11 ms·

Your life's work

316 points by rjim86 14y ago

callmeed 14y ago
There's a difference between being a long-term middle manager at someone else's company and being a long-term founder at your own company. I wouldn't choose the former and I doubt DHH would either (of course, I don't know him so maybe I'm wrong).
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  The transitive insight here is that operating the company for the long haul comes from the top, so when I was at Intel there was never any doubt in my mind that Intel planned to be around 100 years from now, so being a middle manager there would (and for some has) been a lifes work. My manager there, the guy who hired me in 84 retired after having been there for 30 years (he had started in 1980).
edw519 14y ago
I’d be happy if 37signals is the last place I work. 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?
- jshen 14y ago
  It only makes it slightly better if it's your company, but even if it's your own company something out of your control can fuck it up. We often forget that you can get kicked out of your own company. Apple, Cisco, etc. I once did an amazing startup that was working in the online pokern space, we were making good money and everyone loved what we were doing. Congress fucked that up! 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.
- alberth 14y ago
  >>"I’d be happy if 37signals is the last place I work." 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.
  - angersock 14y ago
    I think you misread the meaning--I think he's saying "Hey, I don't ever want to work for/work at/start another company". That's the opposite of what you're worried about.
    - ksmiley 14y ago
      Perhaps he thinks the cofounder wants to coast along in a cushy position for the rest of his life, burdening the company. He's saying "phew! I don't ever have to apply for another job! puts feet on desk" 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.
  - moconnor 14y ago
    In what way does a co-founder intending to stay with the company put its long-term commitment to paying customers at risk?
    - eric-hu 14y ago
      My guess is that the statement "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.
  - eyko 14y ago
    what?
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- jonnathanson 14y ago
  I think we've fully transitioned from the old world, wherein we built our careers around a given company. These days we have to build our careers around skill sets, or industry circles, or knowledge bases. Essentially, the 40-year investment is no longer in Company X, but in Company Me. 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.
  - codegeek 14y ago
    "the 40-year investment is no longer in Company X, but in Company Me." Upvoted for this. If everyone understands this well, they will surely be more happy in the long run.
    - davidw 14y ago
      I wonder if perhaps it's time for the pendulum to swing back the other way some. I mean, I'm pretty happy doing my own thing, but there are plenty of people who just want to have some security in life, and in a world where there's little of that, a company that provides some might be able to attract people. Maybe not in an industry like ours, but who knows... just a random thought.
      - 14y ago
- paulhauggis 14y ago
  This is exactly my thought. No matter where you work (unless you own the company of course), you will always have to do work that you don't want to do. 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.
  - sokoloff 14y ago
    Congrats. Be prepared to still do a lot of work that you don't want to do. It'll just might more clear why and feel more like a rational choice, but make no mistake: you'll have a lot to do that you don't want to do...
h2s 14y ago
I thought this was going to be something different based on the title. A few years ago I had a realisation: we are each of us every day working on our life's work. Your life's work doesn't begin on some nebulous future date after you land that dream job or get to start a clean project in a fresh new codebase. The bug you fixed yesterday, the optional parameter you added to that method today: that's your life's work. 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.
- virtualwhys 14y ago
  @h2s that is getting into the nitty gritty, nicely said. One and only life, easy to forget while coding away -- even if you love what you do, it's going to end, badly, as for as continuation is concerned. 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 ;-)
- r0s 14y ago
  I think of this realization in my own life as The Moment of Panic. Wherein I suddenly realized time was passing. 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.
  - h2s 14y ago
    > time was passing This is an interesting alternative way of looking at it, yeah. I have said several times in the past that I basically live my whole life as if the "time running out" music from Mario was playing [1], but that's more about my impatience in everyday life than any wise long-term awareness of my own mortality. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pDzJC9R3HA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pDzJC9R3HA
ChuckMcM 14y ago
This is a great insight, not just for work but for life in general. 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.
swombat 14y ago
I’d be happy if 37signals is the last place I work. In an industry so focused on the booms and busts, I find myself a kindred spirit with the firms of old. Places where people happily reported to work for 40 years, picking up a snazzy gold watch at the end as a token of life-long loyalty. I'm sure picking up the odd Lamborghini ( http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/coyotes-pulitzer-and-dhhs-lamborghini.html http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/coyotes-pulitzer-... ) as a token of last month's worth of effort is also a good plus... :-)
- ynniv 14y ago
  The Lambo was peanuts compared to the custom Zonda. [http://www.leftlanenews.com/pagani-zonda-hh.html http://www.leftlanenews.com/pagani-zonda-hh.html]
SatvikBeri 14y ago
I've found that thinking of the next 5, 10, and 50 years is a useful mental trick. It puts me in a frame of mind that helps me make better decisions: will working myself to death on feature X help me 10 years from now? (Very rarely, the answer is yes.) Does it make sense to spend more time socializing, studying, or working? I don't want to exercise now, but how will going to the gym affect me in 5 years? 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.
deleted 14y ago
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sergiotapia 14y ago
As I was reading I was thinking to myself, "Damn! This guy must really love his job. I can't imagine being that loyal to a company for years and years and years. Unless I was a co-founder and it was partly mine." 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.
- kayoone 14y ago
  his name is actually also on the top ;)
johnward 14y ago
I've never once held a job that I thought I could do for another 5 years. I couldn't even imagine doing what I'm doing now for the rest of my life. I find that I usually get bored/tired of the BS after 2-3 years. Companies aren't loyal to their employees. I'm not loyal to them.
projectileboy 14y ago
I wrote about this once, FWIW... the technical skills one should focus on that have lasting value: http://softwareboy.blogspot.com/2009/10/learning-things-of-lasting-value.html http://softwareboy.blogspot.com/2009/10/learning-things-of-l...
r0s 14y ago
That's it, I'm applying to Valve.
- pestaa 14y ago
  Good luck and keep us posted! ;)
kevinalexbrown 14y ago
I see a lot of comments suggesting "it's his company, of course he wants it to be good for him!" (One commenter used the term "insipid"). 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.
- sergiotapia 14y ago
  Are you referring to my comment? I'm not quite sure if you're agreeing with me, or just going off on a tangent and not actually refuting my point.
kremdela 14y ago
I attended a talk at SXSW a few years ago, mostly about the Millennial generation and their desire to work with you, not for you. 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.
Skywing 14y ago
I have yet to have this feeling for a company that I work at, but I do remember having this feeling for an online gaming "clan", back in the day. On battle.net, for Diablo, people would make clans and just game together, and eventually war other clans, etc. It was normal to "clan hop" around and join basically every clan until you're in the best clan. I remember the day when a friend and I jokingly joined what we thought was going to be a lame no-name clan, and we had intentions of sneakily doing something as members of that random clan. Turns out that we really enjoyed that clan and stayed with it. I remember the strange change of perspective that I had on clans when I realized that the clan I had joined was so enjoyable that it was without a doubt going to be better than any other clan out there, in my opinion. Because of that enthusiasm for the clan, we all ended up sticking together and ended up being like one of the longest lasting and well known clans of that time period. We moved off of battle.net and onto our own IRC server which we've all been on, every day, since like 2001. It's awesome what that kind of realization can lead to, if given the chance.
vojant 14y ago
That's just not for me.
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jasonkester 14y ago
I think the main reason you don't see this sort of 40-year loyalty in the software industry is money. 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.
- georgemcbay 14y ago
  "Nobody gives 100% raises every other year, but the market as a whole seems to be quite happy to do exactly that." 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!
  - gyom 14y ago
    I think it was meant to be applicable only a few times. He has a point, though, about how unthinkable a 100% raise seems, but if you get another job it's entirely possible.
- absconditus 14y ago
  Such large raises generally do not continue after one has 3-5 years of experience.
drats 14y ago
There isn't a 37 signals "voting ring" but pretty much we see about a blog per week from them of extremely low/general quality. Often they are of a lifestyle/why we didn't go big and why we are actually better than all the big IPOs changing the world nature. I mean this post boils down to "I love my company (that I own, not that I work for)". I think even if PG posted a blog so vapid, "I love Ycombinator, I can picture working here for years", even he would get a bit of fire. I certainly hope we aren't going to be seeing these vapid posts for a decade or more from 37S. You could randomly select a book from the self-help or business section of a bookstore, select a random page, and have a good chance of getting something more insightful than a standard weekly 37s post. 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.
- rednukleus 14y ago
  > there isn't a voting ring but there is probably a bunch of social contacts who are up voting this. 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.
zaidf 14y ago
Sounds a lot like Charlie Munger's philosophy that he likes to invest in few businesses that let him sit back and relax for a long time instead of constantly having to worry about getting out of a position at a profit.
deleted 14y ago
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ixacto 14y ago
The USA will still have nukes. People will still drive cars. This aint changing...
eldavido 14y ago
I think you find this attitude a lot more in Europe than the United States. I see it in ZenDesk a lot too, living here in SF and having visited their offices a fair number of times.
logic 14y ago
I suspect the 37signals employment contracts still say "at will" somewhere in them. In fact, Jason Fried talked about exactly that at one point: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2239-employment-contracts-what-are-they-good-for http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2239-employment-contracts-wha... 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.
- jackowayed 14y ago
  What are you actually asking for? Employment in the US is at will by default, unless the employer and employee sign a contract explicitly agreeing to change something about that relationship. What do you actually want in that contract to give you? A guaranteed huge severance package that incentivizes them to keep you? Something that fully makes them unable to fire you without demonstrated cause? Do you also want to lose some of the freedom you have to walk away if they sell and massively change company culture, start hiring worse people, change what they work on or what technologies they use in a way that moves away from your interests, etc? 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.
  - lmm 14y ago
    Where I live you'd expect at a minimum a month's notice from either party (in the contract); 3 months is reasonably common. That's not a long time to wait to leave (and you can reduce it by mutual agreement; most companies will be happy to let you leave earlier once you've handed everything over), but it gives you at least a little time to hit the ground running. As someone who's currently going through the legally-required consultation process prior to redundancies immediately after getting a mortgage, had the company been able to simply say "nope, you no longer have a job, don't come in tomorrow" it would've massively screwed me over. (Of course, in a world where that was a possibility my actions would have been different). 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.
meerita 14y ago
Good rant if you have a sucessful product to sustain your experimentional and fun lifestyle. For the rest of the crowd: keep calm and do work.
6ren 14y ago
10 years is an interesting test. Moore's Law predicts density increase of 100-fold (2^(10/1.5)= 101.6). Cost and processing power usually follow. 100x faster phones overshoots most demand for desktops, so not only would desktops be replaced, we'd likely have an even-smaller form-factor than phones. That's one decade. What to invest in, that will still be relevant in decades? People and problem-solving. Maybe unix and web...
volandovengo 14y ago
"I’d be happy if 37signals is the last place I work. In an industry so focused on the booms and busts, I find myself a kindred spirit with the firms of old." 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.
- lmm 14y ago
  The recent stories from Dustin Curtis have given me a lot more respect for DHH. Sure, he's not solved world hunger, but he's written a major, publicly useful library/framework, and he has paying clients who appreciate the work he does (in my limited experience a lot of consulting work is "easy" by software industry standards - but to a client with no expertise having someone who can do this stuff is a godsend. They don't pay you to solve hard technical problems, they pay you to integrate with their terrible systems and handle their lack of process). He's made the world a better place; perhaps in a small way, but few of us can hope for better. 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".
shanellem 14y ago
"If you’re not committed to your life’s work in a company and with people you could endure for decades, are you making progress on it?" 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.
gadders 14y ago
My life's work is my daughter. Actual work comes way, way behind.

316 points by rjim86 14y ago

There's a difference between being a long-term middle manager at someone else's company and being a long-term founder at your own company. I wouldn't choose the former and I doubt DHH would either (of course, I don't know him so maybe I'm wrong).

ChuckMcM 14y ago
The transitive insight here is that operating the company for the long haul comes from the top, so when I was at Intel there was never any doubt in my mind that Intel planned to be around 100 years from now, so being a middle manager there would (and for some has) been a lifes work. My manager there, the guy who hired me in 84 retired after having been there for 30 years (he had started in 1980).

edw519 14y ago

I’d be happy if 37signals is the last place I work. 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?

jshen 14y ago
It only makes it slightly better if it's your company, but even if it's your own company something out of your control can fuck it up. We often forget that you can get kicked out of your own company. Apple, Cisco, etc. I once did an amazing startup that was working in the online pokern space, we were making good money and everyone loved what we were doing. Congress fucked that up! 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.
alberth 14y ago
>>"I’d be happy if 37signals is the last place I work." 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.
- angersock 14y ago
  I think you misread the meaning--I think he's saying "Hey, I don't ever want to work for/work at/start another company". That's the opposite of what you're worried about.
  - ksmiley 14y ago
    Perhaps he thinks the cofounder wants to coast along in a cushy position for the rest of his life, burdening the company. He's saying "phew! I don't ever have to apply for another job! puts feet on desk" 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.
- moconnor 14y ago
  In what way does a co-founder intending to stay with the company put its long-term commitment to paying customers at risk?
  - eric-hu 14y ago
    My guess is that the statement "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.
- eyko 14y ago
  what?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
jonnathanson 14y ago
I think we've fully transitioned from the old world, wherein we built our careers around a given company. These days we have to build our careers around skill sets, or industry circles, or knowledge bases. Essentially, the 40-year investment is no longer in Company X, but in Company Me. 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.
- codegeek 14y ago
  "the 40-year investment is no longer in Company X, but in Company Me." Upvoted for this. If everyone understands this well, they will surely be more happy in the long run.
  - davidw 14y ago
    I wonder if perhaps it's time for the pendulum to swing back the other way some. I mean, I'm pretty happy doing my own thing, but there are plenty of people who just want to have some security in life, and in a world where there's little of that, a company that provides some might be able to attract people. Maybe not in an industry like ours, but who knows... just a random thought.
    - 14y ago
paulhauggis 14y ago
This is exactly my thought. No matter where you work (unless you own the company of course), you will always have to do work that you don't want to do. 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.
- sokoloff 14y ago
  Congrats. Be prepared to still do a lot of work that you don't want to do. It'll just might more clear why and feel more like a rational choice, but make no mistake: you'll have a lot to do that you don't want to do...

h2s 14y ago

I thought this was going to be something different based on the title. A few years ago I had a realisation: we are each of us every day working on our life's work. Your life's work doesn't begin on some nebulous future date after you land that dream job or get to start a clean project in a fresh new codebase. The bug you fixed yesterday, the optional parameter you added to that method today: that's your life's work. 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.

virtualwhys 14y ago
@h2s that is getting into the nitty gritty, nicely said. One and only life, easy to forget while coding away -- even if you love what you do, it's going to end, badly, as for as continuation is concerned. 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 ;-)
r0s 14y ago
I think of this realization in my own life as The Moment of Panic. Wherein I suddenly realized time was passing. 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.
- h2s 14y ago
  > time was passing This is an interesting alternative way of looking at it, yeah. I have said several times in the past that I basically live my whole life as if the "time running out" music from Mario was playing [1], but that's more about my impatience in everyday life than any wise long-term awareness of my own mortality. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pDzJC9R3HA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pDzJC9R3HA

ChuckMcM 14y ago

This is a great insight, not just for work but for life in general. 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.

swombat 14y ago

I’d be happy if 37signals is the last place I work. In an industry so focused on the booms and busts, I find myself a kindred spirit with the firms of old. Places where people happily reported to work for 40 years, picking up a snazzy gold watch at the end as a token of life-long loyalty. I'm sure picking up the odd Lamborghini ( http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/coyotes-pulitzer-and-dhhs-lamborghini.html http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/coyotes-pulitzer-... ) as a token of last month's worth of effort is also a good plus... :-)

ynniv 14y ago
The Lambo was peanuts compared to the custom Zonda. [http://www.leftlanenews.com/pagani-zonda-hh.html http://www.leftlanenews.com/pagani-zonda-hh.html]

SatvikBeri 14y ago

I've found that thinking of the next 5, 10, and 50 years is a useful mental trick. It puts me in a frame of mind that helps me make better decisions: will working myself to death on feature X help me 10 years from now? (Very rarely, the answer is yes.) Does it make sense to spend more time socializing, studying, or working? I don't want to exercise now, but how will going to the gym affect me in 5 years? 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.

deleted 14y ago

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sergiotapia 14y ago

As I was reading I was thinking to myself, "Damn! This guy must really love his job. I can't imagine being that loyal to a company for years and years and years. Unless I was a co-founder and it was partly mine." 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.

kayoone 14y ago
his name is actually also on the top ;)

johnward 14y ago

I've never once held a job that I thought I could do for another 5 years. I couldn't even imagine doing what I'm doing now for the rest of my life. I find that I usually get bored/tired of the BS after 2-3 years. Companies aren't loyal to their employees. I'm not loyal to them.

projectileboy 14y ago

I wrote about this once, FWIW... the technical skills one should focus on that have lasting value: http://softwareboy.blogspot.com/2009/10/learning-things-of-lasting-value.html http://softwareboy.blogspot.com/2009/10/learning-things-of-l...

r0s 14y ago

That's it, I'm applying to Valve.

pestaa 14y ago
Good luck and keep us posted! ;)

kevinalexbrown 14y ago

I see a lot of comments suggesting "it's his company, of course he wants it to be good for him!" (One commenter used the term "insipid"). 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.

sergiotapia 14y ago
Are you referring to my comment? I'm not quite sure if you're agreeing with me, or just going off on a tangent and not actually refuting my point.

kremdela 14y ago

I attended a talk at SXSW a few years ago, mostly about the Millennial generation and their desire to work with you, not for you. 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.

Skywing 14y ago

I have yet to have this feeling for a company that I work at, but I do remember having this feeling for an online gaming "clan", back in the day. On battle.net, for Diablo, people would make clans and just game together, and eventually war other clans, etc. It was normal to "clan hop" around and join basically every clan until you're in the best clan. I remember the day when a friend and I jokingly joined what we thought was going to be a lame no-name clan, and we had intentions of sneakily doing something as members of that random clan. Turns out that we really enjoyed that clan and stayed with it. I remember the strange change of perspective that I had on clans when I realized that the clan I had joined was so enjoyable that it was without a doubt going to be better than any other clan out there, in my opinion. Because of that enthusiasm for the clan, we all ended up sticking together and ended up being like one of the longest lasting and well known clans of that time period. We moved off of battle.net and onto our own IRC server which we've all been on, every day, since like 2001. It's awesome what that kind of realization can lead to, if given the chance.

vojant 14y ago

That's just not for me.

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toprxsavings 14y ago

jasonkester 14y ago

I think the main reason you don't see this sort of 40-year loyalty in the software industry is money. 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.

georgemcbay 14y ago
"Nobody gives 100% raises every other year, but the market as a whole seems to be quite happy to do exactly that." 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!
- gyom 14y ago
  I think it was meant to be applicable only a few times. He has a point, though, about how unthinkable a 100% raise seems, but if you get another job it's entirely possible.
absconditus 14y ago
Such large raises generally do not continue after one has 3-5 years of experience.

drats 14y ago

There isn't a 37 signals "voting ring" but pretty much we see about a blog per week from them of extremely low/general quality. Often they are of a lifestyle/why we didn't go big and why we are actually better than all the big IPOs changing the world nature. I mean this post boils down to "I love my company (that I own, not that I work for)". I think even if PG posted a blog so vapid, "I love Ycombinator, I can picture working here for years", even he would get a bit of fire. I certainly hope we aren't going to be seeing these vapid posts for a decade or more from 37S. You could randomly select a book from the self-help or business section of a bookstore, select a random page, and have a good chance of getting something more insightful than a standard weekly 37s post. 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.

rednukleus 14y ago
> there isn't a voting ring but there is probably a bunch of social contacts who are up voting this. 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.

zaidf 14y ago

Sounds a lot like Charlie Munger's philosophy that he likes to invest in few businesses that let him sit back and relax for a long time instead of constantly having to worry about getting out of a position at a profit.

deleted 14y ago

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ixacto 14y ago

The USA will still have nukes. People will still drive cars. This aint changing...

eldavido 14y ago

I think you find this attitude a lot more in Europe than the United States. I see it in ZenDesk a lot too, living here in SF and having visited their offices a fair number of times.

logic 14y ago

I suspect the 37signals employment contracts still say "at will" somewhere in them. In fact, Jason Fried talked about exactly that at one point: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2239-employment-contracts-what-are-they-good-for http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2239-employment-contracts-wha... 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.

jackowayed 14y ago
What are you actually asking for? Employment in the US is at will by default, unless the employer and employee sign a contract explicitly agreeing to change something about that relationship. What do you actually want in that contract to give you? A guaranteed huge severance package that incentivizes them to keep you? Something that fully makes them unable to fire you without demonstrated cause? Do you also want to lose some of the freedom you have to walk away if they sell and massively change company culture, start hiring worse people, change what they work on or what technologies they use in a way that moves away from your interests, etc? 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.
- lmm 14y ago
  Where I live you'd expect at a minimum a month's notice from either party (in the contract); 3 months is reasonably common. That's not a long time to wait to leave (and you can reduce it by mutual agreement; most companies will be happy to let you leave earlier once you've handed everything over), but it gives you at least a little time to hit the ground running. As someone who's currently going through the legally-required consultation process prior to redundancies immediately after getting a mortgage, had the company been able to simply say "nope, you no longer have a job, don't come in tomorrow" it would've massively screwed me over. (Of course, in a world where that was a possibility my actions would have been different). 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.

meerita 14y ago

Good rant if you have a sucessful product to sustain your experimentional and fun lifestyle. For the rest of the crowd: keep calm and do work.

6ren 14y ago

10 years is an interesting test. Moore's Law predicts density increase of 100-fold (2^(10/1.5)= 101.6). Cost and processing power usually follow. 100x faster phones overshoots most demand for desktops, so not only would desktops be replaced, we'd likely have an even-smaller form-factor than phones. That's one decade. What to invest in, that will still be relevant in decades? People and problem-solving. Maybe unix and web...

volandovengo 14y ago

"I’d be happy if 37signals is the last place I work. In an industry so focused on the booms and busts, I find myself a kindred spirit with the firms of old." 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.

lmm 14y ago
The recent stories from Dustin Curtis have given me a lot more respect for DHH. Sure, he's not solved world hunger, but he's written a major, publicly useful library/framework, and he has paying clients who appreciate the work he does (in my limited experience a lot of consulting work is "easy" by software industry standards - but to a client with no expertise having someone who can do this stuff is a godsend. They don't pay you to solve hard technical problems, they pay you to integrate with their terrible systems and handle their lack of process). He's made the world a better place; perhaps in a small way, but few of us can hope for better. 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".

shanellem 14y ago

"If you’re not committed to your life’s work in a company and with people you could endure for decades, are you making progress on it?" 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.

gadders 14y ago

My life's work is my daughter. Actual work comes way, way behind.