SEASON 2 - EPISODE 160 - AUGUST 13, 2025

Titles, tenure, and paths don't matter

In this episode, 37signals co-founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson talk about why résumés, job titles, and career timelines take a back seat to what really matters when hiring — your actual work. They share how real-world examples cut through the noise, and open doors for people who may not have a traditional path.

Watch the full video episode on YouTube

Key Takeaways

00:15 - Great software helps customers see things from the creator’s perspective
00:00 - Episode highlights
00:10 - Why final hiring decisions come down to a candidate’s actual work
03:50 - The 37Better redesign project
07:27 - How real project work reduces the guesswork of hiring
14:29 - Why creating work outside your portfolio shows your range and creativity
20:02 - Hiring when it hurts

Links & Resources

Transcript

Kimberly (00:00): Welcome to REWORK, a podcast by 37signals about the better way to work and run your business. I’m Kimberly Rhodes, joined by the co-founders of 37signals, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. This week I thought we’d talk a little bit about the hiring processes at 37signals. We’ve talked about it in a couple of different episodes, but Jason just recently wrote something on his HEY World about how we look at years of evidence versus years of experience, so I thought we would jump in with that, I’ll link it to in our show notes. One of the things that this writeup ends with is “Titles, tenure and paths don’t matter. The work does. Always look at the work. It’s the truth.” So with that, Jason, I’m going to have you kind of kick off if you’ll talk us through what you were talking about there, and then we’ll kind of share a little bit about what we’ve been doing here at 37signals.

Jason (00:46): Sure. Well, we just went through a designer hiring round and the programmers went through a programming hiring round, so we’ve got hiring on our mind. And at the end of the day it always comes down to work. What has this person made at the end of the day? Of course, before that you look at a few other things. You look at their writing abilities, you maybe look at their history a little bit, what kind of things have they done? But ultimately the deciding factor is always the work itself. It’s always that, and it’s always kind of a surprise actually. Sometimes you think this leading candidate is going to be the finalist and then it turns out someone else comes from behind with the work

(01:19): Or whatever it might be. But there’s usually a surprise at the end. And what we’ve tried to do, David can speak more to this, but on the programmer hiring round, we can cast a little bit of a wider net for work. On the designer hiring round, I think we let the last five or six people do a project for us or invited them to do a project for us, it’s a week’s worth of work. They all delivered the work, but three of them were kind of instant no’s, and at least one of those was like, I think this person could maybe win the whole thing. Win is maybe the wrong way to put it, but kind of not also. You are kind of winning, frankly. You win a job in a sense, you’re competing for one. And then of the two finalists, the work was just outstanding.

(01:58): It was a really hard decision, but the work always at the end, just like that is the thing that made the difference. It was who had more creative range, who displayed more range, who thought about the details a little bit differently than maybe the other person. And that’s how we ultimately made the decision. So while the other things do matter, at some level, they don’t matter anywhere near as much as the actual work. Now the problem is you can’t give 2000 people a project. So you do have to look at some other things first to whittle it down. But I think it does make sense to get people who you’re excited about to do work earlier than later so you don’t go down the wrong path and spend too much time with someone who’s not going to cut it.

Kimberly (02:33): And David, before we jump to you, quick question for you, Jason. When you’re saying you’re looking at the work, are you looking at past work that they’ve submitted in their application process or are we talking about work for the take home project?

Jason (02:47): I think, well, the past work is what gets them further and further and further along in the process. You have to be attracted to something someone’s done, which be like, this is really good or really interesting or really clever, or whatever it is. So you look at that. But the work I’m talking about with the finalist is actually a project that they do for us. So they have to produce original work within a few days based on a certain prompt we give them like we’re trying to redesign the whatever screen in whatever product. How would you approach this? It’s like that broad, it’s not very, and the designer side, it’s not very specific. It’s a broad thing because I want them to think things through. We don’t give them any research, we don’t give them any evidence. We don’t give them anything, just like, here’s a screen we have, how would you make this better? Maybe on a few different counts, maybe there’s a few things we’d like to make better or we’d like to make this page more dynamic and fresh in terms of the information on it, whatever. But it’s very broad so we can see what they do. But yeah, the work I’m talking about specifically is the finalist work, which is an actual project we hire them to do on the designer side for five days. They basically have five days to pull something off.

Kimberly (03:50): And then David on the programmer side kind of talk us through that process.

David (03:53): Yeah. First I think it’s funny to note that when I first got attracted to 37signals, I was in Copenhagen in Denmark. Jason didn’t know me at all. I was just a fan of the company. And what I was a huge fan of was this project called 37better, which was essentially 37signals at the time, back in 1999 doing exactly what Jason just accounted for in public, taking one page of someone’s website in that case without invitation and redesigning it, making it better, and presenting the thinking. Here’s a single screen from a bank, let’s make it better. Here’s how to present the information. There was, I think FedEx got redesigned this way. About five of these were up on the website and I was just mesmerized by just the unconventional approach to design. It actually rewrote my conception of what web design was supposed to do because 37better was all about rethinking it, how should it work? And there was not a lot of graphics. It was mostly text. It was mostly sort of hints at what the flow could be. So I think it’s just beautiful that here we are 25 years later and we are asking design candidates to essentially do exactly what the company itself did 25 years ago to win its own competition.

Kimberly (05:10): I’ve never heard of this before. So tell us more about, this is literally the first time I’ve heard about 37better.

Jason (05:17): Yeah. Okay. So way back in the day, it was a few things. It started with I think FedEx or maybe 37 Better Bank. I’m not sure which one was first, but I was shipping stuff with FedEx and I had to go through this really arduous, horrible process on their website. And you can imagine what their website was like in 2000 or whatever it was. And I’m like, everyone says this, there’s got to be a better way. There’s got to be a better way to do this. I’m a web designer, why don’t I just redesign the page. Now, of course, I don’t know all the variables. I don’t know the pressures, I don’t know all the stuff, but forgetting all that, here’s what I would do with what I know based on what I have to do as a customer to use this site. So I redesigned this page. It was an HTML and CSS and well early CSS. HTML primarily and inline styles and whatnot. And then I wrote up, here’s my reasoning for what I did. And we put these up and we did 37 Better Bank. 37 Express or FedEx. We did a 37 car interface, actually like a better car interface. And we did a couple others, I can’t remember what they are., but…

Kimberly (06:18): Can we find these?

Jason (06:19): Yeah, they’re online somewhere. Yeah, yeah. I’ll send ‘em to you or we’ll find ‘em in the archive, whatever, but…

Kimberly (06:22): Yeah, perfect.

Jason (06:23): What’s interesting about them is that first of all, it was a way for me to relieve my pressure of frustration, number one, but also it was a great way for us to get client work. Back in the day, we were a web design firm, we didn’t have a lot of clients. People want to look at a portfolio and you’re only as good as the portfolio that you have, and you’re only as good as the client’s work that they let you do basically. And I couldn’t get FedEx as a client. I couldn’t get a bank as a client. We were nobody. So like, well, I don’t care. I’ll just do their websites myself. Like who cares? I’ll do a page. And I said, they didn’t hire us to do this and everything, but anyway, it’s a great way for a web design firm or for a freelancer to build up their portfolio with big brand names that didn’t hire you and just shows how you exercise your thinking and your approach and your design skills, whatever it might be. And so we did a collection of those and it helped us land other clients and apparently helped us land David as well. But really it was just kind of fun, frankly. How can we make this thing better that’s bad.

Kimberly (07:24): Yeah, that’s so interesting.

David (07:25): Now I think what’s beautiful to me about this is that we are not asking anyone applying for a job at 37signals to do anything that the company and its people haven’t done themselves since the beginning of time. On the programming side, it’s very much the same thing. The way I started working with Jason was essentially replying to a prompt that he had sending him code. Here’s how I would do it. Here’s how to solve this problem, and at a broader scale, this is what I did with open source. Here’s how I program. It is a way not just to win business, win attention. It’s also for me and for us, it’s been a way to win candidates, to win applicants, to win people who could be potentially working with me as fellow programmers that, having the work out there is just such a great leveler because it reduces the entire process to the closest to the meritocratic ideal that you can possibly get.

(08:25): There’s a lot of other ways to hire people. Not everyone does it this way. Lots of people go on credentials, oh, you were at so-and-so university, you got so-and-so good grades and you worked for this company and that company. And they look at the CV, and I think both Jason and I have just realized over our 25 year plus career that the CV is very frequently full of shit. It’s full of half-truths if not outright lies about how you move this lever and how you produce this amount of impact. And it’s just gotten to the point that I look at the CV and you can see, all right, this person’s been here, there and somewhere, but it doesn’t really tell me whether they were just writing coattails of someone else, how much they were actually involved, how much of that impact that everyone tells you how to list out in your little CV actually is attributable to that person specifically.

(09:17): And that’s focusing on the work does. It just takes all that bullshit, all that pretending, all that charade, and it just puts it into the shredder and then it asks, so what can you do? These things are important, if they are important. If it’s important that you went to this fancy school, that you got super good grades that you worked at this prestigious firm, it should amount itself into superb work. Now of course, as Jason hinted at, what we realize very often is that that’s not true at all, that we find the best candidates to work at 37signals come from all sorts of places, not with the most impressive CV. Sometimes they’re very impressive, other times not at all. And you know what? It just doesn’t matter. We’re not hiring a piece of paper. What are we going to do with that CV? Hang it somewhere.

(10:04): Like you go to a doctor’s office and they have all their little diplomas, and that’s fine because you can’t actually look at the work doctor does. You have to take the credentials, word for it. You’re not going like, hey, can I review your last appendix surgery? I know what to look for. No, that’s not how it goes. Well, maybe you’re going to look up whether they have a million lawsuits against them, but otherwise you have to take the credentials on good faith. You don’t have to do that when it comes to programmers, when it comes to designers. And it’s just such a huge belief that you can simply look at someone’s skill, someone’s skill applied to your kind of problems. ‘Cause that’s the other thing, someone could have been a designer or a programmer at Meta or at Apple or at Google or some fancy company, and within that realm they did well.

(10:49): They worked with the big teams, they worked on the big scale, they did all these things, and then they come to our problems and they don’t work well at all because our problems are different problems. They’re not the problems of a company of 50,000 people with billions of users. They’re far more immediate and they need a very different pace and a very different turnaround. So, with programmers, we’re a little bit more fortunate I think, than on the design side. On the design side, Jason really has to narrow down the field to just a handful of people because the assignment is going to run over several days because doing this original design takes quite a lot of time. On the programming side, we’ve been able to distill it, what we need to see from someone into a take home test that could be done in about four to six hours.

(11:33): That’s not nothing, four to six hours. I mean, that’s a substantial investment for someone, but no more than getting flown into the company headquarters and put through the ringer of five back to back interviews. So that feels reasonable and it’s also reasonable for us to assess and it means we could do it with more people. So we ended up in the last hiring round, hiring four programmers in total, two juniors and two seniors, and it was out of a pool of about 75 programmers who took the at-home test. That in itself was out of I think 2200 applicants, totally. So you could see just even the whittling down that needs to happen before we can give you the at home test is actually pretty severe. And then we do look at things like your cover letter. Do you write well, do you speak to us?

(12:19): Are there some signals in that CV or things that you’ve worked on, things you’ve told us about that kind of says you should be one of the 75. So Jason says, it gets you a chance to try out, but in no way is it a replacement for the tryout. And I also think it’s funny, as Jason says, I’ve been doing this for 20 plus years looking at candidate code, and I always think I can guess who’s going to do well. I think like this time now I have another two years of experience, 22 years of experience looking at code. I can tell. I can tell that this cover letter, this CV that’s going to be the strong suit. No, I can’t. No, I can’t. Still don’t have a clue. And it’s still the work that reveals it every single time. And what’s nice about that is it takes a lot of the guesswork and a lot of the, is this person going to fall flat on their face in the first three weeks out of it.

(13:13): Because if you’ve seen them do something real, you have a pretty good indication. That still doesn’t mean that everyone we hire end up working out. I think actually even at our process, we end up with about one third of the hires that we do in the programming side, do not make it past one year. No one has this figured out. No one has figured out how to pick talent out of a pool in a way that’s repeatable and has a 90 plus success rate. This is one of the things I loved with this Google study. They analyzed themselves this about 10 years ago. Oh, so we’ve been trying to hire people this way, that way the other way, credentials, lead co. What’s the conclusion? The conclusion? No one has a fucking clue. We cannot predict with any certainty who’s going to do well, who’s not going to do well. So I guess we’re going to keep looking at Stanford grads, MIT grads, because what else are we going to do, right? For us, thankfully we don’t have to do that. We could just look at the work and it is an absolute pleasure to allow someone who would never had made to an interview at FANG because they don’t have the credentials for it on the back of the fact that they’re just really fucking good.

Kimberly (14:26): Okay. What I think is so interesting, I’m going back to your 37 better because obsessed, I think it is interesting because you could as an applicant take that idea of creating something to show in your portfolio that you haven’t actually created. I think for a lot of people, you think you put together your cover letter and your CV and you talk about all of these real things that you’ve done where you could create something like this and include that in your package as an applicant. That seems like a way to definitely get yourself ahead when you maybe didn’t have the roles that would allow you to do some of your best work.

Jason (15:01): Yes, I agree, and I hear this from juniors all the time. Well, I haven’t had the chance to show myself.

(15:07): Then make the chance. Show your own stuff, make your own things or make something on the side or pick a big brand and redesign it. I don’t care what you pick. I want to see the work and I want to understand why you approached it the way you did, what you were thinking of while you did it. And I often will ask someone in the interview process at the end when I’m looking at into work, if you had a few more days, what would you do differently or how would you change this? Or what don’t you love about what you’ve done? And I want to see someone be able to move and pivot around that too and spin around that idea and think about it and respond in real time versus like, well just be lost. Because I’ve seen that too, where someone like you could tell they put a lot of effort into their work, but then they can’t think about their work.

(15:47): They can’t critique their own work, they can’t riff on their own work. I like to riff with people. I used to go through a bunch of different varieties of changes and opportunities and tweaks and adjustments and stuff in real time where we’re playing in the inspector, playing in the code and messing stuff, messing around. I want to be able to work with someone like that. When I see someone who can’t do that, it’s a problem also. So when you make your own thing for whatever it’s that you’re doing, maybe it’s a FedEx redesign or Nike, wherever the heck it is, and you thought it through and you weren’t dictated to do it a certain way by a client, you should even have more freedom, more flexibility to talk about the work that you did because you’re not boxed in by requirements. It’s like, this is what I wanted to do is how I thought about it, and here’s what I would do if I had more time. Or here’s how I would approach this other page in the site. It’s a jumping off point for a conversation, a discussion to get into it, and then you can reveal your interest in the work too. So anyway, I do think it’s very valuable and I don’t like the excuse. I haven’t been given the chance to do anything yet. You can’t wait for someone to give you the chance. Just do something, pick something.

David (16:47): I think what’s interesting is on the programming side, you have even less of an excuse because you don’t even have to invent work. There is an infinite amount of work available in the world’s open source projects. You can literally just show up in almost any project, pick any bug or offer suggestion for a feature and just do it. Just do it. Don’t ask anyone for permission. You just do the work. You submit it to the maintainer, whether they take it or not, doesn’t even matter. In many case, they will take it. If you are actually good at what they do, they’ll be like, thank you. You fixed this bug, you documented this thing, you made something better. And now you have a record of real work in the real world. And not only is it real work, there’s a really good chance that if you invest your time in open source projects that are relevant to the kind of companies you would apply to, those companies will already be using your work by the time you apply.

(17:43): It is such a hack. It almost feels like a cheat coat. Now, there are a bunch of people who do this, but there’s also a bunch of people who don’t. And I am always astounded, as Jason said, how rare it actually is for people to put in the effort, how rare it is for someone to be just showing up doing that kind of work. And you think it’s not like it takes 10,000 hours and we’re not asking about five years of work. These are juniors. When we’re hired juniors we’re talking about, so maybe you only had a few months. Do you know how much work you can get done in a few months? Do you know how much work you can produce in a fucking summer? You have three months. You could write a whole goddamn web framework like someone did once upon a time in literally a goddamn summer, right?

(18:31): And you don’t even have to do that. It doesn’t have to be heroic at all. If you sit down in front of the computer and you program for just eight hours, I’m not asking 12, 14, whatever, just in one summer, you can produce an absolute mountain body of undeniable proof that you are worth betting on. And you know what? Almost no one does it. This is what I find so somewhat exhilarating about watching this sort of David Goggins content. I’ve cited him before, right? And he has this great bit on, it’s never been easier to be great because no one fucking shows up, no one has any discipline, no one wants to put in the effort. So if you just put in a little bit of effort, a little bit of discipline, you’re going to look like you’re a goddamn superhero. That’s what it takes. You have all the ingredients in your little fat fingers to be a superhero when it comes to this kind of contribution, and it requires barely anything at all and almost no one does it.

Kimberly (19:32): Okay, David, I want to ask you about, you mentioned two juniors, two senior programmers, Jason, you’ve hired a designer. I mean, that’s five people coming into this company, which is kind of a lot in comparison to where we are now. Tell me, I know we always say hire when it hurts. So I’m curious from both of you if this is a hurt situation or a future work situation, and then also of that number, was that the plan? Were you planning to hire two juniors to seniors when you started this whole process?

David (20:02): We’re definitely hiring because it hurts a bit. We are a little tight on programming right now, and that shows up in multiple ways, both that there’s more the design capacity than the programmers can absorb and do something with, which isn’t great, and it also shows up in the toil. We just have to do maintaining our system that folks have to rotate in a little too frequently to be on our on-call schedule, as we call it. On-call for programmers, doesn’t actually usually mean you get waking up in the night like it sometimes does for operations, but it does mean that you’re the person support goes to when something is wrong with the app and a customer complains. So it definitely hurts, but we could have gotten away with hiring two people. That would have gotten us right there. But I think one of the realizations we’ve gotten that I’ve certainly gotten, Jason was earlier on than I was on this was, do you know what?

(20:53): It’s okay. At our stage in the lifecycle of this business, 25 years in to have a little healthy fat on the bones, right? We don’t need this 5% body fat margin. Do you know what? Don’t need to be a s slob, don’t need to be an obese organization. Not at all, but could we have 15%, 17%? Could we go one week without food, without literally being dead? That’d be nice. We can afford it at this point. And I think part of it, for me, what was so difficult was we spent so many years in this ultra lean mode, partly because that’s where we had to start, so that with the habits we built, we built incredible habits for getting exceptional productivity out of a tiny, tiny, tiny team. And those habits die hard, but I think it’s just as important to be able to look at those habits with fresh eyes and go, you know what?

(21:47): I don’t need to operate the business now 25 years in the same way we did when we were four people and we barely did a million dollars in ARR, right? That’s just, that’s okay. So four is a lot. I’d actually say it’s probably one of the biggest, maybe it’s the second biggest hiring round we’ve ever done, and five people total is almost increasing the size of the company by 10%, which sounds a little nuts when you put it in those terms, but I think it’s also why it’s so important for us to really feel like the folks we’re hiring in, we have high confidence that they’re going to work out, not a perfect confidence because statistically speaking, that’s just not how it pans out. But we have high confidence because we’ve seen their work and we’re excited about hiring them, and we’re excited about giving two juniors a shot.

(22:34): This is a thing that when we posted this, people were freaking out about, partly because we were hiring juniors at all in a time when everyone’s going like, AI’s going to take over everything in five minutes from now. Well, first of all, I love AI, but it hasn’t taken over everything, right? We are still going to need human programmers for some time still, and if you need human programmers for some time still, you also need to hire juniors because who else is going to do it when the rest of ‘em… Anyway, the other thing was the salary. I think the salary for juniors were hiring $145,000 a year, which sounds from European ears like nuts because a bunch of these markets are very regional in normal hiring processes, and we are this odd, weird, bizarre company that has one fixed salary around the entire world.

(23:27): So those two factors together really I think raise some eyebrows, but I’m just super duper excited about getting someone new in at is junior in their career. I’ve seen what great juniors are able to do, how quickly someone who has the trajectory and the promise can go from junior to senior to lead to beyond in just a few short years. It’s just very gratifying to do. As long as we still do this again, maybe in two years from now, we’re going to be like, all right, game over Claude code, whatever. Gemini is going to take it all. But until that day, humans

Kimberly (24:06): And our levels are junior programmer, programmer, senior. Is that the hierarchy here?

David (24:12): It goes junior programmer, programmer, senior programmer, lead programmer, and principal programmer. We have five steps. Same on the design side, by the way.

Kimberly (24:21): How often have we hired these junior roles? You said people were surprised, so it makes me feel like it’s rare.

David (24:27): Yeah, we hadn’t in a bit, but over the course of the company, we’ve hired quite a few juniors and many of them are some of the best hires that I think we’ve ever made because it’s also all the more sweet and satisfying when you take someone who have not yet had a chance to work with the kind of stuff that we work with, the kind of scale that we work with. Not that it’s Google scale, but our scale is still pretty significant for someone who hasn’t done anything and that we’ve been willing to take a bet and then see that bet pay off. Now, not all of the bets pay off. I’d say the bets are perhaps more likely not to pay off when you’re hiring a junior because you don’t have a lot to look at. When we look at the work that they do, we have to look at it with quite a few caveats. We can’t look at it like, I’m going to hold this to the standard of a lead programmer who’s been working at this company for five years. That wouldn’t be fair or reasonable. So there’s a fair amount of leap of faith and it doesn’t always pan out, but when it does, it’s all the sweeter. It is the sweetest form of hiring is that you’ve spotted sort of undiscovered diamond here.

Kimberly (25:29): Nice. Well, with that, we’re going to wrap it up. Rework is a production of 37signals. You can find new show notes and transcripts on our website at 37signals.com/podcast. Full video episodes are on YouTube, and if you have a question for Jason or David about a better way to work and run your business, leave us a video recording. You can do that at 37signals.com/podcastquestion.