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37signals is known for sustainable, human-being focused development among other things. They solve problems by breaking them into first principles and composin

37signals is known for sustainable, human-being focused development among other things. They solve problems by breaking them into first principles and composing them into shapes that fit them. They've created RoR which at the time brought together with textmate millions of developers onto mac and "programming can be actually pleasant and cool" side. Their hero style page was copied everywhere on the internet which is visible to this day. Many unicorns grew from RoR, many use it to this day. They are open source advocates. They create environment of certain kind of skepticism towards established tech while injecting novel approaches here and there. You're saying something about inline code highlighting and jumping onto shitting over whole company and saying something about kubernetes. It's hard to take it seriously even if you have a point there that some functionality is embarrassingly missing in one of their products.

dlisboa 4y ago
I think his criticism is warranted when you think of 37signals without Ruby on Rails or the open source angle. Judging them just on their products. I don't really see people refer to them as the cream of the crop. Basecamp's UX is opinionated but still complicated: I get lost on it even though it's a simple product. It seems to work well for a team more similar to 37signals'. Hey.com I haven't seen take the world by storm, even though it does seem better than most e-mail software (and I do appreciate their technological solutions on it). I guess most people don't have that problem with e-mail that the Basecamp founders do. That's a bit of a trend for them: they often claim people should do one thing and everything else is worse, even though that one thing really works for them and might not work for anyone else. Their agile methodology, their team size, their tech stack, etc. they often pose themselves as the "sane" ones doing it simple and easy, while everyone else is chasing the wrong thing. So in that sense I can see why OP said they're reactionary. I would disagree, however, as they've been revolutionary on many fronts, but it's usually as part of a contrarian view that sometimes is more of a miss than a hit.
madeofpalk 4y ago
> human-being focused development So human-being focused a third of their human-being employees quit after the CEO wrote a blog post! https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/30/22412714/basecamp-employees-memo-policy-hansson-fried-controversy https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/30/22412714/basecamp-employe...
- leansensei 4y ago
  Yes, it's the prerogative of a company to not want its work environment to be polluted with discussions that have no relationship to the tasks at hand. It is human-focused to not pussyfoot around such decisions but to instead bring clarity to the table and allow humans to make their choice. More companies should be like that and, in fact, in Europe, still are.
  - madeofpalk 4y ago
    > no relationship to the tasks at hand. > It is human-focused Human-focused, as long as the human is white and male. When you make a communications service, you probably want to involve a wide range of perspectives to make sure you build a good product that doesn't contribute harm. Specifically with Hey, they've walked back a bunch of features (props for being reactive, I guess) after they got a modicum of feedback from people that don't look like the two founders. - https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1275991097261449216 https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1275991097261449216 "This is a great and important perspective we hadn’t considered" is a stunning example - You don't need to (and can't!) personally consider every perspective, but maybe if you involved more people in the product development process you get to catch these things before you release them. Human-focused. - https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1275595820121776128 https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1275595820121776128 - https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1276173017060569089 https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1276173017060569089
    - sickcodebruh 4y ago
      Do you know how many people they did have working on this, or what people specifically were lacking to catch these? Do you have insight into what major problems they caught before release that they public never saw?
- tinus_hn 4y ago
  Tweeting you ‘plan to leave’ is not the same as actually quitting.
- PedroBatista 4y ago

dlisboa 4y ago

I think his criticism is warranted when you think of 37signals without Ruby on Rails or the open source angle. Judging them just on their products. I don't really see people refer to them as the cream of the crop. Basecamp's UX is opinionated but still complicated: I get lost on it even though it's a simple product. It seems to work well for a team more similar to 37signals'. Hey.com I haven't seen take the world by storm, even though it does seem better than most e-mail software (and I do appreciate their technological solutions on it). I guess most people don't have that problem with e-mail that the Basecamp founders do. That's a bit of a trend for them: they often claim people should do one thing and everything else is worse, even though that one thing really works for them and might not work for anyone else. Their agile methodology, their team size, their tech stack, etc. they often pose themselves as the "sane" ones doing it simple and easy, while everyone else is chasing the wrong thing. So in that sense I can see why OP said they're reactionary. I would disagree, however, as they've been revolutionary on many fronts, but it's usually as part of a contrarian view that sometimes is more of a miss than a hit.

madeofpalk 4y ago

> human-being focused development So human-being focused a third of their human-being employees quit after the CEO wrote a blog post! https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/30/22412714/basecamp-employees-memo-policy-hansson-fried-controversy https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/30/22412714/basecamp-employe...

leansensei 4y ago
Yes, it's the prerogative of a company to not want its work environment to be polluted with discussions that have no relationship to the tasks at hand. It is human-focused to not pussyfoot around such decisions but to instead bring clarity to the table and allow humans to make their choice. More companies should be like that and, in fact, in Europe, still are.
- madeofpalk 4y ago
  > no relationship to the tasks at hand. > It is human-focused Human-focused, as long as the human is white and male. When you make a communications service, you probably want to involve a wide range of perspectives to make sure you build a good product that doesn't contribute harm. Specifically with Hey, they've walked back a bunch of features (props for being reactive, I guess) after they got a modicum of feedback from people that don't look like the two founders. - https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1275991097261449216 https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1275991097261449216 "This is a great and important perspective we hadn’t considered" is a stunning example - You don't need to (and can't!) personally consider every perspective, but maybe if you involved more people in the product development process you get to catch these things before you release them. Human-focused. - https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1275595820121776128 https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1275595820121776128 - https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1276173017060569089 https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1276173017060569089
  - sickcodebruh 4y ago
    Do you know how many people they did have working on this, or what people specifically were lacking to catch these? Do you have insight into what major problems they caught before release that they public never saw?
tinus_hn 4y ago
Tweeting you ‘plan to leave’ is not the same as actually quitting.
PedroBatista 4y ago