Basecamp Employee Handbook
github.com
github.com
> You may also choose to take an additional 8 weeks leave unpaid. Note that this does not guarantee your employment. We're simply keeping your job open for an additional 8 weeks, unless your position becomes redundant.
Is it just me, or does that sound a little harsh? (Maybe I'm used to UK workers rights) Isn't this exactly the reason why many parents don't take the parental leave they probably should? ie that they fear they will become obsolete simply from not being in the office...
It's a bit disingenuous to zero in on the unpaid leave policy; what they're saying is, if you need more than 6 weeks, they'll try to work something out with you, and it'll probably be fine. They're being explicit about something most companies are opaque about.
In my EU country you will get up to three years of paid maternity leave per child, so I guess I am just spoiled.
Something between the European standard expectation of a year's leave and the American top-end norm of 12/6 primary/secondary is probably the right answer here.
But this is all a tangent. It is totally unreasonable to criticize Basecamp for policies that are on the high side of normal in the market they operate in.
Really, what's happening is that Basecamp has been forthright about something most companies are deliberately opaque about, and people on message boards are beating them up for it. If their policies were bad, I wouldn't care, but their policies on parental leave are in fact quite good for this market, so this is some bullshit.
Does it create a suboptimal situation at the workplace. Sure, sometimes. However, since the management probably have taken long parental leaves themselves they are very understanding and willing to accommodate the next generation of parents.
In short - troublesome in the short run for certain companies, very beneficial for society as a whole in the long run.
Exactly. Low fertility rates is something that most rich countries struggle with, so to me it does seem like a good idea to invest in good childcare policies.
Here in Canada, we get a year that can be divided in different ways. Almost everyone takes it when they have kids, so it's the norm. We pay for it (60% salary to a hard max IIRC) through "Employment Insurance" which is basically a jointly funded payroll tax. Employers can choose to top up if they want. Some do.
Honestly, I can't imagine any other way of getting through that first yet without this set up.
Easy, just take a look at companies in EU outside of Germany. The three years of paid maternity leave is slowly turning into lifetime unemployment for a lot of people. Then we act surprised when the companies are scared of hiring full time and decide to leave and take most of the jobs away with them.
I'm pretty much always on the side of workers in any discussion of labor vs. employers...but, there's also small business to consider. I think there's some kind of happy medium to be found, where workers are treated well and small businesses can survive long enough to become somewhat bigger businesses. In the US this is codified into law; rules and regulations that apply to large companies may not apply to smaller mom-and-pop shops.
My company couldn't afford to give an employee more than a few months paid time off; we're a four-person company, and we'd literally run out of money if a quarter of our work wasn't being done for months. On the other hand, if we had a hundred employees, we'd barely notice if one or two people were out for a while.
As others have pointed out, maternity/paternity leave in other Western countries are heavily subsidized through government assistance programs. The costs are not completely shouldered by the business.
Japanese leave policies are historically pretty simple: the government says you get X weeks, buuuuut X is an inconvenient number for us, so you probably want to look around the room and conform to the practices of your coworkers, which are closer to Y days. Also, for you ladies: remember that the traditional expectation is that you have unlimited maternity leave when you leave formal employment after marrying or having a child. (Some re-enter when the child goes to school. This is largely not compatible with career advancement, with rare exceptions like e.g. translation/interpretation.)
I'm not opposed to such subsidies being implemented in the US.
As a parent to two teenagers, both of whom were born in the early years of startups, I feel your pain --- having children is hard. But if we're going to lose our collective shit about this, can we start by getting mothers in blue-collar jobs 6 weeks of paid leave before we start worrying about six-figure fathers needing more than 6 weeks off?
I just can't wrap my head about how all the people are doing it. You can't just leave that small kid somewhere, is there some way of taking unpaid leave or are people just quit the job? I don't know.
People figure out a way to struggle and survive. It's in inherent to us as a species.
Some people have family help. Others have older children. Others can support on a single income. Others have paid help. Others bring their kids to work with them. Others work from home.
You just figure it out as you go.
Some of us don't live in barbarous backwaters like Illinois, but instead in places that, if not actually civilized like the rest of the developed world, are actually aware of and occasionally making efforts toward civilization (e.g., California) and already have gotten most working mothers up to four months of pregnancy disability (typically, without complications, 4 weeks prior and 6 weeks after delivery for vaginal delivery, 8 weeks after for C-section, but longer is permitted with medical necessity) plus 12 weeks of bonding time, all job protected, with potentially all of the former paid as for other disability and up to six weeks of paid family leave that can be used for the latter.
So, can we keep talking, now?
Note though that a health insurance policy in the US will cover maybe 60% of 8 weeks of salary for the birth mother under a disability benefit claim (no joke). If a father becomes the primary caregiver, then the company is paying 100% of that time off, without support. So offering equal carries a cost and guarantees that all your employees, male or female, if they are having a kid will take that time and incur that cost, rather than a % gender of your workforce. All things you need to factor in and cost into a business, especially a small one.
No, it's not. Obviously, it's discriminatory to have a policy that differentiates on any axis, but not all policies (whether public or employer) that differentiate based on gender (or sex, which may be more to the point here, if we define "mother" as "parent giving birth" and not "parent of the feminine gender"; the two often go together but are not equivalent) are illegal.
I'm in a great position to work part time and nowadays we both do. The work gets done and our child gets love and care. Those two days we put her to a day care place, she loves being there. Everyone's happy :)
I went remote when my kid was in middle/high school because my kid needed me and it was good for me to be around. You can tell a 14 year old to shut up if you're on a conference call...most of the time. Also, I could take a few minutes in morning to get the kid to school (we lived close by to the school) or take a late lunch so my kid could go to after-school practices, classes, etc.
When a kid is in elementary school, it's vastly easier to work in an office. Elementary school is when life will be the most predictable with a kid. When a kid is in middle/high school, that's when you need to be present. For all the reasons you're thinking of. Teenagers are jerks.
All in all, I did pretty well. Kid is at a highly selective college these days.
Yesterday I was working the afternoon at home, my son barges into my office and takes over my laptop:
Every company should be legally obligated to provide 18 years of paid leave for each child a worker has. Anything less is signaling that they value money over the personal and family life of their employees, and it's ridiculous that I still haven't found a country or business that offers this.
Again, I think Basecamp is being transparent and forthright about something that most companies are terribly opaque about, and it bothers me to see people cheering as they get less transparent so as not to trigger message board haters.
Assuming Basecamp is even covered by the parental leave portions of the FMLA (which they may not be due to size and geographical distribution of the company [1]), someone can't be fired or laid off while on the 12 protected weeks of parental leave. However, in this additional 8 weeks, they can be.
[1] The internet says Basecamp employs 50 people, which is the minimum requirement for a company to be covered by the FMLA. Additionally a given employee is only eligible if at least 50 employees work within 75 miles of where they do.
I'm not sure that'd be a bad thing, in the grand scheme of things for society - childcare is an unbelievable racket, and we'd probably be better off if parents could actually raise their children instead of having to foist them off on strangers 9-5. But it'd be ruinous for businesses.
I'm not saying he should or needs to do that, it's just the economics of the situation.
In retrospect, it makes such perfect sense that I feel foolish :)
That's pretty amazing in and of itself.
> 50 person companies can't as a rule guarantee year-long parental leave
That is clearly not legal or even true in most civilized countries.
But "primary caregiver" is a loaded term that goes beyond biological necessity. What if a woman's husband is quitting his job to take care of the kid(s) and the woman plans to return to work? Is she the secondary caregiver because she spends less of her time doing childcare than her husband? What if the primary caregiver is a nanny?
Even if HR says "Oh, nevermind what you actually plan to do, if you're pushing the kid out, we can mark you as primary" it creates a terrible start to things if you have two parents who set out with good intentions to share childcare efforts equally. HR is telling one parent they're the "primary" and another parent they're the "secondary" and they have to sign legally binding documents attesting to this. It's just ridiculous. I think it's a great example of good intentions backfiring dramatically.
A lot of things can go wrong when people are gone from their work environment in that situation.
From that perspective, it seems more than reasonable.
Fresh, organic, local fruits and vegetables are great to have on-hand, so we'd also like to offer a CSA membership to you. Finding a local provider will be up to you, but you can expense the cost of a seasonal or annual CSA share as an employee benefit, up to $1,000/year.
Count that as a perk I've never heard of before.
Cool peek into how a company that works remotely can function successfully. This handbook could be a blueprint for that model - are there any other examples of remote companies publishing their internal handbooks?
A company I used to work for used to send people to the local farmers markets and stock up the kitchen at work. Employees were allowed to take home whatever they wanted and to cook whatever they wanted at lunch -- it was awesome! You quickly learn to make friends with the skilled amateur chefs in your department.
It's not a big deal but I wouldn't mind some extra cash.
I wish this was more common in the tech industry. I know for other industries this is basically a standard thing, but it seems like many tech companies don't do this.
Where I work now there's a sabbatical scheme where you can contribute X amount of salary per month to an entire year paid off (every 3 years).
But hey, I'm not leaving before everyone else everyday. I've had flextime at every job since 1999. Wonder how long it's going to take them to catch on, since I can get another job pretty easily (2-4 weeks max). It's been kind of nice though only doing 3 full days.
I don't think I've ever had a vacation longer than 10 days.
according to google, sabbatical is:
> a period of paid leave granted to a university teacher or other worker for study or travel, traditionally one year for every seven years worked.
I feel like in academia it is easier for a sabbatical as you can go to another university and study something different.
Probably not a fair comparison - professors don't typically go on sabbatical to take another position at the same institution.
So technically you can spend it on the beach, but don't be surprised when your coworker who learned "language or framework of the week" is going to get the choice assignment or promotion you really wanted. Of course if you edit your book or learn a new language while sitting at a beach, or you are the primary organizer of a tech conference that happens to be on a tropical island or other vacation spot ...
It is very easy to make simple comparisons between UK and European standards vs US standards. The fact is that there is almost zero government funding/support for parental leave in the US. The US is the only developed country in the world without any government mandated parental leave standards.
What Basecamp offer in terms of paid leave to either parent is top tier in the US. If you take a look at Facebook, Google and others they offer close to similar benefits - https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Ibj79Eh8Cvk4Wy_dPZNc...
In the US, any company stepping up in this area is doing so of its own volition and cost - again the government gives a company zero funding. In the UK, German, Sweden etc they pick up most of the tab of extended leave. In the US, the only form of support is for mothers through expensive health insurance for the 'disability' of having a child. So before you engage in moral relativism, it's healthy to get the context and the facts. Check out http://www.pledgepl.org if you want to clue up or help fix this situation.
"The government... pick[s] up most of the tab of extended leave" is simply not true. Other taxpayers - including other parents - pick up the tab.
I know it may seem pedantic but phrases like "Government funding", "free", and "entitlements" muddy the waters when discussing the morality of policies.
Is the same as hearing "the US Government declared war on North Korea". Sounds much more heroic than it'd wind up being. At least, since Davy Crockett died ;)
I wish iDevices had a thing that would let me "double click" the power button to passcode-lock the device and disable TouchID until unlocked again.
I don't use the TouchID on my MBP at all.
They can do all of this even if you're a citizen. In the US, citizens (and, to a lesser but still meaningful extent, LPRs) cannot be denied entry to the country. But you can still lose all your devices. You can be detained, potentially overnight, no matter who you are. If you're not a citizen, you can be detained and then sent back without your devices.
The only realistic answer is not to have sensitive data on your devices at the border at all, nor any indication of where your sensitive data is or any means of getting access to it.
Now that’s resistance.
Also: I've heard of people who just wipe their devices and then just download really really grotesque photos to their devices to gross out the employees who have to look through it.
Agree or not, really all I'm saying is: "don't try to leverage your superior tech skills to outsmart customs". You are probably better at tech than the customs agent you talk to first at the border. You are not better than the customs department as a whole. Money buys a lot of tech ability, and countries have a lot of money.
Why isn't it an option? The only way for you to "travel to the US" is to leave the US in the first place. You have the option to not travel outside of the US.
AFAIK, while you have to deal with the TSA, you don't have to deal with customs/immigration for domestic flights.
Not routinely, but Border Patrol claims special powers and jurisdiction in a shockingly large portion of the country. Anything a hundred miles from a border (or a lake that touches a border, placing places like Chicago in it). https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone
I used to be able to enter that country with a driver's licence and a hello. Amazing how things have changed.
It feels like this has changed a lot in a very small number of years.
Does anyone know how common it is to actually be put through this rigmorole?
At my current company, I do not get any 401k matching, and it sucks. However, the company fully covers medical insurance for each employee and their ENTIRE family. My copay's are more then fair, and unless I end up in an emergency and I'm rushed to a hospital that's out network and it turns out that it wasn't an emergency, I have no other costs. Being married, I save thousands a year in my paycheck by not having to cover any of my insurance. Compared to the cost of my previous job, the difference is enough to fully fund my IRA which is roughly equivalent to a 4% match in my 401k which is the best any company has offered me to date. So in the end, I lost an employee match, but save $6k a year in medical insurance for my family.
It's a balance, and I can understand why people would be upset to "only" see six weeks of Paternal leave, but when you look at their entire portfolio of perks, it's amazing. It is among the best. Can they do better? Sure. Should people flay them for two sticking points? Absolutely not.
Super smart move - probably the cheapest but most personal marketing effort a small firm can create. Did they have an upper cap on the speaking gigs or available time?
Part of the idea is, the good conferences do some of the vetting for the bonus for you. They discourage "touring" talks, and have a high bar for inclusion, so if you're speaking at e.g. Black Hat, CanSecWest, Recon, and Toorcon, there's probably a reason that's happening and NCC is probably very happy about that reason.
I've done contract work for companies at both extremes; there are many companies that consider speaking or participation in conferences as a part of the job, and there are those that don't even discuss it and would never consider sending employees to conferences.
In Europe, standard in IT companies (Central Europe, mind you), is:
* 25 fullt paid days (or more) of vacation every year (no need to call it a sabatical and limit it to once a three years), not including national holidays etc.
* one year of (or more) paid maternity leave (or more), while second parent gets few weeks (two at my country)
* free gym membership (so I can yoga/climb/whatever for free)
* private health coverage (in addition to the public one, if your country (most EU has)
* sickness time at least 80% paid (in most IT it's 100%)
* fresh fruits daily (I don't even mention drinks etc)
* education budget per employee (conferences etc)
Thats a STANDARD if you want to recruit software engineer here you must have.
1. dozens comments here from USA guys, treating basecamp benefits as superb.
2. it's paid by the company in the Europe, not the govt.
3. you seems to quitly skim over thing like unpaid sick leave in USA. It's paid in europe. This alone is a huge difference. or am I wrong and this is paid in US?
Sick leave is usually just taking a day off and in practice nobody really cares. If your really sick then it gets covered by your disability insurance, which is pretty close to that %XX of your wage coverage.
What is your income level there?
Adding vacation time (which is standard not only in IT) of 5 weeks plus average sicktime (let's assume two weeks in a year) that's a big paid difference.
And as to the basecamp package being typical in SV: I concluded from many posts in this conversation differently.
PPP adjusted for cost of living, I suspect 20% lower on average than yours. Taking into account healthcare (priv and public), pensions, education (here is free and much better objectively: https://blog.hackerrank.com/which-country-would-win-in-the-p... but also feel free to google OECD reports for EU/USA gap if you don't like hackerrank) and of course that year of paid maternity leave you skimmed over ;-) yeah it's much "different" here.
p.s. There was also a great discussion on HN about CA standard of housing and costs (rents, houses etc) two months ago. Conclusion: insane, unless you're DINK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_rates
Is this sort of thing common? I wish my current employer did something like this. While I'm still skimming some of the documents - Basecamp sounds like a cool place to work.
> If you don't need your work laptop (or tablet/phone), don't bring it with you!
> Wipe company data from your phone before crossing the border. Restore it afterward.
I've heard this advice quite a few times in recent times. Wonder how useful advice like this (and the implications of this) actually is.
It takes a pretty invasive search to come to that conclusion. (Unless your definition of wipe is like, cat /dev/zero >/dev/sda, in which case they'd probably ask why it doesn't work pretty shortly after asking you to turn it on, and then you'd get to the conclusion fairly quickly.)
I've never had to deal with an invasive search like this but I've also never gone through customs with a laptop, at all. I think this kind of policy instruction is more useful as a way of simplifying the kinds of questions that General Counsel has to answer, especially in a corporate environment where you have a lot of (nerds) extremely privacy-conscious developers.
That eliminates a whole class of questions. "What should I do if I am asked to unlock my computer by a customs agent?" Let them search anything they want to, if they have legal authority to do it. "What if I have sensitive company data on my work laptop and we've signed XYZ NDA with LMNO Company?" This question and a whole host of related questions will never come up at all if there is a policy against carrying any type of sensitive data through customs.
If you are an employee of such company and you have issues with this policy, there is a pretty good chance it's because you aren't in the habit of keeping great backups. So that's one more great reason for the company to have this policy, as that's information that you'll want to become known and have addressed some time well before it matters.
Health Care: no vision, I assume no dental. 25% copay on the PPO is on the higher end too, no?
401K: Not matching up to max. Certainly not all companies do, but still. I guess it's rare for startups.
Equity pool: (1) What happens on year 6? You don't vest any more equity? (2) This feels to me like it would not reward tenured employees as much. If you joined the company at 10 people and it IPOs at 300, you would be diluted significantly more than if you started with 1-2% of the company and diluted at investment rounds (I know they don't like to take on investor money, but just for comparison)
Seems like if you decide to work at Basecamp, you are trading some "real" benefits for the unique company culture.
Yes, paying 25% of the cost of an individual health plan is on the high end for a tech company. However, Basecamp continues to pay 75% of the premium for family plans. Often companies pay for a much lower portion of these expensive plans. It's also a very good health plan with nationwide coverage.
Evidently, they also sold it off recently: https://github.com/basecamp/handbook/blob/master/product-his...
As a frequent international traveler, I feel naive here... can anyone point out any resources as to why this is best practice? What's on the line here, and what's going on that we need to be aware of?
For any company that has external NDA obligations, this seems like a no-brainer to make legal compliance very easy. You don't want to disclose your proprietary company data, well then make a policy that says don't put proprietary company data in a position where it is likely to be subject to legal searches without any strong requirement for a warrant (probably a very short list of situations, maybe just when passing through Customs.) Now you can sign NDAs and pass through customs too, and don't worry about any potential that a conflict between the two could put you in a precarious legal position.
Customs has very broad legal latitude to perform invasive searches on a whim. (Here in the US, I don't think I even need to pass through customs to be subjected to invasive searches like this when passing through an airport.)
And of course there's many companies who use Github and various other online services for core activities.
edit: filed https://github.com/basecamp/handbook/issues/11
edit2: and it's fixed already
To me the big thing is 37 Signals spent years railing against companies with their handbooks and written down procedures. Calling them rituals doesn't change the fact that they have processes
Sounds like an invitation for a phishing attempt.
https://m.signalvnoise.com/become-the-newest-member-of-our-o...
Looking to spread our timezones a bit more, hoping to see lots of EU/Pac applicants!
Is the compensation provided in line with essentially working 24 hours a day for a week once per month?
https://basecamp.workable.com/j/A5A189B311
"We have a shared on call responsibility which is about 1 week (5 week days, and 2 weekend days) a month. (The responsibility means you'll be online within 5 minutes of receiving an alert.) We constantly work on making the on call responsibility as calm as we can. We try to finish what we start vs leaving it for someone else to clean up. When there is a code red event (like a site outage), we all pitch in to help until we are sailing on calmer seas again."
FWIW We're doing everything we can to make this "work hours only" M-F, which we could solve by hiring tons of people immediately, but we also have other ideals like keeping the company as small as possible that we want to realize too.
There's an open and ongoing discussion about making improvements in this area and I'm thankful that David and Jason have been receptive to many of the suggestions I, or anyone else on our team has had.
My personal stance is that we should do everything we can to give Ops a 40 hour work week that's during regular working hours and no more, even if that means people get cut a lot of extra slack to recover after a late night page, etc. (Hopefully our team would back me up in saying I encourage people to take reasonable time to make up "lost" hours.)
(Also fwiw, I participate equally in the on call rotations.)
There's a big problem with being on call for one week out of 6 or 8: you lose touch with the procedures. Sure, your four year veterans know everything by heart - but the first few shifts of a newbie are going to be perilous. I recommend making the shifts shorter and more frequent.
Presumably one person is on-call and everyone else can be called in / woken up as necessary. So - split each day into two halves, and ask people to be on-call for a 12 hour period.
Rotate the roster around so that Jane doesn't always have the same Friday-afternoon shift, nobody has 2 shifts in a row, and put it in a shared calendar so you can always see who has the watch.
With 6 people, you'll take 2 and a seventh shifts per week. At 7, it's an even 2 shifts per week.
Benefits:
- much less of a burden that a whole week of readiness
- brains work better when they haven't been pummeled for a week at a time (at least, mine does)
- easily scales fairly when you have more people, or when someone leaves, but keeps everyone in the loop. When you have 14 people in Ops, you only have one shift a week, but you get one every week.
- much more family-friendly
OK, why 2 12 hour periods instead of splitting the day into 8, 6 or 4? Because people lose track too easily. Trying to schedule around your kid's concert or music lessons with smaller chunks is hard to keep in your head - and trying to work that in with a one week shift is nigh-impossible.
Why not a 24 hour shift? Because it's really hard to recover from that. Humans are generally awake for about 15-17 hours a day. Shifting a few hours is generally doable.
I would recommend that for anyone who took an alert call during non-core hours, you automatically expect them to take the next normal day to recover. I know that when I get woken up at 4AM, I'll run out of steam by 2 or 3PM.
And this is what I can't stand about small businesses. Nothing makes me run from a company faster than a company saying they're committed to their ideals over what's best for everyone. Small businesses, for whatever reason, are the ones who are most likely to shout "Honor before reason!" and shoot themselves, their employees, and their customers in the foot. You don't see megacorps doing this.
What's best for everyone is to hire "tons of people immediately". If your ideals conflict with that, then you need to jettison your ideals.
I would literally rather work the counter at Taco Bell than work in an environment like that.
Edit: And forget about going to the doctor, too. I can't wait for an employee to go to the doctor for a medical emergency, miss an alert, get fired, and then launch a spectacular lawsuit.
Y'know, the doctor's office around the corner from me actively bans cell phones past the waiting room. They have huge signs saying "NO CELL PHONES" at the back of the waiting room and in every exam room.
And if I am surprisingly indisposed it would fall back to everyone else. If I need to go to the doctor, then I would swap times with someone else. No one has gotten fired for letting an alert through, just minorly teased the next day.
Technically there is some merit in what you say. Taking the overall manual in context, I guess that notifying your team that you have to go for a medical emergency, or doing so after the fact, will make it a non-issue.
If anyone had an old school pager go of when you are deep asleep you will know that it can take 20 mins and a coffee just to be in the right state to work :-)