The 5 reasons why people tend to micromanage in the workplace – and how to manage up, and around them. I’ve heard the phrase, “I have a micromanaging boss,” more times than I can remember. I heard it again, just last week. This person asked me, “What do I do? Is there anything I can say… keep reading
Yesterday at 12:45pm central time, our ops team detected a dramatic spike in login requests to Basecamp. More than 30,000 login attempts were made in the hour that followed from a wide array of IP addresses. Our first line of defense was to block the offending addresses, but ultimately we needed to enable captcha to… keep reading
Since our company is itself our most important product, we keep tweaking, experimenting, and – hopefully! – improving the organizational software that makes it run. Here’s an example of how we refine our process at Basecamp: That change then got codified as an update to our How We Work guide in the Basecamp Employee Handbook.
We received over 700 applications to the opening for a data analyst at Basecamp last Fall. There were a lot of qualified candidates, but in the end it was Jane Yang who bubbled to the top, and this month we were thrilled to welcome her to the team. It’s probably not a big secret that… keep reading
The folks at Basecamp have been blogging since 1999, when Jason Fried would write by the light of a fire fueled by David Heinemeier Hansson’s savage indictments of the tech industry. A lot has changed since then (with the exception of DHH’s feelings about Silicon Valley). Basecamp’s blog, Signal v. Noise (the site you’re reading… keep reading
The web isn’t just another software platform. It’s the greatest software platform the world has ever seen. And yet even in its obvious glory, we’re still learning how to be grateful for all its constituent parts. Take View Source, for example. I owe much of my career to View Source. It’s what got me started… keep reading
I wish ad-supported services could look at my average usage (# of pages I’ve viewed, ads I’ve seen, etc), and give me an option to directly pay them the same amount they would have charged the advertisers for my slice of views/clicks/etc. No ads for me, they get paid as if they were serving me… keep reading
Silicon Valley has become especially good at turning software, the highest margin product ever, into many of the worst performing businesses imaginable. With few exceptions, the amount of money being lost by the leaders of the new school is absolutely staggering.
During the dotcom boom back in the late 90s, I did a bunch of Photoshop-cut jobs. You know, where a designer throws a PSD file over the wall to an HTML monkey to slice and dice. It was miserable. These mock designs almost always focused on pixel perfectness, which meant trying to bend and twist… keep reading
Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic… keep reading