131–140 of 238 posts
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One-month-long? Isn't it too short for sabbatical? How is it different from vacation? I think I might not understand what they mean by sabbatical.
Most vacations, at least in the US, are 1 week in length. Upper middle class takes maybe 2 weeks. The wealthy of course take as long as they want. I don't think I've ever had a vacation longer than 10 days.
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Looking at the job req, it mentions the expectation is for 5 minute response times when you're on call (from alert to being online) and that you're on call one week a month. Is the compensation provided in line with essentially working 24 hours a day for a week once per month? https://basecamp.workable.com/j/A5A189B311 "We have a shared on call responsibility which is about 1 week (5 week days, and 2 weekend days) a…
Wow, that sounds horribly oppressive. What that basically means is "For 1 week a month, you can forget about going to the movies, going out to eat, going shopping, or going anywhere where you're not within 5 minutes of a desktop computer. You can probably forget about cooking, too, unless you're willing to start a kitchen fire when you get an alert. Hope you like DoorDash!" I would literally rather work the counter a…
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.
Is "doing speaking engagements" really a big thing in tech? I've been in the industry for close to 20 years and have never felt the need to (or been asked to) go drone on about something at a conference somewhere, or even to go attend one for that matter. I couldn't even tell you what any major software conferences are, although I'd probably recognize the names of some of them.
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Looking at the job req, it mentions the expectation is for 5 minute response times when you're on call (from alert to being online) and that you're on call one week a month. Is the compensation provided in line with essentially working 24 hours a day for a week once per month? https://basecamp.workable.com/j/A5A189B311 "We have a shared on call responsibility which is about 1 week (5 week days, and 2 weekend days) a…
(I run our Ops team.) The time burden goes down with the more people we have. It's still a burden though -- and our compensation (in theory) reflects that. FWIW We're doing everything we can to make this "work hours only" M-F, which we could solve by hiring tons of people immediately, but we also have other ideals like keeping the company as small as possible that we want to realize too. There's an open and ongoing d…
There's a big problem with being on call for one week out of 6 or 8: you lose touch with the procedures. Sure, your four year veterans know everything by heart - but the first few shifts of a newbie are going to be perilous. I recommend making the shifts shorter and more frequent.
Presumably one person is on-call and everyone else can be called in / woken up as necessary. So - split each day into two halves, and ask people to be on-call for a 12 hour period.
Rotate the roster around so that Jane doesn't always have the same Friday-afternoon shift, nobody has 2 shifts in a row, and put it in a shared calendar so you can always see who has the watch.
With 6 people, you'll take 2 and a seventh shifts per week. At 7, it's an even 2 shifts per week.
Benefits:
- much less of a burden that a whole week of readiness
- brains work better when they haven't been pummeled for a week at a time (at least, mine does)
- easily scales fairly when you have more people, or when someone leaves, but keeps everyone in the loop. When you have 14 people in Ops, you only have one shift a week, but you get one every week.
- much more family-friendly
OK, why 2 12 hour periods instead of splitting the day into 8, 6 or 4? Because people lose track too easily. Trying to schedule around your kid's concert or music lessons with smaller chunks is hard to keep in your head - and trying to work that in with a one week shift is nigh-impossible.
Why not a 24 hour shift? Because it's really hard to recover from that. Humans are generally awake for about 15-17 hours a day. Shifting a few hours is generally doable.
I would recommend that for anyone who took an alert call during non-core hours, you automatically expect them to take the next normal day to recover. I know that when I get woken up at 4AM, I'll run out of steam by 2 or 3PM.
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Whenever I am ready to have children, I'm going remote. It's far from a perfect solution, but at least I'm close to my children.
Speaking from experience: try this for a few months before you commit to it! I worked from home for 2 years, but 6 months after my son was born I chose to switch to a job with an office. It was impossible to get anything done at home with the constant interruptions (even though I wasn't the primary caregiver). My work and family lives are both loads better now that I have proper separation between the two.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looking at the job req, it mentions the expectation is for 5 minute response times when you're on call (from alert to being online) and that you're on call one week a month. Is the compensation provided in line with essentially working 24 hours a day for a week once per month? https://basecamp.workable.com/j/A5A189B311 "We have a shared on call responsibility which is about 1 week (5 week days, and 2 weekend days) a…
Wow, that sounds horribly oppressive. What that basically means is "For 1 week a month, you can forget about going to the movies, going out to eat, going shopping, or going anywhere where you're not within 5 minutes of a desktop computer. You can probably forget about cooking, too, unless you're willing to start a kitchen fire when you get an alert. Hope you like DoorDash!" I would literally rather work the counter a…
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3 years sounds extreme. How is a person supposed to run a business with that kind of law? More than 6 months paid leave is too long from a business perspective. The government can tax and guarantee income, but I am not for paid parental leave > 6 months paid by businesses.
It's not paid for by businesses, it's paid by the government. It's pays out up to 80% of your income up to a limit and some companies chose to fill in the final gap as well.
Something between the European standard expectation of a year's leave and the American top-end norm of 12/6 primary/secondary is probably the right answer here.
But this is all a tangent. It is totally unreasonable to criticize Basecamp for policies that are on the high side of normal in the market they operate in.
Really, what's happening is that Basecamp has been forthright about something most companies are deliberately opaque about, and people on message boards are beating them up for it. If their policies were bad, I wouldn't care, but their policies on parental leave are in fact quite good for this market, so this is some bullshit.
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3 years sounds extreme. How is a person supposed to run a business with that kind of law? More than 6 months paid leave is too long from a business perspective. The government can tax and guarantee income, but I am not for paid parental leave > 6 months paid by businesses.
It's not paid for by businesses, it's paid by the government. It's pays out up to 80% of your income up to a limit and some companies chose to fill in the final gap as well.
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I think it's fair to say that given DHH's lifestyle, Basecamp can afford to do this. No judgement on how David choses to spend his time or money, I just think it's a little disingenuous to act like they're a normal startup. It's a well-oiled lifestyle company that prints cash.
This is not remotely fair to say. To promise a year of leave for all employees, you have to be able to add headcount to cover the absence. It's not simply a year's cash salary we're talking about; it's a potentially uncapped obligation.
I'm not sure that'd be a bad thing, in the grand scheme of things for society - childcare is an unbelievable racket, and we'd probably be better off if parents could actually raise their children instead of having to foist them off on strangers 9-5. But it'd be ruinous for businesses.