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EPISODE 0010.5 - DEC 26, 2017 Mailbags

REWORK Mailbag 1 — Part 2

with Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
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This is the second in a two-part series in which Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson answer listener questions. If you’d like your questions answered on a future mailbag episode leave a message at 708.628.7850.

Transcript

(00:00:00) Broken By Design by Clip Art plays.

Wailin: (00:00:01) Welcome to REWORK, a podcast by Basecamp about the better way to work and run your business. I’m Wailin Wong.

Shaun: (00:00:08) And I’m Shaun Hildner. This is the second part of our mailbag show where Jason and David answer your questions. If you’re new to the show, you might want to go back and catch the first one. And remember, if you’d like your questions answered on the show, leave a voice mail at (708) 628-7850. Or, email us at hello@rework.fm.

Wailin: (00:00:26) And if you don’t have a question, we’re actually gathering stories for an upcoming episode about horrible meetings. So, if you have a funny or cringe-worthy or otherwise notable story about a meeting at work, please call in and tell us about it. Or feel free to email us. And, if you have a story about a way you stopped having horrible meetings at work, we’ll also take that story, too. Any kind of meeting story, I want to hear them.

Mark: (00:01:06) Hi friends, my name is Mark Johnson. I’m a product owner in Cleveland, Ohio. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how we non-managers, non-C-levels can gain support for REWORK-type ideas. I certainly see what I can get away with at work without having to ask for approval, but when I’ve tried to reach out to management previously, my ideas, well, your ideas, the ones we have in common, tend to fail.

David: (00:01:32) So, this reminds me of when I was working in Copenhagen in 2001. I worked at a company called Kaput, and at the time, I was reading Joel on Software a bunch, a wonderful blog by Joel Spolsky, the founder of Fog Creek and Stack Overflow, and a bunch of other companies. Anyway, he was blogging in much of the similar way that we then ended up blogging. And one of the early inspirations.

(00:02:00) And I took a lot of ideas from him, and I wanted to try those damn ideas. But I happened to be an HTML monkey at Kaput which was pretty much the lowest rung on the ladder. So, I had no natural traction, and what I found was that if you have no natural traction, it’s almost impossible to inflict any kind of change. The only kind of change you can inflict is on yourself, your own work, and perhaps your team. That’s who you can convince. You’re not going to convince anyone else in management of radical new ideas that have not been tried in your environment, where they’ve not seen actual results. It just doesn’t work like that.

(00:02:38) Which is kind of discouraging. I tried and pushed a lot and I got exhausted, and I just thought, like, this sucks. And it was one of the motivations for why I ended up wanting to be part of running a company, not just be employed by a company, because I felt like the ideas that I had read. The ideas that I found to be true, I couldn’t put those into life. I could affect my own work, and that was absolutely a positive change. A bunch of the things that we talk about on interruptions or how to structure your day or how you feel about progress. These are all things that are about you. Remapping, reshaping your brain and your reactions. But the organizational patterns… unless you have buy-in from someone who already is sympathetic to the ideas, forget about it. Unfortunately, which is kind of sad. In many cases, it’s easier to find a new job than it is to convince a stubborn boss that they’re wrong. The power dynamics just generally do not allow for that to happen.

Jason: (00:03:40) Yeah, I don’t have a lot to add except to say that I’ve heard from some people who’ve tried this and David alluded to it, basically, is go down to the smallest possible level you can, which might just be yourself or your team if you’er managing a team, or something. I think you said you were product owner, so you have some power at some level, to change what’s below you. But very little to change what’s above you. So, you’re working on a product. You hopefully have some control over the product and the team. You can apply some of these principles there. But I do think if you try to walk uphill with them, you’re going to get tired really fast. People are going to push you back down, so I’d just say stick to your local area as best you can and then, maybe your management or managers or owners, they’re going to pay attention to success and to results and whatnot. If your little group is doing something better than some other little group, they’re going to go, oh, what’s going on in this little group? And they might see what’s going on and perhaps then you have some leverage.

(00:04:37) If you want to have some change, you have to have leverage. And you have to think about, how big is the lever basically? It’s going to be very difficult to move a whole company with a short lever. You need a big, long lever, and that comes from being successful in your own little space for a while. Then you can move the company perhaps.

(00:04:59) Anyway, it’s going to take a while, it’s going to be very hard, but I’d stay focused on what you can actually control and not so much the things—you might want to change the whole thing but you’re probably not going to be able to do that.

David: (00:05:08) One of the things I’ve found, too, is the limits of logic. You think, oh, this argument is so persuasive, like, I was really persuaded by this argument so I can just use this really good argument for someone else, and it just doesn’t work like that. Unless there is—I think Clayton Christensen had this notion of, there’s got to be a slot in their brain for this argument. Unless there’s already room and they’re receptive to it, it doesn’t matter how good the argument is. It doesn’t matter how good the logic is. It’s just not going to fit.

Jason: (00:05:37) Yeah, if their business is running fine in their eyes, like, why would they mess it up? Of course, if there’s a mutiny and a bunch of people start leaving, then it might wake them up. But, if things are probably okay from where they sit, it’s going to be very, very hard to change someone’s mind. Just like it’s hard to change your mind if everything’s fine where you sit. Maybe you’re open to these ideas because things aren’t fine for you.

(00:05:55) Anyway, yeah, I’d start small. String together some successes, perhaps, that give you some more leverage to have at least more of a conversation and be taken more seriously. Otherwise, if you go straight to the top without successes or without a handful of wins, it’s going to be very very hard to convince anybody of anything.

David: (00:06:11) So, Luke asks a question about mental health. He wants to know, how do you support people suffering with mental health problems? Do you treat time off for mental health the same as you would do for dealing with physical illness?

(00:06:25) That’s a good question, and I think especially in the US, mental health issues have an odd stigma to it. Someone being depressed is often not taken that serious, and I think we’d like to think, at least, that we treat that topic with more respect. And in part, with the privacy that that often entails. So, when we talk about vacation and time off, one of the ideas is that first of all, there’s a general principle of three weeks of vacation, and then there’s also the flexibility of just, days off that you need.

(00:07:07) That’s days, that’s not months or whatever, but it just gives some direction, like, if you’re going to take a couple days off, like you feel off or whatever? Totally fine. No one is going to ask questions about that. I think that that’s often how it comes in, that like, a lot of people would feel uncomfortable raising that as, oh, I want to take time off because I’m just feeling depressed. If you just have a reasonable buffer of days that someone could take for whatever reason, you can take those for that.

(00:07:34) We’ve had other cases, though, when I think one employee just wrote up a Heartbeat a couple days ago, just simply stating it outright. Like, I didn’t feel good today. It wasn’t a physical thing. My head wasn’t in it, and I took the day off. And we have this feature in Basecamp where you can basically plot that and half the company had plotted that. There’s a, I think, an acceptance about this now that wasn’t true perhaps 10 years ago or 15 years ago in the same way.

(00:08:02) And, I’m sure it’s also not the same in every company. We’ve also had other cases where someone needed more time off and actually that’s how we came up with the notion of the sabbatical. So, at Basecamp, every three years, you can take a month off and you can use that month to learn a new skill, sit on the couch, do housework. Do anything you want, and it started actually as someone who just needed a sustained amount of time off from work to work through some personal mental issues.

(00:08:33) It worked out so well in that case, that we thought, well, why shouldn’t everyone have that opportunity. So, that’s kind of how we think about it and how we try to help.

Jason: (00:08:42) Yeah, I don’t have much to add, other than, I think what’s tricky about this for a lot of people is coming forward and saying, like, look, if you have the flu, it’s really easy to go, hey, I’m sick. I just threw up last night, it was a terrible night. I’m out. And you’re like, okay. Like, I have a fever, I’m out. It’s hard sometimes for an employee to come to a boss or whatever and say, hey, I’m suffering depression, or whatever. Or someone in my family is, my husband, my wife, whoever, I need to be around for someone else. It’s difficult to do that, so we try and be as sensitive as possible to that if someone brings it up, it’s completely private. Unlike, you know, if someone has the flu, you might just tell your friends or your other coworkers, hey, this guy’s out because he’s got the flu or whatever.

(00:09:26) I think you have to be very careful about that and very sensitive about that. But yeah, I do think it’s important. I don’t really know how else to handle it beyond being thoughtful and private about it and being completely fair. And recognizing that it’s real. And if someone needs extended time then they’ll get extended time. I think that’s what we’ve always done and if there’s other things we can do to be better, I think we should. But it’s a great topic and I think it’s not really discussed that much.

(00:09:57) I think depression is discussed often, but how do companies deal with it, or handle it, when an employee has it? Or is it sustained, or is it a short? Those are topics that are really interesting, and I don’t know if there’s been that much discussed generally about that, so.

David: (00:10:11) I think where we try to think about the topic, too, is are we contributing to that? Are you in a work environment that’s going to make it worse? If you are prone to depression, are we putting on workloads or scenarios that create extra stress for you to kind of get into the [inaudible] of that? Same thing with burnout. Are we doing things, scheduling projects in such a way or otherwise configuring our business such that we would make things worse?

(00:10:38) And if we are? Let’s change it. So, we’ve done a lot of things, and the whole—the keyword, the theme for Basecamp for a while now has been, how can we get more calm. And I think this notion of calm has a helpful impact on these issues, and it makes it easier to cope with. If you do have a tendency to depression, to not get sucked into that because we surely should not be contributing to that.

(00:11:08) Oftentimes, it’s not related to that at all. Sometimes, it is, and for those times, can we do more to kind of lessen that, and I think the tech industry, in particular, is actually terrible at this. I think overwork, stress, meaningless deadlines, meaningless pressure, that’s all just self-imposed. It’s absolutely a contributor to depression, to burnout, to all sorts of mental issues. Where we could just do so much better, because why? Why are we doing these things? Why is it so crazy at work? Why is the deadlines so unrealistic? Why is there such an encouragement to work 80 or 90 or 100 hours? Why are we doing this, again? And just recognizing that if you have an environment like that, that has consequences, and for some people those consequences, they can just shrug them off. And for other people those consequences are full-on depression, burnout, or other issues.

Jason: (00:12:04) That’s a really good point. I hadn’t thought about that so much, but it’s spot-on, because I think, in general, corporate America—I know, I’m generalizing when I go there. Let’s just call it work. People think, I guess, my assumption is, is that a lot of companies think people, their employees bring depression into work. Like depression happens outside of work, and they bring it into work and it affects work. But really it could be the office and the work that’s creating the depression in people’s lives. So, that’s a really great point David brought up about, like, if people are coming to you with that, and again, it’s delicate to figure out. And if you’re not qualified psych—who knows.

(00:12:46) It’s hard to diagnose all this stuff that we can’t diagnose it, but I do think it’s important to look at that and recognize, what is this person doing here? What’s our environment? What have we created here? What are we putting people through? And are we contributing to that. I think that’s a great point. Something that’s worth thinking about.

David: (00:13:03) It reminds me of this cartoon about climate change where there’s this conference, basically, where they’re talking about all the things. Oh, we could clean up the air, we could clean up the oceans, we could do all these things. And then one person rises up and says, well, what if we just made the Earth better and it wasn’t us?

(00:13:21) So, whether you’re a contributor to depression and burnout or whatever, like, what’s the worst that can happen if you make your workplace better? Well, your workplace get better. Whether that’s a contributor or not to the mental anguish of the people that work there, it still gets better. So, you should be doing your part and you should be doing more to create a calm environment.

Jason: (00:13:42) Aaron from Portland emailed us to ask, what advice do you have for developers wanting to work at a company run like Basecamp. Seemingly every company hiring developers touts their amazing work-life balance, their unlimited vacation policy, and their sponsored lunches or happy hours. It’s really difficult to figure out which companies actually mean what they say. What should I look for when researching a company?

(00:14:03) I get this one a lot via email, too. People say, I know you guys don’t have any openings, but are there other companies out there like Basecamp, and I generally say I don’t know, because I really don’t. I don’t really keep track of that sort of thing, but, I think if you want to know what it’s really like somewhere, you have to ask someone who works there. You really shouldn’t take the company’s advice, or word for it. That would be my thing. So, you can go on LinkedIn, or Twitter or whatever and find someone who works at this place and say, hey, I’m thinking about working there, what’s it really like there? And get their actual take.

(00:14:40) And, I think I’d probably talk to someone who’s been there who was just hired recently and also someone who’s been there for a while. Because there’s always a honeymoon period, and some people are really fired up about the new job, maybe they were unemployed for a long time, so any job is great. Like, it’s hard to know. So, I’d get a sense of what the different sort of frames of time are like, there.

(00:15:00) For example, I think maybe a year ago, had you asked someone who had just joined Basecamp what it was like, some people would say it was pretty crappy, actually. I think our on-boarding process was actually really bad. We hadn’t really been hiring really frequently, and we really hadn’t perfected the on-boarding experience and so, it wasn’t very good. And we heard that from a few employees, because we started doing these entry interviews and started to learn about what the on-boarding experience was like. And we’ve made some significant improvements and now, I think, hopefully a lot of people feel like it’s really great.

(00:15:30) People who’ve been working here for a long time would probably say it’s really good, but someone new is like, well, they didn’t do this, and they didn’t do that. And I didn’t even know who to talk to and I wasn’t sure what to do next. And, so, I’d talk to a few different people, get a sense of it.

(00:15:41) Also, I will say this, that if you’re looking for, if you’re like, piling up the perks and figuring out if that’s a good company to work for, you’re probably looking at the wrong things. Their unlimited vacation policy is not going to make you happy. Their sponsored lunches are not going to make you happy. Their amazing work-life balance, whatever that means. Maybe that has something to do with happiness for you, but what does it really mean? Who really knows? So, I’d figure out why you want to work at that place to begin with. Are they doing interesting work? Do you like the people who work there? Do they generally seem to be a cool place to be? Or a place that feels good for you based on what you’ve heard and what you’ve read? I wouldn’t just kind of measure up the perks, I think you’re sort of… then you’re just looking at the ingredients, and you’re not really tasting the dish and I think that the ingredients are sort of—you just kind of pile them up. You’re like, is this going to taste good? I don’t know. Who knows. It’s just a bunch of things. So, I’d look at that.

(00:16:36) So, anyway, that’s my general advice for it. I don’t think there’s a list. We don’t have a list of companies like us, or anything like that. I would just kind of go ask people who’ve been there.

David: (00:16:44) I’d also look at that label. If you are going to look at the ingredients, you should think a little bit more carefully about them. For example, unlimited vacation policy? There’s a lot of very good critique out there about that principle. We used to have an unlimited vacation policy and we went away from that because it’s actually terrible in all sorts of ways. It creates this uncertainty about what is actually reasonable. Unlimited doesn’t mean unlimited at all, it’s more like a cell phone plan where there’s like two pages of footnotes on what unlimited actually means. Or, what about catered lunches? Or anything else at the office. There’s foosball tables. Is the idea there that employees should live their whole lives at the office. That anything that can keep them there longer is actually better?

(00:17:27) There’s a bunch of perks that seem like they’re great on the outside, and then if you actually think about them a little more, then they’re not so great, and there’s more of a motive behind those perks that are all about keeping people at the office for 60, 70, 80 hours a week. And then all of a sudden, you could think, like, oh, the perks sounded great but the consequences of that is not something I’m interested in. Maybe you are. Maybe you want to work 80 hours a week and you want to have the office be a playground where you can stay all day. Well, fine.

(00:18:00) You can hear about the sarcasm in my tone that I don’t think that’s fine at all, actually. So, the perks and benefits that we try to line up at Basecamp, for example, are all about supporting people away from work. Like, we actually don’t have any catered lunches or foosball tables, or… Actually maybe we have—we have a ping-pong—some table somewhere.

Jason: (00:18:18) Somewhere. It’s folded up right now.

David: (00:18:18) But, it’s not the focus of it, right? Like, the focus is on something else, so. I’d look at that and then think a little deeper about what these things mean.

Jason: (00:18:27) I’ve also done a little bit of a thought experiment around this, whenever I see other companies applying, or having job openings, I’ll sometimes read their listings because I’m curious to see how other companies advertise for jobs. And, when I look at some of the perks, they’re actually huge turn-offs for me. So, I’ll see, like, drink-ups every Friday. Like, I would never work at a place where there’s “drink-ups.” That, to me is not for me. Some people might like that. I do not like that. Not for me.

(00:18:51) And that, to me, signals the values of the companies and the importance of alcohol and whatever is going on at a company. So, I’d look at perks, also, not just as things that you’re attracted to, but things that you’re—you want to reject, basically, and go… If the list of things doesn’t feel like me, or like, I can sort of see the culture through this. I can read between the lines, like, that’s not going to be a place for me. I’d use them also as filters and not just things that you’re attracted to.

Troy: (00:19:20) Hey, this is Troy from Grand Rapids, Michigan. The internet is filled with business advice, and I think a lot of people spend time listening to podcasts and reading books, thinking that the next chapter is going to have some secret nugget of information that will lead them to prosperity and success when in reality, they just need to put their head down and get to work. So, do you guys have any advice for how to ignore advice?

David: (00:19:45) That’s good. I think when we got started with Basecamp, we were a little fortunate in the sense that the internet advice cottage industry had not ramped up to the insane levels it’s at right now. So, it was a little easier to ignore that.

(00:20:03) These days, one of the best antidotes, I find, is, Nassim Taleb, who wrote The Antifragile and The Black Swan, and so-on. He has a great way of weighing books and advice, whether it’s valuable enough. Which is basically, is it old? Because if it’s old, that means it’s survived. If a book is 20 years old and it’s still in print and it’s still for sale? You know what? The advice is probably pretty good because otherwise it would not be in print and it would not be for sale. Most books do not get second printings. Very, very few books get 20th printings. So, if you basically just look for old advice. And it doesn’t actually have to be that old, I mean, the Power Law of this is that any book or collection of advice that survives 10 years has outlived 99.99% of all advice.

(00:20:53) So, that’s where I kind of go shopping for advice, in the archives. One of my favorite books on business, for example, is the book The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham. And I think that was written in 1954. And I learned a lot about what he calls securities analysis. Which is basically just looking at businesses and figuring out, is this a good business or a bad business? Most of the principles that he applies in that book are the same principles I apply to looking at whether Groupon was a good business or not a good business, whether Zynga had an enduring model. And it doesn’t always all apply, but I think you can take up some of those core principles. The one that really are going to endure, the ones that aren’t going to change in five minutes or two years. And you get those from sources that have survived.

(00:21:39) Another source of great advice that I’ve found is stoicism and the stoic principles. Most of that advice is about 2,500 to 3,000 years old, and it’s incredibly timely, and it’s incredibly good because it’s survived 3,000 years. The vast majority of advice you’ll read on Medium or whatever, is going to be forgotten next week. So, I would be careful where you mine for that advice. The easiest thing on the internet is just to follow a link which will lead you to the most recent thing. It’s very, very unlikely to be the best thing. Very few very recent things turn out to be the best things. So, it’s just so much easier to go back in the catalogues, and say, I’m going to ignore the chatter that’s going on right now, and just focus on the old stuff. Because there’s plenty of it and the education and the value you’re going to get out of that is way more likely to be a hit.

(00:22:35) So, I’d say, shut your laptop and maybe bring out your Kindle or order some actual physical books. Which is funny, because I didn’t used to hold this opinion. I used to think that most books were too long, or they were too boring or whatever. And it was because I was reading the wrong books. I was basically reading books that were just like Medium posts today. Compilations of a single idea that didn’t stand the test of time.

(00:22:56) Once I started just going a little further back and reading books from 1954 or from 2,500, or for 250 BC, I felt like, oh, actually books are pretty good. You just have to find the right ones, and there’s just not a lot of those, but there’s still plenty of them, right?

(00:23:12) I think another good book Jason and I have been talking about recently was a big inspiration for both of us, which was the book called Maverick by Ricardo Semler and I think that was published in 1999, or ’98 or something like that. Basically 20 years old. It’s still good.

(00:23:29) Just, go for those tomes.

Jason: (00:23:31) So, I’ll add another perspective just to round it out a bit. Actually, a couple things. First of all, I like to look at the source, of course. And I like to take advice from people who have done the thing that they’re telling you to do. So, there’s a lot of academics that provide advice. There’s a lot of sort of business celebrities who provide advice. There’s a lot of that stuff. And if they haven’t done what they’re telling you to do, I don’t listen to it, basically. It might be right. It might be wrong. I don’t even care, because if they can’t even do it, or they haven’t even done it, I feel like they’re making it up.

(00:24:07) So, that’s the first thing I would look at, is has this person done the thing they’re talking about.

(00:24:13) The other thing is that I think while I agree with David about some really solid old advice, I think that advice has an expiration date, as well. For example, I haven’t started a business in 18 years, so don’t ask me how to start a business. I don’t remember, to be honest. I can tell you about how to run a business and how to make decisions as we go, and whatever. And I could probably come up with some really fundamental basic principles on how to start a business, but I think you’re better off talking to someone who started a business six months ago than talking to me about how to start one.

(00:24:44) If you want to talk about how to stay in business, talk to me. I think I’ve done that pretty well. But, so, I think that’s the key is that, that just because someone did something a while ago, it doesn’t mean they still know how to do it anymore in a given environment. There’s some, like, sort of fundamental truths, which I think is what David was getting at. There’s some stuff that does stand the test of time. But, I think a lot of the stuff that’s sort of spewed today is very temporal. It’s like, right now, and it just sort of—who knows if it’s going to hold up, who knows if it isn’t. And the person who’s giving you advice may have done it a long time ago.

(00:25:18) So, first of all, look at the advice and figure out, has this person even done it? When did they do it? Is the time roughly the same? And if not, are these principles so fundamental that they’ll still stick around, or not? That’s kind of how I would approach advice.

(00:25:33) And also, I think, for the most part, you’re probably better off not paying attention to any of it, and just doing something. Learning it yourself… I think there’s a lot of people these days, especially, who are obsessed with getting the latest tip and hack and whatever it probably doesn’t matter as much as—you’re not going to learn as much from that as just simply doing the thing. And then, after you’ve tried to do it, if it didn’t work, then ask someone for some help. But maybe don’t ask for help ahead of time because it’s going to sort of point you in their direction versus your own direction.

David: (00:26:04) I find, too, that when you try to consume advice about things you actually haven’t done, there’s not the right slots in your brain for it. I remember when I went to Copenhagen Business School and I had been out, I had been out working in the industry for three years before I went to Copenhagen Business School. And I found that a lot of my peers, classmates who’d gone straight from high school to college, they had no way to process the information and where to put it because they had no experiences to bounce the advice off. So, it just bounced off. And they just took notes on everything. I would take very, very few notes at Copenhagen Business School, because most of the stuff got filtered through the sieve of my experiences where someone else who didn’t know what was really important or what resonated, they just took everything down, which meant that they learned nothing.

(00:26:57) I find that when I want to learn, for example, a new programming language. I have to sit down and start typing on the computer. You can’t just sit and read a whole book about it. That doesn’t do anything. So, most of the advice that I seek out is when I’m already doing it. It’s kind of like, I’m trying to put together—I put together a desk, actually, three days ago. And I just started putting it together, and as soon as I found a piece that didn’t fit, I was like, all right, let’s look at the instructions. It’s just so much easier to do it that way. Just in time, you just take the bits that you need to get onto the next point. And then you keep moving from there.

Jason: (00:27:30) I agree, but I do the same thing. I just kind of get as far as I can, and then when I can’t, I go look for help. If you look for help ahead of time, you’re probably spending time on something that won’t actually help you. You don’t really need it, yet. You don’t need help until you’ve done something and you’re stuck, basically, is the way I would look at that. So, I wouldn’t mine for advice that you don’t need. And you haven’t encountered the problems that it’s referring to, yet.

(00:27:58) So, when people are talking about, here’s how to start a business. Here’s how to do this, here’s how to do that. Well, if you haven’t started one yet, I wouldn’t worry about it. Just like, to start one, you just do something, first of all. Like, starting a business, you don’t have to get legal about it, you just do the thing you’re gonna do and you can deal with the rest later. So, yeah, don’t get advice ahead of time on things you don’t need. It’s like, you don’t have a problem yet. Until you actually have it, don’t worry about it.

Shaun: (00:28:19) Great. So, don’t take our advice. Read other’s people’s books, and don’t ask Jason about shit.

Jason: (00:28:25) That’s exactly…

David: (00:28:25) That’s a great summary.

Jason: (00:28:27) That’s what I would say.

(00:28:29) Broken By Design by Clip Art plays.

Wailin: (00:28:39) We, at REWORK want to wish you a very Happy Holiday Season. We’re going to take a few weeks off, and we’ll see you back here in 2018!

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