Things are going so well we’re doing a hiring freeze

By American standards Norwegians are all racist assholes.

As an employee for a larger company, if your manager tells you to do crap you don't want to do, well you generally have two choices: do it, or quit.

If you're running your own thing, you suddenly have a few more choices: you can reassess whether that thing needs to be done in the first place. You can suck it up and do it yourself, but perhaps you're a little more motivated than if it were your boss at $megacorp telling you to do it because you directly understand why it needs to be done. You could also delegate it to one of your employees, or to a contractor. Etc.

I've been in the industry for about 10 years - at tiny startups, growing startups, mid sized agencies, large companies - and I'm realizing more and more that the odds of running your own thing seem more favorable than the odds of finding the perfect team with a delightful manager where you will only ever work on the things you want to work on, in the environment you want (maybe you want every other wednesday off to hang out with your kid. maybe you don't want meetings after lunch because that's when you're the most productive. etc.)

Of course, that equation is different for everyone - depending on your priorities and interests, you might be better off just working for $megacorp, taking the good with the bad.

But I find it a little mind blowing that my comment is so controversial (currently at -1, with only dismissive replies) on a board dedicated to entrepreneurship.

I will also add (and I'm not saying anything new here, just parroting what 'patio11 and others have said over and over over the years) that most programmers are better equipped than they think they are when it comes to generating meaningful value that can be turned into, at the very least, a living where they get to call the shots.

Lately I've really noticed that you don't just get advice anymore, you also get a little bit of commentary on how the rest of the tech industry is dumb or insane or both because those fools are doing it the old way and we're doing it our own progressive and enlightened way that we figured out on our own after we sat down, put on our critical thinking caps, and tried something different, and lo and behold it worked.

This latest exercise stands out as particularly offensive because there really isn't any advice or wisdom worth sharing. They're just telling us that Basecamp had the best year ever and they don't feel like improving on it so they're not hiring at the moment. Correction, it's actually a hiring freeze. Same thing, except the phrase "hiring freeze" is normally used in the context of something bad. They're going to use it in a different context to, you know, get more claps on Medium. On top of all this they felt the need to do a little compare and contrast between what they're doing vs what the rest of those unenlightened fools in the tech industry are doing, i.e. reinvest profits into new ways to grow.

Whatever. There are plenty of businesses that are happy with where they're at and settle-in, Basecamp is different because they're a tech company and they feel the need to blog about it. As for those companies that are growing, well, I think it's perfectly fine to keep growing, just don't turn your company into the equivalent of foie gras.

It's just disappointing. I looked up to them, still kinda do, but this is just marketing spin designed to make something boring and innocuous look radical.