You should never hire anyone for something you haven’t first struggled to do on your own. It’ll teach you most of what you need to know to actually interview candidates, it’ll allow you to understand the nature of the work better (do I even need to hire or can we outsource?), and you’ll know exactly what a job well done will look like. It’ll also give you a sense of whether the job is big enough for a full-time hire yet or if you can skimp by on your own (the latter is preferable if possible).

Jason didn’t hire me to help him program Singlefile (now defunct) before he had a sorta-just-barely-working prototype running off his own PHP skills. I didn’t hire Mark to do system administration before I had spent a whole Summer setting up a cluster. Jason didn’t get Sarah on board to do support before he had first done it for years on his own.

The benefits of having done the work yourself before seeking help doesn’t stop at hiring either. You’ll be a much better manager of roles that you’ve already held than when you’re completely in the dark about what it takes to perform. You’ll have empathy available when the going gets tough and it’s not their fault — and a stern voice when it is.

Don’t let big titles scare you off either. What does a business development person do? Find out by trying it on! Call people, make a few deals. Think you need a usability tester? Try a simple session on your own first with friends. No, it won’t be perfect. That’s okay. What you’re paying in initial execution will be repaid many times over by the benefits above.

We missed out on doing the promised 37signals Live event last week, so now we’re going to make it up by going double this week. Today, Jason will be speaking to the Milwaukee Area Technical College at 4:45PM CDT 5:30PM CDT. Tomorrow, we’ll both be doing a show from the office that’ll mix debates and the regular Q&A style at 11:00 AM CDT.

Both shows will as always be available live from http://live.37signals.com/. Hope to see you there!

Update on Milwaukee chat: Actual start time is 5:30PM CDT. Apologies for the confusion.

Apparently there’s something worse than being despised and that is to be utterly irrelevant. Gruber hits it spot on in his commentary on Microsoft’s panic response to the mixed reception of the Seinfeld ads. A company that stands for nothing can not market themselves out of that position.

I actually liked Microsoft better when they stood for something. Even when that something was being a ruthless corporation hell-bent on world domination. Batman needs the Joker too.

It’s hard to imagine that the once mighty 800-pound gorilla in the room has been reduced to a mere monkey. A monkey with a $230B market cap, but a monkey no less.

I pity the marketers working the Microsoft account. There’s no way to win. If they go vague, they get people_ready. If they go edgy, they get panic and push back. Talk about a set of golden handcuffs.

Aesthetics have a bad rap in geek circles. CmdrTaco infamously slammed the original iPod with “No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame”. In other words, it’s all about the features and the functionality. If you don’t do more than the other guy, you’re useless. I don’t agree, but I accept.

It’s when the argument is raised from the “I” and to the “them” that it starts getting ridiculous. In arguing some new, ugly IBM laptop over the MacBook Air, I read the following and thought this is exactly where it goes wrong: “If you’re buying a laptop to impress girls at Starbucks (in which case, you might want to do some serious self-evaluation), this ain’t the one for you”. In other words, people only buy beautiful products to impress other people (and that’s a shallow thing to do).

It’s actually not so much that this position is ridiculous, it’s more that I feel sorry for someone holding it. I get so much enjoyment out of surrounding myself with beautiful things that I feel sad for anyone missing out on that. Aesthetics is a feature in itself. One that I — and most the rest of the human race — is perfectly willing to let trump other functionality.

I think you’ve fundamentally misunderstood why people buy beautiful products, if you think it’s all about projection. While there’s certainly something to that (and I see absolutely no shame in that either!), it’s at the core about people feeling good about that which is pretty. That doesn’t make us shallow, that just makes us human.

I’m a big fan of swearing. Not in the derogatory, directed-at-you kind of way (“hey, fuck you!”), but as verbal marker to underline key concepts, create emphasis, and express passion. It certainly doesn’t work in every environment nor should it, but there are plenty were it does.

The first place where I’ve found it to be useful is between coworkers (“fuck, that’s awesome”). A team of British researchers found a while ago that profanity at work can help build solidarity and release stress. Couldn’t agree more. When people feel comfortable enough to let their emotions bare with the use of profanity, I’ve found the resulting atmosphere to be so much more relaxed and pleasurable. It’s not the profanity itself (although I adore “fuck” as one of the most versatile words in the English language), but what it says about the knitting of the culture.

The second place I’ve used profanity to great effect is at conferences where you feel you know the audience enough to loosen your tie and want to create a mental dog ear for an idea. Of all the presentations I’ve given, I’ve generally had the most positive feedback from the ones that carried enough passion to warrant profanity and it’s been very effective in making people remember key ideas (“they sell fucking shoes”).

It seems that profanity can work as a record button for the brain. It brings people to the edge of their attention as they’re trying to figure out whether they’re supposed to be offended or inspired. And then the content warrants the emphasis, the idea seems to stick better and longer and with more affection.

As with any tool, it can certainly be misused and applied to the wrong audience. But you can cut yourself with a great steak knife too. Use profanity with care and in the right context and it can be fucking amazing.

Venture capitalists are glorified gamblers in the Ace-from-Casino sense of the word. They try their best to collect intel on the players, but ultimately still just place bets. Bets that usually fail more often than they succeed. It’s the 1-in-10 blowout payoff that makes sure the piano keeps playing for them while the tune goes mum for the rest of their bets.

Those are potentially good-enough odds for a VC to make a decent return for their investors. Lots of VC’s can’t even pass that bar, though, and end up net-negative for their backers. But let’s just take the guys who do make it. What’s their seal of approval worth?

According to Adam from Heroku, it’s much more valuable to get the peg from these gamblers than actually having sales in the shop:

When you’re doing your own thing, you have very little feedback on whether your path makes sense. You’ve got users/customers, sure. But for any random thing you might build, you’ll always be able to find some weirdos that want it, and maybe are even willing to pay for it. Whether those people represent the vanguard of a sustainable customer base, or whether they are a niche too tiny to build a real business on, is impossible to tell early on.

But convincing investors of the viability of your idea – enough to place a monetary wager on it – provides early confirmation that you’re on a viable path. It may even provide some course-corrective feedback. This is why VC-backed companies tend to get more respect than non, all other things being equal. A firm whose sole purpose is predicting technology trends believes that there is a reasonable chance that this company’s product will be the next big thing.

It’s funny, I have the exact opposite take from the same indicators.

Real customers who use their own money to pay for your products seem like a much better, much more real confirmation that you’re doing something right than getting pegged by a VC using other people’s money to fish for 1-in-10 chances of a monster trout.

To me, convincing a VC to give you money only confirms that they think your outfit is capable of having a long shot of making a big sale down the line. And that they can dilute you successfully enough that they’ll get the lion’s share of the spoils. As a confirmation of a real business? Meh.

Separate users from customers to determine success
I think the confusion comes from how callously users and customers are conflated. I absolutely agree that if you’re just giving away your shit for free, then interest is only an indirect indicator for possible success at best. Who knows if these freeloaders can actually be made to turn a profit? Better take the money upfront and run for the exit before you have to find out!

But if you stop thinking so much about users (or eyeballs if we’re talking early 2000s) and start focusing on customers, the game opens up. Real customers not only confirm directly that you have a compelling product (rather than the by-proxy way of a VC), they also help fund your operation from the get-go.

You don’t need outside bets to launch a web business
Most web startups don’t have high costs outside of labor that can’t be linked at least linearly (and preferably better than that!) to the growth in customers. If you need lots of servers, it’s presumably because lots of people like your product and if you’re treating your users as customers, that means you’ll be having plenty of dough to bake a profitable cake.

All that being said, it’s certainly possible that being on the receiving end of a VC bet can lead you to the jackpot. The wheels in Vegas wouldn’t keep turning if some people didn’t see a big bucks ringing of cha-ching sometimes. So if the idea of trusting VCs over customers appeals to you, just roll your dice and hope you don’t roll seven!

I never liked the idea of the “for Dummies” or the “complete idiot’s guide to” book series’, but their sales success have certainly demonstrated that plenty of people identify with being a dummy or a complete idiot. Self-deprecation is fine, just realize that there’s a dear line between embracing your own ignorance and ensuring a prophesy of certainty.

This extends well beyond the kind of books you’re buying. I’ve met far too many people who seem so certain of their lack of abilities that they curb their chances of success before they’ve walked the first step. While there are probably plenty of geniuses out there, most of the interesting people I’ve talked to are of average intelligence, but above-average aspiration. Stop believing in the myth of triple-A people as a different kind.

Just because you don’t know how to program or design or lead or do anything doesn’t make you a dummy or an idiot. Mastery is probably closer than you think.

I didn’t start programming for real until I was 20-something. Rails was my first project in Ruby. Jason didn’t train to be a designer, but got a degree in finance. The world is filled with people who didn’t know jack not too long ago about whatever it is that they’re doing and are now highly regarded in their fields.

If there’s something you don’t currently know how to do, please decide not to be a dummy or an idiot. You’re as smart as you always were, you’re just looking to learn something new. Set your ambition to that of equality: There’s no reason I couldn’t be as good as that guy or girl doing what I want.

It seems that every conference I go to some company thinks it hip to use USB keys for swag. I’m sure it was hip. In 2001. Now it’s just such a waste.

Especially because the keys usually aren’t even a remotely useful size. If you’re going to splurge the marketing budget on a swag key, then 256MB is just not going to cut it.

I’d rather have a squeeze ball or a yoyo!

We circle the on-call responsibility between all the programmers at 37signals. Every day is someone’s day to take care of the technical issues that bubble up from support but can’t be resolved there. And that seemed to work pretty well in the beginning, but we’re starting to think that we need a more systematic approach.

The problem with passing the support monkey around is that everyone just wants to get rid of him as soon as possible. There’s not a whole lot of vested interested in dealing with the root cause of the issues, so you solve one-off problems for individual customers and get on with your day.

For the individual programmer, that approach will appear to work reasonably well because the feedback cycle is so long. You forget next week that you’ve actually already dealt with this problem before. And you certainly don’t get the feedback of knowing that the issue caused three other incidents for other people during the week. So your personal incentive to fix the true cause isn’t building naturally.

I’ve found that to ever get anything done, you really need to align personal incentives with the task at hand. That’s why we’ve been thinking about doing support weeks.

A single programmer gets assigned to work the support monkey all week and have to solve the root cause for every issue he encounters. No I’ll-just-deal-with-this-guy one-offs. But not just because of the directive that it’s what you’re supposed to do, but because it’ll come ever so natural when you’ve solved the same problem three days in a row.

Are you finding the root causes for your daily grind or do the wheels just keep spinning on the same issues?

Grady Booch delivered the following axiom at BrainstormTECH last week: “The average work of the average worker is average”. At first, it sounded perfectly rational. But on second take, I got really bothered by this. It’s based on an assumption of bad, average, and good as being static attributes of a person that I find whole fully offensive and narrow minded.

In my experience, we’re all capable of bad, average, and good work. I’ve certainly done bad work at times and plenty of average work. What I’ve realized is that the good and the exceptional work is at least as much about my environment as it is about me. Average environments begets average work.

Good people do bad work or worse all the time
Just think of all the great people and startups that have disappeared into some big borg of a company, only to come out after a few years on the other side with little to show for the trip. Even so-called exceptional people can do unmemorable work when they’re placed in inept environments.

Or think of how easily good people can be made to do bad things when put under the right circumstances. The Stanford Prison Experiment is a good example of the banality of evil.

That’s not to say that we’re all created equal and that star power can be unlocked with hippie music and sandals alone. Just that there’s a ton of untapped potential trapped under crappy policies, poor direction, and stifling bureaucracies. People waiting to do great work if given the chance.

No one can be a rock star without a great scene
So if you want your team to excel, quit thinking about how you can land a room full of rock stars and ninjas (note to recruiters: even if these terms weren’t just misguided, they’d be tired by now anyway). Start thinking about the room instead!

Here are three questions to think about as you begin to self-diagnose your environment:

• Do you value effort over effect?
  Someone who stays up all night working is a hero, but getting the work done and leaving early marks someone who isn’t a “team player”.
• Do you trust people to do the right thing?
  We don’t count vacation days and we give everyone a company credit card but require no real expense reports.
• Do you encourage questioning?
  Ending discussions with “because I want it like that” or explaining policies with “because that’s the way it is”.

But most importantly, stop using the perceived quality of your team as an excuse for why you can’t try or follow new ideas. That’s a self fulfilling prophesy that’ll never fail to disappoint. Humans are incredibly eager to live down to low expectations.

P.S.: You’ll know you’re committing this fallacy when you start your comment to a Getting Real post with “but that would never work here” (it probably would, you just need the courage to try), “sure, you can do that because you have a team full of star players” (we have star players because we do it like that), or “we can’t all just do it like that” (don’t worry about all, just worry about you — and you probably could).