Do you think people in charge of hiring, particularly outside of the SV bubble, are going to be eager to pick someone up who left their last job because they couldn't agree to stop bitching about politics on the company dime? I don't see how demonstrating the inability to follow basic company rules in the interest of productivity improves their career prospects. Even inside the SV bubble, things aren't that warped, are they?
> Do you think people in charge of hiring, particularly outside of the SV bubble, are going to be eager to pick someone up who left their last job because they couldn't agree to stop bitching about politics on the company dime?
I think that's a big mischaracterization of what happened.
For one, it seems a lot of the issue was about the 'funny names list' and heated debate around that. It wasn't people going to war over liberals vs conservatives. It seems DHH took particular umbrage at someone brining the Anti Defamation League's Pyramid of Hate into the conversation.
Secondly, Basecamp had allowed the creation of a Diversity and Inclusion committee with at least a dozen employees joining. DHH and Fried decided to unilaterally dissolve it. If you're going to give employees your blessing for a D&I group then just axe it with no discussion or warning, some people will be put off.
Then there's the fact that employees found out about this group of changes via blog post. That betrays a lack of empathy/care for employees when implementing a set of big changes.
Lastly, saying 'no politics or societal issues' because you, as the owners of the company felt uncomfortable, is a recipe for ruining the culture of a company like Basecamp. For some employees, they can't get away from politics and societal issues because it affects them every day and their very existence has been politicized. More savvy leaders could've established a better climate of respect and politeness around any 'political' discussion rather than a heavy handed and clumsy edict.
This wasn't about a bunch of people endlessly bickering about politics at work, it's about company owners who took a manageable issue and turned it into a public crisis. Companies several orders of magnitude larger manage to accommodate employees having political conversations without making messes like this.
> For some employees, they can't get away from politics and societal issues because it affects them every day and their very existence has been politicized.
It might sound like a "lazy excuse" for someone who hasn't been in their shoes. As lazy as commenting one's gut reaction even. It might be worthwhile to actually give this one some thought, maybe read up on it, talk to people. The non-lazy response basically.
Nobody’s “existence” has been politicized in the 30 years I’ve been in America.[1] I remember during 2015-2016 my friends were freaking out asking if I was worried if Trump would be sending people from Muslim countries (like me) to internment camps. I thought they were being completely absurd. I guess it wasn’t just me: a third of Muslims voted for Trump in 2020. People don’t do that when their “very existence has been politicized.”
Government policies may be unfair, unconstitutional, or discriminatory to different groups of people. But that’s not politicizing people’s “very existence.” That sort of rhetoric is just a way to dial up the temperature of political debates by equating any negative impacts with existential harm. People have a right to freely debate things like who the government will let into the country, what benefits it will provide to whom, etc.
[1] Except unborn children, whose very existence has literally been politicized.
What about deportation of undocumented immigrants? Isn't their existence in this country politicized?
People are being killed by gun violence, police violence, gang violence. Isn't it fair for people affected by these things to feel their lives have become political footballs?
> What about deportation of undocumented immigrants? Isn't their existence in this country politicized?
Their presence in a country they’ve entered illegally is the subject of political debate, but that’s not equivalent to a threat to their “very existence.” Calling it that is an attempt to emotionalize a basic function of sovereign nations: policing their borders. It’s something every country does—including the countries from where these undocumented immigrants came.
> People are being killed by gun violence, police violence, gang violence. Isn't it fair for people affected by these things to feel their lives have become political footballs?
If you’ve been killed by gun violence or police violence or gang violence, then you’re dead. If you haven’t, then you’re debating government policy, not the fact of your “very existence.” Even mundane government policy has life or death implications. People running red lights kills six to ten times as many people each year as mass shootings. But framing a debate over stoplight timing in terms of peoples’ “existence” would be a way to shut down rational policy debate.
As an Asian person, I’m much more likely to be killed or attacked by a repeat offender than by the police. But that doesn’t mean I can shut down a discussion of eliminating bail by saying it’s a “threat to my very existence.”
Based on the way you are using terms, you are correct, nobody's existence can be politicized. If they are alive (although possibly sick, in jail, or deported), they exist so there is nothing to discuss. If they are dead, they are dead, so there is obviously nothing to discuss.
Putting those semantics aside, the point was, some people's lives are affected by politics (I'd argue all are) and you can't expect them not to talk about their lives, including the effect of policy and politics on them. Well, you can, but apparently 2/3 of your workforce will decide that's not cool and leave.
There have been times when people’s very existence has been a political issue. That’s not happening in 21st century America.
Of course people’s “lives are affected by politics”—often very significantly. That’s a very different statement than saying people’s “very existence is politicized.” That’s just a rhetorical device to exaggerate the personal impact of political issues.
I would agree with that. People exaggerate at times, and you're correct that it can lead to unclear conversation. One of the worst parts is that bad actors can seize on a couple of words and detail an entire line of reasoning based on it.
> If you’ve been killed by gun violence or police violence or gang violence, then you’re dead
Unless it’s your family/friends who have been? “How was your weekend Mary?” “My husband/kid was shot in the back by police”
I find it sad how your arguing how people’s existence can’t be political or if they are it “doesn’t matter” because they unborn or dead while neglecting people who would still be affected daily like family or a mother who wants to get an abortion but can’t/has to deal with the assholes out front protesting
About 80 / year police shootings of unarmed individuals.
There were about 19,000 homicides last year.
1 in 55 people people are on parole or probation.
So even if we make the ludicrous assumption that people on parole or probation have exact same rate of violent crime as non probation or paroled you still end up with 345 homicides by people on parole or probation.
I assume a rate 2-3x the base rate for population would be a completely reasonable assumption, giving us ~10x more homicides by people on probation/parole.
The point is if police shootings rise to being an existential threat, than criminal justice reform is at least a much of an existential threat.
I disagree. If you are deported to a country which you may not speak the language, have no known relation, and be completely unable to support yourself, your life is effectively over. You can rebuild a new life from scratch, but depending on how you define existence, I think it's reasonable to say your old life no longer exists. Conversely, you could say you still exist after you die, because the master that made up your body hasn't exited the closed system of the universe.
To make it for home a little more, I'll ask, where would you go if you got deported?
Not really if you're limited to talking about a particular country.
Like I guess you could argue it's the difference between ethnic cleansing internally and invading a neighbor to engage in ethnic cleansing, but that's sort of not a hugely important distinction.
I think they're arguing the distinction between "I'm not allowed to live in the u.s. so I have to live somewhere else" and "I'm not allowed to live because I shot in front of a firing squad".
Which would seem like a very important distinction if it was my existence.
This thread was in part, but not solely, about undocumented immigrants, and sure maybe they have a place they can legally be sent to. But the same argument has been used for racial separation ("No, we don't want to subjugate black people, we just want to have a white ethnostate where the black people will be forced to move". The part not said aloud of of course, being what happens if someone wishes to stay where they have lived their whole life).
So yes, I think the distinction between "will be kicked out by force" or "will simply be shot in the street" can be a lot more tenuous than you're suggesting.
But even still, if we're discussing any group that isn't undocumented immigrants (or even potentially citizens whom the president wanted to strip that right from) the question of "where do they go" becomes even more important, because there usually isn't a place they can go.
I'm unclear on what exactly you mean by nation states. That term usually implies a cohesive culture shared by the population, and as such is more normally applied to smaller ethnically homogenous nations (think Spain or Japan or South Korea) and not a large ethnically and racially diverse nation liked the US. In fact the US (with it's vastly different culture and racial makeup between say Hawaii and Nebraska and Georgia) is usually the prime example of a country that isn't a nation state.
I think what you're actually asking is if I feel that it is just to enforce immigration laws on people already in the country, and generally speaking no, I don't think deportation is a just punishment for trying to be a productive member of society but overstaying a visa or similar.
You’re mixing up nation states and ethnostates. The US is a nation state and like every other nation it gets to decide who is allowed to take up residence there. The fact it’s not an ethnostate just means it doesn’t make those decisions in order to preserve an existing ethnic homogeneity. That doesn’t deprive it of the right to decide on what terms foreigners get to live there.
Deportation isn’t a “punishment.” It’s restoration of the status quo ante in response to someone entering illegally. If you build a house on someone else’s land, they can force you to tear it down. That’s not a punishment, it’s just undoing the effect of the illegal act.
I'm not, using common definitions. They just happen to usually be the same because culture and ethnicity are often very tightly coupled.
The factors you're talking about (border sovereignty and determination of citizenship/residency) are all related to being a "state" and have relatively little to do with being a nation, which is just a shared culture. A nation state is the term for a state, the political entirely, whose population shares a broadly homogenous culture. If you choose to define the US as a nation-state, then it blunts the "nation" portion to the point of redundancy, as the culture of sharing a government is enough to define a nation. Do a bit of research here and at a minimum you'll find that the US being a nation state is widely disputed. But we can agree to disagree because again, everything you're talking about is political determination related to statehood. Nation is irrelevant.
> Deportation isn’t a “punishment.” It’s restoration of the status quo ante in response to someone entering illegally
This is weak semantics. A goal of retribution is not a requirement for some act to be a punishment. It is simply "the imposition of an undesirable or unpleasant outcome upon a group or individual, meted out by an authority as a response and deterrent to a particular action or behavior that is deemed undesirable or unacceptable". Defacto it is a punishment. But this again doesn't matter even if you choose to find it not a punishment, it is still unjust. It may also be a return to the status quo, but so too is, for example, returning someone to prison for a parole violation, and I think you'd be hard pressed to define that as anything but a punishment.
> If you build a house on someone else’s land, they can force you to tear it down.
I'm dubious of this. You likely could not compel me to tear it down. You could sue to cover the costs, but if I had no money there are limits on what you could do.
I'm contending that deportation is similar. It, at a minimum, is not a just way to "restore the status quo".
And if which you may not speak the language, have no known relation, and be completely unable to support yourself. Where would you go if you got deported?
Also I said about as safe. Your risk of being involved in a homicide is ~1%. You'd need to be at a much higher risk of being killed before this impacts your overall safety.
Trans peoples existence certainly has been politicized. In many cases they are de facto not allowed to exist.
> Except unborn children, whose very existence
To use your same disingenuous measure of argument, no their existence isn't politicized, whether or not they are "persons" (or alive) is. Fetuses quite obviously exist, everyone agrees on that.
The HN guidelines suggest you steelman the arguments of people who you respond to. I don't think you're doing that if your entire argument boils down to a weak rhetorical disagreement about how precisely to define "very existence". Since certain forms of discriminatory policy are politicizing people's very existence.
I also don't think people ever widely suggested Muslim people's existence had been politicized, so that's simply a strawperson.
Im pro choice and think the banning of gender reassignment in children is bad.
But you're arguing that deciding whether or not a fetus or unborn child is a person is not an existential issue, but when someone can choose to get gender reassignment is.
One is very literally an argument about personhood and the right to terminate and the other is about children's and parents right to choose appropriate medical care.
I'm not. I'm arguing that they're the same situation. I think there are other factors that make the issue of gender reassignment completely unlike abortion, but yes they're both existential. GP was claiming only abortion was and I pointed out that that was logically inconsistent.
The differences are that regulating abortion harms a third party, the woman, while allowing gender reassignment doesn't.
> Trans peoples existence certainly has been politicized
To expand on this - If a trans person has a coworker who consistent and deliberately mis-genders them, there's no way for the person to have a discussion about it that's not political.
Even simpler: if the existence of trans, let alone non-binary, people is a contentious issue in politics, there's no way for a non-binary (or GNC binary trans) person to state their pronouns without it being a political act.
The same is true for people in same-sex relationships. You can't just mention your spouse like a straight person would without it being political.
> It might sound like a "lazy excuse" for someone who hasn't been in their shoes.
I'm in those shoes. I still won't interview anyone who left their previous company over an inability to keep their religious/political beliefs away from work.
It's a double whammy if the person in question left because they couldn't proselytise to their co-workers.
> ... someone up who left their last job because they couldn't agree to stop bitching about politics on the company dime? I don't see how demonstrating the inability to follow basic company rules in the interest of productivity improves their career prospects.
Exactly. These didn't use to have to be rules -- it was simply part of Professionalism and social courtesy. That wasn't that long ago, it seems.
It's not 0%, but I spend a negligible amount of company time talking about political issues. I also don't have a particular desire to.
Nonetheless, if something of a political nature did come up, either as a distraction that was affecting my colleagues (e.g. they're part of a minoritized group, or empathetic to one, and something is going on), or something the company was doing was at odds with my own political values; I would hope the company would accommodate the need for _some_ level of discussion.
An outright ban ala Coinbase, and now Basecamp, would send an extremely troubling message - and would prompt me to begin the motions of seeking employment elsewhere. A generous severance package would make it a much easier decision.
I'd say it'sa new union topic. Employers need to start worrying about what political opinions they are lobbying for, and what their employees want them to be lobbying for.
Corporate lobbying is going to stop just being for the owners
I wonder if there have been court cases for this; is slack considered a non-work area for, say, the purposes of discussing unionization? Would a DM between two people mediated through the company slack be a non-work area?
Though generally, it seems this kind of ban (of union discussion or pay) would be unlawful in the US,
> For example, your employer cannot prohibit you from talking about the union during working time if it permits you to talk about other non-work-related matters during working time.
This is a weird take. The tech industry is all politics all the time. Even if all you're doing is discussing policy changes as it relates to the business. Even if literally everyone at the company agrees and is on the same political side you'll still occasionally discuss things like municipal broadband or the Affordable Care Act. By banning politics it creates a hush hush atmosphere where the mere mention of something inocuious can get you fired so you end up never talking about anything.
.. This is a comical generalization of an entire industry which spans beyond US..
I have worked in plenty on companies (big and small) where politics was simply left outside of business and everyone was fine with simply discussing the actual system design, infrastructure and data models.
Employees were simply not permitted to attempt to convert others to Christianity or initiate flame wars regarding abortion laws.
There is a time and a place for politics and a business setting is just not it.
I think this is a great move by Basecamp and I hope more companies follow. At a minimum, their stance is now crystal clear and there will be high cohesion between employees and management.
System design is often inherently political as well.
How do capture gender in the database?
That's a political debate. Do you care that you can't correctly store 'foreign' names? Political.
Do you offer Catalan too when you translate to Spanish? Political.
Do you include disputed territories on your countries lists or allow people to enter 'other'? Political.
Privacy protection? Political.
Systems are shaped by political debate and in turn shapes it. Your decisions will have a political dimension whether or not you like it.
And that is before considering all of the internal cultural and behavioural issues that are inherently political.
As for Basecamp, I think they've set themselves up for further conflict and turmoil. If I was there and hadn't quit yet, I'd consider it now because such a huge departure will destabilize oth.the company and internal culture for a long time.
My team could professionally and empathetically discuss each of the issues you outlined, but that doesn't mean I raise discussions about whether voting for certain candidates is a case for the-end-justifies-the-means. I don't understand how a good-faith reading of an "activism on your own platforms" policy leads to "we can't discuss the data modeling for people's names anymore." This strikes me as a case of false equivalence.
> I don't understand how a good-faith reading of an "activism on your own platforms" policy leads to "we can't discuss the data modeling for people's names anymore." This strikes me as a case of false equivalence.
I suggest you read up on the politics of the use of names in the context of slavery in America as a starting point for understanding why names has a long history of being inherently political.
I've worked across a wide range of companies in tech for 25 years, so no, I don't. But I've also yet to work for or with a single company where tech decisions were not inherently political.
E.g. I had a contract to do a communications system to relay debug mapping data from an autonomous submersible. For a military research institute. It was inherently political because I had to consider if I was ok with working a project that might end up being used in armed conflict in the future my code certainly wouldn't).
Or when I worked on code to maintain the quality documentation for a systems integrated that delivered backend systems for the police. I had no problems with that, but I might have if it'd been somewhere where the police had a worse reputation than in Norway where I did that job.
I've worked on billing systems where we had to decide on anti-fraud measures. Sounds non-political, until you realise it often involves broad blocks that stereotypes behaviours based on factors that very easily ends up effectively profiling users.
I could list many more. I've yet to work on a single software system where the higher level architecture did not involve consideration of political issues whether explicitly, or implicitly. I'm sure there are some, but I think there are far fewer than you imagine.
Do you consider a farmer’s decision to sell food to the public political since he could be feeding terrorists?
Pencils can be used to write manifestos that result in countless deaths. Is the pencil manufacturer responsible for that?
I worked for a company that had train control systems as a product. How do you suppose that was political? Do you think we should have spent more time considering that maybe we shouldn’t have been making trains safer because we could accidentally save the next Hitler?
Parent offered since terrific examples. The least you could do is give an example of a company unaffected by politics. Frankly I'm skeptical of your line of reasoning but happy to entertain it.
I don’t think they exist because even something as simple as “changing master to main” gets pushback because “political”
It’s a name, it’s generally not hard to change, and if it makes someone happier why not main is shorter to type! But people still push back against it for.. reasons
But people still push back against it for.. reasons
It's pretty simple, actually
Person A: We need to do thing X
Person B: Why?
Person A: Because I am morally superior to you, and I say so
You really don't understand why person B would push back against tacitly accepting that they were the moral deficient? It's the same reason people dislike vegans who say "for moral reasons", they're asserting that everyone around them is immoral, and people find it obnoxious.
Im sorry but I really don’t follow. How is asking making any moral judgements? Your either reading into what people say and not handling your own discomfort very well or making assumptions on what person a would say? When this first came up I too asked why:
“Because it reminds people of slavery which is still fresh in the minds of many and makes some uncomfortable”
Because it reminds people of slavery which is still fresh in the minds of many and makes some uncomfortable
Well, "main" is like "mainmast" of the sailing ships that brought the slaves over.
See, once you start this game, it never ends. The master in "master branch" was never anything to do with slavery - and everyone knows it. No one in the world equated committing to master with endorsing slavery, but that is what you are accusing them of. Same as master bedroom and master's degree and mastering a skill and countless other examples. And why is "master" problematic but not "owner"? After all the common term was not "slavemaster" but "slaveowner" remember. Shall we do branch owners or code owners or file owners next?
Another way of looking at it is “why not?”
Why not leave it as it is then? Why step onto a never ending treadmill of arbitrary changes for change's sake?
Anyway I'm not trying to convince you here (I get the feeling that that would be pointless) I am merely explaining to you the behaviour you have observed but don't understand the motivation for.
Slippery slope much? I don’t see anyone bothered by or complaining about main, except those who don’t want to change it, and no ones ever said anything about owners. A large number of people don’t like master and if I can make someone’s life a little better with such a small change I will. Times change, language changes.
If you won’t do so that’s fine, but be honest why you won’t, your arguments keep changing first it was their “moral superiority” And now “where will it end/its change for changes sake” which both sound like excuses to me
If you won’t do so that’s fine, but be honest why you won’t, your arguments keep changing first it was their “moral superiority” And now “where will it end/its change for changes sake
What are you implying that my "honest" reason is, of course you are insinuating that I am a closet racist. And it is just change for the sake of being able to demand a change, if you are being honest, you get a vicarious thrill out of the power you get and the sense of superiority it gives you and you won't stop, and we both know it.
lol no that didn't cross my mind. more that its seems the idea of renaming master -> main makes you uncomfortable for some reason and your not dealing with it well. You keep bring up morales and now "superiority" - none of which crossed my mind because i don't think like that and wrt master/main all i care about is changing it for those who want it nothing else but it's real clear these are important to you and this discussion centers around those themes for you.
You keep jumping to extreme conclusions and assumptions which is kinda hilariously sad as that's what you accuse "the other side" of doing
i don't think like that and wrt master/main all i care about is changing it for those who want it nothing else
What you are missing - because I never mentioned it, and I should never have to mention it - is that I actually am a BAME or a POC or whatever. Not only does the word "master" not make me feel uncomfortable, noone ever bothered asked me if it did before starting to agitate for this change. Now you may be one too, I don't know, and feel free to change it to anything you want in your own repos if a word upsets you so much (and you should rid yourself of all other problematic words too, like "owner"). But don't kid yourself that you're doing it for the benefit of the wider BAME community. And don't kid yourself about your reasons for telling everyone about it.
You don't speak for all POC just like i don't speak for all queers and never would be so presumptuous to assume my opinions are shared across the community. So just because you didn't care or want it changed doesn't mean others didn't ask for it.
> don't kid yourself about your reasons for telling everyone about it
You really seem to have a hard time grasping that there was nothing more to it other then being raised as a concern by POC so i just did it and moved on with my life. The only reason i mentioned it was to use it as an example of how hard it can be to escape politics entirely in the workplace and this entire conversation has really hit that point home.
This entire thread is kinda the point. I feel like I've wasted days of my life reading about master versus main. Even went and converted my biggest open source projects to "release" myself cause I typically work on develop then push to master and tag as a release. So to me master is "most recent release". In my head it was always like "master recording". It's not even "main" cause work is being done on develop and the release branch gets it last. I honestly don't care either way, didn't bring it up at work, and no one else did either but the virtue signaling with this is just toxic. Your implication that someone not wanting to change their branch name makes them inherently racist is super toxic. It's just gate keeping being woke. You don't have woke enough points if you don't do this, that, and the other thing.
Also does a single POC represent their entire race? Isn't that itself racist to think that way? In any population you'll find people who can claim to support literally anything.
Except this isn’t how the fantasy plays out in real systems. This breaks builds, readmes, packaging, etc and takes a non-trivial amount of time to fix.
For all of those issues you can dryly resolve them by selecting whichever choice maximizes profit. By eliminating moralizers from its ranks, Basecamp can now make decisions that only consider profit.
That would also be a political choice. And in many cases there isn't going to be a choice that maximises profit without taking into account the PR effect of choices, which again devolves into politics.
The idea that any organisation can be apolitical is fundamentally flawed. At most you can enforce the (political) choice of pretending you're not political by shutting down discussion of it and leaving it exclusively in the hands of the executives and board. This appears to be the avenue Basecamp has taken. They are free to pretend that's an apolitical choice, and we're free to point out that it's bullshit.
Obviously, but that isn't my argument. My argument is that when you create a culture that approaches political decisions from a profit perspective, it is easier to make a profit.
> And in many cases there isn't going to be a choice that maximises profit without taking into account the PR effect of choices, which again devolves into politics.
This is wrong. You are conflating understanding a political position with believing in a political position. Understanding a political position doesn't require you to believe in it.
I honestly don't understand the sentiment here when people are saying "do your job" and other things to that effect that strip all context from this. The biggest issue right now is COVID and when discussing it the topic can and will inevitable lead to something political. Is it helpful to have to think about the arbitrary line your employers have drawn and try to toe it? When do you know if you pissed off someone higher up? You cannot stop workplace discussions because programmers are people too and will want to find camaraderie and sympathy. Putting these rules and posting them publicly seems like a poor way of simply avoiding the issue rather than resolving it
> The biggest issue right now is COVID and when discussing it the topic can and will inevitable lead to something political.
Will it? I feel like I've had dozens of conversations about the coof (most recently, about getting the shots and related stuff - I had some bad side effects to mine that caused me to miss a half day of work) without politics being a part of it. Do people not even try anymore?
Just the very idea of bringing up vaccines is "political" to those that think vaccines are a means of the state to control the population. You don't think it's political, but it is to someone. And that person, under the guise of a "no politics aloud" policy could seek to silence you from any references to the benefits of the vaccines, it's side effects, etc.
> By banning politics it creates a hush hush atmosphere where the mere mention of something inocuious can get you fired so you end up never talking about anything.
My understanding is that these people did not leave because they were not allowed to discuss something innocuous, they left because they were not allowed to preach their belief system at work.
> you'll still occasionally discuss things like municipal broadband or the Affordable Care Act.
And if the woke crowd were able to "discuss" something without calling everyone who refused to join their belief system names, then this wouldn't be a problem.
There's a big difference between having a friendly argument about the ACA over beers and telling a coworker they're enabling genocide by keeping a funny names list on the company slack.
I think "couldn't agree to stop bitching about politics on the company dime" is really minimizing the leadership vaccuum that caused this in the first place.
As someone who hires I'd have zero issue with a talented person who also felt passionately about not working with people who enable racism or toxic environments. That's part of how you build good companies.
As a self considered centrist, I would have an issue if they couldn't discuss these issues in a dispassionate way at work. That might be wrong, but IMO (within reason) we are there to work and create value. We will make mistakes along the way, and some of those will be perceived as a step towards racism and toxicity. If we can't accept that it's a spectrum and not a binary, that reasonable people can have different opinions, and that once a decision is made we should move on together, I think I actually would have trouble working with such a person (and have in the past).
This sounds like I agree with what the founders did here. I don't at all. But I understand why they did it, and I don't disagree with their intentions.
I’ve worked with people who were passionate about each of those issues (maybe not all at once). None of them encouraged or participated in the dehumanizing of other people and all found that kind of behavior towards others to be abhorrent. I can tell you that if they were confronted with a list making fun of people's names in this manner said list would not have survived with any one of them being at the company, let alone all of them. =)
I would note as a follow up to this re: leadership and culture; 30 people left Basecamp today. DHH is hanging out on social media like it’s no big deal, back to talking about Apple. You know what’s consistent between the start of this incident and today’s behavior? The derisive and dismissal treatment of people that have been a part of his company for many years.
From the reporting I've seen, the issue here is not that these are the kinds of people with strong opinions that are fun to bounce ideas off of, these are the kind of people with strong opinions who if you disagree with will escalate the situation to intolerable levels such as refusing to accept a perfectly sincere apology and then equating it with genocide. This isn't the fun debate crowd, it's "the conflict is abuse" crowd.
I love a good debate with someone who disagrees with me in good faith, but that other sort of person is just exhausting and counterproductive to debate anything with.
It is not my intention here to cast judgement on people belonging to either side of the political spectrum. Just wanted to make sure that no double standards are applied in OP's hiring practises.
I agree that their behaviour hurts their career prospects. But I'm not sure if they agree. Many might think that the public at large is on their side and what they did looks good from the outside. This might be objectively false, but this belief would nevertheless encourage them to take the 6 months free money and leave.
At my college, some of the computer science coed fraternity leadership tried to convince us that even if someone couldn't do fizzbuzz they were still a programmer.
Fizzbuzz is not that difficult. There are two twists in the original task description. But if we talk about fizbuzz—like tasks: The point is not to be difficult. There are people applying to programing jobs who seemingly can’t solve even very simple programing tasks in a language of their choice. I could not believe it if i would not have seen with my own eyes. Fizzbuzz-like tasks are there to filter these folks out.
( You might ask what are the two twists in the original fizbuzz task:
- you have to know about the existence of modulo operator and how it can be used to test for dividibility. If you don’t know that one trick then fizbuzz is a lot harder for you.
- If you are the kind of person who translates the human sentences of the task description to code word by word then you can get into a kind of garden-path situation where you have to backtrack once to succeed. What do I mean by that? You read “For every number dividable by 3 print fizz”, you write “if i%3==0: print ‘fizz’”. Then you read the next sentence “For every number dividable by 5 print buzz” and you type “elif i%5==0: print ‘buzz’”. Then you read “for every number dividible with both 3 and 5 print fizbuzz” and you might translate that to “elif i%3==0 and i%5==0: print ‘fizbuzz’” but that of course would never execute, you have to move the translation of this last sentence to be the first condition checked for it to have a chance. Not anything I would call really challenging, but it requires a certain way of thinking to recognise that this is a problem and to solve it.
Thank you. Something just snapped into focus for me. Fizzbuzz always seemed easy to me, because I'm a math nerd, but I just realized that the concept of a "remainder" isn't something people often use in their adult life. Also, the fact that programming languages have any sort of remainder operator might not come up in a typical web dev coding bootcamp or a self-taught programmer's education. Or even a college graduate could easily gloss over the boring math operators, eager to make cool stuff in the worlds of OOP and web dev.
It's sad that Fizzbuzz is used at all. At present, using Fizzbuzz selects for people who either (1) Are math nerds or (2) Are already in the "in group" and possibly read HN. That probably makes a small contribution to the lack of diversity in tech.
Yes, and a "crankshaft" isn't something universally understood by non-mech-eng's, a "flank" isn't something universally understood by non-mil-scis, and "leverage" isn't universally understood by non-financiers. That doesn't mean there isn't value in expecting new hires to understand those concepts.
Implementing fizzbuzz successfully requires someone to have the most basic understanding of cause and effect, the ability to reason from that understanding, and the ability to reason abstractly. Nearly all forms of programming require that. So yes, fizzbuzz selects people in the "in group"- the in group of people who are actually potential programmers.
That's another good point, fizzbuzz really tests two things, and people tend to only think of one of them. The first one everyone thinks of is "does the person know how to write a simple if/else expression". But the other thing people need to know is how to do math, and use programming syntax, they haven't thought of in potentially a very long time.
It would be like testing if someone knows about a "crankshaft" in a job where they'll be exclusively working on Teslas.
I think it very much depends on the specific programming job, but I can't think of many roles I've come across where, if I were in charge of programming hires, I'd be happy with somebody who wasn't even aware of the concept of modulo. And I consider myself FAR from a math nerd.
> It would be like testing if someone knows about a "crankshaft" in a job where they'll be exclusively working on Teslas
Yeah completely agree. Not all things people call "programming" are the same. Only jobs that require someone to think in this way should have tests filtering for it
> Also, the fact that programming languages have any sort of remainder operator might not come up in a typical web dev coding bootcamp or a self-taught programmer's education.
That may be true, but as a web dev, I use the modulo quite frequently. Just yesterday I used it to implement some code where the client wanted to insert ads after every sixth paragraph in a page body, but not if there would be two paragraphs or less left on the page after the last ad. I can't imagine what kind of goofy hackneyed solution I would have ended up with if I didn't know about `%`.
Before CSS had :even and :odd pseudoselectors, we also commonly used it to zebra stripe tables.
Web dev isn't typically as math-y as, say, game dev, but I'd encourage anyone getting into it to at least learn the modulo beyond basic algebra stuff.
I've had to use it too - mostly when faffing about and not using some jQuery builtin. But to say that someone who doesn't know this easily-stackoverflowed ("how do I do something every nth array item") lacks basic programming ability ("why can't programmers program" is I think the original fizzbuzz blog post title) is I think going too far.
I regularly have people fail before introducing fizzbuzz, and then regularly pass on people that can’t do an equivalent problem that isn’t exactly fizzbuzz. Surprise, tons of applicants out there can’t actually code, it’s true!
As someone outside of the tech industry, this surprises me. I’m a writer, but when I wanted to learn to code, I did loads of coding exercises, including FizzBuzz. A couple of years later I could knock up a FizzBuzz algorithm in JavaScript or Python and probably other languages too—and I’m really not very good at programming, certainly not at a professional standard. Why is it such a Shibboleth in the tech industry?
The whole point of FizzBuzz is it is a trivial exercise. It could be any trivial problem. For some reason many applicants to software development jobs are simply not able to program even trivial stuff.
The initial blog post did not make that distinction. Not only is that a significant mistake in clarity, it was a significant mistake to announce a change like that via blog post.
With that change they also got rid of the D&I committee established with employee participation. If you're gonna tell your employees 'you have a seat at the table' on something sensitive like D&I, then eliminate that group with no warning, people are gonna feel some kind of way about it. Even Palpatine didn't dissolve the Imperial Senate right away.
I'd say probably a personal visit to the HR office, assuming he was bringing neo-nazi politics into the office. If he was doing it strictly on his own time, not a work issue.
You don't think someone holding views to the effect that jews, gays and black people/slavs should be exterminated is a work issue? If I belonged to any of these groups and found out by chance that the person was a neo-Nazi, even if they never brought it up at work, I would certainly demand that they not work in my vicinity anymore. Then management would get to choose between me and a literal neo-Nazi.
The problem is, at least in my experience, that phrases like "neo-nazi" more commonly refer to Trump supporters, Republicans, edgy Twitter wags, etc and less to Mein Kampf reading would-be perpetrators of genocide.
If I worked with a colleague from Iraq can they report me to HR for having been in the military and bombing their country?
I’m sure we can think of lots of cases where it is or isn’t easy to say yes to “report to HR”. It’s a tough topic and the answer to it changes over time and based on geographic social norms.
> Do you think people in charge of hiring, particularly outside of the SV bubble, are going to be eager to pick someone up who left their last job because they couldn't agree to stop bitching about politics on the company dime?
Depends on how you frame this. Describing it as "sudden change of company culture", "lacking leadership communication" or "wanted to change fields and took the opportunity" can both be valid and inoffensive to either side.
On the other hand, there's a chance your hiring manager will feel similarly strong about politics, especially in SV, so even your framing might work.
"they offered a lot of money and it looked like a good idea" seems like a good enough justification to me. It seems unlikely to me that 1/3 of basecamp employees wouldn't shut up about their support for Donald Trump and how QAnon would save the dau
