15 ms·

so they: - Announced a new company policy publicly before telling the staff - Deleted internal threads that would go against their narrative of why they did s

• nate 5y ago
  When they DHH+Jason laid the 7 of us off from Highrise (the Basecamp CRM spin-off) no one even showed up online to say anything to us on our last day. Just the Head of Devops to turn off our access to things. (That guy at least apologized for no-one else being there) :/
  • whitepoplar 5y ago
    Could you speak a little more about your impression of the company while you were there? I know you didn't want to talk about it after you left, but so many of us are/were curious, especially as to how Basecamp's private image compares to its public image.
    • nate 5y ago
      It's tough to get it all down here in a comment. Maybe now this is all out I'll share more in some channels soon. I will say that last comment in Casey's article: “They don't want to deal with people, which is something you have to do as a manager … Jason and David just threw us away.” That could easily have been written from someone at Highrise. (It wasn't. But it could have been) We killed ourselves to turn that thing around. And it hurt. Some of this coming out I can definitely empathize with and concur with what people experienced. Thanks for asking.
      • whitepoplar 5y ago
        Thanks Nate, I really appreciate the reply, and just want to say how much I appreciate your (and your team's) work on Highrise. You poured everything into it and it's sad to read what happened at the end.
      • jf 5y ago
        Thanks for sharing your viewpoints Nate. I appreciate that you’re willing to tell stories in public that most people would only tell over beers
      • kondro 5y ago
        I appreciate all the work you did at Highrise, but after DHH+JF announced they were going to sell it because it was a distraction & renamed 37 Signals to Basecamp, it was difficult to keep using the product… even when they decided they didn't want to sell. The way in which DHH announced the _conversation_ he had with Salesforce was a thing of amazement all of its own.
        • nate 5y ago
          Thank you. Oh for sure. (for people not familiar) So we took Highrise over a bit after that announcement, and that was almost an impossible thing to overcome. It was hemorrhaging customers. It was always a turnaround project. Our biggest task for the first couple years was just trying to erase the "marketing" that we had shut down already.
  • indemnity 5y ago
    Shit, that sucks. What a classless way to go.
    • giglamesh 5y ago
      Just the opposite really. In a classless society people will not be treated like commodities.
      • sbarre 5y ago
        Words can have multiple meanings.
        • dools 5y ago
          "Hey Buster I thought you had class" "I thought YOU had class!"
  • rsanheim 5y ago
    The way a company deals with really difficult things like lay-offs speaks volume about the character, empathy, and skill of leadership at the top. This is really sad hearing about how crummy DHH and Fried are at one central piece of management: having very hard conversations with people while still treating them with respect and dignity.
    • fatbird 5y ago
      one central piece of management: having very hard conversations with people while still treating them with respect and dignity. I'd like to highlight this. I'd like to frame it and tape it to the head of every founder and entrepeneur so they have to look at it constantly. Hell, everyone who ever has to oversee other people. This is absolutely the heart and soul of good management and being a good person, and everyone who thinks they're created a great workplace, but doesn't know this, needs to chant this 1,000,000 times.
  • 1123581321 5y ago
    I really enjoyed reading about and watching your videos about your turnaround of Highrise as it was happening. Tons of work. Hope you'll publish what happened at the end someday.
    • nate 5y ago
      Thank you!
  • SrslyJosh 5y ago
    Ugh, that's definitely a relevant data point.
• indemnity 5y ago
  Even if your heart isn’t 100% in it, the least you could do is acknowledge and thank the people for their contributions while they were there. Kind of gives the lie to the progressive, all-in-it-together environment they portray with their public image. So, just like any other company really, except due to the excessive power of the top two execs, no recourse if you have a problem they don’t perceive as a problem.
  • ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago
    I hope people detach themselves from their offices a bit more. There is too much of worship of these companies like basecamp faang etc. Thing to remember is this is just a job and not to take moral guidance from companies.
• fallenfromgrace 5y ago
  for what it's worth, I find the picking on DHH for taking this call from bed unnecessary If he was sick, whether physically sick because of their own actions or otherwise...sick is sick. Seemed like a no-win for him whether he could either refuse to show up because he is sick, or show up to at least listen to what's going on (assuming recording it wasn't an option).
  • DiNovi 5y ago
    he had over 10 retweets and tweets the same day after this call. And did not use those tweets to thank his old team, just more "apple bad" stuff as if nothing had changed. Color me skeptical.
    • Trasmatta 5y ago
      DHH has one of the most annoying Twitter feeds. He picks a hobby horse every few months and tweets incessantly about it, until something else grabs his attention. Surely they shouldn't have been surprised that many of the people they chose to hire would be likewise strongly opinionated, and not take kindly to those policy changes.
      • nmfisher 5y ago
        I had to unfollow him for precisely this reason. It’s just a relentless torrent of negativity. Maybe his feed isn’t a great indication, but he seems like a very unhappy person.
    • fallenfromgrace 5y ago
      Hear you, but not knowing the exact timeline of events here...and seeing how this is a disaster on so many other levels...I find there is value in showing him grace for being...sick. (There is already so much bad, that his absence/presence is a moot point) But totally hear what you're saying and appreciate your skepticism!
      • predaking 5y ago
• Trasmatta 5y ago
  > Can't believe only 21 employees walked The article said they extended the buyout offer indefinitely, so I wouldn't be surprised if more people leave over the next few weeks. Even if you weren't thinking of leaving, 3-6 months severance would be really hard to turn down, especially if you know you can get another job quickly.
  • dudul 5y ago
    Absolutely. At this point you start interviewing for a new job and get the extra 3/6mo of cash.
  • freddie_mercury 5y ago
    If that many employees think they can get another, comparable, job quickly then that is implicitly saying Basecamp's overall compensation package (including how interesting the work is, extra time off in summer, profit sharing, etc, etc) isn't actually especially unique or valuable. Which kind of says something not great about Basecamp in and of itself.
    • etchalon 5y ago
      They also made their overall compensation package a lot loss less attractive with 10% profit sharing as a replacement for lifestyle subsidies.
      • comp_throw7 5y ago
        Do you mean a lot more attractive? I would be shocked if the aforementioned lifestyle subsidies were valued by the median employee at even $1000/year; if the profit sharing came out to less than 5 figures in a normal year (again, for a median employee) I would likewise be surprised.
        • etchalon 5y ago
          Humans are weird. I’ve found most employees seem to be be more attracted to guaranteed subsidies than to profit sharing. Not all, but most. Just my experience though. Obviously, both is better.
• rodgerd 5y ago
  > - Had a conservative senior employee go off about politics on the call discussing the new no politics policy. Ironically it seems that, contra to the narrative existing in the minds of quite a few HN posters, it was the Brietbart quoting, "white people are the real victims of racism" guy who had spend over a decade being unable to shut up about politics in the workplace.
  • SvenMarquardt 5y ago
    Where's your evidence of that?
    • davidgerard 5y ago
      at the top, you'll see a link to the article this thread is about
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    • FireBeyond 5y ago
      The quote in the article? And the fact that the author gave Singer a chance to respond, and Singer did so in some depth, and did not deny or rebut the claim that he said that?
      • SvenMarquardt 5y ago
        Which quote?
• mbergal 5y ago
  > - Announced a new company policy publicly before telling the staff Bad > - Deleted internal threads that would go against their narrative of why they did so I am not sure where you are getting this, but I might have missed it. > - Had a conservative senior employee go off about politics on the call discussing the new no politics policy. Yes, on 90th minute - we are not sure what was said before that. > - refused to reprimand said employee on the call For what? I don't understand. > - had one founder take this extremely sensitive call from his bed with his camera off and on mute. We all can be sick sometimes, certainly would be better to it in some other way, but maybe he was just that sick? - After the employees resigned, did not send any sort of public message thanking them for their time at the company. Pretty bad, especially considering comments from Highrise employee in this thread.
  • freewilly1040 5y ago
    The bit about deleting the emails is discussed in the article.
  • FireBeyond 5y ago
    > We all can be sick sometimes, certainly would be better to it in some other way, but maybe he was just that sick? He was busy hitting Twitter pretty hard during the day, throwing some shade at Apple. No mention of company, employees, anything. That's bad optics, regardless of how you're feeling. If you're sick, you're sick. If you're too sick to deal with the most pressing issue your company is facing, you should consider yourself too sick to devote chunks of time to Twitter feuds.
• ashtonkem 5y ago
  It seems like most of these attention hungry founders have extremely poor impulse or emotion control. I’m increasingly of the opinion that a “thought leader” CEO or founder is a red flag for a company, as tales of these people’s greatness always seems to diminish with distance.
  • alostpuppy 5y ago
    I’ve always thought of Elon Musk as DHH 2.0.
  • ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago
    That's why Bob iger of Disney is such a good leader. We need more like him instead of the Elon musk's.
  • cbsmith 5y ago
    What's always funny to me is this phenomenon generally has nothing to do with the actual people involved. It's just a story telling phenomenon. None of the people who know these thought leaders imbue them with qualities they don't have.
    • ashtonkem 5y ago
      That does not seem correct to me. It’s not a “story telling phenomenon” that DHH and Jason Fried are perceived as industry thought leaders, it’s the result of both repeated actions on their part, plus some luck. Those two didn’t accidentally end up in the public conversation, they wrote five books about working, plus god knows how many blog posts, talks, and more. That is explicitly attention seeking behavior, and it’s a hard prerequisite to becoming a “thought leader” or even just famous enough that a three letter initial is enough to identify yourself.
      • antoniuschan99 5y ago
        It’s also content marketing (both the blog and books)
• azangru 5y ago
  > - Had a conservative senior employee go off about politics on the call discussing the new no politics policy. The article really doesn't tell us whether that senior employee just went off on a political tangent for no reason whatsoever, or he was responding to an earlier made political statement that he decided to disagree with. What the article does suggest is that that contribution by that senior employee was preceded by a discussion of the funny names list that involved the mentioning of the "pyramid of hate". That pyramid is already a political statement and should not, if the company were true to its new policy, have been brought up in the discussion.
  • rst 5y ago
    I'm not sure the context of the Singer's remarks matters much -- they were clearly against the newly announced policy that the meeting itself was about. And as a senior employee and member of the company's leadership, it was more incumbent on him than on others to follow the policy, in order to set the tone and be a good example. (NB even David and Jason seem to have recognized this -- after the meeting, Singer was suspended; he's since resigned, but this is likely the only one of the several recent resignations that was not entirely of the employee's own volition.)
  • itsdrewmiller 5y ago
    The discussion of the "funny names" list including the pyramid of hate discussion was what led to the "no politics" rule - it didn't happen in violation of it.
  • faizmokhtar 5y ago
    Based on what I followed from Twitter, that senior employee is the one who regularly posted articles from Breitbart to the internal thread that was deleted.