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Comment by moduspol | Hacker News Reader

Nobody said it wasn't important, but 20 out of 60 people focusing on it in a remote company that builds unrelated software is absolutely off the rails. You're essentially paying 1/3 of your employees to come up with new ways to suggest the other 2/3 need to stop being so racist / sexist / bigoted. It's difficult to imagine a more self-destructive culture.

> Oddly, according to the coverage, the owners had previously said publicly and internally that they thought it was important.

No owners would publicly say D&I are not important.

> I wonder how it will feel to them to become the darlings of people very opposed to those positions they had been taking, as seen in these threads.

I'm sure these decisions only came about after some hard looks in the mirror.

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There's a fundamental disconnect where the way that a bunch of rich, mostly-liberal tech employees in cushy jobs talk to each other does exactly dick-all for people facing the very real social problems in America. They live in separate worlds.

These well-meaning D&I enthusiasts are pushing on a rope -- and then, when another innocent man gets killed by the cops the next week or whatever other newsworthy thing happens, they push harder. That's not how ropes work.

My gosh that's such a great and funny analogy.

It express the reality that having good intentions may have nothing whatsoever to do with outcomes and that misalignment can be exacerbated under more pressure.

The issue at Basecamp and every other socially minded startup is obviously that people don't realize they are pushing on rope, and they lament anyone pointing out the fact as some kind of obstacle.

The clear majority of these kinds of 'social blow ups' are happening at companies where leaders and staff tilt way over to the Left/Liberal and Libertarian/Openness side of things, which should give pause for people consider that maybe those 'pushing back' aren't remotely trump-loving alt-righters, in fact probably the opposite.

The very nature of these threads is exhausting and frankly if I had to work at once of these places I would take respite in not having to deal with it. If there were some kind of pervasive evil that needed to be dealt with, then of course we'd have to do that, but I strongly doubt that this is the case.

I feel like you have a misunderstanding. Most of the work of a D&I group like this is pushing for diversity and inclusion issues in their workplace, not in the country at large. And why shouldn’t they? There are places and organizations for society-wide stuff as well.

> And why shouldn’t they?

A few reasons:

* They weren't hired or asked to do that

* It doesn't bring more value to the business

* It contributes to a toxic working culture

And it's especially bad in a small company, because you're no longer looking at high level statistics. With only 58 people, you're not saying, "we've got too many white men, statistically." You're implicitly saying, "Mike and Jeff shouldn't have been hired. We should have found people of the race / sex I want to see more of." And, implicitly, "We're going to have to really lean on them to not hire another white guy." Now hiring managers are hesitant to do what's best for the business out of fear of being called -ist.

This idea that employees are entitled to organize privately on company time to try and leverage the company to focus on some unrelated special interest at the expense of being as successful as possible as a business is not as widely accepted as some here seem to think.

The “special interest” is not actually unrelated. A company can become better and more successful while also becoming more diverse. The very fact that you see becoming more diverse as coming at the expense of being more successful shows your inherent bias.

Right, if you think DE&I consists of "new ways to suggest everyone else stop being so racist / sexist / bigoted", you're clearly not into it.

You realize those who think it's important don't think that's what it is, right?

If 20 employees were on the "social" committee planning a holiday party, would you consider that as "off the rails", because you are paying them (some here unspecified number of hours) to throw a damn party? I doubt anyone would get that up in arms about it.

I get it, you think DE&I is a mistake, (unless you think coming up with new ways to tell people to stop being racist is not a mistake? But I think you were clear), so the more people involved in it, the bigger the mistake. But if someone thinks it's important, perhaps even more important than a holiday party, then the more people involved in it the better, and having a large portion of the company involved in it is not a mistake. That's it.

> If 20 employees were on the "social" committee planning a holiday party, would you consider that as "off the rails"

The party planning committee would presumably not try to dictate which vendors the company deals with and which speaker is at the next all-hands meeting.

If you think a party planning committee doesn't have real power and influence, bring nothing but carrot cakes and oatmeal raisin cookies to your next party.

> Right, if you think DE&I consists of "new ways to suggest everyone else stop being so racist / sexist / bigoted", you're clearly not into it.

There's no other way for 20 out of 58 people to spend any significant length of time focused on D&I of the company they work for.

1 out of 58? Maybe. But 20? There's only one way this thing can end.

> If 20 employees were on the "social" committee planning a holiday party, would you consider that as "off the rails", because you are paying them (some here unspecified number of hours) to throw a damn party? I doubt anyone would get that up in arms about it.

A party planning committee is not targeting the rest of the company.

> I get it, you think DE&I is a mistake,

I didn't say it was a mistake. I said 1/3 of a small remote company focused on it shows it was off the rails.

Maybe they should have just joined in. Each of the 58 employees could be brainstorming ways the other 57 employees can be less bigoted. Just hope they could find some time to write software, too.

> A party planning committee is not targeting the rest of the company.

Sounds like a pretty lame party if they're not inviting the rest of the company.

Also, that you think discussing how to make a workplace more diverse, equitable, and inclusive is somehow "targeting" the other employees says a lot about your stance on those things.

It's a committee. Not their primary job focus. You seem to be willfully misunderstanding that.

Time and effort put into the committee comes at the expense of time and effort put into their primary job though.

And a lack of time and effort put into the committee led to the expense of having to buy out 1/3 of the staff.

Wonder how that balances out.

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