Inside a Corporate Culture War Stoked by a Crypto CEO | Hacker News Reader

Inside a Corporate Culture War Stoked by a Crypto CEO

nytimes.com

44 pointscapableweb10 comments

> It’s just not practical to allow 3,000 people to customize their pronouns

> That same day, he invited employees to join him in a Slack channel called “debate-pronouns” where he suggested that people use pronouns based not on their gender identity but their sex at birth

Seriously? Why does the CEO care so much about gender in the workplace? People should be able to come to work and get their job done while not worrying about others mis-gendering them or trying to "scientifically prove" that gender identity isn't a thing. It's a pronoun... it takes zero-effort to address someone the correct way.

It’s kinda interesting how it is described as libertarian, but they seem happy to tell some folks what they can’t do, say, etc.

Slack literally has an OOTB feature to let people set their pronouns:

https://slack.com/help/articles/1500011115781-Manage-pronoun...

it's just not practical to allow 3000 people to customize their usernames.

it's just not practical to allow 3000 people to set their emoji to an avocado to indicate that they're at lunch.

it's just not practical to allow 3000 people to give us a little green dot which indicates when they're online and available for discussions.

>Seriously? Why does the CEO care so much about gender in the workplace?

Seriously, if people want to be identified as [X], why is it such a big deal? My only ask would be to plead for patience while I adjust my own thinking to catch up. It's not that big a deal. If we can deal with people changing names when they get married, we can deal with simply referring to people in a way that they desire.

Well I guess this is the “hit job” the CEO alluded to. Always difficult to know anything from the outside but two red flags for me:

- suing Glassdoor to unveil the identities of reviewers? Not just petty but a total misuse of company money.

- a 31 page manifesto? For all the noise made around how SJWs are ruining the workplace having to read over 30 pages of manifesto in order to work somewhere? No thank you.

> “We have this ideological purity test,” Mr. Powell said about the company’s hiring process on a 2018 crypto podcast. “A test of whether you’re kind of aligned with the vision of Bitcoin and crypto.”

Is it “the vision of bitcoin” or just his vision?

Oh I see. Outrage bait and hit pieces always race to the top for mission focused companies after the CEO announcing they were hiring. If it is not a headline titled 'Kraken layoffs incoming', then it has to be about the CEO's own profile in pushing back against woke nonsense.

But you know what? Who cares?

You have to just look at what happened to Netflix accepting this nonsense. It destroyed them beyond their own stock crashing so hard, that not only they cancelled lots of deals and films promoting it, but they changed their own hiring memo to reflect that and no longer promote it heavily than they used to.

I can only see that the Kraken CEO is being mission focused and avoiding the detriment that 20 bad fits will do to drag others and the whole company down, and make them lose money. At least he has admitted his mistake of not checking earlier. Now that it is clear it is mission focused, If do you don't like the company you are free to leave and start your own because they will not change.

He’s being anything but mission focused, though. A 31 page manifesto that includes advice on gun ownership? That’s distraction, not mission. Worse, it’s distraction he’s involving the entire company in.

https://archive.ph/vXQVF

Reply on news.ycombinator.com