The 37signals Employee Handbook
basecamp.com
basecamp.com
Main takeaway is don't do anything outside of work that will significantly impact work performance, but the way it is written is well balanced and supportive of employee growth.
EDIT: Also it seems like they don’t like you doing things similar to what they paid you to do, even if it’s not in competition at all… so sounds like after hours coding consulting even in a complete different industry would be frowned upon even if it didn’t affect your performance
So all in all, still pretty strict
I avoid obvious conflicts of interest. And for any unpaid and pizza-paid advice/minor work for people I do it quietly.
But that stuff is pretty simple relative to a (minor) real side-gig which I had (shareware back in the day) but was pretty much orthogonal to my day job and my manager knew about.
> But we want to make sure professional endeavors outside of 37signals don’t create conflicts of interest or affect your time, dedication, or performance at 37signals. So it’s a delicate balance.
How about you mind your fcking business (literally in this case), and if I start to slip at work you can talk to me, discipline me or fire me. What I do at 5:01 PM is no one's business but my own.
37S is just yet another corp who wants to control every aspect of your life. Water is wet, grass is green.
The only valid point apart from conflict of interest is this, otherwise they should stop pretending they own my body, mind and soul:
"Does it require you to be away during times when you’re needed at work?"
Or, I believe, pragmatically that it is seldom enforced and is seldom a problem, but is a useful clause for the company when a employee really is taking the piss.
I think that's what they're getting at here. They're trying to call out things that could lead to needing to have these type of conversations and prevent that from happening by preemptively giving examples of problematic scenarios.
Under "Not OK"
1 & 3 - Are basically don't work for a competitor at the same time because that's a conflict of interest. Totally fair, IMO, as it opens the company up to lawsuits about trade secrets.
2 & 5 - Are basically don't do work for another company during work hours as it's disruptive. Again, IMO, a totally fair ask.
4 - This is the only one I really see as overstepping a bit. I think they're trying to get at something something similar to #2 (don't let another job take time away from your work here), but it's phrased in a bit of a controlling way.
Disagree it’s the employees job to find a job and employer that offers the right terms for you personally.
Lots of jobs have contracts that do limit what you can say or do outside hours of work.
The White House press secretary doesn’t get to go home after work and talk smack about the president on Twitch.
Members of the military can’t go and work out with enemies of the state on vacation.
As long as the agreement is clearly communicated and voluntary at the start of employment there are reasonable limits to employees even after work hours.
I love freedom but I understand discipline and limitations make everyone more free than chaos.
Those are weird examples to pick, considering how entirely different they are to the circumstances of an SWE at 37 Signals possibly doing other work after hours. And also weird is suggesting that such control is a form of discipline that help keep chaos at bay, and is in fact part of making everyone more free.
That doesn’t mean it’s always 40 hours per week or doesn’t cover work outside of the standard 9 to 5.
Lots of us have to work hours that suck to keep the world running.
delete "37signals pledges to be a company with a calm and friendly work environment. What follows applies to all active 37signals employees and contractors."
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Ah, I found it. https://github.com/basecamp/handbook/commit/620b0637452bda02...
As one advances, particularly at larger or more bureaucratic organizations, soft skills become more important. Being "most trusted" for instance, is of significant value. It suggests that one has built a reputation and delivered on his or her promises over a period of time and thus, can be trusted to lead a difficult or ambitious project. These things you mentioned, being important, influential, needed, or trusted, are all proxies for providing value over an extended period of time while maintaining good relations with peers. This is a good thing to select for when promoting up a hierarchy in a large human endeavor.
Of course we all know cases where people get promoted because of their social clique for whom this isn't true, but it's not crazy to not just focus on mastery of hard skills.
They also don’t allow Windows or iOS.
If the productivity/hiring/morale hit from requiring one platform becomes too great, then they'll get IT to figure out how to manage other kinds of endpoints. But in a small company, trying to manage disparate endpoints across multiple OSes is hard and expensive, but allowing corporate secrets on unmanaged endpoints is also a bad idea. So, this is the trade-off.
What is "endpoint management," in layman's terms? My corporate laptop has 2 different "endpoint manager" applications running (and about 30 scripts that run in task manager). What are these things doing for them?
1) That the device is compliant with whatever security standards (AV is running, no weird user accounts that are admins etc;)
2) That if the machine is lost || fails to check in: it is wiped.
3) That if security standards change; those changes can be rolled out.
4) That activity on the device is somewhat logged, not to great extent but: Login Events (and what factor was used), if Admin elevation was called; if a strange executable was executed. etc; These logs are only useful in certain circumstances and I've never seen anyone actually use them outside of arbitration.
>We respect everyone’s right to participate in political expression and activism, but we avoid having political debates on our internal communication systems. 37signals as a company also does not weigh in on politics publicly, outside of topics directly related to our business. You should be at peace with both of these stances.
From April of 2021:
Changes at Basecamp - <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26944192> (883pts, 814 comments)
Behind the Controversy at Basecamp - <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26963975> (65pts, 47 comments)
What Really Happened at Basecamp - <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26963708>(193pts, 38 comments)
“About one-third of Basecamp employees accepted buyouts today” - <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998127> (1366pts, 2020 comments)
I guess my take is that if you want to have a truly personal blog or social media channels, it should be as anonymized as possible. (Which has pros and cons.) Certainly, there are a ton of things I wouldn't write on a public channel even if I weren't technically violating any company policy because they would bite me.
When I was an analyst, I would absolutely not write anything about a CxO that differed from what I would put in a research report.
Are you concerned that if too many companies take this approach, it will become the norm, like it was before about 10 years ago, and that then there will be attempts by politicians to codify it into law?
The question I suppose really is to what extent society (through the agency of the law and elected representatives) can police (or more precisely in this case to prevent the policing of) private forums like company internal communication systems. I'd argue that simply being privately owned does not put up a perfect barrier to society, and that society does have a legitimate interest in how such forums are run.
There seems to be this idea in the US that any form of tyranny and oppression is ok, so long as it is not the government that is doing it.
This was the norm until recently. Would you say that these politicians (who are they, by the way?) had already won during that time?
As for companies not talking about politics, I don't care what companies have to say. They're the mouthpieces of their owners. As can be seen in this case, when the owner dictates that the company doesn't participate in politics unrelated to its business. Should companies have the right to speak about arbitrary subjects, but not the right to silence? How can an employee feel like they'll be treated fairly if they don't agree with the company line (issued yesterday) about apricots in Africa?
I'd go farther and say that the list of subjects that a company opines in public about is the same as the list of subjects an employee can feel like they're not free to have an opinion on that anyone at their job could hear about without risking their livelihood.
The fact that DHH goes on and on about politics in his personal life but keeps it away from the company is a positive indicator that it's not opinions that are being suppressed, but opinions about business-unrelated political matters on internal systems.
edit: I feel that a priority for any sort of socialism, or civilization for that matter, is to figure out how to work productively with people you don't like or agree with. And psychologically, not being able to cooperate with people who differ from you is an issue of autonomy and boundaries.
Of course we should balance this with the needs of the business in keeping company communications 'on topic' as it were, and to avoid damaging professional relationships.
This was voluntary, and there is no evidence that it was anything but internal.
Do you have something that would point to a specific politician or party being involved?
As a counterpoint, the liberalization and allowing of corporate lobbying and speech has made it much easier to manipulate political agendas, and remove agency from the population.
I have zero interest in politics, if I had to mentally filter dozens of lines of chat about XYZ political topic when I'm trying to find something technical that would bother me. It wouldn't offend me but it would have a negative affect on productivity due to spending more time finding things.
If a group of folks with a common interest want to talk about politics privately that seems reasonable to me. That would be comparable to going out for lunch in a non-remote setting, chatting in the parking lot or an empty conference room during a break.
It seems like a sensible rule to me.
By all means, talk among your friends circle after work at the bar. But I don't have a lot of interest in engaging with a lot of political conversation that I may or may not agree with.
But I think if a company nowadays wanted to have the same stance, they could just nonchalantly say “we have the same policy as coinbase and basecamp regarding politics at work”.
If it is used as a weapon to prevent discussing of topics that management doesn't want discussed, while promoting topics they like, it becomes simply a policy of control.
As an example, recently the topic of remote work has become of interest in political debates.
In other words, if people of a particular subgroup of the population were to complain that the company's policies or culture were harmful to them, that might get shut down based on this policy. An example I could see happening is a company with a handful of Deaf employees who ask in the #general Slack channel that anyone running a Zoom meeting could please enable captioning when setting up the meetings. If few people honor this request, maybe the complaints escalate and the Americans with Disabilities Act gets mentioned. Suddenly it's "political" and the Deaf folks are causing a distraction. But really, they are just asking to be put on a more even playing field so that they can actually participate and contribute to the work, but if the wrong person got their feelings hurt, suddenly it's a "political" issue and no one can talk about it, and before you know it, all the Deaf employees have left for greener pastures, and now maybe there's no more "politics" in the shared channels, but the company is worse off for letting themselves become a hostile work environment for those folks.
I do understand your general point that it can be difficult to draw lines. I just think that issues like the one you raised would be handled through HR if a friendly "hey can we turn on captioning" message didn't get enough support. I've also never heard of anyone getting their feelings hurt about zoom captions.
But you're right that the people at the top will be the ones deciding what is deemed "political" and what is not. If their definitions don't match up with what the remaining employees think, there could be issues. I haven't heard of any drama since the original incident. Has there been any?
"Political actors, including voters, activists, and leaders, are often ignorant of basic facts relevant to policy choices. Even experts have little understanding of the working of society and little ability to predict future outcomes. Only the most simple and uncontroversial political claims can be counted on. This is partly because political knowledge is very difficult to attain, and partly because individuals are not sufficiently motivated to attain it. As a result, the best advice for political actors is very often to simply stop trying to solve social problems, since interventions not based on precise understanding are likely to do more harm than good."
Status quo bias unfairly benefits those who are at the top of the social hierarchy and perpetuates ongoing harm against those lower on the hierarchy.
To take one example, this attitude would be very convenient for white men to take and encourage others to take, but would be seen as negative for people of color, women, LGBTQ people, etc. Pushing this attitude in a corporate setting would then turn off recruitment for those people and limit the diversity of the company, which has longer term implications for hiring quality and product appeal.
Put simply, the desire to “avoid politics” favors certain classes of people to the detriment of others.
I am not saying the answer is to bring politics in to the office, but I am suggesting a more nuanced response to those who desire to do so. Encouraging people to “stop trying to solve social problems” is very transparently an attempt to solve the social problem of political activists making choices you view as flawed. If you truly don’t want to be involved with social problems yourself that includes letting others make their own choices and being sensitive to that (while still balancing workplace norms). For example you might decide not to encourage others to stop their activism, but limit activism at work that distracts the company.
I am happy to respond to any specific questions you have (even with excerpts) but I am not here to read a 25 page PDF. And as an aside, I see in the author's conclusion that they are wholly dismissive of Karl Marx, which I view as a serious error. I suppose the author is not familiar with the excellent work of modern Marxist intellectuals like Richard Wolff and David Harvey who have quite effectively applied Marx's original works to modern day economic analysis. If the author were familiar with their works it would be clear that modern Marxist intellectuals view the 20th century not as a complete failure of Marx's theories, but of the application of those theories in the hands of the centralized state. When applied with coercive violence those theories lose the very democratic power they had hoped to capture and give way to human greed and demand for accumulation of power. We can nonetheless learn from Marx's analysis of the problems of class-based society and the benefits of worker or community control of the means of production. As Wolff and Harvey repeatedly explain in their work, the task is not to dismiss Marx's analysis but to learn from 20th century experiments of the importance of democratic control. As a practical example, Wolff's primary takeaway from all this, informed by the desire to reduce the importance of class and expand worker based control of production, is that we should aim to move our economy to one where firms are more predominantly worker owned. That we would move from top-down managed firms to worker-managed firms is a well founded and reasonable argument that bears no resemblance to Stalin's USSR, for example. I don't know if the author balances the arguments of pro-Marxist and anti-Marxist intellectuals or simply chose only to look at one side and believe they had the full picture, but it only reinforces my belief that if someone advocates for a depoliticized society, they will simply favor the status quo.
I would encourage reading or listening to the words of people of color and other marginalized groups to ensure that any prescriptive views of society you hold take in to account the different ways that marginalized people experience the world. You mentioned you are interested in holes in Huemer's logic, and that is where you will find them.
It seems to me to be a gross intellectual error to conflate Marx with mass murderers. Marx’s theories were popular among revolutionaries at the time of Lenin’s rise and he took advantage of that appeal when he styled himself a Marxist. But even then he created his own theories we call Marxist-Leninism, so called because they are not based purely on Marx.
To say Marx played any real part in mass murder is like saying the Nasis were socialists because they put “socialist” in their name - intellectually vacant. I implore you - do not put so much stock in the writing of someone who has led you down this path! There are better answers out there without these gross errors.
I propose we create models to reduce complexity, and then make adjustments to approximate reality with increasing accuracy. If this works out in our favor, let's also give it a name, like science.
The fact that no person can understand everything in detail doesn't mean some of us shouldn't try in some capacity.
Then the human race spent a few centuries studying physics.
Sociology may be running in circles now (i.e. replication crisis), but imagine what it can discover in a similar timeframe.
Meanwhile, our best course is educating ourselves, no matter how futile, because inaction is not a good way to live with other people on the same planet.
See Section 3.3, "Social Theory is Harder than you Think". It would be nice, but I'm very doubtful.
>our best course is educating ourselves, no matter how futile, because inaction is not a good way to live with other people on the same plane
Many possible rebuttals here, but let's take the simplest one: Opportunity cost.
Huemer argues for political inaction, not freezing yourself in a block of ice. All that time you save on politics could be time you spend on e.g. discovering new drugs for terminally ill patients, or making it cheaper to desalinate water. Or, just doing your normal job. These are not easy tasks, certainly not as easy as reading The Sociological Times for 8 hours a day, but they will almost certainly end up doing far more good for people.
Especially if you have a new drug in your hand, or have a better way to get clean water. One tribe will milk the optics, the other will sabotage and rally people against the thing.
Have a co-worker in Kiev, and you say you're worried? Boom, your neighbor buries you under Russian propaganda.
Got vaccinated? Congrats, half your family just disowned you.
Every decision is taking a side, if not in our own minds, then in those who breathe the same air.
But I must say, Andrew, this is awesome, and you gave me a lot to think about.
There was some very visceral discussions in one of the CNCF groups late last year around the events in the middle east that impacted discussions, saw individuals publicly at odds, etc. Technical conferences, in a sense, may be different than work, but individuals participating in conferences should feel supported in engaging, discussing, and presenting the material relevant to the conference. Harassment/etc should be frowned upon and actively dealt with. Conferences, unless political/societal in nature, should also be political free zones.