Episode 169 - Basecamp’s Boundary on Politics
Basecamp asks employees not to discuss too much politics at work, and some of them (plus the media) freak out! The Local Maximum gets a new setup.
Links
Jason Fried, CEO: Changes at Basecamp
The Verge: Basecamp’s Political Speech Policy, Basecamp Implodes
TechCrunch: Basecamp sees mass employee Exodus
WSJ: Basecamp and the Political Bullies
Related Episodes
Episode 149 on Ideology in the Workplace at Google
Episode 143 on Expensify going Political
Episode 139 on Coinbase going Apolitical
Episode 76 on Political Activism at Google
Transcript
Max Sklar: You're listening to The Local Maximum, Episode 169.
Time to expand your perspective. Welcome to The Local Maximum. Now here's your host, Max Sklar.
Max: Welcome everyone you have reached another Local Maximum. Today is… We're making a little bit of a Local Maximum history today, wouldn’t you say so, Aaron?
Aaron Bell: I don't want to oversell it, but it's definitely a milestone.
Max: Yeah. I've got this little studio set up, and by that I usually, when I used to talk about my studio, it was my studio apartment in Brooklyn. But now, no, it's literally a room in my apartment that is a full-time podcast studio. Now, we're not taking video in here today. But I think next time we'll get the video set up, maybe we'll send some pictures over to those who are on Locals, at maximum.locals.com to see us in the new room. I feel like we just need to– and first of all, we have never been in-person, have we?
Aaron: I think the only time we've recorded in the same room was at the tech retreat episode, and that was really a panel recording.
Max: Right. That was the only one. Well, no, was that the only one?
Aaron: I think so.
Max: Okay, wow. We've never actually done an in-person kind of co-hosted show. Now we're in the same room. I think we predicted this at the beginning of the year that it would happen, and here we are. I think, I feel like we need to get I don't know stuff for the walls here, something for the backgrounds. I need to go to– I don't know where to go to set up this room. I want to say Office Depot, but that sounds very old-fashioned. That sounds the most, that's the most boomer thing I could possibly say.
Aaron: Well, I thought part of the appeal of doing a podcast was that I don't have to put on makeup or shave and get a haircut because nobody can see me. But I guess that's going out the window.
Max: We used to do some videos so, I don’t know. Every once in a while we can come in and do some videos or I could just you know, video my portion of it. Or you know, we could just have it be, not the highest quality video so everyone can't see exactly what you're looking at. But anyway, we should probably get to the topics at hand for today.
Aaron: Yeah, what's going on in the world? Anything exciting?
Max: Well, let's talk about what's going on in technology today. You know, we have this– it's tech, but it's also you know, about what's going on in our society. Because really, it's about a 60-person company, which I don't know why this is news, but everybody's talking about Basecamp, which is– have you heard of Basecamp? Because I have, but I don't know if it's, people have heard of it.
Aaron: Before they exploded in the news in the last week or so, I was aware of them as a company. But if you asked me exactly what they did, I was a little fuzzy on it.
Max: Okay. Before we get to the juicy stuff of all of the stuff because you know, is Basecamp exploding, imploding, exploding? Did they do a good thing, did they do a bad thing, what did they do?
Aaron: They’re just regular-ploding.
Max: Yeah. Let's talk about what Basecamp is. They are a company that based out of Chicago. Jason Fried is, I think that's how you pronounce Fried, is one of the co-founders. He's the guy sending out their policy changes that kicked this whole story off. They are a productivity company. They do product management, internal communications. I think that back in like 2011, 2012, in Foursquare we used Basecamp. I think it was called Campfire for their internal communications tool. They do email, newsletters, a lot of companies do that.
Aaron: When you say internal communications this is kind of the same role as Slack fills.
Max: Yeah.
Aaron: Okay.
Max: It was pre-Slack. I don't know why productivity companies are always so woke and full of themselves as compared to other companies. But it seems like that's a pattern like, like Asana and Expensify.
There's something about productivity, where maybe productivity is so boring, that like, you know, they, they need to come up with— Because remember, Asana was always big about how, “We're going to change the world and bring spiritual awakening to everyone.” It's like, “Yeah, how about your checklist? You're making me a checklist, and you're gonna make it work.” So, I don't know. But anyway, they have an email communications tool called Hey, H-E-Y, which I had never heard of before. That's when they announced this stuff.
Aaron: That's a super recent launch in their product line, I believe.
Max: Okay.
Aaron: I think within the last year they expanded into basically, private email.
Max: Gotcha. private email. Yeah, it's private emails. Emails are so big right now. Everybody's into email. It's back to the, what's old is new.
Aaron: Yeah. I read somewhere that they do email and that was a recent development. When I saw that it was called Hey, that made me think of, do you remember back in the heyday of when, no pun intended with heyday there when you could basically roll out an app for anything and get venture money for it? There was an app called, I think it was Yo.
Max: Yes, I remember. That's exactly what I was thinking. It was basically Facebook poking, where—
Aaron: But that was it. That was the full functionality of the app.
Max: Well, they were like, “Hey, if Twitter is better with 140 characters at the time, what if we have a communications tool with zero characters?” Essentially, zero, no, Yo is two characters. But since you can only say Yo, there's no, that’s zero information.
Aaron: It's even more fundamental than Morse code. Instead of dots and dashes. You just have dots.
Max: You just have dots, but each dot has a timestamp like so. Or you could only send empty tweets. You know, the yeah, exactly. All right. What happened to Yo, do you remember?
Aaron: I have no idea.
Max: I don't think it's still around. But I could be wrong about that.
Aaron: I wouldn't bet money on being able to find it in the App Store.
Max: How many people are making– have made Yo their daily routine since the founding? I mean, if you think about it, like we do Swarm in Foursquare, there are people who have done check-ins making that their daily routine for a decade. That's pretty big. But I don't think that that happened with Yo.
Alright, so let's get back to Basecamp. They’re basically– let me just drop the big changes. You can read the article, I’ll post the article on www.localmaxradio.com/169, the article, the announcement. The big change is no more social or political discussion at work. Which is interesting, because I thought that we weren't supposed to be having social and political discussion that was too deep at work, because it could upset people. There are also a few– but that was the one, that was the announcement that really upset people. There were– and the other one is that the DEI initiative. The diversity, equity, inclusion stuff. Apparently, they had a 20-person committee for that. A 20-person committee in a 60-person company, or on the DEI committee. Then he said, “No more committees, this is just one person's job now.”
Aaron: I'll just add one piece to that.
Max: Yeah.
Aaron: Which, in my experience, serving on several boards of directors for non-profits. When something goes to committee, it's because you want to kill it. If you want something to get done, you don't send it to committee. I'm surprised that they bothered to get rid of the committee, but that's probably because there was stuff going on the committee itself that was counterproductive, as opposed to being concerned about the output of the committee.
Max: I'm sure. Yeah, I'm sure it was more, they felt it was more counterproductive than just non-productive.
Aaron: Yeah, well, it sounds like there was a lot of animosity brewing up from this process.
Max: Well, I mean, I can talk about my experiences and some of these initiatives at work, they can be very frustrating. I think we had a Diversity Committee at one point, several companies that worked for. I've checked in on them, but eventually either nothing gets done, or there's so many people who have to say their thing. It's just, “Get me out of here and let me do my work.”
Anyway, a few other changes I should mention, just because we're talking about this, because there were other changes that were maybe less controversial, but still a little controversial. Before we go on, why don't I just mention what they were, so you have– so everyone's up to date on what Jason’s email is.
Aaron: Yeah.
Max: The other changes were, they're taking away certain benefits and just giving you cash instead. All right. Another one is no more 360-degree reviews, which is when, for your annual review, they actually, not only did they talk to everyone you worked with but they do, that's actually, I guess, the your official review. That's, I mean, I don't like reviews in general. I don't know what to say about that, other than the tone seems to be, “Oh, co-workers simply supported each other, and so they were too good.” But I've seen 360-degree reviews where somebody uses it as a means to like, get back at someone they don't like, and say something bad about them. Because negative feedback on that is always amplified because it's there's less of it.
Aaron: I've never been in a functional 360-review environment. But my impression is that it can very easily get tied up in inter-office politics. It sounded like his spin was more that, “I want this review to be assessing your performance, not how you've negotiated basically your relationship with everyone around you. Are you doing the things that you've been tasked to do effectively? I can get that just as easily from your manager, rather than wasting everybody else around you’s time, having them write up these reports that are, in most cases, not particularly enlightening.”
Max: I guess so, I guess. I mean, sometimes those things have been helpful if it's like, “Hey, I've been working with this person, so you better ask– you should ask them—”
Aaron: Yeah. I think there's a middle ground, and certainly, there's nothing preventing managers from talking with their direct reports to get insight into other people. The principle of the 360 I think is a good one. But execution perhaps leaves a lot to be desired.
Max: I've never, I've hated all reviews. Whether I get a good review or a bad review, it's always just like, “Just leave me alone. You don't want me working here? Let me know, I'll go somewhere else, but I don't want to hear it.” I know I shouldn’t. I know I should—
Aaron: I think there's just a hint of prisoner's dilemma to the 360 degree.
Max: I know I should take feedback and all that. But I mean, at some point, it's like, well, anyway. I found it, it's a lot less useful than the company propaganda always says.
Aaron: It's useful for somebody. It may not be you though.
Max: No but the propaganda is always like, “This is for your benefit, so you can improve.” See, I mean, I don't know if you've gotten that, but I have. I think the people say that believe it. But it's, man. Alright. The people, they were not happy. About a third of the company, they left. They took a buyout. This is a lot like Coinbase, remember, at the end of last year, and I'll link to that episode. I don't remember. What episode is that? Now I'm inclined to look it up.
Aaron: I think it was back in September that story broke, but I don't remember when we talked about it. When the story initially broke, the first piece was their announcement of these changes, which, and it did not include— The Coinbase one did one. The Coinbase made the announcement. I think part of that announcement included the offer of buyouts for anyone who wanted to leave and generous severance. That was not publicly– that was not in the public notice of these changes.
Max: Okay.
Aaron: Although it sounds like it either was on the internal channel or very closely followed that, given the large scale exodus that did happen—
Max: I’m trying to find one, I feel like I named the podcast episode. Oh, well, okay. It was Episode 143. I know we were talking about the election that day, too. It was right before the election when– so that makes sense. Coinbase said, they're not gonna have a lot of politics at work, either. People were so enraged by that, they were giving people buyouts to leave, and they left. Now Coinbase went public this year, and it was not a factor in the IPO that Coinbase had this policy, so maybe it's not gonna be worth as much. I don't know if it's so– it's starting to look like not a bad decision. But that I feel like with Basecamp, this is going to be this is going to be taken to a whole other level. Because, so first of all, Coinbase, rough numbers here– yes, sorry—
Aaron: Is Coinbase a Silicon Valley company?
Max: Yes.
Aaron: Okay.
Max: I saw them in their office, they're in San Francisco. They have different offices now.
Aaron: I'd say that may be a worthwhile distinction to make. Maybe the other question, and this is something that was– I picked up from, from some of my other readings on the Basecamp scenario. Basecamp is not a startup in the sense that employees have equity. Coinbase, I don't know if they were not. I think being in Silicon Valley, that's much more likely to get the case.
Max: Yeah.
Aaron: That certainly changes the dynamic when employees, a large portion of them, actually own a stake in the company. Whether or not they have, you know, seats on the board or anything like that. But there's a functional difference compared to Basecamp here, where– and this is led to some interesting comments by disgruntled employees, where they compare it to the Jeff Bezos model. It's like, “We're all slaving away in the mines here. But you guys up top, you're making all the money. That can't possibly be fair.”
Max: Wait, so why have these employees then been working? Some of them said, “Oh, I've been working here for 10 years. This is it. Now that I can't talk about my politics and work, I quit.” This is the biggest outrage that’s happened in 10 years? Also, it seems like, why would you work for 10 years for a company that is not giving you equity? If you are in tech, that makes no sense.
Aaron: Well, I think they pitch an environment that is very much like that Silicon Valley ethos, just without the actual skin in the game, which raises some questions about why people might be willing to do that. I think one of the theories proposed is this kind of a Midwest thing that it has to do with kind of culture and attitudes in the Midwest makes people much more likely to get on board with that kind of thing, without necessarily having as much of a financial incentive to go along with it.
Max: I see. I see. Yeah, also, I feel like, I suspect that a lot of them joined for this social and political attitude. I can't confirm this. But like the rumor is on Twitter's, I don't want to say this is definitely what happened, but historically the leadership pushed activism on social and political issues in the workplace. They told people, “This is the place where we are going to, we're going to change the world. Sure, we're going to build some products, change the world. But we're also going to, I don't know, push for whatever social and political issue is of interest on the day, of the day.” Or whatever is popular, which has changed quite a bit.
Aaron: I certainly don't want to make any sweeping generalizations. But there are at least several individuals who have come out and said that straight up that was part of their understanding and expectation when they joined the company.
Max: Yeah.
Aaron: I think that's not unreasonable, given how it was being pitched. But it sounds like the paradigm has shifted. The team is not all on board with that shift. But when management owns the company, management can turn the ship any way they want. They might have a mutiny. But as long as they have enough people to keep manning the operation, that's not going to sink the ship. Alright—
Max: I will talk about—
Aaron: I've tortured that metaphor enough. So—
Max: Yeah, no, no, I want to. I want to get to that in a bit like what is actually going to happen. We're not going to predict, but we'll talk about something's going to happen. I believe 10%, left in Coinbase. Right now, about a third left at Basecamp. But some people say it could be as high as 50% of employees take this buyout at the end of the day. They’ll– I guess they'll start building up from there. A lot of the employees left dramatically. Like they all posted tweets. You know, like I said before, “I've been working here for 10 years, and I am done. I am sad. I am exhausted. I am tired.” I am, you know, all that stuff.
Aaron: Which, to be clear, they are completely entitled to those feelings and opinions.
Max: Yeah. All right. Obviously, there's more of a backstory here. If you read– I'll link to some of the articles. Where did this come from? I read some of the articles, and so I'm going to talk about what my takeaway is, but I've got to say something doesn't make sense with some of these stories. Like we're not, we're definitely not getting the full story here. But let me just try to piece together what I've read from the news. Apparently, there had been going on this list of funny names, this list of funny customer names, that some people at the company were keeping.
Aaron: Right, which goes back at least a decade, possibly. Further back than that.
Max: Apparently, that these were not ethnic names is what some people were saying. But although I don't know, but you know–
Aaron: Not exclusively. Yeah, they're there– I think I saw that, you know, I haven't seen the list. I don't think they published the list. But it was, you know, there were some Asian names on there, which is very sensitive in the wake of the incident in Atlanta, that wasn't that long ago.
Max: Everything going on, yeah.
Aaron: But it was by no means the majority of the list that it was not based on primarily ethnic stereotypes.
Max: Right. Okay. There's a lot of good reasons why you don't want to do this. You got your– they should have nipped it in the bud. Now, of course, now that there's been a “reckoning”. “Oh, sensitivities are different now.” Then there's a reckoning. Now all of a sudden, some employees had an argument over it, even employees who used to contribute to the list said that, “Oh this, doing a list like this is a precursor to genocide.” That was the rhetoric being used. Because there's been some things– well, you know, but before there's genocide, first, there's dehumanization. I guess the first step is making fun of people's names. I don't know. But—
Aaron: Ok, that's perhaps not the most charitable steal man take on the situation, but it's not incorrect, either.
Max: Well, I just want to say this, you know, the idea of the management is saying, “Well, you know, social attitudes have changed.” I– look, if I went back in time to, pick a date, like 1953. I told someone a company in 1953. “Hey, you think it's a good idea to make a list of your employees that are, funny names and would like you to pass around work? Do you understand why that might not be a bad idea?” I think they would get it. There's this whole idea that like, “Oh, you know, this used to be okay, but it's not.” It's just ridiculous. The difference is that the overdramatization of everything is kind of, du jour of the day versus, “Hey, this is a bad idea.” I just want– when these things happen, I want these companies or whoever's job is HR, whatever, to go over there and say, “Hey, here, you're doing this stuff. It's not a good idea, knock it off.” That should be the end of it. But no, now it has to be a whole discussion.
Aaron: To be clear, that that is pretty much what happened when it bubbled up at that in the most recent incident. Yeah. There was a concern that– part of the reaction was that, “We don't think you're taking this seriously enough.” There was the comment made about the, I forget the proper term for it, but there was the like, pyramid of, oh, gosh. It was some structural device that that has been used to show how that type of low-level discriminatory action lead can eventually lead to things like genocide.
One of the company founders said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's take a step back. I think you're…” They may have used the term catastrophizing, that this is an overreaction.
Max: They’re right.
Aaron: Let's roll it back. That's what really got people to blow up. They said, “How could you possibly be minimizing our reaction here, that this is serious?” I think that's probably what tipped the management overboard, that that they were perfectly willing to, to go along with, “Yes, this was wrong, we're going to take action, we're going to fix it.” Maybe some people will be disciplined, but at a minimum, we're gonna have some internal trainings to make sure that something like this never happens again. They were fully on board with it. But then when they got a backlash to that comment about maybe you're overreacting a little bit here with some of your rhetoric, I think that's what pushed them over the line. They said, “Okay, we need to, we need to put our foot down here. Otherwise, we're going to lose complete control of the situation.”
Max: That's a problem with some of this woke stuff is like, there is no– you're not allowed to admit to any overreacting. There is no such thing as overreacting. It's a problem because then the reactions get bigger and bigger and bigger, and there's no stopping point. Versus, “This is dumb, this is counterproductive, knock it off.” Now we have to have a discussion about how basically, you’re Hitler, or Stalin, or whatever, pick your genocide that's happening.
Aaron: I hate to feed into the presumed roles of, you know, someone coming from my background and some of my stances on this but the the perception is certainly that nobody is safe from the– no matter how deep you are in the movement, how many liberal– whether or not you choose to see social justice as a pejorative term or not, but however steeped you are in that, there's no guarantee that it won't turn on you on a dime. That seems to be to some extent, what happened here.
Max: Yeah. Okay, let me read some of the—
Aaron: Are we going to the tweets?
Max: Well, I'll just go to one. I actually had saved a tweet and then I looked up, went to look back at the tweet that I had saved or linked to, and it turned out the person had protected their tweets. Maybe some of these tweets, maybe people are not so happy that they tweeted them.
Aaron: You gotta always screenshot because Twitter is ephemeral.
Max: Yeah. Okay, I'm going to do this one, Sam Stevenson. He better be someone who worked there, and not a fake. Because I know Jason Calacanis wrote a fake. Jason Calacanis, for those who don't know, he does a podcast called This Week in Startups. He’s a big investor and he— I think he wrote a tongue in cheek like, “I'm quitting my CMO role after 15 years of Basecamp to go wreak havoc on another company.” But okay, this is Sam Stevenson: “As a result of the recent changes at Basecamp. Today is my last day at the company. I joined over 15 years ago as a junior programmer, and I've been involved in nearly every product launch there since 2006. For—”
By the way, people love to make dramatic, storm-out pronouncements. Maybe there's a time for it, but I feel like it's almost always just an overreaction to me. I always just— people love to do it in the heat of the moment way more than they should. That's just my opinion. But in my observation of—
Aaron: Many things that feel good are not necessarily wise.
Max: Okay, so then he writes, “At Basecamp, I help bring open source project like prototypes by rocket…” blah, blah, blah, but you know, all his projects. “This is my life's work, the output of my entire career. I'm proud to have built it in public. Effective immediately, I will make no further updates to nor releases of any of the aforementioned open source software I worked on. This is my decision, thank you for understanding.” Basically people are, they're trying to make it out to be, “Hey, I built all this wonderful stuff.” We say this as engineers a lot. “I built all this wonderful stuff.” “You need me,” basically, and, “You've gained a lot from me,” which is, in some cases, very true. “Now you're going to lose it all.”
I kind of wonder if, whether, as software engineers, which I have been, right, I do that a bit now too, quite a bit. But it's like, how much power do we really have? I feel like you quit a company, they usually replace you pretty fast. Sometimes you bring knowledge away from you, but they eventually catch up. It just might take a little while. I don't know, there are some people who could leave a company and basically tank a product. But I don't know if— I feel like it's— you often think you're going to be somebody and tank the products but it's way less than you—
Aaron: Certainly, the leadership's outcome for the situation, preferred outcome, would have been nobody leaves, and the people who are there adopt the new paradigm.
Max: Maybe that's not what they want.
Aaron: There's been some talk about all they were just looking for a way to get rid of dead weight. But given how the people that are leaving are kind of across all levels of the company, it hasn't just been the new people they hired in the last year or two who are Gen Z-ers and super woke or whatever. It's certainly not restricted to them that this—
Max: These are millennials.
Aaron: Yeah, well, and some of them are in team lead positions and stuff. It's certainly in areas that will result in setbacks. Whether that's setbacks that they weren't prepared for or weren't expecting is a question that I'm not in a position to answer.
Max: Right. A lot of these tweets use terms like ‘disgusted’, and one was ‘supremely privileged founders who have lost the plot.’ But of course, it remains to be seen if we've lost the plot. I mean, it's—
Aaron: I could see this, if you were working at somewhere like Amazon or Google, and out of the blue you found out that they were involved in a massive weapons project or something. You're like, “This is completely against my ethics, I'm out.” Right? I could see storming out and quitting over something like that.
Max:Yeah.
Aaron: I personally might not do that. But I could understand why people would. This, I have trouble viewing this through the same way.
Max: I think a lot of the people who do— so they're saying, “Well, you need us because we love to talk about politics at work. If you make this law, make this rule, this guideline, we're going to go.” But don't you think talking about politics at work or social issues at work also, it turns certain people away as well. Those tend to be the people who are more quiet. I mean—
Aaron: Sure. Their counter-spin on that would probably something to the effect of that we build better products by having a diversity of views in the room. Which is not incorrect. But you can have a diversity of use in the room without basically proselytizing your views on particular subjects. There’s a lot to be said for taking the 10th man view, for being a contrarian when it comes to the aspects of a particular project. But that may not be particularly relevant to an email product.
Max: Yeah, let me give a specific example. I've worked at companies where there were, you know, there were Israelis, people from Israel and there were Palestinians there. You really want to bring that stuff up in the middle of trying to work on an email project. Now, look, you can see what some of the people are posting on Facebook and Twitter. You might not like it, but I feel like you should have the ability to say, “Hey, we're all here. We're all trying to build a good product that has nothing to do with this right now. Let's do our job”. But, and now these issues are just over the stupidest things. Like I don't know what they're what they're— Well, I mean, okay, sometimes these are important issues, but it's also, they expect everyone to want to get with their program, whatever it is, to solve whatever social issue they think needs to be solved.
Aaron: I haven't been looking too closely for it—
Max: Do you really want—
Aaron: —with Basecamp but I know with Coinbase, there were a lot of accusations that, “Man, it's, they're turning into a white supremacist company.”
Max: But that's, this so ridiculous.
Aaron: Yeah, I had difficulty jumping to that conclusion. But maybe that's a shortcoming on my part.
Max: Yeah. No, it's catastrophizing is what it is. Yeah, I mean, it's, I've seen—
Aaron: The counterargument I would expect would be something to the effect of we are both white males from upper-middle class backgrounds, and so we have the privilege of not having to worry about a lot of the things that these people are doing.
Max: Yeah.
Aaron: Which is, those things are all facts about us. I hesitate to draw that conclusion from those facts, but—
Max: Right. Some people will say, you know, they'll say something like, “They'll only hire privileged people where politics doesn't affect them.” The assumption of that is that politics affects the people who are leaving, they're like, “Well, politics affects me personally because I'm being oppressed by politics and by society right now.” But, yeah, you're— that's a little bit of a histrionic disorder there. I think that, I just think that on your day-to-day, you can put it aside. If you really think that there are people in society coming after you committing genocide or whatever, I wouldn't try to argue it at work, I would get the hell out of here. But so if that is a problem, but if it's really just like, “Oh, I see something politicians are talking about on TV, and it's upsetting me.” People should be able to look like, you should be able to work through that.
Aaron: Yeah, I'll tie this into another thing that's been in the news that would seem completely unrelated.
Max: Are they more, are people more upset about the news stories that go on day-to-day, than I was on 9/11? Is that what it is, what it was like every day? Do you really have to live like that? Is that really like, “Oh, politics is affecting me.” Like, do you really have to? That's— I'm sorry they're gonna say, “Oh, you don't know what you're talking about, Max.” But I'm sorry, it's a choice. Convince me otherwise.
Aaron: I think there's an argument to be made that it's a question of context and venue, that none of this is saying that these people can't be activists for causes they believe in.
Max: Oh, no.
Aaron: It's simply saying that work is perhaps not the place for that.
Max: That's why I have a podcast here, so I can talk about issues that I agree with, and I don't have to bring it up at work.
Aaron: “Well, as an employee of this podcast, I feel that my view is…”But I think this ties into something that a Supreme Court case that—
Max: There will never be a no controversial issue decree on The Local Maximum.
Aaron: We can deal with this in my 360 review later. But there's a case that was accepted by the Supreme Court, I believe, in the last week or two, that involves can schools punish students for things that are said and done outside of school. Not on school grounds, not during school time.
Max: Yeah, I’m against that.
Aaron: I think most, well, I would hope that most of our listeners would be on board with that. Similarly, your company shouldn't punish you for things that you spend your time and money and other resources on outside of the workplace. There's nothing wrong with that being an important part of your life, and maybe the thing that defines you. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it needs to follow you into work every day in the way that some people seem to have made central to their character.
Max: I've worked with people who, I've seen what they're tweeting. They’re tweets and posts, some of the things upset me. But you know what I come in, I'm like, “Hey, this is not… This does not happen in here. Here we are… We have a job to do. They have their reasons for whatever their beliefs are. I'm not going to hold it against them. I'm going to carry on as if I never saw it.” I've done that several times. I don't see why anyone else can't do that. I mean, I guess it's, yeah, so I have, right. If someone's saying, “Oh, this person tweeted something that I don't like. I don't think I could work with them.” I'd be like, “Get over it.” At least that's what I hope— maybe that's not what people want now.
Aaron: I guess the only thing that pops to mind, the type of situation where I might have a reaction like is if somebody I worked with tweeted something about, “Yeah, man. They really should just burn all the Jews,” or something like that. I would be uncomfortable with that. I might bring that up with co-workers and HR. But—
Max: I had someone I worked with once who tweeted something that was, I'll tell you after the show. It was not… It was different, but not that far off.
Aaron: It seems like many of the people having this reaction, that's the level that this is, I hate to use the term, triggering them too. But that's the level of reaction they're having. Maybe it is a failure of imagination on my part. But again, I can't see how you could crank things up to that, you know, turn them up to 11 based on the input that they're seeing there.
Max: Yeah. The thing is, like, in my situation, this was many years ago, it wasn't at Foursquare. It was just like, nobody is going to care. I'm not one of the groups where anyone cares what's going on there. But anyway, let's— I've seen a bunch of stupid questions on Twitter about this. “Oh, my God, if there's no politics, what am I allowed to say, what I'm not allowed to say?” I feel like people have lost all common sense.
One person mentioned, “Well, my kid is in public school. It is inherently political that my kid is in public school. How am I ever going to mention it? If I said, I have to leave and pick up my kid from his public school, then all of a sudden, I'm in violation?” Well, first of all, no. Secondly, why is that even a question? Why is somebody— are they just being overly dramatic? I get it. If I want to send my kid to a public school, and you want to homeschool your kid, there is no reason why we shouldn't be able to work together. Maybe I'm against what you're doing. Maybe you're against what I'm doing. But we— there's— I feel like if people can't set something like that aside, and get work done, there is a problem in our society.
Aaron: Yeah, I mean, there's a quote, and I don't know if I'm—
Max: Nobody should shame anyone like that. There's no, I'll get to that in a second. But it's not like, “Hey, well, I send my kids to public school.” You could probably, you should be allowed to say that. Maybe it could get too much after a while, and you sort of proselytize. But if somebody else says, “I homeschool my kid.” Then you go, “Well, that kid's gonna be screwed up.” No! You shouldn't do that at work. I mean, that would be common sense. Like, am I going crazy here?
Aaron: It may be too much to expect for the adults in the room to behave like adults.
Max: Another one they mentioned as well, we have to figure out how we can approach gender on the sign-up forms, and that's political. It's like, “Okay, well, look, if you're building a signup form, that's one case. Yes, you could talk about it, and you could talk about what you think about it. But then you put that aside.” It’s not that hard to figure out what you should do. But I feel like people have been taught an entirely different ethos of how to get work done, and it probably comes from the universities, the moment, I don't know.
Aaron: Yeah, I mean, there's a mindset that everything is politics, and political is everything, which is perhaps not healthy, but certainly is the mantra for a significant portion of the population.
Max: I cut you off a little bit here talking about a quote.
Aaron: Oh, that's what I was thinking of, and I can't find the proper quotation or the attribution to it. But essentially, the fact that everything can be viewed through a political lens—
Max: Gotcha.
Aaron: –and it must be, and the problem is that politics has become a team sport. Politics is also a form of battle. If politics is war, by other means, and everything is politics, then everything is war. I don't want to live, work, eat, drink, and breathe in that environment that—
Max: Yeah.
Aaron: I don't need that kind of stress.
Max: Also, I don't want to have to think about opinions my co-workers that have that might upset me. Some of them put it in my face at work, maybe that— maybe they shouldn't do that. But it's also, I don't, I feel like we should be able to say, “Hey, we all look at the world very differently. We should be able to put–” There's kind of a problem where we're— they're saying we should be for diversity. I feel like we should be for diversity, but there has to be some common thread with everyone who works together. There has to be some common set of values. It’s hard to define where those common values lie. I would like a very objective set of values. Here's how we relate to our customers, here's why we want to be fair to each other, blah, blah, blah.
Whereas I think, what certain groups have, let's call them the wokesters or whatever, they want to have a very, a much more progressive set of values at work, and then they'll be, “Okay, but we'll have diversity within that.” Maybe we won't have diversity of thought, but we'll have people of different ethnic backgrounds just so long as they think like us. But I feel like you could also have a thinner set of values that you promote, and then within that you get a broader range of diversity of thought.
Aaron: Much of that could be driven by following Wheaton’s Law.
Max: I don't know that.
Aaron: It's named after Wil Wheaton. It's a mantra that we should all live by. It's, “Don't be a dick.” If we all managed to do that, I think that would solve not all problems, but it would help avert a lot of situations which have found their way into being crises.
Max: Right.
Aaron: It doesn't take that much effort to not be a dick to people that we interact with on a daily basis.
Max: Yeah. The media is apocalyptic about this. The Verge says Basecamp implodes. We'll see. They were talking about the same thing with Coinbase. I feel like this is a little bit more difficult than Coinbase because they're pulling off a band-aid that has a bit more— they pulled off the band-aid and a bunch of their flesh came up with it. We'll see what happens. Would you rather be— okay, here's an interesting question I didn't tell you, I have a question here. I know that it sounds—
Aaron: Pop quiz.
Max: Would you rather be— today, would you rather be in Basecamp’s position or Parler’s position?
Aaron: I haven't been following Parler that closely. I'm guessing that they're probably in a worse position right now.
Max: Yeah. They're in a worse position, even though Basecamp lost maybe half their employees?
Aaron: Yeah. Well, and I've heard, perhaps it's a hot take, but a take nonetheless. Good news, everybody: Basecamp has openings for ambitious engineers. That in this difficult economy, if you have those skills, you know, there are positions available.
Max: Yeah. That's the thing, people assume that when they quit, that the companies won't be able to replace them. Yes, the war, the so-called war for talent is very, is heated, but there are certainly, there are always people looking for jobs. I think they make it sound like, “Well, no one would want to work in this apolitical workplace,” or, “No person of color would want to work in this apolitical workplace, especially.” I don't buy it. I think there are plenty of people who would, a diverse set of people who would, I think.
Aaron: Yeah, I've heard it suggested that while, maybe this will not only serve to reorient their workplace culture in a way that management would prefer, but that it may, in fact, attract certain people who may sympathize with, you know, the James Damore’s of the tech sphere. That—
Max: Well, so first of all, okay, well, I can continue on—
Aaron: I threw a grenade with that one. Because he's a bit of a flashpoint.
Max: You threw a grenade at the end of the podcast. Here's why I don't think so. Because James Damore was in an inherently political workplace. He was asked at Google to share his opinion. At an apolitical workplace, like presumably Basecamp wants to become, he would have to keep his opinions largely to himself on that issue. I mean, it— yeah, we’re the same.
Aaron: Like I said, that's a take I saw. I haven't given it that much thought, and I think you have a reasonable rebuttal to it there.
Max: Yeah. All right. I feel like for me, this is kind of a lesson for starting a company. Whereas if I start a company, I want to be very clear about the— from the get-go, about how, in my ideal company, how I want the culture to be. I want to make it clear from the get-go that people aren't going to use the company as a platform for their social and political issues. If that's what they would like to do, they could either do it outside of work, that's fine. Or if they want a workplace like that they should work somewhere else, but not even, just right off the bat, “Hey, are you comfortable with these workplace rules?” Then you only get people who do. It doesn't mean that you're not don't have a diverse workplace.
In my experience, I think the way you get a diverse workplace and fair hiring, is you talk about exactly that. You kind of look for talent in different places than you otherwise would. You talk about fairness in hiring, you have these people who don't fit in, you could, in their current team, you kind of try to move them around a little bit. You— there's all sorts of things you could do. To me, you kind of have kind of an open forum for saying, “Hey, what's bothering you?” Maybe there might be an issue, for example, some companies have all of the— I know, in one case, we had this issue where all of the events were around drinking, and certain people don't drink. Well, maybe we should mention that. Okay, good. We could fix that. There's all sorts of things that you could do in order to fix problems. But if they're concrete, and if you just talk about them like reasonable adults, you can solve them. That should be the, or even reasonable children can probably do a better job than a lot of these people. Then I think—
Aaron: To be clear, I don't think that's exactly the problem that they had. I think initially, they were, they were okay with that level of activism, mostly because they shared those positions. When management shares the same political views as the team, they don't see any problem with using company resources, basically, to advocate along those lines. But once that is no longer the case, that becomes a much bigger problem. This was— pivots are never easy. They're certainly going to feel the growing pains of this one.
Max: Yep. Well, it could go one way or another. I'm kind of interested, if this one works out well, like the Coinbase one did, then we might see more companies would adopt this policy, but I feel like we'll definitely see the new start-ups. I'm looking at this for starting a company, I'd be like, “Yeah, just figure this out from the get-go.”
Aaron: Well, and that's part of when you're building a culture and looking for culture fit, which it sounds like they were doing, you need to make sure that you're building the culture you want. Because they built a certain culture, and now they've changed their mind about what they want, which, as owners of the company, they're entitled to do. Yeah, but not easy.
Max: Culture fit is always— it's a controversial issue, too, in terms of hiring, because some people say if you hire for culture fit, then you're basically hiring people like you. There's a tendency to say, “Well, we should ban all talk of cultural fit, because if there's like systemic bias in hiring, from that cultural fit—” But on the other hand, culture fit is a real thing.
Aaron: You could certainly flip that lens—
Max: Culture your fit is a real thing.
Aaron: You can certainly flip that lens and say, “We're intentionally looking for people who are going to bust up this culture.” That, I don't know how many companies actively do that without breaking it down into somewhat more of a numerical, you know, quota type approach.
Max: But what I'm saying is, I think that culture fit is important, even though— but it's also been vilified. Some of the arguments against it are actually correct. That like, you know, people say, “Oh, don't hire this person, because they weren't culture fit, because they're not a culture fit.” When really, they're kind of using it as a way to like bias against bias. But on the other hand, you have to have a common understanding if you're —on certain things.
Aaron: It's a subjective measure. As all subjective measures are susceptible to, it's a place where biases could be sneaking in. At some companies, culture fit could actually just be code for, “We want to hire white guys from Ivy League universities—
Max: Terrible idea.
Aaron: Who—
Max: That's when you’re going to get the worst.
Aaron: —whose parents also went to Ivy League universities, because they are the kind of people who fit well in this, in this investment banking company.” Or whatever it is. You can't say that outright, but if you refer to it as culture fit, then there's a little column, you can put a number in on your rubric, and it gets the same result. Obviously, well, maybe not obviously, but I think we can agree that that's not the desired outcome. There's reason to be cautious about that. But you also don't want to hire somebody that's going to be completely miserable at your company because they have a dramatic mismatch of expectations and whether that's culture or something else. Anytime expectations don't match up, there's going to be conflict.
Max: What if somebody— okay, here's another one, what if somebody does not, clearly you're doing the interview, and then they get their questions right, but they clearly don't have a positive attitude. You— how you work with people are kind of expected you to have a positive attitude. How do you know, do you really want to hire that person? Because it's like, well, you know, you're just that's a subjective measure, even though everybody who interviewed them detected it.
Aaron: Yeah. Well, there's been a lot of research and I haven't done a deep dive on this recently, but about the hiring process and basically saying that interviews are garbage. You would get much better results if you just didn't do the in-person interview. You really, analyzed, you can look at letters of recommendation, you can look at resumes you can look at, you know, you can give them screening questions and stuff. But the face-to-face interview doesn't add anything other than unwarranted confidence in the people making the decision that they made the right decision.
I think that that gets us interestingly close to some questions about having machine learning or some sort of algorithm doing the hiring process, which, there have been noted issues with it. Was at Amazon or Google who had some sort of machine learning algorithm that they realized had encoded some significant biases. They had to basically can it.
Max: I think it was Amazon.
Aaron: I think we talked about on our previous episode. But you know, that's, with all the things that are being done with ML and AI, and that's a topic that keeps popping up. That, you know, what with it being a black box and all that, that there's some challenges there. But that's not to say that that human subjective analysis is without its flaws.
Max: Yeah, I don't know. I feel like it. Yeah. I don't know how it ended up then. It’s— I've been in the industry for 15 years, and I don't really understand engineering culture very well. Maybe I'm just a little bit jaded by it, especially when it comes to hiring and the philosophy of how teams should work. I've talked about it a lot on the show. But I've never felt that I've personally cracked it, or have a really good understanding of— it’s not understanding, like I know how to hire. I know what's fair and what's not fair. I feel like there's just no way to make everyone happy. That's the thing. There's no silver bullet philosophy in terms of hiring culture that's going to work. It's got to be a case to case, by case basis. There's no formula for it. Then engineers are always looking for a formula for it. Every formula has a flaw. That makes our heads explode.
Aaron: Yeah, we like things that are concrete.
Max: Alright, so I think we're, that's good enough for today. We have got all the stories, but we can get into them next week or another time. How do you like being in person in the studio? Because I'm— I think this has been great.
Aaron: Yeah, I'm a fan. I know in the past, we've gotten some feedback from listeners saying that, “You guys need to stop interrupting each other and talking over each other.” Which is, I think, better in person, although I certainly interrupted you a couple of times there. Maybe that's just our style.
Max: It's got to be 100% better, though. I mean, without the delay, it's totally better.
Aaron: Yeah. Well, and pulling back the curtain here, we'll see how this impacts editing.
Max: Alright. Yeah. Make sure that you check out our Locals page on www.maximum.locals.com. Maybe I'll put a few pictures up of what we've got here. I know we need a little bit more, has to be a little bit more decorative. It's just a white background. But I think we've got a good start here. We can have a discussion about today's topic, which I'm sure will be fairly controversial. Oh, yeah, I had a controversial tweet about this. Should I read my tweets before I go out? Because nobody—
Aaron: Those of you in the Locals are already going to be privy to this. Are they not?
Max: Oh, yeah, they're already privy to this. I tweeted out some of my thoughts. As you know, I mentioned some of them today. I was like, “Okay, I might get into a lot of trouble.” Nobody noticed. I dodged the bullet there. That's good. But I really think that the decision that Basecamp made, most of the decisions on that list were really good decisions, they should have done it from the get-go. My— I actually do think, I do predict that they're probably, if the founders have enough will, they'll pull through this and they'll be better than they were before. That's hard to hear from these engineers leaving because they think they're really destroying it. People are really talking with glee right now on Twitter how the place is imploding, the place is gonna be destroyed. We have the power, people power.
But I think that Basecamp is going to end up a better company after this if they survive, but they certainly have the clients, so I don't see why they wouldn't survive it. Coinbase, it only took a few months for people to forget. Even if Basecamp, it takes people a year or so I think they'll be fine. But we’ll pass it out. I just don't like when people take their religion and their ideology and their way of thinking, and they just have to evangelize it to everyone else. The only way to work with people is to— since you know, this is true now, it's true 50 years ago, it’s true 100 years ago: if you need to work with different people, you're going to have to keep certain hot topics to your— to after work.
Aaron: So, I'll put two closing thoughts. One is that, yeah, I think Basecamp is going to weather this okay. What we don't have is an easy metric, like we did with Coinbase. Coinbase, we knew that they had the impending IPO, and if this really hit them hard, we would have expected to see it there. There's nothing on the horizon for Basecamp where we can point and say they're going to either hit or miss this milestone, and that'll tell us how this is really impacting them. We'll have to keep a little bit closer eye.
The other thought is one thing that was mentioned and how we talked earlier about how the staff, the engineers really don't have any equity here. It's a founder-owned company. The other thing that I've seen tossed around a little bit here is that this would be very different if the team was unionized. There's a lot of talk about engineers, especially in the software tech world, unionizing. I think that's something we're going to see a lot more discussion of in the future. It's something we'll probably see pop up here again on the show.
Max: As an engineer, I would never want to work for a company that's run by the engineering department. It's, well, we could have a whole long discussion about this, and it would be the union of the engineering department, so even worse. All right. What do you guys think? www.maximum.locals.com, www.localmaxradio.com for the website, and anything you want, just tweet us. Start a flame war. Whatever. All good. Have a great week everyone.
That's the show. To support The Local Maximum, sign up for exclusive content and our online community at www.maximum.locals.com. The Local Maximum is available wherever podcasts are found. If you want to keep up, remember to subscribe on your podcast app. Also, check out the website with show notes and additional materials at www.localmaxradio.com. If you want to contact me, the host, send an email to localmaxradio@gmail.com. Have a great week.
