Basecamp offers buyouts

What the founders misunderstand about remote work

Apr 29, 2021

Yesterday I wrote about the sad state of affairs at Basecamp, where a long-kept list of “funny” names maintained by the customer support team prompted a series of conversations that led to a ban on discussing “politics” in the workplace. More than 200,000 people have read the story so far, and there has been an active discussion in Sidechannel all day picking apart the issues involved.

Today, let’s talk about the fallout.

Both Basecamp co-founders posted responses to recent events Wednesday on the company’s own blogging platform, which is part of its Hey email service. CEO Jason Fried approached the controversy by talking about it without talking about it; his post was titled “On Making Decisions,” and it made no specific reference to the company’s new policies. Instead, he wrote:

Whenever I make decisions, I don't think about now, I think about eventually. How will this feel then. Right now is the wrong measure of the moment. Later is the right one.

How will it feel when it's real, not raw. When the bone heals, when the crack fills, when the wound mends, when the break sets, when nerves settle, when the last zap of electricity arcs the gap.

Well, for now it’s all still raw, particularly for the employees who no longer feel welcome at the company. And now have a big choice to make, Fried’s co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson said Wednesday in a lengthy new post on the controversy:

Yesterday, we offered everyone at Basecamp an option of a severance package worth up to six months salary for those who've been with the company over three years, and three months salary for those at the company less than that. No hard feelings, no questions asked. For those who cannot see a future at Basecamp under this new direction, we'll help them in every which way we can to land somewhere else.

These are really hard questions. I've been inundated with emails from executives and employees who are wrestling with them at their companies. I hope that the airing of our dirty laundry, and the shitstorm its caused, can help others answer their own questions better. Whatever the answer they deem right for them.

Basecamp’s no-politics rule followed in the footsteps of a similar decree at the cryptocurrency company Coinbase. Coinbase also offered employees up to six months of severance after announcing its no-politics policy, and 60 people — about 5 percent of the company — accepted. Basecamp is much smaller — only 58 people work there total at the moment — but based on my conversations over the past day, I expect Basecamp’s workforce to shrink meaningfully as a result.

However you feel about Basecamp, six months of severance is a generous offer. (Employees with a tenure of at least three years are eligible; those who have been at Basecamp for less time will get a still-not-bad three months’ severance.) Likewise, Hansson’s post was rather gracious to me, copping to the facts that my story laid out without lashing out at journalism or questioning my motives.

Sometimes you do an investigation into a company and executives ice you out for months or years afterward; other times they open up and you wind up having productive conversations that benefit everyone. As a conflict-averse coward, I always prefer the latter scenario, but it depends heavily on the temperament of the executive and the degree to which they can stomach whatever you wrote about. Hansson spent an hour on the phone with me Tuesday, walking through the history of the funny-names list and articulating his point of view on creating a framework for having productive workplace discussions, and whatever else I feel about the Basecamp situation I do appreciate that.

When I wrapped up my reporting Tuesday, there were only two pieces that I felt were missing. One was the actual list of “funny” names, which no one was willing to share with me out of mortification. Two was the post that Hansson made made in response to an employee who had argued that the company should be more considerate of the connection between mocking people’s names and racial injustice. That post had led two employees to report Hansson to human resources, but my sources said they did not want to share it with me because they considered it a violation of the trust that Basecamp had put in them.

Imagine my surprise, then, when Hansson went and just posted the whole thing. But reading through it, I can understand why, since it’s essentially just a compressed version of what he told me over the phone. Like:

We can recognize that forceful renaming by a colonial regime is racist and wrong while also recognizing that having a laugh at customer names behind their back is inappropriate and wrong without equating or linking the two.

I personally think there’s a clear connection between those things, and I think most of the people who take the Basecamp buyout will think so too. And in any case, the fact remains that this is a company co-founder calling out an employee in front of all of their peers, and then following up by sharing that post publicly on the web, redacting little more than the employee’s name. Unlike the co-founder, the employee can’t risk responding in public without fearing for their job. The power dynamics here are ugly — the sort of thing that could make you think twice about wanting to work for someone.

II.

One aspect of Hansson’s post I agreed with was the observation that the struggles Basecamp is having lately aren’t unique to the company. Hansson writes:

It's also a really hard time. We've always been a remote company, but we've never gone a year and a half without seeing each other. Normally, we'd all have met up thrice during this time to recharge, reconnect, and rehumanize. Add to that all the stress from the pandemic, from those societal politics, from, well, everything we've been through recently, and it's no wonder that everyone is extra vulnerable, extra quick to jump to conclusions, extra likely to escalate. We're human and that's a human response.

I’d be surprised if that passage didn’t feel at least somewhat true of the company where you work. And yet it leaves out a salient point: that Basecamp’s core tool is meant to enable this exact kind of long-term remote employment, improving team cohesion and productivity. With today’s buyouts, it seems like we have found the limit of what Basecamp the product can do.

But it’s not just Basecamp. In so many tech labor stories that have unfolded over the past years, a workplace chat tool has been at the center. At the end of 2019, a luggage company CEO resigned in part over her Slack messages. The story of morale at Facebook in 2020 could largely be told by the farewell “badge” posts that workers posted to their internal Workplace tool. Facebook set new rules for workplace communications in September after heated discussions about societal issues were derailing conversations.

Back in the office, many of these discussions might have taken place in situations that were more amenable to good-faith disagreement and compromise. (Many others may never have taken place at all, for better and for worse.) In a remote-work world, though, internal communication tools serve as digital storm drains into which all resentment and bad feelings about the company collect. These drains are easily clogged, and over the past year we have seen them burst repeatedly.

It speaks to the difficulty of the problem that not even an avowedly remote-first company like Basecamp has managed to find a solution, despite writing an entire book on the subject. There are a lot of lessons we can draw from the company’s story, and one is that remote-work software alone will not solve your remote-work problems, and may even exacerbate them.

One Basecamp employee told me today that they thought the co-founders enjoyed remote work primarily because it meant that their workers left them alone for long stretches of time. But employees who are out of sight may soon be out of mind, and left to their own devices they will develop ideas of their own. Uncomfortable ideas, even. Ideas that will spread across every workplace communication surface, and for which you will eventually have to answer.

Fried and Hansson seem to be telling themselves that they can get around this by replacing their current crop of troublemakers with more docile substitutes. That notion presupposes that Basecamp’s current problem is with its workers, rather than with its management.

It’s all too easy for problems to fester at companies even when people are working alongside one another in offices. Dispersed around the world, even minor actions can feel incredibly fraught. (If you’ve ever felt your stomach drop when your manager sends you the single word “hey” in Slack, you know what I’m talking about.) No matter the company, workplace chat tools focus bad feelings into lengthy, engaging threads and groups, helping them to spread throughout the organization with comments and upvotes.

I can understand why, in such a world, managers would want to simply shut down the chat and start over. But I suspect someday Fried and Hansson will learn what their employees already know — it was never the conversations that were the problem. Basecamp doesn’t need new employees — it needs leaders who want to manage and engage with the ones it already has.

LIVE AUDIO CHAT: I’ll be talking about the Basecamp story at 5:30P PT Wednesday on Sidechannel with my co-hosts Anne Helen Petersen and Charlie Warzel, who are at work on a book about remote offices and the future of work. Stop by and ask us questions — you can find your link to join Sidechannel here if you haven’t already.

The Ratio

Today in news that could affect public perception of the big tech companies.

🔃 Trending sideways: Facebook temporarily hid some posts that used the hashtag #ResignModi. The company seemed to say that this had been a mistake, although at some point I assume it will be legally mandated. And then perhaps we can talk again about what it means for platforms to fight this fight. (Manish Singh / TechCrunch)

Governing

⭐ With the COVID crisis there worsening, police in India are prosecuting a 26-year-old man who used Twitter to try to find oxygen for his dying grandfather. Shashank Yadav has been charged “with spreading a rumor over oxygen shortages ‘with intent to cause... fear or alarm.’” (BBC)

Epic Games’ lawsuit against Apple starts next month; here is a summary of expert witness testimony filed by Epic, and here is a summary of expert witness testimony filed by Apple.

Aviv Ovadya on why the Oversight Board should consider alternatives to deplatforming. Facebook and other platforms provide a bundle of services, and binary on-or-off votes don’t allow for the flexibility that is required in making these calls, he argues. (Charlie Warzel / Galaxy Brain)

Nilay Patel interviewed Amy Klobuchar about her new book on antitrust. “There’s just this unbelievable number of things that have been going on that have stacked the decks against regular people. And so, that means action. And as I said, throughout time we have acted. Farmers with the pitchforks, unions organizing in Chicago against monopolies. And it’s time to do it again.” (The Verge)

TikTok will open a “transparency” center in Europe to answer questions from regulators and other interested parties. It follows the opening of a similar center in the United States last year. (Natasha Lomas / TechCrunch)

Highly revealing commercial data generated by mobile phones and other devices is being bought and sold in bulk by America’s adversaries. A bipartisan group of senators wants to ban the sale of this data without a warrant. (Byron Tau / Wall Street Journal)

Deepfake satellite imagery poses a not-so-distant threat, geographers are warning. Faked satellite images “could be used to create hoaxes about wildfires or floods, or to discredit stories based on real satellite imagery.” (James Vincent / The Verge)

How online speech regulation moved from an approach inspired by the First Amendment to one focused on “proportionality.” A great, pithy interview with Evelyn Douek about her new article in Columbia Law Review. (Gilad Edelman / Wired)

A look at platforms’ increasing willingness to take into account off-platform behavior when making decisions about banning users. Long a loophole for bad actors exploiting cracks in the system, platforms are beginning to develop more robust policies. (Elizabeth Culliford / Reuters)

It turns out anyone can get content removed from Facebook if the content shows where they live. If you ever find yourself embroiled in scandal, now you know what to do. (Ben Smith / New York Times)

Facebook and Gucci filed a joint lawsuit against an alleged international counterfeiter. “The defendant used multiple Facebook and Instagram accounts to evade Facebook’s enforcement efforts and continue to promote the sale of counterfeit Gucci products,” Facebook said. (Facebook)

China censored social media posts about Chloé Zhao’s Oscar win. The Nomadland director is first Chinese woman and first nonwhite woman to win the Academy Award for directing, but China is mad at her for saying in a previous interview that in China “there are lies everywhere.” Speak your truth Ms. Zhao! (Kim Lyons / The Verge)

Industry

⭐ Spotify had a good quarter. Google had a better quarter. Facebook had an even better quarter. Apple had the best quarter. Only poor Pinterest had a bad quarter.

Máuhan "M" Zonoozy, Spotify’s head of innovation, plans to launch “moonshots” for audio. “Imagining a world ahead, the role of audio will evolve and change and consequently the jobs to be done will also change. It will become more nuanced in how we leverage audio in our daily lives.” (Kerry Flynn / CNN)

Spotify’s new terms for podcasters are surprisingly friendly to creators. The company will soon let people use OAuth to let people listen to their paid subscriptions in the app, while letting creators retain control of the customer relationship. (Ben Thompson / Stratechery)

Facebook is building an in-app podcast player separate from its Spotify mini-player. The Spotify mini-player has now launched, too. (Ashley Carman / The Verge)

YouTube could soon surpass Netflix in revenue. Both companies are racing toward $30 billion this year. (Jennifer Elias / CNBC)

Zoom’s new “immersive view” creates a digital cut-out of your body and puts you in various digital environments with the other people meeting. Let me know if this assuages the crushing alienation of 14 months away from your colleagues! (Ian Carlos Campbell)

Police are investigating after the Pornhub CEO’s mansion was set ablaze. The company has been under scrutiny amid reports it hosted a huge number of videos that were taken or uploaded without the consent of the people appearing in them. (Mack Lamoureux and Samantha Cole / Vice)