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Things are going so well we’re doing a hiring freeze
- c8d3f7b49897918 9y agoThey are stopping at the lower end of Dunbar's number. Smart guys.
- tbirrell 9y agoEven if you don't read the article, you should read this story[0] that it links to. Which explains the mindset behind the decision. It's only like 200 words. [0]: http://renewablewealth.com/the-parable-of-the-mexican-fisherman/ http://renewablewealth.com/the-parable-of-the-mexican-fisher...
- dhagz 9y agoI absolutely love that story, and it's a big influencer for my daily decision process.
- netrus 9y agoI think it is based on Böll's "Anekdote zur Senkung der Arbeitsmoral" [1] - not only a great short story, but a great title as well ("Anecdote concerning the Lowering of Productivity" - but also "[An] anecdote [meant to] lower productivity"). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekdote_zur_Senkung_der_Arbeitsmoral https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekdote_zur_Senkung_der_Arbei...
- Tepix 9y ago"Senkung der Arbeitsmoral" does not translate into "lower productivity". Arbeitsmoral means working morale. Senkung means reduction.
- solidsnack9000 9y agoPerhaps “Arbeitsmoral” could be translated as “work ethic”.
- solidsnack9000 9y agoIn that story, the fishing village is in Western Europe.
- Mc_Big_G 9y agoI like the story but there's a glaring omission. Financial security. All you have to do to make the story fall apart is introduce a serious illness or handicap in his wife or kids.
- Quarrelsome 9y agobut if you spend time in the village you build up a support network and its that support network that helps each other out in times of need. Sure if all the fish die they're still screwed but you can always find a reason to scare yourself into thinking you'll encounter the uncommon.
- jessaustin 9y agoI have sympathy for this point of view, but unfortunately the most recent exposure I have to it is a local government deciding not to require Mennonite contractors to carry insurance, even though their competitors must. Apparently it's against their religion to imagine that the Lord would hurt a Mennonite on a jobsite badly enough that the community "support network" couldn't heal him themselves. I feel sorry for the poor bastard who won't get physical therapy and will be stuck in bed for the rest of his life. Maybe the support network could afford the therapy, but he won't get it anyway, because Mennonite elders DGAF. I hope he'll be able to sue the cheap-ass property owner who bribed the city council to pass this stupid exception in the first place.
- icebraining 9y agoTrue, but the story still works if you add "and a bit extra for a rainy day."
- kaybe 9y agoGermany had general health insurance even back then.
- f33g91pv43232f 9y agoIf you take the anecdote to be for an individual (or just a few), yes. Now take it to the economy. Economy != business or individuals. If an individual "saves" it means they forgo consumption, so that resources can go elsewhere. When the economy "saves" (and let's assume we are talking about all of earth) it means - what? The same economic activity but fewer people buy something? Doesn't quite work. We could leave resources like oil in the ground to "save". On the scale of the economy, there is no "saving" for retirees, not unless you are looking for other nations to fill the gap (but let's look at the whole earth so that won't work unless you find aliens). The currently working population has to produce everything needed for the currently living population. How would "saving" look like, I ask again? They produce much more and put it into giant warehouses to be used 30 years later? That anecdote for the economy could mean that you stop trying to sell people stuff they don't need (more insurance, more cars, more... stuff). you can still invest into R&D, and more relaxed and less stressed people will be much more productive in this field than stressed ones. Looking at studies of worker satisfaction and - a bit more unscientifically but still enlightening for its popularity (this and similar ones) - Dilbert cartoons, and also reddit or HN anecdotes and what I see for myself, a sizable amount of the workforce thinks their work contribution is rather meaningless. Still, we are forced to keep going. There is no option to stop and think "hey, my job is actually pretty useless". If you act on such a thought you will be severely punished by society. Anyone who claims that "the market" takes care of all those inefficiencies... well, okay then.
- hammock 9y ago"you should read this story" Posts unclickable link Edit: you fixed it, thanks
- wldcordeiro 9y agoI don't get why it's unclickable but it bothered me as well.
- icebraining 9y agoThe spaces at the start of the line make HN treat it as code: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dev360 9y agoInteresting. I heard the exact same story but it was about 'a wealthy American businessman I know' and an Italian restauranteur. Modern fables.
- Nadya 9y agoSame story with an alternate ending [0]. It's a more realistic story for a capitalist society. [0] http://jameszol.com/stories/infamous-fisherman-parable-now-with-an-alternate-ending/ http://jameszol.com/stories/infamous-fisherman-parable-now-w...
- s73ver_ 9y agoAnd this, dear reader, is why nobody likes MBAs. They ruin everything they touch.
- taw-an 9y agosure, but how do the employees feel about it? what happens when support work balloons but you have the same amount of staff? this is just an excuse to extract more profits coated in technofounderbabble.
- subway 9y agoThe article explicitly mentions it isn't likely applicable to support roles in a footnote.
- drelihan 9y agoIf support volume grows, there are three options: 1.) hire more staff 2.) keep staffing levels the same and force workers to take on more for the same pay or 3.) look at why support volume is growing and a) fix some avoidable reasons that require support ( small fixes in UX can go a long way ) , b) automatically solve some of the support issues ( improved documentation ), and c) have the support staff build themselves better tools so they can more efficiently handle the support volume rise. If you are an owner, #3 will not only improve your products, but also likely to make your entire company much more valuable over time. If the staff are also owners or there is a system in place such that the staff benefits when the owners benefit, they will likely be on board for #3 as well. If #3 is not sufficient enough to provide support, then hiring should be done.
- Tepix 9y agoThere is another option: Raise prices.
- dasil003 9y agoHow do the employees feel about it? I’d bet a lot of money they’re in the top 5% retention among tech companies. Also they’re probably pretty happy to avoid the constant churn and failed projects of working in a company desperately chasing hypergrowth. I imagine customers are pretty happy too knowing that they aren’t at risk of the company being flipped and the product discontinued or bloated in order to attract the next order of magnitude growth from corporate buyers who will themselves never use the product. Your last sentence is the most laughably ironic since the entire VC game is to extract value from the energy and drive of young people with the promises of Facebook riches which will only ever materialize for a vanishingly small number of individuals, especially amongst the rank and file.
- razialx 9y agoCongratulations. You've figured out how to make me want to apply to your company! In the same way that I will never stop wanting to move to Norway, since they don't want me, I will now forever desire to work for Basecamp... I am so easily manipulated.
- eitland 9y agoGetting into Norway doesn't seem too hard - but I'm open to be told why I'm wrong. Here is what I found: "Broadly speaking, the award of a residence permit depends on two things: your country of citizenship and your ability to financially sustain yourself and any dependents. This generally means you need a job offer, or you must prove financial sustainability if you are coming to Norway to study or for some other reason. It is possible for some people to move to Norway as a job seeker, but this is only allowed for a relatively short period of time. If you don’t manage to find employment during that time, you will have to leave the country, and there is a waiting period before you will be able to return." - https://www.lifeinnorway.net/norway-immigration-guide/ https://www.lifeinnorway.net/norway-immigration-guide/
- razialx 9y agoInteresting. I just recall reading an article that went on about how your best chance of getting in is to marry in, which is unlikely for myself as I'm happily married already! There was never anything specific about Norway (as compared to the other Scandinavian countries that generally top happiness indexes and such) just that the article said that I _couldn't_ live there.
- eitland 9y agoStackoverflow careers often list a number of jobs close to where I work in Oslo. It seems to me if one gets a real job offer then there is a good chance to get a work permit.
- Consultant32452 9y ago>your country of citizenship and your ability to financially sustain yourself and any dependents. This generally means you need a job offer, or you must prove financial sustainability if you are coming to Norway to study or for some other reason. By American standards Norwegians are all racist assholes.
- ppeetteerr 9y agoI really like their approach but I want to comment on the Mexican Fisherman story. Neither the fisherman nor the banker have it right. You see, the banker may be overly ambitious, but the fisherman is not taking precaution against future's uncertainty. You can be sure DHH has enough money and he doesn't need the headache of running a big business. The fisherman, on the other hand, may want to consider the day he cannot fish and not expect the seas to provide until his very last day.
- wavefunction 9y agoThe Mexican fisherman leans on his family and friends, his community, when he runs into trouble. The banker relies on a socialized bailout.
- oldcynic 9y agoThe fisherman feels shame and regret for having to turn to friends and family. Especially now his community is struggling as a result of having to bail out the finance sector. The banker is happy to be getting on with business as usual.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- astral303 9y agoSad but true
- watwut 9y agoThe fisherman gets little support from community, because they are still pissed he testified against popular community member back then. Closed small communities often work that way.
- beastcoast 9y agoIt’s notable that Amazon, despite record growth, is also in a hiring freeze for nearly the entire Retail business. Leadership is also simplifying the management chain to reduce bureaucracy.
- norswap 9y agoWhile I love their philosophy, part of me can't shake the feeling they are rubbing it in our faces for marketing purposes.
- fjsolwmv 9y agoIt's a corporate blog. That's the entire purpose of it.
- mattgreenrocks 9y agoPlus, it's hosted by Medium. The entire modus operandi of tech Medium is shameless self-promotion.
- dasil003 9y agoTrue but it’s a necessary counterpoint to the VC-fueled greed that you see reflected in the majority of articles from tech founders. Cancerous growth is the default aspiration of young people coming into tech.
- clutchdude 9y agoPer the parable, there is a altered version in which the business man, sensing the fisher man is not open to ventures, strikes up a similar conversation with another fisherman who does agrees to expand fishing to better provide for his family and community. As a result the original fisherman finds his fish stocks are sapped by the growing fisher man's venture, and, unable to afford a boat to go into deeper water, finds himself bankrupt and working for the businessman who would have been his partner. The issue with that version is it ignores that you aren't just sitting on your hands but rather ensuring that your customers stay your customers. But it does beg the question - Are you growing to a better future or just improving the same day over and over?
- geofft 9y agoIt sort of seems to me that the story continues to have a clear villain, the business man, and a clear victim, the other fisherman who will spend 20 years scaling before he gets back to the life he wanted—and so the right plan is for the original fisherman to treat the businessman and his American ideas as a threat to the community. Tell the other fishermen that if they go along with the businessman's plan to destroy the community and sell it to American interests, they'll be excommunicated from the village and their original business will be dead long before the businessman returns with lawyers. But if they change their minds, they'll be welcomed back with open arms.
- clutchdude 9y agoWell, you can always modify it as the fisherman being unable to compete with the influx of capital to a competitor and ends up having to work for them. That the community would be hit by a natural disaster but the prospering fisherman provides the influx of cash for emergency relief whereas doing nothing meant no means of recovery. The story of preservation/destruction of habitat, the community improving/declining, the prospering fisherman rising but still (not) finding time to enjoy chatting with friends, and other dramatic flairs to help sell whatever flavor of capitalism you believe in.
- sodapopcan 9y agoIt's insane how making a profit seems to considered "uncool" in the business world. Basecamp and particularly Jason Fried's writings (I realize this is particular article is by DHH) are super inspirational. I wish that building a solid, profitable business as opposed to being so focused on growth and finding more investors was more of the norm. I want to work at Basecamp even more now, haha.
- crdoconnor 9y agoshrug VCs seem to prefer 1 hypergrowth startup and 20 failures in their portfolio to 17 solid, growing, profitable startups without hypergrowth and 4 failures.
- tinymollusk 9y agoThis is because the portfolio strategy (1 hypergrowth + 20 failures) is the best strategy from the VC perspective. It's nearly impossible to know which startups will succeed (high uncertainty decision making), and very difficult to know how big the successful ones could be (open ended results). If it were simply as easy as building 17 solid startups to just 4 failures, I'm sure there would be more investment in that area. It seems much more likely to have maybe 5 solid startups (20% annual profit), 5 with possibilities (losing 20-30% per month) and 11 failures. Entrepreneurs suffer from their biased perspective; of course my startup could be solid and profitable, because otherwise why would I continue working on it? Therefore it seems rational to assume you can identify prospectively profitable startups. My opinion is that VC investment is a crapshoot, where nobody knows the odds of a given company. They're buying lotto tickets, and they'd rather buy $5mm tickets that have a max prize in the billions, instead of a $100k ticket that has a max prize in the millions. To change the current system, all we need to do is come up with a guaranteed way of evaluating whether a startup will be profitable.
- itchyouch 9y agoThey also want that billion dollar startup. Having 20x small, profitable companies netting say 1-5M/year isn't their modus operandi.
- traviswingo 9y agoAmidst the craziness that is the startup battlefield, its always a breath of fresh air to hear from the Basecamp founders. I feel more people should take this realistic approach to starting and running companies, and stop putting their life's work on 17 red.
- combatentropy 9y agoI would love to work at a company like Basecamp. Are there any other companies like them? - Less is more. Jason Fried is such a minimalist, https://www.inc.com/magazine/20091101/the-way-i-work-jason-fried-of-37signals.html https://www.inc.com/magazine/20091101/the-way-i-work-jason-f... - Few formal meetings. - No full-time managers. - In fact, just about everything in their books Getting Real, https://basecamp.com/books/getting-real https://basecamp.com/books/getting-real, and Rework. They do things that I've always felt are right but could not well argue. They are the opposite of most companies in so many ways, especially big corporations. If you haven't read their books, you might tell me, just work at a start-up. But you really have to go through Getting Real to see how much they differ from everyone else, even your typical start-up. The chapter about doing less than your competition is particularly devastating, different than even most start-ups.
- GuiA 9y agoWhy join? Start your own, run it like you want it to be run, and not only will you have the reward of working at a healthy place, you'll also have the reward of enabling dozens of employees to live fulfilling lives. I like to think that Jason Fried/DHH went to the bother of writing all these books and blog posts because they legitimately want to see more businesses run like theirs in the world.
- PopsiclePete 9y ago>Why join? Start your own, run it like you want it to be run Man, seriously, not everyone can, or even should, run a company. I like to write code, I don't like to run a business. That is such a silly, extremely silly thing to suggest. Work at Google? Why? Start your own Google! For realz?
- GuiA 9y agoYes, suggesting starting a company on a discussion board dedicated to startups and entrepreneurship is definitely an "extremely silly idea".
- 9y ago
- mankash666 9y agoThe only thing novel here is the blogging/marketing. Lots of profitable companies don't hire when they don't need to - they don't brand it a "hiring freeze", blog about it and have strangers fawn over the concept.
- xrd 9y agoI gave them 11 claps. I've never done that before.
- xrd 9y agoWho will be the first to hack into this now unhireable fortress and get a job with them? They have just made getting hired there a quest for every rails developer in the world. Changing the hiring and recruiting process, turning it on its head.
- rokhayakebe 9y agoRevenue?
- dblohm7 9y agoAnything larger than ~50 people and it becomes harder to maintain the company culture. Kudos to them for recognizing that they're happy where they're at.
- cardboardedge 9y agoJust a question, I don't use Basecamp or similar products-- does Basecamp have competitors who are great at product and execution and who are pouring more resources and time and focus (like, where the team doesn't split their time between their product and a major OSS project like ROR) into their offerings? Is there no such competitor that has a better product that poses a threat to Basecamp's retention of users?
- ravitation 9y agoWhat do people who use Basecamp think of the product? (This is a slightly reworded version of my initial question... Who uses Basecamp?)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Bjorkbat 9y agoControversial opinion incoming, but I've found their writings less valuable over time and see them more as opinions with an elitist tone. This is coming from someone who owns a copy of Rework and might just go over it again for it's unique quality of life advice. Lately I've really noticed that you don't just get advice anymore, you also get a little bit of commentary on how the rest of the tech industry is dumb or insane or both because those fools are doing it the old way and we're doing it our own progressive and enlightened way that we figured out on our own after we sat down, put on our critical thinking caps, and tried something different, and lo and behold it worked. This latest exercise stands out as particularly offensive because there really isn't any advice or wisdom worth sharing. They're just telling us that Basecamp had the best year ever and they don't feel like improving on it so they're not hiring at the moment. Correction, it's actually a hiring freeze. Same thing, except the phrase "hiring freeze" is normally used in the context of something bad. They're going to use it in a different context to, you know, get more claps on Medium. On top of all this they felt the need to do a little compare and contrast between what they're doing vs what the rest of those unenlightened fools in the tech industry are doing, i.e. reinvest profits into new ways to grow. Whatever. There are plenty of businesses that are happy with where they're at and settle-in, Basecamp is different because they're a tech company and they feel the need to blog about it. As for those companies that are growing, well, I think it's perfectly fine to keep growing, just don't turn your company into the equivalent of foie gras. It's just disappointing. I looked up to them, still kinda do, but this is just marketing spin designed to make something boring and innocuous look radical.
- ravitation 9y agoIf this were a Medium post, I'd give you lots of claps. And I'd highlight this... > They're just telling us that Basecamp had the best year ever and they don't feel like improving on it so they're not hiring at the moment. And... > There are plenty of businesses that are happy with where they're at and settle-in, Basecamp is different because they're a tech company and they feel the need to blog about it. I do enjoy their approach, quite a lot actually. But I'd enjoy it more if they spent more time sharing real experience and learnings (and failures), and less time projecting often absurd things on mainstream "entrepreneurial culture" while telling me how they're so much better.