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Basecamp Employee Handbook

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Re: Basecamp Employee Handbook

#151

Post by tptacek »

1337biz wrote: post #51
tptacek wrote: post #15

There's a lot of good stuff here. I'm surprised about their take on speaking engagements (they're OK as long as they don't involve multi-day travel obligations). I get that you don't want team members touring talks or becoming conference tourists. But a lot of companies want their employees doing speaking engagements; Matasano/NCC, my old employer, pays a pretty substantial cash bonus for every time you do that.

> pays a pretty substantial cash bonus for every time you do that Super smart move - probably the cheapest but most personal marketing effort a small firm can create. Did they have an upper cap on the speaking gigs or available time?

Not really explicitly, but implicitly they won't pay you to travel to conferences nobody has heard of (there was a list of acceptable conferences for the benefit at one point --- it covered pretty much all the well known conferences in our field, and there were a bunch of them).

Part of the idea is, the good conferences do some of the vetting for the bonus for you. They discourage "touring" talks, and have a high bar for inclusion, so if you're speaking at e.g. Black Hat, CanSecWest, Recon, and Toorcon, there's probably a reason that's happening and NCC is probably very happy about that reason.

Re: Basecamp Employee Handbook

#152

Post by ryanwaggoner »

huac wrote: post #50
kayhi wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Employees at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest private foundation in the world, will be able to enjoy up to one year of paid time with their newborns during the child's first year after birth or adoption starting next year." - Business Insider

As of 2015 they had 1382 employees, a far cry from 50. They also had Bill Gates.

Wow! For some reason, this blows my mind. I guess I had my mind a dozen people sitting in an office writing checks and compiling reports. I had no idea it was a huge global organization with 1420 employees and 8 locations around the world.

In retrospect, it makes such perfect sense that I feel foolish :)

Re: Basecamp Employee Handbook

#153

Post by jpalomaki »

nodesocket wrote: post #72

Anybody else surprised that their billing and identity system[1] is publically accessible (login required of course). Shouldn't this only be accessible within a trusted zone (office/VPN)? [1] https://billing.37signals.com

Not necessarily, Google is doing something similar: https://cloud.google.com/beyondcorp/

And of course there's many companies who use Github and various other online services for core activities.

Re: Basecamp Employee Handbook

#154

Post by kornakiewicz »

kzisme wrote: post #52

> Basecamp will pay up to $100/month for your gym membership, yoga studio membership, or whatever activity you do to stay in shape. Is this sort of thing common? I wish my current employer did something like this. While I'm still skimming some of the documents - Basecamp sounds like a cool place to work.

In Poland, almost all companies offer "sport card", which can be used at gyms, pools and other facilities with no limits (or very little). I could basically spend all my free time at gym or whatever. Employee has to participate in small fraction of subscription fee (say, 10$).

https://www.benefitsystems.pl/en/for-you/multisport/

Re: Basecamp Employee Handbook

#155

Post by no_wizard »

tptacek wrote: post #16
SomeHacker44 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't go that far, but I do have all my hardware encrypted (MBP, iPhone, iPad) and I power these things off so that they will be unable to trivially decrypt them when I go through customs. I wish iDevices had a thing that would let me "double click" the power button to passcode-lock the device and disable TouchID until unlocked again. I don't use the TouchID on my MBP at all.

That's not enough: they can demand that you unlock the device at the border, including powering it on. If your battery is depleted, they'll give you a charger and wait. If you refuse, they can and will confiscate the devices. You can't outsmart them: for pretty much every major country, they're better at this than you are. They can do all of this even if you're a citizen. In the US, citizens (and, to a lesser but sti…

I wonder if some form of push back on this would be timed release malware? its just crazy talk and all, I'd NEVER do this, but as a hypothetical since they are plugging your device(s) in to a machine, it would be possible to infect said machine, yes?

Now that’s resistance.

Also: I've heard of people who just wipe their devices and then just download really really grotesque photos to their devices to gross out the employees who have to look through it.

Re: Basecamp Employee Handbook

#156

Post by t3rabytes »

epsilongreedy wrote: post #127

Is it just me or are their "real" benefits pretty poor? Health Care: no vision, I assume no dental. 25% copay on the PPO is on the higher end too, no? 401K: Not matching up to max. Certainly not all companies do, but still. I guess it's rare for startups. Equity pool: (1) What happens on year 6? You don't vest any more equity? (2) This feels to me like it would not reward tenured employees as much. If you joined the…

Dental is there... https://github.com/basecamp/handbook/blob/master/benefits-an...

Re: Basecamp Employee Handbook

#157

Post by [deleted] »

epsilongreedy wrote: post #127

Is it just me or are their "real" benefits pretty poor? Health Care: no vision, I assume no dental. 25% copay on the PPO is on the higher end too, no? 401K: Not matching up to max. Certainly not all companies do, but still. I guess it's rare for startups. Equity pool: (1) What happens on year 6? You don't vest any more equity? (2) This feels to me like it would not reward tenured employees as much. If you joined the…

[deleted]

Re: Basecamp Employee Handbook

#158

Post by dejv »

tptacek wrote: post #141
dejv wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a father of 11 month old, I can't imagine how people can live with just 6 or even 16 weeks of maternity leave. Even after almost one year it feels like care is (at least) full time job, which would be quite hard to outsource. In my EU country you will get up to three years of paid maternity leave per child, so I guess I am just spoiled.

My sister is a public interest lawyer in Chicago who will get a few short weeks of leave --- not 6 --- and then be expected back in court advocating for her clients. It is really difficult for me to connect with fathers who claim that 6 weeks of paternal leave is too onerous. As a parent to two teenagers, both of whom were born in the early years of startups, I feel your pain --- having children is hard . But if we'r…

I guess my wording was wrong, there was no worrying about fathers at all.

I just can't wrap my head about how all the people are doing it. You can't just leave that small kid somewhere, is there some way of taking unpaid leave or are people just quit the job? I don't know.

Re: Basecamp Employee Handbook

#159

Post by patio11 »

tptacek wrote: post #128
mtberatwork wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That kind of law would guarantee only quite large business can survive, which is counter-productive if one wants to empower individuals. As others have pointed out, maternity/paternity leave in other Western countries are heavily subsidized through government assistance programs. The costs are not completely shouldered by the business.

Many of those countries also increasingly have a two-caste system of fully-fledged full-time employees and "temp" workers of various types. If you want Salaryman culture, like they have in Japan, you can set pretty arbitrarily high expectations about leave and job security.

It is my anecdotal impression that this is common in some European countries.

Japanese leave policies are historically pretty simple: the government says you get X weeks, buuuuut X is an inconvenient number for us, so you probably want to look around the room and conform to the practices of your coworkers, which are closer to Y days. Also, for you ladies: remember that the traditional expectation is that you have unlimited maternity leave when you leave formal employment after marrying or having a child. (Some re-enter when the child goes to school. This is largely not compatible with career advancement, with rare exceptions like e.g. translation/interpretation.)

Re: Basecamp Employee Handbook

#160

Post by rdslw »

I find this discussion of "benefits" fascinating.

In Europe, standard in IT companies (Central Europe, mind you), is:

* 25 fullt paid days (or more) of vacation every year (no need to call it a sabatical and limit it to once a three years), not including national holidays etc.

* one year of (or more) paid maternity leave (or more), while second parent gets few weeks (two at my country)

* free gym membership (so I can yoga/climb/whatever for free)

* private health coverage (in addition to the public one, if your country (most EU has)

* sickness time at least 80% paid (in most IT it's 100%)

* fresh fruits daily (I don't even mention drinks etc)

* education budget per employee (conferences etc)

Thats a STANDARD if you want to recruit software engineer here you must have.

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