Software makers are obsessed with new. And of course we are, that’s our job: making more, newer, better! But as a lot, we’d be well-served to remember this affliction is generally not shared by our users and customers.

Sure, some people love upgrading to the latest version the minute it lands. It’s also a lot easier when it’s a personal device, like an iPhone, where the focus isn’t purely productivity.

But remember all those companies holding on to IE6 for their dear life? That’s the other side of ‘upgrading fun’. Disrupting workflow, processes, and institutional knowledge because the damn fax machine won’t send the important contract until the firmware is upgraded. What possible utility could a firmware upgrade to the fax machine provide that’s worth keeping a document from sending?

Remember the Flip camera? From its premiere in 2006 until the business was sold to Cisco in 2009, the little video recorder was killing it. Lavish praise, booming sales, flying high. And then cell phones got good enough at recording video, and that was the end of that.

If you disregard the acquisition proceeds, was Flip a terrible business? Well, that depends: Were they taking profits along the way?

There’s no natural law that states all products and services must endure forever and always. Some companies are glorious sprints, others are slugging marathons. Both can work, but the former is especially sensitive to making money along the way.

The problem is that everyone thinks they’re going to run a spectacular marathon in technology these days. There’s no amount too great to be invested in future growth, because the future is infinite, and you’d be a fool not to capture as much of that as you possibly can.

But what if the time allotted to your capture looks more like Flip? What if your product is going to have a great, booming run, but not for the next 30 years, just the next five?

Many writers and publishers are freaking out after Apple opened Safari to ad blockers in iOS9. Ad blockers have been around for a long time, but the fear is that this is the move that will take the concept mainstream.

That fear appears well justified. The App Store’s charts have been dominated by ad blockers since the release of iOS9 last week. Currently, the #1 paid app is Crystal, an ad blocker, and so is #3, Purify. Clearly some pent up demand.

Another data point is the following poll from The Verge. It was setup with an almost satirically over-the-top slant, and yet readers pummeled them:

The cattle has to be round up. Complaining about the weather or going without sleep for 16 hours isn’t going to do it. So clench your teeth and get the work done. That’s the grit needed to be a cowboy.

But I’m a lot less sure that grit is such a positive trait in other professions, particularly creative endeavors like programming, design, or writing.

If I had more grit, I would probably just have clenched my teeth and dug into that J2EE architectural hole with greater perseverance, rather than giving up and building Ruby on Rails. I would probably have spent more time finishing my math classes as a senior in high school, rather than just plagiarizing my friend, and spending the time running gaming websites in the late ‘90s.

Grit is a convenient trait for enticing others to comply with the uncomfortable or the uninteresting. It elevates the perseverance of such adversity to a virtue in and of itself. Just dangle that long-term goal in front of them, accuse them of lack of grit, and compliance will oft follow.

But far more important than to be capable of suffering for your cause is to ask “what cause”? Am I the beneficiary here, or is someone else? Being high on grit may well mean sticking with a faulty cause for far longer.

Grit is an optimization for local maxima. If you’re able to change the function, drop the grit.

I’m not surprised that Jeff Bezos didn’t recognize the Amazon depicted by Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace, a NYT exposé on its culture. Jeff would never have heard those stories, because nobody would ever tell him. These are the stories you have to dig for, and the NYT did.

Whether the overall, pretty glum, picture painted of Amazon work culture is perfectly accurate isn’t even that interesting. It’s certainly not an adequate defense to deflect the questions raised, as one Amazon high-level but rookie manager tried to do. There are more than enough anecdotes, supposedly gathered by more than 100 interviews with current and former employees of Amazon, to raise more than a few red flags.

How you respond to a red flag is what matters. You can deny its very existence. You can argue that it’s not really red, but more of an orange pink. You can argue that the people holding the flag aren’t true Amazonians. You can argue that the people who caused the red flags to fly were rogue actors, going against the intentions of the company. Or you can simply just claim that since you hadn’t personally seen any of the incidents, the flags are illegitimate on their face.

But the bottom line is that culture is what culture does. Culture isn’t what you intend it to be. It’s not what you hope or aspire for it to be. It’s what you do. There’s no way to discredit, deflect, or diffuse that basic truth.

Here’s how that can play out: High-level manager A gives mid-level manager B a tough, maybe even impossible, goal. Maybe A ties a bonus or dangles a promotion to the fulfillment of that goal. Now set that in context of WE ARE THE SMARTEST, WE WORK THE HARDEST.

How hard do you think B is going to push subordinate C to reach the goal? To not fail BEING SMART, WORKING HARD? Do you think that some meaningful number of times, C might feel such aggregated heat from two layers of management that it could resemble some of the anecdotes from the NYT article (and then imagine 3-4-5 layers of management)? If so, do you think A is blameless, and do you think the organization that serves as context for this scenario is blameless? I don’t.

“But that’s not what I meant” is an adequate, if somewhat naive, excuse the first time you see the consequences of your actions. The second, third, or fifth time, it’s a lot less so. At some point “unintended side effects” becomes “predictable outcomes”.

The NYT did Amazon a favor. They shone a bright light on some dank corners of the organization and its work culture. Corners that had long been rumored to exist. Now it’s out in the open, and Amazon can seize the catalyst for a thorough audit of the gap between what Jeff wants the place to be and how it sometimes isn’t.

To do so, Jeff, and other senior management at Amazon, need to remember that nobody tells you anything when it comes to bubbling-up abuse from the trenches. It’s completely unrealistic to expect someone five levels deep in the bowels of the organization to reach out to the fifth-richest man in the world and trouble him with his or her toils. It doesn’t matter how many invitations to open doors, escalators, or elevators you extend, it’s just not going to happen.

The only reliable way to get this sort of information is to ask. You cannot just extend the “open door” invitation, lean back in your executive chair, and think that you’ve done all you can.

Jeff, or a team he charges with finding facts (and not protecting egos or appearances), has to follow up on the leads, examine the stories, identify root causes, and propose sanctions and remedies. And Amazon has to be willing to accept that maybe some of its systems are producing consequences it does not desire, and that they should change.

Disclaimer: Jeff Bezos personally owns a minority, non-voting stake in Basecamp acquired in 2006. That makes this case personal for me. Factor in that bias. Also, this exact problem, top-level management being the last to know, is why we created KnowYourCompany.com.

Run a business long enough, and you’re bound to say goodbye to employees along the way. You might not think it matters how that goodbye is said – hey, they’re leaving anyway! – but you’d be wrong.

To be honest, we haven’t always had graceful goodbyes at Basecamp. To be even more honest, I’ve said goodbyes that weren’t graceful. And that still bugs me, and it serves as a recurrent reminder of why it matters.

A bad goodbye is abrupt and unexpected. It’s curt. And it’s like that because it’s easier to bottle up small frustrations, on both sides of the table, until they aren’t small at all anymore. By the time shit is spilling over everywhere, the time for small corrections has passed, and cutting ties can feel like the only option. A goodbye that sails through like a break-up text out of nowhere is the last thing you want, and it’s one of the worst ways to see an employee go.

Of course, not all goodbyes are bad. Far from it. People grow, people change. Like all relationships, not all roles are destined FOR LIFE.

In a relatively small company like ours, the career path at Basecamp is generally to become better at your craft. Level up within your domain of competency. Not to climb a managerial ladder, because there isn’t much of one.

We’ve also had people leave Basecamp to go build their own company or to change careers. Those are generally good goodbyes, because they’re the easiest to make. Wishing someone well for pursuing something you couldn’t offer them anyway shouldn’t take much skill (although I’ve been surprised).

But underlying all goodbyes is that they reflect not just on the relationship you maintain with the people who leave, but also with the ones who stay. They set a tone for how you treat people when things get rocky or take a different direction. It seeps into everything else. No goodbye is a single, isolated event.

Say goodbye with grace.

We’re hiring another iOS developer to help us build great native apps for Basecamp on all Apple platforms. You’ll join an existing iOS team at Basecamp that’s currently hard at work building a next-generation native app, but you’ll also help keep our legacy catalogue of apps humming.

It’s an offering for an experienced developer. You should have multiple shipped iOS apps under your belt (or one amazing one). You should be well-versed in iOS frameworks and APIs, but also be comfortable going off the golden path when necessary.

Our native development approach at Basecamp is hybrid. We combine great native navigation around WebViews and ground-up native features to get the best of both worlds: Productivity through shared codebases on the web, and great fidelity through native.

So while the bulk of the work is in ObjC/Swift, you should also be reasonably comfortable with both JavaScript and Ruby. Enhancing a Rails application to extend the API or tinkering with Turbolinks to make it work with a native-JavaScript bridge shouldn’t scare you.

It’s a great time to join Basecamp and our iOS team. We’ve recently gone all-in on Basecamp. Millions of people have used Basecamp, and our iOS apps are both well-liked and growing rapidly as the way people use the system. The latest work we’ve been doing, and that you’ll help us finish, will make that even more so the case.

We’re looking for someone who’s ready to do the best work of their career – without risking their health, sanity, or life outside of work. Basecamp is here for the long term. We’ve been in business for 16 years (5 before Basecamp, 11 since Basecamp), and we’ve been profitable the whole time. We’re not beholden to or on any venture capitalist timeline. Private and profitable allows us to set our own course given what’s best for our customers and employees.

We believe in taking great care of our incredible team, most of whom have been with us for a long time. This means lovely benefits to help you be the best you possible: fitness and massage allowances, fresh fruit/vegetable subsidies, helping out with continued education, matching charity donations, and of course great healthcare and retirement assistance (401k match in US). When you’ve been here for a year, you’re also in on Fridays off in the Summer. It’s a great package that’s part of creating a great scene.

Since we literally wrote the book on working remotely, we’re of course also open to applicants from both the Americas and Europe (any further away is tough to get enough timezone overlap). We do, however, expect your proficiency with English to be at or close to a native speaker. If you happen to be in Chicago, we have a great office for you to work from as you please. If not, we’ll pay for co-working space or help you outfit a great home office.

Does this sound like you?

Then please write [email protected] with [iOS Developer] as part of the subject line. We strongly encourage you to kill on the cover letter, but also to include links to some actual code you’ve written. If the code is on Github, you can share a private repo with dhh. (If it’s not possible to share code, that’s not a deal killer either, if you can blow us away otherwise).

Remember, it doesn’t matter where you went to school (or if you even graduated). We don’t care about how many years of irrelevance you have under your belt. The work is what matters as well as your willingness to improve yourself and everything you touch. We look forward to hearing from you!

(This opening has been cross-posted to WeWorkRemotely.com as well).

Entrepreneurial lore is rife with odes to hunger as a foundational necessity of success. Hungry founders are commended as the ones desperate enough to do whatever it takes. Hustle the gullible, bend the law, persevere through endless death marches. Whatever it takes.

But is desperation really the best foundation to build the kind of sustainable and long-term businesses the world benefits from the most? Or, is it rather a cheap trick to juice the odds of a short-term pop to the primary benefit of those who are only ever along for a quick ride?

I believe the latter. That it’s key to a narrative that serves those who extract their riches from the startup mining shafts — venture capitalists.

That’s what really gets to me. Champions of hunger-as-a-badge-of-honor are usually the fattest cats in the land. Extolling the virtue of an empty stomach is unsurprisingly easy when it’s something for others to endure.

And what a rotten virtue in any case. Poor decisions are the natural consequence of an empty stomach. Hunger has a Maslowian way of placing itself on the top of your hierarchy of needs. Whatever focus is gained through the tunnel vision of hunger is quickly overshadowed by the accompanying disregard for all else.

It’s the incarnation of short-term priorities. Primal neural pathways taking over. Fight or flight at every encounter. And not just for the time it takes to get to the first taste of success. Habits formed from hunger, like any other habits, gleefully outlive their founding context, and continue to govern behavior long after it is gone and forgotten.

It need not be this way. It’s not only entirely possible, but vastly preferable, to set off a new venture on a full stomach. Building the new not because of a perceived existential threat if you don’t succeed, but simply because building the new is intrinsically rewarding.

It’s also that much easier to keep your moral compass calibrated and pointed in a sustainable, healthy direction when you can focus on your own thoughts and not a growling stomach. It’s how you build businesses and organizations that aren’t just about fulfilling your own personal and immediate needs, but instead bring about respect – possibly even admiration – from customers, employees, founders, and perhaps even competitors.

Hunger is a stick for nobility to beat peasants into submission. Mistaking its abuse for inspiration is an entirely avoidable travesty. It’s time to pick another source of motivation for starting new businesses.