Casey Newton para su boletín Platformer y publicada en The Verge, “What really happened at Basecamp”:

The controversy that embroiled enterprise software maker Basecamp this week began more than a decade ago, with a simple list of customers.

Around 2009, Basecamp customer service representatives began keeping a list of names that they found funny. More than a decade later, current employees were so mortified by the practice that none of them would give me a single example of a name on the list. One invoked the sorts of names Bart Simpson used to use when prank calling Moe the Bartender: Amanda Hugginkiss, Seymour Butz, Mike Rotch.

But both of their posts avoided discussing the actual series of events that had led up to the policies, which were related directly to the workplace. In fact, the events all took place on Basecamp’s own software, which it sells to other companies on the promise of improving cohesion and reducing stress in the workplace.

Employees say the founders’ memos unfairly depicted their workplace as being riven by partisan politics, when in fact the main source of the discussion had always been Basecamp itself.

El problema comenzó a crecer cuando los llamados para una política interna de inclusión no recibieron mucho entusiasmo por parte de los fundadores de Basecamp—según las entrevistas de Newton—.

While Basecamp does not publish diversity statistics, it is still, like most tech companies, majority white and male, employees said. But the idea of worker-led efforts on diversity issues got a frosty reception from the founders last year, employees told me. They were allowed to work on the project, but did not feel as if the founders were particularly invested in the outcome.

Nonetheless, the DE&I council attracted significant support. More than a third of the company — 20 out of roughly 58 employees — volunteered to help. They began examining Basecamp’s hiring processes, which vendors the company works with, how Basecamp employees socialize, and what speakers they might invite to one of the all-remote company’s twice-yearly in-person gatherings.

Esto provocó que iniciara una discusión sobre la lista de nombres, la que involucró a David Heinemeier Hansson.

Hansson wanted to acknowledge the situation as a failure and move on. But when employees who had been involved in the list wanted to continue talking about it, he grew exasperated. “You are the person you are complaining about,” he thought.

Hansson’s response to this employee took aback many of the workers I spoke with. He dug through old chat logs to find a time when the employee in question participated in a discussion about a customer with a funny-sounding name. Hansson posted the message — visible to the entire company — and dismissed the substance of the employee’s complaint.

Less than two weeks later, Fried announced the new company policies.

Desde mi punto de vista, las nuevas políticas pueden imponer una barrera dentro de la misma compañía, eliminando la posibilidad de enfrentar diversas problemáticas como brecha salarial o acoso laboral. Además, los fundadores son sumamente políticos y abiertos en cuanto a diversos temas polémicos, lo cual solo provoca confusión entre los mismos empleados, quienes no pueden comportarse ni discutir de la misma manera que como lo hacen los fundadores. Por ejemplo, lo que ha dicho Jane Yang en su publicación y entrevista con Newton es fundamental.

Jane Yang, a data analyst at the company, told me that restricting internal conversations would negatively affect diversity and inclusion efforts. For example, she said, the company’s profit-sharing plan gave more profits to people who have longer tenure — a group that is majority white and male. Making that discussion off limits internally could ensure that inequality in profit sharing becomes a structural feature of the company.

¿La nueva política funciona para empleados y fundadores?

Hansson told me that the rules are not draconian — no one is going to be bounced out the door for occasionally straying out of bounds. The founders’ goal is to reset the culture and focus on making products, he said, not to purge political partisans from the workforce.

But to employees, the move was received more as a shift to willful ignorance — about the world around them, and about the lived experiences of the employees who occupied it.

Claramente veo una separación entre lo que Jason Fried y David Heinemeier Hansson evocan con su filosofía, activismo político y productos con la manera en la que están manejando el ambiente, la capacidad de discernir y discutir dentro de Basecamp. Con las reglas que han anunciado, uno ya no cree en la filosofía rebelde y disruptiva de sus propios productos—una decepción—.