Brian Armstrong wants to have it both ways. He wants employees to focus “on the mission”, and not bring societal politics and activism into the workplace. Fair enough. For better or for worse, we live in a capitalist system, and companies are not first and foremost social justice organisations. I am not unsympathetic to the problems he is trying to solve.
But he also wants to influence politics and laws to benefit his company. Coinbase pays hundreds of thousands of dollars to lobbyists and lobbying companies around the world to advocate for their position (this is all public information).
He seems to believe that you can separate “political decisions that benefit Coinbase” and “political decisions that are irrelevant to Coinbase”, but you can’t. They’re all interconnected. It’s naive to pretend otherwise.
I have to say most companies I’ve worked for have subscribed to the policies in Armstrong’s blog post, and it has worked very well. But these companies were mostly outside the Bay Area.
I suspect the Bay Area is extremely nondiverse and homogeneous, and folks there aren’t actually used to having to work with and get along with people who strongly disagree with them on politics. In that kind of monoculture, it’s easy to think that politics can and should be part of work life. In a much more diverse workforce, though, it rarely works well.
If Coinbase is going to be remote-first, as they recently announced, the company’s employees are certainly going to encounter a level of diversity they haven’t been exposed to in the Bay Area. This could be preparation for that.
>I suspect the Bay Area is extremely nondiverse and homogeneous
I moved there from Ohio to work for a FAANG for six months. It's not nearly as bad on the ground as it might seem but you do witness spectacles with much more frequency.
Racially and culturally its definitely not homogenous but there aren't any black folks to be found. Alameda county is the only one around the bay to break double digit percentages, mostly because of Oakland. SF at ~6% is on par with Colorado Springs and Portland lol. The rest (Santa Clara, San Mateo, Santa Cruz, Napa, Marin, etc etc) are on the order of 1-2% black, and based on my short experience living and working there I imagine a good chunk of those are immigrants.
I had no idea and when I first noticed it I got extremely creeped out. Not because I'm some diversity champ, it's just that everybody else is there and you realize there's clearly some kind of filter at work.
SF did shove black people out with urban renewal but aren't demographics mostly like this in the West since the slave trade wasn't as extensive?
The real indicator for the tech industry's lack of diversity is that CA's 39% Hispanic population reflects as some minor fraction of the tech population.
Some extraordinary filter is occurring somewhere that's keeping Hispanic people out. Not alleging malice, just the scale is so huge.
That Wikipedia article has a measure for every 10 years from the Census starting with 1990:
1900 0.70%
1910 0.90%
1920 1.10%
1930 1.40%
1940 1.80%
1950 4.40%
1960 5.60%
1970 7.00%
1980 7.70%
and then you can fill in the rest with Census / ACS data
1990 7.40%
2000 6.40%
2010 6.20%
So, overall, it looks like it's about right. Black people were mostly in America through the slave trade and spread to areas adjacent to the South. The West saw very little increase.
Anyway, thank you for sharing that. It was enlightening. I do have to leave this discussion, though. I promised not to participate in non-tech here.
> I suspect the Bay Area is extremely nondiverse and homogeneous, and folks there aren’t actually used to having to work with and get along with people who strongly disagree with them on politics
This is extremely ironic given the hiring practices of Bay Area companies.
They’re only superficially diverse, perhaps due to the homogeinity of the Bay Area.
Basically the companies only look at skin color and what’s between your legs. As long as you have an American middle class/upper class upbringing or at the minimum had your education in certain American universities. So culturally they are pretty much identical.
From this point of view a white, black and asian American middleclass teenagers that have had identical education are wildly different and bring diverse viewpoints. Whereas a French, Italian and a Polish person would be non diverse. Even though the latter group has massively different cultural background compared to the first group.
I think he’s referring to diversity of ideas, not superficial attributes like race/gender/sexual preference/etc. A group of people that look different but all have the same world view is not a diverse group, imo.
>If Coinbase is going to be remote-first, as they recently announced, the company’s employees are certainly going to encounter a level of diversity they haven’t been exposed to in the Bay Area.
A lot of companies are going to get some serious culture shock if they increase their remote hiring.
But they are not the same. Every company and organisation will advocate for itself by advertising, lobbying, legal battles etc. Brands will also adopt a LGBT pride/BLM/etc campaign as soon as they think it provides good publicity. The aim of all this is to help the company/org. It's not the same as employees bringing up their social or political views while at work.
Companies do not merely advertise or lobby for specific regulations that affect their industry: they spend money to elect specific politicians who take positions on laws that affect that company's employees, in and out of the workplace.
No, companies spend money to elect politicians who will favor them, and the fact that those politicians have to have positions on social issues as well is (for companies) an unavoidable negative. Hobby Lobby type companies with an active social agenda are a tiny minority.
Lobbying about taxes and immigration is working as intended since it is just telling politicians what policies would benefit said company. It is important for politicians to know about it when they make policies so they can better consider pro's and con's.
However lobbying for for laws such as for/against gay marriage or religious rights is unrelated to their business. Then the company is used to exert some individuals political influence instead of just being a business.
Of course politicians are sometimes corrupt and get favors from the companies and then go to do whatever the companies lobbyist tells them to, that is what people usually mean when they mention "lobbying". But lobbying itself isn't inherently a malicious or political act, in its purest form it just conveys information so politicians can make better decisions.
That attitude reifies the company - the company itself is nothing more than the collection of people who work together to drive it. Political stances, even for business purposes, come from the individuals who make up the company leadership, not out of some abstract organisation.
In that sense, it's terribly unfair to forbid employees to bring up politics at work. After all, their bosses are doing it: and not only that, their bosses are using their employees' productivity to empower those political views.
Proportion is important - bringing politics up occasionally (rarely), peacefully, and in proportion to other topics .. is very different to crusading about it, bullying about it, being emotional and irrational and losing sight of others' perspectives.
Those strongly emotional actions are a whole different thing and it's dishonest to use mild language to describe those behaviours as 'bringing it up' and more accurate to call it something such a 'arguing about politics instead of working'.
Viewed in that light is it unfair to forbid employees to regularly argue about politics instead of working?
> their bosses are using their employees' productivity to empower those political views.
that's because the bosses (an owner of the company) is paying for it. Presumably, doing so reduces the amount of money the company can make (since employee time is diverted away to an unproductive, but political action).
The employee, however, do not have this right, because if they are doing so not under the instruction of the owner of company, they are taking away their productivity that they've sold to the company (for their wage/salary).
As someone who works for a mostly apolitical organization - it depends on the issue.
For example, the company refuses to take a stance on:
- Brexit (even though it will negatively impact them)
- Elections or any vote (even though again, this impacts them)
But for example actively campaigns on:
- Agricultural issues (It's in the food industry)
The company VERY strongly supports LGBT rights and minority rights, and will raise money for charities, but typically this does not transfer into support of individual political policies or parties.
The view is effectively that the company has lots of customers, and we shouldn't alienate them if they have opposing views, and that taking a strong political stance outside our industry can look like we are not respecting opposing viewpoints that our customers or competitors may have.
It's not true that "LGBT Rights" are value-free. Promoting LGBT rights also alienates members of the largest religious groups in the world, including those that are majority-non-European like Islam and Catholicism. Being a practicing L, G, B, or T or pro any of them is against sharia, the Catechism, and against the rules of many major Protestant sects like Mormons. Gay marriage is expressly against the rules of most major global belief groups that are not the US and its Marshall Plan colonies.
Without a lot of double speak, there is no such thing as a 'universally tolerant' corporate policy because different legal, social, and religious moral frameworks are mutually incompatible. In the US people just prefer to pretend that post-Protestant Woo-ism is universally friendly to everyone.
So many of these major companies are extremely vocal about LGBT+ rights but it's all just lip service, the second it comes down to money the whole thing goes out the window.
Look at Apple they were very proud to tell us about their pride themed watch face and emoji, yet some developer within Apple had to write the if statement to disable these graphics if the device is in Russia [1]. By choosing to take a stance on these issues but not willing to take the monetary loss you're causing someone in your organisation to write that if statement which could even be interpreted as an active act of oppression to LGBT+ people.
If your company truly holds these values then there shouldn't be even a question about giving up that revenue for the greater good. Until that moment then its just performative, taking advantage of those communities for the sake of advertising and headlines.
If money is more important which we know it is because you wrote the if statement, well maybe leave politics at the door then.
A 'principled stand' in Russia would be to accept all the legal punishments that would come from flouting Russian law and the moral conventions of the dominant religion in Russia. That would be consistent with the principles of 'civil disobedience.'
However, globocorps do not do that. They are woke where the educated elite are aggressively secular and the laws support it, and they are profit focused and 'business-first' where it isn't. The US educated elite is under a mistaken impression that its secularism is 'tolerant' or 'universal' when it is actually rather parochial, particular, and incompatible with most of the largest global faith groups. The US outlook is also incompatible with Chinese political culture, and China will control the largest and most significant economic power bloc over the next 30 years -- no one else will be close, including the rapidly declining US.
Your high level point about universal tolerance stands - but you might like to challenge some of your object level assumptions about world religions and LGBT. Iranian theocratic leadership for example
officially does not think that being trans is against sharia and the nation carries out more gender reassignment surgeries than any country except Thailand (not that their treatment of trans people is perfect by any means).
Point being there is no such thing as a universally 'tolerant' moral system -- no matter what stance you profess to take on a given issue of this type, it will be discriminatory against very large groups of people (billions of them).
A past employer decided to publish a rainbow themed design for LGBTQ pride and rolled back the UAE version of the website following feedback from clients there.
I think "impossible to reconcile with the codified teachings of religion X" and "would receive negative feedback / appear intolerant to people currently practicing religion X" are different claims. Though I totally agree the latter is a good argument for why "universal tolerance" is not a straightforward concept.
Specifically: I'm disputing the theological claim "Being a practicing L, G, B, or T or pro any of them is against sharia, the Catechism, and against the rules of many major Protestant sects like Mormons." That's not really a settled question.
Iran subsidises gender reassignment surgeries because homosexuality in Iran is a capital crime. Transitioning is that country's form of conversion therapy; hardly progressive.
i hope you realize that homosexuals in iran are sometimes forced to transition just so they don't get killed.
>Iran is one of a handful of countries where homosexual acts are punishable by death. Clerics do, however accept the idea that a person may be trapped in a body of the wrong sex. So homosexuals can be pushed into having gender reassignment surgery - and to avoid it many flee the country.
Yeah Iran remains massively homophobic and hostile to LGBT rights - the variety of approaches taken shows that there is scope for the laws to be interpreted as compatible. I'd argue that claiming that LGBT rights are irreconcilable with Islamic law makes things worse overall.
I didn’t say the company was value/culture free - apolitical doesn’t mean that they don’t have values, morals and core beliefs.
It’s about adopting values which tend to unite your customers rather than divide them, and in the U.K. at least LGBT rights is one of those issues. A stance of no-support on these issues would elicit a severe backlash from customers in the U.K. but meanwhile they aren’t campaigning for changes to the law in these areas, or supporting particular political parties because of it (as reasonable people could disagree on that because of how democracies work, and doing this will alienate specific customer groups).
Not to mention that "LGBT" rights aren't a single, unified campaign and increasingly are in conflict with each other. Many, many gays and lesbians feel threatened by modern transgender ideology, and not without good reason. "LGBT" is an increasingly shaky alliance.
Funny you should say that, as the Marshall Plan terms were quite generous and the countries that refused them due to commie pressure are now significantly worse of in terms of GDP per capita, etc.
My take on it: Most LGBTQ+ rights issues are almost entirely settled and agreed on anyways at the greater societal level. You'd be hard pressed to find an appreciable amount of people that rationally want to take away normal, everyday rights from LGBTQ+ individuals. Sure there are exotic and controversial discussion points (E.g. child transitioning, odd bathroom laws, etc) but no normal business touches those issues with anything but a ten-foot pole and vague "messages of support". Brexit, on the other hand, is probably a 50-50 split within the overall population in terms of support and is an arguable/defendable position that rational people can and do make.
Meanwhile LGBT rights are pretty much universally agreed, and I don’t think that “LGBT support” is generally classed as a political view so much as an expected cultural norm (i.e. not showing support would elicit a severe backlash within the customer base).
That statement alone will divide customers in the U.K. and the advantages/disadvantages of withdrawing from EU human rights agreements are something that reasonable people disagree on.
Generally supporting established lgbt rights with no specific link to policy is different - it’s overwhelmingly supported and not even generally classed as a political view anymore (along with “is evil bad?”).
You're missing your own bias. There are people in the US (and in the UK, in the Vote Leave team who are now in Government) who believe that LGBT people (in particular the T) shouldn't exist.
LGBT rights are human rights. Brexit absolutely has a human rights component to it.
> He seems to believe that you can separate “political decisions that benefit Coinbase” and “political decisions that are irrelevant to Coinbase”, but you can’t. They’re all interconnected. It’s naive to pretend otherwise.
I agree that it's hard and maybe impossible to make a hard line that separates the two, but wouldn't you agree that some political decisions are way more specific to Coinbase than others? Specifically the CEO sets out a pretty clear distinction: "If there is a bill introduced around crypto, we may engage here"
He addressed the lobbying for crypto related issues in the plog post, something to the affect that we may engage in political lobbying when it relates strongly to our core mission.
That seems fair to me, lobbying for crypto and maybe even internet privacy laws wouldn't seem outside the mission to better his company but publicly declaring support for one candidate or another would. Likewise getting involved in a non-crypto centric mission like BLM would be quite far outside its mandate.
Whilst this is true it's clear that plenty of individuals let alone companies go through life only caring about and acting on issues that directly impact them regardless of the larger scope of impact.
I disagree that we live in a capitalist system, the lobbying you mention in your post clearly points to that.
Companies do what works better for them, which means:
- Earn money
- Retain employees
Political discussions will definitely make some employees feel uncomfortable or unwelcome (unless you have an entirely homogeneous company).
This is deeply unfortunate and troubling (I blame education and the media for people incapacity to have a discussions without feeling triggered) but it's today polarised reality.
Preventing or discouraging polarising discussions on the private properties of the company sounds like a sensible choice.
Political moves from the company will definitely have some trade-offs but have less of an impact on employees. This is not zero (I remember some Google or Amazon employees leaving over their company's political choices) but it's far less common.
We do not live in a free market capitalist system, which is blatantly obvious from things like government bailouts of big banks during GFC and huge encroachment of government within areas such as healthcare.
And so for better or worse we're actually in some socialist capitalist system. Blaming capitalism for problems that are often rooted in bad government is often just wrong.
But he also wants to influence politics and laws to benefit his company. Coinbase pays hundreds of thousands of dollars to lobbyists and lobbying companies around the world to advocate for their position (this is all public information).
He seems to believe that you can separate “political decisions that benefit Coinbase” and “political decisions that are irrelevant to Coinbase”, but you can’t. They’re all interconnected. It’s naive to pretend otherwise.