[Thank you for all your advice -- it's greatly appreciated. I've edited this post since it included a few personal details that I don't want permanently attached to my account on here. I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.]
One possibility is to bring it up in the interview, and ask probing questions. The downside to this is you might not get hired --- but if that costs you the job, maybe you don't want to work there in the first place? I wouldn't. The upside is that either way, you'll be sending a pretty strong signal that this article "broke through" and that people care about it; companies do tend to pay attention to things they hear in the recruiting process. You don't have to throw away your market power; you can deploy it.
This is a company that took the time to write a damage control pre-buttal to an NYT story, so you can safely assume they have a canned answer about it deployed to their recruiting teams. So the key here would be the "probing questions" part.
And, who knows? Coinbase might convince you that their heart is in the right place on this issue.
Even in the absence of anything else, the fact that over half of their black employees complained to HR of racism and 3/4 quit[0] seems to be a strong signal that there is a problem.
Whether you go on with the job or not should be based entirely on how you personally feel about the situation. Maybe this bothers you but you’d like the opportunity to make a difference and try to shift the culture. Maybe you’re so bothered by it that you don’t want to work for them at all. Maybe it bothers you, but not enough to change your course. Maybe something else.
I think the one important thing to do is that, if you do pull out of the process, let them know why. Hiring people costs a lot of money, and perhaps seeing that there are actual consequences for letting their corporate culture be what it seems to be might help to drive home the message that this stuff matters enough to affect their bottom line, and that they should therefore take it seriously.
Full disclosure, I'm personally a bit more motivated than most about what the company that I work for stands for, but to me, you made the answer clear with this:
> I do already have a (very) good job, so I don't "have" to have this and can afford to just drop it.
I understand the getting an interview struggle, but you have time and comfort here to wait and find a better option. My one counterpoint in my head (change from the inside) is ruled out if Coinbase isn't receptive to the change at a leadership level, which seems to be the case here. I think you do the most good here by explicitly dropping out and telling them this is the reason why. Maybe if they won't listen to their own employees, they will listen to the labor market.
If you want my instant feedback, while I understand that you're not getting the quantity of interviews you'd like, I'd caution you against thinking of Coinbase as a "hot" company. That designation would have been true years ago, when the work/reward balance would have been much more in your favor. Instead, right now you're going to work startup hours for less salary than FAANG and a truly miniscule and non-commensurate amount of (likely underwater, as of now) options.
The company is heavily capitalized and clearly mismanaged.
Excellent points. I'd also add that the best place to take a startup job is where societal value generation is high and rapidly growing. That way you get lots of revenue and societal support. In contrast "crypto" is a space whose demonstrated value creation is very limited, and has been stuck at that level for years. Regulators have broadly gone from "let's see what happens" to cracking down on the many excesses of the space. And that's before we look at what the new administration will do.
I can see why investors might put money in Coinbase; they can place bets on many horses. But for a full time job? I'd advise friends to work elsewhere.
You mentioned you are interested in this space, and there’s no company in this space bigger than Coinbase.
I wouldn’t turn down an opportunity just because of a (probably biased) article. Get Coinbase’s side of the story during your interview and decide for yourself.
I agree with your last point, it's not that hard to accept the fact that your company is influenced by social trends. Pretending that we're laser focused and everything should be checked at the door wreaks of bias.
Clearly, the CEO was not distressed at the events, and wanted to minimize anyone else's negative feelings about the matter because it wasn't important to him.
A better CEO might recognize that this issue was important to the social fabric and therefore is also important to his company's mission.
Listen to black debaters in the 1950's and 1960's sometime, david hoffman on youtube has a few really great videos up. Some of the Black panthers stuff is pretty interesting IMO.
Black people are more than capible of holding their own in corporate america, but they've been disenfranchised and disabused by crappy social policies and generational complex trauma stemming back to the 1600's in America, compounded by familial and community abandonment.
The net result of this is you have a bunch of basically abandoned children that, when they get into an adult environment, especially a tech environment, they can't function. Then, the devil incarnate comes along and says an environment of high emotional regulation (professional standards and boundaries) where people strive to develop cognitive function (think through their problems) and work as teams (because we all have to specailize) is "whiteness" because people are explaining the basics to them, or they can't negotiate because they get very nervous, or a myiad of other issues that really boil down to development.
It is a terrible lie, many things that aren't really racist become racist because all of a sudden we are discovering this group of disabused people don't have the development they need to have to function in that environment, are getting left behind, and have no clear path to attainment. Then the media vultures come in and "monetize" them.
And in some cases, they make people feel threatened and not physically but intellectually, and some narcisstic people feel like they've been dressed down a few notches which is BS.
You're American, some goat farmer is going to come over and invent the next big thing, put you out of work, then you're going to go work fixing robots and make 4x what you were making. Deal with it, leave your cultural identity on the boat.
So first of all, be the best you can be. You have nothing to feel guilty over by doing that and working towards that.
Second, recognize this group has been through an incredibly difficult time and more importantly, that survival instinct and moral perspective are important to really listen to and to play chess with. Keep "whiteness" and "blackness" out of the discussion and just stick to this as a navigation exercise.
Third, keep in mind a lot of them are impatient and angry. That isn't your doing, the best you can do is offer them an ear, mentorship if they ask for it, and a straightforward and fair explination.
