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We are talking about 37Signals here. This is the company that, when faced with the problem of making a shared to-do list application, created Ruby on Rails. And when they decided to write up their remote working policy, published a New York Times bestselling business book.

This is not a company that merely shaves its Yaks. It offers a full menu of Yak barber services, and then launches a line of successful Yak grooming products.



...and don't forget the time where they wrote a blog post, kept posting through it, and a significant amount of the company quit.


I do forget that time -- what's the context?



> significant amount of the company quit.

no they didn't


Yes, they did. This is not a debatable fact. IIRC, it was 30%+ of the company.


i am sure you will supply proof for your claims.


I was at the company when it happened. I'm currently at the company. I'm in ops and work on all of the mrsk/de-clouding efforts.


Has the political change lead to a better or worse work environment?


ha right on! Must've be real awkward for the people who didn't quit in hottest tech job market of all times :D



> at least 20 people — more than one-third of Basecamp’s 57 employees — had announced their intention to accept buyouts from the company.

Thanks for subjecting me to this crap article ( Which i presume you didn't bother to read.).


The article seems to provide evidence for the claim that a dispute within the company over the messaging from leadership led to 1/3 of the staff leaving. I provided it without comment.

Do you believe that a significant proportion of the staff did not quit? Do you have an alternative source that provides evidence for that version of events?


intention to leave = staff leaving ?

then scarlett johanssen is my wife because i intend to marry her.

> Do you have an alternative source that provides evidence for that version of events?

Yes because people go around documenting evidence for things did not happen.


announced their intention to leave... to the company... in response to the company making an open offer to people of terms for them to leave.

That seems like a slightly different prior, in terms of our Bayesian assessment of the probability that those people remained employed at the company afterwards, than your hypothetical engagement to Ms Johannsen.


> to the company

Where did you get this though?

> had announced their intention to accept buyouts from the company.

Is it just people clicking 'yes' reaction to internal slack message ? This didn't sound like they were making any commitment ' to the company' .

Also do you have any comment about the title of the article that you linked. Does that seem honest to you?


So strange to white-knight a company and attempt to deny something that happened pretty publicly...

> As a result of the recent changes at Basecamp, today is my last day at the company. I joined over 15 years ago as a junior programmer and I’ve been involved with nearly every product launch there since 2006.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210430155528/https://twitter.c...

https://web.archive.org/web/20210430140035/https://twitter.c...

https://twitter.com/zachwaugh/status/1388190748189802501

> I’m leaving my position at Basecamp, where I’ve worked for 4 years, due to the recent changes and new policies.

https://twitter.com/lexicola/status/1388189598367559688

https://twitter.com/dylanginsburg/status/1388199059983413257

https://twitter.com/jonasdowney/status/1388205182916440070

> Given the recent changes at Basecamp, I’ve decided to leave my job as Head of Design.

https://twitter.com/mackesque/status/1388206605506842627

https://twitter.com/kaspth/status/1380616358266871810

https://twitter.com/wcmoline/status/1388208323908968449

> I have left Basecamp due to the recent changes & policies.

https://twitter.com/conormuirhead/status/1388207801646780416

https://twitter.com/Rahsfan/status/1388209146487623681

https://twitter.com/AdamStddrd/status/1388223100823642112


> So strange to white-knight a company and attempt to deny something that happened pretty publicly...

it was just skepticism from seeing these sorts of claims over the years. Half of hollywood would be in canada if people really followed up on those. At some point it became acceptable to make these sort of claims with no intention of following up.

I guess quitting your job in the hottest tech market of all time is a little different than moving to a different country.


> Last week was terrible. We started with policy changes that felt simple, reasonable, and principled, and it blew things up internally in ways we never anticipated. David and I completely own the consequences, and we're sorry. We have a lot to learn and reflect on, and we will. The new policies stand, but we have some refining and clarifying to do.

https://world.hey.com/jason/an-update-303f2f99


Wouldn't surprise me if they're doing all that with Yakety Sax[1] blaring in the background.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnHmskwqCCQ


They seem to have lost their touch though. I think they peaked with Remote.

After typing that I found that they renamed from Basecamp Inc. back to 37signals and their website is trying to hearken to their past. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/37signals

Edit: lol https://37signals.com/22/


You could just look this up. They renamed to Basecamp because they decided to be a single-product company (at the same time, they divested Highrise and Campfire). Six years later, they launched HEY, their email product, so "Basecamp" stopped making sense as a name. They wrote a post about this last year.

later

I added "six years later", but I don't think it changes the meaning of what I wrote originally.


People were used to calling them 37signals, so even if that's the sole reason they renamed, it's more complex than that


Most HN people probably never stopped calling them 37signals, so this seems like an especially weird thing to get hung up on.


Are they dead-naming a company? Isn't that illegal in California already?


That decision was always baffling to me. Basecamp is such a UX nightmare even Jira looks good next to it...


I don’t think they were ever Basecamp Inc, I think they were always an LLC.




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