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'Tokenized': Inside Black Workers' Struggles at the King of Crypto Start-Ups (nytimes.com) 197

Nathaniel Popper, reporting for The New York Times: One by one, they left. Some quit. Others were fired. All were Black. 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. Before leaving in late 2018 and early 2019, at least 11 of them informed the human resources department or their managers about what they said was racist or discriminatory treatment, five people with knowledge of the situation said. One of the employees was Alysa Butler, 25, who worked in recruiting. During her time at Coinbase, she said, she told her manager several times about how he and others excluded her from meetings and conversations, making her feel invisible. "Most people of color working in tech know that there's a diversity problem," said Ms. Butler, who resigned in April 2019. "But I've never experienced anything like Coinbase."

In Silicon Valley, where entrepreneurs and investors often preach high-minded missions and style themselves as management gurus, Coinbase has held itself up as a model. Since the start-up was founded in 2012, Brian Armstrong, the chief executive, has assembled memos and blog posts about how he built the $8 billion company's culture with distinct hiring and training practices. That has won him acclaim among influential venture capitalists and executives. 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, the start-up has long struggled with its management of Black employees. 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.
On Wednesday, before publication of this article, Emilie Choi, Coinbase's chief operating officer, wrote an email to employees to preemptively question the article's accuracy and said, "We know the story will recount episodes that will be difficult for employees to read." The company posted the email to its public blog. "As Brian shared with the ColorBlock ERG this morning, we don't care what The New York Times thinks. "
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'Tokenized': Inside Black Workers' Struggles at the King of Crypto Start-Ups

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  • by sinij ( 911942 ) on Friday November 27, 2020 @01:13PM (#60770578)
    NYT, a formerly journalistic publication and now a discredited [nypost.com] political activism organization, published a smear article after Coinbase implemented anti-activism work policy [forbes.com]? I am not at all surprised.
    • Meanwhile at NYT... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by sinij ( 911942 ) on Friday November 27, 2020 @01:23PM (#60770602)
      Meanwhile "progressive" NYT staff racially harasses insufficiently woke Jewish journalist [washingtonpost.com] into resigning. Bari Weiss: "Twitter has become its[NYT] ultimate editor".
    • by DNS-and-BIND ( 461968 ) on Friday November 27, 2020 @02:06PM (#60770684) Homepage

      Wow, they really did that "erase what we said and replace it without allowing anyone to know we did it" thing? That's jaw-dropping. In George Orwell's novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four" the protagonist Winston Smith has the exact same job. Only, it's not at the world's most credible newspaper: he works at the Ministry of Truth, whose job it is to spread lies.

      "As with the names of the other ministries in Oceania, the name Ministry of Truth means the opposite of what it says. If the Ministry of Love is the place of torture and hate, the Ministry of Truth is where lies are manufactured. Winston works here, rewriting old news articles to reflect the Party's latest version of reality and throwing the old articles down a "memory hole" where they are incinerated. The Ministry of Truth reflects the Party's belief that power is the only truth and that those with the power can make the "truth" into whatever they choose."
      https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/book-1984-what-was-main-role-ministry-truth-720

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The never journalistic publication and long ago discredited New Your Post said that?

      The same publication which originated the Hunter Biden Laptop conspiracy theory [wikipedia.org]?

  • by ITRambo ( 1467509 ) on Friday November 27, 2020 @01:20PM (#60770594)
    If an employee was considered competent and intelligent enough to hire, then they need to be treated as such and invited to any and all meeting and activities the position they hold call for. I cannot comprehend how ignorant some managers can be. Some great ideas will never be heard.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      If an employee was considered competent and intelligent enough to hire...

      Has anyone started to figure out the wickedness of diversity quotas yet? How condescending lowered standards for different skin colors are? And how this might all play out in a real work place where work has to actually get done?

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        The goal should not be to lower standards, merely to see if there are better standards to measure someone's value to the company by.

        For example if the model that HR uses to filter candidates is "must have attended one of the prestigious universities on our list" they are excluding a large number of potentially great candidates.

    • Yeah for sure. But do you really take the anecdotes in the article at face value? I don't.
    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Maybe they only got hired to fill a diversity quota? In SJW land you can't tell until you actually have a conversation with them or see their work yourself.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      They dismiss them as "diversity hires" it just hate black people. It happens sometimes, more often if they get away with it.

    • I've been skipped on meeting invites. Even when I was to report on something. Even when something I was in charge of was to be decided on. It happens. Is it racist? Not unless something else is also happening.
      If you have not been skipped on a meeting invite, then you have not worked at a large enough company or long enough or many other things.
      Even meeting invites are not perfect. Such is life.

  • GoT (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hdyoung ( 5182939 ) on Friday November 27, 2020 @01:40PM (#60770644)
    Wow, it's almost like the atmosphere at a hot-new-tech-startup-worth-potentially-billions is going to be a ruthlessly cutthroat arena where most of the civilized wrapping that people usually wear gets discarded. Sir, I am shocked. Shocked I say.

    I guarantee Uber is like that. Facebook was like this in the early days. Microsoft was like this in it's heyday. Maybe there are exceptions to this but they are exactly that, exceptions. Barely-concealed undercurrents of racism, sexism, classism, and all the other bad "isms" that plague us.

    I'm going to get downmodded by people who will say "might doesn't make right" and "you shouldn't condone or explain away bad behavior". These are both true, but I'm simply talking about hard reality here. People who join these companies stand to go from "50k per year" to "owning stock worth millions" in the blink of an eye. It's easy to play nice with others when everyone is earning a halfway decent salary and there's no chance for anyone to strike it filthy rich. Once serious money is on the line, it's going to be mean, cutthroat, nasty and competitive. People will get away with WHATEVER they can in order to get ahead. Alliances will form, backs will be stabbed, and, yes, I'm sorry to say, ugly tribalism, ethnic and religious fault lines will be exposed.

    If someone of (insert human group here) joins an outfit like that, they're voluntarily entering a combat arena where only a few stand to reap massive rewards. The rules are lightly enforced at best. They need to go in with their eyes open, make alliances and play as nasty as the guy next to them. Joining an outfit like Coinbase and expecting a pleasant experience is naive. You join for the chance to make millions, and you cut as many throats as you need to.

    If you don't like this, there are more established companies, teaching jobs, government jobs, etc. etc. where people play much nicer most of the time.
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      We know Uber is like that because they have already been sued and had their dirty laundry aired. For them it seemed to be more about misogyny.

    • But you just argued these employees _should_ leverage wokeness; 'WHATEVER they can in order to get ahead'.

      And screw the company, trash the PR and stock if they don't get their cut. If anything goes, stop whining like little bitches when the cheating isn't in your favor.

      • From what I understand, these people are complaining AFTER they've left the company. I consider this to be a failure of strategic timing. You play the "woke" card while you're at the company and still might benefit from a massive stock option payout. Running that gambit after getting stomped out of the company is simple revenge. Don't get me wrong: revenge is their right and I don't begrudge them, but I simply don't respect it. Would have been much smarter to make the play while employed in order to take th
  • by kwandar ( 733439 ) on Friday November 27, 2020 @02:04PM (#60770680)
    .... and Coinbase is avoiding the problem. I would never let this continue in my organization, and Coinbase in saying "we only care about what our employees think", are effectively denying there is a problem. I've rarely seen the NYT report a problem, where there isn't one. Their failure to address this head on has most certainly devalued the company, and I'd be furious if I held their equity.
    • Coinbase has a $8 billion valuation and will probably IPO at $15 billion valuation. Meanwhile the NYT is worth zero and falling fast. I agree with Coinbase: I don't care what the NYT thinks either.
      • by samkass ( 174571 )

        The New York Times has a valuation of $7B and makes about $175M in profit a year on revenues of $1.8B. The two companies are actually somewhat comparable in their current financials. We'll see about the future financials or credibility of CoinBase, but those of the New York Times have been tested for a century and a half, and remain intact.

      • Are you sure you didn't wan to at least punch NYT into a stock ticker [google.com] before you made that comment?

        As far as I see the 5Y, NYT is up 4x since 2016 and has a valuation of $7B. That's a smidge less than Coinbase and a whole hell of a lot more than "zero and falling fast".

  • If they're going to bait me by mentioning recordings they need to at least quote some of what was in them ...

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Crypto was, is and forever shall be a money laundering cult.

    150 years after the end of slavery and you're still segregating members of society ethno-economically by race, far out!

    Enough of the clickbait. I refuse to be outraged.

  • Bigotry sucks (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Martin S. ( 98249 ) on Friday November 27, 2020 @02:27PM (#60770750) Journal

    The problem with bigotry is that it discriminates on the wrong criteria, one that has absolutely no connection with actual job performance.

    In my experience, 25 years in highly productive software development teams, it is underperforming managers that bully and blame those most easily cast as the outsider.

    Step one to building high performance teams is dumping toxic people.

  • "One by one, they left. Some quit. Others were fired. All were Black."

    Wait, the narrative is trying to make us think that only employees who left the company were black? I am NOT saying the narrative is wrong. If it is correct, I want more evidence and a clearer statement on that. Cause it's hell of misleading.

    That said, a more poignant quote is

    "they represented roughly three-quarters of the Black employees at the 600-person company"

    ... THAT statement is clearer and in my worldview likely truer than the above statement and so I require less confirmation. It's pathetic that the company didn't do something to figure out why it was happening and try to stop it. It

  • by greytree ( 7124971 ) on Friday November 27, 2020 @03:50PM (#60770964)

    Is that a thing now?

    A rule?

    Am I White, or white ?

    What about Asian, Jewish, Christian, Tall, Fat, Stupid?
    All capitalized?

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Asian is capitalized because it is derived from Asia. Similar to French, British and so forth.

      Similarly Jewish should be capitalized because it is derived from Judaism. Same with Muslim, Christian and so forth.

      There is no proper noun/name from which white, black or tall are derived so no need to capitalize those.

    • by igny ( 716218 ) on Friday November 27, 2020 @06:03PM (#60771318) Homepage Journal
      Yes, looks like a new rule

      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.
    • Looks like it's sort of new, as of July [nytimes.com]. Though you could also look at it as an update of a 1930 policy to capitalize Negro, in which case it's not new at all.
  • by The Grim Reefer ( 1162755 ) on Friday November 27, 2020 @03:50PM (#60770966)
    Damn it. I was hoping this had something to do with the Black Riders complaining about king Aragorn discriminating against their new cryptocurrency. I figured the Nazgul had to do something after the defeat of Sauron.
  • by minorityreport ( 6925286 ) on Friday November 27, 2020 @07:03PM (#60771482)
    Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong Sep 27 [coinbase.com]:

    We focus minimally on causes not directly related to the mission:

    * Policy decisions : If there is a bill introduced around crypto, we may engage here, but we normally wouldn’t engage in policy decisions around healthcare or education for example.

    * Non-profit work: We will do some work here with our Pledge 1% program and GiveCrypto.org, but this is about 1% of our efforts. We are a for-profit business. When we make profit, we can use that to hire more great people, and build even more. We shouldn’t ever shy away from making profit, because with more resources we can have a greater impact on the world.

    * Broader societal issues:: We don’t engage here when issues are unrelated to our core mission, because we believe impact only comes with focus.

    * Political causes: We don’t advocate for any particular causes or candidates internally that are unrelated to our mission, because it is a distraction from our mission. Even if we all agree something is a problem, we may not all agree on the solution.

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