Incidentally this "Hiring 500 roles" PR appears to be an effort to get ahead of news related to an impending "hit piece" the CEO alludes to in his twitter feed today ->
You must not have experienced this brand of activists yet. They are toxic to the entire team and organization in which they are present. They sow division, intolerance, hatred, bigotry and exclusion unlike anything I've seen in decades of work experience.
Demands for equality and consideration are toxic to an organization where...
- CEO claims "Most American ladies have been brainwashed"
- CEO says that the company must "control the language" of employees and must not allow employees to self-identify
- CEO argues using racial slurs is fine as long as it's affectionately
- Lawsuits are filed against employees for posting Glassdoor reviews
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that what makes Kraken toxic, is not in fact people asking for consideration, but instead a CEO who thinks that (among other things) women are brainwashed. Maybe not the sort of leadership you wish to align yourself with.
That's because the actual goal is the opposite of diversity. They want conformity, they want to force the same norms and culture on everyone.
It's interesting, Coinbase had the exact same issue and it ended with some employees leaving the company. But it doesn't look like the trouble has stopped, now apparently different people seemingly unrelated to the DEI crowd are also unhappy with the way the company is run. See that recent petition for example that lead Brian to react with a bizarre Twitter rant.
Many of these crypto companies seem to have grown way too fast and hired too many new people at once. They failed to integrate them.
i’ve had people like that on my team. i’ve had people who, like yourself, primarily complain about the former. guess which one was more corrosive to the team?
No, funny thing, the venn diagram of people who complain about social justice warriors and being forced to respect others and people who are just assholes to work with is pretty close to a perfect circle.
I had a boss (construction) identify himself as a racist, use the N-word, and tell me he was glad to be moving to another state where there are fewer black people (but "Mexicans are okay").
It's the same kind of person. The difference is that your boss correctly identified himself. The activists in question are the same, but misidentify themselves, hiding under a false label. They are wolves in sheep's clothing.
I also made the mistake thinking they were sheep at first. They talk all about diversity and inclusion and tolerance, but in practice it's precisely the opposite.
Assuming you're correct that they don't genuinely want inclusion and tolerance (and I might agree with you depending on the individual), that doesn't make them the same kind of person as racists. You see, racists have a long tradition of actually murdering people, not just being annoying.
As mentioned in phphphphp's reply to your original comment, surely the CEO here is also "sowing division, intolerance, hatred, bigotry and exclusion unlike anything you've seen in decades of work experience".
DEI to inclusiveness is what Inquisition is to the original christianity principles. Imagine the ego of those who picked this acronym (dei=god). DEI has become identity fundamentalism at this point, a worship of body and emotions. Corps push it because it breaks bonds between employees (a careless joke may be reported to DEI apparatchiks, so better to be bland and professional). So a small company that wants to grow should watch out for DEI stuff and stop it early and firmly. A big established corp benefits more from top-down DEI policies, as those crystalize the status quo.
The Intercept article is about activists working in progressive political organizations, not about whether people who have particular pronouns are somehow corrosive to organizational goals. Having clearly-stated preferences for how you're addressed isn't activism. It is, in fact, basic nuts-and-bolts professionalism; voicing a negative reaction to such a preference is in fact more akin to activism.
> Having clearly-stated preferences for how you're addressed isn't activism.
To "address" means to speak directly to. The pronouns people declare aren't about how they're addressed, but rather about how they're referred to in the third person by others.
For example, suppose you've declared your pronouns to be he/him. I wouldn't use those pronouns when speaking to you. I would just use "you". The pronouns you declared become relevant when I refer to you while talking to others.
That's a distinction I didn't make because I don't care about it and it isn't relevant to the point I made. If a colleague with a doctorate wishes to be referred to as "doctor", it is unprofessional to choose to refer to them otherwise. Further, knowingly and deliberately using an undesired form of address for them is trolling; it's the exact opposite of professionalism.
None of this is news to Kraken, whose CEO helped maintain a "more troll-ish than 4chan" group on their Slack. Professionalism simply isn't one of their company values.
At any rate: my point remains --- there's no apparent overlap between Kraken, where unprofessionalism and cultural activism is coming from management, not from activist employees, and progressive organizations, which is what the Intercept article is talking about.
I've worked with academics directly on a couple of projects, none of them insisted on being called doctor. They introduced themselves by their first names... Maybe it's a cultural thing but in Australia (where I live) it is really weird to call anyone without an MD "doctor" when addressing them
> We've got people in 70+ countries, speaking 50+ languages in the company, trying to build products for people in 190. Differing perspectives will be shared. That's DIVERSITY. It's not always easy. You've gotta be resilient, humble, open and highly tolerant of differing norms.
That tweet is nonsense. Let's talk concretely: should a queer person be expected to be tolerant of a coworker who believes that they should be beaten or killed for their sexual orientation?
How is this belief surfaced? Is the queer person being threatened by the coworker? Why does it need to be treated differently than any other death threat?
I know quite a few high profile queer tech leaders that are constantly posting negative things about cis white men on Twitter. Am I expected to work with them when they're clearly not tolerant of me based on my immutable characteristics?
Random people on Twitter can hurt your feelings, but they don't have access to internal systems or private information that can harm your welfare or impair your ability to get your work done.
You're not expected to work with anyone you don't work with.
Human beings are capable of all kinds of petty emotions for all kinds of petty reasons, most of which are irrelevant to the discussion at hand. As a society, we recognize that prejudice, especially against the vulnerable, is particularly bad.
It is telling that, when a yes-or-no question is offered, the regressive tech contingent cannot stop themselves from posting and yet also can't answer the question.
To address the but-for in better faith than it deserves: as a cis white dude, I absolutely do not care what a tech leader says about much of anything. I do care what my co-workers say and believe, but my co-workers are not of a political, religious, or cultural persuasion that implies that I should be killed for being a cis white dude, and I would expect my employer to do something about it if that were the case.
Wouldn't you?
So, let's try again: queer people should be expected to work with those who believe that they should be killed for being queer. Yes or no?
> So, let's try again: queer people should be expected to work with those who believe that they should be killed for being queer. Yes or no?
No. But what does this have to do with DEI programs? Is the expectation that people who want to kill queers all of the sudden see the light from a powerpoint provided by HR? Or do people who want to kill queers get so outraged by DEI programs that they quit?
I think, in many workplaces, if you express the serious desire to kill a coworker, you will be fired, regardless if the reason is because of some protected class, or they just hate blue eyed people, or whatever.
No. If someone has publicly said that they think queer people should be killed, or if they tell their coworkers that they believe that, most would consider that reasonable grounds for termination, and also likely against the law (depending on phrasing and jurisdiction.)
However, I'm curious about this: "my co-workers are not of a political, religious, or cultural persuasion that implies I should be killed". If someone is a Muslim from Iran, is that sufficient evidence that they think queer people should be killed? If someone donated to a senator who is against immigration, is it sufficient evidence that they hate immigrants?
The interesting and unstated part of the question is, how do we know what a person believes? What's the threshold of evidence needed to condemn someone as a bigot? And who should be making this call?
I guess it‘s more telling if people try to use rhetoric devices like trying to force charged, binary answers on a very nuanced, and definitely nonbinary topic.
Speaking like this reveals that you are part of the subculture obsessed with gender identity. If you talked this way to me at work, I certainly would not want to associate with you. I do not go to work for exposure to this type of non-sense.
You shouldn't be forced to work with racists and sexists, it's your right to demand such people be removed from the company.
The thing is today we know race is pseudoscience and doesn't actually exist. It's an outdated idea that's been proven completely wrong by advances in genome sequencing. The problem is many do not understand this because they don't understand nor care about science, they care more about feelings. That shouldn't be your problem though, because ultimately a racially and sexually charged atmosphere at work creates a toxic environment that makes it hard to work and may even affect your mental health. No one can be forced to tolerate that.
Of course being racist and sexist isn't illegal per se, but companies can use this as grounds for termination. As they should where coworkers are harassed.
No but what's the realistic action. Don't hire from certain countries? Push American values onto entire other countries from the safety of your computer? It's just not a battle that can be won so why fight it?
The realistic action is to expect everyone to behave like professionals. Your boss doesn't get to police what you think, but he can, and absolutely should police what you do at work.
'Bring your whole self to work' is nonsense. If your whole self is at odds with acceptable workplace behaviour, it should stay at home.
The workplace isn't some island where we stop being a society that shouldn't expect tolerance.
It baffles me that people think it's ok to be a bigot anywhere, including the workplace. You don't get a free pass from the bare minimum societal expectation because you're sitting in a cubical.
I dunno. This thread has done a pretty good job of illustrating that one of the things upon which you can hang your hat is the desire for the low-hangingest of fruit to identify via well-actually.
"acceptable workplace behavior" is a rich white cis straight male standard, but you're probably not ready to hear that.
Judging everyone on how well they can act like a rich white cis straight male is naturally discriminatory to everyone who isn't, in proportion to how much unlike that they are.
>"acceptable workplace behavior" is a rich white cis straight male standard, but you're probably not ready to hear that.
I guess I'm now rich and white since I'm familiar with what is and what isn't acceptable workplace behavior. When does my check arrive, and when do you think my skintone will start to change?
The more proximate you are to rich white cis male, the easier it will (generally) be to conform to the standard. If you're a rich black cis male, you'll probably have a much easier time than a poor white trans woman, for example.
> Let's talk concretely: should a queer person be expected to be tolerant of a coworker who believes that they should be beaten or killed for their sexual orientation?
> Leading questions may often be answerable with a yes or no (though not all yes–no questions are leading).
And specifically referencing your example, still from your article:
> Leading questions are distinct from loaded questions, which are objectionable because they contain implicit assumptions[3] (such as "Have you stopped beating your wife?"
That is to say: the question posed is not a leading question, and the article you linked as a citation in fact directly refutes your specific example.
Your article helpfully informs us that your example is a “loaded question,” and we can ask Wikipedia what distinguishes such a question:
> A loaded question is a form of complex question that contains a controversial assumption (e.g., a presumption of guilt).
Yet the original question still fails this new test: there is no controversial assumption, and certainly no presumption of guilt.
Unless, of course, you think it preposterous that anyone would hold a belief such as “queer people should be beaten to death for their sexual orientation.” Or that it’s unlikely or even impossible that one’s coworkers would hold such a belief.
Unfortunately, neither of those are exceedingly controversial - it is trivial to find ample evidence of outright calls for the execution of LGBT individuals in the past month, and I leave that as an exercise to the reader.
The most controversial assumption here is that such a person might be a coworker. And frankly, that just doesn’t rise to the level of a “loaded question.”
This is a yes-or-no question. Should queer people be expected to work with people who believe that they should be killed for being queer?
This is the contention at hand. If you're going to participate in the discussion, you're going to need to grip it with both hands. I obviously think that it's a ridiculous statement, and nobody should be expected, either socially or contractually, to work with somebody who believes they should be killed. Do you?
I most definitely answer "no" to that question but enough with the master suppression techniques. Aggressively dictating what others are allowed to answer has no place in a serious discussion.
> Should queer people be expected to work with people who believe that they should be killed for being queer?
If they want to abide by the civil rights act, then yes. As otherwise those beliefs would serve as a very strong filter against people of certain religious affiliations and national origins.
Yes. It's a stupid question. Should I have to work with people who think atheists should be killed? Also yes. If they're not bringing up their beliefs at work then it doesn't matter. If they are then that's a problem
Taking this hypothetical in good faith how can it possible that one can work with a co worker who believes they are subhuman? A co worker who hates me for writing code they don’t like makes things like 360 reviews dicey, but a co worker who literally wants my death would make me concerned for every pr and 1:1.
What makes you think you aren't working with a group of such people now? I take comfort in not knowing the opinions and life philosophies of my coworkers. I need to compartmentalize some things so that I can continue paying my bills.
Definitely? As in they don't know how to keep their opinions to themselves? That seems to be a separate issue and employees should be coached on this to ensure harmony and prevent witch hunts.
I'm a left wing liberal and atheist but many of my friends are far right conservatives. The easiest way to avoid conflict is to not engage. I learned that when I was in high school.
I mean Im not currently in that situation, and my post is genuinely saying I don’t know what I would do if I was. I can’t imagine being okay with it. Like every interaction with that co worker would become suspect regardless of apparent innocence.
I'm saying, how do you know they think this? If they're bringing it up at work then it's a problem. But if their beliefs aren't brought up at work then how do you even know? If you're hanging out with people from work when you're off the clock then I don't think anything said or done off the clock should affect anything going on at work.
Genuinely: does this mean there are ways someone finds out that a co worker wants them dead that are more acceptable? I can’t imagine a scenario where how I found out would make me somehow okay with it? Like even if I found out by accident, during a drunken happy hour, maybe by an accidentally coming across their Twitter or something, I still can’t imagine being able to go to work and not being affected.
Yeah that's fine. If they didn't make any threats and they aren't harassing anyone then so what? People are allowed to believe whatever weird thing they want as long as they don't act on it. If you didn't find out in the workplace then it's none of your employer's business and they should leave it be. Unless this person is doing something that gives bad PR to the business then I don't see why it's an issue.
Well that’s the thing. Now I don’t know if any interaction I’ve had with them is because of me as a person vs me as a dehumanized thing. Was that nitpick in my codebase…? What about that comment in my 360 review…? Was I left out of a shoutout intentionally or was it just a slip of the mind?
If I find out my coworker is a Nazi, then I'm going to be extremely uncomfortable around them even if they don't say Nazi shit at work.
What if they're my boss? How can I trust them to treat me fairly, when they very literally support the genocide of me and my family?
Why do you think that if someone — again, very literally — wants to murder me, that won't affect the way they treat me or discuss me when I'm not around?
If the worker has swastikas on his FB page fire him immediately and inform the FBI.
I think what we are discussing here is more nuanced in nature. As in someone has an opinion on issue of the day and someone else feels that political issue defines them. It could be homelessness, taxes, or something else.
If someone interrogates me about a political topic I might tell them my opinion or I might tell them I haven't thought about it. Of course someone may get very very angry about the latter.
We’re not really talking about more nuanced things. I know “Nazis” is a logical extreme, but we do have a bunch of them around and they do really support my murder. When I say “I”, “me” and “my” in that context, I do mean “I”, “me” and “my”.
The most common example of what we’re talking about is LGBTQ+. It’s essentially a mainstream conservative position to try to legislate trans people out of existence, for example. That’s “nuanced” in the same way that slavery was “nuanced” 150 years ago — it‘s clear what’s right and what’s wrong, but there are a lot of bigots going to bat for the wrong side.
The thread is very clear they are only open to perspectives that don't challenge any of their own opinions. They complain on the one hand that one shouldn't care about offending, and on the other say that they wouldn't want to ask a Saudi hire what their preferred pronouns are.
Have yet to read the hit piece but some of the symptoms of a minority that just wants to be outraged for the sake of it dragging sentiment down whilst the rest just wants to work is quite telling and not the first time it gets brought up.
Also he’s on point about the loudest people talking about being inclusive usually being the most oblivious.
What minority? This isn't limited any group. When the CEO of Disney expressed his opinion about a divisive topic the governor of Florida was so outraged he and other Republicans lawmakers changed the law to punish an entire company.
I figured that. Also one of the official definitions for the word "minority" in both UK and US dictionaries is an ethnic minority. Therefore when people in the US look at the word in context or even when it's ambiguous that's a valid meaning.
For what it’s worth: I read your post several times, and the way you split the world in two, dismiss one side by saying they are a minority, and accusing them of derailing the conversation, and the final point on the lack of self-reflectivity…
I don’t think there’s two sides in that particular cultural war, however, I can’t tell which side you are on. Both would describe their opponent position that way. It almost reads like you wanted your comment to be ambiguous.
The fact the CEO goes on the defensive means he’s triggered by something which has a basis in reality. On the other hand I also get some of the points he makes. It’s my believe a lot of us are just decent normal people who don’t need the constant company employee wokeness and just want to build things, have a nice working environment (preferably at home) and then spend time on their hobbies and with their families. If there is injustice it’s good that it’s addressed but like many things sometimes the search for injustice and the need to make this about themselves is more a narcissistic trait rather than a genuine problem they want to solve.
The people who preach the loudest often do so to overshout their own past. It’s no coincidence that the loudest proponents of cancel culture and DEI have themselves a history of bigotry and bullying. Today this is the most effective way to bully or marginalize someone.
And some of the symptoms of being a raging asshole is behaving like one, and accusing anyone unhappy with your behavior of being 'not a team player', 'thin-skinned', 'a drama llama', 'outraged for the sake of outrage', and 'assuming ill-intent'.
Bonus points is if you're in a position of power over the people complaining about your behavior.
> In 2019, former Kraken employees posted scathing comments about the company on Glassdoor, a website where workers write anonymous reviews of their employers.
> “Kraken is the perfect allegory for any utopian government ideal,” one reviewer wrote. “Great ideas in theory but in practice they end up very controlling, negative and mistrustful.”
> In response, Kraken’s parent company sued the anonymous reviewers and tried to force Glassdoor to reveal their identities. A court ordered Glassdoor to turn over some names.
Kraken's CEO's notion of "free speech" appears to extend to exactly the periphery of criticism.
Absolutely hilarious. I'm reminded of every single Republican lawmaker who grandstands against gay marriage, only to have it be revealed that they're having affairs with other gay men.
I haven't read it but I'm going to hazard a guess that it's the article Vice just posted about him and Kraken. If it is, then lol of course it was written by them.
It's really funny to me to hear founder-owners be telling people not to talk about politics at work while the employees usually have 1/10th to 1/100th of the shares in the company, if any at all.
Considering most wealth in tech is tied up in equity, and that founders are overwhelmingly white men, it feels oppressive.
Makes sense. There's a lot of time for the DEI stuff at the company when it's doing well. When it's doing poorly, there's just not that much time for it. From the perspective of the discriminated-against person, it's better the ship go down if it won't provide a fair place. From the perspective of the founder, it's his ship, and he's more interested in righting it than dealing with that. And since time is zero-sum, you're going to be doing one or the other.
> If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.
I've always thought that this is Lincoln describing that his top priority is the Union (though others claim its that he doesn't care about slavery - which I disagree with). Essentially, save the ship by whatever means necessary, then fix the conditions on the ship.
Firstly, ranting about your employees to 100k Twitter followers looks childish and unprofessional. A CEO should be capable of dealing with their employees without talking about it on Twitter.
Secondly, it's never a good look to go on the defensive on an article that isn't even released yet. If the article is bad and unfounded, then he's just bringing more attention to it. If the article is valid, then this just makes it look like he's unwilling to acknowledge or address the problems at his company.
plus the fun contrast between complaining that an employee violated an NDA to share some information with a journalist, and saying "don't believe the news."
if the information they're sharing isn't true, how does it violate an NDA?
Some of the thread is reasonable - e.g. the ESL Saudi and pronouns - but trying to get ahead of a critical article by saying “FUD! Don’t believe the news! Apply now!” is not the best look.
I'm a cis woman but any person who gets genuinely upset at people for asking to be addressed by their preferred pronouns comes off like a clown. If I change my name and ask to be addressed by my new name, anyone who wouldn't do it would be ridiculed. And yet someone changing their pronouns asking for the same is somehow too much.
You don't have to be super-woke or tolerant to simply refer to people correctly.
yeah, the whole thing reads like clown city. "I'm way more studied on policy topics" is not exactly the sure sign of an even-handed CEO who's doing a good job at generating consensus or taking feedback. "whether differences in human sex exist at all" is what sexists say when they want to pretend they're just being reasonable, and "hey we have to fire people because they're upset about DEI, feeling disrespected in the workplace, and debates about THE FREAKING N-WORD" is just incredibly unprofessional.
not needing to have debates about the N-word has got to be the absolute definition of table stakes when it comes to competent management. this is the funniest Twitter thread I've read in ages.
edit: and this is the CEO's pitch for RECRUITING! this is clown shit on the level of Theranos, or when Coinbase was handling all its financial transactions through Mongo.
There is a slight difference though. In the pronoun case the asker is implicitly demanding that norms change on their behalf. The changing (or fighting the change) of those norms is an explicitly political act.
Similarly, my wife not taking my name upon our marriage was an implicit political act and my mom going by Ms. was as well.
At different points in time either of those acts could have brought ridicule to my wife and mother so that’s not a terribly good standard.
Personally, I view addressing people as they want to be simply polite but let’s not pretend that our view of “correct” isn’t a political act that is potentially outside the current norms.
I think it’s made to be political but I think the line of what is or isn’t political and avoiding it is itself a political behavior by its nature. It’s inherently political to say one name change is political because “I will go by Jacob instead of Jessica”, and another name change isn’t political because of “only my dad calls me David, I go by Dave”.
First, don’t say “don’t believe the news” because that sounds extremely sketchy. Second, just affirm the/your facts instead of negating the anticipated argument. (Typical corporate speak, “We are focused on our mission,” “We welcome a diverse talent pool,” whatever you want). Third, don’t say apply now because it seems desperate. If you must, then at least don’t link to the application, just say something like “We are always hiring” or “If you want to join Kraken,” etc.
This is basic PR I would expect from even a college club, much less the CEO of a financial exchange: not getting on Twitter using laughing emojis and crying FUD.
Does he mention "the hit piece" at all in those tweets of his? I didn't see it. Clearly, there is a debate going on about the culture at Kraken, including in the media, and he stated his case. Don't see what's wrong with that.
EDIT: oh, it is mentioned: "Someone's likely been sharing internal chat (in breach of their NDA) devoid of context, with a journalist who we expect to publish a hit piece in the next few days. "
He should just use the pronouns people prefer and not call people the N-word, but instead he has to have big sit down conversations where he explains why actually it's ok for him to use the N-word and ignore people's pronouns.
A bare minimum of consideration of people who are different from you goes an astoundingly far way.
Say whatever you want about his positions… but it isn’t cool to throw people in your company under the bus in front of the public. That right there is enough reason to judge him.
It seems people are reading this in completely different ways. I agree with you, but some of the things he said were confusing/unclear. Guess we have to wait for the hit piece to see what the other side of the story is. I'm reserving judgment.
What everyone here keeps forgetting is that you just need to look what happened to Netflix. It effectively almost destroyed them from the inside out. If the stock wasn't enough for them to change, they also changed their hiring memo exactly to what Kraken has done to reject the woke nonsense and focus on the product and not the politics.
In case of Netflix it was actually the DEI people that were the first to get laid off after they cut and cancelled the DEI related films and shows that were already signed. Perhaps cementing the fact that it almost ruined them, low viewing numbers and part of the cause for tens of thousands of users cancelling.
I believe that the Kraken CEO is avoiding a situation that just happened to Netflix and it indeed seems to be very reasonable to eliminate 20 bad eggs dragging everything down as a mission focused company and they have made it clear that they won't change any of that.
Sound very fair as the goal is to make money and to continue to pay the salaries of your employees.
My friend, DEI efforts hasn’t caused Netflix to lose subscriptions. They did that by consistently producing garbage shows, canceling the ones that were promising, and losing the rights to the good ones they licensed - raising prices all the while.
To each their own, I suppose. It’s frustrating to me, personally, that Netflix produces a handful of shows not catering explicitly to the dominant groups in America and suddenly there’s cries of “culture wars.”
That thread is hilarious. He went on blast about "the N-word" being used in company communications and so now I know that what got leaked is embarrassing and a terrible look. I wouldn't normally care, but now that the CEO has gone and done this I'm gonna be on the look out for the story.
As a side note, if this CEO thinks it's okay to toss around "the N-word", then why doesn't he just actually spell it out in Twitter? Or is he just a coward? ;)
Wild that (supposedly) only 20/3200 think using what is basically the ultimate racial slur in English is bad. And that he thinks this is a good thing? Just when I thought my opinion of crypto companies couldn't get any lower ...
I don't think it seems like 20/3200 are saying "Using the N-word is negative", but rather that they are unhappy with the company internals overall. Could be because of that, could because of a lot of reasons, some of them being outlined in the Twitter thread. But to suggest that those people are the ones unhappy with using the N-word and the rest being neutral about it, seems to extrapolate a bit too much from the thread.
> We recently attempted to summarize what the @krakenfx culture has been over the past 11 years, and what we hope it continues to be.
> We had a few heated debates and it turns out we have about 20 people out of 3200 who are totally not on board.
Ok so 20/3200 are "totally not on board" - i.e. they're the group of people supposedly causing trouble that we are going to be discussing in this thread. While tweet #5 lists what this group are annoyed about:
> 5/ What are they upset about?
> * DEI (Silicon Valley's version)
> * pronouns, whether someone can identify as a different race and be allowed to use the N-word
> * whether differences in human sex exist at all
> * being respected and unoffended
> * being "harmed" by "violent" words
So my overall read is that he's taking aim at "woke" culture, and my initial interpretation of the second item was "that non-black people are using the n-word" which tracks with the overall point. I guess it could be interpreted differently ("if you identify as black [these unhappy people] think you should be able to use the n-word") but that isn't really in line with the rest of the tweet.
But my interpretation was, someone's clearly dropping n-bombs and either:
1. only a small minority are vocally upset about it, the rest are ok
2. only a small minority have no qualms with it, the rest are upset
And the scare-quotes in 'being "harmed" by "violent" words' kinda look like he's ridiculing this point. Honestly it reads like a tech-bro version of the usual "these liberal snowflakes need a safe space..." rant to me.
I've worked at Kraken for almost 6 years, and know Jesse pretty well. He acquired my project and I reported to him for a while. I manage a large engineering team here.
I think you and many others are misinterpreting what he wrote. He's not defending the use of the N-word and I've never, ever seen anyone use language remotely close to that in internal communications. I think the example he gave is the ridiculous scenario of someone identifying as a different race so they can have permission to use the N word.
I think people are getting outraged over literally nothing with this story, I've found the vast majority of people working at Kraken to be perfectly reasonable and respectful to each other. I don't understand why everyone on HN/Twitter is so eager to get outraged over stories like this when they have so little detail and context.
I agree with the culture in general but didn't read the document thoroughly because I've been here for so long I know what the culture is. The document was more for recent hires and new candidates.
Nah, it just seems that he wants to be an edgelord ceo in his little kingdom.
> 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, according to conversations seen by The Times. He shut down replies to the thread after it became contentious.
> Mr. Powell reopened discussion on Slack the next day to ask why people couldn’t choose their race or ethnicity. He later said the conversation was about who could use the N-word, which he noted wasn’t a slur when used affectionately.
No. He’s making the troll argument that if people born men can identify as women (and therefore be treated as such) then why can’t white people identify as black and say the n-word.
Not as superficially bad as saying the word, but bad in the sense it is a two-for-one: trivializing the experience of black people and trans people.
Maybe I am giving him the benefit of the doubt, but I read it as the exact opposite.
I read it as him saying: the argument that "why can’t white people identify as black and say the n-word" is a troll argument, made in bad faith, and is disruptive to work culture and productivity, and people making that argument have no place in their culture.
I arrive at that conclusion because the heading starts "What are they upset about?" They are upset "whether someone can identify as a different race and be allowed to use the N-word." I dont really think someone parading against wokism would in good faith argue that somebody can identify as a different race. They would only do so facetiously. Three tweets above it, his SYN flood DoS analogy makes its pretty clear he is against people derailing good conversation with in bad faith arguments.
As an aside, I'm honestly a little concerned that basically every other commenter arrived at a different conclusion. We are all all over the place. Is our ability to connectively parse tribal language, in a consensual way, really this broken? Is what he wrote really that cryptic or unclear? EDIT: I guess he is the facetious bad actor.
I admire your effort to try to parse it, but I don't really think we should, or can: it's not a topic that can be explained in 280 characters, one can only fit so many layers of implicit ironic quotation in a tweet, so…
Don’t make convoluted points about discrimination on twitter. It's not suited for such points.
If you need to, draft something deliberate, long-form and edit it several times. Have a close friend review it, edit some more, and link to it from a tweet, but everything about this thread tells me no one gained much by being exposed to it. As a CEO, he should have known better, learn to communicate clearly and in the right forum, and not force you & others in a futile exercise on exegesis.
No, we are just reading a very charged statement and revealing our biases.
One only needs to look at the history of biblical textualism to see that this is nothing new.
Edit: my interpretation of “they” btw is that “woke” people are upset someone made that argument, which ceo is arguing is a way to shut down good faith argument.
Update: The NYT says he's the one who made the troll argument. So maybe he is the disruption that doesnt fit his own culture. Extending someone the benefit of the doubt only goes as far as until they prove otherwise.
Your interpretation is the other way I read it. Either the pronoun people and the n-word people are the same people, or they are two different groups of opposite upset people.
Given your interpretation, is he saying "engaging troll arguments further is a form of disruption"?
It's also possible the n-word people are prowokism but making a twisted not in bad faith argument that everybody saying the word is more inclusive. And meaning it earnestly. This reading seems the least likely.
His more egregious transgression, to me, is going from "If nobody is ever offended, we either don't have enough diversity of thought or we don't have enough transparency in communication" to 'let's sever ties with our 20 most outraged, so there isnt so many offended here.' There's some contradiction between words and actions. If he wants to build a offense-inclusive environment, it needs to include all outrage.
These 20 people should be encouraged to continue as an anti-culture team, as a counterfource and check & balance counter to their culture, albeit in a way that doesnt monopolize internal attention.
If you want a simple appeal to medical science, gender dysphoria is recognized in the DSM-5 [1], and gender-affirming care and identification have been shown to result in measurable improvements in transgender people’s health outcomes [2].
Neither of those things are true for “trans-racialism.”
Beyond that: I struggle to find almost any good-faith examples of people claiming that they genuinely believe themselves to be “trans-racial.”
The issue there philosophically is that prior to it's recognition in the DSM-5 transgender people would then not have existed. That is more of an appeal to authority than an explanation why one accident of birth is a social construct and one is not.
Yeah, that’s fair as an argument from first principles.
But speaking from a more practical standpoint: we know, empirically, that there are a lot of transgender people out in the world. We know that many of them feel much healthier when they are able to transition, in various different ways.
It’s not just an appeal to authority, it’s an appeal to a fairly significant consensus in medical science. Which feels better to me.
We just don’t have any meaningful evidence for “I identify as black so I can say the N-word” being anything other than an annoying troll argument. Or at least, I certainly haven’t seen any.
But if you want to talk about race/gender as social constructs, that’s a whole ‘nother conversation — one very worth having!
I don't disagree that people are suffering from a condition and feel the way they do. I'm sure if I had it, I would feel the same way. I don't care one bit what clothes you wear or what name you want me to call you.
My problem is mainly when I think about other, similar conditions, like elderly people who think they are 8 years old or patients who think they are celebrities. I'm not asked to think of them in the manner that they think of themselves. Another example: a teenage girl with body dysmorphia identifies as obese, but you'd have to be evil to go along with that dysmorphia. It just seems to me that this one case is different but I can't point to a good reason why.
This kind of argument has been used to deny people their rights forever.
In the 90s and 00s one of the arguments was that if you legalized same-sex marriage then bestiality would be next. These arguments are just a new flavor of that so that people can still be jerks to transgender people.
I think the crucial difference is that nobody was disadvantaged by legalizing same-sex marriage. At least in how it was implemented in the UK, religious venues are not compelled to officiate such marriages. So the LGB folks still get to enjoy marriage equality, but the reverends and imams and suchlike don't feel disrespected.
I was thinking more along the lines of how women's rights are affected, for instance. What's recently been happening to women in prisons quite exemplifies the issue.
Conservatives have complained bitterly that legalizing same-sex marriage disadvantaged people. You've got clerks who say it violates their rights. You've got people who say that it devalues their own straight marriages.
Some clerks have claimed that, but that's akin to a vegetarian working in a butcher's shop and complaining that they have to handle meat. If the job description changes such that conflicts with your religious beliefs then you do have a choice to resign, or, ideally, be made redundant and given redundancy pay to tide you over until finding a more suitable job.
Of course, but the point is that “gay rights and trans rights are distinct because trans rights disadvantage people” isn’t something that everybody agrees on. We shouldn’t let the fact that pronouns aggravate some people create toxic environments for trans people.
It's gone a bit too far now though. I mean, previously it was just a polite fiction to assuage the mental anguish of those who feel at odds with their sex for whatever reason. Now we're all compelled to actually believe it, in all situations. Or at least, convincingly act as if we do.
The honest answer is that I've not yet heard any convincing argument that would cause me to accept this as a reality.
Perhaps this is partly because I used to be a biologist and worked in the medical research field for a while (before pivoting to software development to get out of academia), so I have a very critical eye when it comes to the studies that proponents of this set of beliefs tend to use to support their arguments.
That's an interesting question. She is on record lying about her parentage and about being discriminated against by police.
Trans people (as far as I know) don't claim that their genetics are different from reality, but that their experienced gender is different from their genetically determined one.
I don't know if that's enough to consider her "bad faith", though. If you genuinely did "feel black" despite having white parents, it would certainly be tempting to at least withhold information about your parents.
The obvious answer is that what you identify as does not give you the right to do things that others reasonably consider offensive.
So if a transwoman goes on a rant about how women are all crazy bitches, she doesn't get to justify it by saying she's a woman. She can reasonably ask others to treat her as a woman. But it isn't a get out of jail free card.
Now for a harder one. Why philosophically is being trans OK, but it is not OK for a white to identify as a minority and then receive preferential treatment as one? What if the white is detectably a minority, but so little that nobody would notice if they didn't make an issue of it?
You're going to need to provide a concrete example of the "preferential treatment" in your hypothetical. The concrete example of the treatment trans employees are asking to receive is, in almost all cases, being referred to with the correct pronouns. Pronouns come up in casual conversation routinely -- that's precisely why folks make an issue of it. What's the comparable situation you envision for a coworker who doesn't "look Black" or "look Hispanic"?
It helps to have a more concrete example rather than one designed to be a straw man. I know someone who passes as white, but you'd never guess that she has a black father, making her ethnically as black as Barack Obama, and well above the infamous one-drop rules ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule ) that would have allowed her to be denied civil rights under segregation. By that criteria she's black, but she doesn't use the word in question. We can ask whether she should use it, or should want to use it, or should be able to use it, and that might be an interesting conversation, but not one with any hope of having a useful generalizable outcome; the context differs too much from person to person.
And since racial slurs carry much different, and much more charged connotations than gendered pronouns do, trying to draw analogies here seems almost deliberately designed to generate argument rather than discussion.
The counter is that the troll argument compares a substantial community of good-faith actors (transgender people) to a largely imaginary community of bad-faith actors (people pretending to be trans-racial) and from that point on it assumes that those groups are entirely alike in every way, even though one of those groups doesn't exist to any meaningful extent.
For me it makes me question a number of assertions we have. Why not just have stalls in bathrooms so everyone can have privacy? Why is gender on your drivers license at all? Etc.
Fun fact: gender was not indicated on United States passports until the 1970s, when it was added to combat a perceived rise in androgyny. In other words, it exists to enforce gender roles, not as an actual identifier.
I find it intriguing how this has become part of the conservative political zeitgeist, when it's an issue that previously was the sole preserve of left-wing radical feminists. And one they have been battling for many decades now.
Of course, the conservatives approach it from an entirely different point of view to the feminists, for whom this a fundamental women's rights issue. But it's interesting how they can all reach roughly the same conclusion from entirely different sets of principles.
Yeah, politics are a weird mix of 'we disagree that this is even a problem' (i.e. abortion rights) and 'we disagree about the solution to this problem' (i.e. trans/women's rights)
^That framework and the hypocrisy it breeds is honestly 99% of the humor on The Daily Show and the Fox News knock-offs of The Daily Show (Greg Guttfield etc.)
I've been wrong before in this thread, but I have to guess that the troll argument is actually a https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum where he doesnt believe his argument as much as is using it to illustrate how absurd he finds the pronoun debate.
The idea that a libertarian modeled company is ruling by fiat, and issues a decree telling people they cant ask to be referred to by nicknames/pronouns, is somewhat absurd, and he doesnt appear to see the irony.
I think it's (deliberately) been left vague who is saying has been using that language. But if you look at the tweet itself, it looks like he's got a problem with people who he deems as overly sensitive about some contemporary issues like respecting someone's pronouns and having diversity policies
If you look at the current crash on a Log chart it's not as bad as the 2018 crash was (yet?).
I personally don't hold any crypto and don't care much for it either way, but it seems reasonable that companies that fundamentally believe in it (as opposed to riding the wave and buying football stadiums) would be in it for a long run and hopefully have what it takes to survive a serious crash.
Bitcoin was created in 2009. There are not enough data points to make a reliable prediction that it will go up again. This time a lot more people have had time to think if bitcoin and crypto are going to work at all. Also, there might not be enough new people after this cycle to join in the frenzy and bring the price back up. We might very well be at the end of the pyramid.
If this is the end of the pyramid scheme, then thank goodness.
There is some legit usage for blockchain technology. Like Internet based distributed & encrypted storage (erasure coding FTW). Beyond that, I don't know.
Doesn't check out. Bitcoin's last cycle (bubble) started in 2016 when the price was around $400, went to $20,000 in December 2017, and then down to $3,000. The high previous to that was in December 2013, when the price was $1,000. Obviously, $3,000 > $1,000, even adjusting for inflation. So the low point of the previous bubble was higher than the high point of the one before that.
Adjusting for inflation, BTC today went below its December 2017 price. So the low point of the current bubble is lower than the high point of the previous bubble, which appears to be a new occurrence. Today's low point was $20.1K, which in 2017 dollars would be $17.3K, which is less than 2017's peak value of $20K. The theory that you will profit by holding BTC for at least 4 years is busted.
That kind of reasoning only makes sense if any of the exchanges are driven by actual exchanges of goods or services rather than just speculation. It's unconnected to physical commodities just like fiat currency, controlled by an unaccountable small group of miners and whales, and becomes completely centralized the moment you go through an exchange. How stupid.
During times of stress many companies will create job postings for roles they're not actually going to fill, just as a way to present an image of success.
Yeah, it sounds like a Goodhart's Law exploit: if public confidence is based on hiring/layoffs, make it look like you're hiring. Especially when your business is based on an intangible "asset" whose only value is public confidence.
That's a fair take, especially for a market in which the general sentiment impacts them so much. I guess we'd have to see if they fill those positions to prove they ever intended to.
I mean, it certainly makes it easier to try and hire if you're paying 40% less than Coinbase (at least as of mid-2020)※.
※ - Kraken offer was 120K USD with no room to negotiate, Coinbase pre-offer was ~170K base + ~30K options/year + bonus.
Edit: forgot to mention the weird interview process where they had the interviewee video on, but the interviewers were audio only. Hopefully that has changed since then.
Coinbase-level salaries are perfectly sustainable in this market. But over-hiring for massive product investments, none of which pan out over a whole year, is not sustainable.
Unless you're extremely unlucky (and many engineers are far from living paycheck to paycheck and can afford to take some risks) you're better off with the "unstable" company - even if you get the sack after 2 years and then take a year off until you find something you really like, you're better off than if you worked 3 years at the company with the lower offer.
I wouldn't take either offer today for different reasons, but this was during the hiring ramp up right after the March 2020 COVID shutdowns. No reason to take an offer that was significantly lower at that time.
The only thing I can discern is maybe they wanted to preserve the privacy of the interviewers? But if that's the case, then just do no-video for both parties.
Let’s see how many people they actually hire. To me this smells of PR: push a load of employees out the door under the guise of their views not being “diverse” enough and cover it up by insisting you’re bringing on 500 people. Just after your competitor announced huge layoffs, during a huge downturn in your industry.
So where are the screaming comments from yesterday then? Where is the outrage?
Many thought all the crypto exchanges were dying or getting hit by the crash. So why not this one?
Or is it because not all crypto exchanges operate or hire the same as others and neither are all cryptocurrencies are the same. This is the repeated problem of using sweeping generalisations on anything you don't like. It really doesn't help.
I kinda wonder what is not easy about saying no to such things?
"Oh man I really want to blow a lot of money on a tv ad but I'll just not." That sounds pretty easy / more of a personal motivation than anything else.
It's not easy because as a company grows and gets people from different backgrounds, you hear different signals. In this case, they likely have some marketing professionals with experience in different markets where a superbowl commercial would actually make a bunch of sense. That doesn't make the idea of a superbowl commercial bad, just perhaps not the right kind of expense for a company whose userbase is extremely online.
> See, they are pirates and not professionals, so it’s a “transition plan” and not a buyout package.
Right. 'professionals' like 'Netflix' being questionably part of FAANG doing the exact same thing as Coinbase, leaking memos, freezing hiring and laying off their employees as soon as their stock crashed. Even in the leaked memo, the now want to focus on the focus and not the politics which is reasonable to simply just make money.
I see none of that so far by Kraken. What you have just highlighted is that there is no guarantee attached to those 500 roles. This applies to any company and it's good to be skeptical. If you don't like these companies, you are free to start your own and run it the way you want to.
Them be right pansy pirates! In my day, when the crew's "values no longer aligned" we called it "mutiny" and hove 'em adrift in a lifeboat in the middle of the sea with nought but a couple of loaves of bread, a couple of bottles of water, a bottle of rum, and a few disingenuous wishes of "safe travels".
Mining & exchanges are the base of Crypto business (as long as they don't lose their pants due to hacks or emblazonment.. as they sometimes do). So they will probably be the last ones to fall.. (if it comes to it..)
Bitcoin miners seem to be in trouble, at least the publicly listed companies whose financials are available.
Since last year they've been hoarding most of the coins they mined. Rather than sell their product, they've held onto the coins and instead used financing to pay for the ongoing expense of the mining operations. This was done either because the miners saw cash was cheap and hoped to sell the coins at a better price later, or because they were worried about crashing BTC price by selling. (Since I'm extremely suspicious of everything crypto and tend to think the whole market is 99% fake, I'm assuming it was mostly the latter.)
Now their choices are dwindling and a firesale of BTC from miners may be at hand.
There's not been much research into the depth of the market, but it's pretty clear that you can't sell into much of anything except BTC without greatly affecting the price (if you can even find buyers).
Which is why there was a ballooning of crypto-market makers.
Thin markets and dozens of fragmented exchanges is paradise for a quant market maker. You setup a few dozen websockets and you get to charge some bitcoin miner 10bps per transaction for your “all-in-one API”.
> Kraken is one of the world’s largest digital asset exchanges and the leader in euro volume and liquidity. Globally, Kraken’s client base trades more than 90 digital assets and 7 different fiat currencies, including GBP, EUR, USD, CAD, JPY, CHF and AUD.
Pretty sure "digital assets" is the wording used in legal contexts, especially because many "cryptocurrencies" are not really cryptocurrencies but instead tokens on someone else's cryptocurrency, or systems that are centrally-backed and controlled by some company like a stock or something.
I think "fiat currencies" is just wording meant to differentiate conventional currencies from cryptocurrencies
"The ideal Krakenite is thick-skinned and well-intentioned."
I think that means "if someone is mean to you, or says something offensive, you will be expected to suck it up and not complain. They meant well, after all."
Also, edited because I just noticed: "It’s time to think about taking more of your paycheck in bitcoin because the fundamentals have only improved."
That's insane. Sorry. "Take your money in a form that is rapidly losing value to prove your devotion to our cause" is the language of a cult.
It is basically impossible for me not to find something I could be outraged about or offended by in any company I've ever worked in. If I was not able to respond in a way other than lashing out I would be unemployable, and for good reason.
There is off course nuance here. There are certain principals I am not willing to violate and will burn bridges to speak out against. But it's important to distinguish between those principals and other offensive ideas so you know when to fight those battles and when not to.
You seem to be reading this article and reading stuff between the lines that other people aren't. The article itself doesn't give you enough detail to know whose between the line reading is correct. Seems like maybe that's worth remembering.
I'm reading their extended culture docs at https://kraken-culture.notion.site/. I agree you can't get what I'm saying from the main article in the post. But that culture documentation is really something.
The "best" parts are part VI (where they rip off the US constitution and talk a ton about firearms) and part VII where they regurgitate right-wing "anti-woke" talking points.
Part VI doesn't go in depth about firearms. In any case, it would be pretty alarming to me if a cryptocurrency exchange wasn't oriented towards freedom and against regulation. Cryptocurrency, like cryptography or firearms is fundamentally a freedom-enhancing technology so long as they're in the hands of individuals and not institutions.
Concerning part VII, It emphasizes the importance of tolerance of diverse ideas, and respect for co-workers. Generally speaking, I think that the "identity politics" (e.g. "inter-sectionalism") that characterize "woke-ness" are pretty untolerant and anti-productive, even for the pursuit of progressive/leftist causes. It would be wise for any group with pro-freedom goals to weed out these types from their organization ahead of time.
I will cop that I honestly disagree with you about your characterizations of "wokeness."
But even disregarding that - the company is full of it. They sue and harass people who write negative Glassdoor reviews. Their CEO locks down Slack threads where people disagree with him and refuses to debate, claiming "dictatorship" is better. They claim to be "pro-freedom" but in reality I suspect they mean "pro our executives' freedom." Even if what they are claiming to be is good, that's not who they are.
Freedom simply is used as a synonym for "strength". It is weak to bow to others' wishes. Are you weak, or are you free? It is weak to accept constraints on your will. Will you accept regulations, which attempt to constrain you from exercising your will? Or are you strong?
Firearms are wielded by the strong against the weak. Sometimes for no reason! Weak people explain why they murdered someone. The strong "stand their ground."
I disagree. Freedom is a word with many meanings. One of them is not exactly "strength" but "opportunity", which could be established through higher levels of individual "strength" and ability to shape one's environment.
Generally, firearms are a freedom-enhancing technology because they enable people to somewhat self-govern and give citizens leverage against their own government with respect to the social contract.
But even if we accept the idea that individual "freedom" is somewhat used synonymously with individual "strength", then why would this be considered a bad thing?
>It is weak to bow to others' wishes
Bowing to someone else's wishes is not authoritarianism or weakness. Being forced to do so with no recourse or representation is authoritarianism and weakness.
>Firearms are wielded by the strong against the weak.
I completely agree. The disparity between the armed and non-armed population is what gives fascist and communist dictatorships to operate in the first place.
>Sometimes for no reason! Weak people explain why they murdered someone. The strong "stand their ground."
It might distress you that the strong have power over the weak. But this is merely the natural order of things. The world is only just and moral insofar as the strong choose make it so. If you want to render yourself and your peers weaker then you can do so, but you will only be forfeiting your power to others less benevolent than you.
The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
It's particularly interesting coming from those at the top of the food chain at a company.
Yeah they can say what they want and too bad if someone isn't thick skinned enough / nothing happens.
If someone not at the top of the food chain says something and someone further up isn't thick skinned enough... they can retaliate.
Then there's the weird setup where often folks complaining about people not being thick skinned enough are just reacting to situations where they're ... not being thick skinned / didn't like what they heard.
Yeah the thing that struck me about his Twitter thread was the absurd scare quotes around the terms he clearly disagreed with. It doesn’t come across as well intentioned at all. It’s like a get out of jail free card for literally any behaviour.
They also are looking "diversity of thought" over "stereotypical team diversity measurements".
It looks like to me that they are looking for people with common sense that don't get offended by everything and don't make everything a political issue. I hope we get more companies to do that.
Why is it so hard for people not to be dicks? I manage to go to work every day and avoid harassing my co-workers just fine. Avoiding offensive language is not difficult unless you are an inherently offensive person...
As always in those situations - people like the parent post author pretend that "what is offensive to who" is a settled issue and not the main front in the current culture war.
Would you contend that the offensiveness of racial slurs like the n-word is not a settled issue? That's the level we're at here.
This isn't "somebody said Latina and not Latinx." This is "the CEO wants to be free to use a word that has been notoriously offensive for decades at work."
I don't see where you took the n-word from, but even that to me as a non-american is peculiar. As much as I don't think the word should be used as a slur, people have lost jobs over using it when quoting someone else or even using it verbatim when enumerating things that should not be said which to me is insane.
In my mother tongue there are no "words-than-must-not-be-named" and I struggle to understand the logic behind it.
It reminds me of that Paul Grahams text "What you can't say" http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html:
"I can think of one more way to figure out what we can't say: to look at how taboos are created. How do moral fashions arise, and why are they adopted? If we can understand this mechanism, we may be able to see it at work in our own time.
Moral fashions don't seem to be created the way ordinary fashions are. Ordinary fashions seem to arise by accident when everyone imitates the whim of some influential person. The fashion for broad-toed shoes in late fifteenth century Europe began because Charles VIII of France had six toes on one foot. The fashion for the name Gary began when the actor Frank Cooper adopted the name of a tough mill town in Indiana. Moral fashions more often seem to be created deliberately. When there's something we can't say, it's often because some group doesn't want us to.
The prohibition will be strongest when the group is nervous. The irony of Galileo's situation was that he got in trouble for repeating Copernicus's ideas. Copernicus himself didn't. In fact, Copernicus was a canon of a cathedral, and dedicated his book to the pope. But by Galileo's time the church was in the throes of the Counter-Reformation and was much more worried about unorthodox ideas.
To launch a taboo, a group has to be poised halfway between weakness and power. A confident group doesn't need taboos to protect it. It's not considered improper to make disparaging remarks about Americans, or the English. And yet a group has to be powerful enough to enforce a taboo. Coprophiles, as of this writing, don't seem to be numerous or energetic enough to have had their interests promoted to a lifestyle."
And I don't agree with having someone else's taboos enforced on me.
(Which I'm sure some people will read as "I WANT TO BE ABLE TO SAY <<N**R>> AT WORK", but I don't think I can help those people other than ask them to re-read what I wrote)
Diversity of thought is great, but framing it as the only kind of diversity you need is often code for "We're totally on board with misogyny, racism, and homophobia, which is diverse from all this woke bullshit! If you can't deal with seeing those things at our company, there's the door! And it's totally coincidence that our leadership is all white men!"
It reads to me like they looked at what progressive-leaning companies put in their diversity statements and decided "we'll just do the opposite of that!" Their diversity/culture documentation is essentially a right-wing screed against "woke" companies.
They're right about one thing: It's not particularly professional.
Some of the writing feels like a cult (krakenites, the Mission, true believers) while the other seems like they're trying to pander to right-wingers. Perhaps they see the current climate of companies going all "woke", and want to appeal to those who feel left out?
Do they even realize how abrasive it comes out reading it in a corporate document and not some *chan site?
> CEO is on point about the counter productive SJW culture.
Let’s see what happens when, per the CEO, the other shoe drops “in the next few days”.
> Someone's likely been sharing internal chat (in breach of their NDA) devoid of context, with a journalist who we expect to publish a hit piece in the next few days. I just want to say we welcome all, and don't believe the news.
Far from the worst I’ve seen. But there’s a certain irony in regarding “SJW”s as being counter productive while authoring a 31 page manifesto on company culture and gun ownership(?!). It sounds like an exhausting workplace and frankly like the CEO does not have his eye on the ball.
This is exactly how I feel. I was heads down getting my work done, when suddenly the CEO plunges the entire company headlong into the culture war. It is counterproductive and bad leadership.
I agree. I think everyone in this thread needs to take a step back and stop being so prejudiced about some situation when no one in the public has the full story yet.
If it's accurate (big IF for NYT), there is plenty I'd personally disagree with (keeping non-work related conversations out of work IM servers seems great; being inclusive when it doesn't cost anything is a good idea), but in principle I support their mission-first idea.
https://twitter.com/jespow/status/1536978821345292288