What I do with data at 37signals | Hacker News Reader

What I do with data at 37signals

37signals.com

37 pointswlll13 comments

I've always been a fan of having information about many aspects of how your business is running. Not having detailed information feels like driving blind.

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"Answer those “I wonder” questions- one of my favorite parts of working at 37signals is watching products develop every day in Campfire and on Basecamp. While doing that, people occasionally start a sentence with “I wonder…”. I get to move from wondering to knowing, and that’s loads of fun to do."

Wait, what? He's rifling through people's live projects all day? Does that strike anyone else as unsettling?

I think you're misreading that: 37Signals own products are developed with extensive use of Campfire/Basecamp, and while watching that conversation their own workers will say things like "I wonder if customers who pay us more money are less likely to send in support requests", and this is a question answerable with data, so yay for the data guy.

What would you say you do here?

+1 for the (extremely subtle) "Office Space" reference.

I am deeply curious why 15 people up-arrowed this. Was there something in it that I missed?

Apparently 15 people found it useful and/or interesting. If you don't, flag it or move on.

There is no way that 15 people found it useful and/or interesting. It's someone giving a brief resume and then, in a nutshell, saying "Gonna be doing stuff with data".

So my question stands. Do people just see 37 signals and data and imagine that it's interesting, so they up-arrow? Are there bots at work? Etc. I am deeply curious.

Bots? Maybe?

37 Signals is a pretty popular company so I imagine people get excited for any kind of inside information on their inner workings.

Also, the upvote is a good way to bookmark something to read later (ie. upvote => saved stories). That has to account for some of it.

It seems like so many of the other articles about 37 signals go roughly "37S wrote this blog post that proves that they listen to no one other than themselves and are in the process of shooting themselves in the foot," so in that sense, it is worthwhile to HN to see that do have people who are listening to customers / drawing inference from data / &c.

The article basically states

"We at 37 signals try to collect and analyze data about our users to make our products better. We may share some of what we do in later posts."

It is being upvoted here on HN because it plants a good idea into people's heads:

"I've heard about this new trend about using data to optimize your app, and it turns out those cool 37s guys are doing it. Maybe I should too!"

This guy should work on ending their practice of storing passwords in plain text.

While hardly on-topic, I was surprised to find that, according to http://blog.jgc.org/2009/05/can-you-trust-37signals-with-you..., they really do store passwords in plain text.

They definitely still do as of a few days ago; I got an unrequested email from them the other day with my password in plain text and was pissed.

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