
Your life's work - rjim86
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3389-your-lifes-work
======
drats
There isn't a 37 signals "voting ring" but pretty much we see about a blog per
week from them of extremely low/general quality. Often they are of a
lifestyle/why we didn't go big and why we are actually better than all the big
IPOs changing the world nature. I mean this post boils down to "I love my
company (that I own, not that I work for)". I think even if PG posted a blog
so vapid, "I love Ycombinator, I can picture working here for years", even he
would get a bit of fire. I certainly hope we aren't going to be seeing these
vapid posts for a decade or more from 37S. You could randomly select a book
from the self-help or business section of a bookstore, select a random page,
and have a good chance of getting something more insightful than a standard
weekly 37s post.

I seriously have nothing against them, I wish them more success even: just not
success getting to the front page here because frankly they don't talk about
interesting algorithms, technologies or business strategies. They are
incredibly boring. No mobile, no Google glasses, no new computer game, no
crafty actionable patio11 strategy, no raspberry pi hack, no programming
language hack, no excellent presentation, no struggling story of success, no
rejection and comeback, no scaling of servers, no clever command lines, no new
SSH shell, no browser plugin, no investment philosophy, just "I love my
business".

75% of their posts are simply not HN-worthy and there isn't a voting ring but
there is probably a bunch of social contacts who are up voting this. Please
just subscribe to their twitter or RSS because their weekly show here is
frankly tragic and they should cut down to 1/4th as much and spend more time
with their family.

Edit. Just to note I own a DHH book, so I will pay for the writing of this guy
when it's actually worth it. I'm just saying this blog stuff isn't even worth
free.

~~~
rednukleus
> there isn't a voting ring but there is probably a bunch of social contacts
> who are up voting this.

Depends on how you define voting ring. It wouldn't surprise me if they let a
load of people know every time something is posted, and these people just vote
it up regardless of content.

> they should cut down to 1/4th as much and spend more time with their family.

Most of it is recycled. They wrote some blog posts, turned it into a book, and
now they are recycling the book back into blog posts. As you say it's almost
always short and low quality, so it probably takes very little of their time.

It's very clever marketing on their point, and there is very little that can
be done about it, because there is no downvote on submissions, and 37signals
is not likely to get blocked from the site.

~~~
destraynor
Meh. I'm cynical of the voting ring algorithm.

I used to tweet when I wrote a new post on the Intercom blog but too many of
my followers used to +1 the post and now it seems we're in some way
blacklisted on HN.

Example: <http://blog.intercom.io/the-future-of-email-products/> this post
when pretty much viral everywhere else, ~100K page views, submitted to HN lots
of times by lots of people and I'm sure most of you guys have read it, but
never gets anywhere. Curious.

------
edw519
_I’d be happy if 37signals is the last place I work._

I've had this exact same attitude at every company (many!) I've ever worked
at. Until someone or something completely outside my control fucked it up.
Then I took my positive attitude and moved on to my next "last place to work".

Kinda makes a difference if it's _your_ company, huh?

~~~
jonnathanson
I think we've fully transitioned from the old world, wherein we built our
careers around a given company. These days we have to build our careers around
skill sets, or industry circles, or knowledge bases. Essentially, the 40-year
investment is no longer in Company X, but in Company Me.

This is not necessarily our choice. But the economy and the job market are a
lot more fluid -- sometimes for good, sometimes for bad -- than they were in
the past. Even if someone wanted to settle into one company for the long haul,
that's not only unlikely, but perhaps even highly improbable. The company
itself is likely to be changing and reorganizing at a pace as constant and
rapid as its market.

The old tradeoff between BigCorp and Startups used to be that Startups were
riskier and more exciting, whereas BigCorp was slower, a bit more boring, but
highly stable. The stability has fallen out of that equation to a large
degree. These days it's a choice between _relative_ degrees of comfort and
risk, rather than absolute degrees thereof.

Again, much of this is market driven. There are startlingly few companies, big
or small, that look anything like what they did five or ten years ago. It's a
safe bet that they won't look the way they do today in another five or ten
years. Some people thrive in this sort of environment, and those people would
probably call it "dynamic." Others hate it, and they'd call it "unstable."
Both would probably have to admit, one way or the other, that it's not as
easy.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
>Again, much of this is market driven.

Agree with this. Which is really the problem with this (from the original
post):

>Working people to death to ship any one feature or product is a poor
strategy, as it reduces the capacity to ship the next feature or product (burn
out, build-up of bad rush practices).

Doing things like that is bad if you intend to still exist in 10 years, unless
doing them is necessary _in order_ to still exist in 10 years. Because if you
spend the extra time to get it right, and your competitor ships the minute it
compiles, by the time your product is on the market a huge chunk of your
prospective customers are already locked into a competing ecosystem.

"Take your time and do it right" is Big Company Thinking, because big
companies can _afford_ to take a hit in a nascent business unit for a year or
two in order to more than gain it back a decade down the road. If you're a
startup, you often can't afford it -- even assuming your competitors don't
beat you to market, "take your time and do it right" can easily cause you to
run out of investment capital before the product is finished.

I don't mean to imply that this is actually a good thing, just point out that
these are the incentive structures we're dealing with. Highly competitive
markets have a lot going for them, but stability and long-term planning are
not among them.

I kind of want to blame the antitrust laws, actually, for being such a
catastrophic failure in every direction. On the one hand we have natural
monopoly telecommunications companies abusing their control over radio
spectrum into control over mobile computing devices and control over last mile
wireline service into control over content delivery (classic tying arrangement
in both cases), with nary a peep from the antitrust authorities.

On the other hand, we have the things that antitrust nominally does prohibit
causing the market to run in the opposite direction from the _efficient_
characteristics of monopolistic markets (i.e. non-duplication of effort). When
we have multiple startups working on the same general idea, the natural thing
for them to do is to get together into a single unified organization and pool
their efforts, but we make that illegal. So then they execute the classic race
to the bottom where everyone cuts corners and works unsustainable hours just
because the first mover gets the whole pie and so nothing is sacred if it can
provide a meaningful competitive advantage.

I think we need to rethink this whole mess. The shadow of antitrust regulation
and the _possibility_ of it being enforced is resulting in all of this
widespread inefficiency while the almost complete lack of actual antitrust
enforcement against anyone who deserves it is not even providing the supposed
benefits that all of that inefficiency is supposed to be buying us.

I certainly don't mean to suggest that we don't need something _like_
antitrust -- we can't have AT&T and Microsoft and whatever oligopolies exist
in whatever arbitrary industries turning into de facto unaccountable private
governing bodies, which is exactly what would happen with nothing (and has
happened to greater and lesser extents already), but what we have just isn't
doing the job.

I'd be interested to hear if anyone has any suggestions.

~~~
jbail
_"Take your time and do it right" is Big Company Thinking_

You'd be surprised.

My experience with Big Companies is that it's done "the wrong way" far more
often than at the startups I've worked for.

The reasons for this are many, but none of them have anything to do with being
able to afford it. You still have deadlines and managers who want stuff
finished yesterday. More crucial than that, in my experience, Big Companies
have far less capable talent as well as projects that have been marred by
outsourcing adventures.

Again, only my experience, but I thought I'd share since it runs counter to
yours.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
After I posted that I had seriously considered editing it to add the qualifier
that it only applies to _good_ big companies. Because the same stability and
economies of scale that allow long-term investments and future proofing will
under the wrong management instead provide a ready environment for
inefficiency, laziness and incompetence to continue to exist for a long period
of time without bankrupting the company.

------
ChuckMcM
This is a great insight, not just for work but for life in general.

When I moved to the Bay Area both my wife and I were scrimping and saving to
come up with a down payment for a house. After living there six years we
'traded up' to a roomier house, and in the process of getting our existing
house ready for sale, we did a lot of the stuff we had planned to do 'someday'
but in this case to make the house more attractive. We redid the hall
bathroom, fixed the lights in the den, simple stuff. It was a lot nicer house
to live in just before we moved out. We decided our next house would be
different, we would do the things that made the house more livable/nice when
we thought of them, that way we could enjoy them ourselves.

The tricky bit is doing this even if you aren't "sure" you're going to be in
the same place in 10 years. The fear is that if you suddenly are going to be
doing something else, living somewhere else, well you could have used those
resources better by not spending them on something you wouldn't use/enjoy.

My experience has been that it is always the right thing to invest for the
long haul.

------
h2s
I thought this was going to be something different based on the title. A few
years ago I had a realisation: we are each of us _every day_ working on our
life's work. Your life's work doesn't begin on some nebulous future date after
you land that dream job or get to start a clean project in a fresh new
codebase. The bug you fixed yesterday, the optional parameter you added to
that method today: that's your life's work.

This was a transformative realisation for me. It empowered me to take the
pride in my work that I knew I wanted to, and drove me to push myself a little
harder. It was also useful in helping me see my long term career goals more
clearly. Once you've thought " _this is what I'm going to spend my one and
only lifetime doing_ " all the bullshit falls away.

~~~
r0s
I think of this realization in my own life as The Moment of Panic. Wherein I
suddenly realized time was passing.

I don't think you can see that, until you test your abilities, and see your
own potential. Maybe that's why it took me thirty years to get there.

~~~
h2s

        > time was passing
    

This is an interesting alternative way of looking at it, yeah. I have said
several times in the past that I basically live my whole life as if the "time
running out" music from Mario was playing [1], but that's more about my
impatience in everyday life than any wise long-term awareness of my own
mortality.

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pDzJC9R3HA>

------
jasonkester
I think the main reason you don't see this sort of 40-year loyalty in the
software industry is money.

The first software job I ever had was pretty much perfect in every respect.
Great team, fun projects, respect & support all the way up to the owner,
plenty of leeway to experiment with fun tech on the off chance that it might
come in handy one day.

But they hired me at the market rate for a junior dev. And I got better fast.
Like so fast that the things I built attracted attention elsewhere. And before
the first year was out it was abundantly clear that I could make twice what I
was making simply by responding to an email or two.

So I talked to management, and they did everything in their power to get me up
to the market rate for a regular dev. Which was still way less than I ended up
taking when I did eventually respond to one of those emails. (and a ton less
than I was making a year after _that_ ).

Your value just goes up too fast in this business for a single company to keep
up with. Nobody gives 100% raises every other year, but the market as a whole
seems to be quite happy to do exactly that.

Unless that changes, I think we'll find that most people end up on a track
like my own. We might find our dream job several times along the way. But
unless we're pretty near the end of the track, it'll be hard to justify
staying there forever.

~~~
georgemcbay
"Nobody gives 100% raises every other year, but the market as a whole seems to
be quite happy to do exactly that."

100% raises every other year? I should be making $30,720,000 a year by now!
Gonna have to have a chat with my boss about this outrage!

~~~
gyom
I think it was meant to be applicable only a few times.

He has a point, though, about how unthinkable a 100% raise seems, but if you
get another job it's entirely possible.

------
logic
I suspect the 37signals employment contracts still say "at will" somewhere in
them. In fact, Jason Fried talked about exactly that at one point:
[http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2239-employment-contracts-
wha...](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2239-employment-contracts-what-are-
they-good-for)

If you want me to treat a position like it's the last one I'll take, then show
me the same: treat me like a member of the team that you'll fight to keep
around. Offer equity, take that at-will clause out of the contract, treat me
like a partner in your success.

Anything else is just blowing smoke, I'm afraid. At the end of the day, you
can be let go without notice (and, to be fair, you can also walk away at any
time); that's the agreement you sign during your first professional
interaction with most US-based companies. And it sets the tone for the rest of
the relationship: this is a transient arrangement, and can be discarded as
situations change on either side.

~~~
jackowayed
What are you actually asking for? Employment in the US is at will by default,
unless the employer and employee sign a contract explicitly agreeing to change
something about that relationship. What do you actually want in that contract
to give you? A guaranteed huge severance package that incentivizes them to
keep you? Something that fully makes them unable to fire you without
demonstrated cause? Do you also want to lose some of the freedom you have to
walk away if they sell and massively change company culture, start hiring
worse people, change what they work on or what technologies they use in a way
that moves away from your interests, etc?

Also, remember that if you want a company's default employment contract to be
different, it will also be different for all of your coworkers. Eventually,
the company will make a hiring mistake; no process is perfect. In that event,
you want the company to fire the person as quickly as it becomes clear that a
mistake was made, not hang onto them until they have unquestionably
demonstrated incompetence. Do you want to work at a company that will dilly
dally about firing bad people?

Talk to anyone who has worked at various government agencies, which basically
can't fire anyone after two years, and you will gain respect for at-will
employment.

~~~
lmm
Where I live you'd expect at a minimum a month's notice from either party (in
the contract); 3 months is reasonably common. That's not a long time to wait
to leave (and you can reduce it by mutual agreement; most companies will be
happy to let you leave earlier once you've handed everything over), but it
gives you at least a little time to hit the ground running. As someone who's
currently going through the legally-required consultation process prior to
redundancies immediately after getting a mortgage, had the company been able
to simply say "nope, you no longer have a job, don't come in tomorrow" it
would've massively screwed me over. (Of course, in a world where that was a
possibility my actions would have been different).

As for hiring mistakes, thee months' salary (you're allowed to simply pay an
employee for their notice period if you don't want them coming in) is not a
huge expense compared to the cost of hiring them in the first place.

So yeah; I would never work for a company that wanted to be able to fire me
without cause at zero notice, and I'm willing to put up with having to give
notice myself as a cost.

~~~
nathan_long
You make a good point, but having to give 3 months notice before quitting or
firing is not the same as being unable to quit or fire.

~~~
lmm
Indeed, but an environment where you have to give 3 months notice before
quitting or firing is not "at-will employment".

------
kremdela
I attended a talk at SXSW a few years ago, mostly about the Millennial
generation and their desire to work _with_ you, not _for_ you.

I'm no longer young, but I've bounced around to quite a few jobs because I've
always run into a wall in terms of growth, personal growth within the
organization, or professional growth - not expanding my skill set fast enough
while limited to one employer.

As the founder of a company, you have a lot more control in pushing the
envelope in lots of different ways, but I think the challenge is being able to
create that for yourself vs. creating it for those that work for/ with you.

dhh can create 37racing, work from wherever he wants, push the envelope on
technology as much as he desires, but I believe the challenge is giving the
same to your employees, not just through profit sharing, but sharing the ways
your company can grow.

------
sergiotapia
As I was reading I was thinking to myself, "Damn! This guy must really love
his job. I can't imagine being that loyal to a company for years and years and
years. Unless I was a co-founder and it was partly mine."

Then reached the end and it's DHH. Of course he wouldn't mind working there,
he owns that place. That punchline made the entire article insipid.

~~~
kayoone
his name is actually also on the top ;)

------
SatvikBeri
I've found that thinking of the next 5, 10, and 50 years is a useful mental
trick. It puts me in a frame of mind that helps me make better decisions: will
working myself to death on feature X help me 10 years from now? (Very rarely,
the answer is yes.) Does it make sense to spend more time socializing,
studying, or working? I don't want to exercise _now_ , but how will going to
the gym affect me in 5 years?

The funny thing is that I make better decisions even with extremely short term
projects. If I'm working on a 1-month software project, I'll get it done
better _and faster_ if I have the perspective that I'll be using it for 10
years than if I have the perspective that I'll be using it for 6 months.

So it may be worth putting yourself in a long-term state of mind, even when
it's not necessarily true.

------
kevinalexbrown
I see a lot of comments suggesting "it's his company, of course he wants it to
be good for him!" (One commenter used the term "insipid").

There are worse things in the world than a founder looking to make a company a
good place to work for the long term. Consider: _If shit is broken, we’ll fix
it now, lest we be stuck with it for decades._ Now think about people flipping
companies, people playing hot potato with toxic assets, or looking for the
next vote, or surge in page-views, and this attitude starts to look pretty
nice.

~~~
sergiotapia
Are you referring to my comment? I'm not quite sure if you're agreeing with
me, or just going off on a tangent and not actually refuting my point.

------
swombat
_I’d be happy if 37signals is the last place I work. In an industry so focused
on the booms and busts, I find myself a kindred spirit with the firms of old.
Places where people happily reported to work for 40 years, picking up a snazzy
gold watch at the end as a token of life-long loyalty._

I'm sure picking up the odd Lamborghini (
[http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/coyotes-
pulitzer-...](http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/coyotes-pulitzer-and-
dhhs-lamborghini.html) ) as a token of last month's worth of effort is also a
good plus... :-)

~~~
ynniv
The Lambo was peanuts compared to the custom Zonda.

[<http://www.leftlanenews.com/pagani-zonda-hh.html>]

------
Skywing
I have yet to have this feeling for a company that I work at, but I do
remember having this feeling for an online gaming "clan", back in the day. On
battle.net, for Diablo, people would make clans and just game together, and
eventually war other clans, etc. It was normal to "clan hop" around and join
basically every clan until you're in the best clan. I remember the day when a
friend and I jokingly joined what we thought was going to be a lame no-name
clan, and we had intentions of sneakily doing something as members of that
random clan. Turns out that we really enjoyed that clan and stayed with it. I
remember the strange change of perspective that I had on clans when I realized
that the clan I had joined was so enjoyable that it was without a doubt going
to be better than any other clan out there, in my opinion. Because of that
enthusiasm for the clan, we all ended up sticking together and ended up being
like one of the longest lasting and well known clans of that time period. We
moved off of battle.net and onto our own IRC server which we've all been on,
every day, since like 2001. It's awesome what that kind of realization can
lead to, if given the chance.

------
callmeed
There's a difference between being a long-term middle manager at _someone
else's company_ and being a long-term founder at your own company. I wouldn't
choose the former and I doubt DHH would either (of course, I don't know him so
maybe I'm wrong).

~~~
ChuckMcM
The transitive insight here is that operating the company for the long haul
comes from the top, so when I was at Intel there was never any doubt in my
mind that Intel planned to be around 100 years from now, so being a middle
manager there would (and for some has) been a lifes work. My manager there,
the guy who hired me in 84 retired after having been there for 30 years (he
had started in 1980).

------
volandovengo
"I’d be happy if 37signals is the last place I work. In an industry so focused
on the booms and busts, I find myself a kindred spirit with the firms of old."

This guy is soooooo full of himself, it's pretty nauseating. He acts like
creating basecamp has somehow solved world hunger... I'm amazed nobody calls
him out on it more often.

~~~
lmm
The recent stories from Dustin Curtis have given me a lot more respect for
DHH. Sure, he's not solved world hunger, but he's written a major, publicly
useful library/framework, and he has paying clients who appreciate the work he
does (in my limited experience a lot of consulting work is "easy" by software
industry standards - but to a client with no expertise having someone who can
do this stuff is a godsend. They don't pay you to solve hard technical
problems, they pay you to integrate with their terrible systems and handle
their lack of process). He's made the world a better place; perhaps in a small
way, but few of us can hope for better.

And it's understandable that he gets a bit defensive, even angry, when
unprofitable funded companies are seen to be "worth" more. I've been there and
you get tired of having every customer ask "why are you charging more than
company X", the real answer to which is "because we're an actual business
making a profit, not a bunch of SV hipsters burning investor cash as fast as
they can".

------
johnward
I've never once held a job that I thought I could do for another 5 years. I
couldn't even imagine doing what I'm doing now for the rest of my life. I find
that I usually get bored/tired of the BS after 2-3 years. Companies aren't
loyal to their employees. I'm not loyal to them.

------
projectileboy
I wrote about this once, FWIW... the technical skills one should focus on that
have lasting value: [http://softwareboy.blogspot.com/2009/10/learning-things-
of-l...](http://softwareboy.blogspot.com/2009/10/learning-things-of-lasting-
value.html)

------
zaidf
Sounds a lot like Charlie Munger's philosophy that he likes to invest in few
businesses that let him sit back and relax for a long time instead of
constantly having to worry about getting out of a position at a profit.

------
r0s
That's it, I'm applying to Valve.

~~~
pestaa
Good luck and keep us posted! ;)

------
6ren
10 years is an interesting test. Moore's Law predicts density increase of
100-fold ( _2^(10/1.5)= 101.6_ ). Cost and processing power usually follow.
100x faster phones overshoots most demand for desktops, so not only would
desktops be replaced, we'd likely have an even-smaller form-factor than
phones. That's _one_ decade.

What to invest in, that will still be relevant in decades? People and problem-
solving. Maybe unix and web...

------
shanellem
"If you’re not committed to your life’s work in a company and with people you
could endure for decades, are you making progress on it?"

It's a good question. This post reminds me of another question: Are your goals
worthy of your life? If they're not, I think it's best to find a new
company/project.

------
eldavido
I think you find this attitude a lot more in Europe than the United States. I
see it in ZenDesk a lot too, living here in SF and having visited their
offices a fair number of times.

------
gadders
My life's work is my daughter. Actual work comes way, way behind.

------
meerita
Good rant if you have a sucessful product to sustain your experimentional and
fun lifestyle. For the rest of the crowd: keep calm and do work.

------
vojant
That's just not for me.

------
ixacto
The USA will still have nukes. People will still drive cars. This aint
changing...

