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In fairness to Adam and Eve, nowhere in Leviticus are you told not to obey a talking snake.

Today's News:

Life Is More Than an Engineering Problem, an interview with Ted Chiang from earlier this year. “I don’t believe it’s meaningful to say that something is better art absent any context of how it was created. Art is all about context.”

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

A reader writes:

You’ve talked about how inappropriate it is for employers to ask candidates about their salary expectations without giving out any info on salary themselves.

I became a small business owner without having received training in that aspect of things, but learned early on when I am hiring to always ask the candidate their salary expectations before giving any information out about the range I am willing to offer. Why? Firstly, the money comes directly from our pockets and frankly if we can get away with paying $20/hour instead of $22/hour, why wouldn’t we? It also gives us room for raises, bonuses, etc. without taking too much of a financial hit. You always advocate that employees look out for their own interests. Why should that be so different for me as an employer? Maybe we tend to think of employers as big corporations but in our case we’re just hard-working individuals hoping to keep expenses in check.

The second reason I want that information first is that if I were to give my range, a candidate expecting more might well say, “Sure, that’s fine” while planning to take the job and keep looking for something else. Frankly, I want to know if they’re likely to be unhappy with that salary! Hearing that they expect more is valuable information for us to have and if I can get it, I will.

So there you have it from a brazenly unapologetic employer who plans to continue asking the question. (For what it’s worth, we are excellent employers whose staff have been with us for years and seem very happy).

I answer this question over at Inc. today, where I’m revisiting letters that have been buried in the archives here from years ago (and sometimes updating/expanding my answers to them). You can read it here.

The post I ask candidates their salary expectations, and I don’t feel bad about it appeared first on Ask a Manager.

Have you ever known someone who seemed nice enough and perfectly normal, until you saw one of their social media accounts and realized they were insane? Like, you became Facebook friends with your uncle, or followed that friend-of-a-friend who's fun at parties on Instagram, and it turns out they constantly post about weird shit like the deep state and demographic replacement and the pedophile ring that Hillary Clinton definitely runs from the basement of a pizza parlor?

Over the past couple weeks, the tech community has been slowly coming to terms with a prominent person like that. He seems congenial — started a successful open source project, co-founded a reputable company — until you come across his blog filled with unhinged political diatribes. I’m speaking, of course, of DHH: Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson.

If you, like me, don't pay much attention to this person, the last thing you might remember him from is the fracas a few years ago over his company Basecamp banning political discussions at work. While I had my opinions about that, it seemed to fit within the general range of politics you can expect from most people. I assumed David was just a normal guy with whom I had some political differences, and went on with my life.

That all changed when I heard about the recent hostile takeover of the RubyGems package manager, which appears to have started over a lost sponsorship for giving David a conference speaking slot. My interest was piqued, so I checked out his recent post "As I remember London". By the time I finished reading, my jaw was on the floor.

DHH's politics are not normal.

Maybe they used to be, I don't know, but as of right now the dude is way the fuck outside of what most people would consider moral or acceptable.

But don't take my word for it. We can get it straight from the horse’s mouth. Let’s go through David’s "As I remember London"^[1] post and see exactly what he’s all about.

Native Brits

David's post starts off fairly anodyne:

As soon as I was old enough to travel on my own, London was where I wanted to go. Compared to Copenhagen at the time, there was something so majestic about Big Ben, Trafalgar Square, and even the Tube around the turn of the millenium. Not just because their capital is twice as old as ours, but because it endured twice as much, through the Blitz and the rest of it, yet never lost its nerve. I thought I might move there one day.

Yeah, man. I have cousins not too far away from there, so even though I live across the pond I've been lucky enough to visit a few times. London is great!

That was then. Now, I wouldn't dream of it. London is no longer the city I was infatuated with in the late '90s and early 2000s. Chiefly because it's no longer full of native Brits. In 2000, more than sixty percent of the city were native Brits. By 2024, that had dropped to about a third. A statistic as evident as day when you walk the streets of London now.

The honeymoon is over: Big Ben and Trafalgar Square are only majestic if enough passersby are “native Brits”.

That’s a little vague, but he links "native Brits" to a Wikipedia article called "Ethnic groups in London" so we can see exactly whom he’s talking about:

Greater London had a population of 8,899,375 at the 2021 census. Around 41% of its population were born outside the UK, and over 300 languages are spoken in the region.

59% of Londoners were born in the UK! How could it possibly be that only a third of them are native Brits?

The article’s first section breaks down the demographic data in a table. The first ethnicity listed? “White British” at 36.8% as of the 2021 census.

Ah.

As for other ethnic groups: the table rolls up “Asian or Asian British” at 20.8%, “Black or Black British” at 13.5%, “Mixed or British Mixed” at 5.7% and “Other” at 6.3%.^[2] No other group is even remotely close to a third.

It turns out that when DHH says “native Brits”, he’s specifically referring to white Brits. That's why it's "a statistic as clear as day when you walk the streets of London": it's his coy way of saying that too many of the 59% of Londoners born and raised in the UK are not white.

So if David means "white Brits", why doesn't he just say that? Why bother with the innuendo?

Because complaining that there aren’t enough white people sounds weird and racist! David bristles at that label, but there's a reason he's hiding behind euphemisms rather than just saying what he means. Most people don't go around thinking “boy, all these Black and Asian people make this city so much worse.”

Most people, that is, except for David:

But I think, what would Copenhagen feel like, if only a third of it was Danish, like London? It would feel completely foreign, of course. Alien, even. So I get the frustration that many Brits have with the way mass immigration has changed the culture and makeup of not just London, but their whole country.

He thinks that a city that has too many Black people feels “completely foreign”. That it’s “alien” to see too many Asian people as he walks the streets. David tries to throw "mass immigration" in there — but as we know, his problem with the "culture and makeup" is how many people are not white, whether or not they're immigrants.

Unite the Kingdom

David continues:

That frustration was on wide display in Tommy Robinson's march yesterday. British and English flags flying high and proud, like they would in Copenhagen on the day of a national soccer match. Which was both odd to see but also heartwarming. You can sometimes be forgiven for thinking that all of Britain is lost in self-loathing, shame, and suicidal empathy. But of course it's not.

Who's Tommy Robinson? According to his Wikipedia entry, he’s an “anti-Islam campaigner and one of the UK's most prominent far-right activists with a history of criminal convictions”.

Not a great start! But maybe Wikipedia just has a left wing bias?^[3]

Well…

• He’s described himself — verbatim — as opposed to Islam.
• He promised to retaliate against — also verbatim — every single Muslim in response to a terrorist attack.
• He called for the blanket deportation of — you guessed it, verbatim! — every adult male Muslim who recently immigrated to the entire EU.

How about the march he organized? HOPE not hate reported on what the speakers he invited had to say.

“It’s not just Britain that is being invaded, it’s not just Britain that is being raped. Every single Western nation faces the same problem: an orchestrated, organised invasion and replacement of European citizens is happening.”

That one’s Tommy Robinson himself.

The Dutch far-right commentator Eva Vlaardingerbroek delivered one of the day’s most incendiary speeches, appearing in a t-shirt emblazoned with the words “Generation Remigration”. She said:

“They are demanding the sacrifice of our children on the altar of mass migration. Let’s not beat about the bush — this is the rape, replacement, and murder of our people… Remigration is possible, and it’s up to us to make it happen. We are Generation Remigration.”

I had to look up the word "remigration". It means "ethnic cleansing via the mass deportation of non-white immigrants and their descendants, sometimes including those born in Europe, to their place of racial ancestry".

“This is a religious war,” said Brian Tamaki, leader of New Zealand’s Destiny Church. “Islam, Hinduism, Baháʼí, Buddhism — whatever else you’re into — they’re all false. We’ve got to clean our countries up. Get rid of everything that doesn’t receive Jesus Christ. Ban any public expression of other religions in our Christian nations. Ban halal. Ban burqas. Ban mosques, temples, shrines — we don’t want those in our countries.”

I mean… these people are clearly deranged, right? You'd think any of this would warrant at least a passing mention, but for some reason David doesn't include a single quote about what the people at this "heartwarming" march actually said.

David is well aware that these people are extremists. That's why he tries to preempt that accusation:

The easy way out of this uncomfortably large gathering of perfectly normal, peaceful Brits who've had enough is to tar them all as "far right". That's not just a British tactic, but one used across Europe, and previously in the US as well. It used to work very well, because the historical stigma was so strong, but, like hurling "nazi" and "fascist" at the most middle-of-the-road political figures and positions, it's finally lost its power.

Note that David never actually addresses the "far right" label on its merits — he just pivots to calling it overused, trying to direct your attention elsewhere like a magician distracting the audience as he performs a trick. We are meant to believe him that because people sometimes use “far right” and “nazi” and “fascist” too liberally, that must be happening here as well.

But of course, that’s not what’s happening here. Calling these people far right is "easy" for the same reason it's "easy" to say Joe Biden is liberal: it's obviously true! These are not "middle-of-the-road" positions — they're literally calling to ban non-Christian religions and to ethnically cleanse non-white citizens. It takes no stretch of the imagination to figure out why these people are far right.

Demographic Replacement

Let's say you wanted to trick me into believing a conspiracy theory.

You'd have to start with a grain of truth, right? You can't come out of the gate with the COVID vaccine nano-chips that Bill Gates uses to track us through the 5G cell towers.^[4] That'd scare me off!

No, the first step is to find some common ground. Something we can both agree on. Then you can slowly mix in the crazy stuff.

That in mind, let's continue with David’s post:

I really feel for the Brits because it's not obvious how they get themselves out of this pickle. They're still reeling from the Pakistani rape gangs that were left free to terrorize cities like Rotherham and Rochdale for years on end with horror-movie-like scenes of the most despicable, depraved abuse of British girls.

The child sexual abuse scandals were real and horrible. The perpetrators were mostly British-Pakistani, and the victims were largely white. No one is disputing that; it's the grain of truth.

But like any good con artist, David has mixed in some other not-quite-so-true things he wants you to believe as well.

For one: David really wants to make sure you know that the perpetrators were largely Pakistani: scary brown foreigners. He’s insinuating that there’s some connection between their ethnicity and sexually abusing children. It's not just that many of these abusers happened to be Pakistani; David's implying they did it because they were Pakistani. (Many of them were also British — but as we know by now, in David’s eyes that only counts if you're white.)

When it comes to the victims, though, David brings out the dog whistles. He describes them as "British girls" (read: white). "Barbaric outsiders preying upon innocent white women" is a classic racist trope that would be perfectly at home in the Jim Crow South or Nazi Germany.

I don't know. But I'm glad that there clearly are many Brits who are determined to find out. Unwilling to just let their society wither away while their bobbies chase bad tweets instead of the rampant street thefts or those barbaric rape gangs. Unwilling to resign the rest of the country to the kind of demographic replacement that befell London over the last two decades.

On top of the "barbaric rape gangs", David also brings up "rampant street thefts" — suggesting that the same scary brown foreigners are responsible. The problem is that his implication is only backed up by bigotry. The source he links to about the street thefts, for example, never mentions race or ethnicity. And in spite of the salacious rape gangs story, data show that non-white people in the UK are ever-so-slightly less likely to commit child sexual abuse.

After planting the grain of truth and making lurid insinuations, David finally gets to the crazy stuff. "Demographic replacement”: a reference to a debunked conspiracy theory that there’s a plot to replace white people in Western society. It's the same thing that motivated the deadly Charlottesville Unite the Right^[5] march's infamous chant: "you will not replace us!"

“Far Right”

David ends with a quote from Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen of the Social Democrats. Someone, he says, that “nobody could credibly charge with being ‘far right’”:

There are really a lot of us Danes who believed that when people came to this ‘world’s best country’ and were given such good opportunities, they would integrate. They would become Danish, and they would never, ever harm our society. All of us who thought that way have been wrong.

Notice how moderate her words are compared to what David says and supports! Frederiksen is not saying that her country is being "invaded" or "raped", for example. She's not calling for it to be ethnically cleansed, or accusing of foreign men of being predators.

This is a running theme for David. He is desperately trying to convince you that he is not "far right", his people are not "far right", his politics are not "far right". Probably because – for all his bluster about how the label has lost its power — David knows that it's actually a huge red flag.

Personally, I don't think the label matters. I've been calling these people "far right" because it's convenient and accurate, not because I'm invested in that particular term. Shit by any other name would smell as foul, and David and his friends are extremely pungent.

Let's ditch the superlatives and review David's post objectively:

• He thinks that even if you were born in the UK, you only count as British if you're white.
• He wouldn't consider living in London specifically because it has too many people of color.
• He uses racist tropes to accuse Asian men of being dangerous predators who attack white women.
• He pushes debunked conspiracy theories about immigrants replacing white people.
• He finds a march where speakers called for banning all non-Christian religions and ethnically cleansing immigrants "heartwarming".
• Finally — and maybe most alarmingly — he argues that all of the above is normal and not extreme.

You can use whatever word you want to describe all that. But if you, like me, didn't realize that this is who DHH is, we can probably agree that he's way worse than we thought.

---

1. I'm linking to the archive.org page rather than directly to his site to avoid giving it any more Google juice. ↩︎

2. The rest are non-British subcategories of "White”, which come in at a cumulative 17%. ↩︎

3. More like Wokipedia, amiright? ↩︎

4. This is a real thing people believe. ↩︎

5. You might notice the name is similar to Tommy Robinson's "Unite the Kingdom" march, which I am skeptical is a coincidence. ↩︎

With such tasty skin in the game, we’ve got to get this right.

America is a country full of pyramids. Decisions come from the top and make their way to the bottom. Every organization is a fiefdom. We're all in pyramids on top of pyramids, all the way to the top: the president of the united states. The buck stops at the president no matter who sits in the chair. Right now, the president is making and enabling a lot of decisions that we all disagree with. He rules by some form of absolute authority. He's making steady gains towards complete authoritarian rule. He's harming and killing millions of us around the world.

Trump has advisors; he gets information from his favorite news sources. People in his orbit try to persuade him to do things. And he makes unilateral decisions. But apart from cruelty and scale, how is his power different from the person at the head of any organization?

When I think of fascism and authoritarian rule, I think of hierarchy. What do they have in common? Umberto Eco wrote the book (the essay) on fascism. It's tempting to see the characteristics of fascism as a shopping list for the current regime. What do they have in common? Both have a preference for traditional values—the status quo is strong at many companies. Both hold a fear of disagreement and dissent. Secrecy and information hoarding abound. Paternalism is the foundation of all hierarchies. Someone at the head of the table knows best? All the time?

I have a feeling we all know a boss or two who is too controlling or makes poor judgment calls. I want people to have as much agency in their daily lives as they need. I know there are ways out of the workplace hierarchies we may find ourselves up against.

Michael Y. Lee documented how CashCo, a for-profit company, decentralized its structure. He wrote a fascinating article last year in Administrative Science Quarterly. Over 18 months, he observed CashCo reconfigure itself from a top-down hierarchy to a system called Holacracy.

In Holacracy, every person at a company holds one or more roles. A role is a set of essential functions and tasks. Most people will hold many roles. These roles then group into circles, or formal work groups, based on what the role covers. These circles in turn decide what responsibilities each role has. Each circle also has what's called a Lead Link, which plays an oversight role. These are not managers in the normal sense. Lead Links can add or remove people from the roles in a circle, but any person can decline a role assignment. Lead Links do not have the power to assign work, hire or fire, or conduct employee evaluations. Instead, they hold accountability for how well the circle as a whole functions. The circles have governance meetings to make needed decisions together.

"Decentralization is not a destination but rather an ongoing and contested process." Lee writes about how durable the hierarchy can be while we're dismantling it. In a hierarchy, rank is explicit. People above hold power over people below, and everyone knows it. Even without a formal hierarchy, some people will create their own. Some may judge their performance relative to others and put themselves on a spectrum. He notes some of the many issues with a hierarchical structure. Decisions slow down or become murky when they "go up the chain." Having a boss with the power to hire or fire you is hard on people's mental health and feelings of safety. Power based on authority can alienate people without it, even if those people are essential to the company.

Instead, decentralization shifts that power so that more people hold it. Power flows downward so people can make autonomous decisions about their roles. Without a formal hierarchy, peers across an organization can make decisions together. I can't tell you how many times an employee asked me to ask my peer to ask their employee something. It felt like setting up a playdate for children, if all the children had credit scores.

As fantastic as this hopefully sounds, decentralization did have its growing pains. Former managers and workers would sometimes invite hierarchy back in like a vampire. A former manager might try to reclaim the power to make a high-profile decision. A former employee might defer a decision to their old boss even when that person holds the power. In fact, leaders in a hierarchy make vibes-based decisions so often that it intimidates the newly-empowered. "How could they have made those decision so easily before?" someone might ask. Because before, nobody was there to stop them!

how decentralization worked

Lee shared his perception on what made CashCo's transition go so well. He identified three major points that reinforced a decentralized structure.

1. Roles had clear documentation. Each role had a defined list of tasks, responsibilities, and decision-making power. But roles could change at any time with the approval of the circle. Functions were constantly discussed and negotiated. If someone claimed authority they didn't have, there was a process to support or redirect them.
2. Roles were task-based, not individual-based. Think about all the hats you might wear at work. Now, imagine if each of those hats was a distinct role. You might give someone a hat as easily as you'd give them, well, a hat. When a person approached someone about a task, they were coming to them as a role, not as themselves. When someone made a decision, they did so because it was their job. Everyone agreed that it was their job. They didn't get to make uninformed decisions just because their title said "boss."
3. Everyone could read about every role. The documentation for each role lived in one place online. This meant that anyone could look up a job function or find out who was responsible for a decision.

The boundaries on these roles seems to be what made decentralization permanent. In many situations it feels easy to fall back on the old when the new isn't working out quite right. It took vigilance and assertiveness from all staff to maintain the new system. Lee writes that maintaining these boundaries, "constrained leaders while empowering workers."

my thoughts

Fear of consequences seems to be the biggest reason why people resist decentralization. Nobody wants to be the one who messes something up for everyone else. Mistakes of course have lasting and costly real-world impacts. I think the pressure to make a wise choice is a beneficial one. People who feel that weight of responsibility may give a decision the care and time it needs. That's a more likely outcome than a decision made by an executive who is juggling many such decisions.

There is still a hierarchy outside our walls. I ran into this in my cooperatives research. The whole idea of a co-op is that everyone owns an equal share of the business. Most bank loans aren’t structured to list a dozen or more equal-share owners as a responsible party. That can force an "owner" on a business that's trying to avoid one. For a decentralized business, there's that same outside pressure to have a "boss" at the top. That’s at odds with not wanting to concentrate power in a single individual.

Defining roles reinforces them. Holacracy encourages constant role revision and review when needed. People have the power to act based on the authority that their role gives them. Lee notes the constant cycle of describing one's role to get something done, then redefining it to be more apt. Imagine having a job description that lays out exactly what your had to do every day. At every place I've worked, my job ended up being quite different from the job description they hired me to do. Who can keep track of all that? Why should we have to?

"The old way" is hard to resist—but we must resist it! The fear of consequences I named above is a huge temptation to go back to the way things were. This goes double in the aftermath of a mistake or when the stakes are high. It's important to remember that people make big mistakes in hierarchies, too. In a hierarchy, one fallible person has to hold knowledge for how an entire company works. Decentralized, many people who all know a lot about their own roles share that weight.

if you want to go far

It's almost always better to find ways to improve a new system than it is to go back to an old one. What I found remarkable was what Lee learned about hierarchy and centralization. Those two concepts can easily exist without each other. At CashCo, some people tried to give power back to informal "bosses" even though their structure was flat. Whether we're in a hierarchy or not, we should want to hold onto as much of our own agency as we can. Some systems are harmful even when they aren't currently causing us harm.