It’s rare that you find people singing the praises of lawyers, so I thought it’s worth calling out a great experience I’ve recently had with one.

His name is Kent Novit and he does real estate law and contracts in Chicago. Kent is different for a number of reasons. First of all, he has a flat fee. It used to be $500 per transaction, but he recently lowered it to $450 (when does that ever happen?!).

Second, because of the flat fee, he never wastes any time. All conversations on the phone with him are short and to the point. He’s always happy to explain things if you ask for them specifically, but usually it’s Just The Business. Love it.

Third, he’s always available to help. Even if it’s slightly outside his area or responsibility. The focus is on getting the deal done as smoothly as possible.

Three cheers to Kent Novit. If you’re buying real estate in Chicago and especially if you’re going it alone, then you really should be using Kent.

I understand that most legal matters are more complicated than that of real estate contracts, but it’s still a refreshing experience to see what dealing with legal matters can also be like.

We rely way too much on averages to run our business. We have our average response time, our average conversion rate, our average lifetime value per customer, and a thousand other averages.

The problem with averages are that they tell you nothing about the actual incidents and often gives you a misleading big picture.

Our average response time for Basecamp right now is 87ms, says New Relic. That sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? And it easily leads you to believe that all is well and that we wouldn’t need to spend any more time optimizing performance.

Wrong. That average number is completely skewed by tons of super fast responses to feed requests and other cached replies. If you have 1000 requests that return in 5ms, then you can have 200 requests taking 2,000 ms and still get a respectable 170ms average. Useless.

What we need instead are histograms. That way you can pick off clusters much easier and decide whether you want to deal with them or not. Outliers are given a more appropriate weight and you’re more likely to make good decisions from the data.

P.S.: Listing the standard deviation helps very little when there’s great variability. When some of your requests take 5ms and others take 5,000ms, the standard deviation is not of much use.

We are very proud to announce that Joshua Peek will be joining the ranks of 37signals as a full-time employee in January. Like most of the other programmers we’ve hired at 37signals, I first got to know Josh through Ruby on Rails where he has been doing a fantastic job for years now.

We’ve been trying to hire him just about ever since, but despite our best efforts, we haven’t been able to get him to drop out of college. So that’s also why we’ll be waiting impatiently until January for Josh to wrap up the final batch of tough classes.

Josh has actually been working on the 37signals suite of products for quite some time as a contractor, though. So when I announced that we’ve come to an agreement on permanent employment this morning, there was much rejoicing from the rest of the team:

Joshua Peek will be the 15th signal.

Graffiti is a problem in a lot of cities, but the tagging that annoys me most is that of American politicians. Take the Secretary of State for Illinois, Jesse White, as an example. I see his name everywhere and it’s making me crazy. He’s adorning my fucking driver’s license in a place more prominently featured than my own!

The website to deal with renewing license plates or anything driving is called “The Official Web site for Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White”. His HEAD is part of the logo! That just pisses me off to no end. If I ever get the right to vote in this country, the first thing I’ll do is vote for anyone but this self-promoting clown.

Stop worrying about spray cans and start worrying about the tagging of these renegade politicians. It’s much more costly to clean up their shenanigans.

A great resume will get you not-rejected, a great cover letter will get you hired. That’s the conclusion I’m left with after going through the applications for our junior support programmer position.

Most people can make their resume look reasonable which makes it a poor qualifier. We don’t believe in years of irrelevance, so you’re not going to beat out another candidate by having four instead of three years of experience. That means all you’re left with is just check marks: Yes, there’s Rails experience. Yup, there’s the sysadmin stuff.

Poor qualifiers filter out few candidates. When I’m saddled with 70 applications for a job, I have to make some rough cuts very quickly. I literally have to decimate the pool. With the resume only doing 20% of the job, the key is left with the cover letter.

This means that “If you like my resume, give me a call” doesn’t make the cut for a cover letter. I need more romance and originality than that to pick up the phone.

Strike a tone in tune with the company

It also means that you really have to tailor your tone to the company. Pulling out your Business Serious voice and addressing “Dear Hiring Manager” instantly kicks you down a few levels. Just like showing up in a suit would do when everyone else is wearing jeans and t-shirts (except of course if you have extreme pizazz to pull it off).

The gut reaction builds immediately. If the first paragraph is a strike, the second has to work that much harder. If there’s no hook in the first three, it’s highly unlikely that anything is going to come of it.

This advice is probably exactly the opposite of what you’ll if you’re aiming to get into a big shop with a formal HR department. In that scenario, it’s often last man standing in the numbers game and checklist requirements. Personality doesn’t matter to make it through the first cut.

But when you’re looking to get hired by managers who actually have to work with you, personality is almost all that matters to get to the interview. So beef up your cover letter and let your personality shine (Jason Zimdars who we recently hired set the gold standard).

We’re looking to hire a support programmer who can work with Sarah and Michael on customer issues. This includes investigating reports of abnormal behavior and fixing bugs, but it also means building tools to automate the work.

See the full job posting on the 37signals Job Board for more details.

I love how revealing the language of marketing can be some times. When marketers are insecure about their offerings, it’s a predictable consequence that the presentation will grow ever more over the top.

The long-standing “all-new” trend is a perfect example of this. When an advertiser is claiming something to be an “all-new” car/soap/computer/camera it usually means exactly the opposite. It actually hardly even means new, at best it’s most commonly just “marginally-new” or “just-a-few-tweaks-new”.

In any case, focusing on just the newness of something is usually a pretty weak selling point. How about you just focus on something that rocks about your product? If the product is great, your customers will most likely automatically be buying the new thing.

I love when people call what we do at 37signals a “lifestyle business” — but probably not for the reasons they think. When the lifestyle card is pulled from its tired deck, it’s usually meant as a pat on top of the head. An “oh, that’s such a pretty drawing, dear little boy.” Ha!

It’s the archetypical false dilemma. Either you 1) let your business devour your life and you’ll be incredibly successful or 2) you balance your life with other things than work but are relegated to paying-the-rent success. Double ha!

It’s been a long time since there was a direct correlation with the number of hours you work and the success you enjoy. It’s an antiquated notion from the days of manual labour that has no bearing on the world today. When you’re building products or services, there’s a nonlinear connection between input and output. You can put in just a little and still get out a spectacular lot.

Here’s where I put on my pocket psychology hat. I think that it’s very hard for some people to come to grips with this new reality. It’s a lot easier to deal with your lack of success when you can rationalize it by saying other people just work harder. That leaves the door open to think, “I could have that too, if I was just willing to give more. But since I’m not, I’ll be content with what I have.” That’s a comforting, ego-protecting notion.

It also works if you’re already having reasonable success and you want a life distraction. You can assign your success to the insane hours you put in and then not feel so bad about giving up everything else. If you convince yourself that the only way that you can have success is through total immersion, you don’t have to make excuses to yourself or your surroundings. The sacrifice is justified.

I’m not saying that you can’t have success by pouring in all your waking hours. Of course you can. I’m saying that you don’t have to. That the correlation between the two is weak.

We’re living proof that you can work much less than popular entrepreneur lore would have you believe and still run a very successful, multi-million dollar business. And still have time for taking flying lessons, learning to play the guitar, nurture your garden, go hiking, enjoy cooking, socialize with people outside your tech circle.

It’s your choice.

It’s so easy to say yes. Yes to yet another feature, yes to an overly optimistic deadline, yes a mediocre design, yes, yes, yes. We all want to be loved.

But the love won’t keep you warm for long when you’ve taken on yet another obligation that you don’t whole-heartedly believe in. You very quickly become trapped in a pit of guilt when the stack of things you’ve said yes to loom so high that you can’t even see the things you really should be doing.

That’s not a good way to live or work. Which is why you have to start getting into the habit of saying no. No to things that just don’t fit, no to things that just aren’t the most important right now, and no to many things that simply don’t cut it.

It’s incredibly rare that I’ve actually regretted saying no, but I dread my yes’s all the time.

Use the power of no to get your priorities straight. Take the brief discomfort of confrontation up front and avoid the long regret down the line.