CCTV Installations

Since Shape Up came out, many people asked some version of this question: I understand you make bets six weeks at a time. But how do you plan in the longer term? Don’t you have some kind of a roadmap? The short answer is: no. We don’t have roadmaps. We think about what to do at the timescale larger than single bets, but we do it in a different way. Why not a roadmap? No matter how you try to hedge it, a roadmap communicates a plan—a series of commitments—to other people. We of course have lots of ideas about what we’re going to do next. But we don’t want to make any commitments, internally or externally. This is very important. What’s wrong with committing to future work? First, there’s the uncertainty. We don’t have a crystal ball. Say we have features A, B, and C we want to build. We don’t know if A is going to work out as planned, and what that would mean for B. We don’t know if we’ll have a eureka in the bathtub one day, and new idea X will suddenly feel much more import...

Can you believe we used to willingly tell Google about every single visitor to basecamp.com by way of Google Analytics? Letting them collect every last byte of information possible through the spying eye of their tracking pixel. Ugh. But 2020 isn’t 2010. Our naiveté around data, who captures it, and what they do with it has collectively been brought to shame. Most people now sit with basic understanding that using the internet leaves behind a data trail, and quite a few people have begun to question just how deep that trail should be, and who should have the right to follow it. In this new world, it feels like an obligation to make sure we’re not aiding and abetting those who seek to exploit our data. Those who hoard every little clue in order to piece of together a puzzle that’ll ultimately reveal all our weakest points and moments, then sell that picture to the highest bidder. The internet needs to know less about us, not more. Just because it’s possible to track someone doesn’t ...

After a recent talk I gave, a student came up to me and asked me for one bit of advice for someone’s who’s still in school but about to graduate. I’ve always found these questions difficult to answer. For one, It’s been 25 years since I’ve been in college. I don’t remember what I wished I knew back then, and today I know even less about what would be useful to know right now. So I backed off a specific, and shot for a general. The advice was this: Habits are always forming. No matter what you do, you’re also forming habits too. Keep that in mind with whatever you do. When we talk about habits, we generally talk about learning good habits. Or forming good habits. Both of these outcomes suggest we can end up with the habits we want. And technically we can! But most of the habits we have are habits we ended up with after years of unconscious behavior. They’re not intentional. They’ve been planting deep roots under the surface, sight unseen. Fertilized, watered, and well-fed by recu...

We pay at the top 10% of San Francisco market rates for salary + bonus (but not stock options) at Basecamp. Those rates apply to everyone here, regardless of the role or where they actually live. We don’t even employ anyone who live in San Francisco! We picked San Francisco as our benchmark because it’s the highest in the world for technology, and because we could afford it, after carefully growing a profitable software business for 15 years. For programmers, designers, operations, administration, and the vast majority of other roles at Basecamp, simply following the top of the market rates is a pretty sweet deal: High salaries, benchmarked against the top market, yet most people live in places with far lower cost of living, which means we’re even more competitive in local markets. (While we might be top 10% for San Francisco, I’m pretty sure we’re in the top 1% for, say, Fenwick, Ontario or Spokane, Washington or Madrid, Spain.) But where this doesn’t work as well is when the San ...

Basecamp is hiring a director of operations to run the team responsible for all our technical infrastructure. Our suite of applications is served from a mix of our own servers in leased data-center space and cloud setups in Google Cloud and AWS. The job is to ensure that everything runs smoothly, the lights stay on, and we’ve prepared for bad luck with good planning. This is a role for someone with experience running a team at least as big as ours and a multi-million dollar budget. You’ll be managing a team of seven and report to the CTO. Basecamp is a remote-work company, but you’ll need at least 4 hours of overlap with Chicago time in your normal work-day routine. We strongly encourage candidates of all different backgrounds and identities to apply. Each new hire is an opportunity for us to bring in a different perspective, and we are always eager to further diversify our company. Basecamp is committed to building an inclusive, supportive place for you to do the best and most r...

Whenever we write a book, we include our email at the end so people can reach out and share their stories. With their permission, I’d like to share an email we received this morning from a reader of “ It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work. ” Published as written, only their name is being withheld at their request: Hi Jason, David, Your book ‘It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work’ prompted me to change my life. Thank you.  When I started reading the book back in January this year, I was working 14-16 hour workdays, working weekends, and practically had no life outside of work. I was eating unhealthy food because I had no time to cook and my house (I live alone) resounded the inside of a shabby animal’s cage. I was following what was told to me as the right path to success, and I was giving away my life for a boss who somewhere deep down didn’t really care for me at all. My company offered me no benefits and it was a pathetic environment to work in. And I stayed, slogged day in and...

It’s always inspiring to read about the early days of an idea. About the doubt, the pushback, the impossibilities, the models telling you it’ll be too expensive, the “but, but, but…”, the breakthroughs, the vision, and the drive when you just have a hunch. The knowing that there’s no way to know until you try. These moments are often wrapped with unusual combination of vulnerability and confidence. I find them fascinating. Here’s an oral history of how Amazon Prime came to be . from Signal v. Noise https://m.signalvnoise.com/how-amazon-prime-came-to-be/ via Local CCTV

As we write in “ It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work “, you should treat your company as a product too. To improve a product, you listen, learn, (re)consider, concept, and iterate . The same approach should be used to improve your company itself. How you work, how you manage, how you develop and communicate policies and procedures should all improve through iteration as well. With that, we wanted to share how we’re improving through iteration on the inside. We recently updated our Employee Handbook (which anyone in the world can read) to clarify a few key points: First, what are the different responsibilities of an executive vs. a manager vs. an individual? At some level the differences are obvious, but at the edges it’s not always clear. And where there’s murkiness, there’s often confusion and then conjecture. In the pursuit of clarity, we recently added a section to the handbook defining these responsibilities . Second, what happens if an employee finds themselves in a situation...

Wouldn’t it be great if there really was just one secret you had to know, and all your professional or entrepreneurial dreams would come true? Then you wouldn’t have to bother trying what works for your or your domain. You’d just have to apply The Secret , and voila! Needless to say, if there is such a unifying secret, I haven’t found or heard of it. And yet, I keep seeing this false hope powering one of the most common questions I get in interviews: What’s THE ONE THING that you’d tell your younger yourself/other entrepreneurs/new programmers?! This is followed by the breathless anticipation of whatever profound wisdom the questioner most wish they could glean from my life’s experiences. The boring truth is that the big leaps are all the result of an interwoven tapestry of practices, each contributing a strand of progress or insight. If you pull just one, all you have is that thin, disconnected strand. It’s only together the colors come alive. That’s why all the books Jason and I ...

From 2:13am GMT March 13 / 9:13pm Central March 12 until around 4:10am GMT / 11:10pm Central, Basecamp 3 was mostly offline and Basecamp 2 unable to process file uploads and downloads, as our cloud storage provider had a severe, sustained outage.  We continued to have minor disruptions in service from 4:10am GMT / 11:10pm Central until everything was cleared at 6:53am GMT / 1:53am Central. This is the second time in a week that I’m forced to write “I’m so sorry”. That’s incredibly painful. Both because it’s because we’re failing our customers for the second time in a week, but also because it’s showing us just how unprepared we’ve been as an organization to deal with these cloud challenges, despite our belief otherwise. I’m not going to bother you with platitudes about “lessons to be learnt”, because I’ve already done that just a few days ago. This goes much deeper than just a few lessons. It has called into question our entire risk management and operational structure at Basecam...