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Basecamp Employee Handbook

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Re: Basecamp Employee Handbook

#91

Post by fastbeef »

raz32dust wrote: post #83
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.

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.

Re: Basecamp Employee Handbook

#92

Post by [deleted] »

raz32dust wrote: post #83
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.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Basecamp Employee Handbook

#94

Post by SwellJoe »

s73ver wrote: post #86
raz32dust wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Business isn't the only thing in the world.

That kind of law would guarantee only quite large business can survive, which is counter-productive if one wants to empower individuals.

I'm pretty much always on the side of workers in any discussion of labor vs. employers...but, there's also small business to consider. I think there's some kind of happy medium to be found, where workers are treated well and small businesses can survive long enough to become somewhat bigger businesses. In the US this is codified into law; rules and regulations that apply to large companies may not apply to smaller mom-and-pop shops.

My company couldn't afford to give an employee more than a few months paid time off; we're a four-person company, and we'd literally run out of money if a quarter of our work wasn't being done for months. On the other hand, if we had a hundred employees, we'd barely notice if one or two people were out for a while.

Re: Basecamp Employee Handbook

#95

Post by emperorcezar »

themcgruff wrote: post #79
toomuchtodo wrote: post #70

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…

(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…

We rotate daily, except weekends, which has a single person. Works well for us.

Re: Basecamp Employee Handbook

#96

Post by SwellJoe »

ryandrake wrote: post #66
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.

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.

For companies that are growing rapidly, it's a pretty common recruiting tool. You may notice that a lot of speakers begin and/or end their talk with, "I work on X at Y Company, and we're hiring!"

I've done contract work for companies at both extremes; there are many companies that consider speaking or participation in conferences as a part of the job, and there are those that don't even discuss it and would never consider sending employees to conferences.

Re: Basecamp Employee Handbook

#97

Post by gberger »

stevenwu wrote: post #17

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) Allowance Fresh, organic, local fruits and vegetables are great to have on-hand, so we'd also like to offer a CSA membership to you. Finding a local provider will be up to you, but you can expense the cost of a seasonal or annual CSA share as an employee benefit, up to $1,000/year. Count that as a perk I've never heard of before. Cool peek into how a company that works remotely c…

Valve: http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...

Re: Basecamp Employee Handbook

#98

Post by ceejayoz »

slantyyz wrote: post #81
toomuchtodo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a US citizen who lives in the US. Not traveling to the US is not an option.

>> I'm a US citizen who lives in the US. Not traveling to the US is not an option. Why isn't it an option? The only way for you to "travel to the US" is to leave the US in the first place. You have the option to not travel outside of the US. AFAIK, while you have to deal with the TSA, you don't have to deal with customs/immigration for domestic flights.

> AFAIK, while you have to deal with the TSA, you don't have to deal with customs/immigration for domestic flights.

Not routinely, but Border Patrol claims special powers and jurisdiction in a shockingly large portion of the country. Anything a hundred miles from a border (or a lake that touches a border, placing places like Chicago in it). https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone

Re: Basecamp Employee Handbook

#99

Post by quicksilverFTW »

hackermailman wrote: post #28
bluetidepro wrote: post #3

> Sabbatical - Every three years, employees are eligible to take a one-month-long sabbatical. Just give a heads-up preferably three months in advance, so we can coordinate the work-load accordingly. I wish this was more common in the tech industry. I know for other industries this is basically a standard thing, but it seems like many tech companies don't do this.

They also have 4 day work weeks May through August https://github.com/basecamp/handbook/blob/master/benefits-an... Where I work now there's a sabbatical scheme where you can contribute X amount of salary per month to an entire year paid off (every 3 years).

My job took away my flex time after 6 weeks. "We just don't like that here". Well, I negotiated it on my hiring (for a large paycut), so I now work 3.5 days a week instead of 5 (they've yet to notice in the last 15 or so weeks).

But hey, I'm not leaving before everyone else everyday. I've had flextime at every job since 1999. Wonder how long it's going to take them to catch on, since I can get another job pretty easily (2-4 weeks max). It's been kind of nice though only doing 3 full days.

Re: Basecamp Employee Handbook

#100

Post by mtberatwork »

SwellJoe wrote: post #94
s73ver wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Business isn't the only thing in the world.

That kind of law would guarantee only quite large business can survive, which is counter-productive if one wants to empower individuals. I'm pretty much always on the side of workers in any discussion of labor vs. employers...but, there's also small business to consider. I think there's some kind of happy medium to be found, where workers are treated well and small businesses can survive long enough to become somewha…

> 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.

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