> In general, we should expect more, not less, media coverage (both positive and negative) as we grow. I’m sorry you’ll have to deal with these types of questions and comments again — I know it’s frustrating and distracting. Let’s keep focused on building an amazing company together.
Acknowledges that bigger companies deserve more scrutiny. Then proceeds to be immature by implying that said scrutiny is merely frustrating and not worthy of any further internal dialogue.
Also, why isn’t this letter signed? It doesn’t exactly read like a corporate memo as it’s rather opinionated and sounds like one person wrote it. Is the CEO too chicken shit to put his name here?
> As Brian shared with the ColorBlock ERG this morning, we don’t care what The New York Times thinks. The most important thing we care about is you, our employees, and what you think.
(As long as you’re of the correct skin tone and political ideology)
You can have political thoughts. But these employees demanded in tears that upper management break their silence on an on-going case (which they decided was due to skin color, racism, and police violence/murder, when these interpretations are far from clear).
So what about the "political" thoughts, that said that Floyd was a career criminal unworthy of sainthood or role modeling, dying from a self-inflicted fentanyl overdose, and resisting arrest (where the other people in the car somehow received fair treatment, despite their skin color). It was gross to hear company's talk of police murder and police racism, and their devastation of the passing of someone they don't know, and wouldn't have known if they were Latin or Asian or Indian or basically any other minority.
As the article says in the second paragraph, the employees that they spoke to left in 2018 and 2019, so this response is irrelevant. I personally find it reprehensible and deliberately lacking context as well but you are entitled to your opinion.
The blog post about leaving politics at the door was in response to the death of Floyd and some employees upset about their perceived "silence" of upper management, where more woke companies did speak up. So it's relevant and provides context to that policy of focusing on company mission, instead of making statements about racial inequality, police brutality, and unfair societies.
You are entitled to political thoughts. If you can handle it, you are even allowed to share them with colleagues. But don't get upset if others have different political thoughts. And certainly not get upset enough to accuse them of racism.
It's very odd how people who openly express deeply-racist sentiments (as your previous comment repeating lies about George Floyd does) get so offended when accused of being racist.
> Floyd was a career criminal unworthy of sainthood or role modeling.
Floyd was arrested for a home invasion, where a 1-year-old baby was present, and he threatened a woman to tell her where the money and drugs was hidden, by pressing a gun to her stomach. After that he was arrested and processed 8 times for crimes related to drugs and theft. The day of his arrest he tried to pay with a counterfeit bill. After his death, Floyd was witlessly treated as some martyr, killed at the hands of racist violent police, and portrayed as a role model for all black people and the struggles they go through, just trying to turn his life around.
> dying from a self-inflicted fentanyl overdose
Handwritten notes of a law enforcement interview with Dr. Andrew Baker, the Hennepin County Medical Examiner, say Floyd had 11 ng/mL of fentanyl in his system.
"If he were found dead at home alone and no other apparent causes, this could be acceptable to call an OD. Deaths have been certified with levels of 3," Baker told investigators.
Offended that you brand me with racism for telling you an unpleasant truthful interpretation? No, I think me and my wife can live with that. But a little scared, yes. You can accuse me and others of deeply-racist sentiment, and that accusation seems enough to financially and socially damage me. At least give me a "fair" trial: Show me where I lied. Or these racist accusations hold as much water as those in the Coinbase article, and are exposed for the bloody clubs they really are.
> As evidence, it cites comments from Andrew Baker, the chief medical examiner in Hennepin County, who performed an autopsy on Floyd. But Baker didn’t say that Floyd died of a drug overdose.
> The medical examiner’s office ruled that the manner of Floyd’s death was homicide.
> The cause of death, according to the medical examiner, was "cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression."
You realize that his murder was caught on video right? Tens of millions of people saw it. And for the crime of trying to pass a counterfeit bill at a convenience store. If you've ever exceeded the speeding limit while driving, you have performed an act which posed more of a threat to society and danger to others than the act of passing a counterfeit bill.
"The Hennepin County medical examiner said that Floyd bloodwork showed a “fatal level of fentanyl,” according to court documents, but he didn’t say this killed him."
Seems a bit pedantic and disingenuous to say that the examiner didn't attribute the death to an overdose, without providing the above context.
I'm not here to defend the knee-on-the-neck arrest of a handcuffed suspect, but the evidence as it stands holds it as a possibility that he died from the drug use, which still wouldn't justify the completely reckless/inhumane way in which he was restrained.
Actually I think what the other poster did is disingenuous, which was to repeat a (false) claim that Floyd died from an OD, and not mention the fact that the medical examiner conclusively ruled he died from a heart attack caused by suffocation, and ruled the manner of death a homicide.
He was dying from an OD, brutishly helped along by a poorly applied restraint move, held too long, because filming onlookers challenged the authority of the cop, and the cop was afraid to have to fight Big Floyd, before the ambulance arrived.
Anything to avoid admitting that a cop killed a black man in cold blood by kneeling on his neck for eight minutes, even after he said "I can't breathe" repeatedly.
> because filming onlookers challenged the authority of the cop, and the cop was afraid to have to fight Big Floyd.
Are you suggesting that cops are such snowflakes that they can't do their jobs if a civilian criticizes them? I'm struggling to think of any other customer-facing job where that would be acceptable. This is like suggesting that it's fine if a waiter throws your meal in the trash and refuses to comp you because you complained that it was taking too long. They would be fired on the spot, for the crime of slightly inconveniencing you!
Also, there were FOUR cops there. Are you trying to suggest that an experienced cop, with three other cops present, was afraid of one guy who was supposedly so incapacitated that he was actively dying before even being subdued?
>>Anything to avoid admitting that a cop killed a black man
Way to stoke a flame war.. At the risk of exacerbating it: anything to bring up Floyd being black, while identical deaths involving people of other racial backgrounds, like in the case of Floyd, Tony Timpa, are never attributed to racism.
Also, way to implicitly accuse him of being a racist for not agreeing with you on the motives and culpability of the police.
Maybe it is the prevalence of this knee-jerk assumption you're exhibiting now, where you attribute any wrong committed to a black individual to some endemic anti-black societal bias, and not Coinbase's workplace environment, that is the reason why so many employees interviewed by Coinbase accused the company of anti-black racism, without
a single definitive piece of evidence.
>>Are you suggesting that cops are such snowflakes that they can't do their jobs if a civilian criticizes them? I'm struggling to think of any other customer-facing job where that would be acceptable.
Would you agree or disagree with the statement that "accusing cops of intentional cold-blooded racist-motivated murder on the basis of his and his victim's skin color, without presumption of innocence, sourced from emotion, and with mob justice, is a major problem in American society"?
See how you can disagree or agree with my question, while your goal-post moving question can only be agreed to if you are a reasonable person? Just because racist-motivated murderers exist and are problematic, does not mean Floyd was murdered with racist motives.
You demand I defend the cop's actions, just for my interpretation of the case does not align with your interpretation. You call me a racist and a liar. You can't even direct quote me, so you put words in my mouth, and then call me disingenuous (I never said "died from an OD"). You are debating from very bad faith, and debating poorly at that. And I don't think you even realize that, nor the damage it does to the debate, working together to a solution, division, and growth of the "silent majority", who is starting to get fed up with this childish I-never-fell-off-a-skateboard Twitter-follower activism.
> You are debating from very bad faith, and debating poorly at that
You're clearly not trying to "debate" out of a neutral position. You are tossing out a mix of unrelated facts and lies in an attempt to prove that George Floyd's murder was not racially motivated, or that he was actually dying from a fentanyl OD so the cop's behavior would have been fine for a healthy person, or not even to prove anything but to paint him as a career criminal who deserved what he got to bias people against him.
Short of a written declaration from Derek Chauvin, stating that "I killed George Floyd because he was black and I was having a bad day", there is nothing that will make you admit this murder was racially motivated, and I think it's pretty obvious to most readers of this thread why that is.
>>You're clearly not trying to "debate" out of a neutral position.
I recommend you practice some introspection, because this statement is so out-of-touch with your own obvious bias and ideological perspective, that it makes discussion with you almost pointless.
>>in an attempt to prove that George Floyd's murder was not racially motivated
There is absolutely no proof Floyd's murder was racially motivated.
Please don't flame me. I could just easily flame you and I'm not.
I substantiate this very easily: affirmative action means preferential treatment for job applicants who are black, and affirmative action is very common.
> Please don't flame me. I could just easily flame you and I'm not.
Your first claim so blatantly false and wrong that it's pretty appropriate to assume that you're trolling. I mean, systemic/institutional racism doesn't exist and/or isn't a problem in the US, what?
> I substantiate this very easily: affirmative action means preferential treatment for job applicants who are black, and affirmative action is very common.
So on the one hand you deny that it exists towards black Americans, but you find affirmative action to be so significant that it however substantiate systemic racism in favour of black Americans?
Am I correct you assume that you've honed in on the word systemic and will only accept that it solely means whatever is explicitly written down? So that systemic/institutional racism does not include implicit bias?
>>Your first claim so blatantly false and wrong that it's pretty appropriate to assume that you're trolling.
You do realize that I think exactly the same about you, right? To assume that your perspective is so superior, that it gives you a right to ignore civil protocol, is incredibly arrogant.
>>I mean, systemic/institutional racism doesn't exist and/or isn't a problem in the US, what?
You're not providing a counter-argument. Your incredulity at my statement of fact doesn't give your absurd allegation of systemic racism any more credibility.
>you find affirmative action to be so significant that it however substantiate systemic racism in favour of black Americans?
Affirmative action is a form of systemic racism, in that it's racism that institutionized, meaning part of the formal structure of organizations, and accepted by the social contract.
>So that systemic/institutional racism does not include implicit bias?
The formal structure of institutions, as defined by their formal usually written rules, is the best description of their systemic/institutional properties. Only laws and other formal structures can have a systemic effect, and anything institutional by definition consists solely of them.
One can stretch the definition of systemic/institutional a bit to also include the social contract.
In neither case can one claim there is anything except systemic/institutional racism in favor of black Americans.
Implicit bias is not a systemic property, as it varies between individuals. There is also significant implicit bias in favor of black Americans.
This study shows police are 25 times more likely to shoot an unarmed white male than an unarmed black male:
> You do realize that I think exactly the same about you, right? To assume that your perspective is so superior, that it gives you a right to ignore civil protocol, is incredibly arrogant.
I'm curious to know about what year you think, approximately, that systemic racism against black Americans ceased?
That you find me uncivil doesn't really bother me.
> "The formal structure of institutions, as defined by their formal usually written rules, is the best description of their systemic/institutional properties. Only laws and other formal structures can have a systemic effect, and anything institutional by definition consists solely of them.
One can stretch the definition of systemic/institutional a bit to also include the social contract.
In neither case can one claim there is anything except systemic/institutional racism in favor of black Americans."
As I thought. You have just decided to entirely redefine the accepted definition of systemic/institutional racism so suit your argument. "But it doesn't say anything about race in this formal document!". Ignoring anything - apparently no matter how established and prevalent - that goes against your arguments is the fallacy of cherry-picking.
The definition at the outset of the article is accurate, and consistent with what I said:
>>Institutional racism, also known as systemic racism, is a form of racism that is embedded as normal practice within society or an organization.
Anything "embedded as normal practice" is either part of the formal rules of the organization, or its informal social contract, just as I described.
Much of the rest of the article doesn't describe anything systemic or institutional, or it doesn't describe racism, so yes it's blatantly inaccurate. Wikipedia is articles that any one can edit, and when there is such an extreme ideological bias in the Humanities and Social Sciences, there is always the risk that the articles begin to reflect ideological conceptions of these terms, that don't match the words that the terms contain, like "institutional" and "racism".
>>I'm curious to know about what year you think, approximately, that systemic racism against black Americans ceased?
I think the end of Jim Crow laws was the end of most institutional racism, with some remnants of it existing in the social contract that was quickly dismantled in the 1970s, as society took a severe stance against anti-black discrimination.
But now we have institutional sexism and racism in favor of groups that are deemed to be disadvantaged, like women and black Americans.
>>You have just decided to entirely redefine the accepted definition of systemic/institutional racism so suit your argument.
Accepted by who? I don't accept the socialists' definition of "slavery" or "expropriation of surplus value", to include workers earning a wage, and investors earning a profit, respectively, either.
Alright, so you've redefined the entire concept into something else and then went about dismissing the established concept entirely. Because that is, unlike your objective science, based on "extremely ideologically biased humanities and social sciences". Good for you.
> I think the end of Jim Crow laws was the end of most institutional racism, with some remnants of it existing in the social contract that was quickly dismantled in the 1970s, as society took a severe stance against anti-black discrimination.
This is just staring oneself blind on the letter of law, ignoring everything else. That's not how societies work.
It's pointless to discuss subjects with someone who will just redefine them entirely and then refuse to even recognize anything else - everything else is now false, no matter how established. If this is not trolling it's at least dragging the level of discussion into never ending discussion of definitions and revisionism.
I'm referring to the terms "institutional" and "racism", when put together. If an ideological camp wants to put the terms together, and refer to a class of properties that are not both institutional and racism, I have no obligation to accept their arbitrary redefinition of the terms, and I can point out that the term is extremely misleading, like the "wage slavery" used by Marxists.
>>This is just staring oneself blind on the letter of law, ignoring everything else. That's not how societies work.
This is just ignoring what the terms "institutional" and "racism" mean, to push a grievance ideology narrative that castigates society.
I'm commenting on "institutional racism", not racism in general. Institutional racism is "racism that is embedded as normal practice within society", which only occurs through the mechanism of systemic properties like its laws or rules, or its social contract, just as I explained.
>>It's pointless to discuss subjects with someone who will just redefine them entirely and then refuse to even recognize anything else
You're the one redefining "institutional" and "racism", and resorting to ad hominem when any one points out the pure absurdity of your narrative.
> Institutional racism is "racism that is embedded as normal practice within society", which only occurs through the mechanism of systemic properties like its laws or rules, or its social contract, just as I explained.
Come on. You've cherry-picked a single vague line from the preamble of that article because it's so general that it also fits your narrow definition. The rest of the article goes on about the established definition.
You're redefining an entire concept coined to mean what we are talking about. Instead your clutching at straws adamantly sticking to the textboox definitions of the each word. That's just childish and have to place in any adult conversation.
Just in the last week you've redefined the following to fit your unsupported narrative here on HN and called everything else objectively false and refused to even discuss the other definition:
* Institutional/System racism, ignoring ~50 years of history (for the term itself, the practice itself is obviously much earlier).
* Soclal Democracy, ignoring ~200 years of history
* The concept of personal property and it's distinction from private property. Ignoring ~200 years of socialist history.
You do realize that you don't have to agree with the concept to at least discuss it? Something like "Yes, if we use established definition, which I disagree with, there's systemic/institutional racism against black people in America".
Because what definition do you even think people are using when asking you if it exists? "Do you like the color blue?", "No! there's no blue color". That's just childish and will never generate any constructive discussion at all, and is for all purposes just trolling or at least sabotage - answering a question that contains an established concept/definition with an entirely new one that only you know about.
>>Come on. You've cherry-picked a single vague line from the preamble of that article because it's so general that it also fits your narrow definition. The rest of the article goes on about the established definition.
The preamble is the most important section of an article. You don't "cherry pick" the most important part of an article.
My definition is exactly what the terms "institutional" and "racism" would imply when put together.
>>You're redefining an entire concept coined to mean what we are talking about.
It was not coined to mean whatever it is you're talking about (which none of you have actually specified by the way, because you know how absurd it sounds when spelled out).
>>* The concept of personal property and it's distinction from private property. Ignoring ~200 years of socialist history.
The concept of personal property is a socialist one. It's not used outside of left-wing circles who believe in left-wing economic quackery that is completely rejected by mainstream economics.
>>You do realize that you don't have to agree with the concept to at least discuss it? Something like "Yes, if we use established definition, which I disagree with, there's systemic/institutional racism against black people in America".
Established by who? Just as socialists don't get to establish what private property, or the terms "wage" and "slavery" when used together, mean for everyone else, racial injustice grievance activists don't get to establish what the terms "institutional" and "racism" mean when they're used together, for every one else.
Personal property is a form of private property, and demonstrates the prehistoric roots of capitalist principles.
The massive expansion of social welfare spending in the US over the last 50 years reflects the US moving drastically toward the social democratic pole of the free market - social democracy.
Workers are not "wage slaves" and their relationship with employers in no way resembles slavery.
There is no institutional racism in America, except in favor of members of allegedly disadvantaged groups, which receive explicitly favorable treatment through institutional privilege like affirmative action.
> The preamble is the most important section of an article. You don't "cherry pick" the most important part of an article.
Yikes. If this is the level that you're at, I really hope that you are trolling.
The point is that you don't have to agree with the definition, you can just recognize that it exists and that it's used. Then you can try to argue against the actual contents of it instead of the naming. So let's call "systemic/institutional racism" something of your choosing and go on about actually challenging the contents of it instead, alright? If not, this is a waste of time.
Is the massive BLM protests just a massive misunderstanding - nostalgia of former injustices rather than current ones?
>>Yikes. If this is the level that you're at, I really hope that you are trolling.
Please stop trolling. Comments like this are extremely pretentious, and qualify as trolling someone else.
>>Is the massive BLM protests just a massive misunderstanding - nostalgia of former injustices rather than current ones?
Is the massive Tea Party protests just a massive misunderstanding? How about the massive pro-Trump protests against the results of the election? How about the massive anti-lockdown protests?
You're acting like it's absurd to reject the beliefs of protestors.
> Anything to avoid admitting that a cop killed a black man in cold blood by kneeling on his neck for eight minutes, even after he said "I can't breathe" repeatedly.
This shows how you view me. You judged me as a racism denialist, for having an opposing interpretation. It is like I won't accept the Truth of your rendition of that scene, but maybe evil enough to be aware of it.
It would be absolutely horrible if a cop killed a civilian by maliciously kneeling on his neck arteries! That the cop did it, mainly because the civilian was Black and he was white! You sound like you want that horrible reality to be the truth! You already spray-painted his face on a banner with political talking points! Maybe you even got your company Twitter to pay their respects to Floyd.
> even after he said "I can't breathe" repeatedly
He was saying that when he got out of the car. He was under enormous stress from the arrest and prospect of possible jail, with a drug that already increases heart rate. The single cop had to restrain, because ambulance (not arrest car) was called, after it was clear from the "I can't breathe" that he needed medical attention for OD. The other cops did crowd control, because the frantic yelling of Floyd attracted attention. "Hey, man, let him go, he is just saying he can't breathe". Like Philando Castile, that single video footage then went viral, and the cop acquitted on ALL charges, after companies such as Google send out PR condemning police brutality and systemic racism, because capitalism is a tool which employees can play as well (ideally, aligned with -- not damaging -- the company mission!), and now we are here, with you suggesting I think cops are snowflakes.
Give me a court case, a light symbolic punishment to avoid a second protest/riot, while allowing for the possibility that racism exists, and did not play even a minor role in the case of the death of Floyd. That cop looked like a nonchalant fool enough to mess this up. Not foolish enough to kill a black man out of racist motives, while your Asian and Hispanic colleagues are keeping Social Media away from reality.
There's nothing in the article alleging that Brian Armstrong attributed "bad stuff" to being on the autistic spectrum.
The only allegation in the article is that Brian Armstrong did not speak or make decisions at meetings, and attributed this to being on the spectrum. The full quote is:
>"Mr. Armstrong rarely spoke or made decisions in meetings, the current and former employees said, leaving them uncertain about his opinions. In a staff meeting this summer, he said he knew his style made many employees uncomfortable and attributed it to being "on the spectrum,” according to a recording of the event."
There's nothing wrong or "bad" about managers who don't speak and make quick decisions at meetings. It's just a management style, and it's disingenuous IMHO to spin it as some kind of bad behaviour.
Obviously they were talking about decisions regarding the treatment and complaints of black employees.
I mean honestly what is there to think about? What are the other stakeholders he’d need to consult, racists? What other considerations, what is the other side, what downside is there about being against harassment?
Every educated person could issue a quick decision: reprimand the people harassing your black employees! So surely you can see why it makes “the inability to quickly condemn and reprimand harassers” is bad.
He adopted some really fucking stupid, untested, non mainstream cultural policy. Of course there are going to be consequences. Am I the only person who sees he’s bad at this job? And that it is a complete and utter insult to people with actual social disabilities when he blames “being on the spectrum” for being bad at his job?
> And that it is a complete and utter insult to people with actual social disabilities when he blames “being on the spectrum” for being bad at his job?
That cuts both ways. Discrimination on neuro-diversity is also bad.
> And that it is a complete and utter insult to people with actual problems with racism when she blames “being Black” for missing a promotion?
The autism-jab was in bad faith, and it worked on you. You turned his inability/carefulness not to make split decisions into a poor-faith excuse for being a racist tech bro oblivious to the struggles of others.
> What are the other stakeholders he’d need to consult
Labor attorneys, hopefully. An executive has a fiduciary duty not to make from-the-hip pronouncements (true or not) that might hurt the company’s case in court.
Fact check: James Damore never said this in his own defense and afaik didn't publicly reveal that he's on the spectrum until the Guardian wrote a profile of him months after the initial controversy.
This is in the wake of Coinbase decision to be a "mission focused company" and prevent their employees from speaking out about political issues at the workplace. It shows the dangers of being apolitical when saying "Blank employees should feel safe and welcome at their job" is apparently still a political statement.
This is exactly my point. What in this article is "woke politics"? It is all just basic "don't be racist" problems. When that is labeled as "woke politics" and you can't talk politics, we have a problem.
If you read the rebuttal Coinbase did 3 investigations, 2 of them by external reviewers (with the doucmentation made available to the nytimes) who found no evidence in the complaints. This is a hatchet job by the woke nytimes using identity politcs to cow a company who refused to kneel.
> Ms. Butler said she was not told how to make an official complaint; Ms. Sawyerr said she never spoke to an investigator and was not informed of the findings
Maybe you're not aware of the back story. Coinbase was one of the few large companies that did not go all woke over the George Floyd incident.
The identity politics activists in the company took offence to this and demanded management make a statement. When management refused to bend the knee the activists made allegations of racism and took them to the nytimes.
I feel like someone needs to put a big flag at the top of the comments section asking people to at least skim the article. Maybe the problem is the paywall? Anyway, the people they spoke to all left the company prior to George Floyd's death.
I don’t see why we need to be debating politics all day in the work place. I can guarantee you my politics (libertarian / capitalist / corporatist / anti-collectivism) will do nothing but enrage you and debates in public chats, lunch, etc. will serve nothing of purpose. Isn’t it better if we save the philosophical debates for beers and the ballot box? I don’t want to hear your soap box and you don’t want to hear mine.
You missed the point of my comment entirely. The issue is how "politics" is defined. I couldn't care less if Coinbase banned people from talking about the estate tax or free trade. However it is a problem when people can't speak up about the discrimination they feel at work.
You are talking about something that is so wrong it warrants a front page NYT expose and results in potentially multi-million dollar lawsuits. I can understand why a company wouldn’t want to promote sessions where everyone accuses the corporation of systemic discrimination.
Nothing post modern about it. From the financial system to the rules governing corporate ownership and taxes, they are all political. These these absolutely dominate your day to day life. Even the fact that there is an internet was a political decision (see ARPA then DARPA).
> As many tech leaders publicly voiced support for Black Lives Matter protests, Black employees at Coinbase said on the Slack messaging platform that they were hurt by the silence of Mr. Armstrong and other executives about the matter.
Also seems like lack of making a statement is now a workplace risk according to the tone of the article.
> One Black employee said her manager suggested in front of colleagues that she was dealing drugs and carrying a gun, trading on racist stereotypes. Another said a co-worker at a recruiting meeting broadly described Black employees as less capable. Still another said managers spoke down to her and her Black colleagues, adding that they were passed over for promotions in favor of less experienced white employees. The accumulation of incidents, they said, led to the wave of departures.
I find this hard to imagine without someone getting reprimanded. Not disbelieving the person's quote, but not accepting it as fact either. Seems like it would be easy to get corroborating witnesses for a situation that inappropriate.
The only group I've seen it be permissible to make stereotyped observations about in the last decade in an SF tech office is european/indian/chinese workers. FWIW I don't think that's okay either; we should be striving to make an inclusive workspace for everyone.
A lot of people traffic in blatant stereotypes in the guise of some kind of positive statement, which makes reprimands less likely. I once had a speaker tell us - in a diversity seminar! - about specific racial groups he thinks are too timid to speak up for themselves.
Our execs have short text guides on how to work best with them and everyone on my team has been encouraged to share similar. The default assumption is everyone should be working together to accommodate on how we can all work best together.
I've been in environments where certain communications styles are labeled more correct or ideal. So I've really loved this guidebook + accommodation approach.
I went into this article with an open mind about there possibly being toxicity I haven't witnessed w/i the company. But tbh the evidence comes up short and just doesn't match with what I've seen. I have interviewed at companies where some level of toxicity was easy to pick up on during the onsite (eg Uber during peak growth years).
My fear is that this article might scare away diverse folks from Coinbase, and possibly even crypto at large given some of the descriptions about the industry at the end. CB is a really great company for any curious nerd to join. I'd also say the Ethereum community and associated startups+labs are especially welcoming and friendly.
>CB is a really great company for any curious nerd to join.
Not if they're black or brown, apparently. I have no idea how you could say this is a 'great' company after reading this article. Like my mind is actually blown.
I work on a diverse team at CB that has engagement scores through the roof. And you don't need to know the survey data to know that; just join us for lunch. We're curious, we care about each other, and we care about the mission.
The NYTimes is like the Daily Prophet for muggles. Don't over-index on a hit piece.
You mention diversity. Do any black folks work on your team? Do you think it’s possible that black engineers are treated well and black CX are treated poorly?
On my direct team nope. I can imagine folks being treated differently in Eng vs CX at other companies, and have seen that. I have trouble imagining that at CB, but anything's possible.
CB stands out in my career for the number of good human beings I've gotten to meet and work with. And my read when I see Brian, Emilie, Surojit, and Manish speak at weekly AMAs is they genuinely care about everyone in the company. It's a gut instinct, and so far I have no personal experience or anecdotal from within my circles to the contrary.
My sister used to work in CX (outside of tech) and it was really damaging work for her. It'd be devastating for me to learn our folks are not supported.
You are wrong, apparently. 4 out of 7 members of the exec team have last names indicating they are people of color. Check yourself: https://www.coinbase.com/about
If the head of product and the head of engineering are brown people, I am very confident that CB is a great place to join for brown nerds since culture flows from the top.
Really missing the forests for the trees, here. It's clear that there are under-represented groups at CoinBase that are routinely discriminated. It is unthinkable to me for HN readers to defend that, but here we are regardless.
Maybe I should have used the term 'under-represented minorities,' because I don't see a single black or latino person (admittedly, this is what I meant as 'brown' since I'm Hispanic).
> It is unthinkable to me for HN readers to defend that
> admittedly, this is what I meant as 'brown'
I mean, if you are going to use 'brown' to exclusively refer to latinos when half the world (or more?) is brown, then obviously you are going to sow confusion on forums like HN with participants across the globe.
I think it’s much less an issue with people who have relocated and spent a few years adapting to us, but to succeed with foreign cultures you have to know how directly they prefer to communicate. Dave Barry tells this story:
(Beth) “… and then we want to take a plane from Point A to Point B.”
(Japanese travel agent) “I see. You want to take a plane?” “Yes.”
“From Point A?” “Yes.”
“To Point B?” “Yes.”
“Ah.” “Can we do that?”
“Perhaps you would prefer to take a train.” “No, we would prefer to take a plane.”
“Ah-hah. You would prefer to take a plane?” “Yes. A plane.”
“I see. From Point A?”
This mystified his wife but apparently between Japanese this is virtually screaming “THERE IS NO PLANE, YOU ZITBRAIN!”
Yeah, for working with non-American employees this kind of training would make a lot of sense. This guy in particular was talking about American Latinas, though.
Being timid is strongly connected to your upbringing, your upbringing is strongly connected to culture and culture is strongly connected to race.
Sure, saying "X are too timid" is a stereotype, but pointing out at a diversity seminar that you should be extra observant around X because they tend to not speak up for themselves is just good advice. Many cultures value being quiet and doing your job a lot more than others, and those values get passed down by parents for at least a few generations after immigrating. If that group doesn't have a good support structure (no BLM equivalent), that only adds to the fear of speaking out.
If you're a manager that gets many complaints from group Y but very few from group X, knowing that might lead you to do some more investigating and discover group X is being treated even worse, they're just not reporting it. Using a heuristing to optimise your search given imperfect information, if you will.
See, that's the kind of thing I've never understood - how could it not be connected? Race has been historically mostly a geographic thing. You'd see Asian people in Asia, African people in Africa, etc. Anyone else had to have immigrated, or is the child of an immigrant however many generations ago. Culture is also very geographic. Immigrants tend to bring their culture with them (which is a good thing!) and parents usually want to raise their children at least partially in their culture.
Eh, I'm not sure what point I was trying to make, and to be clear I don't think your comment was racist.
Culture is obviously correlated with race in some respects. It's when you start talking about the reason behind some of those correlations that you risk (rightly or wrongly) being called a racist.
> The only group I've seen it be permissible to make stereotyped observations about in the last decade in an SF tech office is european/indian/chinese workers.
As a South Asian minority, this is also my experience. The racism, stereotyping and stigma against South Asians feels more acceptable and totally unrecognized.
People treat you with contempt and ridicule if you complain about being unfairly treated. They hide behind objective processes that give cover to be biased. If process A, B, and C are objective, A+B+C can still yield terrible, biased outcomes. Witnesses and data simply doesn’t matter without empathy and understanding.
So do you believe that all the white employees just laughed about this? Did any of them corroborate the allegations?
I work at a FAANG and a massive percentage of employees are rabidly anti-racist, and wouldn't stand for anything like that. Are coinbase employees just cut from a different cloth?
Absolutely. Look at their CEO statements. They seem to hire very anti-establishment, anti-pc (in their view). It’s easy for a culture to then not hire people who don’t fit that mold.
> I work at a FAANG and a massive percentage of employees are rabidly anti-racist, and wouldn't stand for anything like that.
I get nervous when I make a comment about Zoom being insecure because it's Chinese around Chinese coworkers, and I can at least point to its bad track record on security and how Five Eyes members are treating Huawei.
I'm not sure I fully understand your point, but it might be worth adjusting your language a little bit to account for a quirk of our language(in that Chinese could refer to the nationality, or the government): I assume your problem with Zoom is its association with the CCP, and not just that it is merely Chinese.
Conspiracy theory time: That's not a quirk with our language, there's a deliberate lack of distinction between the country and the people. During the Cold War, you could say "Soviet" instead of "Russian" to clearly demarcate between the nation and the nationality. We don't have a modern equivalent for the PRC, and that's because someone wants it that way. It'd be trivial for a new term to be pushed through media, but it's not being done, even though we clearly need one.
Jews, who formed such a large part of the emigration from the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s to the USA, often bristle at being called "Russian". Yes, their language is now Russian after Eastern Europe's Jews have shifted away from Yiddish, but they still don't consider themselves Russians. For example, my own mother-in-law is a member of this emigre demographic and insists on being referred to as "a Jew from the Soviet Union".
> During the Cold War, you could say "Soviet" instead of "Russian" to clearly demarcate between the nation and the nationality
That's not what that distinguished. It distinguished whether you were talking about things pertaining to the USSR and those specifically having to do with Russia; the same rough difference as between “American” and “Californian” (or, perhaps a better analogy would be “British” and “English”.)
> We don't have a modern equivalent for the PRC
Mostly because China didn't conquer a bunch of neighbors and create a name for the resulting state distinct from “China”, which remains as the name for the absolutely dominant component.
But, again, while the Soviet/Russian distinction did exist, it did not serve the purpose you describe, and we didn't have any linguistic distinction that did.
China definitely refers to themselves as China when speaking English just like the United States refers to itself as 美利坚合众国 or just 美国 when speaking Chinese.
That's a good point: it's specifically CCP involvement, and language doesn't differentiate that well. It doesn't help that the CCP is the only game in town. It's hard not to be involved with the CCP in China.
It seems possible that a much smaller company could have a sizable number of employees who claim to be anti-racist, but fail to behave that way in practice. Particularly one with a concentration of libertarian "crypto bros" who are often at odds with employees who might be described as "rabidly anti-racist".
A job in a competitive industry is probably the first area where a lot of people first see social promotion end as younger more capable people surpass them. This is going to be especially true for people who have received the benefits of affirmative action up until this point in their lives.
> I know it’s frustrating and distracting. Let’s keep focused on building an amazing company together.
One would hope an amazing company that doesn't cover it's ass when it turns out the executive couldn't give a hoot about the treatment of black people and now everyone knows
One could argue that it would be unethical to use your investors’ money as a political (or even idealogical) bullhorn.
Notwithstanding, such a position places zero restrictions on doing the same with your own money..but corporations make for more interesting headlines than the individuals that run them.
Do you think 11 instances in a company of 1,394 employees shows an "extensive pattern"? We also don't know how many of those were even accurate or corroborated.
When it's 50% of the black employees, yeah. When discussing issues in crosstabs, you can't use the overall number as the denominator. That's bad statistics.
Because an extensive pattern of racism against Black employees is still an extensive pattern of racism. Being an exceptional employer to Asian or White or Middle Eastern employees does not excuse an extensive pattern of racism against Black employees, and vice versa.
Like, I'm not sure how to clarify this further. Being racist against only a specific race or races is very much still racism (sort of by the definition, isn't it).
I don't think it's extensive because of the very low sample size, the fact we don't know about each instance and none of it has been corroborated.
I'm also uneasy about letting black people speak for other POCs on this issue. In my experience, racists tend to be racist towards multiple or all other races rather than a single one -- hence why you dismissing other POCs views on it doesn't make sense to me.
Less than 1% is not "extensive" by anyone's metric, either.
At the risk of repeating myself, it's not 1%. It's 50%.
I don't see back people speaking for other poc. I see black people speaking about their own experiences, and you discounting those experiences because they may not be shared by other poc.
It also seems strange to me that you believe racism is always cross-cultural. The causes of anti-black, anti-middle eastern, and anti-asian discrimination by americans are all different, why do you assume they'd be the same. Things get even more complicated when you add other cultures to the mix. You presumably don't discount caste discrimination against one caste because the others didn't experience it, so why presume that someone who is prejudiced against black people must also be prejudiced against asians?
While there is racism against asian people in tech in the bay, it's usually model minority related things, or language based (or there are other kinds but less common in a workplace context). Less about being unqualified, and more about being different. It wouldn't at all surprise me if the multiracial leadership team of coinbase set the culture such that certain forms of prejudice (that affect the leadership) were not allowed, while certain forms of prejudice (that perhaps the leadership shares, or perhaps they are simply ambivalent about) can fester.
The NYT has long been complicit in promoting the divisive and racist woke/CRT cult. I can't imagine either side of this genuinely believes they are an impartial party.
if a house is burning and you have the fire extinguisher, you don’t get to be neutral buddy
you run a company and tell people they will feel included and then they face discrimination... well your house is on fire, you are the leadership and decide not to use you position to do anything
but yeah let’s make it zero sum and say that looking after the investor means that we can treat black people with some decency
> Still another said managers spoke down to her and her Black colleagues, adding that they were passed over for promotions in favor of less experienced white employees
I hate this kind of sloppy writing. who added that, the colleague or the manager?
EDIT: Downvoted. I guess clarity in the NYT isn't allowed to be questioned..
This piece paints coinbase as a company with racist tendencies and a hostile place to work for black people.
Based on the evidence or lack there of provided the article and after reading coinbase's rebuttal, I must say this NYT piece feels like an attempt to bully coinbase/armstrong into reverting its/his stance on engagement in issues unrelated to coinbase core mission and into submission to the cause.
11 of then ~20 Black employees by early 2019* had complained to HR about racism. That's over half! And that's only the people with the fortitude or optimism to talk to HR (HR is notoriously useless at many companies). That's a complete disaster. 15 of that 20 quit! Why wasn't that treated as an emergency?
*At the end the article says at the end of 2019 there's 31 Black employees of 1000. At the beginning of the article about the beginning of 2019 it's about 20 of 600 before 15 Black employees quit.
It's a private company, they can do whatever they want as long as it doesn't violate the law.
And if there is a legal case against them the accuser has the burden of proof and due process.
All I see from this article is a bunch of hearsay & rumors. It looks like a smear campaign to get some quick 'reparations' by riding a popular trend.
We have this thing in the US called presumption of innocence, but apparently in case of racism accusations you're guilty as soon as proclaimed guilty by the media.
Coinbase legal team should definitely sue NYT and this 'team' of accusers for libel & slander. The hysteria is getting ridiculous.
Neither the parent nor the GP said anything about Coinbase violating laws. I’m not sure how the legality of their actions is relevant to the discussion.
I don’t think employees recounting their personal experiences while at the company is rumors or hearsay. And the article mentioned many of them had to sign an NDA in exchange for a severance package so I don’t think “reparations” are the goal.
Several black employees claim to have experienced racism at a noteworthy tech company. It’s been posted to HN for the same reason all the other stories, discussion. Do these employees need to ask you for permission before they can go to the press to talk about what they experienced? You complain about baseless accusations and then make a claim about this being extortion for settlement money.
If their rights have been violated why don't they go to court with all the available evidence?
Accusation of racial discrimination in a workplace is a serious deal, and it's not up to the media to decide who's right or wrong solely based on one side (disputed) claims.
It's called defamation and they are legally liable.
Are you saying that the highest standard you’d hold a company to is mere compliance with the law? Hope I never have to work somewhere where that’s the best we can do.
Let’s not forget that Coinbase took that no-politics stance while NYT is a company thriving on politics drama. Also, legacy media companies have an axe to grind with the high tech industry which lately is their direct competitor for ad money.
Bottom line, New York Times is heavily biased and has zero credibility when it comes to their coverage of the high tech industry. This is a hit piece.
Your comments keep repeating about stances of "no-politics", why does that attract you so much? Why is the status quo of politics so good that being apolitical looks to be something you prize?
Libel and slander, both? Does your legal consultancy understand the difference between the two? Does it understand how those laws apply to newspapers in America?
According to the article 15 black people left in total between late '18 early '19. It seems that the compliance team makes up the major part of the departures (up to 8 quit, depends how you read it). From the article this could be attributed to coinbase opening an office in portland and employees declined to move.
The headline also mentions that black people were fired, but never follows up on it.
Companies can be incredibly callous about retention issues, especially if fixing them involves noticing which managers are responsible for behaving badly towards their staff.
Well we allow those companies to continue to dismiss their interactions with most of the people in the company as "retention issues," so I think I can spot an actual cause here. Roll in typical treatment of customers as barriers to profit and we have a theme starting.
Hiring and onboarding costs money. Having people quit costs money in replacing them. Allowing managers to drive them out and incur the cost of replacement is basically allowing them to light money on fire for their entertainment.
Not from the POV of the company, but from the individual actors within it, is the problem solved. Principal-agent dilemma, innit.
Only if the issue is with that individual employee. In this case, that obviously isn’t the case. Ignoring a systemic problem in your company solves nothing.
Don't know if that's true. The big goal is to avoid federal lawsuits and other scandals. If the can can be kicked down the road for a few more years, fine! Uber only blew up because Susan Fowler was better connected than most, and you'd like to know how much the scandal affected the company. Uber is fine, Kalanick is fine, a few HR drones lost their jobs, business as usual.
Diversity in team pays off, you are missing if you don’t have a diverse team. It’s not a charity anymore it’s more of a science in getting quality output from your team.
The cynical view is that you can either kick out your racists or those who complains about racists. And given how "diverse" tech is I wouldn't be surprised if the company would have a bigger problem if the racists left instead of the black people.
Tech is incredibly diverse.. The racial representation in tech is roughly proportional to the racial representation in Computer Science. i.e. it's not racism that is keeping black Americans out of tech, and suggesting otherwise with zero evidence beyond the observed racial disparity is extremely irresponsible.
It’s not. It isn’t. And why do you think the racial diversity in Comp Sci doesn’t match that of America? Or even that of the general college population?
The same reasons that are always ignored or considered sinful by progressives. Some people are more interested than others, just the same way that nursing and numerous other non-diverse fields that you mysteriously aren't concerned about have people driven to them in numbers that don't match the population.
You can only claim tech isn't diverse if you ignore the massive overrepresentation of asians. Going off of Google's diversity report (because it's easy to find), non hispanic whites make up 43% of Google but 61% of America. For blacks it's 5% of Google and 12% of America. By those metric we should be pushing Google to hire more white and black employees.
This needs a name, but when you have a very small minority in a much larger group (women who are software engineers, black people in a white company or guys who work as childcare workers) you can see insane levels of hated against members of that group, even if most of the larger group goes out of their way to be friendly with the minority, because even a very small percent of the larger group that hates the minority can still be numerically larger than the entire group. Not to mention that one bad manager can cause trouble for numerous employees.
I'm not sure I understood correctly - wouldn't removing discrimination or other hurdles for marginalized groups in your organization be more "for everybody"?
There was no evidence of discrimination after 3 investiagtions. 2 done by external auditors. This isn't about discrimination it's about a group of woke activists trying to sieze power for themselves.
"we hired an external consultant in August of this year who specializes in data science and diversity and inclusion to cull through all of our historic data related to diversity ... and conduct a high volume of interviews with employees representing all background, functions, and tenures to understand the employee experience. The independent investigation concluded that there was no evidence of structural bias in hiring, promotions or performance evaluations."
"All of those complaints were thoroughly investigated, one through an internal investigation and two by separate third-party investigators, all of whom found no evidence of wrongdoing and concluded the claims were unsubstantiated. We have shared this information with the reporter."
So external investigators didn't find anything wrong and the data was shared with the NYT reporter. What else can they do if they are really innocent?
Nothing, they refused to participate in valley politics and are now the enemy. They can do nothing. In the eyes of NYT reporters and similar, they are evil.
Did they disclose who the "external investigators" are? It matters. There are firms you can hire to rubber stamp a conclusion and others who with serious reputations.
The external investigators were hired and paid for by Coinbase and we know nothing about the details of their findings (or who they even were) other than that single mention in the company's own blog post. There's no mention in the post about 'data' shared with the NYT, they just told them the investigations cleared them. Here's NYT's version:
Ms. Milosevich said Coinbase hired a consultant over the summer who did interviews and looked at the company’s history, and found “no evidence of structural bias.”
“Employees reported a strong culture, fair employee treatment, high employee satisfaction and high energy for belonging, inclusion and diversity,” she said.
Managers in the customer support team, where many of the Black employees work, wrote their own report last month.
As far as I can tell the NYTimes was unable to find evidence either. There's no corroborating witness, emails, slacks, voicemails, statistics, or anything else concrete that you can point at in the article. It's a collection of accusations and color to lend them credence.
When a group of people say they see smoke I tend to believe them. But I'm also not a national news paper. I'd have like to see the NYTimes get some concrete facts before making such a serious accusation.
The NYT are not the police/FBI. They do not have access to those things, unless employees are able to exfiltrate said info at significant personal risk.
Seems a bit incongruous to suggest that people willing and able to accuse Coinbase of racism in the NYTimes are not willing or able to exfiltrate evidence of those accusations.
None of those are messages/documents contain racist action by anyone at Coinbase. They are (1) a reaction to a blog post, (2) a reaction to a letter, and (3) a conclusion in a report. They are not concrete evidence of racism.
I'm not sure what your standard is, you said 'corroborating evidence'. This is evidence that corroborates what the employees told the NYT. Now you're at 'concrete evidence'. What would that be? That someone yelled racial slurs at employees and then handed out signed receipts? The coinbase 'prebuttal' doesn't concretely dispute much either, it says you're going to see some stuff in the NYT that's 'hard to read'. If anything, it's striking how little both pieces disagree about the employees' allegations.
For example, the article talks extensively about Layllen Sawyerr's case. So I'd expect corroboration to look something like "we talked to suchandsuch other people who confirmed she was treated unfairly", "we read this email in which she was treated unfairly", or perhaps "we heard about this specific personnel decision which was unfair to her". A lack of corroboration doesn't mean her accusations are false, but a lack of attempt to corroborate is very troubling from a national newspaper, especially when the subject of the article is going on the record to say the accusations aren't true. Either Milosevich and Coinbase are lying about their investigation or Sawyerr's story is false - isn't the NYT curious to figure out which one?
You don't need to do anything. Newspapers are free to publish whatever they'd like. But if the NYT isn't interested in discovering the truth of the accusations, that lends credence to the idea that their primary motivation is not the accusations but Coinbase's lack of support for racial justice politics.
Again: the NYT is a newspaper, and isn't vested with subpoena powers. They operate within the limits all newspapers operate in, and there is more than enough meat in this story to understand why they ran with it. "Isn't interested in discovering the truth of the accusations" is hardly a fair criticism here.
A lack of subpoena powers doesn't mean they can't look into it!
Take this article on the US Meat Animal Research Center (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/20/dining/animal-welfare-at-...) as a good example of an organizational misconduct investigation done right. Dr. Keen told the Times they're doing some abusive things to the animals. So the Times talked to a bunch of employees, and reviewed a bunch of documents, in order to make sure they could accurately and concretely describe specific instances of wrongdoing. This is the quality of journalism the New York Times is generally known for. It would be a much worse article - both less fair to the research center and less convincing about the accusations - if they hadn't dug in like that.
See upthread, with examples of how the article does exactly what you ask it to.
It seems like your criticism is that the article implies that Coinbase's executive management has racial bias problems, and the article doesn't establish that bias to your satisfaction. But that's always going to be a problem with news articles. Some will present evidence that is dispositive to you, some won't.
I find the reporting in this piece damning. I understand how others would view it more charitably. That's what we're meant to be discussing. Less productive: a discussion of the legitimacy of the reporting itself.
I don't see it as a discussion of legitimacy. It's about the strength of evidence the article offers, and whether there's anything the article could have done to offer stronger evidence or to better defuse suspicions that the author had motives unrelated to the evidence. That seems more productive to me than a discussion about whether Coinbase's management actually is biased, which will inevitably degrade to a dispute about how biased we thought they were before reading the article.
(For what it's worth, the article's lede is well-corroborated, and I agree it provides strong evidence of a serious problem with retention of black employees.)
The NYT didn't title their piece 'Coinbase is racist'. It's reporting on 'lots of Coinbase's black employees feel the company handles race and diversity issues poorly'. The reporting looks into that and, well, reports on why the employees think that.
The 'other side' of this is a Coinbase blogpost that says 'we hired a consultant who told us we don't have such problems'. You are certainly free to decide which of these is better supported.
The article was written as if the hook/angle for the article was created after the No-Politics-Policy, then filled in by contacting former and current employees. I don't think a report with "Coinbase gets lots of unfair flak, but tries really hard to be inclusive" article would be published, or even could have been written with the selection of sources.
That's like scientists finding a negative result, and not getting it published. Skilled scientists don't let that happen often.
Not in response to the rule, but to the media cycle that followed publication of the rule.
I don't believe that in the editing room they went: "Next item. The Coinbase controversy. Let's do an objective investigation of this and see what we find." But I won't accuse the NYT of bad faith, economic/journalistic incentives are sufficient to explain that angle, fishing for further controversy for a company with an already bad reputation (deserved or not).
Notice the NYT article even wrote negatively of Coinbase's diversity efforts: Supposedly, black people where shoed into photos, to make the company look good to the outside, but were never promoted or listened to (implying, because they were black, and white Libertarian autist tech bro's don't listen to or promote their black employees as a matter of principle). With such an angle about questionable motives, it is neigh impossible to do anything right. It is "we already determined you are wrong, now where is your apology?".
I don't understand. If Black employees were deliberately encouraged to show up to be photographed, but otherwise ignored and passed over for advancement, it doesn't take much of an editorial slant to show a problem; that behavior is inherently problematic.
That behavior (passing over an employee due to their skin color) is not only problematic, it is against the law.
Did the editorial show that Coinbase is engaging in illegal discrimination practices? No, but they sure implied it.
Would it be problematic to encourage diverse representations to show up for company photos, if you did not ignore them for advancement? On its own, I think that's just common sense, and taking some PR advantage of the costly diversity programs.
A random/unplanned company photo I was in, was circulated online, to falsely claim that my company only hires white people. Felt really bad, especially for my multiracial colleagues present in that photo. Can you even give this movement what they want, without accusations of pandering/fake concern?
> Not specifically require Black employees to relocate to different cities while giving non-Black employees the opportunity to work out out whatever the nearest office is.
I refuse to believe that Coinbase based that decision on skin color, and I find it hard to believe anyone else sees that differently. As such, to follow this rule, you would have to overturn your decision -- based on rationale --, because it happens to negatively impact a person with a specific skin color. How is this a decent decision: "Sorry Chad, we can't let you work from home to care for your mother, because we just told some black-skinned support engineers to relocate, and we don't want to specifically require black people to relocate, and allow white people to work from home."? How is that fair? To who? It suddenly becomes justified if Chad was black, or if you allow everyone to work from home?
The comment I replied to appears to have been substantially edited in the time since I've replied to it.
Sure. You can:
* Not specifically require Black employees to relocate to different cities while giving non-Black employees the opportunity to work out out whatever the nearest office is.
* Treat Black employees respectfully in meetings.
* Not allow people who manage Black employees to mock them for being drug dealers and for carrying weapons.
* Not allow recruiting team members to discuss the merits of different races and their likelihood of success as candidates in hiring team meetings.
This all seems pretty basic?
Incidentally: I don't know what the "movement" you're referring to is. I've been in this industry since the 1990s, and these seem like rules that would have been equally germane in 1995.
I'm not trying to zing you with that, but am noticing a persistent subtext on this thread that attempts to equate Black people not wanting to be discriminated against with some larger basket of "far-left politics". Plenty of conservatives have the same objections to racial bias as whatever the "movement" we're talking about here is. Ironically, among Democrats (Black people overwhelmingly identify with the Democratic party for historical reasons), Black people trend significantly more conservative.
No edit, I just replied to you in my previous comment.
Are you under the impression that Coinbase makes Work-From-Home decisions based on the skin-color of their employees?
If yes (which it seems like to me), I'd like to learn more about that, and your reasoning. Am I oblivious to modern work-place racism? Imperceptive? Naive? Defending vile racists? I'd like to reconsider those questions on a more informed ground. My (and your) view kinda hinges on that impression and its truth.
I can understand why Black employees would have that impression, but if it's not true, then I also see that as problematic.
> I am under the impression that Coinbase demanded that the Black employees of the compliance group relocate to PDX so that the whole group could work out of the same office, and then exempted a white worker in the same group from that requirement.
Did it matter for this demand that one group was Black and the other was white? Or did this just happened to be the unfortunate outcome, which is bad optics if you focus on skin color attributes, and such bad optics should be avoided?
I am still not too sure. Can you remove "Black" and "white" from your impression and still say the same thing, or is it essential to your impression, and telling of a problematic work environment?
I am under the impression that Coinbase demanded that the Black employees of the compliance group relocate to PDX so that the whole group could work out of the same office, and then exempted a white worker in the same group from that requirement.
These kinds of things happen all the time in companies. Company relocates team x, company decides not to allow remote but that one engineer doesn’t relocate it or works remotely. Usually because the employees has long tenure/unique skillset/otherwise valuable that losing them would be a big loss.
We don’t have details who exactly was required to relocate and who weren’t. Coinbase’s compliance department is huge made of multiple teams, so it’s not just the handful of people mentioned in this article.
It's only incongruous if you evaluate it in the context of people who expect to be treated fairly when they report mistreatment.
There is a pattern of behavior minimizing the scope and impact of abusive or discriminatory actions across the tech industry, and it is very prevalent on this site as well.
The simple reality is that unless an employee is able to obtain clear, slam-dunk evidence of directly legally actionable abuse or misconduct, then it is a huge personal risk to come forward. Most businesses that are large enough to have systemic problems have enormous resources to litigate against those claims.
In contrast, for employees to collect and use evidence, it is required that they:
a) experience the abuse or discrimination, repeatedly
b) collect evidence and documentation of that behaviour
c) exfiltrate that evidence in contravention of legal contracts that can include NDAs, binding arbitration clauses, morality/non desparagement clauses, etc
d) be in a strong enough financial position to defend against litigation
e) be confident enough in their own skills, reputation, and network to be able to give up future career prospects based on A-D.
And this is just from the 5 minutes it took me to compose this message.
I get that HN is a bastion of support for meritocracy, and that founder worship is a strong bias for many on this forum, but as a community, and as an industry we have got to stop undermining and destroying the folks trying to hold people and firms accountable for bad behavior.
Thinly veiled insults aside, you didn't address my actual point. The people in the article risked all the repercussions you mentioned by formally reporting the abuse and speaking with the NYTimes. Saying that they would do that but not risk snapping a pic of a racist e-mail, as an example, doesn't make any sense.
Insulting people wasn't my intention, but I have some uncharitable views of the HN community members that cry meritocracy and find founders blameless.
You are correct that the people in the article that either filed complaints, or spoke with the New York Times risked repercussions, but not all of the folks the Times spoke with are identified. People were willing to talk, but not necessarily on the record, or to be identified. That is because they are fearful of reprisal, based on past experiences and observations.
That is the biggest challenge for people confronting systemic issues like racism, poverty, homelessness, or any number of topics. It's not enough for victims to stand up for themselves, because there is a systemic imbalance in the ability to pursue remedies through the courts or other means. Getting justice in civil matters often boils down to the size of a victims pocket book (and especially in contrast to pocket books of the people or organizations that have made that person a victim). There are so many individuals who have left the tech industry after experiencing bad behaviour, discrimination, and abuse, and any one of those people could be the next Hedy Lamarr or Philip Emeagwali, and the industry is worse for not having those people in it.
Again, as a community we do our peers a disservice by not trusting them when they say there is a problem, especially when they are so consistently proven right.
>You are correct that the people in the article that either filed complaints, or spoke with the New York Times risked repercussions, but not all of the folks the Times spoke with are identified. People were willing to talk, but not necessarily on the record, or to be identified. That is because they are fearful of reprisal, based on past experiences and observations.
You're arguing against a straw man here. I did not say that the only acceptable proof was an on the record statement. Anonymous corroboration or reporting a general description of an e-mail to preserve anonymity would be fine. There's nothing even like that.
>Getting justice in civil matters often boils down to the size of a victims pocket book
That's not really true. Susan Fowler blew up Uber with a single blog post. The difference is making specific accusations and providing some level of detail. There's essentially none of that in the NYTimes piece.
> You're arguing against a straw man here. [...] There's nothing even like that.
And you are arguing in bad faith; there are several parts of the article that detail exactly what you are looing for.
In the second paragraph, the article indicates that 11 of the folks who left notified HR or their managers.
In the third paragraph one of the named victims states she made several reports.
In the sixth paragraph 5 on the record employees and 18 off the record employees, and internal documents and recordings are claimed as evidence.
Despite this, Coinbase only reports three official complaints in the year many of these folks left.
Coupled with the stream of hot garbage that Brian Armstrong has proposed trying to position as being "Mission Focused", in the middle of a pandemic, massive, ongoing riots, and political instability just illustrates how utterly tone deaf the leadership at Coinbase is.
> Susan Fowler blew up Uber with a single blog post.
Yes, you correct. You also have to look at the facts; Susan is an excellent writer, and based on her book, she already had some measure of experience speaking truth to power. Coupled with the fact that she was already recognized as a talented engineer and a published author, it's not surprising her blog post was as well received as it was.
Susan also wrote about her experience with her own voice and had receipts to show how bad it was. I certainly don't want to down play the issues that women in tech face, but it's also well known that people of color frequently have different social and economic circumstances than white or white-presenting folks (and it's not me saying this -- she calls out in her book the casual anti-semitism she faced from folks who didn't know she is Jewish).
>And you are arguing in bad faith; there are several parts of the article that detail exactly what you are looing for.
Everything you list is an accusation. What I am looking for is:
(1) Person X said this racist thing happened.
(2) The event in (1) is (a) true, and (b) backed up by a corroborating witness, this email, some document, etc
>You also have to look at the facts; Susan is an excellent writer, and based on her book, she already had some measure of experience speaking truth to power.
If the NY Times doesn't have reporters that can do that then they should fire the ones they have and find some that can.
So you're looking for a smoking gun level of proof? The unfortunate thing is that life usually isn't that easy. When smart people do bad things they generally don't leave a paper trail.
Meh. You are moving goal posts, and you are making baseless claims against an experienced reporter who is well connected in the Bay Area for a major newspaper.
You are offhandedly discounting the reported experience of more than 20 people, many of whom have come forward with evidence.
>You are moving goal posts, and you are making baseless claims against an experienced reporter who is well connected in the Bay Area for a major newspap
You did that! You said Susan Fowler was effective because she was able to speak truth to power. Implying that this article is ineffective because the writer doesn't know how to speak truth to power.
>You are offhandedly discounting the reported experience of more than 20 people, many of whom have come forward with evidence.
Can I just step in, in defense of individualism and meritocracy here?
I would like to challenge the perception of issues as systematic being a universal fact. You first have to accept that groups, as opposed to individuals, are responsible for action. This doesn't seem to hold up. Any delineation of people into any sort of groups is arbitrary. Corporations are legal fiction. Actions are perpetrated by individuals.
I would like to live in a society that optimizes for enthusiastic consent in, and at-will termination of all interactions and relationships for any reason whatsoever. This seems to be the only reasonable way to live in a society of people who disagree about fundamental things. To take this to the extreme, if you want to run a company full of racists, and be racist in your hiring policy, you should be able to do so. It is quite possible to support this standard of liberty without being racist oneself. I may disagree with what you say and all.
>What else can they do if they are really innocent?
Innocent of what exactly? At a certain point whether the leadership of Coinbase is racist or not doesn't matter. What matters is their actions. The article says "roughly three-quarters of the Black employees" left the company over a 6 month span due to feelings of being discriminated against. That isn't an accusation. It is a fact. It also isn't something that will just happen accidentally. That alone is a problem that demands urgent attention regardless of what is in the hearts of Coinbase's leadership team.
It's a fact, but it means nothing without context.
I punched a man in the face yesterday. To determine if I'm a violent person it's important to know whether I punched a man who was pushing his child on a swing set, or whether I punched a man who was crawling through a window in my home.
What context would exonerate Coinbase of fostering an environment that results in 75% of its Black employees feeling discriminated against? And if that context existed, why didn't Coinbase mention it in their preemptive rebuttal?
How about the CEO refusing to align with far left politics? Whether you think that is good or bad, that could well be the reason for them leaving, but it doesn't actually mean that there was overt racism.
If you’re truly ignorant to the social pressures the black community places on each other (specifically the prevailing majority on the ‘dissident’ thinkers), than it’s a topic I suggest you read in to.
Black Democrats (most Black people are Democrats, something for which there is some social pressure) are generally more conservative, and significantly more religious, than other Democrats. So: no, this isn't responsive to what I said.
All that means is that social pressures (in this case) weren’t exerted using the lever of religion or political affiliation.
That doesn’t at all mean that other levers don’t exist or weren’t leveraged. Such as the common, ‘uncle tom’ or ‘not black enough’ social pressure commonly applied in the black community.
"Uncle Tom" and "Not Black Enough" have nothing to do with far-leftism. As I just said, with an academic source: Black people are relatively more conservative than other Democrats. To the extent that we're including Black Republicans in the mix, the analysis gets even weirder.
Lol, that’s understating it a bit. The president elect said “you ain’t black” to black people who even consider Trump. An old white man confidently telling black people their identity is jeopardized if they even consider not voting for him.
Can you expand on what you mean by "far left politics"? Reminder, this happened in late 2018 and early 2019. It was before this year's round of Black Lives Matter protests. It was also before Coinbase issued its no politics edict. I am really struggling to think of what "far left politics" you are referring to here that would be important enough to the Black employees of Coinbase that it results in 75% of them leaving.
Far left politics is an extremist. For example, if you criticize BLM for looting, you will be labeled racists.
Looting small shop owners makes no sense. Many shop owners are even black. This happened in Seattle where many shop owners support BLM.
You might say, well, that was an exception. But Noah Trevor (an influential person) also justified looting because police breaks social contract first. Now why would you loot random shops because of that? The fact that Noah hasn't been canceled makes me think a lot of BLM supporters see looting as positive.
To sum up, you basically can't say anything bad about BLM. Otherwise, you would be labeled as racists and canceled.
This is a trend in the far-left politics. They would force you to personally sacrifice to better society. Another example is homeless people camping in front of your shop. If you try to make them go away, you will also be canceled. This far-left politics is just evil, IMO.
To repeat myself, this happened in late 2018 and early 2019. That was before the round of protests that you are speaking about. What far left political issue was Coinbase potentially fighting against during the relevant time window that would have pushed these employees out?
Also I think you mean Trevor Noah and not Noah Trevor.
Most other tech firms make a specific effort to recruit Black people, promote them, and support causes Black people support. Coinbase's position is that while they support those things they want to focus on their cryptocurrency mission. Given that, the expected outcome would be 0 Black people working at Coinbase. If you were black, you'd much rather work for the firms actively trying to recruit and promote you.
> Baltimore said that he’s glad more people are talking about the problem, but that what’s really needed is “boots on the ground”: consistent money, time and leadership dedicated to actively bringing more Black tech professionals and investors into the industry.
That doesn't sound like "most companies" in the tech industry actively seeking and hiring minorities. Perhaps they do and articles like these are deceptive?
I would look up others but I think those three make the point. Companies are actively hiring underrepresented minorities. Yes some people think more effort should be put in but to say it isn't happening is being ignorant of reality.
> I would look up others but I think those three make the point. Companies are actively hiring underrepresented minorities.
I was questioning the assertion that it was most companies. Three companies, no statistics showing actual improvement, that doesn't make the point. Thanks for the links. It looks like Google is having trouble achieving this goal, since the article you linked shows the same percentage of minorities year to year. Apple says they have made progress, which is good. The facebook link doesn't have any numbers. Apple says "53% of new hires in the U.S. are from historically underrepresented groups in tech" but it doesn't give a timeframe or provide statistics that show how much of their workforce is minority or how much improvement they have made. I'm not sure that public relations boilerplate actually translates to a commitment to a diverse workforce.
"If you were black, you'd much rather work for the firms actively trying to recruit and promote you."
This is a tall assumption. People are more complicated than that, and so are their identities. What if you are a pro-life, strongly Catholic black person? I can definitely see the pro-diversity campaigners balking at the "pro-life" component of your identity.
That’s the problem. Black lives mattering is a political issue only to those of privilege. I can’t believe we’re actually having political debate if certain people’s lives should matter or not.
I can think of contexts, especially when n=15(if this was a statistical study on insulin response to artificial sweeteners, people would be saying the sample size is too small to draw conclusions), but I don't know if developing hypothetical scenarios is useful.
Learning the true context is most important. This could be done by corroborating allegations for example.
> especially when n=15(if this was a statistical study on insulin response to artificial sweeteners, people would be saying the sample size is too small to draw conclusions)
And those people would be wrong. It's incorrect to dismiss a study based on sample size without a discussion of significance and effect size in the context of the data.
Moreover I reject the premise that you should be assessing this story quantitatively rather than qualitatively. But if you insist: what are your priors on whether or not a given company engaged in discrimination, and how do these change if you're told 75% of employees of a particular demographic stated there was discrimination?
Okay - one context is where one department has a large number of black people, and that department is defragged for purely business reasons to a different office across the country. Most people never choose the relocation package, and so a big chunk of black employees end up quitting. That's the event that triggered 8 black employees of the 15 who left as I understand it from the article.
> what are your priors on whether or not a given company engaged in discrimination, and how do these change if you're told 75% of employees of a particular demographic stated there was discrimination?
I completely agree that it's a very bad look. It is probably even more likely than not that given those facts, it is due to racism. I guess the question comes down to, philosophically, how one answers the following question: In the quest to eradicate racism and racists, is it better to be over-zealous and destroy a few non-racists to make sure you get all the actual racists(the chemo approach) - or is it better to be slightly more circumspect and let a few racists slip through the cracks so that far fewer non-racists are punished (the US judicial system ideal)?
But this question assumes that the root cause of the problem is that Coinbase has a disproportionately high number of "bad apples." To me that's exactly backwards; it seems much more likely that institutional culture tolerates and even encourages racism.
>I can think of contexts, especially when n=15(if this was a statistical study on insulin response to artificial sweeteners, people would be saying the sample size is too small to draw conclusions), but I don't know if developing hypothetical scenarios is useful.
N = 15 while p ≈ 20. It has been a while since I have taken a stats class, but that sample seems plenty large enough to me.
>Learning the true context is most important. This could be done by corroborating allegations for example.
Corroborating is exactly what journalists do. From the article:
>five people with knowledge of the situation said.
>But according to 23 current and former Coinbase employees, five of whom spoke on the record, as well as internal documents and recordings of conversations
>according to a recording of the session shared with The New York Times
>In a company email he sent later, which was also shared with The Times
>wrote in a Slack message that was viewed by The Times.
>three people briefed on the situation said
>according to a recording of the event
>according to a copy of the message seen by The Times
>according to a copy reviewed by The Times.
>two people with knowledge of the situation said
The NYT talked to dozens of people, watched/listened to multiple recordings, and viewed numerous emails and Slack messages. This story is corroborated.
If you order the claims in the article on a scale of not racist at all to clearly racist, you'll see basically all of the corroboration comes from claims on the left side of that scale, and few if any on the right side. The claims I was specifically thinking about were things like:
> One Black employee said her manager suggested in front of colleagues that she was dealing drugs and carrying a gun, trading on racist stereotypes. Another said a co-worker at a recruiting meeting broadly described Black employees as less capable. Still another said managers spoke down to her and her Black colleagues, adding that they were passed over for promotions in favor of less experienced white employees. The accumulation of incidents, they said, led to the wave of departures.
These have no corroboration, even though they allegedly happened in front of multiple coworkers.
We don't need to corroborate each individual complaint. The story here isn't that one employee was passed over for a promotion. The story is the trend that all these anecdotes support. There is corroboration for the trend.
But the point is that the corroborations are all on the lesser or non-complaints of the article, not the most egregious ones. To make an extreme example, posting a series of actual facts that culminate in aliens have visited earth doesn't make the latter assertion any more true.
edit: Sorry, I'm the poster from above, I just posted from my phone which has a different account logged in that I originally intended to give hiring advice unlinked to my main account(opsec fail).
The egregious complaints are corroborated by the other egregious complaints.
Let's use another example in which evidence is hard to find: sexual assault. If one woman accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault, the burden of proof for her story is high. She would need some pretty strong evidence to get Cosby charged let alone convicted. She probably wouldn't even receive coverage in the mainstream media without some other form of evidence. However the entire situation would change if she was one of 60 women coming forward. Suddenly the burden of proof for that first woman is greatly diminished. Each individual's story is corroborated by someone else having a very similar story.
Well I guess some witnesses lied over three centuries ago so we can't trust any group of people anymore for the rest of history. It is a bummer how that worked out.
Interestingly, "carrying a gun" is an American stereotype here in Europe, not race-specific.
Isn't there like 400 million guns in private hands in the US? If so, the assumption that pretty much anyone you meet in the street might have concealed gun on them is not absurd per se.
But speaking about it aloud seems strange, yes.
"passed over for promotions"
This is the oldest workplace complaint ever and happens in racially homogeneous countries all the time. Favoritism in the workplace is probably as old as the pyramids.
Addressing only the viability of the sample for basic binomial analysis, the sample size is on the small end. This would be okay if we could reasonably expect the underlying events to follow identical and independent distributions, but when we know the people involved worked together that assumption is clearly void. Unfortunately this means we really can’t use any sort of statistical analysis on this datum. The models just don’t support it.
Without the additional context from the article, I think citing 75% is a bit misleading.
"When Coinbase announced it would be opening an office in Portland, Ore., several Black employees in the compliance department who worked remotely were told to move there or reapply for new jobs, four former employees said."
"All of the Black workers in the compliance division ended up among the group of 15 who left."
Without concrete evidence of discrimination in the article, my mind jumps to this being the pivotal cause of the stats, one team getting asked to relocate and that team being disproportionate in its demographics.
I know from co-workers that the company once had a strong stance against remote work and made limited exceptions. I can see that being a source of a lot of discontent. Asking folks to move to a new city is a big ask too; I could see the company having handled that poorly.
On the upside CB shifted to remote-first which should be great for being able to have a more diverse workforce. And contrary to some of the comments here, I take that as strong evidence of the ability for our leadership team to acknowledge mistakes and course correct.
Ok, let's accept what you say as fact and ignore that an exception was made for the single White employee in that department which wasn't made for any of the Black employees you are referencing. Let's also ignore the weirdness of 40% of the company's Black employees being on a single seemingly small team. That still leaves 7 other employees in other departments who left the company in a 6 month window due to feeling discriminated against. 35% is obviously a better number than 75%, but it doesn't allow you to dismiss this problem.
Just went back to double check the article and am actually not certain how you are getting to the number 75%. 11 employees cited a complaint to HR according to the article. Where are you getting the denominator for total number of black employees in 2019?
There's a data mismatch between the CB blog post and the article. CB cites that only 2-3 formal complaints were filed iirc.
11 employee complaints matches pretty closely with the PDX group.
--
FWIW I'm not dismissing the complaints. I've worked and studied in places where I've felt like an outsider; I've seen people make inappropriate comments about race+stereotypes in past work environments; I've also seen people make fishing claims of racial discrimination.
I wasn't on those teams in 2019, so the truth is I simply don't know.
From what I see today and the lack of concrete evidence in the article, I do have some doubts about the overall impression the article tries to give. I have the sense that certain information might have been omitted that might paint a clearer picture. I could totally be wrong as well.
The first sentence of the second paragraph of the article.
>The 15 people worked at Coinbase, the most valuable U.S. cryptocurrency start-up, where they represented roughly three-quarters of the Black employees at the 600-person company.
"[R]oughly three-quarters" implies there were likely either 19 or 21 employees Black employees at the company since 20 would be exactly three-quarters. I was just using 75% and 20 employees because that is the best estimate we got. The article also stated clearly that 8 Black employees were part of the PDX group.
The Coinbase rebuttal was worded very specifically.
>only three of these people filed complaints during their time at Coinbase.
The New York Times wasn't being as narrow with their counting and they said:
>11 of them informed the human resources department or their managers about what they said was racist or discriminatory treatment
There is obvious middle ground between these two quotes. 11 people complained to their manager or HR at some point including potentially after they left the company however only 3 filed official complaints while working there. Keep in mind that simply complaining about something to a coworker isn't the same thing as "filing" a complaint.
If this middle ground scenario transpired as I described, doesn't the NYT's recounting sound much closer to the truth than CB's? Also ask yourself who has a bigger incentive to stretch the truth here. Is it the newspaper that could instead report on literally anything else or the company that is being accused of discrimination?
> Keep in mind that simply complaining about something to a coworker isn't the same thing as "filing" a complaint.
It really depends on the HR department, too. In most, reporting something as seemingly straightforward as an overt sexual assault will raise the question "how do you want to proceed." But they might not lay out what your actual options are -- or worse, they might just offer an ear and won't offer to act unless you demand it. Sometimes, they'll make it quite clear that a complaint will be a huge pain in the ass for everybody involved, especially the person reporting. HR should understand that there can be direct and indirect blow-back; that reporting misbehavior (especially of management, or worse, HR) can have both real and perceived consequences for the person reporting. HR departments cannot, generally, be trusted to police themselves if you can't go to them or above them, the only other option is the labor relations board. So much of the time, marginalized employees will either suck it up and endure the abuse, or quietly leave to keep their reputation intact.
So if anything, I see the discrepancy of 3 official reports and 11 complaints as a weak signal about how seriously HR takes complaints about racism at the company.
> ignore that an exception was made for the single White employee
Let's not ignore that this exception is being positioned as being based on skin color (racist motives), not job role, tenure, exceeding expectations, caregiving responsibilities, or any other plausible reason for an exception. That's a laughable, yet dangerous take. Incredibly inflammatory and accusatory.
Either Coinbase is an incredibly racist and black-unfriendly company, or some people would like you to believe that, and these accusations can all be unravelled to crying wolf, accusing others of downright illegal acts, without even filing a formal complaint to help others not suffer the same fate.
As I have said elsewhere in this thread, these harmless explanations for something that can be perceived as discriminatory are perfectly reasonable when there are only a few isolated incidents. However their believability has an inverse relationship to the number of accusations. When there is a clear pattern of behavior, as their is in this instance, it gets harder and harder to argue it is anything other than discriminatory.
And at a certain point the motive for these decisions doesn't even matter. If an overwhelming majority of Black employees feel they are being discriminated against at work, that is a huge failing for a company whether there is active discrimination happening or not.
It does not work that way (logically). Listing a 100 weak, baseless arguments is a debating tactic to confuse your opponents, not allowing them to address and debunk specifics (and if they still manage: "The lady doth protest too much, methinks"). It also creates the appearance of smoke.
More likely: There is a activist political trend now, that has picked up a lot of steam. In that political view, society is racist, and whites at best profit from this, at worst contribute to this. Anything bad happening to a person of color is then used to accuse the racist system, or even individuals, of a heinous act, to force their hands to adopt your view, or deplatform them and their criticism as an obstacle to growth of your movement, for personal gain, as revenge for inequality, or as a coping mechanism.
Far easier to argue/reason/imagine that, than that Coinbase makes WFH exceptions due to skin color, or that black employee are correctly assessing skills and experience of co-workers and correctly identifying racism on skin color, when passed over for a promotion. And if you don't believe that racism is really a driver at Coinbase, the correct course seems to be to attack these allegations for what its actually doing, not to support it by falling victim to this poor-argument overload and resigning because it is too hard, or too sensitive, or too taboo, to call out this damaging and horrific behavior.
Maybe it doesn't work like that in high school debate clubs, but it works like that in the law. Look up concepts like circumstantial evidence and disparate impact.
We can infer someone is guilty of a crime from a collection of evidence suggesting they are guilty even without direct evidence.
We can also punish someone for discrimination simply for exhibiting a pattern of discrimination regardless of intent to discriminate.
Take it to court then. Collect circumstantial evidence and allow for an objective ruling on discrimination and racism in the workplace. If the circumstantial he-said she-said is of any substance, you can prove your guilt.
Don't do trial by (social) media. Especially when your accusations are incredibly heavy and damaging. Don't play judge when you are not capable of objectively looking at all the presented evidence.
Coinbase presented their side of the story: nothing went to court. No investigation found anything of substance. If the circumstantial evidence was so strong to hold up in court, why didn't it?
For the law, intent is of utmost importance. For (social) media, just "circumstantial evidence" of exhibiting patterns of discrimination is enough to act. It is not enough to act, if you are a decent person.
>Ms. Sawyerr said she had talked with four other Black employees about bringing a discrimination lawsuit against Coinbase, but the others backed out after being offered hefty severance payments in exchange for confidentiality agreements.
It never went to court because almost everyone involved was incentivized for it to not end up in court. Going to court is often a difficult, expensive, and likely damaging path to pursue for victims of a variety of crimes. The lack of a court case has nothing to do with the amount of evidence or the truthfulness of the accusations here.
>For the law, intent is of utmost importance. For (social) media, just "circumstantial evidence" of exhibiting patterns of discrimination is enough to act. It is not enough to act, if you are a decent person.
Once again, you are factually wrong with this comment. People can be thrown in jail based purely on an overwhelming amount of circumstantial evidence and companies can be punished for discriminatory behavior even if there is documented proof that there was no intent to discriminate.
Of course she said that. Big bad company silenced her co-suiters with money, after their spy devision learned that she was bringing suit. Now she has no recourse to go court herself, she absolutely needed those four other employees.
> The lack of a court case has nothing to do with the amount of evidence or the truthfulness of the accusations here.
It allows me to disqualify it as hearsay, and it allows you to think they offered severance payments, with the purpose to keep legit actual racism out of the courts.
Intent is of utmost importance for the law. Every lawyer and judge will agree to that. Punishment is increased for bad willful intent.
I give up. Clearly there is no point to this discussion anymore if you are going to dismiss any possible reporting as hearsay if it isn't argued in court. So I will simply leave this from the American Bar Association.[1]
> In contrast, a disparate-impact claim does not require proof of an intention to discriminate. Instead, showing that a facially neutral employment practice has a disproportionately adverse impact on a protected group states a prima facie case of unlawful disparate-impact discrimination.
What do you know, intent isn't needed for a valid case of discrimination.
We can also punish someone for discrimination simply for exhibiting a pattern of discrimination regardless of intent to discriminate.
No. That's totalitarian and evil. If someone is not intending to discriminate, then they are not guilty of anything and should not be "punished". It's not even slightly reasonable to expect every possible way of slicing a group of people to be reflective of the average gender/race data of the overall population because people are different: that's the entire argument for diversity to begin with.
That's the basic position that is alienating so many hundreds of millions of people and convincing them this kind of activism is toxic. It's why Trump won the first time and did much better than predicted the second. It's why this thread is full of people that think the NYT is being manipulative and deceptive. You may not punish people simply for not having enough black/women employees if they haven't actually done anything to discrimate: end of story.
Please respond to the actual comment made, not something you made up. No where did GP suggest that if every way you slice a group based on gender and race data isn't perfect they'll get in trouble.
They stated that discrimination, even if done without intent, is still discrimination. Please respond to that statement.
And how do you define discrimination if intent doesn't matter? If decisions don't matter then the only way to define discrimination is via observed results: if you have no black employees, it must be discrimination, even if nobody ever actually discriminated in an objective way. Which means you'd be punished for not matching some theoretical demographics.
The whole notion is ridiculous. The fact that California takes this stuff so seriously just makes it look like it's throwing away its tech lead, as viewed from afar.
You seem to be acting as this is some new extreme leftist view of discrimination. This comes from Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. You can find all the details and definitions here[1].
Affirmative action has always been a racist hypocrisy. The fact that there have always been leftists campaigning for it is irrelevant, as it's by far more common. America is indeed structurally racist: against whites and (sometimes) Asians. The fact that this has a long history doesn't make recent trends any more acceptable.
No one was talking about affirmative action, but ok.
And you reveal your true motivation when you say something like "America is indeed structurally racist: against whites". No one with any semblance of objectivity would agree with that.
> We can also punish someone for discrimination simply for exhibiting a pattern of discrimination regardless of intent to discriminate.
It is scary, right? "We can also punish" hides behind the "we", unclear if they mean "We, the people, the court system" or "We, the racial justice movement, public opinion". Then what is this "punishment"? A bad article in the NYT? Calling up your network and suppliers with a 100 people (with too much time and too much anger) to cancel you for being racist? Jail time or a fine for illegal activity?
They are power hungry, totalitarian, and evil. Other comments talk of "subconscious racism" or "white privilege". This comment demands responsibility for outcomes they perceive as unjust, where it is very unjust to demand demographic parity, when it is not possible to attain that, without severely dropping in quality (there are not enough Black people in tech to fill those positions with talent). So they demand you pay/invest to increase Black people in tech. But if too vocal or direct about it, they accuse you of "stating in general that Black people are less capable" as if reasoning from racist motives. So don't look to closely at the reason for not being able to hire as much Black people as society, activist, or the board wants you to.
This activism is a very strong and dangerous and toxic meme. It leads to Qanon levels of delusion, accusing criticism of racism, so it can't be attacked. Where Qanons see the deepstate and pedophiles when looking at government or big business, these activists see a racist society and neo-Nazi's when looking at government or big business. You can't change their minds. They've been in Whatsapp groups for years, pointing out targets for collective actions, and finding counters to often used criticism. It's why no activist would use the word "Identity Politics" even though that's the animal's name (evil Neo-Nazis use that term to attack our efforts!).
So that's why you hear: reverse racism is impossible! Racism has to do with power, and whites have all the power! When nearly every white person can recount cases of being discriminated against, and how terrible it made them feel. Accused of cultural appropriation for liking rap music. Challenged by Black men for having a Black girlfriend. Chosen as victim of robbery, because perceived weak and rich. Accused of getting your promotion, not due to hard work, but because your white old boys network favored your dumb white ass over a Black deserving queen.
If this NYT article was about over-representation of not white Libertarian crypto bros, but of over-representation of Jewish people in positions of power, you'd hear a different tune. Even suggesting that clear fact labels you as anti-Semitic. Apparently white people don't have enough shared culture, shared activism, to make racist anti-male anti-white anti-autist hit pieces like this controversial, even though we supposedly run the world, actively suppress entire races and genders, and create non-inclusive companies out of principle.
It is possible for a Black person to feel discriminated against because of their race even when such discrimination has not occurred. The event mentioned in the article referring to a Black person dealing drugs and having a gun is bad, but the rest of it just sounds like normal annoying work crap. Being talked down to and belittled in a work meeting? I'm a middle-aged white programmer and that's happened to me a number of times over my career.
>It is possible for a Black person to feel discriminated against because of their race even when such discrimination has not occurred.
This explanation's believability has an inverse relationship with the number of claims. I could buy the idea that a couple people perceived "normal annoying work crap" as discrimination, but would that happen 15 times? 75% of the Black employees left the company in a 6 month window. You don't see anything like that at any other company.
The article implies that a number of the Black people who left did so because the compliance division was relocated and they didn't want to relocate with it. It doesn't say how many people's decisions were influenced by annoying work crap that they interpreted as discrimination.
This is a really dishonest article. It tries to lead one to believe things (e.g. that 15 Black people left Coinbase because they were belittled in meetings) without stating it outright or making a case for it. Just insinuation spun up from a few concrete situations that themselves are mostly vague or not obviously discrimination (the gun and drugs thing being the obvious exception).
Well, the article starts from the premise that an abnormally large percentage of Coinbase's black employees left over a short period of time. It then uses a large body of circumstantial evidence to (pretty convincingly, in my opinion) portray the culture at Coinbase as hostile to employees of color. Not really sure how that's dishonest.
The article fails to mention the generous 4-6 month severance package that was being offered at the same time as the relocation of the division. Of course a bunch of employees will take the 6 months paid vacation over moving.
This is the level of dishonesty that I've come to expect from the NYT. Any fact that does not fit their narrative basically doesn't exist.
Do you have inside information that this was the case? Because I'm sure that would be quite compelling to hear.
To clarify, I assume the generous severance you're referring to is not the generous severance Coinbase offered employees as part of their no-politics-at-work approach, because the timelines don't match.
as others have pointed out when this is brought up, this seems out of order to me. the relocations required in the story that caused the team’s exodus occurred prior to the severance package tied to coinbase’s new corporate stance on workplace social justice advocacy.
however, i am not sure that is relevant given the immediate example of a team member who was allowed to work remote. also, i am not sure it is relevant given the fact that there are many other underpinnings for the story’s thesis.
It didn't come across as dishonest at all, but your post did.
> The article implies that a number of the Black people who left did so because the compliance division was relocated and they didn't want to relocate with it. It doesn't say how many people's decisions were influenced by annoying work crap that they interpreted as discrimination.
And mentions the one white person was allowed to stay remote. Pretty dishonest to leave that detail out, no?
> This is a really dishonest article. It tries to lead one to believe things (e.g. that 15 Black people left Coinbase because they were belittled in meetings) without stating it outright or making a case for it. Just insinuation spun up from a few concrete situations that themselves are mostly vague or not obviously discrimination (the gun and drugs thing being the obvious exception).
After reading it it seems a lot left because of constant issues of discrimination - being told to be in meetings in front of cameras to pretend to be diverse, but being ignored in meetings of consequence. Being told to relocate, but applied unequally. Having meetings about BLM and a month later the boss says "leave it at the door." The guns and drugs comment, the black inferiority comment, those are absolutely damning.
This is how racism/discrimination thrive - by playing in the margins, doing things that aren't provable (they never have an email that says "we're discriminating against you!" so therefore it didn't happen or other arguments of that type), giving bad performance reviews after complaints are made, etc. Much like saying "oh it was a joke!"
And finally the icing on the cake:
> Ms. Sawyerr said she had talked with four other Black employees about bringing a discrimination lawsuit against Coinbase, but the others backed out after being offered hefty severance payments in exchange for confidentiality agreements.
These are multiple people's experience with this company - and there are clearly others who were paid not to say anything.
The article clearly does what it set out to do - show the experiences of people who lived in what they believed to be a toxic work culture. I'm inclined to believe them.
You are omitting the fact that the one white employee switched to working out of the NYC office. There's no mention of a black employee making the same request and it being denied, just the request to wfh being denied for both white and black employees.
And then you are extrapolating two uncorroborated anecdotes of inappropriate comments as evidence of widespread discrimination.
According to the article, the white employee was not required to relocate to NYC, but rather was allowed to continue to work from their home in Philadelphia.
And, of course, the article has many more complaints than this one!
I don't see anything in the article that implies the PHL employee was given a choice of office. For all we know they made the request after CB decided against WFH teams.
If we take the articles claims at face value, what we know is:
* There was an existing compliance department.
* It had several remote team members.
* The company opened a compliance office in PDX.
* The company required Black team members to relocate to PDX or apply for new jobs.
* The company allowed a non-Black team member to remain in PHL and work out of the NYC office.
* Multiple sources claimed that the PHL employee was allowed to continue working remotely.
* The stated reason for demanding the relocation of the Black team members was to have the whole compliance team working from one place, a goal that obviously wasn't served by having someone else working out of PHL and NYC.
Maybe the sources in this article are lying (of course, you can rebut any claim that way), but apart from that, I'm not sure how this complaint is easily knocked down.
It's unclear but I think when it's mentioned PHL employee is able to work remote, they mean they are able to work out of the NYC office which is remote relative to the PDX office. It was not my read that they are working remote from home.
Your wording speculates on how the communication around remote was delivered in an unfavorable light. We know the decision was made to end WFH/remote, and one employee managed to get permission to work from the NYC office. A more realistic (still speculative) scenario imo:
-Company announces end of wfh/remote for a team. Folks are asked to relocate to PDX.
-Employee asks for permission to work from NYC. Request is approved.
Group employee relocations are a big deal. You are leaving out the part where the stated rationale for that relo is to have the team all together in one place. Instead, the real rationale appears to have been to have all the Black employees all together in one place (or, just as pausibly, that the relo was in fact a soft RIF of that group of employees).
@tptacek: you are imputing a motivation out of thin air. having fought hard for wfh/remote at companies against it, I can imagine far more benign reasons to be plausible.
No company does a group relocation without expecting to lose several members of the team. They're essentially all RIFs. I've tried to keep my analysis as dispassionate as I can in this part of the thread. I think the facts as asserted in the article speak pretty clearly, and the bulleted list I provided upthread recites those facts pretty much directly and in ways you haven't disputed.
Yep, who cares that racism and sexism can go on and create a disproportionately hostile environment for just some people right! "I don't see anything bad happening to me, so everyone shouldn't care either!"
Thankfully even if the world doesn't act that way, the majority (for now) aren't evil enough to also blatantly proclaim that this is also fine.
> I don't see anything bad happening to me, so everyone shouldn't care either!
What about:
> people's rights to have consensual interactions and relationships with each other are more important than their right to be treated "fairly" whatever that actually means.
The important point here is that we don't have a good working definition of "fair" that is universally agreed upon. The only ethical way to live in a society of people who fundamentally disagree is by optimising for consent.
As much as it's uncomfortable to define fair, I'd argue that it behooves us to strain and come to a conclusion. Every societal problem today and in history can probably be attributed to people not wanting to define a global fair, or defining it in a way (at least in retrospect) that was ostensibly below the mark. I'm sure that at some points in the US history thought it's fair to treat some people as slaves, so does your proclaimed universal sentence stand there too?
While we're straining, the more important question is to what degree is it ethical to impose your definition of fair on others. I would say that there is no ethical basis for the sort of extreme imposition that's currently the status quo. Slavery is clearly not a consensual relationship so it really doesn't apply here. Yes we should make everyone free. No we should not change the definition.
That presumes your view of fair will ultimately end up on the right side of history, just like the eventual abolition of slavery was. However that is not yet knowable at the present.
While you are focused on how your political view is the “right one”, @thegrimmest is more focused on how people should coexist when they all hold strong-but-different ideas of what is fair, and which of those will ultimately go down in history as ”moral progress” is yet unknown.
So the company should just call the Police and wash their hands or be responsible and have an appropriate sexual harassment policy, train their employees on how to identify and deal with sexual harassment, have a clear procedure on how to file and deal with complaints.
Maybe you will call such things "babysitting", I say its being responsible.
"should the company do something or should it not babysit employees?"
The company is doing something by not babysitting the employees. Not baby sitting the employees is the only correct option here.
>So the company should just call the Police and wash their hands
Yes they should call the police, and it's not "washing their hands". Sexual harassment is a criminal offence. Your employer shouldn't be "handling" that like they shouldn't be "handling" rape.
>have an appropriate sexual harassment policy, train their employees on how to identify and deal with sexual harassment, have a clear procedure on how to file and deal with complaints.
The policy is the law. Adults shouldn't have their employer telling them that sexual harassment is a no no.
>Maybe you will call such things "babysitting", I say its being responsible.
The responsible thing is to involve the authorities when one of your employees is committing a crime. Simple as that.
> Not baby sitting the employees is the only correct option here.
No its not. If you ever work in big companies you will know that.
> Adults shouldn't have their employer telling them that sexual harassment is a no no.
Yes they do,
Assuming you are a male, you might be unknowingly harrasing female employees just by having a boys will be boys attitude. So an employer has to give you training and explain you why its wrong.
Some people use throwaway accounts to harass other employees on social media, if your employer gave you the training you would have learnt that is wrong.
> The policy is the law.
Exactly, now you get it, the company may get into legal trouble if they dont have an official policy or they make it super difficult to report complaints.
> The responsible thing is to involve the authorities when one of your employees is committing a crime. Simple as that.
No its not simple as that, just telling the victim to go to authorities is just washing your hands, a responsible company also makes sure that victims can file a complaint with the management. Not all victims want to file a police complaint, that does not mean they the abuser should get away with harassment. The company should still investigate and fire the abuser and then file a complaint with the victim's permission.
These are some of the aspects which you will understand if you been through some training.
>No its not. If you ever work in big companies you will know that.
This is the logical fallacy "appeal to the majority". Just because most companies do something doesn't necessarily mean it's moral, required, logically correct, etc.
>Assuming you are a male, you might be unknowingly harrasing female employees just by having a boys will be boys attitude.
"Boys will be boys" is not the legal definition of sexual harassment, so no.
>So an employer has to give you training and explain you why its wrong.
They do that to cover their ass from "hostile work environment" legal suits. This is not baby sitting.
>Some people use throwaway accounts to harass other employees on social media, if your employer gave you the training you would have learnt that is wrong.
There's nothing a company can do in that instance, no one would even know if it is company related. If the harassment veers off into criminal territory, then police should be called.
>Exactly, now you get it, the company may get into legal trouble if they dont have an official policy or they make it super difficult to report complaints.
Apparently you still don't get it. Companies shouldn't babysit employees if they're committing such crimes. Employers shouldn't be babysitting employees when it comes to crimes such as sexual harassment, rape, etc. These should be directed to the police. QED.
>No its not simple as that, just telling the victim to go to authorities is just washing your hands
It's by definition not "washing their hands" because these crimes are not something the company should be babysitting employees over.
>a responsible company also makes sure that victims can file a complaint with the management.
No responsible company would make or direct a victim to "file an internal complaint" if they are victims of a crime. That is by definition irresponsible.
>Not all victims want to file a police complaint, that does not mean they the abuser should get away with harassment.
That's on them. If you're being victimized, reporting the crime should be the only legal recourse. Companies are not in the business of handling justice, period.
>The company should still investigate and fire the abuser and then file a complaint with the victim's permission.
The last thing we need are companies replacing the role that police, laws, the judicial system, etc. provide.
If an employee is being victimized, the employer should 100% work with authorities to ensure justice is met.
>These are some of the aspects which you will understand if you been through some training.
I understand companies not wanting workspaces to be unfriendly, but "unfriendly" isn't illegal. Period.
> I don't, and neither should the company, which is why they should call the police.
Sexual harassment generally is not a crime (though it overlaps with some crimes), and even if there is a crime involved the police and public prosecutor are under no obligation to do anything about it.
The employer, however, is under an enforceable legal obligation to do something about harassment.
> And if they don't want to, it's not the companies place to babysit and play judge and jury.
It's absolutely the companies enforceable legal obligation to effectively prevent (including terminating ongoing) sexual harassment even if there is no crime, crime report, or criminal law enforcement action.
Sexual harassment overlaps with a variety of crimes, but it doesn't require a crime, and the employer is civilly liable for it no matter if the individual causing the problem has committed or been investigated for a crime or not.
> So the company should fire someone that hasn't been found guilty, simply based on one person's complaint?
No, the company should investigate and have evidence, one way or the other, beyond just the complaint before any kind of final action, though there are some interim precautionary mitigations that are might be appropriate, often.
> Where did "innocent until proven guilty" go?
“Innocent until proven guilty” is a maxim of criminal law; a company treating potential harassers as if the company were either the state enforcing criminal law or, worse, as if it could act only following the state enforcing criminal law will eventually find itself in quite deep civil liability for harassment.
> No, the company should investigate and have evidence, one way or the other, beyond just the complaint before any kind of final action, though there are some interim precautionary mitigations that are might be appropriate, often.
No, the company isn't equipped for this and this is the role of the police and judicial system.
> “Innocent until proven guilty” is a maxim of criminal law; a company treating potential harassers as if the company were either the state enforcing criminal law or, worse, as if it could act only following the state enforcing criminal law will eventually find itself in quite deep civil liability for harassment.
That's why the company isn't enforcing anything and delegating the task to the competent authorities.
In this case the police.
Many people have been victim of wrongful firing and huge damages to their personal life due to rash decisions being taken by companies based on a single complaint from someone.
> No, the company isn't equipped for this and this is the role of the police and judicial system.
It's literally not; sexual harassment is a civil, not criminal, offense. The police have no concern with it at all, except that some sexual harassment is also a crime (e.g., rape, solicitation of prostitution, etc.)
But employers have legal liability for sexual harassment, which only gets more severe as it continues and they fail to act, whether or not there is a crime involved.
They cannot delegate this responsibility to the police.
> It's literally not; sexual harassment is a civil, not criminal, offense.
That's why I included the judicial system.
> But employers have legal liability for sexual harassment, which only gets more severe as it continues and they fail to act, whether or not there is a crime involved.
It happening is required to be based on a suite or investigation.
Again, a company isn't equipped to proceed with such an investigation on it's own.
> The company should not babysit the employees, and should call the police.
Sexual harassment is not a crime, it's a workplace tort (and always a tort by the employer, regardless of who the active harasser is.) It's true that some acts which would also potentially make the employer liable for sexual harassment are also crimes, but it's also worth noting that, even where an act creating potential harassment liability is also a crime, that (1) the burden of proof in a criminal case is higher than for a civil tort, so there is no guarantee, even with the same evidence and the same jury that a criminal conviction would be rendered when there would be harassment liability, (2) the police and public prosecutor have no obligation to take action even if there is a crime, whereas the company does have an enforceable legal obligation to take effective action to prevent harassment, (3) even if the police take action and the prosecutor files charge, and a conviction eventually results, criminal process takes time during which the accused may be free, and, in the absence of effective action by the employer, continue harassing and increasing the employers harassment liability.
Does there exist a thing called "effective management" or not? Do you just give a free pass to all companies for all actions? Is there any evidence that can exist that supports bad management, given that complaining isn't evidence, leaving is not evidence, calling it out isn't evidence sufficient for you? If Paul Graham called it bad management would that suffice?
> The article says "roughly three-quarters of the Black employees" left the company over a 6 month span due to feelings of being discriminated against. That isn't an accusation. It is a fact.
I am not comfortable with promoting the framing of the article to an automatically established fact. The only solid fact here is people leaving and the inferred reason is racial discrimination. I am not saying this inference is likely to be wrong or not, but that it is nonetheless an inference and not a fact. The article also doesn't let the reader know how those numbers compare to the baseline attrition of the company, i.e. what percentage of the other demographic groups have left in the same time period, which tends to be pretty high in the startup scene. Racial discrimination at workplace being pretty seriously illegal in the US these employees would have a strong recourse against it and NYT can not possibly provide a superior standard of factuality for those accusations.
> I am not comfortable with promoting the framing of the article to an automatically established fact.
It is a fact claim that has yet to be disputed on the record by anyone who is in position to dispute it. All media outlets have their biases, but the most prominent ones tend not to make up easily refuted lies. In the claim you are referencing, they say three quarters of the black employees left over a six month period. If that's a lie, Coinbase can simply say so. But they probably won't because it is probably true.
The reasons why are more up to interpretation. Probably no way to get a firm answer on this since many of these people have signed NDAs or otherwise won't talk on the record. But I don't think it's reasonable to claim, without evidence, that the NYT is lying about the proportion of black employees that left over the given time period.
No one is disputing the act of people departing. OP tries to smuggle in the reason of departing together with the act of it as a fact and that is a problem.
Fact space is infinite, which ones we choose to surface and which ones we leave behind is called framing. Technical name for making the audience believe that relevant facts are not relevant and saliencing irrelevant ones as relevant is called bullshitting (For further reading see the essay “On Bullshit” by Harry Frankfurt) and bullshits are much harder to weed out than factual inaccuracies in themselves.
NYT, like any major publication, is not leveling outright falsehoods, but they are finessing around bullshitting. We don’t know, because we depend on them or likes of them to make sense of the events and surface the most relevant information in the first place. Like I said, I personally find it concerning that there is no mention of the baseline attrition rate in a high churn SF labor market, that there is no mention of the lack of serious legal action despite serious discrimination allegations, that there is no distinguishing between discrimination, feelings of discrimination and the types of discrimination; we don’t know if propensity for political activism is confounding the reason for those employee’s departures. Coinbase is explicitly discriminating against political activisim that they don’t deem relevant to their mission, rightly or wrongly not only it is not illegal, it is their right to exercise if they believe it would serve their company or customers better. It feels like NYT wants to penalize this act of “rebellion” by clumping all of these together, emphasize the racial angle and produce an aura of wrongdoing by that adjacency. There might as well be wrongdoing, but in that case courts are the machinery equipped to extract the relevant facts and bring justice to it. Not for-profit publications with very complex power relations and a core competency of shaping narratives. To give an obvious example, NYT the prominent media outlet once also played a role in manufacturing the public consent for Iraq invasion by surfacing such “questions”, “suspicions” while burying relevant facts. It would be naive to buy their narrative wholesale (or any single outlets narrative for that matter).
They could respond to the specific points raised in the article. An “independent” investigation setup, run, and reviewed only by the alleged perpetrator isn’t exactly definitive - especially if you see the points in the article where they acknowledge the complaints are valid (note the non-denial about the only white person in the compliance group getting an offer which wasn’t extended to anyone else) and think about how a “cull through our historical data” might not yield the full story if, as described, not everyone had formal reports included in that data because they were not informed or discouraged from doing so. “Unsubstantiated” only means they couldn’t prove it, not that it didn’t happen or even that all of the possible evidence was fully disclosed.
"Proving innocence" is as tone deaf as their autistic CEO
(who in the article is quoted himself as saying his behavior is because he's on the spectrum.)
Brian Armstrong shut himself in because he doesn't want to deal with it. He doesn't know how to deal with it. All of Coinbase's actions are guided by the consequences, for example, they never needed to address their flash crash because they just needed to placate customers while they were closing a 9 figure funding round announced a few weeks later. They aren't worried about precedent, they are worried about keeping the ship afloat long enough to sell shares to Robinhood traders. This strategy works.
They can also create an inclusive environment that allows them to address underserved markets more accurately. They didn't.
The people I know who are or have children on the spectrum would take issue with your opening sentence. Armstrong might find that a convenient excuse but it shouldn’t erase all of the effort most people put into being considerate.
It was only about the excuse the CEO made, not about anyone else.
Direct all of that energy at him for the representation he is making about people on the spectrum.
If he wants to lean on that as a crutch on all of his organizational decision making skills, then we absolutely get to call him out on that all the time until he does something different.
If you've never done this sort of thing before: there's a huge market for these "external consultants". Their unstated job (and reputations) are as whitewashing firms. You hire them to ensure there is "no evidence" of anything done wrong. The primary purpose is to create a credible defense in lawsuits but PR purposes are also common. Firms that find problems suddenly see their business dry up because most companies don't want this kind of honest evaluation (it just creates a problem and potentially exposes you to liability).
Without access to information about the firm doing the work, the report, or the underlying data it is impossible to know if a real investigation was done or not.
Many of the "issues" bought up in this article aren't even problematic. It says John Russ left because Armstrong took public stance that he wanted Coinbase to focus on crypto space stuff.
Coinbase's stance there is fair, reasonable and moral. It is desirable that some companies just do what it says on the tin. If Russ had a reason for quitting that was race-related then the NYT didn't uncover it.
They can do nothing, once someone calls you 'racist' you're racist for good.
I don't know the details of the story, but the thing is with baseless accusations of racism is that it's a perfect slander, one can never prove innocence once proclaimed guilty.
If a San Francisco denizen says to you, "I stepped in human poop" you don't say, "Pics or it didn't happen." That's becuse it's a common occurrence. It's plausible it happened.
The same is true of racism in Silicon Valley and the adjoint areas. Being less racist is actually the unusual condition that requires proof.
some comments cross over to the realm of outrageous and ridiculous to an extent they cannot be acknowledged in any reasonable and guidelines-compliant way.
In my view the comment you replied to is neither outrageous or ridiculous, and it ought to be possible to disagree with it in a civil manner even if you think it's very wrong.
Thats not true at all. Just because you don’t feel like you can follow the guidelines, doesn’t mean it’s impossible. For example, I think your comment is ridiculous coming from a grown adult I assume, but I am still able to reply in a compliant way.
The burden of proof should not be on the accused. Your comment is a perfect example of things that sound smart because words are put together in a coherent order, but is actually incredibly stupid.
What are you trying to say? over 16 people are just lieing! Whatever dude, you're privilege to not have to face the bs. Then why don't you go get the details before you start talking smack
> Armstrong took public stance that he wanted Coinbase to focus on crypto space stuff.
I don't think that he would have taken that public stance if he didn't feel that the company was being distracted internally by racial justice issues. It being a fair response is highly dependent on those internal conversations.
And the NY Times reports that prior to this conversation there was a public meeting where Black employees brought up difficult experiences at Coinbase. Being told that people should leave politics at home or leave the company is a horrible response to complaints about discrimination.
Well, I don't know what is going on in Coinbase. But the NYT has in the past overplayed the race card with no evidence.
Now I'm happy to agree that the retention rate of black people at Coinbase raises some questions. But the NYT, having asked those questions, came up with no particular evidence of racism.
The major piece of evidence that these issues are substantially due to race is that the NYT felt it warranted a hit piece. That is weak evidence. Being passed over for promotion and feeling unappreciated - which they lead with - isn't evidence. Most of us have been passed over for promotion plenty of times. Most people are unappreciated too.
On the contrary, they came up with several examples of biased behavior, including an instance where the Black members of a team were required to relocate while a non-Black member wasn't, an instance where a Black team member was subjected to to insults about drug dealing and guns from their manager, recruiting team member claims that Black candidates were less capable, the fact that Coinbase employs Black workers at less than half the average of the industry, and the fact that Black workers were dismissed in meetings, to the point where a pattern of repeated HR complaints occurred.
Starting with the assumption that they are racist, that is the tip of a nasty iceburg.
Starting with the assumption it is a pretty normal company, that is a list mostly of stuff that nobody should care about.
If someone can articulate what the HR complaints are about then that might be evidence. But complaints to HR are expected - that is why HR gets hired. They are there to deal with HR complaints. And read resumes.
> including an instance where the Black members of a team were required to relocate while a non-Black member wasn't
This one is stupid. Am I meant to believe they are revealing their racist ways by hiring black people then asking them to relocate, racistly? This is bog standard sucks-to-work-in-support activity. Miserable working conditions, but nothing to do with skin colour. A similar thing happened to my father back in the day. He certainly wasn't black.
Racism is endemic in the US. It was founded with the notion that black people were basically livestock. We've slowly and fitfully moved away from that, but the problem is far from over. With any company we should assume that both personal and systemic bias are present. Which is why well-run companies work to counter that.
Completely absurd. There is absolutely no evidence that "racism is endemic in the US". These kinds of blanket characterizations, are baseless fearmongering, and are incredibly irresponsible.
> Much of Coinbase’s culture stems from the one around Bitcoin, current and former employees said. Bitcoin, which embodies a libertarian philosophy that snubs its nose at the pieties of mainstream institutions, has attracted a generation of fans known as “crypto bros.” Many have propagated a brash male-dominated way of life, facing criticism for sowing racism and sexism.
You claim that there's "absolutely no evidence" that racism is endemic, which is an absurd claim to make. There's enormous amounts of it. Hundreds of studies. Hundreds of books. And the daily lived experience of million of people, who you need only listen to on the Internet. But if you want a very simple, obvious one, take NBER paper 9873: https://www.nber.org/papers/w9873
One could plausibly debate the level of it. But to sweepingly declare there's absolutely no evidence isn't so much a claim of fact as a declaration of willful ignorance. Which, unfortunately, is part of why racism is still endemic. See, for example, Loewen's "Sundown Towns", where the later chapters show how America's ongoing de-facto segregation, which was born out of the Nadir, both depends on and creates the sort of refusal to see the obvious that you engage in here.
Hiring preferences based on the cultural or racial association of names is not an indication of "systemic racism against black Americans" or endemic racism.
Systemic or endemic implies the racism is part of the systemic structure, i.e. the laws of the country, or its social contract. This study would at most imply high incidence of unconscious racial biases among the population.
It could also be explained by employer preference for people who are more integrated in the cultural mainstream, which people with "black" names, or Chinese names, are less likely to be.
>But to sweepingly declare there's absolutely no evidence isn't so much a claim of fact as a declaration of willful ignorance
To claim that there racism against black Americans is endemic, with the strongest evidence you were able to find being the incidence of bias with respect to job applicant names, shows a basic lack of regard for the truth.
Literally, your logic could be used to argue that "racism against white Americans is endemic" because there are studies like this one that shows police are 25 times more likely to shoot an unarmed white male than an unarmed black male:
You're conflating endemic and systemic. I clearly said one, not the other. Although you're wrong on both.
That also isn't the strongest evidence. It's just one of the easiest to understand. But given that you're going to strain at gnats and swallow camels even with the pretty basic ones, I'll leave finding the rest as an exercise to the reader.
Endemic in this context is synonomous with systemic.
You ignore the evidence showing unarmed black Americans are 25 times less likely to be shot by police than unarmed white Americans in a given interaction with similar circumstances, because it doesn't fit your victimhood narrative.
You've done nothing but lob ad hominem at me for not agreeing with your completely baseless and unscientific quackery/dogma.
Well since you believe you understand what I'm saying better than I do, it seems like I'm not needed in this conversation. Have fun arguing with your straw man.
The only institutional racism in America today is affirmative action that blatantly discriminates in favor of individuals belonging to supposedly disadvantages groups, or the racial victimhood ideology that leads to police shooting unarmed black individuals at 25 times lower frequencies than unarmed white individuals in similar situations.
Well since you believe you understand what I'm saying better than I do, it seems like I'm not needed in this conversation. Have fun arguing with your straw man.
Well since you believe you understand what I'm saying better than I do, it seems like I'm not needed in this conversation. Have fun arguing with your straw man.
> It could also be explained by employer preference for people who are more integrated in the cultural mainstream, which people with "black" names, or Chinese names, are less likely to be.
Nobody calls them "crypto bros" except the sort of people who work at the New York Times, and those sort of people routinely describe anything they don't like as racist or sexist. Bitcoin is built on the work of many people who are totally anonymous even - doesn't get more neutral or non-racist/sexist than that.
> Racism is endemic in the US. It was founded with the notion that black people were basically livestock.
The existence of slavery in the past isn’t driving the current race issues in the US so much as fallout from much more recent segregation policies. Nobody alive today was a (or was born to) a slave and the majority of the states that make up the United States were not even part of the country during the civil war.
To claim racism is endemic now because of slavery is lazy. Racism is endemic because segregation didn’t end until approximately the same time as TCP/IP was being invented!
But how, in a democracy founded on the notion of equality, did segregation become a policy? How did the people who passed those laws get it into their heads that it would be a useful thing to do?
A democracy founded on the notion that all white male property owners were equal and slavery was acceptable? Some fancy words in a fancy document doesn't override the actual reality of who was considered equal or not.
I agree plenty of history happened in between, but your notion that they're unrelated is absurd. Nobody today learned English from Alexander Hamilton, but nonetheless we not only understand the Federalist Papers just fine, we live by many of the ideas he expressed. Culture is handed down.
If you'd like to better understand that, I'd suggest you read Kendi's "Stamped from the Beginning", who gives an intellectual history of America's racist ideas. I also think you're mistaken to lay the current troubles at the feet of formal segregation policies, which were only active in one part on the US. Maybe go read "Sundown Towns", which shows that all across America we had towns with de-facto segregation without formal policies. And it takes only a glance at modern maps showing race to see we haven't solved the problem.
> so much as fallout from much more recent segregation policies.
The existence of slavery and the view that Black people could be treated as livestock are why we had segregation policies.
The existence of slavery fueled white anger towards the idea that the "livestock" were suddenly being allowed to go to the same places and use the same services as white people. The generations of people who owned slaves raised the generations of people that enforced segregation, and those generations raised the people today who enforce racial discrimination and oppose racial justice.
And like you said, this isn't far-back history, segregation in the US was recent. People have this flowery view that racism just went away and that slavery just suddenly stopped mattering. But the effects are still very much with us today. A few generations isn't enough to eliminate a culturally pervasive, harmful ideology.
It's important to keep in mind that Black communities (and a lot of other marginalized communities) as a group don't really have these debates as much, because it's completely obvious to them that they aren't being treated equally.
I'm not sure what you're looking for here. Are you saying that it is untrue that there are Black employees who feel that racial issues are being handled poorly at Coinbase? Because that's what the article says. It sounds like you're looking for enough information to make a judgement of whether the company is racist, in an innocent until proven guilty sort of way. But that is very much not the point.
For starters, they can publish the results of the external investigation they paid for, which is something other companies in similar situations have done. Then we can assess the credibility of that report. This seems pretty basic, so it's surprising to see people asking "what else can Coinbase do?".
Whose privacy? Coinbase's?! They wouldn't be the first company to publicly publish an internal report (voluntary or not; such documents routinely go public via the justice system).
The employee's. If someone makes a complaint to HR it might easily be illegal to investigate then broadcast it to the world accompanied with a "this employee is full of it" style message. Doing that might, for example, damage that employees prospects of finding employment or reveal specific personal details. Certainly appalling form, probably illegal.
You are, due respect, basically just making this up. Companies publish investigator reports of bias and discrimination somewhat regularly. It's possible that Coinbase contractually can't disclose the reports they've already commissioned --- in which case they probably ought not to have tried to refute the article with them --- but they can certainly commission a new one that they can disclose. It's a 600+ employee company; the cost of the report is a rounding error.
As it stands, the kernel of Coinbase's defense here is "we paid for a secret report and it says we're great". Reasonable people can find that response unpersuasive.
> Companies publish investigator reports of bias and discrimination somewhat regularly.
Are you thinking of a specific example? I don't recall ever seeing this apart from sometimes a short statement on an outcomes (which Coinbase has given us - they found the complaints baseless [0]).
> ...but they can certainly commission a new one that they can disclose.
I did mention law but this isn't fundamentally a legal argument. I was just saying I'd expect there to be a law, given what releasing a detailed report would entail about employee privacy. I'd be ropeable if someone did that to me after I complained to HR and the story got international attention.
Companies have no role at all in airing internal dirty laundry of employees to Hacker News. Coinbase's position is an employee made a baseless claim - in my book it would probably be a very poor precedent for them to start broadcasting details globally. Best case, utterly unfair because of the power imbalance between a company and an individual employee. Worst case, a smear campaign. All cases, unhelpful except for the enjoyment of pundits Hacker News comment threads.
Sure, an example would be the Uber Covington & Burling report.
I don't know where this "baseless claim" thing comes from; the only foundation you have for that belief is that Coinbase said so. The point of an external report is not having to take Coinbase's word for it. What's funny is paying for an external report, then not showing it to anybody, or even disclosing who did it, and relying on that external report as evidence.
Here's a reasonable question: is the reason Coinbase won't disclose the external reports they commissioned because they can't, because their investigators won't allow them to, because neither are willing to stake their reputations on the interpretation Coinbase drew from them? If not, how do you know that?
Do you have a link? I searched quickly and you might have been mislead by lazy titling. They released the recommendations of the report - I can find that very quickly [0] - but the actual investigation isn't obvious.
And that was investigating stuff Susan Fowler had already attacked them publicly on. I'm not going to try and look up all the details but it is probably a different set of circumstances.
The amount of speculation with regards to this topic among “engineers” and “innovators” is kind of amazing.
The HN community appears to be no more rational or evidence-based finders of fact than those found in the comments section of Fox News or the New York Times.
What hope do we have if the creators and maintainers are prone to the same proclivities as the users?
It’s always amusing to me that people are shocked HN isn’t actually that much smarter than any other internet community. The relative level of pretentiousness though is off the charts
Eh, I think it’s a bit hyperbolic to compare it to the commenters on the aforementioned sites, but yeah I mostly agree. Given the site’s founders and general audience it’s not really shocking though. I still prefer it over say Reddit, mostly because the more focused nature makes it easier to find the actual smart comments.
I agree there is some great content here, and there’s definitely a lot less nonsense compared to reddit. I do think some of the smaller subreddits are just as good as here though
> Coinbase's stance there is fair, reasonable and moral
The 60 people who left makes it clear this is not agreed upon. HN has already played out this debate on the original post so I'll save going into it here, but it's disingenuous to say that Russ didn't quit because of race-related policy, whether or not you think the policy is race-related.
That said, putting out that "apolitical stance" in the direct wake of George Floyd/BLM is unavoidably tied. As others have said, timing is key. If they had the policy from day 1, they might have a leg to stand on. It seems likely in context with this article (and frankly, to many before this) that Coinbase's apolitical stance is not a rejection of all politics but a tacit rejection of George Floyd/BLM. No one should be surprised about a diversity problem in such a company.
This "what else can they do?" question stems from a criminal judicial standard of guilt and conviction, but that is not where this discussion exists. To think that Coinbase must be innocent and needs to prove that over many former employees being on the record + clear statistical issues that all align with the narrative the company has set with previous actions shows a central flaw in the tech community's approach to racism and politics.
I realize the question does not direct say that they must be innocent, but the implications and assumptions here are important to note, and certainly lean in that direction.
Are there other non-crypto political stances Coinbase has taken? It seems to me that this was just the first time they needed such a policy. I certainly wouldn't have anticipated the possibility of a new political slogan that almost every major company is forced to chant.
Many companies regularly work within mainstream political action such as LGTBQ+ rights, data privacy, homelessness, local housing or public works, and children's orgs such as Big Brother Big Sister. While these vary in controversiality, relevancy, and apolitical nature, it's not at all uncommon to see companies working in these areas (and others unlisted). Often companies grow into them along with size and profits, so I don't know if Coinbase historically can be taken as sign of consistency either. What Coinbase did was effectively say "well now that BLM has entered mainstream politics and other companies are taking stances, we no longer feel that the mainstream politics of the industry are agreeable to us."
The George Floyd spark very much "outed" Coinbase here, because it became an issue you couldn't avoid taking a side on. That's just the state of the world and you're right that they couldn't have anticipated it, but they chose to make a clear stance rather than trying to ride the thin line, and they became less diverse for it. I don't know why anyone would be surprised their prior actions match that recent stance.
Again, I'm trying to avoid the philosophical "Should companies be political" debate that's already been hashed, but simply stating how their actions translate in the current landscape.
If Wired's reporting is accurate (https://www.wired.com/story/turmoil-black-lives-matter-polit...), Coinbase did try to ride the line, but a bunch of activists demanded for Armstrong to publicly chant the slogan and eventually went on strike until he did.
Then they made their choice - their employees believed their company was not supporting them as people and forced the issue. Coinbase then chose its side. Is there anything more to say?
From those actions alone you can't determine if Coinbase rejected George Floyd/BLM, or rejected all kinds of slogan chanting that the CEO was pressured to chant by strikes.
It was, after all the first time he was pressured that way.
I disagree from my interpretation of what we do know. They could have made the case about that specifically if they wanted to, but they decided to deflect with a blanket policy on politics. To say we can't determine anything is silly - we're making best guess judgements, not trying Coinbase in court for murder.
I've made this comment elsewhere, but I really would love to know why people are digging in so hard here. Let's just call a spade a spade.
He’s asking specifically about Coinbase. Referencing how “most companies” do things isn’t relevant to his question.
And can you explain to me why one is absolutely required to publicly vocalize their stance on the George Floyd issue? How is not wanting to speak on the topic in the workplace equivalent to being racist?
I'm not sure. I think it probably applies in personal life. But is there an imperative to 1) bring it into the workplace, and 2) to fall in line with any specific group and their chosen preferred language/actions?
I'm equivocal on both of these.
In the case of (1), why should the act of fighting injustice pause by some notion of decorum at work? Where should our priorities and values lie?
In the case of (2), many people have good reasons to find the prevailing leftist/progressive rhetoric distasteful. But right now the groups who espouse that rhetoric are also the most active and most effective groups taking action right now. If you aren't with them, who exactly are you with? Or so the rhetoric might go.
>The George Floyd spark very much "outed" Coinbase here, because it became an issue you couldn't avoid taking a side on.
You said this so casually. It's an axiomatic truth that everyone has to 'take a stand', implying that you have to call it out, and in a context moreover where not a single person applauded the murder of Floyd. How disingenuous for you to call it a stand, implying that there's a debate. Instead what you mean is, sign up to a calling out of the police. What betrays the problem at hand, why companies cannot feasibly all be political by nature, is that there a zillion possible social causes that one could rationally argue are impossible to call out, from shootings domestically (1100 in my city this year so far), to corporate malfeasance (sweat shops overseas, finance fraud), to foreign policy (bombings of middle eastern countries).
If you and I worked together and you stood up and demanded everyone call out the Floyd thing, outed as you call it, you and I would be debating the above points in front of everyone.
THAT is why companies should allow for an apolitical space.
> The 60 people who left makes it clear this is not agreed upon.
Did all 60 people leave because of Coinbase's political stance, or did some leave because of the generous severance package of 4-6 months pay that the CEO offered in September?
I know that if I were looking to make a life change, I'd seriously consider that offer even if I liked the politics.
We can only speculate on the numbers, but it can always be a both/and situation. This culture/environment itself can be part of the reason for wanting that life change.
But forget number speculation, we have concrete proof of this in the article:
> another employee who left in October was John Russ, the head of marketing and the company’s highest ranking Black employee, who had been hired three months earlier.
> In a brief phone interview, Mr. Russ would only say that he disagreed with Mr. Armstrong’s new position and left as a result.
We can, but we can only do this because people in the comments are independently informed. The NYT repeatedly emphasized 60 people leaving (across two articles) but never mentioned the severance.
We are in dynamic world and businesses need to stay away from politics and focus on its core value. Someone leaving has nothing to do with racism. We live in a time where few people and the media are manipulating the rest.
When penguin employees are having a cry about a guy that published a book with all the life advice a good father would give, I'm really not surprised there's people out there shoving their hands out looking for or concessions not granted to anyone else.
It's a uniquely American thing that the academic grifters with nothing better to do are desperately trying to import here as well.
> Coinbase's stance there is fair, reasonable and moral
this is a self-evident conclusion being hawked as a premise, and the rest of the comment doesn't do much to mold this premise into an argument
> If Russ had a reason for quitting that was race-related then the NYT didn't uncover it.
There's an unfalsifiability in this rhetoric, because someone leaving for race-related reasons in an industry that either:
a) has "subtle racists"
b) is funded by "subtle racists"
c) functionally aids and/or abets "subtle racists" through inaction
would be incentivized to not specify these things, as these industries (finance and crypto) optimize for relationships almost as much (if not ==) to the amount they optimize for merit. And that's not even getting into clauses baked into employment termination contracts.
So you have a scenario where you can't actually "prove" race was a primary motivator for quitting because:
a) if it were a "subtle racist" co-worker, they're probably using euphemism
a2) if they're a "not subtle racist" co-worker, it would embarrass the employer for keeping that person on the book swhen the reputational cost exceeds the cost of sourcing and hiring someone who's not a not subtle racist"
b) If the person wants to work in tech again, relationships will likely be burned as a direct or indirect result of airing out a company's dirty laundry
c) Could be sued for violating non-disparagement clauses (prices out anyone who doesn't have the security to burn the bridge between them and a growth industry)
If the point of your comment was to use a number of premises that aren't empirical, and border on dogmatic, then I misunderstood, and apologize for trying to search for rhetoric where it was not intended to be found.
If the purpose of the statements above where to be rhetorical or logical, then we're getting into a place where we're asking for evidence that would be difficult for someone with said evidence to do without them, say, being financially and occupationally secure enough to burn the bridges between them and:
- Coinbase
- Coinbase's Investors
- Coinbase's Investors' LPs
- Coinbase's Investors' companies
- Every other company that either doesn't question whether they are less meritocratic than they believe, or doesn't question whether or not they can replace the problematic superstar employees
You took one example and ignored the rest. It’s not like NYT wrote this article simply because Russ left. What about the employees who were asked to be present for photo shoots to show workplace diversity but who felt ignored and talked down to during meetings? That sounds problematic. If it were a couple of employees it’s one thing but when most of your black employees leave because of what they feel is racism in the workplace that’s harder to ignore. It doesn’t necessarily prove there was racism, but it’s certainly a red flag.
> What about the employees who were asked to be present for photo shoots to show workplace diversity but who felt ignored and talked down to during meetings?
That is extremely vague. Is it a red flag? Yes. Does it imply racism? No. It doesn't even guarantee there is a problem or a systemic trend for that matter.
If there are 3 red flags and some actual evidence of racism then that is one thing. But there isn't. Even the number of black people quitting - what is the expected retention rate in that team? Most people quit due to dodgy managers, so people quitting points to a dodgy manager before it points to racism.
You've squeezed a bit into the premise of that question. If, why and how persistently someone was ignored are very relevant questions that we have no facts on. And what the subject of the meeting was.
We know that Alysa Butler felt unappreciated. I'm hesitant to believe the NYT is even representing her opinions fairly. If you read what they've written about carefully, the article doesn't have her accusing Coinbase of any sort of racism, the NYT is just weaving her experience into a story that they construct elsewhere (normal practice in newspapers). A 'diversity problem' is different from racism. 25 year olds being ignored in meetings is not a new phenomenon either in my experience.
And you’re completely ignoring the fact that they are using these employees who they hired for an actual job as props for diversity brochures. Is that really just a “diversity problem”? To use your employees as token figures? Not every racist act has to be consciously malicious. It at the very least implies it, diversity problem honestly just sounds like a euphemism.
> And you’re completely ignoring the fact that they are using these employees who they hired for an actual job as props for diversity brochures.
Yeah, I am completely ignoring that. "My presence in the workplace was excessively celebrated" isn't a complaint. There is nothing there to respond to.
If you want to argue that could technically be racist behaviour I agree, but typically when people talk about racism they are actually going to serious issues like money, power or personal safety. Photos taken for promotional material is not something that needs a defence - it is a frivolous thing to argue about. Any company might do that.
Oh well as long as you think it’s fine I guess it is. Sorry about that. I was just listening to the people who worked there and experienced it firsthand. I should have realized they were just making a big fuss over a nonexistent problem. Thanks for the insight!
They probably wrote it because Coinbase stood up to BLM activists internally and the NYT is the media arm of BLM. But you get these accusations constantly against companies. "I felt ignored in meetings therefore the firm is sexist and racist". No, that happens to people all the time, including white men. A better explanation is maybe you weren't saying anything worth listening to in meetings, or you feel you were but your manager disagreed.
when most of your black employees leave because of what they feel is racism in the workplace that’s harder to ignore
They weren't ignoring it. Some of these people weren't even saying they felt that way to Coinbase - one of the people who claims she was bullied also claims nobody told her how to make an official complaint and that's why Coinbase have no record of her views. Complaining to HR has to be the easiest task in any modern corporation; if she couldn't figure out how to do even that then we probably found the explanation for why she felt unappreciated: maybe she just sucked. Or maybe she's made up this supposed racism after she left, as part of achieving other ends (like getting in the NYT).
Which all boils down to that old quote: "lies, damned lies, and statistics".
Political parties have pet Think Tanks and Consulting Companies and various other organisations that only exist to massage the existing data into the desired narrative.
Look for the data points that indicate 'normal' and orbit that. When the inevitable questions about X% of the African-American workforce quit within Y time, just point to the stats that say 'normal'. Find some other outlier statistic to point out that random groupings happen, use this to try and dismiss this scenario as a one-off random event; coincidence.
Kids: learn your statistics! You'll be able to cheat your way into at least a couple of promotions throughout your career. (What I actually mean is: learn your statistics so you can spot when you're being cheated).
Imagine if the consultants had in fact found discrimination. Would the company ever report that publicly? Maybe there was or wasn't discrimination, but there is zero reason to conclude based on somebody chosen and paid for by the company.
I think that’s unfair, not all corporations are big bad monoliths trying to crush the little guy. The New York Times article is a hit piece, and main stream media’s continuation of constantly looking to create racial tension.
> If you've never done this sort of thing before: there's a huge market for these "external consultants". Their unstated job (and reputations) are as whitewashing firms.
There are consultancies whose reputations depend on reporting only unvarnished truth to their clients. That way the client can reliably handle and eliminate actual discrimination, and defend themselves against false claims. I'm not sure that a whitewashing firm would be as valuable as all that.
This is the same NYT which is widely agreed to have helped elect Trump by aggressively covering a number of stories about Clinton, including an entire series based on the Clinton Cash book written by right-wing activists? Or is your objection that their reporting isn’t politicized in a way which supports your preferred outcome?
It's important that they investigate what is alleged, and fix whatever wrongdoing they find.
If any individual was treated unfairly, that individual can sue under discrimination law, for a private apology and settlement.
But beyond that, it's also important that there be NO public apology or acceptance of the idea that refusing to espouse activist politics makes a company intolerant.
I think it's admirable Coinbase is taking a stand to keep activism out of the workplace.
Treating people fairly is required; tolerating campaigning in a private enterprise is not.
> So external investigators didn't find anything wrong
This feels like a trap that we don't fall into in other areas. This is an external consultant is paid by the company, whos reviews and future job prospects are based on being an attractive hire for other companies accused of racist action. There's obviously a huge conflict of interest there.
At HN we would recognize that conflict of interest if we were talking about binding arbitration. We would recognize that conflict of interest if we were talking about a security consultant that was dismissing security disclosures from 3rd-parties. It's a little disappointing to me to see unequal standards applied here.
The question is, is what the NYT is saying plausible, is there evidence of this going on? And yeah, the story sites specific examples, interviews specific employees, and cites complaints from managers. It seems completely plausible to me.
I don't get why people are suddenly so eager to buy into corporate narratives about structural racism and bias, when they would never buy into those same corporate narratives about issues like privacy and security. Every time an Apple or a Google thread comes up, our comment section is filled with people calling them out as disingenuous; it's filled with people who are willing to read between the lines on their policies and press releases. We have no shortage of people in those threads who are willing to extrapolate or judge those companies based on the past actions of the industry. But when it comes to representation, suddenly all of that goes out the window?
Representation and bigotry even just as general topics are a huge blind spot for HN that we need to get better at talking about. We need to be less dismissive of these claims. We need to take racial discrimination more seriously, because it is a serious problem in tech.
this seems like it’s also a struggle between different teams at the same company. Customer Service teams are very often looked down upon as “less than” other teams like engineering, and this article states that a disproportionate number of the black employees were on that team.
Customer Service is often regarded in companies like insurance is regarded by most people—you gotta have it, in a perfect world you’d never need it, and very few people brag about how much they pay for it.
That’s why Customer Service isn’t treated like the Rock Stars that Sales or Engineering is treated like in a company.
It also tends to have the most natural turnover, and tends to be the lesser skilled positions in a software company (not often requiring specializations, like developers).
yeah it’s unfortunate even at a finance startup that CX is so disregarded. Coinbase doesn’t exactly have a great CX reputation eg lots of horror stories plus it seems to go down every time there’s a big move up or down.
CX folks at CB are doing God's work. Nothing but respect for them on my eng team at CB. At past companies I had to do a lot more legwork to dive into an issue; our CX folks are incredibly technical and have great instincts on identifying, grouping, and triaging issues as well as providing just the right amount of context.
I’m speaking from the perspective of the customer. They might be top knotch but if it’s understaffed and underesourced then no one can be set up for success when they have to face the wrath of a million customers when the site goes down on the slightest uptick in volume due to a large move.
Man, when I was at an early stage online brokerage back in the day, customer service was pure gold. These people were mostly ex-traders who knew the ins-and-outs of complex options trades, and were legit viewed as rock stars.
I was willing to support the general message Brian Armstrong put out, but with the added context and chronology I cannot.
I would say that this kind of mission statement can only work if done at the beginning, as reacting in response to the work environment described by their employees was doomed for failure.
I know many people like Brian Armstrong, and the investors. They are all cut from a similar cloth and they honestly have no clue how to react. They don't know how to get women on a panel, they don't know how to get qualified people of color in positions to change things. They are just told what they did wrong and just shut themselves off from it. The very people with power to change anything get marginalized themselves. And yes, some - not all - of them actually are not interested in inclusion or really are racist and sexist. But for the former, there is room to empathize with these kind of people to steer their energy in more productive ways.
Yeah my point was about empathizing with people being expected to make statement after statement, instead of vilifying them when they stop jumping when people say jump. Aside from the topic sentence of that paragraph it was no longer about Coinbase.
Where is the Hispanic and Black representation? I see 3/15 people on that page being women, not a very strong point for a group that is 50% of the population.
This is the standard SV makeup. Do a random sample of any large tech company and this is the team you’d get. This tells me they’re not doing anything different.
If true, what are they doing to change that? When I was at Google there were zero paths to bring in people with potential and train them up. I’m guessing it is the same at Coinbase. Doing nothing to address the problem then pointing at your H1Bs and patting yourself on the back.
The talent pools exist, they can definitely increase recruiting at different schools.
America is where it is by not even tapping into the productivity of basically up to half of its population across various demographics, imagine if it did.
also: for companies that are global in nature, with global operations, offices, employees, etc. is it right to take on the issues of the country where they have an office? (or are HQ-ed, or have X% of employees (even if majority)?)
Why not other things? Why aren't the issues of the impoverished of India an issue w/ tech companies, especially given the large presence of "well to do" Indians or upper-casters?
If corporations were not involved in our politics in the US it would be fine. You don’t get to shape the laws of a country then wash your hands of responsibility for the people.
Our healthcare relies on our employment, they fund politicians, write laws. They are very much the lords of the modern era and they need to act in the interest of people, or lose their corporate personhood.
As for the globalist perspective, I agree. We should care how people up the supply chain live. I understand the issues in the US significantly better than those in China or India though. For those issues, give them visibility and work toward a solution. It doesn’t have to be either or.
Coinbase aspires to be a global company. What does "Black" even mean in that context? People with dark skin color? If so, a broad portion of South Asians and sub-Saharan Africans would qualify.
What does Hispanic mean? Would Spanish people qualify?
Did you mean only in the context of the USA? If so, how is that different than the Nationalist jingoism of Donald Trump, where you want US-centric population representation in a global company?
Do you think there are zero differences in races and that one race wouldn't naturally drift towards particular roles or industries more than another race? Because this point of view isn't supported by data.
Asians, a minority by every measurement, are over-represented in STEM classes to the point that Harvard and others actively discriminate against them.
Studies have shown, repeatedly, that blind hiring (stripping names from resumes, showing only experience) actually worsens diversity. This means companies generally give more opportunity to black, Asian and other minority groups.
If you measure some quantity using biased sampling, you're invariably going to see biased results. The assumption that the biased results in this scenario are due to lack of opportunity, racism, etc are unfounded. Correlation is not causation.
Yes, but that's not at the hiring level but at education level. You can't expect every single tech company to be representative of the population since there simply aren't that many female/black/whatever engineers
+1000. So succinct. Brian's hissy fit about being "apolitical" was clear and blatant "not my problem, let's ignore any racism and accusations of racism" which is utterly unacceptable at a company that (like any others of this size) is likely to have the occasional (or very common) problem with racism and discrimination.
> they don’t know how to get qualified people of color in positions to change things
These aren’t the kinds of things that someone running a business should be concerned with.
Don’t be condescending. Women and “people of color” don’t need to be rescued and hoisted up into a business artificially. They are perfectly capable of joining the workforce through the same doors as all other people.
When minorities get hired just because companies want to show they are doing their part, doesn't it make sense people hired because of their skin color have harder times to get promotions?
You will get downvoted because HN reflects SV groupthink, but you are absolutely correct. This is a well-studied phenomenon analogous to the Peter principle, and has been observed in workplaces (as you described) and schools (black students who get in to meet an arbitrary target struggle more and have a worse college experience).
We are doing these people a disservice. Even in the most “socially forward thinking” companies like Google, this sentiment prevails. The loudest non-black advocates for black hiring are privately the owners of the strongest fences. But when its time to virtue-signal, they’re at the front of the line. Hire a black employee directly into their team in eng/sales? No thanks - but they’ll gladly advocate for the customer service, recruitment and “diversity officer” roles to go to a black individual. Direct result of the push to hire disproportionately many black people which has led to them having a worse experience at these jobs as the psyche of existing employees is they’re automatically a lower bar hire (very unfair to these people!).
Good job big tech - you have once again turned a target into a measure and completely missed the point. Except now the people you supposedly tried to help are hurt the most.
Look at Coinbase - the exec team is largely women and minorities, yet NYT takes every opportunity to point out the percent of black employees (with no context on the number in the hiring funnel and at target colleges) as if CB has an obligation to hit a certain number.
Disclosure: I worked at Coinbase for a brief period.
Ready for the downvotes, but look around at those in your team and within yourself, and ask yourself if there is anything untrue in what I said before hitting that button.
When I replied, the thread was quite young. I thought that comment (vaguely mirroring the first paragraph of my comment iirc) was unpopular but certainly not offensive enough to be flagged. Or it is on HN?
Sorry, could you clarify what precisely is a "well studied phenomenon" and maybe link some of the studies? With this sort of research you have to be extremely careful about what claims you assert it supports because there are often serious methodological issues. I also notice in your post that you use the phrase "virtue signal", which suggests a certain political view on your part, so I want to make sure I'm responding to exactly what you claim so we don't get confused by terminology or matters of degree.
I have worked in this industry - on and off - for 3 decades. This is an ugly phenomenon nobody wants to acknowledge.
The mere suggestion that this is a funnel issue, rather than a racial bias issue, is met with vehement accusations of racism (if coming from an older man like me, even more so).
I’d even go as far as to say SV has a real discrimination problem - and that is ageism. When supply and demand is considered, it is many times as blatant as the supposed race issue.
Finally, I did use the term virtue signalling. It is fairly unambiguous. There are no political leanings to extrapolate from there, yet the subtle accusations put forward based on that is abundantly clear here. Once again - before dissecting my comment and projecting an image of me to attack/downvote, ask yourself if the way SV (likely your employer based on HN demographics)and outlets like NYT frame these issues is truly honest.
Since there seems to be some activity around this comment and I can no longer edit the parent comment, let me add a few more thoughts here.
Diverse hiring (as in equal outcome hiring) does not materially benefit companies.
I was on, or closely worked with teams that built early versions of modern virtual memory, Excel, Turbo Pascal, WebTV, and IIS, and they were largely white men, with a sprinkling of Asian men. Would these products be better engineering marvels with more racial and gender representation? Possibly, but not because of the existence of “women algorithms” or “black design patterns”. Human brains work similarly given similar inputs. There is some revenue to be regained in designing for edge case blind spots, but it is an overwhelming small fraction when you are working at the bleeding edge of an industry. You did not see these initiatives in tech at the time for the same reason you don’t see them in the space travel industry, or anti-aging research, or on the teams working on a COVID-19 vaccine (how ridiculous would that sound?). The industry was not mature enough, as it is now, for such overhead (distractions, to be less polite). There was important work to be done, and we didn’t care who you were as long as you could help. These were some of the most open, progressive, intelligent and honest teams I got to work with.
Then why is it important? Because diverse hiring (as in equal-opportunity hiring) is __the right thing to do__. Talent can come from South America or South Chicago just as easily as Bangalore or Austin, TX. The next Donald Knuth or Jeffrey Dean should not be denied an opportunity because of their skin color or gender if they shone through. And in those teams, several of them shone through and we scrambled to bring them aboard.
What is happening now is analogous to dredging the river bed, incurring the costs of that (which is possible because the industry is massively profitable and mature, with very little paradigm-shifting work left at these companies) to find what might be remotely shiny. We can then report our “progress” and pat ourselves on the back. Except, this breeds resentment from the rocks and diamonds not getting dredged, the aforementioned Peter Principle issue, and as I’ve observed, the general unease. You will not find a team at a company like Etsy that is as accepting and open as the teams I mentioned, because the sacred thing that pulls together smart people - the “bar” for lack of better term - may have been compromised in bringing in the latest new hire. If there is a shadow of doubt about that, even if this person truly is a diamond, they are done a disservice because of this dynamic at play. It is unfair, and in the long term, actually hurts these UR communities in this industry.
What can be quantified is then optimized. What can't be quantified is ignored or even denied.
Chinese or Russian historians in the distant future, rustling through the bones of our fallen civilization, will disagree on many things. Marking the rise of the nerd as the beginning of the end won't be one of them.
Certainly, but I don't think we have any reason to believe Coinbase was doing this in the first place. (Personally I generally get the sense they wouldn't be.) Edit: Erm, I read the second half the article now. I guess we do, in the compliance department.
If there was a positive discrimination program (big if) it is well studied; the effect is the so-called Berkson's Paradox [0]. Positive discrimination programs reduce the pool quality of the group they are targeted at.
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
In the US, being "marginalized" means you are part of a cultural minority group that is politically useful to political corporatists - typically of the cultural coalition party.
It's not "newspeak" to suggest that Black people are treated differently than Asian people; in fact, it would be more surprising to hear that they aren't, since the two groups of people have wildly different histories in the United States.
And both face heavy discrimination and racism outside of the tech bubble of Silicon Valley, both historically and in the present day. To exclude Asians from the definition of POC is to disempower us because you consider one POC “more important” than another.
Indeed, we see this mentality in programs like affirmative action in which the suffering of Asian children is seen as an acceptable sacrifice for uplifting other minorities.
The major problem with this "people of color" designation is that it sweeps specific discrimination against African Americans* under the rug. It is certainly possible to have 100% employees "of color" while consciously excluding African Americans, which I have witnessed at private companies (blue collar jobs mostly) in California (where I live). The result is that affirmative action for African Americans, which has been replaced with affirmative action for women and non-white men, does way more for non-African Americans than the originally intended recipients (collectively). Even black African/Caribbean immigrants are used for diversity accounting-- see the NYTimes article from 2004, "Top Colleges Take More Blacks, but Which Ones?".
Please note this is not a slight against women, immigrants, or anyone else. They obviously have valid discrimination claims. But if you work in a community where less than 1% of African-American students are scoring at grade level in mathematics, and your company claims it is "diverse" yet hires no local African-Americans, there is still a serious problem in your community that should be addressed. (It's OK if you don't care, as long as you don't pretend otherwise). So please do not conflate hiring "people of color" with hiring any specific group.
* By "African-American" here I mean descendants of slaves who lived in the USA, and are thus severely disadvantaged because of it, having actual wealth stolen without any legal means available for recovery. I do understand that "African-American" is commonly used to mean any black U.S. resident.
> By "African-American" here I mean descendants of slaves who lived in the USA, and are thus severely disadvantaged because of it, having actual wealth stolen without any legal means available for recovery. I do understand that "African-American" is commonly used to mean any black U.S. resident.
Interestingly, a growing number of activists prefer the term ADOS (American descendants of slavery) because it makes precisely this distinction.
I do not give a hoot about skin color. MLK taught me to judge people not by the color of their skin. If I were to tone down my speech, because I focus on the color of the skin of my audience, I would feel bad and awkward: "these people deserve coddling due to their skin color" ranks close to "these people deserve scorn due to their skin color".
Accusing others of racism is a serious faux-pas. It is also delusional to think someone talking down to you, is caused by the color of your skin, and not, maybe, because you deserved a talking down to, or the person is just an asshole, and talks down to everyone.
Saying someone else got a promotion, because their white skin, despite being lower skilled than you, is a horrible thing to say, and a horrible thing to believe. It would be vile distracting paralyzing racism, instead of an opportunity to reflect and grow.
If racial equality activists make you feel that way, judge others on the color of their skin, and paint decision-making of white people that way, then this activism is not doing you any favors. It is not making you stronger. It is making you a victim. It sours inter-racial relationships.
If a manager really says something along the lines of "watch out for her, she is dealing crack in the ghetto, and secretly carries a gun everywhere." then that manager is fired everywhere in the world, and the Black employee is compensated for this evil. No company wants to keep such managers around. No need to invoke tricks like paying off an external investigator. That manager is gone.
Yet, that manager is still around. No complaint was filed. No colleague stepped up. So what really happened? A joke gone wrong? Being above racism led to problems with an employee for who being black and female is the major two traits of their group/social media identity, and now they can't help but relate every interaction, to whites hating their skin color, or the patriarchy keeping them down?
Racism is gross, but this "I am being discriminated against by these elite white tech bros, because they notice my skin every day, promoting their dumb jocks over me, again due to the color of my skin, and nobody is willing to stop that" is even grosser. It is sexist, slanderous, weak, prejudiced, generalizing, blameful, divisive, and racist.
The taboo-ness of the topic is wielded as an effective weapon by activists. They realized early on what the power of calling someone's employer, conference organizers, or hinting at company racism can do to stifle opposing views and criticism, and the economic damage they can inflict on a brand. Even if totally out of line and false, such as accusing white business owners of cultural appropriation by selling Asian food, can get such a business cancelled, because people are afraid to be tarred and feathered by association. Socially ostracized without ever a court to fairly validate if you really furthered (illegal!) racism. Portrayed by international media as some sort of neo-Nazi libertarian hellscape momcorp, without ever a court or independent investigation finding anything of real substance. Acquitted by a judge, yet constantly called a murderous racist, because you killed a black-skinned person at a traffic stop.
So what happens if you loudly overreact to perceived company racism? You start to promote diversity and inclusion programs. You start asking applicants for their skin color or gender. You bring back the focus on skin color, ideally looking for a Disney-style PR diversity representation that's obvious for the outside (black, female, flamboyantly gay). You, of course, hire a black gay female to run these diversity programs, because white straight males are not suited for the job. Start policing language and technical jargon, as to not offend their favorite social scholars. And what happens to me? I look twice at a new colleague. The second time I notice skin color and gender. And I can't help but wonder... did those factors contribute or was this the best candidate for the ...
Techies are usually too naive about how the media works. This is a hit piece. Cui bono? Who are Coinbase's competitors? Who would stand to gain from Coinbase taking a hit?
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 361 ms ] threadhttps://blog.coinbase.com/upcoming-story-about-coinbase-2012...
Acknowledges that bigger companies deserve more scrutiny. Then proceeds to be immature by implying that said scrutiny is merely frustrating and not worthy of any further internal dialogue.
Also, why isn’t this letter signed? It doesn’t exactly read like a corporate memo as it’s rather opinionated and sounds like one person wrote it. Is the CEO too chicken shit to put his name here?
(As long as you’re of the correct skin tone and political ideology)
So what about the "political" thoughts, that said that Floyd was a career criminal unworthy of sainthood or role modeling, dying from a self-inflicted fentanyl overdose, and resisting arrest (where the other people in the car somehow received fair treatment, despite their skin color). It was gross to hear company's talk of police murder and police racism, and their devastation of the passing of someone they don't know, and wouldn't have known if they were Latin or Asian or Indian or basically any other minority.
You are entitled to political thoughts. If you can handle it, you are even allowed to share them with colleagues. But don't get upset if others have different political thoughts. And certainly not get upset enough to accuse them of racism.
> Floyd was a career criminal unworthy of sainthood or role modeling.
Floyd was arrested for a home invasion, where a 1-year-old baby was present, and he threatened a woman to tell her where the money and drugs was hidden, by pressing a gun to her stomach. After that he was arrested and processed 8 times for crimes related to drugs and theft. The day of his arrest he tried to pay with a counterfeit bill. After his death, Floyd was witlessly treated as some martyr, killed at the hands of racist violent police, and portrayed as a role model for all black people and the struggles they go through, just trying to turn his life around.
> dying from a self-inflicted fentanyl overdose
Handwritten notes of a law enforcement interview with Dr. Andrew Baker, the Hennepin County Medical Examiner, say Floyd had 11 ng/mL of fentanyl in his system.
"If he were found dead at home alone and no other apparent causes, this could be acceptable to call an OD. Deaths have been certified with levels of 3," Baker told investigators.
> and resisting arrest
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/aug/4/george-floyd...
Offended that you brand me with racism for telling you an unpleasant truthful interpretation? No, I think me and my wife can live with that. But a little scared, yes. You can accuse me and others of deeply-racist sentiment, and that accusation seems enough to financially and socially damage me. At least give me a "fair" trial: Show me where I lied. Or these racist accusations hold as much water as those in the Coinbase article, and are exposed for the bloody clubs they really are.
Just one example: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/sep/25/blog-posti...
> As evidence, it cites comments from Andrew Baker, the chief medical examiner in Hennepin County, who performed an autopsy on Floyd. But Baker didn’t say that Floyd died of a drug overdose.
> The medical examiner’s office ruled that the manner of Floyd’s death was homicide.
> The cause of death, according to the medical examiner, was "cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression."
You realize that his murder was caught on video right? Tens of millions of people saw it. And for the crime of trying to pass a counterfeit bill at a convenience store. If you've ever exceeded the speeding limit while driving, you have performed an act which posed more of a threat to society and danger to others than the act of passing a counterfeit bill.
Seems a bit pedantic and disingenuous to say that the examiner didn't attribute the death to an overdose, without providing the above context.
I'm not here to defend the knee-on-the-neck arrest of a handcuffed suspect, but the evidence as it stands holds it as a possibility that he died from the drug use, which still wouldn't justify the completely reckless/inhumane way in which he was restrained.
> because filming onlookers challenged the authority of the cop, and the cop was afraid to have to fight Big Floyd.
Are you suggesting that cops are such snowflakes that they can't do their jobs if a civilian criticizes them? I'm struggling to think of any other customer-facing job where that would be acceptable. This is like suggesting that it's fine if a waiter throws your meal in the trash and refuses to comp you because you complained that it was taking too long. They would be fired on the spot, for the crime of slightly inconveniencing you!
Also, there were FOUR cops there. Are you trying to suggest that an experienced cop, with three other cops present, was afraid of one guy who was supposedly so incapacitated that he was actively dying before even being subdued?
Way to stoke a flame war.. At the risk of exacerbating it: anything to bring up Floyd being black, while identical deaths involving people of other racial backgrounds, like in the case of Floyd, Tony Timpa, are never attributed to racism.
Also, way to implicitly accuse him of being a racist for not agreeing with you on the motives and culpability of the police.
Maybe it is the prevalence of this knee-jerk assumption you're exhibiting now, where you attribute any wrong committed to a black individual to some endemic anti-black societal bias, and not Coinbase's workplace environment, that is the reason why so many employees interviewed by Coinbase accused the company of anti-black racism, without a single definitive piece of evidence.
>>Are you suggesting that cops are such snowflakes that they can't do their jobs if a civilian criticizes them? I'm struggling to think of any other customer-facing job where that would be acceptable.
Strawman.
See how you can disagree or agree with my question, while your goal-post moving question can only be agreed to if you are a reasonable person? Just because racist-motivated murderers exist and are problematic, does not mean Floyd was murdered with racist motives.
You demand I defend the cop's actions, just for my interpretation of the case does not align with your interpretation. You call me a racist and a liar. You can't even direct quote me, so you put words in my mouth, and then call me disingenuous (I never said "died from an OD"). You are debating from very bad faith, and debating poorly at that. And I don't think you even realize that, nor the damage it does to the debate, working together to a solution, division, and growth of the "silent majority", who is starting to get fed up with this childish I-never-fell-off-a-skateboard Twitter-follower activism.
You're clearly not trying to "debate" out of a neutral position. You are tossing out a mix of unrelated facts and lies in an attempt to prove that George Floyd's murder was not racially motivated, or that he was actually dying from a fentanyl OD so the cop's behavior would have been fine for a healthy person, or not even to prove anything but to paint him as a career criminal who deserved what he got to bias people against him.
Short of a written declaration from Derek Chauvin, stating that "I killed George Floyd because he was black and I was having a bad day", there is nothing that will make you admit this murder was racially motivated, and I think it's pretty obvious to most readers of this thread why that is.
I recommend you practice some introspection, because this statement is so out-of-touch with your own obvious bias and ideological perspective, that it makes discussion with you almost pointless.
>>in an attempt to prove that George Floyd's murder was not racially motivated
There is absolutely no proof Floyd's murder was racially motivated.
I substantiate this very easily: affirmative action means preferential treatment for job applicants who are black, and affirmative action is very common.
Your first claim so blatantly false and wrong that it's pretty appropriate to assume that you're trolling. I mean, systemic/institutional racism doesn't exist and/or isn't a problem in the US, what?
> I substantiate this very easily: affirmative action means preferential treatment for job applicants who are black, and affirmative action is very common.
So on the one hand you deny that it exists towards black Americans, but you find affirmative action to be so significant that it however substantiate systemic racism in favour of black Americans?
Am I correct you assume that you've honed in on the word systemic and will only accept that it solely means whatever is explicitly written down? So that systemic/institutional racism does not include implicit bias?
You do realize that I think exactly the same about you, right? To assume that your perspective is so superior, that it gives you a right to ignore civil protocol, is incredibly arrogant.
>>I mean, systemic/institutional racism doesn't exist and/or isn't a problem in the US, what?
You're not providing a counter-argument. Your incredulity at my statement of fact doesn't give your absurd allegation of systemic racism any more credibility.
>you find affirmative action to be so significant that it however substantiate systemic racism in favour of black Americans?
Affirmative action is a form of systemic racism, in that it's racism that institutionized, meaning part of the formal structure of organizations, and accepted by the social contract.
>So that systemic/institutional racism does not include implicit bias?
The formal structure of institutions, as defined by their formal usually written rules, is the best description of their systemic/institutional properties. Only laws and other formal structures can have a systemic effect, and anything institutional by definition consists solely of them.
One can stretch the definition of systemic/institutional a bit to also include the social contract.
In neither case can one claim there is anything except systemic/institutional racism in favor of black Americans.
Implicit bias is not a systemic property, as it varies between individuals. There is also significant implicit bias in favor of black Americans.
This study shows police are 25 times more likely to shoot an unarmed white male than an unarmed black male:
https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publications/abstract.aspx?ID=2674...
> absurd allegation of systemic racism
So the contents of this article is blatantly false? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism
I'm curious to know about what year you think, approximately, that systemic racism against black Americans ceased?
That you find me uncivil doesn't really bother me.
> "The formal structure of institutions, as defined by their formal usually written rules, is the best description of their systemic/institutional properties. Only laws and other formal structures can have a systemic effect, and anything institutional by definition consists solely of them.
One can stretch the definition of systemic/institutional a bit to also include the social contract.
In neither case can one claim there is anything except systemic/institutional racism in favor of black Americans."
As I thought. You have just decided to entirely redefine the accepted definition of systemic/institutional racism so suit your argument. "But it doesn't say anything about race in this formal document!". Ignoring anything - apparently no matter how established and prevalent - that goes against your arguments is the fallacy of cherry-picking.
>>Institutional racism, also known as systemic racism, is a form of racism that is embedded as normal practice within society or an organization.
Anything "embedded as normal practice" is either part of the formal rules of the organization, or its informal social contract, just as I described.
Much of the rest of the article doesn't describe anything systemic or institutional, or it doesn't describe racism, so yes it's blatantly inaccurate. Wikipedia is articles that any one can edit, and when there is such an extreme ideological bias in the Humanities and Social Sciences, there is always the risk that the articles begin to reflect ideological conceptions of these terms, that don't match the words that the terms contain, like "institutional" and "racism".
>>I'm curious to know about what year you think, approximately, that systemic racism against black Americans ceased?
I think the end of Jim Crow laws was the end of most institutional racism, with some remnants of it existing in the social contract that was quickly dismantled in the 1970s, as society took a severe stance against anti-black discrimination.
But now we have institutional sexism and racism in favor of groups that are deemed to be disadvantaged, like women and black Americans.
>>You have just decided to entirely redefine the accepted definition of systemic/institutional racism so suit your argument.
Accepted by who? I don't accept the socialists' definition of "slavery" or "expropriation of surplus value", to include workers earning a wage, and investors earning a profit, respectively, either.
> I think the end of Jim Crow laws was the end of most institutional racism, with some remnants of it existing in the social contract that was quickly dismantled in the 1970s, as society took a severe stance against anti-black discrimination.
This is just staring oneself blind on the letter of law, ignoring everything else. That's not how societies work.
It's pointless to discuss subjects with someone who will just redefine them entirely and then refuse to even recognize anything else - everything else is now false, no matter how established. If this is not trolling it's at least dragging the level of discussion into never ending discussion of definitions and revisionism.
>>This is just staring oneself blind on the letter of law, ignoring everything else. That's not how societies work.
This is just ignoring what the terms "institutional" and "racism" mean, to push a grievance ideology narrative that castigates society.
I'm commenting on "institutional racism", not racism in general. Institutional racism is "racism that is embedded as normal practice within society", which only occurs through the mechanism of systemic properties like its laws or rules, or its social contract, just as I explained.
>>It's pointless to discuss subjects with someone who will just redefine them entirely and then refuse to even recognize anything else
You're the one redefining "institutional" and "racism", and resorting to ad hominem when any one points out the pure absurdity of your narrative.
Come on. You've cherry-picked a single vague line from the preamble of that article because it's so general that it also fits your narrow definition. The rest of the article goes on about the established definition.
You're redefining an entire concept coined to mean what we are talking about. Instead your clutching at straws adamantly sticking to the textboox definitions of the each word. That's just childish and have to place in any adult conversation.
Just in the last week you've redefined the following to fit your unsupported narrative here on HN and called everything else objectively false and refused to even discuss the other definition:
* Institutional/System racism, ignoring ~50 years of history (for the term itself, the practice itself is obviously much earlier).
* Soclal Democracy, ignoring ~200 years of history
* The concept of personal property and it's distinction from private property. Ignoring ~200 years of socialist history.
You do realize that you don't have to agree with the concept to at least discuss it? Something like "Yes, if we use established definition, which I disagree with, there's systemic/institutional racism against black people in America".
Because what definition do you even think people are using when asking you if it exists? "Do you like the color blue?", "No! there's no blue color". That's just childish and will never generate any constructive discussion at all, and is for all purposes just trolling or at least sabotage - answering a question that contains an established concept/definition with an entirely new one that only you know about.
The preamble is the most important section of an article. You don't "cherry pick" the most important part of an article.
My definition is exactly what the terms "institutional" and "racism" would imply when put together.
>>You're redefining an entire concept coined to mean what we are talking about.
It was not coined to mean whatever it is you're talking about (which none of you have actually specified by the way, because you know how absurd it sounds when spelled out).
>>* The concept of personal property and it's distinction from private property. Ignoring ~200 years of socialist history.
The concept of personal property is a socialist one. It's not used outside of left-wing circles who believe in left-wing economic quackery that is completely rejected by mainstream economics.
>>You do realize that you don't have to agree with the concept to at least discuss it? Something like "Yes, if we use established definition, which I disagree with, there's systemic/institutional racism against black people in America".
Established by who? Just as socialists don't get to establish what private property, or the terms "wage" and "slavery" when used together, mean for everyone else, racial injustice grievance activists don't get to establish what the terms "institutional" and "racism" mean when they're used together, for every one else.
Personal property is a form of private property, and demonstrates the prehistoric roots of capitalist principles.
The massive expansion of social welfare spending in the US over the last 50 years reflects the US moving drastically toward the social democratic pole of the free market - social democracy.
Workers are not "wage slaves" and their relationship with employers in no way resembles slavery.
There is no institutional racism in America, except in favor of members of allegedly disadvantaged groups, which receive explicitly favorable treatment through institutional privilege like affirmative action.
Yikes. If this is the level that you're at, I really hope that you are trolling.
The point is that you don't have to agree with the definition, you can just recognize that it exists and that it's used. Then you can try to argue against the actual contents of it instead of the naming. So let's call "systemic/institutional racism" something of your choosing and go on about actually challenging the contents of it instead, alright? If not, this is a waste of time.
Is the massive BLM protests just a massive misunderstanding - nostalgia of former injustices rather than current ones?
Please stop trolling. Comments like this are extremely pretentious, and qualify as trolling someone else.
>>Is the massive BLM protests just a massive misunderstanding - nostalgia of former injustices rather than current ones?
Is the massive Tea Party protests just a massive misunderstanding? How about the massive pro-Trump protests against the results of the election? How about the massive anti-lockdown protests?
You're acting like it's absurd to reject the beliefs of protestors.
This shows how you view me. You judged me as a racism denialist, for having an opposing interpretation. It is like I won't accept the Truth of your rendition of that scene, but maybe evil enough to be aware of it.
It would be absolutely horrible if a cop killed a civilian by maliciously kneeling on his neck arteries! That the cop did it, mainly because the civilian was Black and he was white! You sound like you want that horrible reality to be the truth! You already spray-painted his face on a banner with political talking points! Maybe you even got your company Twitter to pay their respects to Floyd.
> even after he said "I can't breathe" repeatedly
He was saying that when he got out of the car. He was under enormous stress from the arrest and prospect of possible jail, with a drug that already increases heart rate. The single cop had to restrain, because ambulance (not arrest car) was called, after it was clear from the "I can't breathe" that he needed medical attention for OD. The other cops did crowd control, because the frantic yelling of Floyd attracted attention. "Hey, man, let him go, he is just saying he can't breathe". Like Philando Castile, that single video footage then went viral, and the cop acquitted on ALL charges, after companies such as Google send out PR condemning police brutality and systemic racism, because capitalism is a tool which employees can play as well (ideally, aligned with -- not damaging -- the company mission!), and now we are here, with you suggesting I think cops are snowflakes.
Give me a court case, a light symbolic punishment to avoid a second protest/riot, while allowing for the possibility that racism exists, and did not play even a minor role in the case of the death of Floyd. That cop looked like a nonchalant fool enough to mess this up. Not foolish enough to kill a black man out of racist motives, while your Asian and Hispanic colleagues are keeping Social Media away from reality.
Ah, the ol’ James Damore defense.
The only allegation in the article is that Brian Armstrong did not speak or make decisions at meetings, and attributed this to being on the spectrum. The full quote is:
>"Mr. Armstrong rarely spoke or made decisions in meetings, the current and former employees said, leaving them uncertain about his opinions. In a staff meeting this summer, he said he knew his style made many employees uncomfortable and attributed it to being "on the spectrum,” according to a recording of the event."
There's nothing wrong or "bad" about managers who don't speak and make quick decisions at meetings. It's just a management style, and it's disingenuous IMHO to spin it as some kind of bad behaviour.
I mean honestly what is there to think about? What are the other stakeholders he’d need to consult, racists? What other considerations, what is the other side, what downside is there about being against harassment?
Every educated person could issue a quick decision: reprimand the people harassing your black employees! So surely you can see why it makes “the inability to quickly condemn and reprimand harassers” is bad.
He adopted some really fucking stupid, untested, non mainstream cultural policy. Of course there are going to be consequences. Am I the only person who sees he’s bad at this job? And that it is a complete and utter insult to people with actual social disabilities when he blames “being on the spectrum” for being bad at his job?
That cuts both ways. Discrimination on neuro-diversity is also bad.
> And that it is a complete and utter insult to people with actual problems with racism when she blames “being Black” for missing a promotion?
The autism-jab was in bad faith, and it worked on you. You turned his inability/carefulness not to make split decisions into a poor-faith excuse for being a racist tech bro oblivious to the struggles of others.
Labor attorneys, hopefully. An executive has a fiduciary duty not to make from-the-hip pronouncements (true or not) that might hurt the company’s case in court.
If only that's what it was about and not one group trying to force woke politics into the workplace.
> Ms. Butler said she was not told how to make an official complaint; Ms. Sawyerr said she never spoke to an investigator and was not informed of the findings
“Absence of evidence” etc. etc.
The identity politics activists in the company took offence to this and demanded management make a statement. When management refused to bend the knee the activists made allegations of racism and took them to the nytimes.
But, even the apple you eat, though.
Also seems like lack of making a statement is now a workplace risk according to the tone of the article.
Wow.
The only group I've seen it be permissible to make stereotyped observations about in the last decade in an SF tech office is european/indian/chinese workers. FWIW I don't think that's okay either; we should be striving to make an inclusive workspace for everyone.
I've been in environments where certain communications styles are labeled more correct or ideal. So I've really loved this guidebook + accommodation approach.
I went into this article with an open mind about there possibly being toxicity I haven't witnessed w/i the company. But tbh the evidence comes up short and just doesn't match with what I've seen. I have interviewed at companies where some level of toxicity was easy to pick up on during the onsite (eg Uber during peak growth years).
My fear is that this article might scare away diverse folks from Coinbase, and possibly even crypto at large given some of the descriptions about the industry at the end. CB is a really great company for any curious nerd to join. I'd also say the Ethereum community and associated startups+labs are especially welcoming and friendly.
Not if they're black or brown, apparently. I have no idea how you could say this is a 'great' company after reading this article. Like my mind is actually blown.
The NYTimes is like the Daily Prophet for muggles. Don't over-index on a hit piece.
CB stands out in my career for the number of good human beings I've gotten to meet and work with. And my read when I see Brian, Emilie, Surojit, and Manish speak at weekly AMAs is they genuinely care about everyone in the company. It's a gut instinct, and so far I have no personal experience or anecdotal from within my circles to the contrary.
My sister used to work in CX (outside of tech) and it was really damaging work for her. It'd be devastating for me to learn our folks are not supported.
You are wrong, apparently. 4 out of 7 members of the exec team have last names indicating they are people of color. Check yourself: https://www.coinbase.com/about
If the head of product and the head of engineering are brown people, I am very confident that CB is a great place to join for brown nerds since culture flows from the top.
Maybe I should have used the term 'under-represented minorities,' because I don't see a single black or latino person (admittedly, this is what I meant as 'brown' since I'm Hispanic).
> admittedly, this is what I meant as 'brown'
I mean, if you are going to use 'brown' to exclusively refer to latinos when half the world (or more?) is brown, then obviously you are going to sow confusion on forums like HN with participants across the globe.
(Beth) “… and then we want to take a plane from Point A to Point B.”
(Japanese travel agent) “I see. You want to take a plane?” “Yes.”
“From Point A?” “Yes.”
“To Point B?” “Yes.”
“Ah.” “Can we do that?”
“Perhaps you would prefer to take a train.” “No, we would prefer to take a plane.”
“Ah-hah. You would prefer to take a plane?” “Yes. A plane.”
“I see. From Point A?”
This mystified his wife but apparently between Japanese this is virtually screaming “THERE IS NO PLANE, YOU ZITBRAIN!”
Sure, saying "X are too timid" is a stereotype, but pointing out at a diversity seminar that you should be extra observant around X because they tend to not speak up for themselves is just good advice. Many cultures value being quiet and doing your job a lot more than others, and those values get passed down by parents for at least a few generations after immigrating. If that group doesn't have a good support structure (no BLM equivalent), that only adds to the fear of speaking out.
If you're a manager that gets many complaints from group Y but very few from group X, knowing that might lead you to do some more investigating and discover group X is being treated even worse, they're just not reporting it. Using a heuristing to optimise your search given imperfect information, if you will.
In another context this statement would be seen as overtly racist.
So what am I missing?
Culture is obviously correlated with race in some respects. It's when you start talking about the reason behind some of those correlations that you risk (rightly or wrongly) being called a racist.
As a South Asian minority, this is also my experience. The racism, stereotyping and stigma against South Asians feels more acceptable and totally unrecognized.
I work at a FAANG and a massive percentage of employees are rabidly anti-racist, and wouldn't stand for anything like that. Are coinbase employees just cut from a different cloth?
I get nervous when I make a comment about Zoom being insecure because it's Chinese around Chinese coworkers, and I can at least point to its bad track record on security and how Five Eyes members are treating Huawei.
The demonym for the people who lived in the Soviet Union was “Soviet.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union
That's not what that distinguished. It distinguished whether you were talking about things pertaining to the USSR and those specifically having to do with Russia; the same rough difference as between “American” and “Californian” (or, perhaps a better analogy would be “British” and “English”.)
> We don't have a modern equivalent for the PRC
Mostly because China didn't conquer a bunch of neighbors and create a name for the resulting state distinct from “China”, which remains as the name for the absolutely dominant component.
But, again, while the Soviet/Russian distinction did exist, it did not serve the purpose you describe, and we didn't have any linguistic distinction that did.
Or, you've got to read to the end of the sentence:
> Mostly because China didn't conquer a bunch of neighbors and create a name for the resulting state distinct from “China”
That last part matters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_China
A job in a competitive industry is probably the first area where a lot of people first see social promotion end as younger more capable people surpass them. This is going to be especially true for people who have received the benefits of affirmative action up until this point in their lives.
One would hope an amazing company that doesn't cover it's ass when it turns out the executive couldn't give a hoot about the treatment of black people and now everyone knows
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Notwithstanding, such a position places zero restrictions on doing the same with your own money..but corporations make for more interesting headlines than the individuals that run them.
That is clearly false, given the evidence collected by the Times, which shows an extensive pattern of racist conduct.
To get a complete view, surely you need data from Asians, Indians and other minorities.
Like, I'm not sure how to clarify this further. Being racist against only a specific race or races is very much still racism (sort of by the definition, isn't it).
I'm also uneasy about letting black people speak for other POCs on this issue. In my experience, racists tend to be racist towards multiple or all other races rather than a single one -- hence why you dismissing other POCs views on it doesn't make sense to me.
Less than 1% is not "extensive" by anyone's metric, either.
I don't see back people speaking for other poc. I see black people speaking about their own experiences, and you discounting those experiences because they may not be shared by other poc.
It also seems strange to me that you believe racism is always cross-cultural. The causes of anti-black, anti-middle eastern, and anti-asian discrimination by americans are all different, why do you assume they'd be the same. Things get even more complicated when you add other cultures to the mix. You presumably don't discount caste discrimination against one caste because the others didn't experience it, so why presume that someone who is prejudiced against black people must also be prejudiced against asians?
While there is racism against asian people in tech in the bay, it's usually model minority related things, or language based (or there are other kinds but less common in a workplace context). Less about being unqualified, and more about being different. It wouldn't at all surprise me if the multiracial leadership team of coinbase set the culture such that certain forms of prejudice (that affect the leadership) were not allowed, while certain forms of prejudice (that perhaps the leadership shares, or perhaps they are simply ambivalent about) can fester.
you run a company and tell people they will feel included and then they face discrimination... well your house is on fire, you are the leadership and decide not to use you position to do anything
but yeah let’s make it zero sum and say that looking after the investor means that we can treat black people with some decency
BS
I hate this kind of sloppy writing. who added that, the colleague or the manager?
EDIT: Downvoted. I guess clarity in the NYT isn't allowed to be questioned..
Impossible!
*At the end the article says at the end of 2019 there's 31 Black employees of 1000. At the beginning of the article about the beginning of 2019 it's about 20 of 600 before 15 Black employees quit.
And if there is a legal case against them the accuser has the burden of proof and due process.
All I see from this article is a bunch of hearsay & rumors. It looks like a smear campaign to get some quick 'reparations' by riding a popular trend.
We have this thing in the US called presumption of innocence, but apparently in case of racism accusations you're guilty as soon as proclaimed guilty by the media.
Coinbase legal team should definitely sue NYT and this 'team' of accusers for libel & slander. The hysteria is getting ridiculous.
I don’t think employees recounting their personal experiences while at the company is rumors or hearsay. And the article mentioned many of them had to sign an NDA in exchange for a severance package so I don’t think “reparations” are the goal.
Public shaming? Making the world a better place via baseless accusations and media witch-hunt?
Coinbase is pre-IPO, considering early 2021 public debut.
This case stinks of extortion of settlement money via very well timed smear campaign.
Accusation of racial discrimination in a workplace is a serious deal, and it's not up to the media to decide who's right or wrong solely based on one side (disputed) claims. It's called defamation and they are legally liable.
I'd take that vs. a company driven by woke trend of the day.
Bottom line, New York Times is heavily biased and has zero credibility when it comes to their coverage of the high tech industry. This is a hit piece.
The headline also mentions that black people were fired, but never follows up on it.
Companies can be incredibly callous about retention issues, especially if fixing them involves noticing which managers are responsible for behaving badly towards their staff.
Well we allow those companies to continue to dismiss their interactions with most of the people in the company as "retention issues," so I think I can spot an actual cause here. Roll in typical treatment of customers as barriers to profit and we have a theme starting.
Not from the POV of the company, but from the individual actors within it, is the problem solved. Principal-agent dilemma, innit.
If all of a sudden your turnover spikes that's a lot of sudden unexpected cost, which is very bad.
>And why do you think the racial diversity in Comp Sci doesn’t match that of America?
That's a different subject, and nothing to do with whether tech is racist.
"we hired an external consultant in August of this year who specializes in data science and diversity and inclusion to cull through all of our historic data related to diversity ... and conduct a high volume of interviews with employees representing all background, functions, and tenures to understand the employee experience. The independent investigation concluded that there was no evidence of structural bias in hiring, promotions or performance evaluations."
"All of those complaints were thoroughly investigated, one through an internal investigation and two by separate third-party investigators, all of whom found no evidence of wrongdoing and concluded the claims were unsubstantiated. We have shared this information with the reporter."
So external investigators didn't find anything wrong and the data was shared with the NYT reporter. What else can they do if they are really innocent?
[1] https://blog.coinbase.com/upcoming-story-about-coinbase-2012...
Ms. Milosevich said Coinbase hired a consultant over the summer who did interviews and looked at the company’s history, and found “no evidence of structural bias.”
“Employees reported a strong culture, fair employee treatment, high employee satisfaction and high energy for belonging, inclusion and diversity,” she said.
Managers in the customer support team, where many of the Black employees work, wrote their own report last month.
When a group of people say they see smoke I tend to believe them. But I'm also not a national news paper. I'd have like to see the NYTimes get some concrete facts before making such a serious accusation.
wrote in a Slack message that was viewed by The Times.
according to a copy of the message seen by The Times
according to a copy reviewed by The Times.
(I wonder how many people apply this level of corroboration requirement to forward-looking statements about the benefits of bitcoin?)
Take this article on the US Meat Animal Research Center (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/20/dining/animal-welfare-at-...) as a good example of an organizational misconduct investigation done right. Dr. Keen told the Times they're doing some abusive things to the animals. So the Times talked to a bunch of employees, and reviewed a bunch of documents, in order to make sure they could accurately and concretely describe specific instances of wrongdoing. This is the quality of journalism the New York Times is generally known for. It would be a much worse article - both less fair to the research center and less convincing about the accusations - if they hadn't dug in like that.
It seems like your criticism is that the article implies that Coinbase's executive management has racial bias problems, and the article doesn't establish that bias to your satisfaction. But that's always going to be a problem with news articles. Some will present evidence that is dispositive to you, some won't.
I find the reporting in this piece damning. I understand how others would view it more charitably. That's what we're meant to be discussing. Less productive: a discussion of the legitimacy of the reporting itself.
(For what it's worth, the article's lede is well-corroborated, and I agree it provides strong evidence of a serious problem with retention of black employees.)
The 'other side' of this is a Coinbase blogpost that says 'we hired a consultant who told us we don't have such problems'. You are certainly free to decide which of these is better supported.
That's like scientists finding a negative result, and not getting it published. Skilled scientists don't let that happen often.
I don't believe that in the editing room they went: "Next item. The Coinbase controversy. Let's do an objective investigation of this and see what we find." But I won't accuse the NYT of bad faith, economic/journalistic incentives are sufficient to explain that angle, fishing for further controversy for a company with an already bad reputation (deserved or not).
Notice the NYT article even wrote negatively of Coinbase's diversity efforts: Supposedly, black people where shoed into photos, to make the company look good to the outside, but were never promoted or listened to (implying, because they were black, and white Libertarian autist tech bro's don't listen to or promote their black employees as a matter of principle). With such an angle about questionable motives, it is neigh impossible to do anything right. It is "we already determined you are wrong, now where is your apology?".
Did the editorial show that Coinbase is engaging in illegal discrimination practices? No, but they sure implied it.
Would it be problematic to encourage diverse representations to show up for company photos, if you did not ignore them for advancement? On its own, I think that's just common sense, and taking some PR advantage of the costly diversity programs.
A random/unplanned company photo I was in, was circulated online, to falsely claim that my company only hires white people. Felt really bad, especially for my multiracial colleagues present in that photo. Can you even give this movement what they want, without accusations of pandering/fake concern?
> Not specifically require Black employees to relocate to different cities while giving non-Black employees the opportunity to work out out whatever the nearest office is.
I refuse to believe that Coinbase based that decision on skin color, and I find it hard to believe anyone else sees that differently. As such, to follow this rule, you would have to overturn your decision -- based on rationale --, because it happens to negatively impact a person with a specific skin color. How is this a decent decision: "Sorry Chad, we can't let you work from home to care for your mother, because we just told some black-skinned support engineers to relocate, and we don't want to specifically require black people to relocate, and allow white people to work from home."? How is that fair? To who? It suddenly becomes justified if Chad was black, or if you allow everyone to work from home?
Sure. You can:
* Not specifically require Black employees to relocate to different cities while giving non-Black employees the opportunity to work out out whatever the nearest office is.
* Treat Black employees respectfully in meetings.
* Not allow people who manage Black employees to mock them for being drug dealers and for carrying weapons.
* Not allow recruiting team members to discuss the merits of different races and their likelihood of success as candidates in hiring team meetings.
This all seems pretty basic?
Incidentally: I don't know what the "movement" you're referring to is. I've been in this industry since the 1990s, and these seem like rules that would have been equally germane in 1995.
I'm not trying to zing you with that, but am noticing a persistent subtext on this thread that attempts to equate Black people not wanting to be discriminated against with some larger basket of "far-left politics". Plenty of conservatives have the same objections to racial bias as whatever the "movement" we're talking about here is. Ironically, among Democrats (Black people overwhelmingly identify with the Democratic party for historical reasons), Black people trend significantly more conservative.
Are you under the impression that Coinbase makes Work-From-Home decisions based on the skin-color of their employees?
If yes (which it seems like to me), I'd like to learn more about that, and your reasoning. Am I oblivious to modern work-place racism? Imperceptive? Naive? Defending vile racists? I'd like to reconsider those questions on a more informed ground. My (and your) view kinda hinges on that impression and its truth.
I can understand why Black employees would have that impression, but if it's not true, then I also see that as problematic.
> I am under the impression that Coinbase demanded that the Black employees of the compliance group relocate to PDX so that the whole group could work out of the same office, and then exempted a white worker in the same group from that requirement.
Did it matter for this demand that one group was Black and the other was white? Or did this just happened to be the unfortunate outcome, which is bad optics if you focus on skin color attributes, and such bad optics should be avoided?
I am still not too sure. Can you remove "Black" and "white" from your impression and still say the same thing, or is it essential to your impression, and telling of a problematic work environment?
We don’t have details who exactly was required to relocate and who weren’t. Coinbase’s compliance department is huge made of multiple teams, so it’s not just the handful of people mentioned in this article.
There is a pattern of behavior minimizing the scope and impact of abusive or discriminatory actions across the tech industry, and it is very prevalent on this site as well.
The simple reality is that unless an employee is able to obtain clear, slam-dunk evidence of directly legally actionable abuse or misconduct, then it is a huge personal risk to come forward. Most businesses that are large enough to have systemic problems have enormous resources to litigate against those claims.
In contrast, for employees to collect and use evidence, it is required that they: a) experience the abuse or discrimination, repeatedly b) collect evidence and documentation of that behaviour c) exfiltrate that evidence in contravention of legal contracts that can include NDAs, binding arbitration clauses, morality/non desparagement clauses, etc d) be in a strong enough financial position to defend against litigation e) be confident enough in their own skills, reputation, and network to be able to give up future career prospects based on A-D.
And this is just from the 5 minutes it took me to compose this message.
I get that HN is a bastion of support for meritocracy, and that founder worship is a strong bias for many on this forum, but as a community, and as an industry we have got to stop undermining and destroying the folks trying to hold people and firms accountable for bad behavior.
You are correct that the people in the article that either filed complaints, or spoke with the New York Times risked repercussions, but not all of the folks the Times spoke with are identified. People were willing to talk, but not necessarily on the record, or to be identified. That is because they are fearful of reprisal, based on past experiences and observations.
That is the biggest challenge for people confronting systemic issues like racism, poverty, homelessness, or any number of topics. It's not enough for victims to stand up for themselves, because there is a systemic imbalance in the ability to pursue remedies through the courts or other means. Getting justice in civil matters often boils down to the size of a victims pocket book (and especially in contrast to pocket books of the people or organizations that have made that person a victim). There are so many individuals who have left the tech industry after experiencing bad behaviour, discrimination, and abuse, and any one of those people could be the next Hedy Lamarr or Philip Emeagwali, and the industry is worse for not having those people in it.
Again, as a community we do our peers a disservice by not trusting them when they say there is a problem, especially when they are so consistently proven right.
You're arguing against a straw man here. I did not say that the only acceptable proof was an on the record statement. Anonymous corroboration or reporting a general description of an e-mail to preserve anonymity would be fine. There's nothing even like that.
>Getting justice in civil matters often boils down to the size of a victims pocket book
That's not really true. Susan Fowler blew up Uber with a single blog post. The difference is making specific accusations and providing some level of detail. There's essentially none of that in the NYTimes piece.
And you are arguing in bad faith; there are several parts of the article that detail exactly what you are looing for.
In the second paragraph, the article indicates that 11 of the folks who left notified HR or their managers.
In the third paragraph one of the named victims states she made several reports.
In the sixth paragraph 5 on the record employees and 18 off the record employees, and internal documents and recordings are claimed as evidence.
Despite this, Coinbase only reports three official complaints in the year many of these folks left.
Coupled with the stream of hot garbage that Brian Armstrong has proposed trying to position as being "Mission Focused", in the middle of a pandemic, massive, ongoing riots, and political instability just illustrates how utterly tone deaf the leadership at Coinbase is.
> Susan Fowler blew up Uber with a single blog post.
Yes, you correct. You also have to look at the facts; Susan is an excellent writer, and based on her book, she already had some measure of experience speaking truth to power. Coupled with the fact that she was already recognized as a talented engineer and a published author, it's not surprising her blog post was as well received as it was.
Susan also wrote about her experience with her own voice and had receipts to show how bad it was. I certainly don't want to down play the issues that women in tech face, but it's also well known that people of color frequently have different social and economic circumstances than white or white-presenting folks (and it's not me saying this -- she calls out in her book the casual anti-semitism she faced from folks who didn't know she is Jewish).
Everything you list is an accusation. What I am looking for is:
(1) Person X said this racist thing happened.
(2) The event in (1) is (a) true, and (b) backed up by a corroborating witness, this email, some document, etc
>You also have to look at the facts; Susan is an excellent writer, and based on her book, she already had some measure of experience speaking truth to power.
If the NY Times doesn't have reporters that can do that then they should fire the ones they have and find some that can.
You are offhandedly discounting the reported experience of more than 20 people, many of whom have come forward with evidence.
You did that! You said Susan Fowler was effective because she was able to speak truth to power. Implying that this article is ineffective because the writer doesn't know how to speak truth to power.
>You are offhandedly discounting the reported experience of more than 20 people, many of whom have come forward with evidence.
No I didn't. I said I tend to believe them.
I would like to challenge the perception of issues as systematic being a universal fact. You first have to accept that groups, as opposed to individuals, are responsible for action. This doesn't seem to hold up. Any delineation of people into any sort of groups is arbitrary. Corporations are legal fiction. Actions are perpetrated by individuals.
I would like to live in a society that optimizes for enthusiastic consent in, and at-will termination of all interactions and relationships for any reason whatsoever. This seems to be the only reasonable way to live in a society of people who disagree about fundamental things. To take this to the extreme, if you want to run a company full of racists, and be racist in your hiring policy, you should be able to do so. It is quite possible to support this standard of liberty without being racist oneself. I may disagree with what you say and all.
Innocent of what exactly? At a certain point whether the leadership of Coinbase is racist or not doesn't matter. What matters is their actions. The article says "roughly three-quarters of the Black employees" left the company over a 6 month span due to feelings of being discriminated against. That isn't an accusation. It is a fact. It also isn't something that will just happen accidentally. That alone is a problem that demands urgent attention regardless of what is in the hearts of Coinbase's leadership team.
I punched a man in the face yesterday. To determine if I'm a violent person it's important to know whether I punched a man who was pushing his child on a swing set, or whether I punched a man who was crawling through a window in my home.
(One good source: White & Laird).
That doesn’t at all mean that other levers don’t exist or weren’t leveraged. Such as the common, ‘uncle tom’ or ‘not black enough’ social pressure commonly applied in the black community.
Lol, that’s understating it a bit. The president elect said “you ain’t black” to black people who even consider Trump. An old white man confidently telling black people their identity is jeopardized if they even consider not voting for him.
White & Laird's book is super interesting. Check it out.
Looting small shop owners makes no sense. Many shop owners are even black. This happened in Seattle where many shop owners support BLM.
You might say, well, that was an exception. But Noah Trevor (an influential person) also justified looting because police breaks social contract first. Now why would you loot random shops because of that? The fact that Noah hasn't been canceled makes me think a lot of BLM supporters see looting as positive.
To sum up, you basically can't say anything bad about BLM. Otherwise, you would be labeled as racists and canceled.
This is a trend in the far-left politics. They would force you to personally sacrifice to better society. Another example is homeless people camping in front of your shop. If you try to make them go away, you will also be canceled. This far-left politics is just evil, IMO.
Also I think you mean Trevor Noah and not Noah Trevor.
Really? "Most other tech firms" do this?
That doesn't sound like "most companies" in the tech industry actively seeking and hiring minorities. Perhaps they do and articles like these are deceptive?
Apple does "For the past five years, we’ve continued to hire more women and underrepresented minorities every year." https://www.apple.com/diversity/
Facebook does "We’re committed to building a workforce that’s as diverse as the communities we serve" https://www.facebook.com/careers/facebook-life/diversity
I would look up others but I think those three make the point. Companies are actively hiring underrepresented minorities. Yes some people think more effort should be put in but to say it isn't happening is being ignorant of reality.
I was questioning the assertion that it was most companies. Three companies, no statistics showing actual improvement, that doesn't make the point. Thanks for the links. It looks like Google is having trouble achieving this goal, since the article you linked shows the same percentage of minorities year to year. Apple says they have made progress, which is good. The facebook link doesn't have any numbers. Apple says "53% of new hires in the U.S. are from historically underrepresented groups in tech" but it doesn't give a timeframe or provide statistics that show how much of their workforce is minority or how much improvement they have made. I'm not sure that public relations boilerplate actually translates to a commitment to a diverse workforce.
This is a tall assumption. People are more complicated than that, and so are their identities. What if you are a pro-life, strongly Catholic black person? I can definitely see the pro-diversity campaigners balking at the "pro-life" component of your identity.
Learning the true context is most important. This could be done by corroborating allegations for example.
Yes that's what was asked; which ones?
> especially when n=15(if this was a statistical study on insulin response to artificial sweeteners, people would be saying the sample size is too small to draw conclusions)
And those people would be wrong. It's incorrect to dismiss a study based on sample size without a discussion of significance and effect size in the context of the data.
Moreover I reject the premise that you should be assessing this story quantitatively rather than qualitatively. But if you insist: what are your priors on whether or not a given company engaged in discrimination, and how do these change if you're told 75% of employees of a particular demographic stated there was discrimination?
> what are your priors on whether or not a given company engaged in discrimination, and how do these change if you're told 75% of employees of a particular demographic stated there was discrimination?
I completely agree that it's a very bad look. It is probably even more likely than not that given those facts, it is due to racism. I guess the question comes down to, philosophically, how one answers the following question: In the quest to eradicate racism and racists, is it better to be over-zealous and destroy a few non-racists to make sure you get all the actual racists(the chemo approach) - or is it better to be slightly more circumspect and let a few racists slip through the cracks so that far fewer non-racists are punished (the US judicial system ideal)?
N = 15 while p ≈ 20. It has been a while since I have taken a stats class, but that sample seems plenty large enough to me.
>Learning the true context is most important. This could be done by corroborating allegations for example.
Corroborating is exactly what journalists do. From the article:
>five people with knowledge of the situation said.
>But according to 23 current and former Coinbase employees, five of whom spoke on the record, as well as internal documents and recordings of conversations
>according to a recording of the session shared with The New York Times
>In a company email he sent later, which was also shared with The Times
>wrote in a Slack message that was viewed by The Times.
>three people briefed on the situation said
>according to a recording of the event
>according to a copy of the message seen by The Times
>according to a copy reviewed by The Times.
>two people with knowledge of the situation said
The NYT talked to dozens of people, watched/listened to multiple recordings, and viewed numerous emails and Slack messages. This story is corroborated.
> One Black employee said her manager suggested in front of colleagues that she was dealing drugs and carrying a gun, trading on racist stereotypes. Another said a co-worker at a recruiting meeting broadly described Black employees as less capable. Still another said managers spoke down to her and her Black colleagues, adding that they were passed over for promotions in favor of less experienced white employees. The accumulation of incidents, they said, led to the wave of departures.
These have no corroboration, even though they allegedly happened in front of multiple coworkers.
edit: Sorry, I'm the poster from above, I just posted from my phone which has a different account logged in that I originally intended to give hiring advice unlinked to my main account(opsec fail).
Let's use another example in which evidence is hard to find: sexual assault. If one woman accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault, the burden of proof for her story is high. She would need some pretty strong evidence to get Cosby charged let alone convicted. She probably wouldn't even receive coverage in the mainstream media without some other form of evidence. However the entire situation would change if she was one of 60 women coming forward. Suddenly the burden of proof for that first woman is greatly diminished. Each individual's story is corroborated by someone else having a very similar story.
Our culture is full of anecdotes and stories that serve as a warning why this is a very bad idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_witch_trials
Isn't there like 400 million guns in private hands in the US? If so, the assumption that pretty much anyone you meet in the street might have concealed gun on them is not absurd per se.
But speaking about it aloud seems strange, yes.
"passed over for promotions"
This is the oldest workplace complaint ever and happens in racially homogeneous countries all the time. Favoritism in the workplace is probably as old as the pyramids.
"When Coinbase announced it would be opening an office in Portland, Ore., several Black employees in the compliance department who worked remotely were told to move there or reapply for new jobs, four former employees said."
"All of the Black workers in the compliance division ended up among the group of 15 who left."
Without concrete evidence of discrimination in the article, my mind jumps to this being the pivotal cause of the stats, one team getting asked to relocate and that team being disproportionate in its demographics.
I know from co-workers that the company once had a strong stance against remote work and made limited exceptions. I can see that being a source of a lot of discontent. Asking folks to move to a new city is a big ask too; I could see the company having handled that poorly.
On the upside CB shifted to remote-first which should be great for being able to have a more diverse workforce. And contrary to some of the comments here, I take that as strong evidence of the ability for our leadership team to acknowledge mistakes and course correct.
There's a data mismatch between the CB blog post and the article. CB cites that only 2-3 formal complaints were filed iirc.
11 employee complaints matches pretty closely with the PDX group.
--
FWIW I'm not dismissing the complaints. I've worked and studied in places where I've felt like an outsider; I've seen people make inappropriate comments about race+stereotypes in past work environments; I've also seen people make fishing claims of racial discrimination.
I wasn't on those teams in 2019, so the truth is I simply don't know.
From what I see today and the lack of concrete evidence in the article, I do have some doubts about the overall impression the article tries to give. I have the sense that certain information might have been omitted that might paint a clearer picture. I could totally be wrong as well.
>The 15 people worked at Coinbase, the most valuable U.S. cryptocurrency start-up, where they represented roughly three-quarters of the Black employees at the 600-person company.
"[R]oughly three-quarters" implies there were likely either 19 or 21 employees Black employees at the company since 20 would be exactly three-quarters. I was just using 75% and 20 employees because that is the best estimate we got. The article also stated clearly that 8 Black employees were part of the PDX group.
The Coinbase rebuttal was worded very specifically.
>only three of these people filed complaints during their time at Coinbase.
The New York Times wasn't being as narrow with their counting and they said:
>11 of them informed the human resources department or their managers about what they said was racist or discriminatory treatment
There is obvious middle ground between these two quotes. 11 people complained to their manager or HR at some point including potentially after they left the company however only 3 filed official complaints while working there. Keep in mind that simply complaining about something to a coworker isn't the same thing as "filing" a complaint.
If this middle ground scenario transpired as I described, doesn't the NYT's recounting sound much closer to the truth than CB's? Also ask yourself who has a bigger incentive to stretch the truth here. Is it the newspaper that could instead report on literally anything else or the company that is being accused of discrimination?
It really depends on the HR department, too. In most, reporting something as seemingly straightforward as an overt sexual assault will raise the question "how do you want to proceed." But they might not lay out what your actual options are -- or worse, they might just offer an ear and won't offer to act unless you demand it. Sometimes, they'll make it quite clear that a complaint will be a huge pain in the ass for everybody involved, especially the person reporting. HR should understand that there can be direct and indirect blow-back; that reporting misbehavior (especially of management, or worse, HR) can have both real and perceived consequences for the person reporting. HR departments cannot, generally, be trusted to police themselves if you can't go to them or above them, the only other option is the labor relations board. So much of the time, marginalized employees will either suck it up and endure the abuse, or quietly leave to keep their reputation intact.
So if anything, I see the discrepancy of 3 official reports and 11 complaints as a weak signal about how seriously HR takes complaints about racism at the company.
Let's not ignore that this exception is being positioned as being based on skin color (racist motives), not job role, tenure, exceeding expectations, caregiving responsibilities, or any other plausible reason for an exception. That's a laughable, yet dangerous take. Incredibly inflammatory and accusatory.
Either Coinbase is an incredibly racist and black-unfriendly company, or some people would like you to believe that, and these accusations can all be unravelled to crying wolf, accusing others of downright illegal acts, without even filing a formal complaint to help others not suffer the same fate.
And at a certain point the motive for these decisions doesn't even matter. If an overwhelming majority of Black employees feel they are being discriminated against at work, that is a huge failing for a company whether there is active discrimination happening or not.
More likely: There is a activist political trend now, that has picked up a lot of steam. In that political view, society is racist, and whites at best profit from this, at worst contribute to this. Anything bad happening to a person of color is then used to accuse the racist system, or even individuals, of a heinous act, to force their hands to adopt your view, or deplatform them and their criticism as an obstacle to growth of your movement, for personal gain, as revenge for inequality, or as a coping mechanism.
Far easier to argue/reason/imagine that, than that Coinbase makes WFH exceptions due to skin color, or that black employee are correctly assessing skills and experience of co-workers and correctly identifying racism on skin color, when passed over for a promotion. And if you don't believe that racism is really a driver at Coinbase, the correct course seems to be to attack these allegations for what its actually doing, not to support it by falling victim to this poor-argument overload and resigning because it is too hard, or too sensitive, or too taboo, to call out this damaging and horrific behavior.
Maybe it doesn't work like that in high school debate clubs, but it works like that in the law. Look up concepts like circumstantial evidence and disparate impact.
We can infer someone is guilty of a crime from a collection of evidence suggesting they are guilty even without direct evidence.
We can also punish someone for discrimination simply for exhibiting a pattern of discrimination regardless of intent to discriminate.
Don't do trial by (social) media. Especially when your accusations are incredibly heavy and damaging. Don't play judge when you are not capable of objectively looking at all the presented evidence.
Coinbase presented their side of the story: nothing went to court. No investigation found anything of substance. If the circumstantial evidence was so strong to hold up in court, why didn't it?
For the law, intent is of utmost importance. For (social) media, just "circumstantial evidence" of exhibiting patterns of discrimination is enough to act. It is not enough to act, if you are a decent person.
>Ms. Sawyerr said she had talked with four other Black employees about bringing a discrimination lawsuit against Coinbase, but the others backed out after being offered hefty severance payments in exchange for confidentiality agreements.
It never went to court because almost everyone involved was incentivized for it to not end up in court. Going to court is often a difficult, expensive, and likely damaging path to pursue for victims of a variety of crimes. The lack of a court case has nothing to do with the amount of evidence or the truthfulness of the accusations here.
>For the law, intent is of utmost importance. For (social) media, just "circumstantial evidence" of exhibiting patterns of discrimination is enough to act. It is not enough to act, if you are a decent person.
Once again, you are factually wrong with this comment. People can be thrown in jail based purely on an overwhelming amount of circumstantial evidence and companies can be punished for discriminatory behavior even if there is documented proof that there was no intent to discriminate.
Of course she said that. Big bad company silenced her co-suiters with money, after their spy devision learned that she was bringing suit. Now she has no recourse to go court herself, she absolutely needed those four other employees.
> The lack of a court case has nothing to do with the amount of evidence or the truthfulness of the accusations here.
It allows me to disqualify it as hearsay, and it allows you to think they offered severance payments, with the purpose to keep legit actual racism out of the courts.
Intent is of utmost importance for the law. Every lawyer and judge will agree to that. Punishment is increased for bad willful intent.
> In contrast, a disparate-impact claim does not require proof of an intention to discriminate. Instead, showing that a facially neutral employment practice has a disproportionately adverse impact on a protected group states a prima facie case of unlawful disparate-impact discrimination.
What do you know, intent isn't needed for a valid case of discrimination.
[1] - https://www.americanbar.org/groups/gpsolo/publications/gp_so...
No. That's totalitarian and evil. If someone is not intending to discriminate, then they are not guilty of anything and should not be "punished". It's not even slightly reasonable to expect every possible way of slicing a group of people to be reflective of the average gender/race data of the overall population because people are different: that's the entire argument for diversity to begin with.
That's the basic position that is alienating so many hundreds of millions of people and convincing them this kind of activism is toxic. It's why Trump won the first time and did much better than predicted the second. It's why this thread is full of people that think the NYT is being manipulative and deceptive. You may not punish people simply for not having enough black/women employees if they haven't actually done anything to discrimate: end of story.
They stated that discrimination, even if done without intent, is still discrimination. Please respond to that statement.
The whole notion is ridiculous. The fact that California takes this stuff so seriously just makes it look like it's throwing away its tech lead, as viewed from afar.
[1] - https://www.eeoc.gov/statutes/title-vii-civil-rights-act-196...
And you reveal your true motivation when you say something like "America is indeed structurally racist: against whites". No one with any semblance of objectivity would agree with that.
It is scary, right? "We can also punish" hides behind the "we", unclear if they mean "We, the people, the court system" or "We, the racial justice movement, public opinion". Then what is this "punishment"? A bad article in the NYT? Calling up your network and suppliers with a 100 people (with too much time and too much anger) to cancel you for being racist? Jail time or a fine for illegal activity?
They are power hungry, totalitarian, and evil. Other comments talk of "subconscious racism" or "white privilege". This comment demands responsibility for outcomes they perceive as unjust, where it is very unjust to demand demographic parity, when it is not possible to attain that, without severely dropping in quality (there are not enough Black people in tech to fill those positions with talent). So they demand you pay/invest to increase Black people in tech. But if too vocal or direct about it, they accuse you of "stating in general that Black people are less capable" as if reasoning from racist motives. So don't look to closely at the reason for not being able to hire as much Black people as society, activist, or the board wants you to.
This activism is a very strong and dangerous and toxic meme. It leads to Qanon levels of delusion, accusing criticism of racism, so it can't be attacked. Where Qanons see the deepstate and pedophiles when looking at government or big business, these activists see a racist society and neo-Nazi's when looking at government or big business. You can't change their minds. They've been in Whatsapp groups for years, pointing out targets for collective actions, and finding counters to often used criticism. It's why no activist would use the word "Identity Politics" even though that's the animal's name (evil Neo-Nazis use that term to attack our efforts!).
So that's why you hear: reverse racism is impossible! Racism has to do with power, and whites have all the power! When nearly every white person can recount cases of being discriminated against, and how terrible it made them feel. Accused of cultural appropriation for liking rap music. Challenged by Black men for having a Black girlfriend. Chosen as victim of robbery, because perceived weak and rich. Accused of getting your promotion, not due to hard work, but because your white old boys network favored your dumb white ass over a Black deserving queen.
If this NYT article was about over-representation of not white Libertarian crypto bros, but of over-representation of Jewish people in positions of power, you'd hear a different tune. Even suggesting that clear fact labels you as anti-Semitic. Apparently white people don't have enough shared culture, shared activism, to make racist anti-male anti-white anti-autist hit pieces like this controversial, even though we supposedly run the world, actively suppress entire races and genders, and create non-inclusive companies out of principle.
This explanation's believability has an inverse relationship with the number of claims. I could buy the idea that a couple people perceived "normal annoying work crap" as discrimination, but would that happen 15 times? 75% of the Black employees left the company in a 6 month window. You don't see anything like that at any other company.
This is a really dishonest article. It tries to lead one to believe things (e.g. that 15 Black people left Coinbase because they were belittled in meetings) without stating it outright or making a case for it. Just insinuation spun up from a few concrete situations that themselves are mostly vague or not obviously discrimination (the gun and drugs thing being the obvious exception).
This is the level of dishonesty that I've come to expect from the NYT. Any fact that does not fit their narrative basically doesn't exist.
Better treatment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25233702
To clarify, I assume the generous severance you're referring to is not the generous severance Coinbase offered employees as part of their no-politics-at-work approach, because the timelines don't match.
however, i am not sure that is relevant given the immediate example of a team member who was allowed to work remote. also, i am not sure it is relevant given the fact that there are many other underpinnings for the story’s thesis.
> The article implies that a number of the Black people who left did so because the compliance division was relocated and they didn't want to relocate with it. It doesn't say how many people's decisions were influenced by annoying work crap that they interpreted as discrimination.
And mentions the one white person was allowed to stay remote. Pretty dishonest to leave that detail out, no?
> This is a really dishonest article. It tries to lead one to believe things (e.g. that 15 Black people left Coinbase because they were belittled in meetings) without stating it outright or making a case for it. Just insinuation spun up from a few concrete situations that themselves are mostly vague or not obviously discrimination (the gun and drugs thing being the obvious exception).
After reading it it seems a lot left because of constant issues of discrimination - being told to be in meetings in front of cameras to pretend to be diverse, but being ignored in meetings of consequence. Being told to relocate, but applied unequally. Having meetings about BLM and a month later the boss says "leave it at the door." The guns and drugs comment, the black inferiority comment, those are absolutely damning.
This is how racism/discrimination thrive - by playing in the margins, doing things that aren't provable (they never have an email that says "we're discriminating against you!" so therefore it didn't happen or other arguments of that type), giving bad performance reviews after complaints are made, etc. Much like saying "oh it was a joke!"
And finally the icing on the cake:
> Ms. Sawyerr said she had talked with four other Black employees about bringing a discrimination lawsuit against Coinbase, but the others backed out after being offered hefty severance payments in exchange for confidentiality agreements.
These are multiple people's experience with this company - and there are clearly others who were paid not to say anything.
The article clearly does what it set out to do - show the experiences of people who lived in what they believed to be a toxic work culture. I'm inclined to believe them.
And then you are extrapolating two uncorroborated anecdotes of inappropriate comments as evidence of widespread discrimination.
And, of course, the article has many more complaints than this one!
Unless I am missing something seems pretty clear the employee switched from WFH in Philadelphia to commuting to NYC to work at that office.
* The PHL employee has been given their choice of office to work from.
* The Black employees were required to relocate, not just show up at a particular office on a schedule.
Were the Black employees offered the opportunity to work out of the NYC office?
* There was an existing compliance department.
* It had several remote team members.
* The company opened a compliance office in PDX.
* The company required Black team members to relocate to PDX or apply for new jobs.
* The company allowed a non-Black team member to remain in PHL and work out of the NYC office.
* Multiple sources claimed that the PHL employee was allowed to continue working remotely.
* The stated reason for demanding the relocation of the Black team members was to have the whole compliance team working from one place, a goal that obviously wasn't served by having someone else working out of PHL and NYC.
Maybe the sources in this article are lying (of course, you can rebut any claim that way), but apart from that, I'm not sure how this complaint is easily knocked down.
Your wording speculates on how the communication around remote was delivered in an unfavorable light. We know the decision was made to end WFH/remote, and one employee managed to get permission to work from the NYC office. A more realistic (still speculative) scenario imo:
-Company announces end of wfh/remote for a team. Folks are asked to relocate to PDX. -Employee asks for permission to work from NYC. Request is approved.
Thankfully even if the world doesn't act that way, the majority (for now) aren't evil enough to also blatantly proclaim that this is also fine.
What about:
> people's rights to have consensual interactions and relationships with each other are more important than their right to be treated "fairly" whatever that actually means.
The important point here is that we don't have a good working definition of "fair" that is universally agreed upon. The only ethical way to live in a society of people who fundamentally disagree is by optimising for consent.
While you are focused on how your political view is the “right one”, @thegrimmest is more focused on how people should coexist when they all hold strong-but-different ideas of what is fair, and which of those will ultimately go down in history as ”moral progress” is yet unknown.
If an employee was sexually harassing female employees, should the company do something or should it not babysit employees?
Glad you agree.
So the company should just call the Police and wash their hands or be responsible and have an appropriate sexual harassment policy, train their employees on how to identify and deal with sexual harassment, have a clear procedure on how to file and deal with complaints.
Maybe you will call such things "babysitting", I say its being responsible.
"should the company do something or should it not babysit employees?"
The company is doing something by not babysitting the employees. Not baby sitting the employees is the only correct option here.
>So the company should just call the Police and wash their hands
Yes they should call the police, and it's not "washing their hands". Sexual harassment is a criminal offence. Your employer shouldn't be "handling" that like they shouldn't be "handling" rape.
>have an appropriate sexual harassment policy, train their employees on how to identify and deal with sexual harassment, have a clear procedure on how to file and deal with complaints.
The policy is the law. Adults shouldn't have their employer telling them that sexual harassment is a no no.
>Maybe you will call such things "babysitting", I say its being responsible.
The responsible thing is to involve the authorities when one of your employees is committing a crime. Simple as that.
No its not. If you ever work in big companies you will know that.
> Adults shouldn't have their employer telling them that sexual harassment is a no no.
Yes they do,
Assuming you are a male, you might be unknowingly harrasing female employees just by having a boys will be boys attitude. So an employer has to give you training and explain you why its wrong.
Some people use throwaway accounts to harass other employees on social media, if your employer gave you the training you would have learnt that is wrong.
> The policy is the law.
Exactly, now you get it, the company may get into legal trouble if they dont have an official policy or they make it super difficult to report complaints.
> The responsible thing is to involve the authorities when one of your employees is committing a crime. Simple as that.
No its not simple as that, just telling the victim to go to authorities is just washing your hands, a responsible company also makes sure that victims can file a complaint with the management. Not all victims want to file a police complaint, that does not mean they the abuser should get away with harassment. The company should still investigate and fire the abuser and then file a complaint with the victim's permission.
These are some of the aspects which you will understand if you been through some training.
This is the logical fallacy "appeal to the majority". Just because most companies do something doesn't necessarily mean it's moral, required, logically correct, etc.
>Assuming you are a male, you might be unknowingly harrasing female employees just by having a boys will be boys attitude.
"Boys will be boys" is not the legal definition of sexual harassment, so no.
>So an employer has to give you training and explain you why its wrong.
They do that to cover their ass from "hostile work environment" legal suits. This is not baby sitting.
>Some people use throwaway accounts to harass other employees on social media, if your employer gave you the training you would have learnt that is wrong.
There's nothing a company can do in that instance, no one would even know if it is company related. If the harassment veers off into criminal territory, then police should be called.
>Exactly, now you get it, the company may get into legal trouble if they dont have an official policy or they make it super difficult to report complaints.
Apparently you still don't get it. Companies shouldn't babysit employees if they're committing such crimes. Employers shouldn't be babysitting employees when it comes to crimes such as sexual harassment, rape, etc. These should be directed to the police. QED.
>No its not simple as that, just telling the victim to go to authorities is just washing your hands
It's by definition not "washing their hands" because these crimes are not something the company should be babysitting employees over.
>a responsible company also makes sure that victims can file a complaint with the management.
No responsible company would make or direct a victim to "file an internal complaint" if they are victims of a crime. That is by definition irresponsible.
>Not all victims want to file a police complaint, that does not mean they the abuser should get away with harassment.
That's on them. If you're being victimized, reporting the crime should be the only legal recourse. Companies are not in the business of handling justice, period.
>The company should still investigate and fire the abuser and then file a complaint with the victim's permission.
The last thing we need are companies replacing the role that police, laws, the judicial system, etc. provide.
If an employee is being victimized, the employer should 100% work with authorities to ensure justice is met.
>These are some of the aspects which you will understand if you been through some training.
I understand companies not wanting workspaces to be unfriendly, but "unfriendly" isn't illegal. Period.
Apparently you still don't get it.
I do. Stop projecting about "not getting it".
I fully explained the position, and why your original example falls through.
QED.
It's IMAX-level projection.
>Some people dont want to deal with police complaint.
And if they don't want to, it's not the companies place to babysit and play judge and jury.
>If you dont understand that you will never get it.
If you don't understand that it's not the company's place to play the judicial branch (and may be illegal for them to), then you'll never get it.
It is by definition the wrong thing to do.
QED.
yes it, why do you support people who abuse, why should they still be kept in the company if the evidence is credible?
So does it mean now you understood why some people dont want file a police complaint?
I don't, and neither should the company, which is why they should call the police.
>why should they still be kept in the company if the evidence is credible?
Company is free to fire criminals if they want, no issues there. Many don't hire criminals to begin with, since your criminal history is public.
>So does it mean now you understood why some people dont want file a police complaint?
This is non-sense. If you're the victim of a crime, report the crime to the police.
They are not yet criminals though.
> If you're the victim of a crime, report the crime to the police.
and you still dont get it.
They're free to fire, furlough, place on paid leave, etc.
>and you still dont get it.
And there you go with the IMAX-level projection; it's painfully obvious you have no clue.
Sexual harassment generally is not a crime (though it overlaps with some crimes), and even if there is a crime involved the police and public prosecutor are under no obligation to do anything about it.
The employer, however, is under an enforceable legal obligation to do something about harassment.
Unwarranted touching is sexual assault, sexual messages are illegal harassment, etc.
>even if there is a crime involved the police and public prosecutor are under no obligation to do anything about it.
Immaterial since that can be applied to anything, criminal or civil.
It's absolutely the companies enforceable legal obligation to effectively prevent (including terminating ongoing) sexual harassment even if there is no crime, crime report, or criminal law enforcement action.
Sexual harassment overlaps with a variety of crimes, but it doesn't require a crime, and the employer is civilly liable for it no matter if the individual causing the problem has committed or been investigated for a crime or not.
Where did "innocent until proven guilty" go?
No, the company should investigate and have evidence, one way or the other, beyond just the complaint before any kind of final action, though there are some interim precautionary mitigations that are might be appropriate, often.
> Where did "innocent until proven guilty" go?
“Innocent until proven guilty” is a maxim of criminal law; a company treating potential harassers as if the company were either the state enforcing criminal law or, worse, as if it could act only following the state enforcing criminal law will eventually find itself in quite deep civil liability for harassment.
No, the company isn't equipped for this and this is the role of the police and judicial system.
> “Innocent until proven guilty” is a maxim of criminal law; a company treating potential harassers as if the company were either the state enforcing criminal law or, worse, as if it could act only following the state enforcing criminal law will eventually find itself in quite deep civil liability for harassment.
That's why the company isn't enforcing anything and delegating the task to the competent authorities. In this case the police.
Many people have been victim of wrongful firing and huge damages to their personal life due to rash decisions being taken by companies based on a single complaint from someone.
It's literally not; sexual harassment is a civil, not criminal, offense. The police have no concern with it at all, except that some sexual harassment is also a crime (e.g., rape, solicitation of prostitution, etc.)
But employers have legal liability for sexual harassment, which only gets more severe as it continues and they fail to act, whether or not there is a crime involved.
They cannot delegate this responsibility to the police.
That's why I included the judicial system.
> But employers have legal liability for sexual harassment, which only gets more severe as it continues and they fail to act, whether or not there is a crime involved.
It happening is required to be based on a suite or investigation. Again, a company isn't equipped to proceed with such an investigation on it's own.
Sexual harassment is not a crime, it's a workplace tort (and always a tort by the employer, regardless of who the active harasser is.) It's true that some acts which would also potentially make the employer liable for sexual harassment are also crimes, but it's also worth noting that, even where an act creating potential harassment liability is also a crime, that (1) the burden of proof in a criminal case is higher than for a civil tort, so there is no guarantee, even with the same evidence and the same jury that a criminal conviction would be rendered when there would be harassment liability, (2) the police and public prosecutor have no obligation to take action even if there is a crime, whereas the company does have an enforceable legal obligation to take effective action to prevent harassment, (3) even if the police take action and the prosecutor files charge, and a conviction eventually results, criminal process takes time during which the accused may be free, and, in the absence of effective action by the employer, continue harassing and increasing the employers harassment liability.
I am not comfortable with promoting the framing of the article to an automatically established fact. The only solid fact here is people leaving and the inferred reason is racial discrimination. I am not saying this inference is likely to be wrong or not, but that it is nonetheless an inference and not a fact. The article also doesn't let the reader know how those numbers compare to the baseline attrition of the company, i.e. what percentage of the other demographic groups have left in the same time period, which tends to be pretty high in the startup scene. Racial discrimination at workplace being pretty seriously illegal in the US these employees would have a strong recourse against it and NYT can not possibly provide a superior standard of factuality for those accusations.
It is a fact claim that has yet to be disputed on the record by anyone who is in position to dispute it. All media outlets have their biases, but the most prominent ones tend not to make up easily refuted lies. In the claim you are referencing, they say three quarters of the black employees left over a six month period. If that's a lie, Coinbase can simply say so. But they probably won't because it is probably true.
The reasons why are more up to interpretation. Probably no way to get a firm answer on this since many of these people have signed NDAs or otherwise won't talk on the record. But I don't think it's reasonable to claim, without evidence, that the NYT is lying about the proportion of black employees that left over the given time period.
Fact space is infinite, which ones we choose to surface and which ones we leave behind is called framing. Technical name for making the audience believe that relevant facts are not relevant and saliencing irrelevant ones as relevant is called bullshitting (For further reading see the essay “On Bullshit” by Harry Frankfurt) and bullshits are much harder to weed out than factual inaccuracies in themselves.
NYT, like any major publication, is not leveling outright falsehoods, but they are finessing around bullshitting. We don’t know, because we depend on them or likes of them to make sense of the events and surface the most relevant information in the first place. Like I said, I personally find it concerning that there is no mention of the baseline attrition rate in a high churn SF labor market, that there is no mention of the lack of serious legal action despite serious discrimination allegations, that there is no distinguishing between discrimination, feelings of discrimination and the types of discrimination; we don’t know if propensity for political activism is confounding the reason for those employee’s departures. Coinbase is explicitly discriminating against political activisim that they don’t deem relevant to their mission, rightly or wrongly not only it is not illegal, it is their right to exercise if they believe it would serve their company or customers better. It feels like NYT wants to penalize this act of “rebellion” by clumping all of these together, emphasize the racial angle and produce an aura of wrongdoing by that adjacency. There might as well be wrongdoing, but in that case courts are the machinery equipped to extract the relevant facts and bring justice to it. Not for-profit publications with very complex power relations and a core competency of shaping narratives. To give an obvious example, NYT the prominent media outlet once also played a role in manufacturing the public consent for Iraq invasion by surfacing such “questions”, “suspicions” while burying relevant facts. It would be naive to buy their narrative wholesale (or any single outlets narrative for that matter).
(who in the article is quoted himself as saying his behavior is because he's on the spectrum.)
Brian Armstrong shut himself in because he doesn't want to deal with it. He doesn't know how to deal with it. All of Coinbase's actions are guided by the consequences, for example, they never needed to address their flash crash because they just needed to placate customers while they were closing a 9 figure funding round announced a few weeks later. They aren't worried about precedent, they are worried about keeping the ship afloat long enough to sell shares to Robinhood traders. This strategy works.
They can also create an inclusive environment that allows them to address underserved markets more accurately. They didn't.
Direct all of that energy at him for the representation he is making about people on the spectrum.
If he wants to lean on that as a crutch on all of his organizational decision making skills, then we absolutely get to call him out on that all the time until he does something different.
Without access to information about the firm doing the work, the report, or the underlying data it is impossible to know if a real investigation was done or not.
Many of the "issues" bought up in this article aren't even problematic. It says John Russ left because Armstrong took public stance that he wanted Coinbase to focus on crypto space stuff.
Coinbase's stance there is fair, reasonable and moral. It is desirable that some companies just do what it says on the tin. If Russ had a reason for quitting that was race-related then the NYT didn't uncover it.
I don't know the details of the story, but the thing is with baseless accusations of racism is that it's a perfect slander, one can never prove innocence once proclaimed guilty.
The same is true of racism in Silicon Valley and the adjoint areas. Being less racist is actually the unusual condition that requires proof.
are you for real?
Sorry, I'm unconvinced by this line of reasoning for the same reason I don't feel obligated to pay for an indulgence to atone my sins.
I don't think that he would have taken that public stance if he didn't feel that the company was being distracted internally by racial justice issues. It being a fair response is highly dependent on those internal conversations.
And the NY Times reports that prior to this conversation there was a public meeting where Black employees brought up difficult experiences at Coinbase. Being told that people should leave politics at home or leave the company is a horrible response to complaints about discrimination.
Now I'm happy to agree that the retention rate of black people at Coinbase raises some questions. But the NYT, having asked those questions, came up with no particular evidence of racism.
The major piece of evidence that these issues are substantially due to race is that the NYT felt it warranted a hit piece. That is weak evidence. Being passed over for promotion and feeling unappreciated - which they lead with - isn't evidence. Most of us have been passed over for promotion plenty of times. Most people are unappreciated too.
Starting with the assumption it is a pretty normal company, that is a list mostly of stuff that nobody should care about.
If someone can articulate what the HR complaints are about then that might be evidence. But complaints to HR are expected - that is why HR gets hired. They are there to deal with HR complaints. And read resumes.
> including an instance where the Black members of a team were required to relocate while a non-Black member wasn't
This one is stupid. Am I meant to believe they are revealing their racist ways by hiring black people then asking them to relocate, racistly? This is bog standard sucks-to-work-in-support activity. Miserable working conditions, but nothing to do with skin colour. A similar thing happened to my father back in the day. He certainly wasn't black.
> Much of Coinbase’s culture stems from the one around Bitcoin, current and former employees said. Bitcoin, which embodies a libertarian philosophy that snubs its nose at the pieties of mainstream institutions, has attracted a generation of fans known as “crypto bros.” Many have propagated a brash male-dominated way of life, facing criticism for sowing racism and sexism.
reads your username
One could plausibly debate the level of it. But to sweepingly declare there's absolutely no evidence isn't so much a claim of fact as a declaration of willful ignorance. Which, unfortunately, is part of why racism is still endemic. See, for example, Loewen's "Sundown Towns", where the later chapters show how America's ongoing de-facto segregation, which was born out of the Nadir, both depends on and creates the sort of refusal to see the obvious that you engage in here.
Systemic or endemic implies the racism is part of the systemic structure, i.e. the laws of the country, or its social contract. This study would at most imply high incidence of unconscious racial biases among the population.
It could also be explained by employer preference for people who are more integrated in the cultural mainstream, which people with "black" names, or Chinese names, are less likely to be.
>But to sweepingly declare there's absolutely no evidence isn't so much a claim of fact as a declaration of willful ignorance
To claim that there racism against black Americans is endemic, with the strongest evidence you were able to find being the incidence of bias with respect to job applicant names, shows a basic lack of regard for the truth.
Literally, your logic could be used to argue that "racism against white Americans is endemic" because there are studies like this one that shows police are 25 times more likely to shoot an unarmed white male than an unarmed black male:
https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publications/abstract.aspx?ID=2674...
That also isn't the strongest evidence. It's just one of the easiest to understand. But given that you're going to strain at gnats and swallow camels even with the pretty basic ones, I'll leave finding the rest as an exercise to the reader.
You ignore the evidence showing unarmed black Americans are 25 times less likely to be shot by police than unarmed white Americans in a given interaction with similar circumstances, because it doesn't fit your victimhood narrative.
You've done nothing but lob ad hominem at me for not agreeing with your completely baseless and unscientific quackery/dogma.
What? That is just euphemistic racism.
The existence of slavery in the past isn’t driving the current race issues in the US so much as fallout from much more recent segregation policies. Nobody alive today was a (or was born to) a slave and the majority of the states that make up the United States were not even part of the country during the civil war.
To claim racism is endemic now because of slavery is lazy. Racism is endemic because segregation didn’t end until approximately the same time as TCP/IP was being invented!
If you'd like to better understand that, I'd suggest you read Kendi's "Stamped from the Beginning", who gives an intellectual history of America's racist ideas. I also think you're mistaken to lay the current troubles at the feet of formal segregation policies, which were only active in one part on the US. Maybe go read "Sundown Towns", which shows that all across America we had towns with de-facto segregation without formal policies. And it takes only a glance at modern maps showing race to see we haven't solved the problem.
The existence of slavery and the view that Black people could be treated as livestock are why we had segregation policies.
The existence of slavery fueled white anger towards the idea that the "livestock" were suddenly being allowed to go to the same places and use the same services as white people. The generations of people who owned slaves raised the generations of people that enforced segregation, and those generations raised the people today who enforce racial discrimination and oppose racial justice.
And like you said, this isn't far-back history, segregation in the US was recent. People have this flowery view that racism just went away and that slavery just suddenly stopped mattering. But the effects are still very much with us today. A few generations isn't enough to eliminate a culturally pervasive, harmful ideology.
It's important to keep in mind that Black communities (and a lot of other marginalized communities) as a group don't really have these debates as much, because it's completely obvious to them that they aren't being treated equally.
In none of those examples is there proof of racial bias.
As it stands, the kernel of Coinbase's defense here is "we paid for a secret report and it says we're great". Reasonable people can find that response unpersuasive.
Are you thinking of a specific example? I don't recall ever seeing this apart from sometimes a short statement on an outcomes (which Coinbase has given us - they found the complaints baseless [0]).
> ...but they can certainly commission a new one that they can disclose.
I did mention law but this isn't fundamentally a legal argument. I was just saying I'd expect there to be a law, given what releasing a detailed report would entail about employee privacy. I'd be ropeable if someone did that to me after I complained to HR and the story got international attention.
Companies have no role at all in airing internal dirty laundry of employees to Hacker News. Coinbase's position is an employee made a baseless claim - in my book it would probably be a very poor precedent for them to start broadcasting details globally. Best case, utterly unfair because of the power imbalance between a company and an individual employee. Worst case, a smear campaign. All cases, unhelpful except for the enjoyment of pundits Hacker News comment threads.
[0] EDIT Rather than replying - "all of whom found no evidence of wrongdoing and concluded the claims were unsubstantiated" https://blog.coinbase.com/upcoming-story-about-coinbase-2012...
I don't know where this "baseless claim" thing comes from; the only foundation you have for that belief is that Coinbase said so. The point of an external report is not having to take Coinbase's word for it. What's funny is paying for an external report, then not showing it to anybody, or even disclosing who did it, and relying on that external report as evidence.
Here's a reasonable question: is the reason Coinbase won't disclose the external reports they commissioned because they can't, because their investigators won't allow them to, because neither are willing to stake their reputations on the interpretation Coinbase drew from them? If not, how do you know that?
And that was investigating stuff Susan Fowler had already attacked them publicly on. I'm not going to try and look up all the details but it is probably a different set of circumstances.
[0] https://www.uber.com/newsroom/covington-recommendations/ and then https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1s08BdVqCgrUVM4UHBpTGROLXM...
The HN community appears to be no more rational or evidence-based finders of fact than those found in the comments section of Fox News or the New York Times.
What hope do we have if the creators and maintainers are prone to the same proclivities as the users?
The 60 people who left makes it clear this is not agreed upon. HN has already played out this debate on the original post so I'll save going into it here, but it's disingenuous to say that Russ didn't quit because of race-related policy, whether or not you think the policy is race-related.
That said, putting out that "apolitical stance" in the direct wake of George Floyd/BLM is unavoidably tied. As others have said, timing is key. If they had the policy from day 1, they might have a leg to stand on. It seems likely in context with this article (and frankly, to many before this) that Coinbase's apolitical stance is not a rejection of all politics but a tacit rejection of George Floyd/BLM. No one should be surprised about a diversity problem in such a company.
This "what else can they do?" question stems from a criminal judicial standard of guilt and conviction, but that is not where this discussion exists. To think that Coinbase must be innocent and needs to prove that over many former employees being on the record + clear statistical issues that all align with the narrative the company has set with previous actions shows a central flaw in the tech community's approach to racism and politics.
I realize the question does not direct say that they must be innocent, but the implications and assumptions here are important to note, and certainly lean in that direction.
The George Floyd spark very much "outed" Coinbase here, because it became an issue you couldn't avoid taking a side on. That's just the state of the world and you're right that they couldn't have anticipated it, but they chose to make a clear stance rather than trying to ride the thin line, and they became less diverse for it. I don't know why anyone would be surprised their prior actions match that recent stance.
Again, I'm trying to avoid the philosophical "Should companies be political" debate that's already been hashed, but simply stating how their actions translate in the current landscape.
It was, after all the first time he was pressured that way.
I've made this comment elsewhere, but I really would love to know why people are digging in so hard here. Let's just call a spade a spade.
https://youtu.be/p5Wny9TstEM
Pretty sure there’s only one “side” anybody’s actually ever taken there.
What most don't condone is burning down buildings and attacking and harassing diners.
BLM is the ultimate motte and bailey.
And can you explain to me why one is absolutely required to publicly vocalize their stance on the George Floyd issue? How is not wanting to speak on the topic in the workplace equivalent to being racist?
Vox (among others) wrote a piece on it: https://www.vox.com/2020/6/3/21278245/antiracist-racism-race...
I'm equivocal on both of these.
In the case of (1), why should the act of fighting injustice pause by some notion of decorum at work? Where should our priorities and values lie?
In the case of (2), many people have good reasons to find the prevailing leftist/progressive rhetoric distasteful. But right now the groups who espouse that rhetoric are also the most active and most effective groups taking action right now. If you aren't with them, who exactly are you with? Or so the rhetoric might go.
You said this so casually. It's an axiomatic truth that everyone has to 'take a stand', implying that you have to call it out, and in a context moreover where not a single person applauded the murder of Floyd. How disingenuous for you to call it a stand, implying that there's a debate. Instead what you mean is, sign up to a calling out of the police. What betrays the problem at hand, why companies cannot feasibly all be political by nature, is that there a zillion possible social causes that one could rationally argue are impossible to call out, from shootings domestically (1100 in my city this year so far), to corporate malfeasance (sweat shops overseas, finance fraud), to foreign policy (bombings of middle eastern countries).
If you and I worked together and you stood up and demanded everyone call out the Floyd thing, outed as you call it, you and I would be debating the above points in front of everyone.
THAT is why companies should allow for an apolitical space.
Did all 60 people leave because of Coinbase's political stance, or did some leave because of the generous severance package of 4-6 months pay that the CEO offered in September?
I know that if I were looking to make a life change, I'd seriously consider that offer even if I liked the politics.
But forget number speculation, we have concrete proof of this in the article:
> another employee who left in October was John Russ, the head of marketing and the company’s highest ranking Black employee, who had been hired three months earlier.
> In a brief phone interview, Mr. Russ would only say that he disagreed with Mr. Armstrong’s new position and left as a result.
We can, but we can only do this because people in the comments are independently informed. The NYT repeatedly emphasized 60 people leaving (across two articles) but never mentioned the severance.
Note that I am Black too.
It's a uniquely American thing that the academic grifters with nothing better to do are desperately trying to import here as well.
this is a self-evident conclusion being hawked as a premise, and the rest of the comment doesn't do much to mold this premise into an argument
> If Russ had a reason for quitting that was race-related then the NYT didn't uncover it.
There's an unfalsifiability in this rhetoric, because someone leaving for race-related reasons in an industry that either: a) has "subtle racists" b) is funded by "subtle racists" c) functionally aids and/or abets "subtle racists" through inaction
would be incentivized to not specify these things, as these industries (finance and crypto) optimize for relationships almost as much (if not ==) to the amount they optimize for merit. And that's not even getting into clauses baked into employment termination contracts. So you have a scenario where you can't actually "prove" race was a primary motivator for quitting because: a) if it were a "subtle racist" co-worker, they're probably using euphemism a2) if they're a "not subtle racist" co-worker, it would embarrass the employer for keeping that person on the book swhen the reputational cost exceeds the cost of sourcing and hiring someone who's not a not subtle racist" b) If the person wants to work in tech again, relationships will likely be burned as a direct or indirect result of airing out a company's dirty laundry c) Could be sued for violating non-disparagement clauses (prices out anyone who doesn't have the security to burn the bridge between them and a growth industry)
If the point of your comment was to use a number of premises that aren't empirical, and border on dogmatic, then I misunderstood, and apologize for trying to search for rhetoric where it was not intended to be found.
If the purpose of the statements above where to be rhetorical or logical, then we're getting into a place where we're asking for evidence that would be difficult for someone with said evidence to do without them, say, being financially and occupationally secure enough to burn the bridges between them and: - Coinbase - Coinbase's Investors - Coinbase's Investors' LPs - Coinbase's Investors' companies - Every other company that either doesn't question whether they are less meritocratic than they believe, or doesn't question whether or not they can replace the problematic superstar employees
That is extremely vague. Is it a red flag? Yes. Does it imply racism? No. It doesn't even guarantee there is a problem or a systemic trend for that matter.
If there are 3 red flags and some actual evidence of racism then that is one thing. But there isn't. Even the number of black people quitting - what is the expected retention rate in that team? Most people quit due to dodgy managers, so people quitting points to a dodgy manager before it points to racism.
We know that Alysa Butler felt unappreciated. I'm hesitant to believe the NYT is even representing her opinions fairly. If you read what they've written about carefully, the article doesn't have her accusing Coinbase of any sort of racism, the NYT is just weaving her experience into a story that they construct elsewhere (normal practice in newspapers). A 'diversity problem' is different from racism. 25 year olds being ignored in meetings is not a new phenomenon either in my experience.
Yeah, I am completely ignoring that. "My presence in the workplace was excessively celebrated" isn't a complaint. There is nothing there to respond to.
If you want to argue that could technically be racist behaviour I agree, but typically when people talk about racism they are actually going to serious issues like money, power or personal safety. Photos taken for promotional material is not something that needs a defence - it is a frivolous thing to argue about. Any company might do that.
when most of your black employees leave because of what they feel is racism in the workplace that’s harder to ignore
They weren't ignoring it. Some of these people weren't even saying they felt that way to Coinbase - one of the people who claims she was bullied also claims nobody told her how to make an official complaint and that's why Coinbase have no record of her views. Complaining to HR has to be the easiest task in any modern corporation; if she couldn't figure out how to do even that then we probably found the explanation for why she felt unappreciated: maybe she just sucked. Or maybe she's made up this supposed racism after she left, as part of achieving other ends (like getting in the NYT).
Political parties have pet Think Tanks and Consulting Companies and various other organisations that only exist to massage the existing data into the desired narrative.
Look for the data points that indicate 'normal' and orbit that. When the inevitable questions about X% of the African-American workforce quit within Y time, just point to the stats that say 'normal'. Find some other outlier statistic to point out that random groupings happen, use this to try and dismiss this scenario as a one-off random event; coincidence.
Kids: learn your statistics! You'll be able to cheat your way into at least a couple of promotions throughout your career. (What I actually mean is: learn your statistics so you can spot when you're being cheated).
There are consultancies whose reputations depend on reporting only unvarnished truth to their clients. That way the client can reliably handle and eliminate actual discrimination, and defend themselves against false claims. I'm not sure that a whitewashing firm would be as valuable as all that.
They can choose to ignore the NYT, since during the trump years it's been laid bare that they're a political publication.
If any individual was treated unfairly, that individual can sue under discrimination law, for a private apology and settlement.
But beyond that, it's also important that there be NO public apology or acceptance of the idea that refusing to espouse activist politics makes a company intolerant.
I think it's admirable Coinbase is taking a stand to keep activism out of the workplace.
Treating people fairly is required; tolerating campaigning in a private enterprise is not.
This feels like a trap that we don't fall into in other areas. This is an external consultant is paid by the company, whos reviews and future job prospects are based on being an attractive hire for other companies accused of racist action. There's obviously a huge conflict of interest there.
At HN we would recognize that conflict of interest if we were talking about binding arbitration. We would recognize that conflict of interest if we were talking about a security consultant that was dismissing security disclosures from 3rd-parties. It's a little disappointing to me to see unequal standards applied here.
The question is, is what the NYT is saying plausible, is there evidence of this going on? And yeah, the story sites specific examples, interviews specific employees, and cites complaints from managers. It seems completely plausible to me.
I don't get why people are suddenly so eager to buy into corporate narratives about structural racism and bias, when they would never buy into those same corporate narratives about issues like privacy and security. Every time an Apple or a Google thread comes up, our comment section is filled with people calling them out as disingenuous; it's filled with people who are willing to read between the lines on their policies and press releases. We have no shortage of people in those threads who are willing to extrapolate or judge those companies based on the past actions of the industry. But when it comes to representation, suddenly all of that goes out the window?
Representation and bigotry even just as general topics are a huge blind spot for HN that we need to get better at talking about. We need to be less dismissive of these claims. We need to take racial discrimination more seriously, because it is a serious problem in tech.
That’s why Customer Service isn’t treated like the Rock Stars that Sales or Engineering is treated like in a company.
It also tends to have the most natural turnover, and tends to be the lesser skilled positions in a software company (not often requiring specializations, like developers).
I would say that this kind of mission statement can only work if done at the beginning, as reacting in response to the work environment described by their employees was doomed for failure.
I know many people like Brian Armstrong, and the investors. They are all cut from a similar cloth and they honestly have no clue how to react. They don't know how to get women on a panel, they don't know how to get qualified people of color in positions to change things. They are just told what they did wrong and just shut themselves off from it. The very people with power to change anything get marginalized themselves. And yes, some - not all - of them actually are not interested in inclusion or really are racist and sexist. But for the former, there is room to empathize with these kind of people to steer their energy in more productive ways.
> They don't know how to get women on a panel
2 out of 7 members of the exec team are women.
> they don't know hot to get qualified people of color in positions to change things
4 out of 7 members of the exec team have last names of Choi, Chatterjee, Grewal, Gupta.
It's almost as if you have strong biases (or delusions) and didn't even do a basic fact check before making bold claims against Coinbase.
[1] https://www.coinbase.com/about
I’m saying we can all address this better.
This is the standard SV makeup. Do a random sample of any large tech company and this is the team you’d get. This tells me they’re not doing anything different.
Your local governments have to push the education forward instead of doing these racist affirmative action rules.
America is where it is by not even tapping into the productivity of basically up to half of its population across various demographics, imagine if it did.
also: for companies that are global in nature, with global operations, offices, employees, etc. is it right to take on the issues of the country where they have an office? (or are HQ-ed, or have X% of employees (even if majority)?)
Why not other things? Why aren't the issues of the impoverished of India an issue w/ tech companies, especially given the large presence of "well to do" Indians or upper-casters?
Our healthcare relies on our employment, they fund politicians, write laws. They are very much the lords of the modern era and they need to act in the interest of people, or lose their corporate personhood.
As for the globalist perspective, I agree. We should care how people up the supply chain live. I understand the issues in the US significantly better than those in China or India though. For those issues, give them visibility and work toward a solution. It doesn’t have to be either or.
a) bullshit
b) even if it wasn't bullshit, the companies improve with the representation to adequately ship products to markets that they would otherwise ignore
c) both kinds of people are benefits to the companies, as there is a greater priority to address markets than cater to egos of internal employees
Coinbase aspires to be a global company. What does "Black" even mean in that context? People with dark skin color? If so, a broad portion of South Asians and sub-Saharan Africans would qualify.
What does Hispanic mean? Would Spanish people qualify?
Did you mean only in the context of the USA? If so, how is that different than the Nationalist jingoism of Donald Trump, where you want US-centric population representation in a global company?
Yes. The word has a definition - even an official one by the Census Bureau.
Asians, a minority by every measurement, are over-represented in STEM classes to the point that Harvard and others actively discriminate against them.
Studies have shown, repeatedly, that blind hiring (stripping names from resumes, showing only experience) actually worsens diversity. This means companies generally give more opportunity to black, Asian and other minority groups.
I would think that progressive activism is the minority rather than the default view.
Isn't it the racially discriminatory stance to make decisions based on race?
I think most rational people would rather make decisions purely on competence and facts, not identity.
Say that 30 times real fast and ask a new question
Sure sounds like quotas are what is desired.
> they don’t know how to get qualified people of color in positions to change things
These aren’t the kinds of things that someone running a business should be concerned with.
Don’t be condescending. Women and “people of color” don’t need to be rescued and hoisted up into a business artificially. They are perfectly capable of joining the workforce through the same doors as all other people.
We are doing these people a disservice. Even in the most “socially forward thinking” companies like Google, this sentiment prevails. The loudest non-black advocates for black hiring are privately the owners of the strongest fences. But when its time to virtue-signal, they’re at the front of the line. Hire a black employee directly into their team in eng/sales? No thanks - but they’ll gladly advocate for the customer service, recruitment and “diversity officer” roles to go to a black individual. Direct result of the push to hire disproportionately many black people which has led to them having a worse experience at these jobs as the psyche of existing employees is they’re automatically a lower bar hire (very unfair to these people!).
Good job big tech - you have once again turned a target into a measure and completely missed the point. Except now the people you supposedly tried to help are hurt the most.
Look at Coinbase - the exec team is largely women and minorities, yet NYT takes every opportunity to point out the percent of black employees (with no context on the number in the hiring funnel and at target colleges) as if CB has an obligation to hit a certain number.
Disclosure: I worked at Coinbase for a brief period.
Ready for the downvotes, but look around at those in your team and within yourself, and ask yourself if there is anything untrue in what I said before hitting that button.
Oh well.
https://www.heritage.org/courts/commentary/how-affirmative-a... (Relating to drop out rates)
https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-sad-...
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3699572?seq=1
https://hilo.hawaii.edu/campuscenter/hohonu/volumes/document...
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/the-pai...
I have worked in this industry - on and off - for 3 decades. This is an ugly phenomenon nobody wants to acknowledge.
The mere suggestion that this is a funnel issue, rather than a racial bias issue, is met with vehement accusations of racism (if coming from an older man like me, even more so).
I’d even go as far as to say SV has a real discrimination problem - and that is ageism. When supply and demand is considered, it is many times as blatant as the supposed race issue.
Finally, I did use the term virtue signalling. It is fairly unambiguous. There are no political leanings to extrapolate from there, yet the subtle accusations put forward based on that is abundantly clear here. Once again - before dissecting my comment and projecting an image of me to attack/downvote, ask yourself if the way SV (likely your employer based on HN demographics)and outlets like NYT frame these issues is truly honest.
Diverse hiring (as in equal outcome hiring) does not materially benefit companies.
I was on, or closely worked with teams that built early versions of modern virtual memory, Excel, Turbo Pascal, WebTV, and IIS, and they were largely white men, with a sprinkling of Asian men. Would these products be better engineering marvels with more racial and gender representation? Possibly, but not because of the existence of “women algorithms” or “black design patterns”. Human brains work similarly given similar inputs. There is some revenue to be regained in designing for edge case blind spots, but it is an overwhelming small fraction when you are working at the bleeding edge of an industry. You did not see these initiatives in tech at the time for the same reason you don’t see them in the space travel industry, or anti-aging research, or on the teams working on a COVID-19 vaccine (how ridiculous would that sound?). The industry was not mature enough, as it is now, for such overhead (distractions, to be less polite). There was important work to be done, and we didn’t care who you were as long as you could help. These were some of the most open, progressive, intelligent and honest teams I got to work with.
Then why is it important? Because diverse hiring (as in equal-opportunity hiring) is __the right thing to do__. Talent can come from South America or South Chicago just as easily as Bangalore or Austin, TX. The next Donald Knuth or Jeffrey Dean should not be denied an opportunity because of their skin color or gender if they shone through. And in those teams, several of them shone through and we scrambled to bring them aboard.
What is happening now is analogous to dredging the river bed, incurring the costs of that (which is possible because the industry is massively profitable and mature, with very little paradigm-shifting work left at these companies) to find what might be remotely shiny. We can then report our “progress” and pat ourselves on the back. Except, this breeds resentment from the rocks and diamonds not getting dredged, the aforementioned Peter Principle issue, and as I’ve observed, the general unease. You will not find a team at a company like Etsy that is as accepting and open as the teams I mentioned, because the sacred thing that pulls together smart people - the “bar” for lack of better term - may have been compromised in bringing in the latest new hire. If there is a shadow of doubt about that, even if this person truly is a diamond, they are done a disservice because of this dynamic at play. It is unfair, and in the long term, actually hurts these UR communities in this industry.
Chinese or Russian historians in the distant future, rustling through the bones of our fallen civilization, will disagree on many things. Marking the rise of the nerd as the beginning of the end won't be one of them.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Interesting. Are Asians or Indians not “people” or “of color” in this worldview?
Indeed, we see this mentality in programs like affirmative action in which the suffering of Asian children is seen as an acceptable sacrifice for uplifting other minorities.
Also, it is used in a divisive, racist fashion by places like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/gumxuy/...
different cultural groups also behave differently and make different choices based on familial affinities & social incentives
Please note this is not a slight against women, immigrants, or anyone else. They obviously have valid discrimination claims. But if you work in a community where less than 1% of African-American students are scoring at grade level in mathematics, and your company claims it is "diverse" yet hires no local African-Americans, there is still a serious problem in your community that should be addressed. (It's OK if you don't care, as long as you don't pretend otherwise). So please do not conflate hiring "people of color" with hiring any specific group.
* By "African-American" here I mean descendants of slaves who lived in the USA, and are thus severely disadvantaged because of it, having actual wealth stolen without any legal means available for recovery. I do understand that "African-American" is commonly used to mean any black U.S. resident.
Interestingly, a growing number of activists prefer the term ADOS (American descendants of slavery) because it makes precisely this distinction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Descendants_of_Slaver...
Accusing others of racism is a serious faux-pas. It is also delusional to think someone talking down to you, is caused by the color of your skin, and not, maybe, because you deserved a talking down to, or the person is just an asshole, and talks down to everyone.
Saying someone else got a promotion, because their white skin, despite being lower skilled than you, is a horrible thing to say, and a horrible thing to believe. It would be vile distracting paralyzing racism, instead of an opportunity to reflect and grow.
If racial equality activists make you feel that way, judge others on the color of their skin, and paint decision-making of white people that way, then this activism is not doing you any favors. It is not making you stronger. It is making you a victim. It sours inter-racial relationships.
If a manager really says something along the lines of "watch out for her, she is dealing crack in the ghetto, and secretly carries a gun everywhere." then that manager is fired everywhere in the world, and the Black employee is compensated for this evil. No company wants to keep such managers around. No need to invoke tricks like paying off an external investigator. That manager is gone.
Yet, that manager is still around. No complaint was filed. No colleague stepped up. So what really happened? A joke gone wrong? Being above racism led to problems with an employee for who being black and female is the major two traits of their group/social media identity, and now they can't help but relate every interaction, to whites hating their skin color, or the patriarchy keeping them down?
Racism is gross, but this "I am being discriminated against by these elite white tech bros, because they notice my skin every day, promoting their dumb jocks over me, again due to the color of my skin, and nobody is willing to stop that" is even grosser. It is sexist, slanderous, weak, prejudiced, generalizing, blameful, divisive, and racist.
The taboo-ness of the topic is wielded as an effective weapon by activists. They realized early on what the power of calling someone's employer, conference organizers, or hinting at company racism can do to stifle opposing views and criticism, and the economic damage they can inflict on a brand. Even if totally out of line and false, such as accusing white business owners of cultural appropriation by selling Asian food, can get such a business cancelled, because people are afraid to be tarred and feathered by association. Socially ostracized without ever a court to fairly validate if you really furthered (illegal!) racism. Portrayed by international media as some sort of neo-Nazi libertarian hellscape momcorp, without ever a court or independent investigation finding anything of real substance. Acquitted by a judge, yet constantly called a murderous racist, because you killed a black-skinned person at a traffic stop.
So what happens if you loudly overreact to perceived company racism? You start to promote diversity and inclusion programs. You start asking applicants for their skin color or gender. You bring back the focus on skin color, ideally looking for a Disney-style PR diversity representation that's obvious for the outside (black, female, flamboyantly gay). You, of course, hire a black gay female to run these diversity programs, because white straight males are not suited for the job. Start policing language and technical jargon, as to not offend their favorite social scholars. And what happens to me? I look twice at a new colleague. The second time I notice skin color and gender. And I can't help but wonder... did those factors contribute or was this the best candidate for the ...