While Friday’s meeting would eventually grow heated, it began on a conciliatory note. And this was the final straw for a lot of employees.” II. If they don’t experience it, then it’s not real. If they don’t think it’s an issue, it’s not an issue. “They really don’t care what employees have to say. “My honest sense of why everybody is leaving because they’re tired of Jason and David’s behavior - the suppression of voices, of any dissent,” one employee told me. And they suggest that efforts to eliminate disruptions in the workplace by regulating internal speech may cause even more turmoil for a company in the long run. Collectively, they describe a company whose attempt to tamp down on difficult conversations blew up in its face as employees rejected the notion that discussions of power and justice should remain off limits in the workplace. This account is based on interviews with six Basecamp employees who were present at the meeting, along with a partial transcript created by employees. The response overwhelmed the founders, who extended the deadline to accept buyouts indefinitely amid an unexpected surge of interest. And while many of them had been leaning toward resigning in the aftermath of Fried’s original post, the meeting itself pushed several to accelerate their decisions, employees said. Within a few hours of the meeting, at least 20 people - more than one-third of Basecamp’s 57 employees - had announced their intention to accept buyouts from the company. Over the weekend, Singer - who worked for the company for nearly 18 years, and authored a book about product management for Basecamp called Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters - resigned. Thirty minutes after the meeting ended, Fried announced that Basecamp’s longtime head of strategy, Ryan Singer, had been suspended and placed under investigation after he questioned the existence of white supremacy at the company. What followed was a wrenching discussion that left several employees I spoke with in tears. On Friday, employees had their chance to address these issues directly with Fried and his co-founder. “My honest sense of why everybody is leaving because they’re tired of Jason and David’s behavior” They also disbanded an internal committee of employees who had volunteered to work on issues related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. But Fried and his co-founder, David Heinemeier Hansson, had been taken aback by an employee post which argued that mocking customer names laid the foundation for racially-motivated violence, and closed the thread. The internal discussion over that list had been oriented primarily around making Basecamp feel more inclusive to its employees and customers. In his blog post, Fried said the decision stemmed from the fact that “today’s social and political waters are especially choppy,” and that internal discussions of those issues was “not healthy” and “hasn’t served us well.” The public reaction had been furious, and Fried said he was sorry for the way the new policies had been rolled out - but not for the policies themselves.īehind the scenes, Fried had been dealing with an employee reckoning over a long-standing company practice of maintaining a list of “funny” customer names, some of which were of Asian and African origin. Four days earlier, he had thrown the company into turmoil by announcing that “societal and political discussions” would no longer be allowed on the company’s internal chat forums. At 8AM PT on Friday, a bleary-eyed Basecamp CEO Jason Fried gathered his remote workforce together on Zoom to apologize.
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