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Last year, 37signals employees shared the “pyramid of hate” in a work chat in response to seeing a list of “funny Asian names” of customers. Upper management responded by banning discussion of politics at work (I presume “politics” means “anything that creates a sense of social responsibility beyond investor value”). Its handling of the situation caused a third of its employees to resign [www.nytimes.com].
However, I don’t think this policy is in effect anymore: 37signals leadership is using a company blog for railing against diversity and inclusion [world.hey.com], and then doubling down after criticism [world.hey.com]. Is the “no politics” rule lifted, is upper management exempt, or does “no politics” only refer to politics that challenges David Heinemeier Hansson to change his behavior? I look forward to hearing a clarification on this rule.
37signals is known for creating Basecamp, Hey.com (an email service with bespoke email filters that are somehow incompatible with IMAP), and for creating Ruby on Rails. It appears to remain a key member of the Rails Foundation. For now.
POSSE [indieweb.org] note from https://seirdy.one/notes/2022/11/25/politics-and-37signals/
@Seirdy This is untrue, world.hey.com/dhh is a personal blog of DHH, the founder of 37 Signals, not a company blog. I’m not a Hey user myself, but as far as I understand it, Hey World is basically like Substack, but for Hey users, and is available to anybody using the platform. If I remember Basecamp’s statements correctly, they have explicitly stated that employees are allowed to be politically active, as long as it doesn’t happen in the official company chat.
@miki Thanks, I edited the post. I do think that the leader of a company blogging about his political views on hiring practices probably does reflect on the company’s emergent political stance on hiring practices, and that limiting workers ability to discuss company decisions just because they’re “political” is a really bad look.
@Seirdy Also, as far as I remember their statements, employees were explicitly encouraged to create other places where they could discuss politics amongst themselves, as long as participation was voluntary and they weren’t using work infrastructure. I think WhatsApp and Signal groups were provided as examples.