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Comment by sulam | Hacker News Reader

I found it interesting (just started reading it, so this is near the beginning) that they have no employees in the SF Bay Area. Since I assume they are using Ruby and RoR (heh), it seems like there must be some filtering function removing the many talented developers expert in their stack from their recruiting pool. It could be as simple as salary (maybe they aren't willing to pay "market-rate" for SV) or it could be something else. Anyone know?

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I work at Basecamp. From our handbook [1]:

"Basecamp pays at the top 10% for our industry at San Francisco salary levels, regardless of where an employee lives. The comparison data is provided by a company called Radford that polls compensation data from all the major companies in our industry and plenty of our smaller peers as well. Because we don't pay bonuses, we match our base compensation to the base + bonus of our peer group."

[1]: https://github.com/basecamp/handbook/blob/master/making-a-ca...

Basecamp's "calm" ethos is in direct opposition of so much of SF's "to the moon at all costs!" mentality and the types of devs it attracts. Seems like a direct conflict of end goals.

I'm sure it's completely possible for a very talented rails dev to live in SF and be aligned with Basecamp's values, but just not as likely as one might assume.

What percentage of the world's technologists and designers live in SV? I don't know what it is but I bet it's overwhelmingly more everywhere else combined. Through that lens you can see how Basecamp ended up with 30 or so who don't live in SV.

(Disclosure: I work at Basecamp and don't live in SV.)

Why would they be willing to pay the hyper-inflated "market-rate" for SV employees when they are optimized for remote workers, so being located in the Bay has no value to them?

I'm not arguing they should. Just proposing a possible answer that would be reasonable.

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