:13 AM on April 28, 2021 [10 favorites]


For folks who've never heard of Basecamp, they're one of the "cool kid companies". Small shop, does what they want, thought-leadery founders. They were behind Ruby-on-Rails which was a revolution in web application development. Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) are tech industry celebrities, particularly in the Hacker News crowd. They also had Campfire, a Slack-like product that was fairly good in the 2010 era but for whatever reason never quite took off. They're a boutique company doing very well for themselves staying small.

So that's why this stupidity from them now lands particularly hard. It's not entirely surprising if you've followed their history closely but it's coming from a company a lot of people have looked up to.
posted by Nelson at 11:16 AM on April 28, 2021 [15 favorites]


another twitter thread from a current employee, george claghorn
I’ve felt straight-up bad when people have told me how wonderful they think it must be to work here, when applicants have called Basecamp their "dream job." Friends have asked me to let them know when we’re hiring, and I’ve awkwardly agreed and intentionally not done so.

...

The reality of working at Basecamp for anyone other than Jason and David has been far messier than the image they’ve crafted for some time.

I’ve never broached this topic publicly. They chose to take it public and slam the door closed internally.
posted by i used to be someone else at 11:18 AM on April 28, 2021 [20 favorites]


Sounds like the business is struggling and the CEO is avoiding responsibility for their poor business decisions by blaming employees for some behavior that is likely just another symptom of management failures. They are also spinning the elimination of benefits (likely a cost savings move) as some kind of stand against paternalism.
posted by interogative mood at 11:18 AM on April 28, 2021 [4 favorites]


Original article
posted by Going To Maine at 11:21 AM on April 28, 2021 [1 favorite]


If worked in procurement at a company that used their software and I had a service contract or license up for renewal, boy I’d be renegotiating the hell out of that RIGHT. NOW.

These guys aren’t just idiots, they are templates for so many of the other idiots roaming and ruining the Bay Area.

This situation will be an eagerly-watched “growth opportunity” for them both
posted by armoir from antproof case at 11:45 AM on April 28, 2021 [3 favorites]


One result I'm confident of is that Hacker News is going to be a shitshow about this. Somehow I gave up my daily checkins there, and that is going to come in handy today. Unfortunately they only allow me like four comments per day, so I won't be the one to correct the Internet today.

Why not just recognize that the list caused problems, acknowledge it, acknowledge the obvious complicity, and move on?

Marco Rogers went over this with a clarity that suited me.
posted by rhizome at 11:49 AM on April 28, 2021 [4 favorites]


These guys aren’t just idiots, they are templates for so many of the other idiots roaming and ruining the Bay Area.

Chicago. That doesn't prevent them from being a template for SFBA doofs, but since, as above, I can't correct the entire internet today, I'll have to focus my energies at smaller scales. :P
posted by rhizome at 11:51 AM on April 28, 2021 [8 favorites]


The "tech idiots roaming and ruining the Bay Area" is unfortunately more of a wider ranging state of mind geographically-speaking.

(I say as a Chicagoan not particularly part of that industry anymore who would have called himself a 37signals acolyte back in the day.)
posted by MCMikeNamara at 11:54 AM on April 28, 2021 [1 favorite]


"Arrogant is usually something you hurl at somebody as an insult," Hansson said. "But when I actually looked it up — having an aggravated sense of one's own importance or abilities' — I thought, sure."

Hard not to succumb to the temptation to make too much of this, but if he really said "aggravated" instead of "exaggerated", he must not know what either one means, and he probably thinks he knows all kinds of things he barely has a clue about.
posted by jamjam at 11:56 AM on April 28, 2021 [15 favorites]


there were some jokes in source code comments

Semi off-topic,

I work at BIGCO -- if you really care, check my post history -- and there's a tool running against all of our source code to protect the company against random fallout. It's pretty wide-reaching; I recently had to change a comment which said something like "prevent the process from hanging" because "hanging" is on the disallowed list. You can add individual instances to a special file in order to assert that "the word is okay in this particular context", but it's really just easier to edit the comment or source to accommodate the tools.

While I'm generally sympathetic to at least part of the goal, it's always felt a little Orwellian to me -- if only because one of the things I did early in my tenure there was to rename all the ReadOnlyCollection variables that had been named "roc".
posted by Slothrup at 12:05 PM on April 28, 2021 [2 favorites]


David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

Oh, it's that guy.

It all makes sense now.
posted by flabdablet at 12:20 PM on April 28, 2021 [3 favorites]


twitter thread from mathowie:
At the core of the Basecamp kerfuffle, it’s a disagreement at work around a tense subject. I’ve seen this play out many times before and after reading all the accounts from all sides it boils down to an executive unwilling to take the L.

[...]

Even when you’re the CTO and you’re eating crow by apologizing to staff, if one response is you didn’t do enough, TAKE THE LOSS and be quiet and think over why this person didn’t think you got it. DON’T GET DEFENSIVE. Repeat: don’t get defensive.

[...]

An exec should take the high road, do big picture stuff & protect employees.

But DHH didn’t deescalate, he dug through years of chat logs to repost a hypocritical gotcha from the person who posted criticism which is remarkably petty! DHH’s gotta win every argument at all costs!

There's a path to redemption but it would be tough. DHH could acknowledge he flipped out, they could admit "no politics at work" is ridiculous (and impossible to avoid when making big choices in software design) and try to rebuild from there.

But instead they'll triple down.
(And in the replies, and filing under disappointing-but-maybe-unsurprising: Maciej firmly planting himself in the contrarian no-but-maybe-they-have-a-point camp and dude, really, "struggle sessions" and "purity tests"? fucking *eyeroll*.)
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 12:54 PM on April 28, 2021 [8 favorites]


Basecamp got a glowing review on Breitbart (archive.is link)

Whatever they do from now on, they're The Nazi Software Company.
posted by acb at 1:12 PM on April 28, 2021 [7 favorites]


Thank you for reminding me to cancel my long-dormant basecamp account today.
posted by maxwelton at 1:27 PM on April 28, 2021 [1 favorite]


One of the things my brain has latched onto the most about intersectional feminism is the idea that the mere act of living in the world in my body is political. I can't walk down the street without a man making my body political. A gay person can't talk about his husband without it being political. A brown person can't drive a car without it being political. A trans person can't use a public toilet without it being political. Oh lah tee dah what it must be like to be able to apolitically exist.

And good lord if anyone ever accuses me of being pleasant during a conversation please shoot me down dead.
posted by phunniemee at 1:36 PM on April 28, 2021 [66 favorites]


Companies are actually standing up to, say, the state of Georgia and saying Black votes matter, Black lives matter. Climate change matters. Economic equality is important. Etc, etc. The major trend is towards huge companies like Coca Cola or Delta taking some mildly progressive political positions.

Don't get too starry-eyed. They may say that stuff but I doubt any of them are paying their lowest tier workers, who are most likely disproportionately people of color, a living wage, or doing anything that has an actual impact on people's lives. For instance, if Coke and Delta really gave a shit about climate change, they'd shut themselves down. They just care about optics.
posted by Jess the Mess at 1:44 PM on April 28, 2021 [7 favorites]


>>"I'm not designing software for other people," Hansson says. "I'm designing it for me."

> Who do you sell it to? How is that a business plan?

In the loathsome language of the tech world I would say that Basecamp had a "first mover advantage", they were the first online project management software that incorporated clean and minimal design. That sustained them for a long time because project management is something that feels like a pain for companies to switch. Lots of legacy accounts out there.

Having said that, my personal experience is that many people have switched. The last time I used Basecamp for anything was 2014 maybe? Even before all of this brouhaha, they had become a bit of a joke ("Oh is Basecamp still a thing?", etc.)

Despite their goals of simplicity etc. I found the organization of the app confusing, arbitrary and not at all a joy to use. Which kind of comes with the territory: all project management software sucks.

As I said earlier in lieu of that 2008 article, if you're a couple of white guys who found success and had all these other white dude tech groupies thinking you're god's gift to Earth, you're going to stick with what got you there: privilege.
posted by jeremias at 2:07 PM on April 28, 2021 [4 favorites]


I like Basecamp software just fine; it seems like weird timing to attack the quality when these employees are the ones that did the work on it. This whole thing is unfortunate. Agree with Matt they could've de-escalated better. If there were specific interpersonal problems, they could've addressed them better. Turning fringe benefits into cash, doing profit share and offering six months severance all seem really nice to have. Maybe everyone else's job already does that stuff, but not mine.

If people do leave I'll be curious what they end up doing. Lots of talent and skill in that company.
posted by michaelh at 2:18 PM on April 28, 2021 [2 favorites]


Basecamp leadership is obsessed with their sense of themselves as "thought leaders" on many subjects, but especially on how to run a business.

This is basically their entire business. Think of it as a lifestyle company that sells products, a GOOP for tech companies if you will. Their devotees will see what they've done and because it is the One True Way, this clampdown will spread like wildfire.

There's one good solution: Unionize.
posted by tommasz at 2:27 PM on April 28, 2021 [13 favorites]


Turning fringe benefits into cash

Not permanently though; from the Changes at Basecamp announcement:
By providing funds for certain things, we're getting too deep into nudging people's personal, individual choices. So we've ended these benefits, and, as compensation, paid every employee the full cash value of the benefits for this year.
Changes at Basecamp: A Fan Translation:
It's not our job to encourage you to do anything but make us more money so, starting next year, we're cutting benefits.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 2:44 PM on April 28, 2021 [5 favorites]


Ah, okay. Is the profit sharing supposed to replace the benefits?
posted by michaelh at 2:47 PM on April 28, 2021


Switching to profit sharing at a small company like that is kind of a classic scumbag move. It gives you the best of both worlds because you can talk up the best case scenario of max bonuses and then at the end of the fiscal year, the owners write themselves checks for sufficient money to ensure there's no profit, if there was actually any to begin with. It takes awhile for people to catch on to that. The tell is that it's a guaranteed benefit being converted into a conditional one. They could just give people $X raises if they wanted it to be about just giving the money out to do whatever with.
posted by feloniousmonk at 2:58 PM on April 28, 2021 [33 favorites]


Before you judge, you should read the actual letter. If you're anything like me, it will make you judge even more harshly. The contempt, unacknowledged privilege, libertarian dog whistling, and paternalism just radiate off the screen.

I don't think I've ever read a corporate press release that's made me want to punch someone in the face so badly. And I am not prone to face punching.
posted by treepour at 3:07 PM on April 28, 2021 [14 favorites]


Agreed (though I'm more prone to want to face punch probably, even if I don't do it); I've just re-read it for the third time, and I find something newly horrible every time. It's a masterpiece in a way, just so unbelievably bad in almost every measurable way from a public relations and human resource standpoint.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 3:23 PM on April 28, 2021 [2 favorites]


We are not a social impact company.

You are now!
posted by chavenet at 3:29 PM on April 28, 2021 [29 favorites]


Having said that, my personal experience is that many people have switched. The last time I used Basecamp for anything was 2014 maybe? Even before all of this brouhaha, they had become a bit of a joke ("Oh is Basecamp still a thing?", etc.)

I tried to use Basecamp to manage operations for a small R&D org recently. It reminded me a lot of when SUN conducted a usability study of the GNOME Desktop a very long time ago, driving the removal of features and affordances because "we didn't need them." It was super high-handed, made the experience worse for anyone who wasn't running the product on substantial hardware, and I chose not to update any of the documentation I'd been writing as a volunteer.

Basecamp is just a very confining piece of software, and confining in a way that left me feeling as if I were in unpleasant communion with yet another cod-Jobsian "I'll tell you what you want" design mind. The experience primed me for this particular imbroglio and the tone coming out of their leadership.
posted by mph at 4:04 PM on April 28, 2021


“whatever horrible injustices are being perpetrated on this group or that”

Nothing on earth or in fiction could crush something down to a more concentrated form of disdain and white privilege.
posted by FallibleHuman at 4:08 PM on April 28, 2021 [23 favorites]


I went into this wondering what turgid culture wars cesspool had been created in their workplace systems for them to consider such an action. Boy, was that ever giving them too much credit. "We did have a Diversity and Inclusion Committee that a third of our workforce wanted to participate in, but we got rid of it because doing things 'by committee' just isn't what we're about!" This is such an about-face that I really wonder if there isn't something else going on. The situation reads like someone got their soylent and microdosing quantities reversed, woke up and immediately shaved their eyebrows like Bob Geldorf in the Wall.
posted by Sparx at 4:55 PM on April 28, 2021 [10 favorites]


I'm super disappointed in DHH and Fried. I was definitely part of the fandom; I'm only in tech because Rails & the attendant bootcamp ecosystem catapulted me in, I live in Chicago, I've always been deeply skeptical of most of the culture in tech, and I thought Basecamp was a feasible alternative for how to run a tech company in an ethical way. I figured DHH was a bit of a dick sometimes, but he was mostly right when he criticized the industry, and Basecamp really did seem like a great job in a lot of ways.

>> And in the replies, and filing under disappointing-but-maybe-unsurprising: Maciej

Yeah, him and Gruber both. Deeply disappointing, not terribly surprising.

This whole thing sucks. I just can't imagine being so invested in your whiteness and privilege that you'd cheerfully burn down two decades of good will like this.
posted by protocoach at 5:22 PM on April 28, 2021 [8 favorites]


I see Maciej has actually decided to go full "wokeness is poisoning the opportunity for tech workers to be in solidarity with other members of the working class", so...definitely unsurprising. Probably past time to audit some subscriptions.
posted by protocoach at 5:31 PM on April 28, 2021 [5 favorites]


>>I like Basecamp software just fine; it seems like weird timing to attack the quality when these employees are the ones that did the work on it.

Weird in what way? If you're referring to my comment, I wasn't "attacking" anyone or anything, merely describing my experience and opinions of Basecamp, a web app I haven't used or thought of in years until this week.

If I didn't connect the dots well enough, my theory is that a company run by two individuals who publicly state that listening to customers is foolish, might also think that listening to their employees is foolish.
posted by jeremias at 5:43 PM on April 28, 2021 [3 favorites]


Here is Maciej's archived tweet which appears to have been deleted.

The work culture at rich tech companies (people read something upsetting in the news and want to discuss and 'process' it on company time) is so alien from most people's experience of work that it makes me despair for ever finding common ground with the actual working class
posted by mecran01 at 5:52 PM on April 28, 2021 [4 favorites]


That's actually the one thing I have seen among all those white dude comments that kinda makes sense. Here we are posting on MeFi during the workday (for some of us), when for many, many people (factory, fast food, hotel, the list goes on), discussing anything other than immediate work tasks for more than a passing minute or two isn't even a possibility. (That's part of the challenge for union organizing.) That has no bearing on how a tech company should be run, or the idiocy of the Basecamp exec comments and attitudes, but the divide Maciej was pointing to is real.
posted by PhineasGage at 6:00 PM on April 28, 2021 [8 favorites]


...does he think that "working class" employees never shoot the shit on company time? I mean, it's variable depending on how assholish the work environment is about it, maybe, but people still talk to their coworkers.
posted by tavella at 6:01 PM on April 28, 2021 [11 favorites]


Did it get deleted? It and the following tweets are still showing up for me.

For starters, it's weird that he's talking about "the work culture at tech companies" like he's an expert on it, given that he sorta famously hasn't actually worked at a tech company for what, 11 years now? But also, the idea that some other, truly-working working class exists that doesn't talk about politics is just wildly, absurdly divorced from every non-tech job I've ever had.
posted by protocoach at 6:11 PM on April 28, 2021 [15 favorites]


I mean, to say that nobody who works at Basecamp can be marginalized (because they work at Basecamp) is to take a very willfully obtuse definition of marginalization, to say the least.
I generally like Maciej, he's got a focus on worker organization that's often missing from the industry. But this isn't the first time he's had this take.
posted by CrystalDave at 6:15 PM on April 28, 2021 [2 favorites]


Did it get deleted? It and the following tweets are still showing up for me.

Same here. jeremias's link above dead-ends for me, but I can still see Maciej's thread live on Twitter starting from here.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 7:09 PM on April 28, 2021 [1 favorite]


I think the was-it-deleted confusion is just a paste error in protocoach's original comment; the url for the tweet is a digit short there.
posted by cortex at 7:14 PM on April 28, 2021 [2 favorites]


I took Maciej's point to be only that: the difference between shooting the shit at work vs. spending lots of concentrated time in online discussions during work hours.
posted by PhineasGage at 8:05 PM on April 28, 2021 [4 favorites]


I figured DHH was a bit of a dick sometimes, but he was mostly right when he criticized the industry, and Basecamp really did seem like a great job in a lot of ways.

DHH has always been a dick.
posted by ryoshu at 8:06 PM on April 28, 2021 [2 favorites]


I'm shocked that the guy who once did a conference talk with the words "FUCK YOU" in big letters on a slide would do this...
posted by problemspace at 11:23 PM on April 28, 2021 [1 favorite]


I took Maciej's point to be only that: the difference between shooting the shit at work vs. spending lots of concentrated time in online discussions during work hours.

To which the counterpoint is that there is no difference between the two - the water cooler is the water cooler, whether we're talking about a physical location or something online.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:17 AM on April 29, 2021 [5 favorites]


Basically, Maciej is falling into the usual techie pitfall that there is something fundamentally different between a physical meeting place like a break room and an online meeting place like Slack. But from a sociological perspective, there really isn't. It's the same dynamic, just taking place online rather than physically. Yet because he's bought into the line the tech industry pushes that online is somehow different from real life, he argues that they have to be different.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:29 AM on April 29, 2021 [5 favorites]


Count me as one of the people who always wanted to work at Basecamp and was really disappointed in this.

When I saw that first blog post, my instant thought was, "Oh, an employee that has half the code for Basecamp in their head was at the Capitol insurrection." NOPE!

Dude, you are burning everything down over THIS? REALLY? I know some people think this must be strategic for business reasons. I think it is also possible that his ego is enormous yet fragile enough that at the first bruising he goes full pufferfish.

Glad I never signed up for that Hey account.
posted by rednikki at 12:51 AM on April 29, 2021 [4 favorites]




always wanted to work at Basecamp

web app programming AND thinking about project management all day......you can have it
posted by thelonius at 4:35 AM on April 29, 2021


Mod note: Fixed the broken tweet link and deleted a couple comments about a misunderstanding, carry on.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 7:00 AM on April 29, 2021 [1 favorite]


Honestly, the more I read about Basecamp, especially coming from current and former employees, the less I appreciate the wishy-washy stance from folks like Gruber, et. al, about social media toxicity and other crap. At a fundamental level, Basecamp's stance isn't about "not discussing politics" but about brushing abuse and discrimination under the rug. It's abundantly clear that DHH and Fried are trying to cover their asses. The most charitable reading I can give this is that the environment at Basecamp is a result of ignorance, not malice, but of course, sufficiently advanced ignorance is indistinguishable from malice.

A lot of the people I see trying to defend DHH and Fried's stance are other tech people, and they're those who have supported and promoted Basecamp and their products in the past. DHH and Fried are long time, high-profile members of a certain kind of tech community, and a number of tech folks seem to consider them friends or at least appreciated acquaintances who make a product they like. The face DHH and Fried show in public, or in private with their tech community buddies is separate from how they run their business, however, and those in this tech community who only know their public face need to recognize that people can be perfectly nice, friendly, and entertaining in public life while still being a shitty boss to their employees.

For those who are friends, or at least respect DHH and Fried, this is exactly the time to pay attention to what employees are saying about Basecamp, and to use your relationship to call DHH and Fried out on their bullshit. If you can't call people you know out for shitty behavior, even people of positions of power, people who make things you like, you're not doing your job as a friend.
posted by SansPoint at 7:33 AM on April 29, 2021 [17 favorites]


This thread makes a good point as well - if names from customer data were getting bantered about by Basecamp employees, what other data from customers were they peeking at when they shouldn't?
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:20 AM on April 29, 2021 [11 favorites]


Looks like a number of employees are resigning en masse today.
posted by FallibleHuman at 11:33 AM on April 30, 2021 [6 favorites]


The things that are difficult to discuss generally desperately need discussion. This has certainly been true on Metafilter.
posted by theora55 at 12:11 PM on April 30, 2021 [1 favorite]


Yes - the twitter list of Basecampers is currently full of resignations. Some of them are prominent/foundational people in the Rails community as well, which could have a long-lasting impact. Technologies have - what's the verb? obsoleted? died? - collapsed over less.
posted by bonaldi at 12:13 PM on April 30, 2021 [1 favorite]


It's wild to see people's tweets announcing their resignation due to new company policies show up on the company's official twitter list. Live by the hype machine, die by the hype machine I suppose.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 12:33 PM on April 30, 2021 [2 favorites]


Astonishing that the entire business is imploding over a few days. But I suspect things have been rocky for years, especially with "thought" "leaders" DHH and Fried.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 1:48 PM on April 30, 2021


Well that escalated quickly.

At this rate there wont be a company by Monday.

If I were a company using Basecamp as a pivitol tool I'd be scrabbling for a replacement about now
posted by Faintdreams at 2:29 PM on April 30, 2021 [1 favorite]


Wailin Wong, one of the presenters of Basecamp’s Rework podcast, has just resigned.

This seems like an astonishing act of hubris by the founders. And while they will probably have no issues recruiting to replace the losses, I’d be willing to bet they will be getting a lot of applicants whose personal politics will fundamentally change the character of the company. In shutting down discussion of anything they deem societal or political (nonsensically broad as that is) they have done the opposite. Now that’s literally all anyone will think about Basecamp, whether they’re applying for a job there or choosing a project management tool.

I’m personally really angry about this. I was a huge advocate for Basecamp in an earlier role and heavily involved in wrangling a chaotic email based project management ‘process’ into Basecamp v2, with fantastic results. I felt that Fried and DHH, while abrasive and very sure of themselves, were saying a lot of things that were a very necessary counterbalance to hustle culture, tech bros crushing it and the exploitative bullshit that is astonishingly common in US business culture. I still think some of the concepts in their ShapeUp methodology are very clever and might work really well in developing software.

But it turns out they were just another flavour of arsehole and when it came down to it, they reverted to the assertion of raw power, control and privilege to shut down a conversation they didn’t want to have. Deleted my account this morning.
posted by Happy Dave at 3:01 PM on April 30, 2021 [8 favorites]


Some of them are prominent/foundational people in the Rails community as well, which could have a long-lasting impact. Technologies have - what's the verb? obsoleted? died? - collapsed over less.

There's already talk of forking Rails to pull control away from the Basecamp founders.

This seems like an astonishing act of hubris by the founders.

They thought that they were the reason for Basecamp's success and decided to fuck around.

And now, they're finding out.
posted by NoxAeternum at 3:15 PM on April 30, 2021 [7 favorites]


Yes - the twitter list of Basecampers is currently full of resignations

lol is basecamp a co-op because it just got owned by its workers
posted by acb at 4:19 PM on April 30, 2021 [7 favorites]


guess dhh and basecamp are only okay with 30% cuts when they're the ones behind it
posted by i used to be someone else at 4:22 PM on April 30, 2021 [3 favorites]


@dhof: 37people
@waxpancake: out of 57 employees, the 20th just publicly announced their resignation, so this joke was prophecy

That is ... a lot of institutional knowledge and experience walking out of the door.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 4:50 PM on April 30, 2021 [8 favorites]


Firmly ensconced as I am between the worlds of belles lettres humanism and information technology capitalism, this specific conversation around power and privilege for marginalized people is happening in my proverbial (and literal, if you count this web page) living room.

That said, there's a Hacker News thread addressing this lamentable and disappointing series of actions by the cofounders of Basecamp, and the currently most highly ranked comments are assessing things in ways simpatico with what's been so far expressed, above.

Quoting the first by user grey-area:
I don't think this is really about making fun of people's names, or holocaust references. It's about power.

The managers at basecamp were unhappy that their employees asserted power over them in the workplace, and decided to assert their own power in turn over what they view as their personal fiefdom and retract some of the freedoms they had so graciously granted their workers, because those ungrateful workers actually expected them to live up to their words about openness and owning mistakes. At least 1/3 of the staff, when confronted with their true relations with their management, then decided to quit.

I did find it amusing they announced this new policy of no personal/political stuff at work on his personal blog on hey.com, not on a company blog, and DHH continues to rant on twitter about a very political and public fight with Apple, one he chose to enter on behalf of the company.
In other words, both HN and MetaFilter are very important communities for me, and I sometimes find myself defending one community when visiting the home living rooom of the other.
posted by mistersquid at 5:56 PM on April 30, 2021 [6 favorites]


OMG profit sharing.

I worked for a company which had profit sharing.

Times turned bad and the company repeatedly failed to hit their revenue targets, thus no profits could be shared.

At the same time, the CEO's salary went from seven digits to eight digits.
posted by meowzilla at 6:58 PM on April 30, 2021 [5 favorites]


I bought in on Hey email, previously on Gmail. My renewal is in July. Hit the cancel button today.

While they are both devils, at least I know which one will survive the year. Though I'll look for other options, too.
posted by m@f at 8:04 PM on April 30, 2021 [1 favorite]


Fastmail is as good as any and better than most.
posted by flabdablet at 12:29 AM on May 1, 2021 [2 favorites]


while they will probably have no issues recruiting to replace the losses, I’d be willing to bet they will be getting a lot of applicants whose personal politics will fundamentally change the character of the company.

It doesn't matter who they recruit or how quickly they recruit them. Basecamp's not dead yet, but it's dead. Given its size and its explicit dependence upon a) long-term employees and their implicit knowledge of how things work and failed to work; b) a buddy system for new hires; c) a workflow based upon defined cycles: the point of fragility is a mass exodus. The way to build antifragility in that kind of company is to avoid doing things that provoke a mass exodus.

Say they shuffle the org chart and hire people who are incredibly talented and aren't dissuaded by what's happened this past week: the company still has to write off months of planned work to handle onboarding where there's nobody around to provide gradual transitions. DHH is probably going to have to re-learn to code at the codeface.

Anybody who hasn't already taken the buyout will spend the weekend contemplating how hellish the next few months will be -- not even in terms of internal politics, but just doing the work. The ops people probably won't walk, because they're ops people. (Which can mean that they're indifferent to workplace politics or that they won't abandon the servers or some of both.) There may be a little momentum to complete whatever was already on the project board. But this is a company that absolutely relies on a everybody taking a shift on customer-facing support, and you can't put new hires into those support roles.

There'll be some -- especially in full-time support roles, the people who spend their days interacting with non-techie people who just want things to work for them -- who are willing to put customers first and ahead of the company, even if it's against their personal interests. But they should take the buyout anyway. Let the founders be the ones who turn off the lights.
posted by holgate at 12:57 AM on May 1, 2021 [7 favorites]


This isn't even a company with investors banging at the door demanding tribute: the only outside funding came from Jeff Bezos's venture fund way back during Series A in 2006. Maybe the product itself was getting moribund, but when you have people and orgs paying significant monthly subscription fees you owe it to them to maintain the product, and doing so presumably generates a profit. Maybe the founders looked at the year-on-year spreadsheets and got twitchy and were looking for internal things to blame. Doesn't matter.
posted by holgate at 1:10 AM on May 1, 2021 [1 favorite]


the currently most highly ranked comments are assessing things in ways simpatico with what's been so far expressed, above

Sorry to tell you that HN is back on its BS. Most common opinion now seems to be a lot of people cheering on the company because they themselves also hate those uppity noisy people who think they can bring politics into things at work and make them uncomfortable/get in the way of Making Money.

For a place that prides itself on its intellectual interrogation there’s also quite a lot of accepting the Basecamp line at face value, rather than the obvious proxy it is.
posted by bonaldi at 3:04 AM on May 1, 2021 [5 favorites]


Fastmail is as good as any and better than most.

It's also an Australian company, and thus subject to Australia's draconian national-security laws.
posted by acb at 4:04 AM on May 1, 2021 [1 favorite]




subject to Australia's draconian national-security laws

Meh. There isn't an email service in the world that State actors would be unable to retrieve metadata or even content from if sufficiently motivated to do so, and that assessment includes ProtonMail. If you want State-resistant privacy, email is probably not going to be your messaging technology of choice.

But if you do and it still is, then GPG continues to work over any chain of email providers and, with proper key management, gives you as much privacy as you'll ever get. Despite what Malcolm Turnbull appears to believe, the laws of mathematics are not susceptible to legislative manipulation.

In order for Australia's draconian national-security laws to affect you in this case, you'd need to be susceptible to Australian rubber-hose cryptanalysis; who your email provider was would be completely irrelevant.
posted by flabdablet at 9:18 AM on May 1, 2021


There isn't an email service in the world that State actors would be unable to retrieve metadata or even content from if sufficiently motivated to do so, and that assessment includes ProtonMail. If you want State-resistant privacy, email is probably not going to be your messaging technology of choice.

The threat is not state surveillance but scalable mass surveillance. I.e., the All-Seeing Potato going fishing for Antifa sympathisers in the plaintext of your chats with your loved ones (among other places), and/or a Home Affairs algorithm blacklisting you from positions of influence because your word usage patterns show impermissible levels of Marxism or antipathy to the British Empire or whatever. They're not going to hit your ProtonMail unless you're such a high-value target that they have a specific operation name for tracking you, but you can bet they have a firehose of plaintext from Fastmail being indexed and analysed just in case a person of interest shows up. Or perhaps the algorithms reveal a person to be of interest.
posted by acb at 2:21 PM on May 1, 2021 [1 favorite]


you can bet they have a firehose of plaintext from Fastmail being indexed and analysed just in case a person of interest shows up

If they do, it's illegal. Fastmail has always complied with valid warrants for access to specified accounts, but not even Australia's idiotic new laws are draconian enough to legalize indiscriminate mass surveillance, regardless of how much the Ambulatory Potato wishes this were not so.

And Fastmail does encrypt data, both on the wire and at rest, sufficiently well to make covert mass surveillance about as difficult to achieve as it would be for ProtonMail.
posted by flabdablet at 2:49 PM on May 1, 2021 [1 favorite]


If there is a covert feature providing a back door past Fastmail's encryption, everyone involved (from the engineers tasked with implementing it covertly to the admins tasked with compromising version-control security, to any executives who might interfere) would have been individually tapped and sworn to secrecy on pain of very long prison sentences, so who's to say?
posted by acb at 4:16 AM on May 2, 2021


Mod note: A couple deleted. Since some people have this thread on their recent activity in order to keep track of any new news or developments on the post topic, it would be better for you two to take the off-topic stuff to email. Thanks.
posted by taz (staff) at 11:01 PM on May 2, 2021 [1 favorite]


How Basecamp blew up: Inside the all-hands meeting that led a third of the company to quit, and an executive to resign
posted by Gary at 6:13 PM on May 3, 2021


Hot off the presses from Casey Newton at Platformer, "How Basecamp Blew Up, an account of the Friday all-hands meeting that led to 1/3 of the company quitting:
On Friday, employees had their chance to address these issues directly with Fried and his co-founder. What followed was a wrenching discussion that left several employees I spoke with in tears. Thirty minutes after the meeting ended, Fried announced that Basecamp’s longtime head of strategy, Ryan Singer, had been suspended and placed under investigation after he questioned the existence of white supremacy at the company. Over the weekend, Singer — who worked for the company for nearly 18 years, and authored a book about product management for Basecamp called Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters — resigned.

Within a few hours of the meeting, at least 20 people — more than one-third of Basecamp’s 57 employees — had announced their intention to accept buyouts from the company. And while many of them had been leaning toward resigning in the aftermath of Fried’s original post, the meeting itself pushed several to accelerate their decisions, employees said. The response overwhelmed the founders, who extended the deadline to accept buyouts indefinitely amid an unexpected surge of interest.
posted by mhum at 6:15 PM on May 3, 2021 [5 favorites]


That link is really worth a read. Including the details that DHH joined the call from his bed, camera off; that Ryan Singer was initially thanked for his we-have-no-white-supremacy-here comments by Fried; that they deleted all the receipts on Singer before announcing the policy ... really it is a peach.
posted by bonaldi at 7:04 PM on May 3, 2021 [3 favorites]


Good grief:
The employee called for the founders to denounce white supremacy. “That would be the bare minimum for me,” they said.

“I’m not here to share my personal views on anything,” Fried said. “I’m horrified when one group dominates another.” Fried, who is Jewish, added that he had lost relatives during the Holocaust. “I think it’s absolutely the most disgusting thing in the world … I can’t say that’s happening here.”

Fried added that he didn’t “know what to say about specific terms. I don’t know how to satisfy that right now.”

Hansson remained on mute.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 7:52 PM on May 3, 2021 [2 favorites]


God, this has been disappointing. Not just because Fried and DHH ought to know better, but because of the low-key awful that this has brought out of people like Maciej. (And Gruber, but Gruber's always had a low-key anti-woke thing going on; at some point he posted a link to Louis CK's comeback special and, when people tweeted their disapproval at him, "shadow-removed" it from his archive while simultaneously writing a long explanation-slash-"shame on you" for people who still had the link.)

I've been a 37signals fan since old times, and have been reading Fried and DHH on their HEY World blogs recently, and a recurring theme on DHH's have been his increasingly griping about "cancel culture" and talking about how Glenn Greenwald et al have done nothing wrong. DHH, to his credit, responds to people who email him over his shit, so he and I have been corresponding via email lately, which mainly consists of my disagreeing with things he's written and him counter-disagreeing. Though he went silent a couple of days after his first post last week, for obvious reasons.

A part of why I hate this is that the company really does make some wonderful things. Hey in particular has had me fired up and passionate like no other piece of software has in years; it fixes the problems I've had with email so comprehensively that checking my Outlook or Gmail accounts just leaves me feeling kind of gross. My experience with Basecamp itself has been similar: it's not for everybody, but it centers an experience that emphasizes attention and non-distraction, and finds ways to do things that are just... gentle. I like how they do software so much that it frequently gets me reflecting back on how other apps treat me; software generally feels more contemptuous when I have Basecamp's stuff to contrast it with. And as a professional software designer who occasionally gets to handle UX, working with their stuff has hopefully translated to my making my users low-key happier too.

But this isn't about products—this is about management. And the kind of "arrogance" that occasionally does yield good creative work runs into limits when the "product" you're working with is human beings who you wield an extraordinary amount of power over. I feel like Basecamp has advocated some really good things for its employees (they were all-remote way before anybody else was, they're firmly anti-crunch, and they've wielded their influence in ways that has demonstrably improved certain former workplaces of mine), but at some point management philosophy has to involve actually listening to employees and giving a shit.

For all that DHH can blather on about "cancel culture" and how Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi are unfairly persecuted, the tell-all linked above gets to the thing we all kinda suspected once this started happening: the real issue wasn't the "woke activists", it was an outspoken Breitbart-loving dude who'd been complained about over and over without anything happening. The problem wasn't people being "quietly uncomfortable" about talking politics—it was one person loudly talking politics and insisting that the phrase "white supremacist" was racist against white people. And based on DHH's echoing of that sentiment in internal discussions, you get the sense that he listened to that guy plenty. They were probably close friends. For all that he "openly" disclosed, he seems to have skirted over that detail a couple of times, huh!

I would very selfishly love Basecamp to eat a whole bunch of crow over this, display a backbone, and maybe commit itself to doing better, because I'd like to keep using their app that genuinely improves my quality of life re: a thing I literally cannot professionally or socially avoid. But there's every chance that my hey.com email address is about to turn into a sign that I think white supremacy is okay, at which point fuck it, I'll scrap together as good of a replacement as I know how to make. Good thing I have that two-month buffer before my annual renewal before I commit more money! And more broadly, it's depressing as hell to watch tech people apathetically meander their way towards deciding that caring about institutionalized bigotry is itself a form of bigotry. Not just the Basecamp folks, but the many tech people who're siding with Basecamp almost by default, and the ones like Maciej who are generally leftist but refuse to take a nuanced take on intersectional politics, to the point that they come off as sour, rich, and dismissive. Guys (and I feel comfortable using "guys" here): this really isn't as hard or as controversial as you're making it out to be. If you're going to complain about the polarization of contemporary politics, the least you can do is avoid becoming part of that polarization yourself, especially if you're only doing it because you're too lazy to step in and make a goddamn effort of your own.
posted by rorgy at 9:03 AM on May 4, 2021 [11 favorites]


low-key awful that this has brought out of people like Maciej.

His reaction really is particularly disappointing because of his advocacy for collective action. And his response when the contrast with his usual stance is pointed out is just...ugh.
posted by roolya_boolya at 10:39 AM on May 4, 2021 [2 favorites]


Yeah, it's yet another instance of "he's a cock for a good cause" eventually becomes: "sure, but he's still a cock."

(Not not true of Basecamp either, though they always leaned more "cock" than "good cause"; with Maciej the ratios were reversed.)
posted by rorgy at 10:45 AM on May 4, 2021 [1 favorite]


His reaction really is particularly disappointing because of his advocacy for collective action. And his response when the contrast with his usual stance is pointed out is just...ugh.

His lol was at me. Sigh. I tend to think Twitter really escalates this sort of disagreement so while I'm disapointed that Maciej is digging in on this, I can also accept he doesn't share my exact politics. Likewise, while that all hands meeting at Basecamp seems like it was very upsetting for staff, I can actually understand why some might not want to continue to have big political discussions on the work message board. Like, sane people can disagree. A bigger problem from a labor point of view is the deeper conflict - the reality that Basecamp like the vast majority of 'tech' employers has racially discriminatory and gender biased hiring practices. You can stop people from making racist and generally sophomoric jokes about customer's names (as they apparently should have done years ago!) but it will take some more systemic changes to address some core conflicts in this industry. I think we'd be foolish to dedicate the bulk of our rage at their stupid, clueless chat forum policies over their extremely concrete hiring policies. (or, one can imagine, unspoken promotion and wage policies)

Having said that, the chat forum is also a worker-rights issue. Maciej (and others) scoff at the idea that workers would feel the right to talk politics on their employer-owned message board. But this is the literalequivalentt of the water cooler (also employer owned!) for a digital-based company. Factory workers don't expect to talk politics on the employer message board because they don't have one! But they do expect to do so in the available forums - the lunch room, the water cooler, the factory line. My union contract specifically allows us to have dedicated union bulletin boards in our workplace. This is a thing union members negotiated because we specifically understand that carving out our space to advocate for our needs in the physical space that belongs to our employer gives us power as workers! If Basecamp had a union, they would be wise to negotiate a 'space' on the virtual bulletin board, where members would no-doubt discuss issues that impact them at work, for example , racially discriminatory practices of their employer.

In his tweets, Maciej dismisses the concerns of Basecamp workers, and points to electrical worker union organizers as having 'real' concerns, like, 'we don't want to get electrocuted'. But what exactly does he, someone who speciically tried to unionize the tech industry(!), think tech workers should be fighting for?? Gender and race discrimination ARE the harmful working conditions they face. Every workplace has it's own fights. For programmers, that fight is not going to be the same as electricians.

And back to his lol... What exactly do people think collective action is, or is for? When workers take collective action, it is to gain benefit. When I went on strike with my coworkers in the fall, it was to protect our contract and to get a reasonable raise (among other demands). Basecamp workers are part of an industry where a severance package is a norm. So great for them that they were able to have a financial cushion by accepting the employers buy-out. But organizing collective action is actually extremely hard, and 1/3 of a workplace quitting together is, when compared to collective action at other employers, exceptionally strong action for a large number of workers to take together.
posted by latkes at 11:24 AM on May 4, 2021 [11 favorites]


But what exactly does he, someone who speciically tried to unionize the tech industry(!), think tech workers should be fighting for?? Gender and race discrimination ARE the harmful working conditions they face. Every workplace has it's own fights.

It's not even just a fight for better working conditions. How many times has it happened that software, however unconsciously, has forced the discriminatory assumptions and worldviews of its makers onto the public? "Racism produces racist software" is news that has repeatedly been on at 11. An industry as powerful as tech has a real responsibility to understand and recognize the social forces and systems it affects.
posted by trig at 11:50 AM on May 4, 2021 [4 favorites]


And back to his lol... What exactly do people think collective action is, or is for? When workers take collective action, it is to gain benefit. When I went on strike with my coworkers in the fall, it was to protect our contract and to get a reasonable raise (among other demands). Basecamp workers are part of an industry where a severance package is a norm. So great for them that they were able to have a financial cushion by accepting the employers buy-out. But organizing collective action is actually extremely hard, and 1/3 of a workplace quitting together is, when compared to collective action at other employers, exceptionally strong action for a large number of workers to take together.

This is why it's so contrary to his previous positions, pointing out that tech workers should unionise because they won't maintain their current monetary advantage forever, for example. Or 'If tech workers can’t even fight for a humane workspace for themselves, how can we expect them to fight for users, and for each other?'

This really is uncovering the low-key awful lurking in unexpected corners of tech.
posted by roolya_boolya at 11:57 AM on May 4, 2021 [3 favorites]


Maciej — like a lot of voices on the right, too – fell for the false "this is about agitators derailing productive work with their political noise" framing and I think that set him off in the wrong direction. His take was still badly off-kilter all the same: does he think Red Clydesiders weren't up to their ears in the dialectic? (They were). And collective action isn't solely about basic "please don't kill us with our working conditions" pleas for dignity, done right it is about addressing the intrinsic imbalance of relations between employers and employed. The Basecamp staff deserve solidarity just as much as the electricians do.

Beyond all that, it is still important to keep the focus on the fact that this wasn't about "politics at work". This was "don't challenge us in chat, or anywhere else". Which shouldn't actually be all that surprising: DHH and Fried have been consistent above all in resisting any control over what they do — they don't take VC money, they resist tech fashion, they keep dictatorial control over Rails – why should employees be granted any control either?

Problem is that doesn't square with having an organisation that supports equity and diversity. Because that describes one where employers are no longer able to act as my-way-or-the-highway dictators, especially on political matters. Equity demands the power-balance change; that white people can't tell people of colour to be quiet because they're making them "uncomfortable".

This is what they couldn't handle. And it might cost them their company – if not from the short-term hit, perhaps from the sorts of employees that will take this new deal they're offering. Coinbase is comfortable with who they'll get (financial companies often are), but will Basecamp be?
posted by bonaldi at 12:05 PM on May 4, 2021 [7 favorites]


Also - even if you do take the "politics at work can make for really uncomfortable conversations" framing seriously: so what if it does? We're talking about collective action here. Managers don't expect to have cozy chats with union reps, why do they expect anything different when speaking to an empowered collection of employees about what were, in this case, serious issues central to the business?

The "we are a family, don't be mean to us, your bosses/your privileged peers" corporate framing is little more than cover for exploitation, and employees are right to resist it. That goes just the same for peer-level conversations. What's an annoying distraction from delivering shareholder value for you might be existentially important to your colleagues. What's happy camaraderie for you might be intolerable impositions on others. Conflict resolution styles will have to adapt to cope, sorry. It's possible to be professional while still disagreeing fundamentally.

Slack might be cutesy, the conversations it hosts don't have to be.
posted by bonaldi at 12:11 PM on May 4, 2021 [5 favorites]


Jason Fried broke the half-week silence with a short update.

I give it about equal odds that they process this and wind up sincerely apologizing or that they double down, but I'd give it greater odds than either of those that they attempt to never talk about this again, and quiet the heck out of their blogs for a while too.

So I guess next we see if they hire a bunch of Breitbarters? Or, I guess, if they hire some HR type to actually play the adult in the room for a change. (It's entirely possible that I'm a sucker for holding out hope here, but I can't help myself—forgive me, y'all.)
posted by rorgy at 1:45 PM on May 4, 2021


Last week was terrible. We started with policy changes that felt simple, reasonable, and principled, and it blew things up culturally in ways we never anticipated. David and I completely own the consequences, and we're sorry. We have a lot to learn and reflect on, and we will.
So, less of a "hey, we messed up, sorry about that"; more of a "but still we were right, sorry you overreacted."
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 1:59 PM on May 4, 2021 [4 favorites]


Probably they'll hire some lawyers who will advise them to STFU.
posted by latkes at 2:01 PM on May 4, 2021


I'm excited for their next hard-hitting common-sense business textbook, For the Love of God, Please Stop Talking, I Mean It, Good Lord Fella Why Are You Still Going On About This, What Are You Getting Out Of It I Swear
posted by rorgy at 2:35 PM on May 4, 2021 [3 favorites]


We started with policy changes that felt simple, reasonable, and principled, and it blew things up

I read their original posts. One of said policy changes was along the lines of 'we never used to have committees, suddenly we have committees, we're going to go back to when it was nice and simple and we were the Deciders'. Actually, why am I paraphrasing it; here's the original: For nearly all of our 21 year existence, we were proudly committee-free. No big working groups making big decisions, or putting forward formalized, groupthink recommendations. No bureaucracy. But recently, a few sprung up. No longer. We're turning things back over to the person (or people) who were distinctly hired to make those decisions. The responsibility for DEI work returns to Andrea, our head of People Ops. The responsibility for negotiating use restrictions and moral quandaries returns to me and David. A long-standing group of managers called "Small Council" will disband — when we need advice or counsel we'll ask individuals with direct relevant experience rather than a pre-defined group at large.

They tried really hard to paint their "simple, reasonable, and principled" changes as "Back to basics, back to individual responsibility, back to work." But it was clear the real principle was "back to full control for us and none for you."

I can understand the mentality that goes like 'I'm a good guy, I won't face the possibility that I'm a bad guy, the people who say I'm causing them harm need to shut up.' I really can't understand the mentality that's like 'we hired smart people, but we'll give them obvious obfuscation and they won't see through it.'
posted by trig at 2:59 PM on May 4, 2021 [4 favorites]


At my old job, politics was also banned. It was a small company, where less than half of the employees were male, and about a third were LGBTQ. Very liberal in mission and style. There was an active, fun, and respectful politics chat that got really busy during the early Trump years, as people shared outrage, news, protests to attend, orgs to donate to, and other stuff you'd expect from that time.

Well, it turned out there were two engineers that were self-described Libertarians, and they decided to join the chat and basically rebut everything, all the time. They did so with respect and good humor most of the time, but it was 2 against 20 and they complained of dog-piling and bad faith arguments being lobbed their way.

Then it was discovered that one of the engineers had a twitter which went well beyond Libertarian and got into some wacky Far Right supposedly "rational" content he was linking to regularly, much of it beyond the pale but still apparently cool in engineer circles. But he wasn't doing anything wrong at work, he was always nice to everyone in the office and wasn't disrespectful on Slack, he just argued everything and posted links from places like National Review. None of the "rational" race-based bullshit. Meanwhile, both sides complained to HR that they felt either attacked, unsafe, or disrespected.

The decision was made to just ban politics chat in the office completely. One of the two engineers left the company, as did I so I don't know how it all turned out. At the time I understood the reason, it was stressing people out too much, the differences of opinion weren't helping anyone learn anything. But I'm not sure how to feel about it in retrospect.
posted by chaz at 4:23 PM on May 4, 2021 [2 favorites]


If you give Nazis a platform, you're a Nazi. There is no reasoned debate with people whose goal is to shut down reasoned debate. Removing the platform completely would not have been my preferred solution but it's a workable one. (Firing the Nazis would be my preferred solution.)
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:34 PM on May 4, 2021 [4 favorites]



In his tweets, Maciej dismisses the concerns of Basecamp workers, and points to electrical worker union organizers as having 'real' concerns, like, 'we don't want to get electrocuted'.


As a member of the IBEW I can tell you we are way past that with our negotiations. We want better pay, shorter hours, better health and retirement benefits and honesty from employers. We use our collective power to prevent retaliation for refusing to perform unsafe work but it rarely comes to that. Grievances are almost always over interpretation differences for compensation not safety.
posted by Mitheral at 7:05 PM on May 4, 2021 [11 favorites]


Imagine being such a bad poster that 1/3rd of your colleagues quit over it.
posted by ryanrs at 9:22 PM on May 4, 2021 [5 favorites]


Unconfirmed rumor at this point, but up to 43% of the company may now have taken the buyout.
posted by FallibleHuman at 1:40 PM on May 13, 2021 [2 favorites]


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