Your life's work
37signals.com
37signals.com
I seriously have nothing against them, I wish them more success even: just not success getting to the front page here because frankly they don't talk about interesting algorithms, technologies or business strategies. They are incredibly boring. No mobile, no Google glasses, no new computer game, no crafty actionable patio11 strategy, no raspberry pi hack, no programming language hack, no excellent presentation, no struggling story of success, no rejection and comeback, no scaling of servers, no clever command lines, no new SSH shell, no browser plugin, no investment philosophy, just "I love my business".
75% of their posts are simply not HN-worthy and there isn't a voting ring but there is probably a bunch of social contacts who are up voting this. Please just subscribe to their twitter or RSS because their weekly show here is frankly tragic and they should cut down to 1/4th as much and spend more time with their family.
Edit. Just to note I own a DHH book, so I will pay for the writing of this guy when it's actually worth it. I'm just saying this blog stuff isn't even worth free.
Depends on how you define voting ring. It wouldn't surprise me if they let a load of people know every time something is posted, and these people just vote it up regardless of content.
> they should cut down to 1/4th as much and spend more time with their family.
Most of it is recycled. They wrote some blog posts, turned it into a book, and now they are recycling the book back into blog posts. As you say it's almost always short and low quality, so it probably takes very little of their time.
It's very clever marketing on their point, and there is very little that can be done about it, because there is no downvote on submissions, and 37signals is not likely to get blocked from the site.
Sure, it's called "RSS". *scnr
I used to tweet when I wrote a new post on the Intercom blog but too many of my followers used to +1 the post and now it seems we're in some way blacklisted on HN.
Example: http://blog.intercom.io/the-future-of-email-products/ this post when pretty much viral everywhere else, ~100K page views, submitted to HN lots of times by lots of people and I'm sure most of you guys have read it, but never gets anywhere. Curious.
So, are you complaining at 37 Signals for writing on their own blog, or at HN members for submitting something they thought was interesting?
Also take note that the term "HN-worthy" is highly subjective. Submissions make it to the front page of HN not because they're HN-worthy but because many people vote them up.
There is no transparency as far as how something makes it to the first page or it's position on that page.
I've had this exact same attitude at every company (many!) I've ever worked at. Until someone or something completely outside my control fucked it up. Then I took my positive attitude and moved on to my next "last place to work".
Kinda makes a difference if it's your company, huh?
The world is full of uncertainty, and the grass isn't that much greener with your own company, if it is even greener at all.
It's crazy to me that a co-founder of a company would talk this way about their own business ... at least publicly.
For a company with paying customers, this kind of statement doesn't instill confidence in the long-term commitment of it's founders in the business.
Not that I agree with it, but I understand the interpretation. It's a fairly common view in the tech industry that you should get a new job every 18 months or else your skills will degrade.
"I’d be happy if 37signals is the last place I work."
is very similar to:
"37signals is the last place I'd want to work"
...which is quite a polar difference from the first statement.
This is not necessarily our choice. But the economy and the job market are a lot more fluid -- sometimes for good, sometimes for bad -- than they were in the past. Even if someone wanted to settle into one company for the long haul, that's not only unlikely, but perhaps even highly improbable. The company itself is likely to be changing and reorganizing at a pace as constant and rapid as its market.
The old tradeoff between BigCorp and Startups used to be that Startups were riskier and more exciting, whereas BigCorp was slower, a bit more boring, but highly stable. The stability has fallen out of that equation to a large degree. These days it's a choice between relative degrees of comfort and risk, rather than absolute degrees thereof.
Again, much of this is market driven. There are startlingly few companies, big or small, that look anything like what they did five or ten years ago. It's a safe bet that they won't look the way they do today in another five or ten years. Some people thrive in this sort of environment, and those people would probably call it "dynamic." Others hate it, and they'd call it "unstable." Both would probably have to admit, one way or the other, that it's not as easy.
Upvoted for this. If everyone understands this well, they will surely be more happy in the long run.
That's one reason why many people think it is normal that one of the roles of the state is to be a main provider of jobs.
Not saying that's good or bad, just what the general feeling is, which is very difficult to understand if your baseline is pure capitalism.
This is easy to say as a software developer because of the nature of our industry. Niche jobs are probably different, but a smart worker would recognize such a job as a personal risk ("if this company tanks, I have no marketable skills") and require more compensation in exchange for assuming that risk.
Not everyone can afford this luxury to just hop from job to job, but if you're top 5 at anything, and I mean ANYTHING, someone is probably looking to hire you and pay you well (even something as meaningless as building models out of toothpicks). My advice to my kids will be to find what you're naturally best at and push it to the max. No matter what it is or how much you may think "this wont pay", there's someone out there that will pay you well for it.
Anyways, just an expansion and rant to follow your comment. Thanks for sparking this train of thought in my head. Upvote..
I've definitely seen this effect in action (not personally, per se, but with peers) -- though it can also be fairly dangerous. For instance, a lot of big companies outside of the high tech industry will gladly fork over truckloads of cash -- I mean that almost literally -- to poach top talent from the tech world. Problem is, once you get there, you're kind of stuck. And you're working with people who have no real clue what you do all day, even if they ostensibly hired you to fill a very real knowledge/skill gap. ("I'll let my results do the talking," you might think, but long before you get to the results, you've got to wage daily battle with politics and ill-advised changes in scope or direction).
I guess the point is: skill arbitrage can be a very powerful factor in career growth, but it can also be a double edged sword. I think one needs to choose whether to make this -- almost a form of internal consulting -- a career in its own right. Pick an industry to focus in, or pick a skill set to focus in. Both can be equally valid and equally lucrative choices. But there's less fluidity between the two paths than you might expect.
I guess this doesn't apply so much if one is truly a recognized, top-5 expert in his or her given field -- and by truly, I mean this person keynotes national conferences on the subject, or has published a bestseller, or gets board invitations, or regularly books consulting gigs at an amortized hourly rate that would make a managing partner at a giant lawfirm gasp.
Agree with this. Which is really the problem with this (from the original post):
>Working people to death to ship any one feature or product is a poor strategy, as it reduces the capacity to ship the next feature or product (burn out, build-up of bad rush practices).
Doing things like that is bad if you intend to still exist in 10 years, unless doing them is necessary in order to still exist in 10 years. Because if you spend the extra time to get it right, and your competitor ships the minute it compiles, by the time your product is on the market a huge chunk of your prospective customers are already locked into a competing ecosystem.
"Take your time and do it right" is Big Company Thinking, because big companies can afford to take a hit in a nascent business unit for a year or two in order to more than gain it back a decade down the road. If you're a startup, you often can't afford it -- even assuming your competitors don't beat you to market, "take your time and do it right" can easily cause you to run out of investment capital before the product is finished.
I don't mean to imply that this is actually a good thing, just point out that these are the incentive structures we're dealing with. Highly competitive markets have a lot going for them, but stability and long-term planning are not among them.
I kind of want to blame the antitrust laws, actually, for being such a catastrophic failure in every direction. On the one hand we have natural monopoly telecommunications companies abusing their control over radio spectrum into control over mobile computing devices and control over last mile wireline service into control over content delivery (classic tying arrangement in both cases), with nary a peep from the antitrust authorities.
On the other hand, we have the things that antitrust nominally does prohibit causing the market to run in the opposite direction from the efficient characteristics of monopolistic markets (i.e. non-duplication of effort). When we have multiple startups working on the same general idea, the natural thing for them to do is to get together into a single unified organization and pool their efforts, but we make that illegal. So then they execute the classic race to the bottom where everyone cuts corners and works unsustainable hours just because the first mover gets the whole pie and so nothing is sacred if it can provide a meaningful competitive advantage.
I think we need to rethink this whole mess. The shadow of antitrust regulation and the possibility of it being enforced is resulting in all of this widespread inefficiency while the almost complete lack of actual antitrust enforcement against anyone who deserves it is not even providing the supposed benefits that all of that inefficiency is supposed to be buying us.
I certainly don't mean to suggest that we don't need something like antitrust -- we can't have AT&T and Microsoft and whatever oligopolies exist in whatever arbitrary industries turning into de facto unaccountable private governing bodies, which is exactly what would happen with nothing (and has happened to greater and lesser extents already), but what we have just isn't doing the job.
I'd be interested to hear if anyone has any suggestions.
The main thing that seem to prevent similarly focused startups from joining together is a winner take all mentality in tech investors that discourages any kind of activity that's not winner/loser based or at least big fish/small fish based. The high valuations and the even higher expectations of investors make it very hard for series A or B round company A to absorb another company of that size. The lack of debt financing options in the valley doesn't help matters either.
When it comes down to it, a significant portion of your board is just going to be opposed to providing a "winning" class exit to any of your existing competitors unless they're primarily financed by the same people.
The benefit from merging to monopoly is that you can avoid all the negative pressures that come from extreme competition. You can work 40 hours a week and not cut corners without worrying that someone who does will beat you to market. But that only works if you merge to monopoly -- two competitors merging when there are still five others doesn't get you that. And even if there are only two competitors at present, having them merge doesn't preclude the possibility that some others will spring up as soon as the ability to charge monopoly/oligopoly prices is on the table (which is why the antitrust authorities may not bother you in that case).
To get the benefit (and thus make it worth doing at all), you have to know that you can keep doing it -- that if another competitor shows up with the credible threat of breaking your monopoly, you can merge with them too. And if you can charge monopoly rents then that is exactly what would happen: Anyone qualified and willing to pose a credible competitive threat will threaten to enter the market and then it will become worth it for you to buy them out because retaining the ability to charge monopoly prices and continue working "only" 40 hour weeks is worth having to share the market, provided there are a sufficiently small finite number of such qualified people who would have to be cut in.
But you aren't guaranteed to be able to keep doing that without inviting antitrust scrutiny, especially after you become established. And if you can't be sure regulators will allow you to do it as many times as necessary then there is no incentive to start because the benefits only accrue as long as you can hold the monopoly.
More than that, you're ignoring the reality of a merger which would be a lot of corporate politics ending up with most of the originals founders getting kicked out. The handful who played the game the best will end up getting the whole pie.
Where did I stop talking about startups? All the participants, including startups, that compete for the same market would have the incentive to merge or collude, but only if they can ensure that no one defects or fails to join, because the first defector breaks the monopoly (especially in software where there is effectively infinite reproduction capacity). And they (startups included) could reliably do that with contracts and buyouts if it wasn't illegal, in any market with sufficiently few qualified participants. But it is illegal, which is why even startups don't -- not because it will necessarily be enforced against the startup during the first merger, but because they know that if it works and they ultimately achieve the end goal of a monopoly or cartel, that is what will raise antitrust scrutiny. So we don't start down that road because we know where it currently goes.
Also, I never intended to limit what I'm talking about to startups: I used a startup as an example, but this applies generally. Non-startup small businesses could benefit from working together in similar ways. (As could large businesses, though that quickly becomes the exemplification of why we don't allow it -- again, we still need something to address that.)
And I would also point out that trotsky started talking about mergers so I wrote to address that, but collusion would probably be easier and more manageable, especially if it could be legally enforced between business entities through contracts.
>More than that, you're ignoring the reality of a merger which would be a lot of corporate politics ending up with most of the originals founders getting kicked out. The handful who played the game the best will end up getting the whole pie.
How, if they all have to continue colluding in order for it to work? If you have unhappy former competitors they can quickly become happy future competitors. The only deal that works is the one that makes all the former competitors better off than they would have been otherwise. That might involve some of them not being involved in the operations anymore, but they would still get a piece of the pie.
You'd be surprised.
My experience with Big Companies is that it's done "the wrong way" far more often than at the startups I've worked for.
The reasons for this are many, but none of them have anything to do with being able to afford it. You still have deadlines and managers who want stuff finished yesterday. More crucial than that, in my experience, Big Companies have far less capable talent as well as projects that have been marred by outsourcing adventures.
Again, only my experience, but I thought I'd share since it runs counter to yours.
Not having a runway or a burn rate to manage does a lot to increase the amount of "we'll just fix it later" thinking. Startups deal with technical debt as well, but there's a difference when it comes from a focus to get one thing absolutely right as opposed to a lack of interest in getting anything really right.
More often than not this means thinking about it a couple of hours more, and results in much faster development the next week, so for me the correct answer, even for start-ups, is " we can't afford doing it wrong"
Sometimes, sure. Doing it right is always worth it if you have the time -- and if all it takes is a couple of hours then you almost always have the time. But sometimes doing it right means doing it over, because circumstances have chanced since you started, or there is a third party framework you can use which is clearly a bad fit for your application but the only alternative is to write your own from scratch. Then you're not talking about a few hours anymore, you're talking about a few months. Which you may or may not have.
-- And also management internally.
They are are surely related, but ultimately its almost always a people problem, in the sense that a manager is replaced or layered (or perhaps politically ostracised in some machivellian way). Then the employee is asking himself if he is throwing good money after bad, in a landscape where no wager--no matter how astute--will ever pay off.
My biggest issue is deadlines. At my current company, the boss constantly adds things and changes his mind on a daily basis..even when there are hard deadlines. He also ignores the fact that it will add time onto the deadline (many people have tried), but expects everything to be done on the same timeline.
This is why I have decided to work for myself.
When I moved to the Bay Area both my wife and I were scrimping and saving to come up with a down payment for a house. After living there six years we 'traded up' to a roomier house, and in the process of getting our existing house ready for sale, we did a lot of the stuff we had planned to do 'someday' but in this case to make the house more attractive. We redid the hall bathroom, fixed the lights in the den, simple stuff. It was a lot nicer house to live in just before we moved out. We decided our next house would be different, we would do the things that made the house more livable/nice when we thought of them, that way we could enjoy them ourselves.
The tricky bit is doing this even if you aren't "sure" you're going to be in the same place in 10 years. The fear is that if you suddenly are going to be doing something else, living somewhere else, well you could have used those resources better by not spending them on something you wouldn't use/enjoy.
My experience has been that it is always the right thing to invest for the long haul.
This was a transformative realisation for me. It empowered me to take the pride in my work that I knew I wanted to, and drove me to push myself a little harder. It was also useful in helping me see my long term career goals more clearly. Once you've thought "this is what I'm going to spend my one and only lifetime doing" all the bullshit falls away.
We're wired into thinking that a blip in time (this body/mind) will Energizer-Bunny-like just keep on going and going.
Thinking otherwise brings the doubt: why sit in front of these screens everyday? How utterly pointless it all is! And yet, it seems we must do something, or...
Cheers ;-)
I don't think you can see that, until you test your abilities, and see your own potential. Maybe that's why it took me thirty years to get there.
> time was passing
The first software job I ever had was pretty much perfect in every respect. Great team, fun projects, respect & support all the way up to the owner, plenty of leeway to experiment with fun tech on the off chance that it might come in handy one day.
But they hired me at the market rate for a junior dev. And I got better fast. Like so fast that the things I built attracted attention elsewhere. And before the first year was out it was abundantly clear that I could make twice what I was making simply by responding to an email or two.
So I talked to management, and they did everything in their power to get me up to the market rate for a regular dev. Which was still way less than I ended up taking when I did eventually respond to one of those emails. (and a ton less than I was making a year after that).
Your value just goes up too fast in this business for a single company to keep up with. Nobody gives 100% raises every other year, but the market as a whole seems to be quite happy to do exactly that.
Unless that changes, I think we'll find that most people end up on a track like my own. We might find our dream job several times along the way. But unless we're pretty near the end of the track, it'll be hard to justify staying there forever.
100% raises every other year? I should be making $30,720,000 a year by now! Gonna have to have a chat with my boss about this outrage!
He has a point, though, about how unthinkable a 100% raise seems, but if you get another job it's entirely possible.
A smart company would recognize this and, in fact, give those steep raises. After all, if you're worth $X to the market, you're probably worth more than $X to your current company, where you're already fully trained.
If you want me to treat a position like it's the last one I'll take, then show me the same: treat me like a member of the team that you'll fight to keep around. Offer equity, take that at-will clause out of the contract, treat me like a partner in your success.
Anything else is just blowing smoke, I'm afraid. At the end of the day, you can be let go without notice (and, to be fair, you can also walk away at any time); that's the agreement you sign during your first professional interaction with most US-based companies. And it sets the tone for the rest of the relationship: this is a transient arrangement, and can be discarded as situations change on either side.
Also, remember that if you want a company's default employment contract to be different, it will also be different for all of your coworkers. Eventually, the company will make a hiring mistake; no process is perfect. In that event, you want the company to fire the person as quickly as it becomes clear that a mistake was made, not hang onto them until they have unquestionably demonstrated incompetence. Do you want to work at a company that will dilly dally about firing bad people?
Talk to anyone who has worked at various government agencies, which basically can't fire anyone after two years, and you will gain respect for at-will employment.
As for hiring mistakes, thee months' salary (you're allowed to simply pay an employee for their notice period if you don't want them coming in) is not a huge expense compared to the cost of hiring them in the first place.
So yeah; I would never work for a company that wanted to be able to fire me without cause at zero notice, and I'm willing to put up with having to give notice myself as a cost.
I don't think this has to be the case. If the company treats you well and most of your team has been happily working there for a decade, you're not going to be dwelling on that clause. But if an irresponsible coworker starts dragging down the whole team, you'll be glad that clause is there.
I'm no longer young, but I've bounced around to quite a few jobs because I've always run into a wall in terms of growth, personal growth within the organization, or professional growth - not expanding my skill set fast enough while limited to one employer.
As the founder of a company, you have a lot more control in pushing the envelope in lots of different ways, but I think the challenge is being able to create that for yourself vs. creating it for those that work for/ with you.
dhh can create 37racing, work from wherever he wants, push the envelope on technology as much as he desires, but I believe the challenge is giving the same to your employees, not just through profit sharing, but sharing the ways your company can grow.
Then reached the end and it's DHH. Of course he wouldn't mind working there, he owns that place. That punchline made the entire article insipid.
The funny thing is that I make better decisions even with extremely short term projects. If I'm working on a 1-month software project, I'll get it done better and faster if I have the perspective that I'll be using it for 10 years than if I have the perspective that I'll be using it for 6 months.
So it may be worth putting yourself in a long-term state of mind, even when it's not necessarily true.
There are worse things in the world than a founder looking to make a company a good place to work for the long term. Consider: If shit is broken, we’ll fix it now, lest we be stuck with it for decades. Now think about people flipping companies, people playing hot potato with toxic assets, or looking for the next vote, or surge in page-views, and this attitude starts to look pretty nice.
I'm sure picking up the odd Lamborghini ( http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/coyotes-pulitzer-... ) as a token of last month's worth of effort is also a good plus... :-)
This guy is soooooo full of himself, it's pretty nauseating. He acts like creating basecamp has somehow solved world hunger... I'm amazed nobody calls him out on it more often.
And it's understandable that he gets a bit defensive, even angry, when unprofitable funded companies are seen to be "worth" more. I've been there and you get tired of having every customer ask "why are you charging more than company X", the real answer to which is "because we're an actual business making a profit, not a bunch of SV hipsters burning investor cash as fast as they can".
What to invest in, that will still be relevant in decades? People and problem-solving. Maybe unix and web...
It's a good question. This post reminds me of another question: Are your goals worthy of your life? If they're not, I think it's best to find a new company/project.