Basecamp implodes as employees flee company, including senior staff
After a controversial blog post in which CEO Jason Fried outlined Basecamp’s new philosophy that prohibited, among other things, “societal and political discussions” on internal forums, company co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson said the company would offer generous severance packages to anyone who disagreed with the new stance. On Friday, it appears a large number of Basecamp employees are taking Hansson up on his offer: according to The Verge contributing editor Casey Newton’s sources, roughly a third of the company’s 57 employees accepted buyouts today. As of Friday afternoon, 18 people had tweeted they were planning to leave.
As I wrote in a prior post, speech is rarely free. It costs time, so when time is short, people impose limits on what can be said: speakers need to comply with a LAAP. Just like GAAP restricts what you can say in financial statements, a LAAP restricts what you can say in some particular venue (the L is for Local).
The most common LAAPs impose limits of the form “you can’t say that right here, right now”. When time is short for your meeting, set an agenda–don’t let speakers stray off track, speak too long, or derail the conversation with personal attacks that predictably encourage others to go off-topic. Failure to impose a LAAP like this in an important meeting is simply “meeting malpractice.”
At the other extreme, we have limits to speech of the form “no one can say that anywhere, any time.” These limits are rightly controversial, but not all relevant for business leaders, since only a government has power to impose them.
But there’s a big space in between these extremes, and BaseCamp Shows how tricky it is to get things right. We’ll start with their announcement of this policy:
1. No more societal and political discussions on our company Basecamp account. Today’s social and political waters are especially choppy. Sensitivities are at 11, and every discussion remotely related to politics, advocacy, or society at large quickly spins away from pleasant. You shouldn’t have to wonder if staying out of it means you’re complicit, or wading into it means you’re a target. These are difficult enough waters to navigate in life, but significantly more so at work. It’s become too much. It’s a major distraction. It saps our energy, and redirects our dialog towards dark places. It’s not healthy, it hasn’t served us well. And we’re done with it on our company Basecamp account where the work happens. People can take the conversations with willing co-workers to Signal, Whatsapp, or even a personal Basecamp account, but it can’t happen where the work happens anymore
This policy change was announced along with several others, like switching out benefits for profit-sharing, eliminating all committees, eliminating 360 reviews. But guess which one caused most of the controversy! In part, that’s because it’s more sweeping than the usual “right here, right now” limit we see for a single meeting. It’s “any company venue, any time”–still not “anywhere”, but pretty close.
The new speech limits were also controversial because many employees disagreed with their leadership on where to draw the line between “social and political” issues and work issues. Policy 1 above was bookended with this final policy change:
6. No forgetting what we do here. We make project management, team communication, and email software. We are not a social impact company. Our impact is contained to what we do and how we do it. We write business books, blog a ton, speak regularly, we open source software, we give back an inordinate amount to our industry given our size. And we’re damn proud of it. Our work, plus that kind of giving, should occupy our full attention. We don’t have to solve deep social problems, chime in publicly whenever the world requests our opinion on the major issues of the day, or get behind one movement or another with time or treasure. These are all important topics, but they’re not our topics at work — they’re not what we collectively do here. Employees are free to take up whatever cause they want, support whatever movements they’d like, and speak out on whatever horrible injustices are being perpetrated on this group or that (and, unfortunately, there are far too many to choose from). But that’s their business, not ours. We’re in the business of making software, and a few tangential things that touch that edge. We’re responsible for ourselves. That’s more than enough for us.
This item is less a limit to speech than a good old-fashioned invocation of the Friedman Doctrine: employees should work for the behalf of their employers, not use investors’ money for their own pet projects. That means not getting involved in unrelated social and political issues. That’s a Doctrine worth debating, but even if you buy it in full, you still have the question what social and political issues are related enough to the business interests that they become business imperatives.
And in Basecamp’s case, the speech that their leadership wanted to rule out seem related to their business. It turns out that:
The controversy that embroiled enterprise software maker Basecamp this week began more than a decade ago, with a simple list of customers.
Around 2009, Basecamp customer service representatives began keeping a list of names that they found funny. More than a decade later, current employees were so mortified by the practice that none of them would give me a single example of a name on the list. One invoked the sorts of names Bart Simpson used to use when prank calling Moe the Bartender: Amanda Hugginkiss, Seymour Butz, Mike Rotch.
Many of the names were of American or European origin. But others were Asian, or African, and eventually the list — titled “Best Names Ever” — began to make people uncomfortable. What once had felt like an innocent way to blow off steam, amid the ongoing cultural reckoning over speech and corporate responsibility, increasingly looked inappropriate, and often racist.
Discussion about the list and how the company ought to hold itself accountable for creating it led directly to CEO Jason Fried announcing Tuesday that Basecamp would ban employees from holding “societal and political discussions” on the company’s internal chat forums.
The whole article is well worth reading, because it shows the importance of having a sound LAAP in place. My reading is that Basecamp was a bit loose in enforcing limits to speech over the last decade, saw that was causing problems over the last few years, but didn’t quite know how to handle it. So they overreacted by imposing a single LAAP on a wide range of venues. Who knows–if they studied a bit more moral accounting, they might have handled this better.
Basecamp CEO apologizes to staff in new post: ‘We have a lot to learn’
In a new blog post, Basecamp CEO Jason Fried apologized after the “policy changes” he announced last week ultimately led to a third of the company’s workforce opting to leave. “Last week was terrible. We started with policy changes that felt simple, reasonable, and principled, and it blew things up culturally in ways we never anticipated,” Fried wrote. “David and I completely own the consequences, and we’re sorry. We have a lot to learn and reflect on, and we will.”