We (Balsamiq) look up to Basecamp quite a bit, and people have compared our culture to theirs. Check out our blog for some of our policies and other stuff. Any questions, I'm here. Peldi
Hey Peldi,
Do you have remote?
Ask HN: Companies with a culture similar to Basecamp's?
41–50 of 56 posts
Re: Ask HN: Companies with a culture similar to Basecamp's?
#42Check out GitLab. I don't know how similar their culture actually is to Basecamp, but they seem to put a lot of importance on doing everything possible in the open, so you really get what seems like a good sense of what they are about from reading job postings, their public ops runbooks, mission statements, etc... In no small part due to that, they are one of the very few companies that I would actively like to work…
Is it just me or is their published compensation algorithm not competitive at all? I put in my information and it had me at a ~40k pay cut which seems silly.
Re: Ask HN: Companies with a culture similar to Basecamp's?
#43I work remotely for WorkBeast, a staffing company. We're not tech-driven or a startup, but we're bootstrapped and profitable. My workdays are spent on our custom internal CRM (Rails + AngularJS). I respond directly to the CEO, and have a lot of freedom and responsibility when it comes to my job. Prior I worked for a handful of local startups and digital agencies - this is the closest to Basecamp culture I've found so…
I realize this is off topic. Hope you don’t mind a couple of questions - I’m always interested in companies which choose to invest in custom-built software for seemingly non-core functions. What was the justification for building an internal CRM vs customizing an API-rich commercial system like Pipedrive. How was the decision made? Did you review SAAS or installed offerings first? Do you consider CRM to be a core par…
No worries! Unfortunately, the decision was made long before my arrival, so I'm not entirely sure - but I asked about that too during my interview. My CEO reviewed a few SAAS including Salesforce but none of them made sense for how he worked.
Now, I've reviewed SAAS for other purposes with him, and my guess is that pitches went poorly. My boss is particular about his business, and I've witnessed more than one demo fall apart when customization came up.
The CRM could someday be a core part of the business. It probably offers us the same competitive advantage that a secret recipe benefits a restaurant. I've also integrated into it some nifty functionality I haven't seen yet on the market. But ultimately, the business is driven by staffing.
Re: Ask HN: Companies with a culture similar to Basecamp's?
#44I'm the CTO at Parse.ly, you can visit us at https://parse.ly . We run a fully distributed team. We have commented on our culture around this in these two blog posts-- The How & Why of Parse.ly's Fully Distributed Team: https://blog.parse.ly/post/3203/the-how-and-why-of-parse-lys... Fully Remote, But Here For Each Other: https://blog.parse.ly/post/4736/mission/ We actually recommend "Rework" and "Remote" as two readi…
Only a cheeky jab but in fairness it was the first thing I saw in your job ads
> Parse.ly is looking for a motivated Business Development Representative [..] The position will be based in our New York City headquarters
Do you have any concerns of having a HQ and remote workers? From what I've seen and heard from mixed businesses the remote workers tend to become second class citizens when it comes to benefits/promotions/salary/etc. How do you avoid that, if you do?
Re: Ask HN: Companies with a culture similar to Basecamp's?
#45I'm the CTO at Parse.ly, you can visit us at https://parse.ly . We run a fully distributed team. We have commented on our culture around this in these two blog posts-- The How & Why of Parse.ly's Fully Distributed Team: https://blog.parse.ly/post/3203/the-how-and-why-of-parse-lys... Fully Remote, But Here For Each Other: https://blog.parse.ly/post/4736/mission/ We actually recommend "Rework" and "Remote" as two readi…
Only a cheeky jab but in fairness it was the first thing I saw in your job ads > Parse.ly is looking for a motivated Business Development Representative [..] The position will be based in our New York City headquarters Do you have any concerns of having a HQ and remote workers? From what I've seen and heard from mixed businesses the remote workers tend to become second class citizens when it comes to benefits/promoti…
Great question!
We have two departments, broadly "Business" and "Product". With over 60 full-timers working with the company now, it's important to recognize that these two departments have different cultures, and BDRs joining the Business team end up having a bit of a different experience than, say, a Python programmer joining our Product team.
The "Business" department is centered around sales, marketing, finance, and operations. It only formed as a (large) department of its own in the last 3 years and it has a significant presence in NYC. However, business team hires are even told that "NYC is not HQ" on their first day, and that a better way to think of the office is as the "NYC Internet Cafe". It's a nice Internet Cafe, though! Gigabit Internet, mesh wifi network, and standard issue bamboo sit/stand desks.
The "Product" department is centered around engineering (mostly Python programming), user experience (mostly JavaScript programming) and design (graphic/web). I'm one of the two co-founders of the company and I lead the Product team, and, importantly, I am not based in NYC. This team is 100% remote, and has about 25 people on it. Everyone on this team works either from their (tailored/optimized) home office or from a co-working space. There are actually zero full-time hires on Product that are based in NYC -- this usually elicits some surprise from office visitors.
There is a legitimate concern for some of the Business team hires that if you are not based in NYC but your team lead or some of your team colleagues are, you might suffer from "out of band communication". We try to reduce this by forcing people in the office to use Slack and video conferencing (our conference rooms are set up for GHangouts and Zoom.us) instead of "shout-net" (that is, shouting rudely across the office). This is only a concern on our marketing and support teams, where they have a geographically spread-out team but with a lot of folks in NYC, as well. But they've navigated it well. It doesn't affect our Product team in the slightest because, as I mentioned, we have no team members in NYC and "NYC is just an Internet cafe".
Funny enough, one of our highest-performing salespeople had her best year ever while doing "Remote Year". She wrote about her experience on Remote Year here: https://blog.parse.ly/post/3538/digital-nomad-sales/
We do sometimes use NYC as a retreat location for our Product team. Since it's an easy city to fly to and we have co-working space available via the office, it's often used for week-long hacking sessions of small sub-teams on Product.
p.s. as a result of your comment, I'm going to have the person in charge of hiring Business Development Reps remove 'headquarters' from the job posting -- I think it was just an innocent terminology mistake when drafting the job req.
Re: Ask HN: Companies with a culture similar to Basecamp's?
#46Check out GitLab. I don't know how similar their culture actually is to Basecamp, but they seem to put a lot of importance on doing everything possible in the open, so you really get what seems like a good sense of what they are about from reading job postings, their public ops runbooks, mission statements, etc... In no small part due to that, they are one of the very few companies that I would actively like to work…
Is it just me or is their published compensation algorithm not competitive at all? I put in my information and it had me at a ~40k pay cut which seems silly.
I've noticed that. I'm not 100% sure what the deal is.
From what I know, my one major gripe is that they devalue you based on where you live.
Re: Ask HN: Companies with a culture similar to Basecamp's?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it just me or is their published compensation algorithm not competitive at all? I put in my information and it had me at a ~40k pay cut which seems silly.
I've noticed that. I'm not 100% sure what the deal is. From what I know, my one major gripe is that they devalue you based on where you live.
Yeah, I actually removed myself from their recruitment pipeline a ways back because I saw the salary calculator. It does not and will not ever make sense to pay talent based on anything other than productivity. Where I choose to live should have no bearing on how much I get paid, ever.
Re: Ask HN: Companies with a culture similar to Basecamp's?
#48Re: Ask HN: Companies with a culture similar to Basecamp's?
#49We (Balsamiq) look up to Basecamp quite a bit, and people have compared our culture to theirs. Check out our blog for some of our policies and other stuff. Any questions, I'm here. Peldi
As a user and recommender of your product in the past, that was always the vibe I got from your company. You seemed to espouse many of the same characteristics as basecamp, and I thought of you as very closely related in my mind. If you were building a super minimal web CMS, what features would be a must have?
Thank you! About a super minimal web CMS... I wouldn't build one. We can discuss more over email if you'd like, so we don't highjack the thread: peldi@balsamiq.com
Re: Ask HN: Companies with a culture similar to Basecamp's?
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only a cheeky jab but in fairness it was the first thing I saw in your job ads > Parse.ly is looking for a motivated Business Development Representative [..] The position will be based in our New York City headquarters Do you have any concerns of having a HQ and remote workers? From what I've seen and heard from mixed businesses the remote workers tend to become second class citizens when it comes to benefits/promoti…
Great question! We have two departments, broadly "Business" and "Product". With over 60 full-timers working with the company now, it's important to recognize that these two departments have different cultures, and BDRs joining the Business team end up having a bit of a different experience than, say, a Python programmer joining our Product team. The "Business" department is centered around sales, marketing, finance,…
Thank you for the reply!
Just to note the reason I was asking wasn't to catch you out or anything, I'm trying to encourage a remote work situation at the day job but it always comes down to "we need everyone in the office because communication". Always good to have a few ideas ready to roll in the pocket :)