What an absolute failure of leadership at Basecamp. No matter what you think of the changes they posted about (and I think they sound pretty bad), the way to communicate this—especially at such a small company—is not some public blog post. https://twitter.com/georgeclaghorn/status/1387041235697901571

It seems especially galling from two people that seem to pride themselves on making a low-stress, great place to work, with high quality communication. At least according to their books.

The thing is, if you've ever worked on a distributed team, then read Remote, you know it's full of shit. It's just not reality that a group of people can all communicate effectively over text 100% of the time. If they believe that, they are absolutely delusional

And I think this fits the pattern we see here: what they say is "political" is actually a lot of peoples' right to exist. They are exhibiting a fundamental lack of empathy, and it's not the kind of empathy that seems all that hard to muster.

Marco Rogers has a good take on this, essentially saying "what problem are they REALLY trying to solve?" and I would love to know what precipitated all of this. I have experienced a large-ish team get wrapped up in what might be called "political discussions"…

And being on the leadership team, you observe precipitators to toxic behavior or outright toxic behavior and want to do something, ideally something systemic to "this never happens again", but TBH I'm hard-pressed to think of workable solution other than…

…addressing the specific problems being observed. As Marco said in one of his tweets, if someone is not getting work done due to arguing in Slack, THAT is the problem, not the subject of their arguments. If someone is harassing another employee, THAT is the problem…

And I can absolutely say that dealing with individual bad behavior and poor performance is not easy, not fun, and not something a lot of people have experience with. It seems easier to make a broad rule and let some people quit and then use the rule to force others out…

…but that's not what I'd call great leadership. I won't claim that I'm good at handling this, but I would like to think I'd actually try to identify the problem and solve that, and I'd hope I've have peers on my leadership team that would help me.