Thanks for reading SvN.
Visit m.signalvnoise.com → On Hacker News Jan 2016 – Jan 2020
Career & Management 19Tech Industry & Business 17Society, Policy & Culture 9Life, Learning & Writing 7Software Engineering 4Web & Frontend 3
Not because there aren’t people who actually enjoy working in an open office, there are. Quite a few, actually. But they’re in the distinct minority. The vast majority of people either dislike the …
If you want to be amongst the best paid people in software, you have to move to San Francisco. Or do you?The roots of Basecamp are in Chicago. It’s where the business started, it’s where our only o…
Apple keep insisting that only a “small number of customers have problems” with the MacBook keyboards. That’s bollocks. This is a huge issue, it’s getting worse not better, …
How many times have you heard a company claim that they only hire the best? The top of the top. The crème de la crème. Most of them, by sheer necessity of math, are delusional. There just aren’t th…
Monolith by Rene Aigner Some patterns are just about the code. If your code looks like this, and you need it to do that, here’s what to do. You’d do well to study such patterns, as they give you a …
A few years ago, Microsoft launched a Office 365 campaign with the slogan of #GetItDone. The basic premise was fitting more work into more places of your life. Well, not so much just fitting as sho…
Remember when Zuckerberg dared to wear a hoodie to his IPO party?The easiest way to be disappointed is to expect others to act contrary to their self-interest. So really, we shouldn’t be disappoint…
“And then I said anyone not willing to break their backs working for me was a tourist!”If you want to understand why so many startups become infected with unhealthy work habits, or outright workaho…
This guy never had enough, is that really you?The underpinning tenet of chasing exponential growth is that anything less than “all of it” is never enough. If there’s more possible, more out there, …
When I started programming Ruby, it was on an Apple iBook G4/800. That beautiful 12” powerhouse of a 800 MHz PowerPC with a rocking 256MB of RAM. A lovely computer that was not only fast enough to …
Illustration by Nate Otto These are some of the things I can do because I’m fortunate to work for a company that lets me work from anywhere: Hug my kids and feed them breakfast before they lea…
Is this you? Are you making other feel like this? Group chat is like being in an all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda. In 2006 we launched Campfire, the first modern SAAS group ch…
Microsoft is different now. The evil masterminds are all retired. No more Ballmer jumping around screaming for developers, developers, developers. No more Gates plotting monopoly schemes for world …
A few days ago my wife and I went to see Uncut Gems at a Regal theater in Chicago. We booked our ticket online, reserved our seats, showed up 15 minutes ahead of time, and settled in. After the coi…
Business has never been better at Basecamp. Despite all the competition, all the noise, and all the changes since we launched 14 years ago, 2017 was the year we earned the most revenue ever. While …
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. W…
We’re outspoken about running a profitable company in an industry that so often eschews profits for potential. So why? People ask us why all the time. Why choose profit? So I thought I’d detail som…
I like Chrome. It’s a great browser. But it’s not so good that it deserves to be the only browser. And that’s the unfortunate opportunity we, people browsing the web, are opening for Google by so o…
It’s desperate times for those still clinging to their workaholic, exploitive ways. From Japan to China to even the US, there’s a growing understanding that working 70-80-90 or 130 hours per week i…
We’ve written quite a bit in the past about our approach to building hybrid mobile apps. Basecamp 3 represents the latest generation of this architecture, taking everything we’ve learned from previ…
Whenever executives talk about how their company is really like a big ol’ family, beware. They’re usually not referring to how the company is going to protect you no matter what or love you uncondi…
#WEBSUMMIT2015 About 12 years ago, I co-founded a startup called Basecamp: A simple project collaboration tool that helps people make progress together, sold on a monthly subscription. It took a pa…
It’s a crying shame, really. I love Medium. It’s the best writing environment on the web, and they sweat the details like nobody else. The community too is just peach. This could have been a love s…
A few of us at Basecamp were recently discussing how decisions get made to “green light” new projects, and I came to the conclusion that it boils down a simple rule: If you can make a decision and …