You can get a sense of their philosophy by reading what the company's cofounders have written on the subject [0][1]. They've even written a book about it.
You may not buy it, and that is absolutely fine.
If you do however, and if you've ever worked at a company that works similarly, can you post about it here?
[0] https://medium.com/@dhh [1] https://medium.com/@jasonfried
For instance, my company (I'm the Director of Technology) is like that (just listened to DHH's interview on Ruby Rogues this morning, so many of these are fresh in my mind):
1) Pay talent fairly
2) Customers are more important than technology
3) Small team
4) Reasonable hours
5) Tight focus
6) Trust your talent
7) Remote friendly (people think this first when they think Basecamp, but I think that's just one piece of the culture)
(And since it will be asked: No, we're not currently "hiring", but always interested in conversations if you reach out to me)
Discourse is not hiring right now but we will definitely be hiring a lot more in the year to come. We’re all of the things above, plus a 100% Rails based, open source product.
We run a fully distributed team. We have commented on our culture around this in these two blog posts--
The How & Why of Parse.ly's Fully Distributed Team:
https://blog.parse.ly/post/3203/the-how-and-why-of-parse-lys...
Fully Remote, But Here For Each Other:
https://blog.parse.ly/post/4736/mission/
We actually recommend "Rework" and "Remote" as two reading materials for new hires when they join the company.
As for financing, Parse.ly is no longer a bootstrapped company, but we do take a "lean" approach to SaaS VC fundraising.
My co-founder wrote a bit about this in this post--
A Different Way — Thoughtful Financing, Or Why We Said "No" to a Lot of Money:
Just my 2 cts.
> Parse.ly is looking for a motivated Business Development Representative [..] The position will be based in our New York City headquarters
Do you have any concerns of having a HQ and remote workers? From what I've seen and heard from mixed businesses the remote workers tend to become second class citizens when it comes to benefits/promotions/salary/etc. How do you avoid that, if you do?
We have two departments, broadly "Business" and "Product". With over 60 full-timers working with the company now, it's important to recognize that these two departments have different cultures, and BDRs joining the Business team end up having a bit of a different experience than, say, a Python programmer joining our Product team.
The "Business" department is centered around sales, marketing, finance, and operations. It only formed as a (large) department of its own in the last 3 years and it has a significant presence in NYC. However, business team hires are even told that "NYC is not HQ" on their first day, and that a better way to think of the office is as the "NYC Internet Cafe". It's a nice Internet Cafe, though! Gigabit Internet, mesh wifi network, and standard issue bamboo sit/stand desks.
The "Product" department is centered around engineering (mostly Python programming), user experience (mostly JavaScript programming) and design (graphic/web). I'm one of the two co-founders of the company and I lead the Product team, and, importantly, I am not based in NYC. This team is 100% remote, and has about 25 people on it. Everyone on this team works either from their (tailored/optimized) home office or from a co-working space. There are actually zero full-time hires on Product that are based in NYC -- this usually elicits some surprise from office visitors.
There is a legitimate concern for some of the Business team hires that if you are not based in NYC but your team lead or some of your team colleagues are, you might suffer from "out of band communication". We try to reduce this by forcing people in the office to use Slack and video conferencing (our conference rooms are set up for GHangouts and Zoom.us) instead of "shout-net" (that is, shouting rudely across the office). This is only a concern on our marketing and support teams, where they have a geographically spread-out team but with a lot of folks in NYC, as well. But they've navigated it well. It doesn't affect our Product team in the slightest because, as I mentioned, we have no team members in NYC and "NYC is just an Internet cafe".
Funny enough, one of our highest-performing salespeople had her best year ever while doing "Remote Year". She wrote about her experience on Remote Year here: https://blog.parse.ly/post/3538/digital-nomad-sales/
We do sometimes use NYC as a retreat location for our Product team. Since it's an easy city to fly to and we have co-working space available via the office, it's often used for week-long hacking sessions of small sub-teams on Product.
p.s. as a result of your comment, I'm going to have the person in charge of hiring Business Development Reps remove 'headquarters' from the job posting -- I think it was just an innocent terminology mistake when drafting the job req.
There must be downsides. Right? Are there any? For real people at Basecamp?
> He [the founder] was right. He was absolutely right. In hindsight, this was something I [the employee] should have thought to talk to him about from the start. But it never occurred to me, and David’s insistence that we not teach the seminars was like a bucket of ice water over my head. I felt like I had been punched in the gut. The metaphorical rug had been pulled out from under me.
> I don’t fault David at all, and I even agree that he was right to do what he did. But at the time I felt immensely betrayed. Capistrano was supposed to be my baby! Why, then, had I just discovered a limit beyond which I was not allowed to take it?
You had a disagreement with your boss and you eventually came round to his position... but it's written like a paean to Basecamp's founder.
I get that the author could totally feel this way... I still would have asked for him to tone it down a notch, lest people think the company was forcing an apology.
We are a fully distributed team, and we build a lovable product. We published a book called Lovability[1] to help explain how we do it. We support each other, congratulate each other, and push hard to make it happen; these things require trust and talent in every part of the organization. I am a better person (and engineer) for having worked at this company.
Here are the pillars of our culture[2]:
* Have purpose: You know what you are working towards. You are aware of what success is and guided back to the purpose if you wind up in the weeds.
* Value work: You have the opportunity to achieve and to do something important. Doing great work is valued and recognized.
* Teach hard: Direct feedback is given on a regular basis to help you improve your skills every day.
* Grows talent: There is a framework for success, people are trained on it and given room to grow. There is trust that people will step into challenging roles as the organization needs them to. Promotions occur from within.
* Honor reality: Neither time nor money is invested in manipulation. Work is guided by values and purpose.
* Work it: Work sometimes requires great effort. However, it does not burn you out but instead keeps you going.
* https://blog.aha.io/your-success-think-like-a-grandpa/
* all of these :) - https://blog.aha.io/author/why-i-joined-aha/
* https://blog.aha.io/your-remote-co-workers-feel-left-out/
* https://blog.aha.io/hey-boss-stop-telling-me-to-bring-you-solutions/
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Lovability-Build-Business-People-Happ...
We're all remote and pride ourselves on being humble, helpful and have a proper work life balance. We sometimes describe it as a midwestern work ethic.
I'm not a founder or executive at Zapier so I can't pitch it from that perspective but as a happy employee and fellow fan of Basecamp I think you should check us out.
I know they are hiring for lots of positions as well. auth0.com/jobs
Originally, it was built just to schedule tweets in the future.
Peldi
If you were building a super minimal web CMS, what features would be a must have?
Do you have remote?
But what i've observed is there is a tendency to rationalize away much of what basecamp advocates. Sure, it SOUNDS smart and good, but who needs frameworks really? "Rails is overkill" Or work/life balance? "it's about the hustle" or job satisfaction? "we're changing the world of ___".
Basecamp is championed because at every decision, a reflection is made on the impact it has on the workers. That's why they created ruby on rails and why it is the most productive and enjoyable to use. That's why they hire remote and build a tool that helps remote workers. That's why they have sane project schedules, sane work schedules, and give back where they can. They are a creator focused organization, and optimize for creativity and focus.
Most companies do not make such optimizations for their workforce. They have their own specific vision, their own timetable, and their own checkboxes to hit: staffing numbers, tech stack choices, retention numbers, sales goals, etc. To them, workers are more cog-like and treated as such. There's also often venture funding involved - which creates specific pressures that basecamp is specifically free from.
TLDR: It takes a degree of humility, stubbornness, charity, empathy and perspective to do the things basecamp does for the reasons basecamp does it; that most do not posses or have interest in. But we would do well to raise these as standards and expectations; the demand for real leadership of a company.
Prior I worked for a handful of local startups and digital agencies - this is the closest to Basecamp culture I've found so far.
Some small non-tech companies share more in common with Basecamp than a lot of tech companies do.
(Sorry, we're not hiring.)
What was the justification for building an internal CRM vs customizing an API-rich commercial system like Pipedrive. How was the decision made? Did you review SAAS or installed offerings first? Do you consider CRM to be a core part of the business, or does it offer a competitive advantage to the company?
Cheers!
Now, I've reviewed SAAS for other purposes with him, and my guess is that pitches went poorly. My boss is particular about his business, and I've witnessed more than one demo fall apart when customization came up.
The CRM could someday be a core part of the business. It probably offers us the same competitive advantage that a secret recipe benefits a restaurant. I've also integrated into it some nifty functionality I haven't seen yet on the market. But ultimately, the business is driven by staffing.
Been voted amongst the greatest places to work a number of times, and it's for good reason... the projects are challenging, the perks are amazing, the people are wonderful, company is growing very fast and they live up to its core values:
* Be easy to work with
* Promote personal growth
* Be one step ahead
* Respect the individual and individuality
For more info, see: https://www.mathandpencil.com
And not that 10 hours for 4 days schedule, but actually 8 hours for 4 days.
(I’m all for shorter work weeks but the seasonality of the Basecamp version seems to make a few assumptions...)
In no small part due to that, they are one of the very few companies that I would actively like to work for and frequently check job postings. Unfortunately production ruby experience is a hard requirement for them now, and I've always been in .net/c# + nodejs at work, and my side projects have always been java, node, and python. When I start looking for a new job, the opportunity to get some production Ruby experience somewhere is going to be in the back of my mind as a benefit, just so the door to a job at GitLab might be open in the future.
From what I know, my one major gripe is that they devalue you based on where you live.
* Heroku 7.00 per month
* Rails app
* Android and iOS app developed with Turbolinks plugin.
Now we are in 3 other cities and we made a cms and backoffice to handle the orders workflow and we developed a printer system with raspberry-pi. Currently we are the biggest company of delivery food in the south of Italy. We have no investors