

Kicking the tires: A trial month at 37signals - wlll
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3077-kicking-the-tires-my-trial-month

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peregrine
Every time I read about 37signals and how they work I get a wave of jealousy
and impatience. Its refreshing to know that there are some companies out there
that treat their employees like humans and not cogs in the machine. Its also
refreshing to know you can run a business at the scale of 37signals without
huge bureaucracies.

I know they aren't the only ones who do this but they are vocal about it, and
when your living/working in enterprise land (MKE/Midwest) its good to remember
it doesn't need to be this way.

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jdludlow
A brand new Basecamp developer is allowed to push a change like "disable HTML
support" directly into production, without anyone pointing out that it might
be a bad idea? Seriously?

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patio11
There exist plenty of organizations where a manager would have reported in
April 2012: "Hey Bob, the $PEON_1846 on the QR team in $LOCATION reported that
$COMMIT breaks requirement 1,735: todos must allow embedding the following
restricted subset of HTML. Refer to requirements documents
/shares/documents/basecamp/specs/dashboard/subcomponents/todo/functional_spec.xls
sheet Content Embeds page 3. Submitted as issue 124,436 in the tracker,
assigned to the June milestone. Get it done by then, otherwise we can't fix it
until September prior to the Q4 code freeze, but turn in your TPS reports
first."

Basecamp would be a _very_ different product if it was made that way, though.

There are non-zero costs associated with giving people the authority to do
productive work. On the plus side, this enables them to do productive work.

P.S. Having worked at an organization which did development that way, I can
tell you that having copious documentation does not mean requirement 1,735
will be implemented, but it guarantees requirement 1,735 will be written about
somewhere, which _is what that organization type ends up optimizing for_.

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ceejayoz
There's an enormous middle ground between the two extremes you're portraying,
though.

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patio11
True. If, for example, you're a consulting company, you could have an
intermediate developer sit down and watch every junior developer as he codes.
The intermediate developer could then say "Oh, dude, nice try but stripping
all HTML will probably bork at least some customers' sites. Here, let me open
a console on prod and fire a quick SQL query that would get me fired at TPS
Reports Inc. Ahh yes, it appears customers do indeed embed HTML. OK, let's do
this the long way."

This would allow you to bill, ballpark, $10,000 for "Enhancement: forgetting
to close a tag in a todo no longer borks site."

But, while not being TPS Reports Inc, that is still a pretty different
environment than what 37Signals operates in.

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weaksauce
what's wrong with adding tags at the end of the user editable areas that are
unmatched so the rest of the page does not break when they add unbalanced
html? I think they should parse it and make sure it's legit html before
blindly saving it(xss possibilities if anything is public facing et. al.).

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patio11
I think if you have two developers continue this conversation to its logical
conclusion with bouts of coding and testing interspersed, you will bill $10k.

