When Jason put out a call on Twitter for SEO consultants, he received dozens of responses. In order to choose someone to work with, Jason and Basecamp designer Adam Stoddard interviewed all of the candidates in one six-hour block of back-to-back phone calls. They sit down with Shaun in the latest episode of the Rework podcast to discuss why they’re looking for SEO expertise, how they conducted the interviews, and what it’s like to shop for something you know nothing about.
The open office has gone from the dominant workplace layout to cultural pariah, with these environments seeming to produce more interruptions than collaboration. We’ve even railed against open offices right here on this very blog!
But the open office itself isn’t entirely to blame for the distractions that plague office workers. In this episode, two tech workers share their experiences in open offices—with some surprising findings.
In 2004, fast food company Quiznos launched a national advertising campaign featuring animated rodent-like creatures screech-singing an ode to the chain’s toasted sub sandwiches. The TV commercials were instantly polarizing and lodged themselves in many viewers’ brains like a recurring fever dream. In the latest episode of the Rework podcast, the people behind the campaign share the story of how an early Internet meme got turned into an unforgettable ad campaign.. Take a trip down memory lane and relive the moment when a weird, experimental corner of the Internet briefly crossed into mainstream culture. The real treasure is the spongmonkey friends you made along the way!
Even remote companies need actual face time every once in a while. That’s why Basecamp holds companywide, weeklong meet-ups in Chicago twice a year. Fellow remote tech company Buffer has 85 employees across the globe that get together once a year for an annual retreat, and they’ve visited countries from South Africa to Iceland. On this episode of the Rework podcast, Carolyn Kopprasch of Buffer talks about the kind of work that gets done during this time, helping introverts manage energy during an intense week, and her favorite parts of Retreat.
Basecamp co-founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson are back in the Rework studio to answer your questions. In our latest episode, they discuss listener inquiries on topics like why big companies don’t use Basecamp; how they managed the transition from a web design agency to a product company; and what their business partnership means to them. Kristin Aardsma from Basecamp Support also pops in to answer a question about how her team maintains fast response times while making time for breaks.
Claire Lew is the CEO of Know Your Team, a company dedicated to solving the problem of bad bosses. The company has its origins as a product developed within Basecamp and today is not just a software tool, but a deep vein of resources for managers of all experience levels. In this new episode of the Rework podcast, Claire shares her unconventional path to becoming a CEO, how she completely revamped her company’s focus and business model, and why so much “thought leadership” around management gets it wrong.
The title of this post is how Kenneth Coats described the feeling of leaving his office job to start his own business. After he unplugged from the Matrix, he simply couldn’t return—not even when a challenge from the Illinois Attorney General forced him to shut down his first venture, a service to help people expunge their arrest records. In this episode of the Rework podcast, Kenneth shares the story of how he pivoted, and the drastic move he took to make sure he couldn’t go back to his old work life. Listen below, or click “Keep Reading” for a full transcript of the episode.
Back in February, DHH took to Twitter to rant about the hoop-jumping required to cancel his SiriusXM subscription. Others shared their own subscription cancellation horror stories, and before long, I had something to chase down.
Today we released a new episode of the Rework podcast about our inquiry into hostile subscription tactics in the newspaper industry. I contacted major papers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal about their online cancellation policies, which require a phone call or online chat (in the case of the NYT) to get out of a subscription. None would provide much comment on why they don’t offer online cancellation to all subscribers—I say “to all subscribers” because there is a small exception to the Journal’s policy.
The Wall Street Journal allows online cancellation for California-based customers because of a law introduced in 2017 that, among other things, requires companies that sell subscriptions online to let customers cancel the same way. Because the legislation applied to so many kinds of products, from gym memberships to cosmetics to software, it drew broad opposition from the California business community. One of the groups that pushed back was the California News Publishers Association, which represents newspapers in the state.
“The goal was to try to do everything we could to ensure those techniques and tools that newspapers had at their disposal to try to retain their subscribers could continue to be used,” said Jim Ewert, the CNPA’s general counsel. He said contacting subscribers to try and keep them as customers has been “a practice for at least a century.”
In other words, newspapers—like cable companies and other kinds of businesses—want to get exiting customers on the phone to persuade them to stay. But this tactic feels like a trick.
“I think it’s reasonable of them to ask” to have a conversation, said Laura Hazard Owen, deputy editor of NiemanLab. “I don’t think it’s reasonable of them to require it as a step for giving up your credit card information. You shouldn’t be held hostage until you’ve explained to a real human why you don’t want this anymore.”
I called up a friend from journalism school, Pete Mortensen, to get his take on why this dark pattern persists in the newspaper industry. Pete has worked in journalism, human-centered design, and the business side of media, and he traces the unfriendly subscription tactics to the very start of the industry’s fraught history with the Internet.
“One of the original sins of how we got here was the certainty that the real product was the print newspaper and the website, therefore, was at best an ad for the print publication,” Pete said. “A number of poor decisions cascaded and we’re all dealing with the fallout here almost 25 years later.”
For starters, newspapers didn’t charge for access to their websites. This conditioned readers to see the websites as inferior to the print product. Meanwhile, newspapers loaded up their websites with invasive ad technology, making for a miserable reading experience. In my past life as a newspaper reporter, it was endlessly frustrating that the deeply reported stories that deservedly received star treatment on A1 or section fronts were often nowhere to be found on the home page, which would be full of whatever news was deemed to get the most clicks—a numbing parade of breaking crime stories, aggregated wire stories about celebrities, or photo galleries, interspersed with junky ads.
Design and story selection, especially at larger papers, has improved, but as Pete puts it, “There’s a little bit of not feeling great about the overall digital experience as the ideal way to read and therefore, for digital-only subscriptions, they try to…make it really irritating to leave. That’s common whenever you have a product that people don’t really fully believe in—to feel the need to almost trick you into staying a customer.”
I asked Pete for an example of a newer media outlet setting a positive example in the realm of subscriptions, and he pointed to The Athletic, an ad-free sports publication that charges $9.99/month (and is easy to cancel online). In the Rework episode, I interview Jen Sabella, co-founder of Block Club Chicago, a neighborhood news nonprofit. It costs $59/year to subscribe to Block Club Chicago, which as Jen points out, works out to 16 cents a day. It’s also a simple click to cancel.
“I personally can’t stand when I have to jump through a bunch of hoops,” Jen said, adding: “We’re not trying to trick anyone. If you don’t find it valuable, we don’t want to make you pay.”
For more on newspaper subscription tactics, check out our episode! And to get new Rework episodes whenever we release one, subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, Spotify, RadioPublic, or your favorite podcast app.
Why are manhole covers round? How many golf balls can fit in a 747? Why are job interviews so terrible? In the latest episode of the Rework podcast, Aja Hammerly, a developer advocate at Google, talks about the drawbacks of common tech interview techniques like whiteboard coding and trivia questions, and shares her tips for improving the process by making it about discovering the candidate’s best qualities.
For further reading on interviewing, check out Aja’s post “There Is No Perfect Interview” and these posts by Jim Mackenzie of Basecamp’s Support team: “Interview or Interrogation?” and “Under Pressure.”
In the latest episode of the Rework podcast, we place a long-distance phone call to Antarctica to chat with Kathrin Mallot, an astrophysicist who works at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in the South Pole. In this episode, Kathrin talks about preparing for a work assignment in a super remote part of the world; practicing self-care during the punishing Antarctic winter; getting along with coworkers that you also live with in close quarters; frozen nose hairs, snacks, Internet access, and more!