A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company
blog.coinbase.com
blog.coinbase.com
The severance also included 6 months of health insurance. (Source: https://www.coindesk.com/coinbase-severance-apolitical-missi... )
What percentage of employees at Coinbase are actively interviewing for other jobs at any given time? 5%? If someone has one foot out the door already, taking a bonus equivalent to half a year of your salary is a cherry on top of changing jobs. I'm surprised only 5% of the company took this opportunity.
What kinda of things are people talking about?
Bitcoin isn't hurting, either.
Brian, I've never given two shits about crypto, but this announcement seriously increases my desire to work at Coinbase. You have far more support than will dare to speak up, and I hope more companies start following your lead.
> I want to engage with politics at work.
This is just one more step in that direction.
Funnily enough, I think it has been extrapolated by Neal Stephenson in Diamond Age. We will end up having parallel societies which define themselves not by geographic boundaries, but by affiliation. A North Korean community could be your neighbour.
I agree that our divisiveness is caused by an unwillingness to listen to one another, but I don’t think avoiding discussion in the workplace is making us less willing to listen. People have lots of opportunities to listen to opposing views outside of the workplace, and yet many positively pride themselves on ignoring dissenting opinions—ostracizing one’s family for wrongthink is a veritable badge of honor in certain ideological communities. I don’t see how bringing that divisiveness into the workplace is going to soften those people.
If someone is deeply committed to ignorance and divisiveness, allowing them to proselytize at work doesn’t seem fruitful (everyone who is not committed to ignorance has likely already considered their views) and is very likely going to be harmful. On the other hand, there is a chance that by ignoring politics at work, people might have a chance to build relationships with reasonable people (who they otherwise would have written off or persecuted for heresy) which might have a deradicalizing effect (if you look up to someone who is charitable, honest, and open minded, you are probably more likely to emulate those qualities yourself).
I'll take a shot: - I think compelled activism is inappropriate. You know, the "silence is violence" stuff. - I think expecting to have power to set a company's political agenda and expressing anger when you don't get your way is inappropriate. That power belongs to the board. Employment and stock-options are not "fractions of board seats".
Serving coffee is not political. Planning the network installation is not political. Code reviews, cleaning your office, optimizing the VM, getting a bandwidth deal, negotiating the SaaS pricing, choosing ingredients for the new dish, figuring out how many loads of gravel are needed for the landfill, picking a guy to fix the fence ...
It's 99% not political.
Google search is barely political, ads are a little bit.
Social Media is political and not that-that much more.
It's 100% fine for you to 'work on something consistent with your political views' but at the same time just 'pick the place' instead of 'making the place' inherently political.
Only in a world where words have no meaning.
But, this doesn't mean an organization has to take a position on every hot-button political issue. Even the Biden campaign, a a political organization if there ever was one, needs to focus on getting their candidate elected, and not on things that divide Democrats.
To agree on a mission doesn't mean people on the organization need to agree on everything. Putting aside any differences on stuff not related to the mission is important in being able to work together as a team.
Perhaps less Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age, and more Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe:
If it cannot be disjoint, then it seems like it has become a requirement for it to be aligned in only one acceptable direction - hence why Coinbase's move is apparently controversial. Failure to actively support the standardized and approved message is apparently not acceptable!
> This is just one more step in that direction.
One more misstep. The combination of this effect with polarization means it's only a matter of time before someone realizes there's actually going to be a market for legitimately countercultural companies that reach out to those who don't walk the new party line. Since there's enough of them to elect a president, it's probably high time for some brave company to take you up on your suggestion that everything be political.
I think people are talking past each other with the word 'political'. Some may define it as the execution of governance, and others may define it as partisan gamesmanship, and of course lots around and in between.
Typically the whole discussion around overly political workplaces revolves around west coast tech companies, which are a monoculture of liberalism. Republican views are definitely not heard or dealt with.
I'm curious what your definition of political is, because my gut feeling is that (Almost) nothing is political.
Money is money, and the money of a jew, nazi, gay, christian, muslim or pedophile are all equally good. Anyone rejecting money because they don't agree with where it comes from is either lying or about to be eaten alive by someone who doesn't.
There is a reason why everyone in China is trying to escape to our system, while they have invented personal money - in the form of your social score.
I get that desire, I really do, but I think it's so important to recognize that your work is not apolitical. It doesn't matter what you're building. What you build does not exist in a vacuum, and the decisions you make around politics at work are themselves political decisions.
But those political decisions are ones relevant to the mission of the company.
Coinbase probably shouldn't be involved in politics around police reform, fracking, climate change or the Second Amendment because they are orthogonal to its mission. Insert other topics as you see fit.
And hence its employees should leave their opinions of such matters at the door.
Coinbase should be focused on politics around global financial regulation. And its employees should focus their workplace political energy on those matters.
Also, it's generally just polite and respectful to your coworkers to provide a non-political, non-partisan workplace.
I'm nearing the point of being aggressively dismissive towards this kind of attitude, because a lot of it doesn't even seem to be laid out in good faith. People are just addicted to being mad, addicted to being right, addicted to the idea that they can channel their anger through pop politics and get validation for it as a bonus.
I have an extremely low opinion of the people and groups who follow along with whatever pop social issue is trending today because they don't want to get in trouble, and IMHO those people aren't really worth interacting with because again, it's more about landing a spicy dunk on the bad guys (tm) and collecting heart icons than whatever issue they're using as a weapon today.
>your work is not apolitical. It doesn't matter what you're building
spare me.
Are you sure this isn't just an excuse to make things political in these west coast companies that are full of young, hot-headed, extremely left wing people?
that is the rights of ownership, and is a capitalist ideal. To change it is to strip these rights from ownership and give it to those who do not currently have ownership (and is basically what communism is).
Coinbase will have to make political decisions, and it's natural that people within the company will have differing opinions -- informed by their personal politics -- as to the course those decisions should take.
Their position is pretty straightforward and sensible, even if it is not entirely straightforward to implement in an even handed way.
[1] https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/?...
I and a lot of my colleagues just want to do our work without being forced to participate in regular struggle sessions.
It is also useful in pushing out "troublemakers". People that will not call BS on the unsubstantiated political claims are also less likely to call out corruption/nepotism/inefficiency of the middle management.
In the long term the company will stagnate and die, but we live in such a wonderful time of government bailouts, low interest rates and desperate investors, so it may take a long time to unravel.
Think about it this way - sometimes, you have to be on call and stay up till 5am because of some crappy code you didn't write, and it sucks. Sometimes, you have to go to the May 1st workers parade and help carry a banner you disagree with, and it sucks. Sometimes, you have to go to a silly training session and explore the feelings you don't have, and it sucks. It's all part of the job - it was all fun activities, they wouldn't pay you to do it :)
Your advice would be great for people who are uncomfortable mainly about coworkers using an employer mailing list or chat to ask people to vote a certain way. Otherwise, not so much, I think.
My impression is that restrictions on 501(c)(3)s' political activity are grounded in something like campaign finance concerns.
That's not quite how it actually works. https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organiz...
IMHO, this is not the problem. The problem are the managers of the work. One doesn't need to micromanage to stop this from happening. Nor does one need to limit free speech to prevent this.
Companies aren't working enough, that's the problem and managers aren't keeping people focused on the actual challenge at hand.
P.S. I feel this is a white-collar problem. These soft skills are paramount but also come from leadership. Restricting speech doesn't really deal with the people that the decision affects. Instead, one needs to become a better manager/leader to get 'buy-in' from the workers and then work!
As one example you can see it in the way you can make hostile comments about “straight white males” and nobody says anything, but if you were to make a hostile comment for a perceived racial or sexual minority you’d be fired before even finishing your sentence
That might be seen in a positive or negative light, depending on your stance.
I personally am afraid to associate myself too publicly with a political stance, lest I be wrong and/or the environment changes.
I think that says nothing of a persons political views and is just self-preservation or even indifference. Hiring would have to make some very tenuous assumptions to consider that a signal.
It's probably for the best.
Taking the package can be seen as a strong stance, not taking it... not really.
Ironically / IMHO, the irritant at the center of the pearl that is many of these ('social justice') issues is people treating other people as a member of an imagined group rather than a specific human they can talk to.
I have some on my own resume and I don't mind explaining that here the company was acquired, here we ran out of money, here I had to move to be with family, etc etc.
It's just normal due diligence for a hiring manager.
"Well, whatever life is, you’re going to die. So if you’re going to make things better for yourself or for those you care about, you had better become an activist while you’re still alive." -- Will Provine
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=ptb;c=ptb;...
Put differently: There is a difference between advocacy and activism, between holding political opinions and being comfortable with them as a central focus of your life, or as a central characteristic that you wish people to see in you.
I can understand this fear, but generally if you choose a stance based on compassion for all beings you’ll be in the right in the long run.
This particular issue was sparked by Coinbase not taking a stance on Black Lives Matter, which they are wrong about. Standing for dismantling racism is always correct.
> Standing for dismantling racism is always correct.
As opposed to standing against it, yes. As opposed to "we're just building a juicer, man", no.
Not every group of people "must" take an active stance on every social issue. If they did then they would do nothing but that.
This is why I'm hesitant to invest in Silicon Valley stock at the moment. If this trend continues they'll spend 100% of their time "making a stand", and not innovating or trying to fulfil their stated mission.
I have a responsibility to keep my own house in order. To make sure I'm not racist, homophobic, etc... I don't have a responsibility to spend my life on a cause you select for me, even if that cause is just.
If I were to pick a cause it would be that the central organization for a leading religion is actively harboring and protecting child rapists from international law enforcement. But still I would not, like you, say that every organization that doesn't march under that banner are "wrong about" that.
Companies are not "supporting status quo of child rapists" if they don't put up banners on their website. They're just not. That's nonsense.
You can't condemn me for not marching with you. That's fascism.
I will disagree somewhat with the people who say that companies never have a place for political stuff. If you are any company involved in South Africa during apartheid you should choose a side on apartheid and voice that position.
If BLM means just the simple definition of what the words imply (that black lives matter), there's no point in saying it. Because there's literally no one on the other side. I suspect that's not what it means, because saying a broader statement "All Lives Matter" seems to be considered a kind of slur.
So "Black Lives Matter" means something deeper. More like "Black people are killed indiscriminately by police in this country. The cops get away with it, and it's a huge problem." That is full of assumptions and political beliefs that reasonable people can disagree about. And I don't see why every company should take a side on that issue.
If you don't agree with some of their stated objectives, tactics, leadership, it should be OK to refuse to offer support, and that doesn't automatically imply a tacit support of racism, and it doesn't automatically imply resistance to lower-case black lives matter.
I like capitalism and the free market because I think it's the best system to give most prosperity to a broad spectrum of society. I believe that I take this stance based on compassion but I can assure you that this view is not popular among other people who are in the compassion camp.
I lived in country where you had to be "political" to be in management, it didn't end up well (East Europe, Soviet Union), I always (naively?) thought that West countries were wiser.
So I prefer companies to not mess with politics.
The problem is that this is, in itself, a political stance.
An example could be climate change. If Coinbase is doing nothing to make energy more green (even if that's just writing amicus briefs or blog posts), then they are effectively saying, "The way things are is fine."
I disagree strongly & think you're dead wrong here. Apolitical in the workplace is saying "we come to work to align on & collaborate in working towards shared goals and those goals are what we should be focused on at work. People who share this goal (coinbase, make money, promote crypto whatever) may vote R, D, or not vote at all. We can all still work together on our shared goal."
It means people with different views can work together on stuff they do agree on rather than "I can't work with anyone who doesn't vote the same as me" which is what social-justice-in-the-workplace seems to lead to, for better or worse.
It is NOT an endorsement of the status quo, it's a recognition that you and I might both oppose the status quo for completely different reasons that have nothing to do with work.
You can still be very politically active on your own time.
If I don’t know someone’s political stance, my default isn’t to assume that they think “things are fine”, my default is to assume that they have some set of beliefs that are irrelevant to that particular interaction with them.
Should Coinbase have a political opinion on native rights in South Australia? What about the status and social standing of Burakumin in Japan? What about the Indigenous goups in Taiwan: the Ami, Atayal, Paiwan, Bunun, Puyuma, Rukai, Tsou, Saisiyat, Tao (Yami), Thao, Kavalan, Taroko (also Truku), and Sakizaya?
I think Coinbase should have said "we are a deeply political company concentrated on a single issue to the exclusion of all else. If you want to work where there is more than a single political focus, we are not a good fit".
You can't optimise in all directions, and being clear about what is in scope and out of scope is vital, not just in tech but in life.
You think every single company that isn't writing amicus briefs or blog posts about climate change is taking a political stance against fighting climate change?
You have life outside of work where you can be political.
I believe it's the job of companies to be 'good citizens' and only to be active politically if it's either really part of the mission statement - or - unavoidable, perhaps in the case of NFL, they had a huge communications issue.
Beyond that, protest at your hearts content, just not at the office.
Finally - you can make a political choice in your work if you want merely by choosing disciplines/companies. If you really want to 'push green' then getting into that industry might be a good personal choice.
Or is it just an attempt to be decent and get people to do the thing they were hired to do, which is to make their investors more fucking money? As a shareholder in several tech companies, I don't like the idea of people having discussions like these on my dime. How many bugs that were never fixed with Youtube Music, for example, could have been fixed if there weren't shit heads sitting around having flame wars on my fucking dime?
There's a difference between saying "we don't think it's appropriate for us to take an official stance on X, but feel free to discuss X on your lunch breaks like you would any other topic" and "thou shalt not mention X in any context while an employee of this company"
According to my coworkers, who discovered this because they saw her bumper sticker when she picked me up one day, this is because she is "ignorant and doesn't know the facts" and "if she knew the facts she wouldn't think that way" and that I "need to talk to her and explain them."
They think that, due to their profession, they are intelligent, and therefore anyone who disagrees with them about a complex topic is either less intelligent or uninformed. It's the epitome of youthful arrogance. Naturally, none of them have kids and really don't see the nuance of the issue. It's insufferable, and at one point I was getting ready to clobber a guy who I am 100% positive has never been hit in his life.
Politics should be left out of work. And yes, by convincing a broad spectrum of the American public that Trump won the election because of a few facebook ads bought by Russian assets, instead of simply saying that they had a shitty candidate, the Democratic party has essentially pressured tech companies to have political filtering on their staff. If Facebook had Republicans working at senior levels in their company, they would have been subjected to even more harassment from Dem leaders who scapegoated them for their loss in 2016. Facebook has former Democratic party operatives at high levels in their company. They don't and can't have anyone from the Republican party. They get unending amounts of shit for Thiel being on their board.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/03/facebook-... https://popular.info/p/the-republican-political-operatives
If you wife for example got a manager that thought the females had no place in the workplace and should be a stay at home wife and was open about this, would that be ok?
If you are gay, and your manager loudly say that being gay is a sin, would that be ok?
I get that it can feel like the other way too, it probably feels hostile to be conservative in a fairly liberal company. But being open and supportive of all your employees seems like good and understandable business decision. That of course includes being welcoming to conservative people. If you think your coworkers are a disgrace, no matter the reason, I think it would be smart to not make this known.
it's not apolitical, it's just giving yourself a formal policy note to point to for any future need to tell people to "shut the fuck up and get to work"
Not in tech. If you're not actively competing to be more woke than the next guy, then you're a literal nazi and your silence is violence.
The problem is that “political activism” also encompasses the ongoing american culture war, which indeed does not belong at work in any capacity. Reasonable people don’t want to engage with the culture war at work, and, increasingly, ever.
They want you to think the latter when they mean the former, and support them. The problem is that the “activism” they’re complaining about isn’t the culture war, it’s the fact that there was a widespread social movement to protest racist police abuse, and Coinbase management didn’t feel it important enough for them to participate. Many of their staff took an issue with that, which has absolutely nothing to do with the sort of “who are you voting for?” thing that springs to mind when you think of “political activism at work”.
Don’t get me wrong, advocating for human rights is indeed political activism, which is why their technique is so effective.
It’s intentionally designed to deceive you.
Yeah... I'm genuinely curious how many people actually quit over the "apolitical" stance, vs employees that were just unhappy with the job in general and took this convenient opportunity to leave with a pretty sweet deal.
In an ideal world a reporter could answer your question by talking to many of the people who quit and ask what motivated their decision, but the severance package almost certainly came with an NDA that would make doing so impossible.
So we'll likely never know. Probably one should assume that the answer doesn't look great for Coinbase's narrative; if they thought it would, they might have done a survey and published data from it.
Getting people who are unhappy (politics aside) to leave sounds more like "the severance package was a nice move" than "the severance package was too good."
Frankly, giving the non-offended but unsatisfied employees a ready out is probably good for Coinbase in the long run.
Either people managed to get through a _whole interview process_ in a week, or they're fine with the idea of being jobless during the worst economy in 12 years, or they price the benefit of not being there fairly high.
Which then leads us to how the whole argument is blinkered. It reduces decisions to a cost benefit analysis where a significant part of the benefit doesn't have a market price. Then, it questions if the benefit was too large, but by definition the arguer is still at the company and thus believes the unpricable part of the benefit isn't worth enough enough to leave.
1) don't allow any activism in the company
2) allow ALL types of activism in the company
Right now, it seems most companies only allow liberal activism but not conservative activism. This is a recipe for problems because it's arbitrary and not democratic.
Just ask people who are interested in politics in the workplace to leave.
This isn’t about office politics, or political activism at work. This is about Coinbase making an explicit vote for the status quo of American racism, and trying to deflect the heat they’re taking for that by confusing people into thinking that this is about standard political discussion.
It makes me really angry that they would do this.
It makes me really sad that it worked.
I guess with that much money you can hire really good PR people to shape the narrative into exactly what you want, and dupe tons of people who are rightfully tired of the american culture war into thinking that this has anything to do with that.
It's not that black and white.
Because if you were, you should also argue that during WW2, any companies that helped the Allies should also befall the same criticism (that of being politically aligned rather than be neutral).
[1] https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/?...
So- what was accomplished? I don't remember which companies supported "the cause." All I know is that the companies that I thought I did no longer do- or at least don't show support any more. Which stands out to me more then their support.
Tells me that two things happened.
1. The companies wasted time figuring out how they should show their support, implementing those features, and all the associated work with making major changes to frontends. Spend hours figuring it out, most likely had meetings to discuses how to do it and what they should say.
2. The stopped showing supporting it after a point in time, which tells me they don't actually care. They just want to show they do.
I'm guessing they showed support for two reasons. First is some sort of genuine support for the cause, but the 2nd is a fear of internal backlash for not showing support.
Good on Coinbase for removing the elements inside their company that would get pissed if their company didn't take an active stand on flavor of the month political issues. When I go to work, I'm there to do my job and get paid. I don't want to have to deal with people fighting over what political stand the company should take a position on this month. I don't care that my programming language's maintainers voiced support or not. I don't care that program X or Y slapped a banner on their products for the month.
The fact that there was visible support for for Black Lives Matter that was removed a month later is a lot more telling then their support. You want to be apart of the movement without actually doing anything to fix the issues.
If you want to be political as a company, quietly donate money to the causes you support. Provide resources such as technical help or free/discounted services to the causes you support. That's infinitely more productive and helpful then letting your employees fight over what token gesture they want the company to show.
We saw a similar fashion trend in company cancellations of Facebook ads, multiple companies cancelled their ads for a short duration at the same time (each cancellation catalyzing the next) and we've heard nothing about that since.
I find it quite interesting honestly.
I bet they didn’t have 5% turnover over some time-deaf email from the CEO.
My guess: those 5% got sick of tone-dead all hands meetings/memos and saw their chance to bail out.
I wonder what other companies during the Covid recession has 5% voluntary turnover?
Furthermore, what political mission did these people falsely believe they were joining when they got hired?
Coinbase is literally an app designed for the sole purpose of helping 22 year old kids lose money by speculating on the now deflated crypto bubble.
For a while, coinbase was allowing kids to “invest” using credit cards. I’m not kidding.
How could there be such a disconnect with that many people about what the company actually does—-especially from the inside where you can literally see how they actually make their money?
I hated working at one of previous jobs because there were 600 different issues talked about in the workplace. The underlying assumption was that you were always onboard. Many times I wasn’t and it.
Seeing Armstrong voice this policy makes me much more interested in working at Coinbase. I’m convinced that I won’t be cornered into jumping on the latest cause de jour because that’s what’s expected of me. Where any deviation from the cause’s line would put my job at risk.
I disagree, and I think you're grossly overstating it.
I can see how you could characterize their stance as "supporting the status quo". But, there are varying degrees of "support", and this is pretty much the lowest degree of "support" imaginable.
Put another way, you're painting this as "with us or against us" when in reality there's a spectrum of support. Coinbase is standing just SLIGHTLY off center in one direction.
> And supporting the status quo in this political climate is a strange hill to plant your flag on.
Why do you think it's strange? The vast majority of employees prefer a work environment that is stripped of political conversation. And, such an environment is more conducive to focus and productivity.
I prefer to not be lectured on political issues by my orange juice brand. Their mission should be to sell high quality orange juice and make a profit.
Maybe they have different priorities than you and just want to make money. Not everything is political.
This is kind of the same kind of fallacy as people who try to say that atheism is a religion. No, it's the absence of religion. In the same vein, an apolitical workplace isn't support for the status quo. It's the absence of any political, either for or against the status quo.
Anyone using it is just saying “If you are not with us, your against us”.
It’s simply a way to force a divide of the world into black and white and that sucks.
Social media has amplified polarization.
Is it really the case that everyone must support one or other of the poles?
"No politics = politics" is an utterly vacuous statement.
How many defense contractors are there? These people do have a vested interest to vote for candidates that increase govt contracts with the private sector. This is a massive industry.
Now that govt is getting more involved in health care, we're seeing that too.
These are trillions of dollars we're talking about.
This is also valid for small businesses too. How taxes are done in a given community. Etc.
I can't emphasize enough the vested interest a business has to be selfish. I'm indifferent on if this is a drawback.
I just wish there was more competition/choices for everyone and like you, I wish people would be more upfront (or self aware) of what they're doing.
P.S. When it comes to Coinbase. What stops them from backing a racist KKK member whom backs Bitcoin/crypto? What stops them from backing an anarchist whom backs Bitcoin/crypto? Etc...etc... This silencing of discussion...it a bit disgusting.
I'm sure you meant "overstated".
This is often presented as obvious self-contradiction, but in fact the definition of "politics" here changes from first use to the second. In other words, this is a cheap rhetorical trick to make something sound irrational and self-contradictory, while int fact it isn't.
The problem with the view that activism is ok if the current administration is objectionable is that the "status quo" changes from cycle to cycle.
Presidential politics is only a very small part of political activity in the US (though it is the most visible). What if your frame of reference is state and local politics? Is political activism in the workplace ok if you don't like the local school board?
As citizens and organizations, we surely deserve our right to engage in politics, but that doesn't mean it should what we discuss about on every nights' dinner table. A large fraction of those conversations will be, as it should, devoted to what's going on in the lives of our own and people around us. It's easy to lose focus in the mountains and seas of all those issues that matter, things just won't change in a blink, but we simply can not afford to let those issues to be the entirety of our lives, no matter how important they are, as much as one hope for otherwise. Call it the downside of democracy, but we just don't yet live in a time where everyone can devote all parts of their lives to discussions on fairness and justice, regardless how beautiful it sounds.
1. https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/lobbyis...
What they did makes a lot of sense and I suspect many other companies will follow suit, even if they don't do it so openly.
*typo
I proposed a simple rule that you should seek consent from others in the room before bringing up (partisan) politics. This simple "Hey can we talk about the debate last night..." allows for people to skip out before they get dragged into something they may not be interested in.
Many people have their key social group at work, and a lot more energy is tied up in politics in the US at the moment. I think it's important that people can move this energy with their colleagues and others.
That's the giant strawman if there ever was one.
"Abortion is about a woman's right to chose, who's against that?"
"Abortion is about killing children, who supports killing children?"
Everyone generally supports equality, and something like 95% of Americans including huge majorities of Republicans etc. accept that racism exists and is a problem.
Almost universally Americans want 'equal pay for equal work'.
... the question is the means, the underlying issues, social conditions, solutions, lack of recognition for other groups, the 'racial lens' that we now seem to use for everything, the double-edges sword of affirmative action, double-standards and of course accepting bad behaviour as part of the cause (i.e. riots) etc..
It's not remotely so simple, unfortunately.
These narratives that fuel the culture war “decide” that certain groups are in or out. It’s entirely inaccurate but that’s what the popular narrative dictates.
BLM is, under this system, on the “left” side, along with other made-up narrative entities in this fictional drama such as “antifa”. To the culture war brawlers, entirely disconnected from the actual happenings, they alias to the same thing, the same people, the same group.
Coinbase has leveraged that system to cover for the fact that their silence on the matter of justice and human rights is extremely loud.
https://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/20/zenefits-ceo-says-about-10-p...
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/losing-job-offer-quora-uber-v...
Good luck dealing with disagreements on this when it's so poorly defined.
I figured as much. Coinbase sounds like a great place to work if this works out.
No, we stand for accomplishing the mission and for creating a great place to work."
My god, you're a business, you're entire existence is predicated on making a profit, don't delude yourself into thinking you're chasing some higher purpose, if that was truly the case then you'd be offering your services at a loss or giving away your product for free.
> No, we stand for accomplishing the mission and for creating a great place to work."
> My god, you're a business, you're entire existence is predicated on making a profit, don't delude yourself into thinking you're chasing some higher purpose, if that was truly the case then you'd be offering your services at a loss or giving away your product for free.
Hey now, there are other options besides "solely driven by profits" and "non-profit solely focused on the mission"
For one thing, it is a fiction that public for-profit companies have a fiduciary duty to be monomaniacal profit seeking entities that must do everything legal to achieve that end, and anything illegal where the profit exceeds the risk-adjusted cost of getting caught is at least on the table.
Second, there are plenty of structures for encoding specific missions into a company's charter that are binding. I'm kind of curious to see if Coinbase will follow through on the rhetoric and do something such as becoming a b-corp.
But I thought it was generally understood that there were certain topics you really ought not to talk about at work including religion, politics, disclosing your salary, etc.
Has this changed? Or am I misunderstanding something?
The reason the CEO made this policy is because many people felt they were being pressured to be political at work which is the new norm .
I think Coinbase will now attract/retain fewer conscientious employees. The kind of employees who definitely won't leave are the ones with careerist/mercenary personality types. If that becomes a vicious cycle ( per the 'like attracts like' thing https://youtu.be/wTgQ2PBiz-g?t=75 ), the culture could lead to wide-spread ass-covering and fraud.
Then again, this isn't an area in which I have some particular expertise. Maybe it will work out perfectly.
Another possibility that occurs to me is that some employees are very conscientious, but have value systems that are looked down upon in mainstream Silicon Valley culture.
I could imagine such employees being more willing to stay with Coinbase when that potential source of strife is removed.
Life is complicated, we have a lot of things to focus on, most people like to do work at work, not get tangled in what might be suppressive or irrelevant social webs.
My bet is that 70% of people would prefer apolitical, 20% 'moderate' and only 10% activism - of course - only if it's specifically their view of activism.
I suspect that many of these employees aren't motivated by politics, but instead by money.
My suspicion is that the percentage of folks who are into this is higher at companies like Google, who have absurdly overly bureaucratic hiring pipelines that weed out free thinkers in favor of academic elites who are strong conformists. Strong conformists from academia are the ones I see gravitating most to this form of activism. Add to that the fact that your typical Google engineer is massively overqualified for the actual work that they do on a daily basis (working on a cog in a gear in a giant system) and you get a lot of anxious, bored people trying to erase their guilt over being radically overpaid.
Another group of folks I've witnessed being into social justice activism (at an extreme level) are borderline Aspergers folks I've worked with who, on a good day, have a hard time navigating human relationships of any kind. I think the intersectional, hierarchal nature of these beliefs brings a Dungeons and Dragons, RPG like sense of order to humans that is comforting to them. The fact that it's mostly over-simplified and false escapes them.
Basically, Coinbase probably got rid of a lot of unproductive personnel and won't have to deal with this anymore.
That’s just anecdotal but the people I know at google are the less conforming and the most “weird” (not in a pejorative sense) people I know. They also have no connection to academia and in fact all of them failed their studies for years because they were spending their time doing other crazy things.
Looking at this through another prism, fully 95% of the company decided that being apolitical at work is reasonable.
What happened to the rule against politics and religion in polite society?
What rule? That's only ever been the case in idealized tv 'society', and mostly-homogenous comparatively rich/affluent folk who can afford not to give a shit about politics.
What were the opinions of the bad apples? That they wanted Coinbase to support?
I'm not in the US and a bit clueless
I'm guessing now they're apolitical Coinbase wont be doing any of that.
I honestly don't understand how you could believe that.
Every oil and gas company or tobacco company has been historically engaged in politics.
IBM and BMW famously enabled the Nazi regime during WWII.
Union busting and strike breaking throughout the 70s and 80s was entirely political.
Silicon Valley, in general, heavily invests in political lobbying, including Coinbase itself!
Really. It's that simple.
It's not a hypothetical. Satoshi created Bitcoin as a (particularly ineffective) act of insurrection, and the only reason why governments haven't responded to it like so is a matter of political and judicial economy. Existing money-laundering and securities laws likely already ban Bitcoin, we just haven't seen them fully enforced. Using Bitcoin is inherently a political statement (which I don't entirely agree with); the apolitical choice would be to wind down Coinbase as an ongoing concern.
Acknowledging that black lives matter goes beyond politics.
What does are some concrete examples of a company being political or apolitical? What are the kinds of things the Coinbase used to do and no longer does, which employees might leave over? Is it about the company donating to political compaigns, or openly participating in community debates and having a position on social issues (same sex marriage, abortion, Black Lives Matter, Trump, gun control, etc)?
Additionally, I find it real strange that a cryptocurrency company is pretending to have an 'apolitical' mission. Cryptocurrencies were created for political reasons. A lot of the pre-cursor developers (and suspected inventors) and early proponents are anti-government libertarians/crypto-anarchists. Even before Bitcoin, cypherpunks were heavily invested into digital cash techniques, that although used centralized servers, were nevertheless, blinded and federated, again with the desire to have untraceable cash like transactions that could be sent through unbreakable channels, and untouchable by government taxation and regulation.
But I don't think this is a good way to approach political speech at work. Coinbase is aligned very closely with libertarian politics for a variety of reasons that complement each other. I would be very surprised if there wasn't rampant libertarian-inflected speech being traded by employees. Indeed, a policy against engaging in political speech unrelated to the company's goal will almost certainly amplify that particular type of political messaging.
I work for a company with very conservative leadership, who contribute, individually, to very conservative causes. I contribute to and participate in a Pride event being held in my town. Last year an outside political group protested the event, and it led to the City, via the city council, chaired by the CEO of my company, creating de novo restrictions on usage of City property specially for that event, and my boss showing up to film that event. Later, the same political group ran a political candidate for mayor explicitly on a ticket of shutting out Pride from City facilities (which, obviously, is legally dubious). It was a rancorous election in a deeply conservative community, even though the challenger got nowhere near the votes required to win.
My company's official policy is that, in the interest of respecting others, we should refrain from discussing politics at work. In the context of this election, my coworkers, with whom I share a pod, were discussing how the city should just be able to kick out Pride, because it's fine if people are gay, we just don't want them in our community. These same coworkers often waste their time quoting Steven Crowder and similar political talkers. My manager, who works in the same pod, initiates conversations every week about, how was your weekend, what did you do. I find them uncomfortable, but my manager sees them as valuable for team building.
Generally I find my team fairly collegial, though they almost certainly don't share my political or, in some cases, religious convictions. During the week of Pride I mentioned I had attended the event with my wife, and I received cold looks from the entire office.
I am frequently looking for work elsewhere, for a variety of reasons. And if I were offered a buyout this generous I would definitely take it.
Can we please stop using medium? It's getting worse and worse
> Enable belonging for everyone: We work to create an environment where everyone is welcome and can do their best work, regardless of background, sexual orientation, race, gender, age, etc.
Great. So Coinbase believes that critical to their mission is enabling everyone to feel welcome and do their best work regardless of their background or identity. And then the very next part is:
> We focus minimally on causes not directly related to the mission [such as] policy decisions: If there is a bill introduced around crypto, we may engage here, but we normally wouldn’t engage in policy decisions around healthcare or education for example.
Ok. So to pick an obvious example, two related issues that would clearly fall into the “not directly related to the mission” bucket are gay and transgender rights. Without getting at all into the issue of where you (Dear Reader) stand in terms of these particular issues, it seems to me that by saying “we explicitly will not lobby to make sure transgender people have equal rights, because that’s outside of our mission” is at direct odds with saying “we believe a core part of our mission is making sure transgender people feel welcome and can do their best work”.
The only conclusion I can come to is that Armstrong believes that people who have to fight for their rights can “feel welcome” and “do their best work” just as easily as those who don’t have to fight those same battles — and that seems, at best, a little naive/head-in-the-sand.
Adding on to that, as many people pointed out in this thread, Coinbase does make political contributions — it’s just that their interpretation of this sentence
> If there is a bill introduced around crypto, we may engage here
Seems to be (from a cursory glance at those listed contributions) that they are willing to support any politician that promotes their stance on crypto, regardless of any other stances that politician may take on any other issue. So continuing with the example above, Coinbase may be perfectly willing to support a politician who actively opposes gay marriage, as long as that politician actively supports crypto.
They’re obviously free to do so, but it seem disingenuous to do so while at the same time claiming that one of their core values has to do with enabling everyone to feel welcome and do their best work. At a guess, they are taking an extremely narrow view of “feel welcome while sitting at their office desk” — as in, they promote respectful communication in the office — but I question how “welcome” someone can feel when they know their employer contributes money towards the campaign of a person who (for example) is actively working to remove their right to be legally married.
Unless some law is interfering with the ability of Coinbase to provide a welcoming workplace to employees who are gay/transgendered, gay/transgender social causes have nothing to do with Coinbase's goal of providing a welcoming workplace that maximizes its ability to advance its mission.
You can't shoehorn every 'social justice' issue into the goal of providing a welcoming workplace. The latter statement is not meant to be interpreted in such an all-encompassing way.
The kind of absolutism that premises your perspective/position would engulf everything in politics.
I'd like to mention something I haven't seen in other comments:
Coinbase's mission to produce a new global financial system is itself a kind of political activism.
One that some people believe will make the world a better place for people.
When designing something as fundamentally underpinning as the future of money, that can only work if it is able to underpin the activities of just about everyone.
Rather like cash money today only works because everyone knows it behaves the same regardless of who you vote for, and bank money (for the most part) also behaves the same regardless of your political views.
This analogy is a stretch, because employees at a card services firm aren't the same as users of a card services firm. But let's try it:
Imagine what the country would be like if, say, Visa and Mastercard (and all other payment infrastructure providers) required you to agree, and keep showing you agree, to support a particular collection of present-day political stances and voting affiliations before you could even spend any money on a card.
By that, I don't mean imagine "Visa Democrat Support" card requires you to show your affiliation. I mean, imagine if all Visa card services of every kind, and all the other services, all required the same affiliation.
Unless you're happy with that affiliation, you'd have to lie just to use ordinary services. You'd be at a significant disadvantage in life, and what people say in public would be very different to what they believe.
Some might say at least just causes would be supported. But it's quite an Orwellian prospect.
It's the sort of thing many people associate with China and too many other "less democratic" countries, where (it is said; I don't know for sure) you have to basically pretend to agree with the Party line, keep political views to yourself, and there's no democracy to speak of.
A healthy democracy needs a strong underpinning of common infrastructure, of which cash and money are part, which are available to everyone in a more-or-less apolitical manner, enabling people to hold and express a range of conflicting, divisive views layered "on top" of those basic life-supporting services.
(You could say cash and money, and payment services, are inherently political, as is capitalism, but that's not what I mean here. What's meant here is that a healthy democracy needs to provide some common infrastructure upon which everyone can depend regardless of affiliation. Otherwise it won't be much of a democracy for long.)
Now, I said it was a stretch of an analogy, because users of a company's services aren't the same as employees.
But still, imagine the chilling effect on trying to build up "a possible future of money, strong and unbreakable, available to everyone for the common good" if it was well known that the companies underpinning that future money all displayed public activism along strongly partisan-aligned views, or campaigned on big issues on which it's thought about half the population disagrees.
I've said all this, even though I personally see money itself as rather political, and that's because it doesn't have the innate properties which are commonly assumed. It's possible to engineer types of money to have different properties, and if adopted, these engineered properties have a profound effect on people's lives as well as aggregate behaviour and the economy at large. So I'm not necessarily personally aligned with an "apolitical" stance on a design of future money.
Nonetheless, I can see, and respect, why someone trying to build what they see as "the future of money for a better world for people" might feel that a firm, consistently "apolitical" public stance is an essential ingredient to perform their mission. To ensure the service is not just available to all who want in, but also seen as reliably available, now and in future, to all people regardless of their political affiliations.
(I don't know if Coinbase or its CEO holds this view, but I thought it was a relevant idea worth sharing, having noticed other comments tending to focus only on internal culture and productivity.)
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24724617.
Sure, I’m not sure what the answer is. Then again, I’m not a professional HR person who is supposed to be trained in handling these issues.
Having 5% of your workforce quit over nothing more than messaging is a catastrophic failure in people management.
Outright political speech bans at companies may be perfectly justified, but it’s usually the case that work environments that have a habit of outright banning things are stifling to be a part of. I’m sure this isn’t the first time that employees have heard tone-deaf messaging from corporate, and being offered some money to leave on the heels of some more time-deafness must have been appealing.
It’s not hard to have policies and training rooted in being empathetic and respectful toward others. That way you don’t have to ban difficult topics. Conversations between coworkers being excessively policed never feels good.
Asking people to always be work robots is completely unreasonable - lifelong friendships and marriages happen with coworkers. We are human, social creatures. Things happen in the world and we spend most of our weekday life at work, so we often need other people at work to talk with about them.
I think the CEO’s refusal to take a stance on whether Black Lives Matter is a stance in itself. It’s hard not to assume that he doesn’t agree with the organization or the statement, even if that’s not the case. And while the movement is in some way political, in most ways the organization and the phrase simply stands for the idea that, well, Black Lives Matter. It’s simply a marginalized group seeking equal treatment, and there really shouldn’t be anything political about being treated as an equal.
Of course, the reactionaries in our world always demand that we think otherwise: that we should be considerate of their views on keeping women, certain races and ethnicities, the differently abled, or people with the “wrong” faith as second-class citizens. They want us to consider these fundamentally flawed views as if they are on equal plane as a valid “other side” of the coin, as if it’s simple political disagreement. In reality, their viewpoints were never acceptable, we’ve just had to suffer through them.
There’s nothing political about telling someone through words and actions that they matter, and treating those people with equal protections and rights in the criminal justice system.
As an anecdote, my employer had no problem proclaiming support for Black lives. We have Black employees, of course we should agree that Black Lives Matter. And of course we can have difficult conversations among our coworkers, as long as we know how to listen to each other. This is where HR comes in to help train and guide around keeping those conversations productive and beneficial to everyone, because people grow by having their viewpoints challenged and expanded - and that can happen at work!
That's just wrong. "Black lives matter" encompasses at least three separate categories of claims:
1. The lives of black people are inherently as valuable as the lives of others.
2. The US and western civilization in general is based on white supremacy at its core, and all disparities that disfavor minorities are solely due to present-day racism.
3. Radical change is necessary in order to solve the problems of racism, including reparations, abolishing the police, and ending capitalism.
BLM often ends up being a motte-and-bailey where anyone who isn't totally on board with #2 or #3 is accused of denying #1.
This is where HR comes in to help train and guide around keeping those conversations productive and beneficial to everyone, because people grow by having their viewpoints challenged and expanded
I suspect there are certain viewpoints that can be challenged and others than cannot.
If BLM was just that, most people, even on the political right, would have no problems with it. The trouble is, BLM the organization is run by Marxists, is openly racist in itself (black exclusivity), and their aims are much more than racial equality.
Their leaders have made statements regarding dismantling capitalism, have attended rallies with Nicolas Maduro, and have had their funding organized by ex-convict Susan Rosenberg, who was part of the terrorist May 19th Communist Organization.
I'm a fan of racial equality, and by that I mean completely eliminating racism quotas, making hiring based purely on merit and not melanin. I will have nothing to do with the organization BLM.
> I think the CEO’s refusal to take a stance on whether Black Lives Matter is a stance in itself. It’s hard not to assume that he doesn’t agree with the organization or the statement, even if that’s not the case.
I think you're right about the second part, but I disagree that it's "nothing more than messaging." Surely it must not be about "focusing on Coinbase's mission" but rather that the Coinbase leadership feels that the Black Lives Matter issue simply is not important enough to take a stance on and thus potentially alienate some people. I strongly suspect that Coinbase would take a stance if they deemed the issue to be important enough. Would Coinbase take a stance if there was a current prominent debate over whether Black people should be allowed to vote? Or is that not related closely enough to their mission? What if the prominent debate was over whether Black people should be allowed to have bank accounts, or purchase cryptocurrencies?
I've certainly worked with a number of the type.
By definition most of them do not have strong principles (they're okay with mediocre work representing them), so i don't picture them leaving on principles
It’s a sign of limited leadership capacity to attempt to install culture as a top down mandate.
a. Areas they can't focus on primarily, or b. Areas that would directly make 10, 15, 25% of their human capital feel attacked/engaged in a hostile environment.
It's like that person who screamed "we're trying to build a home here!" at a university when someone was to be cancelled. What? No... that's not what a university is.
Emergent values and culture? A CEO should just start paying people and hope that a business emerges? What? It's literally the job of the leadership to steer the company.
Emergent mission, vision, and culture is a recipe for bankruptcy.
Debate causes or political candidates internally that are unrelated to work
Why limit yourself to the 40-50h you spend at work. Let's just ban political debate everywhere. It's so divisive! At maximum, you should debate causes or political candidates with people who think exactly like you. But even this may lead to unexpected frustration, it's much better to just rest assured that everybody thinks exactly like you.
Semantically perhaps, but not in practice. On most issues there are those who support, those who oppose, and a lot of neutrals who do not want to be involved and do not want to be caught in the middle of the fighting.
No-one in the thread has said this.