The 37signals Manager Playbook
basecamp.com62 points by tosh 5 days ago
62 points by tosh 5 days ago
The bar for remaining on the team at the 1-year mark isn’t just passable performance, it’s hell yeah! You’re excited to have them on the team in their current state, and you can’t wait to see what they do next.
Who writes this cringe-worthy crap? Or is it an American cultural thing?
This is just ultimately a commercial company churning out digital widgets so I hope they are paying "Hell Yeah!" money...
You'd rather the banal corporate beige in every other handbook? At least this reads like someone means it.
I 100% agree with the sentiment. If I had staff, it's the benchmark I'd apply (even if I did word it a touch differently).
Here, let me paste you, verbatim, an ex-colleague's LinkedIn description. This might be more up your alley.
Over 25 years’ experience employing strong business and architectural skills in orchestrating and delivering innovative solutions that provide quantifiable business value to medium and large enterprises.
I have strong technical leadership, a broad background in technology and a deep understanding of business drivers and challenges across multiple sectors which enables me to assist organisations in removing technical blockers and delivering business outcomes. Employing enterprise architecture principles, I am able to balance strategic thinking with pragmatic operational delivery to ensure life-cycle optimisation, organisational change and IT governance requirements are addressed.You'd rather the banal corporate beige in every other handbook? At least this reads like someone means it.
No, I'd rather straight talk clear of idealism about being a corporate cog. It doesn't have to be one or the other.
> You'd rather the banal corporate beige in every other handbook? At least this reads like someone means it.
It reads like someone wants to sound cool but fails to do so.
That corporate drivel is insufferable and completely meaningless. I would never hire that person. But if that person described themselves as in your parent poster's example, I wouldn't believe it either.
They are paying pretty well for a remote only company and are hiring very rarely.
Reading this, anyone give great advice on formulating take home projects that work really well in the AI age? I ran an interview cycle where I gave ~1 day, and tried to hold out some technical questions for a follow up design interview after they had delivered the take home. I felt like the project was very hard to define given AI lets people chew through most of what you throw in front of them very quickly. Giving a bigger project felt like it required drawing them too deeply into our domain, where I was trying to provide a slice of it that we could onboard candidates to in ~45 minutes. Given that the authors here are getting multiple weeks to do it, its hard for me to imagine an appropriate scope.
Give them a take home and then talk about its implementation details? If a machine did the work they won't understand it.
For me personally, the goal of a take-home was always to see how the candidate walks through code, discusses code, and how well they take feedback.
This is why I'd ask candidates for previously written code they were proud of, rather than telling them to code something trivial.
Why do they need a Manager Playbook when they don't have Managers?
Oh wait looking at their org chart they do have managers. But only the special high level ones have real titles. The lowly ones get the work with out the title.
"Policy at 37signals is that employees .... The difference is subtle but important; the former is how to treat responsible, capable adults"
"Openly expressing frustration or discontent with company decisions creates a negative atmosphere and undermines team morale."
A little ironic, given that roughly a third of the company reportedly resigned in the past.
I won’t be taking management advice from them, it may work if you drink the Kool-Aid, but it otherwise seems to be their way or the door.
"Values written on a page do not define culture, but the behaviors of the people within the organization do"
The same company that says politics don’t belong at work has DHH using its company blog to comment on Tommy Robinson’s march.
https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64
"Therefore, we’re asking everyone, including Jason and me, to refrain from using our company Basecamp or HEY to discuss societal politics at work effective immediately."
https://world.hey.com/dhh/basecamp-s-new-etiquette-regarding...
it has been a while since I read what DHH wrote but now it appears that he mostly writes against wokeism, migration, climate hysteria, how Tesla is the pinnacle of capitalism, etc. Yuck.
I would not take any advice from DHH
extremely nice but terse, neither human nor AI slop