
Minimum pay at Basecamp is now $70k - rbanffy
https://m.signalvnoise.com/minimum-pay-at-basecamp-is-now-70000/
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crispyambulance
Good for them.

At ~54 employees according to google search, they're lean, profitable,
sustainable and the employees make a good living according to their abilities.
They're in control of their growth and aren't beholden to filthy rich
investors forcing them to grow like a cancer.

I wish more software companies were like Basecamp.

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digianarchist
Basecamp is the mittelstand of software companies.

~~~
notfromhere
There are a lot of software companies that are mittelstand-ish. Honestly, the
concept could probably do a lot of good for the us economy; especially its
emphasis that not every business needs to be a unicorn

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petercooper
_This new floor also means that the entire salary range at Basecamp is now
around 5x._

So the highest paid employee at Basecamp is earning around $350k. I've seen
several estimates that Basecamp's revenue is north of $100M, so even if
_every_ employee were paid $350k, their wage bill would be incredibly low
compared to their revenues.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Are you implying that they should be paying much more just because the company
can afford to? This doesn't seem like good business sense, especially when
they're already paying above market rate (and based on the highest market rate
in the world, at that).

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vostok
I think they're saying that it's not a very appealing place to work if you can
get $500k or higher offer from the Googles and Facebooks of the world.

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vonmoltke
How many people can actually get that, though? Those are outlier numbers.

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aantix
Take a look at the engineers at Basecamp. Many with 10+ years with the
company, numerous contributions to The Rails ecosystem.

They are the outliers.

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cascom
I’d be curious to know what portion of their employee base is Benefitting from
this “minimum wage” - a couple of admins? I’d imagine all of the front office
jobs and most of the back office jobs at an SF software company would command
wages in excess of 70k?

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beberlei
The article makes mention of this, specifically customer support people are
benefiting from this, which according to the article would have a 50k/year
salary otherwise.

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pbrb
They're also based in Chicago - 70k is right where things start to get
comfortable.

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brianbreslin
i think they said none of their employees live in SF and lots are remote. At
least half are spread out across the globe. So $70k probably goes a long way
in small towns.

~~~
pbrb
even better!

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EGreg
Richard Wolff would be proud. A company that actually values all its
employees. However, he would advocate the company to be OWNED by its
employees, in which case this would be a likely outcome already, not
surprising. It's only surprising under capitalism.

Here is another take completely:

[https://qbix.com/blog/2016/11/17/properly-valuing-
contributi...](https://qbix.com/blog/2016/11/17/properly-valuing-
contributions/)

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backpackway
While I share most of DHH positions, I still dislike him/his tonality/too
dogmatic view/his lame way of doing content marketing--which is the only thing
he seems to be doing nowadays.

It is click-baity and doesn't add anything substantial or new to the
discussion.

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ggg2
wake me up when the people cleaning the office's toilet bowls are also
included in this PR announcement.

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vectorEQ
usually that's external companies....

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Dobbs
That’s the point of the statement.

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theredbox
To me this sounds like a pointless article. If you have a high margin/high
profit company with minimum employees you can pay whatever money you want to
pay.

Is DHH just saying they could pay less to earn more and they are just generous
?

Minimum wage especially with distributed teams is really a pointless metric.

The same way Google can pay top dollar and above average for all employees is
not the same for most of the companies.

I am not saying the companies struggle.. I am saying companies are competitive
entities fighting against other competitive entities like google.

Google extracts the vast majority of the wealth from the world that could have
gone to small / medium sized businesses and so does any other highly
profitable company.

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thiago_fm
Yet another self-publicity stunt.

Maybe the next book they want to sell people will be about compensation? :-)

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onion2k
It's a blog post, on the company blog, about the company. That's not what most
people would describe as a "publicity stunt".

