Basecamp offers buyouts⁠↗

And in any case, the fact remains that this is a company co-founder calling out an employee in front of all of their peers, and then following up by sharing that post publicly on the web, redacting little more than the employee’s name. Unlike the co-founder, the employee can’t risk responding in public without fearing for their job. The power dynamics here are ugly — the sort of thing that could make you think twice about wanting to work for someone.

It’s all too easy for problems to fester at companies even when people are working alongside one another in offices. Dispersed around the world, even minor actions can feel incredibly fraught. (If you’ve ever felt your stomach drop when your manager sends you the single word “hey” in Slack, you know what I’m talking about.) No matter the company, workplace chat tools focus bad feelings into lengthy, engaging threads and groups, helping them to spread throughout the organization with comments and upvotes. I can understand why, in such a world, managers would want to simply shut down the chat and start over. But I suspect someday Fried and Hansson will learn what their employees already know — it was never the conversations that were the problem. Basecamp doesn’t need new employees — it needs leaders who want to manage and engage with the ones it already has.