After announcing on Monday that employees of the tech company Basecamp would no longer be allowed to post social and political material on the company’s communication channels about a third of the company’s sixty employees have said that hey will accept buyouts and leave the company.
I read through the tweets and they mostly sounded proud that they had taken the stand. But one of them sounded suspiciously like reality.
This whole strategy sounds remarkably like a very clever way to have the dead wood “choose” to go away. My guess is that for the last year the social justice wing of the company has been horrifyingly unproductive and the owners realized that banning the problematic behavior would enrage the culprits so much that they would leave on their own.
In the current environment of woke ascendancy, telling SJW’s that they have to work instead of complain about the unfairness of life is like asking them not to breath. And offering them a six month severance package was just too tempting. So I think “bletchley punk” is definitely on to something. It sounds like Basecamp’s owners are saying, “Don’t go away mad, just go away.”
Maybe this could become known as the Coin/base/camp gambit, tell employees that they have to work and then hold the doors open as they leave. You can even hand out vegan muffins to them as they leave and tell them to have a nice day.
Of course it’s also possible that the owners didn’t anticipate this much attrition. But I think not. Stay tuned.
Just earlier this morning watched Scott Adams (Dilbert cartoonist) Vlog where he called Basecamp the management move of the year, getting the problem and and least productive employees to quit on their own.
Scott also wonders how the quitters next job interview is gonna go. “And why did you leave your last position?” “I was told that I couldn’t engage in political activism while on the job.” “We’ll get back to you.”
It is a wonderful paradigm for how to handle these people. I have another post on it coming up. There are more and more details coming out that reinforce just what a smart move these two guys at Basecamp have taken. Vox Day has written extensively on how damaging to a company it is to let these SJW’s hijack everything from your HR decisions to how your employees are allowed to act in the office. He calls them corporate cancer. After having experienced it at my employer I completely agree. It’s one of the biggest problems we face in the… Read more »