> You may also choose to take an additional 8 weeks leave unpaid. Note that this does not guarantee your employment. We're simply keeping your job open for an additional 8 weeks, unless your position becomes redundant.
Is it just me, or does that sound a little harsh? (Maybe I'm used to UK workers rights) Isn't this exactly the reason why many parents don't take the parental leave they probably should? ie that they fear they will become obsolete simply from not being in the office...
6 paid weeks parental leave for secondary caregivers puts them in the top tier of "major" companies, as does 16 weeks paid for primary caregivers; that's more than Google offered a few years ago.
It's a bit disingenuous to zero in on the unpaid leave policy; what they're saying is, if you need more than 6 weeks, they'll try to work something out with you, and it'll probably be fine. They're being explicit about something most companies are opaque about.
As a father of 11 month old, I can't imagine how people can live with just 6 or even 16 weeks of maternity leave. Even after almost one year it feels like care is (at least) full time job, which would be quite hard to outsource.
In my EU country you will get up to three years of paid maternity leave per child, so I guess I am just spoiled.
3 years sounds extreme. How is a person supposed to run a business with that kind of law? More than 6 months paid leave is too long from a business perspective. The government can tax and guarantee income, but I am not for paid parental leave > 6 months paid by businesses.
It's not paid for by businesses, it's paid by the government. It's pays out up to 80% of your income up to a limit and some companies chose to fill in the final gap as well.
It is paid for by businesses as well, in that every person who takes that leave potentially creates another headcount requirement to fill the gap.
Something between the European standard expectation of a year's leave and the American top-end norm of 12/6 primary/secondary is probably the right answer here.
But this is all a tangent. It is totally unreasonable to criticize Basecamp for policies that are on the high side of normal in the market they operate in.
Really, what's happening is that Basecamp has been forthright about something most companies are deliberately opaque about, and people on message boards are beating them up for it. If their policies were bad, I wouldn't care, but their policies on parental leave are in fact quite good for this market, so this is some bullshit.
Just to be clear, this isn't some experimental new thing that the Nordic countries are trying, this has been in place for well over 40 years - It. Works.
Does it create a suboptimal situation at the workplace. Sure, sometimes. However, since the management probably have taken long parental leaves themselves they are very understanding and willing to accommodate the next generation of parents.
In short - troublesome in the short run for certain companies, very beneficial for society as a whole in the long run.
”very beneficial for society as a whole in the long run”
Exactly. Low fertility rates is something that most rich countries struggle with, so to me it does seem like a good idea to invest in good childcare policies.
You still have a headcount issue. You need to hire someone to fill in, but can't hire them full time without a full additional job available. Temporary employees result in a lot of wasted job training and investment.
You don't force businesses to pay directly, you set up a government benefit (payroll tax) that is then used to fund things like mat/pat leaves.
Here in Canada, we get a year that can be divided in different ways. Almost everyone takes it when they have kids, so it's the norm. We pay for it (60% salary to a hard max IIRC) through "Employment Insurance" which is basically a jointly funded payroll tax. Employers can choose to top up if they want. Some do.
Honestly, I can't imagine any other way of getting through that first yet without this set up.
In Germany, you can take several years parental leave in which you are protected against being fired. But you only get paid up to 14 months and only up to 60% or ~2000$/month after tax. This gets completely paid by your health insurance (which you have to have) and your enployer doesn't have to pay anything.
> 3 years sounds extreme. How is a person supposed to run a business with that kind of law?
Easy, just take a look at companies in EU outside of Germany. The three years of paid maternity leave is slowly turning into lifetime unemployment for a lot of people. Then we act surprised when the companies are scared of hiring full time and decide to leave and take most of the jobs away with them.
That kind of law would guarantee only quite large business can survive, which is counter-productive if one wants to empower individuals.
I'm pretty much always on the side of workers in any discussion of labor vs. employers...but, there's also small business to consider. I think there's some kind of happy medium to be found, where workers are treated well and small businesses can survive long enough to become somewhat bigger businesses. In the US this is codified into law; rules and regulations that apply to large companies may not apply to smaller mom-and-pop shops.
My company couldn't afford to give an employee more than a few months paid time off; we're a four-person company, and we'd literally run out of money if a quarter of our work wasn't being done for months. On the other hand, if we had a hundred employees, we'd barely notice if one or two people were out for a while.
> That kind of law would guarantee only quite large business can survive, which is counter-productive if one wants to empower individuals.
As others have pointed out, maternity/paternity leave in other Western countries are heavily subsidized through government assistance programs. The costs are not completely shouldered by the business.
Many of those countries also increasingly have a two-caste system of fully-fledged full-time employees and "temp" workers of various types. If you want Salaryman culture, like they have in Japan, you can set pretty arbitrarily high expectations about leave and job security.
It is my anecdotal impression that this is common in some European countries.
Japanese leave policies are historically pretty simple: the government says you get X weeks, buuuuut X is an inconvenient number for us, so you probably want to look around the room and conform to the practices of your coworkers, which are closer to Y days. Also, for you ladies: remember that the traditional expectation is that you have unlimited maternity leave when you leave formal employment after marrying or having a child. (Some re-enter when the child goes to school. This is largely not compatible with career advancement, with rare exceptions like e.g. translation/interpretation.)
You are right, the trash talk may be a bit misguided since social safety nets that exist in other countries do not really exist in the US. Family leave, universal health care, worker's rights, etc are huge political issues in the US. I'm not originally from the US but have lived here now for a good while and I still am shocked to this day that these kind of societal benefits are not commonplace as they are elsewhere.
My sister is a public interest lawyer in Chicago who will get a few short weeks of leave --- not 6 --- and then be expected back in court advocating for her clients. It is really difficult for me to connect with fathers who claim that 6 weeks of paternal leave is too onerous.
As a parent to two teenagers, both of whom were born in the early years of startups, I feel your pain --- having children is hard. But if we're going to lose our collective shit about this, can we start by getting mothers in blue-collar jobs 6 weeks of paid leave before we start worrying about six-figure fathers needing more than 6 weeks off?
I guess my wording was wrong, there was no worrying about fathers at all.
I just can't wrap my head about how all the people are doing it. You can't just leave that small kid somewhere, is there some way of taking unpaid leave or are people just quit the job? I don't know.
My experience of parenting has been that every aspect of it is like that. I was amazed the first night that we'd kept the boy alive at all. He's going to UIUC in a few months. I can't believe that happened either. Everything is crazy hard, and we're playing on SUPER EXTREME EASY MODE.
In low income households, particularly immigrant ones, the grandma or aunt becomes a fulltime nanny when the grandchildren are born. I don't know what people who don't have this kind of help do.
> I just can't wrap my head about how all the people are doing it. You can't just leave that small kid somewhere, is there some way of taking unpaid leave or are people just quit the job? I don't know.
People figure out a way to struggle and survive. It's in inherent to us as a species.
Some people have family help. Others have older children. Others can support on a single income. Others have paid help. Others bring their kids to work with them. Others work from home.
I’m guessing that women quitting their job in order to take care of their kids is probably quite common in the US. I also think that nannies are more common there.
> But if we're going to lose our collective shit about this, can we start by getting mothers in blue-collar jobs 6 weeks of paid leave before we start worrying about six-figure fathers needing more than 6 weeks off?
Some of us don't live in barbarous backwaters like Illinois, but instead in places that, if not actually civilized like the rest of the developed world, are actually aware of and occasionally making efforts toward civilization (e.g., California) and already have gotten most working mothers up to four months of pregnancy disability (typically, without complications, 4 weeks prior and 6 weeks after delivery for vaginal delivery, 8 weeks after for C-section, but longer is permitted with medical necessity) plus 12 weeks of bonding time, all job protected, with potentially all of the former paid as for other disability and up to six weeks of paid family leave that can be used for the latter.
I'm pretty sure identified the specific state that has the policies I described, though there are some other states with similar or better paid family leave provisions and/or longer allowances for job protected leave for either pregnancy disability specifically, or general disability that includes pregnancy.
By that train of logic we should be fighting for at least equal paternity leave for the average dad before there can be any discussion about more maternity leave..
There is no logic to that whatsoever. But since Basecamp doesn't make that distinction --- it has "primary" and "secondary" "caregiver" --- I don't think we need to argue this point.
It is illegal (discriminatory) to have any policy based on gender. As such, you cannot have a maternity or paternity policy. Thus primary - the parent of the two who will leave their role temporarily as the main caregiver whilst the other partner continues to work OR secondary - the other.
Note though that a health insurance policy in the US will cover maybe 60% of 8 weeks of salary for the birth mother under a disability benefit claim (no joke). If a father becomes the primary caregiver, then the company is paying 100% of that time off, without support. So offering equal carries a cost and guarantees that all your employees, male or female, if they are having a kid will take that time and incur that cost, rather than a % gender of your workforce. All things you need to factor in and cost into a business, especially a small one.
> It is illegal (discriminatory) to have any policy based on gender.
No, it's not. Obviously, it's discriminatory to have a policy that differentiates on any axis, but not all policies (whether public or employer) that differentiate based on gender (or sex, which may be more to the point here, if we define "mother" as "parent giving birth" and not "parent of the feminine gender"; the two often go together but are not equivalent) are illegal.
The difference in Europe is that the UK, Swedish or German government subsidies a great deal of that one year. In the US, the company pays for it all, and on top of it perhaps around $2,000 a month for a family health insurance policy for that employee so they can get the birth and emergency care paid for. Again, this is mostly free outside the US. You're hitting up on some societal grade rather than company policy issues. I feel you though, being from the UK and living in the US, it is just insanity. So little care for mothers and parents.
This isn't really true either. In California, for example, 6 weeks of partially paid leave for a secondary caregiver are provided by state disability insurance. It's a state by state issue.
Dad of a 23 months old here, also europe. Let me tell you, even 11 months is far too short. Next thing for you kid is learn about the world around it and how to talk/interact. Just a day carer, even just one parent isn't enough, both parents are vital to give the kid the best start possible.
I'm in a great position to work part time and nowadays we both do. The work gets done and our child gets love and care. Those two days we put her to a day care place, she loves being there. Everyone's happy :)
Speaking from experience: try this for a few months before you commit to it! I worked from home for 2 years, but 6 months after my son was born I chose to switch to a job with an office. It was impossible to get anything done at home with the constant interruptions (even though I wasn't the primary caregiver). My work and family lives are both loads better now that I have proper separation between the two.
I have the opposite experience: I have 2 kids (one 2 years old, and another 3 months old) and I work from home and remote 100% of the time. I _still_ get more done at home than I ever did in an office, even with 2 little ones who are taken care of by my wife when I'm working.
Long story short, I first worked flex part-time (handing off time with my then spouse) when my kid was very young, then switched to being in an office when my kid started school and I was a single parent.
I went remote when my kid was in middle/high school because my kid needed me and it was good for me to be around. You can tell a 14 year old to shut up if you're on a conference call...most of the time. Also, I could take a few minutes in morning to get the kid to school (we lived close by to the school) or take a late lunch so my kid could go to after-school practices, classes, etc.
When a kid is in elementary school, it's vastly easier to work in an office. Elementary school is when life will be the most predictable with a kid. When a kid is in middle/high school, that's when you need to be present. For all the reasons you're thinking of. Teenagers are jerks.
All in all, I did pretty well. Kid is at a highly selective college these days.
Thanks for sharing your experience. I'm about ten years away from having kids (if I had full control over my future!), so I have a lot to learn. I'd just rather be close to my children than a long subway/car ride away.
I think even 3 years is a little problematic. What are you supposed to do, take care of your child until they're 3 years old and then just go back to work?
Every company should be legally obligated to provide 18 years of paid leave for each child a worker has. Anything less is signaling that they value money over the personal and family life of their employees, and it's ridiculous that I still haven't found a country or business that offers this.
So I should have spent more time adding that comment; it wasn't intended to be negative. I honestly believe that a company who can adjust their corporate guidelines that quickly is something to be admired, and the fact that they're doing it on such an important topic is excellent news.
I'm sorry. I'm taking out a frustration about this whole comment thread on your comment.
Again, I think Basecamp is being transparent and forthright about something that most companies are terribly opaque about, and it bothers me to see people cheering as they get less transparent so as not to trigger message board haters.
That phrasing is really bad, but probably is trying to make a distinction between the protections afforded by the laws like the Family Medical Leave Act, and how their additional 8 weeks unpaid leave work.
Assuming Basecamp is even covered by the parental leave portions of the FMLA (which they may not be due to size and geographical distribution of the company [1]), someone can't be fired or laid off while on the 12 protected weeks of parental leave. However, in this additional 8 weeks, they can be.
[1] The internet says Basecamp employs 50 people, which is the minimum requirement for a company to be covered by the FMLA. Additionally a given employee is only eligible if at least 50 employees work within 75 miles of where they do.
This is curious considering DHH's involvement in Basecamp and how often he espouses European ideals. You'd think they had a year of maternity and paternity leave.
50 person companies can't as a rule guarantee year-long parental leave; that's just not realistic. They can do their best to make it work, but no company of this size in this kind of market can make promises like that.
I think it's fair to say that given DHH's lifestyle, Basecamp can afford to do this. No judgement on how David choses to spend his time or money, I just think it's a little disingenuous to act like they're a normal startup. It's a well-oiled lifestyle company that prints cash.
This is not remotely fair to say. To promise a year of leave for all employees, you have to be able to add headcount to cover the absence. It's not simply a year's cash salary we're talking about; it's a potentially uncapped obligation.
Exactly, it raises the question of how often you can take (m|p)aternity leave successively. For a lot of people, if you're guaranteed a year to eighteen months of paid leave every time you get pregnant, and you get to come back to your job at the end of it, then when you get married and want to start a family, you could ghost for four or five years.
I'm not sure that'd be a bad thing, in the grand scheme of things for society - childcare is an unbelievable racket, and we'd probably be better off if parents could actually raise their children instead of having to foist them off on strangers 9-5. But it'd be ruinous for businesses.
You're accounting for the worst-case scenario, which is fine, but I still don't know why we're behaving like Basecamp can't afford to hire folks to backfill people on leave.
DHH's money <> Basecamp money. Yes obviously DHH gets paid from Basecamp, and he's earned it. But just because he has a lot of money doesn't mean he can turn around and insert a massive expense into the company that turns a nice perk into a huge financial liability.
"Employees at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest private foundation in the world, will be able to enjoy up to one year of paid time with their newborns during the child's first year after birth or adoption starting next year." - Business Insider
Wow! For some reason, this blows my mind. I guess I had my mind a dozen people sitting in an office writing checks and compiling reports. I had no idea it was a huge global organization with 1420 employees and 8 locations around the world.
In retrospect, it makes such perfect sense that I feel foolish :)
For paid leave, you have a point - most European companies don't expect employers to foot the bill for a year of paid leave. For unpaid leave, however, this really is the norm outside of the U.S. Large and small companies manage just fine to "hold a spot" for anyone on maternity leave - either you bake it into your hiring plans, or you hire someone temporarily for the length of the paternity leave.
This doesn't make sense. A single engineer might represent as much as 10% of a 50-person company's engineering capacity (many of Basecamp's employees are customer support staff). Forget about the cost of a year's compensation for them: if a small company loses an engineer for a year, they have to fill the gap. What do they do about that? Besides discriminating against anyone who might potentially claim family leave, I mean.
You'd think it would be the same for both parents. How does my employer know whether I am the primary or secondary caregiver? How do they know there even is a primary or secondary caregiver?
It's also frustrating from a "feminism" perspective. Women need time to recover physically from childbirth and time to figure out a feeding/pumping schedule (even if they don't plan to breastfeed long term, there may be complications to work out). Those are things that men can't do. In order to get that time, they may need to legally declare themselves the "primary caregiver." Especially at companies like mine where "secondary" caregivers get only 2 weeks of leave and FMLA doesn't apply. You can't recover from a c-section in 2 weeks.
But "primary caregiver" is a loaded term that goes beyond biological necessity. What if a woman's husband is quitting his job to take care of the kid(s) and the woman plans to return to work? Is she the secondary caregiver because she spends less of her time doing childcare than her husband? What if the primary caregiver is a nanny?
Even if HR says "Oh, nevermind what you actually plan to do, if you're pushing the kid out, we can mark you as primary" it creates a terrible start to things if you have two parents who set out with good intentions to share childcare efforts equally. HR is telling one parent they're the "primary" and another parent they're the "secondary" and they have to sign legally binding documents attesting to this. It's just ridiculous. I think it's a great example of good intentions backfiring dramatically.
How long would you tolerate not having a fellow staff member, upon whose work you depend, away from their position? 8 weeks seems like a long time to have someone away from work, or to have to cover someone elses job during their absence.
A lot of things can go wrong when people are gone from their work environment in that situation.
From that perspective, it seems more than reasonable.
Agreed- they should clean that language up a bit to reassure those utilizing parental leave that the "leave itself" won't lead to their job loss. There should also be language that commits them to at least notifying and discussing "redundancies" with you well in advance of you returning from leave.
Fresh, organic, local fruits and vegetables are great to have on-hand, so we'd also like to offer a CSA membership to you. Finding a local provider will be up to you, but you can expense the cost of a seasonal or annual CSA share as an employee benefit, up to $1,000/year.
Count that as a perk I've never heard of before.
Cool peek into how a company that works remotely can function successfully. This handbook could be a blueprint for that model - are there any other examples of remote companies publishing their internal handbooks?
> Count that as a perk I've never heard of before.
A company I used to work for used to send people to the local farmers markets and stock up the kitchen at work. Employees were allowed to take home whatever they wanted and to cook whatever they wanted at lunch -- it was awesome! You quickly learn to make friends with the skilled amateur chefs in your department.
As a skilled amateur chef myself, this would be awesome. I feel pretty strongly about the power of a shared meal and I make an effort to regularly make meals for groups. I think being able to share a meal as coworkers would be a fantastic workplace team builder that wouldn't take that much investment on the part of a company.
I'm OK with these kinds of quirky add-on allowances so long as the category for the add-on is positive, either for you as a person (e.g.: fitness, learning) or the local community (e.g.: paid time off volunteering, charity matching). We'd all be better off if we were a little more involved with our community, a little more active, and eating a little bit healthier, and the most common excuse for not doing these is "I don't have the time/money." If you just give extra cash how can you achieve the same effect in encouraging people to live healthier?
I dunno, that seems a little parental. To quote the article: "at the end of the day it's a job." I'm not wild about the company trying to influence aspects of my personal life that don't directly affect the company.
At least in the US, as the company is footing the bill for employee health insurance, the company has incentive to fund assorted employee wellness programs.
I agree; basically if you want to get the full compensation out of your employment (because perks are part of compensation) you have to participate in weird stuff like this.
> Sabbatical - Every three years, employees are eligible to take a one-month-long sabbatical. Just give a heads-up preferably three months in advance, so we can coordinate the work-load accordingly.
I wish this was more common in the tech industry. I know for other industries this is basically a standard thing, but it seems like many tech companies don't do this.
My job took away my flex time after 6 weeks. "We just don't like that here". Well, I negotiated it on my hiring (for a large paycut), so I now work 3.5 days a week instead of 5 (they've yet to notice in the last 15 or so weeks).
But hey, I'm not leaving before everyone else everyday. I've had flextime at every job since 1999. Wonder how long it's going to take them to catch on, since I can get another job pretty easily (2-4 weeks max). It's been kind of nice though only doing 3 full days.
Yes, I believe the origins of the sabbatical are in academia where it was intended to give people the ability to take an extended period of time away from their traditional role and try something different (often travel or an overseas post). This helped keep them fresh and allow them to broaden their range of experience without needing to permanently leave the institution. More recently, the term has been bastardized to a certain extent by start-ups who use it as a form of "bonus vacation" for long-serving team members.
Most jobs I've seen (in the USA) offer up to two weeks of "paid time off" which you need to split between vacation and sickness. The concept of taking more than a contiguous week off per year for an actual vacation must be pretty rare. Usually my vacation days get used for the purpose of running an errand or taking care of a sick kid.
Since becoming an entrepreneur, I have never had a "vacation" - Sure, I went to different places, but always with laptop and a bag full of assorted devices in tow. I was thinking of going back to a "regular job" for a while, just to relieve some stress. Alas, I had another idea and won't be able to rest until that is built :)
that's also what i thought -- vacations for me means a month away from work where i don't have to check anything work related (email, slack, pagerduty).
according to google, sabbatical is:
> a period of paid leave granted to a university teacher or other worker for study or travel, traditionally one year for every seven years worked.
It's paid leave because you're almost always expected to write or finish a substantial piece of scholarship. One month isn't long enough to write a book, so I don't think this is the model Basecamp is following
What does a sabbatical mean in the tech industry? Do I get to work on a side project? or work for another company? or within the company at a different post?
I feel like in academia it is easier for a sabbatical as you can go to another university and study something different.
In academia you would be competing the rest of your career with coworkers who spent their sabbatical teaching in a foreign country or being a principle organizer administrator of a conference or writing a very important paper or book or otherwise adding self directed value to their resume.
So technically you can spend it on the beach, but don't be surprised when your coworker who learned "language or framework of the week" is going to get the choice assignment or promotion you really wanted. Of course if you edit your book or learn a new language while sitting at a beach, or you are the primary organizer of a tech conference that happens to be on a tropical island or other vacation spot ...
I'm pretty immersed in the field of parental leave benefits in the US and UK, having setup Pledge Parental Leave www.pledgepl.org. Important to get the full perspective on the market in the US. You're taking a crap on a company with extremely progressive benefits across the board, furthermore so, one offering them at a 'meager' size of 50, where the relative cost is much greater than compared to a 'large' company.
It is very easy to make simple comparisons between UK and European standards vs US standards. The fact is that there is almost zero government funding/support for parental leave in the US. The US is the only developed country in the world without any government mandated parental leave standards.
In the US, any company stepping up in this area is doing so of its own volition and cost - again the government gives a company zero funding. In the UK, German, Sweden etc they pick up most of the tab of extended leave. In the US, the only form of support is for mothers through expensive health insurance for the 'disability' of having a child. So before you engage in moral relativism, it's healthy to get the context and the facts. Check out http://www.pledgepl.org if you want to clue up or help fix this situation.
Sure - because that burden has been pushed, in part, onto its staff.
I know it may seem pedantic but phrases like "Government funding", "free", and "entitlements" muddy the waters when discussing the morality of policies.
Is the same as hearing "the US Government declared war on North Korea". Sounds much more heroic than it'd wind up being. At least, since Davy Crockett died ;)
Wow - they advise employees to remove all company data from devices, leave the company 1password account, disable touch ID, and put their attorney on speed dial every time they go through customs.
I don't go that far, but I do have all my hardware encrypted (MBP, iPhone, iPad) and I power these things off so that they will be unable to trivially decrypt them when I go through customs.
I wish iDevices had a thing that would let me "double click" the power button to passcode-lock the device and disable TouchID until unlocked again.
That's not enough: they can demand that you unlock the device at the border, including powering it on. If your battery is depleted, they'll give you a charger and wait. If you refuse, they can and will confiscate the devices. You can't outsmart them: for pretty much every major country, they're better at this than you are.
They can do all of this even if you're a citizen. In the US, citizens (and, to a lesser but still meaningful extent, LPRs) cannot be denied entry to the country. But you can still lose all your devices. You can be detained, potentially overnight, no matter who you are. If you're not a citizen, you can be detained and then sent back without your devices.
The only realistic answer is not to have sensitive data on your devices at the border at all, nor any indication of where your sensitive data is or any means of getting access to it.
IMO the only reasonable course of action is to have a good backup/restore system, and completely wipe your device before and after exposing it to hostile agents. When asked to explain why, say that it's a mandatory policy from your employer in order to maintain a secure working environment.
I wonder if some form of push back on this would be timed release malware? its just crazy talk and all, I'd NEVER do this, but as a hypothetical since they are plugging your device(s) in to a machine, it would be possible to infect said machine, yes?
Now that’s resistance.
Also: I've heard of people who just wipe their devices and then just download really really grotesque photos to their devices to gross out the employees who have to look through it.
The best course of action is either don't travel to the US, or don't carry the devices at all. I wouldn't be surprised to find my electronics had been confiscated when importing them ahead of my travels.
With just a few possible exceptions, the real rule you're advocating for is "don't travel internationally with electronic devices". Your protections in most of Europe are also not great, and the big .EU countries are if anything more hair-trigger about sending people back.
Agree or not, really all I'm saying is: "don't try to leverage your superior tech skills to outsmart customs". You are probably better at tech than the customs agent you talk to first at the border. You are not better than the customs department as a whole. Money buys a lot of tech ability, and countries have a lot of money.
>> I'm a US citizen who lives in the US. Not traveling to the US is not an option.
Why isn't it an option? The only way for you to "travel to the US" is to leave the US in the first place. You have the option to not travel outside of the US.
AFAIK, while you have to deal with the TSA, you don't have to deal with customs/immigration for domestic flights.
> AFAIK, while you have to deal with the TSA, you don't have to deal with customs/immigration for domestic flights.
Not routinely, but Border Patrol claims special powers and jurisdiction in a shockingly large portion of the country. Anything a hundred miles from a border (or a lake that touches a border, placing places like Chicago in it). https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone
I've only got one thumb set up for touch ID. If you use the wrong finger 3 times, it'll disable touch ID until you put your passcode in, so you could use your other hand 3 times before you enter the airport.
This company publishes a handbook that puts most corporations to shame in every benefit category. So we are picking them apart for their 401k and their parental leave? Seriously!?! I don't understand HN any more...
It's always easier to identify the bad then it is to identify the good. Especially if you're coming at this from a specific perspective "This company sucks!", then you're bound to find something that doesn't strike you as excellent.
At my current company, I do not get any 401k matching, and it sucks. However, the company fully covers medical insurance for each employee and their ENTIRE family. My copay's are more then fair, and unless I end up in an emergency and I'm rushed to a hospital that's out network and it turns out that it wasn't an emergency, I have no other costs. Being married, I save thousands a year in my paycheck by not having to cover any of my insurance. Compared to the cost of my previous job, the difference is enough to fully fund my IRA which is roughly equivalent to a 4% match in my 401k which is the best any company has offered me to date. So in the end, I lost an employee match, but save $6k a year in medical insurance for my family.
It's a balance, and I can understand why people would be upset to "only" see six weeks of Paternal leave, but when you look at their entire portfolio of perks, it's amazing. It is among the best. Can they do better? Sure. Should people flay them for two sticking points? Absolutely not.
There's a lot of good stuff here. I'm surprised about their take on speaking engagements (they're OK as long as they don't involve multi-day travel obligations). I get that you don't want team members touring talks or becoming conference tourists. But a lot of companies want their employees doing speaking engagements; Matasano/NCC, my old employer, pays a pretty substantial cash bonus for every time you do that.
> pays a pretty substantial cash bonus for every time you do that
Super smart move - probably the cheapest but most personal marketing effort a small firm can create. Did they have an upper cap on the speaking gigs or available time?
Not really explicitly, but implicitly they won't pay you to travel to conferences nobody has heard of (there was a list of acceptable conferences for the benefit at one point --- it covered pretty much all the well known conferences in our field, and there were a bunch of them).
Part of the idea is, the good conferences do some of the vetting for the bonus for you. They discourage "touring" talks, and have a high bar for inclusion, so if you're speaking at e.g. Black Hat, CanSecWest, Recon, and Toorcon, there's probably a reason that's happening and NCC is probably very happy about that reason.
Is "doing speaking engagements" really a big thing in tech? I've been in the industry for close to 20 years and have never felt the need to (or been asked to) go drone on about something at a conference somewhere, or even to go attend one for that matter. I couldn't even tell you what any major software conferences are, although I'd probably recognize the names of some of them.
It seems like speaking and even attending conferences varies a lot by a developer's personality type. I've always been a fan and find it the most effective way to take in info on a large variety of topics I might not otherwise find in a very concentrated period of time. The networking and whatnot can be useful too. At PyCon it was neat to meet GvR for instance. Anecdotally I'd say maybe 20% of the devs I know pursue conferences regularly.
No, it's just one of those things that us popular among HNers, like blogging or being on Twitter all day. Of my team only me has ever attended a conference.
For companies that are growing rapidly, it's a pretty common recruiting tool. You may notice that a lot of speakers begin and/or end their talk with, "I work on X at Y Company, and we're hiring!"
I've done contract work for companies at both extremes; there are many companies that consider speaking or participation in conferences as a part of the job, and there are those that don't even discuss it and would never consider sending employees to conferences.
I wonder if they make a distinction between taking a speaking gig for money, and speaking on behalf of the company (i.e. traveling on the company dime and getting paid by the company whilst speaking)?
For anyone interested in handbooks and culture codes, my startup, Tettra, curated all the ones we could find on CultureCodes.co. Will add Basecamp to the list soon too.
Looks like the slideshow framework you're using to iframe in the handbooks is broken; i couldn't page through any of the companies I clicked through on.
In Europe, standard in IT companies (Central Europe, mind you), is:
* 25 fullt paid days (or more) of vacation every year (no need to call it a sabatical and limit it to once a three years), not including national holidays etc.
* one year of (or more) paid maternity leave (or more), while second parent gets few weeks (two at my country)
* free gym membership (so I can yoga/climb/whatever for free)
* private health coverage (in addition to the public one, if your country (most EU has)
* sickness time at least 80% paid (in most IT it's 100%)
* fresh fruits daily (I don't even mention drinks etc)
* education budget per employee (conferences etc)
Thats a STANDARD if you want to recruit software engineer here you must have.
Other than the vacation and parental leave time spans, which is mostly gov't law in many cases and not the company, that is pretty close to what it is in the USA.
1. dozens comments here from USA guys, treating basecamp benefits as superb.
2. it's paid by the company in the Europe, not the govt.
3. you seems to quitly skim over thing like unpaid sick leave in USA. It's paid in europe. This alone is a huge difference. or am I wrong and this is paid in US?
I was comparing to a typical SV tech company benefits package. I'm pretty sure your central european benefits package isn't standard for the rest of the country either.
Sick leave is usually just taking a day off and in practice nobody really cares. If your really sick then it gets covered by your disability insurance, which is pretty close to that %XX of your wage coverage.
Adding vacation time (which is standard not only in IT) of 5 weeks plus average sicktime (let's assume two weeks in a year) that's a big paid difference.
And as to the basecamp package being typical in SV: I concluded from many posts in this conversation differently.
PPP adjusted for cost of living, I suspect 20% lower on average than yours. Taking into account healthcare (priv and public), pensions, education (here is free and much better objectively: https://blog.hackerrank.com/which-country-would-win-in-the-p... but also feel free to google OECD reports for EU/USA gap if you don't like hackerrank) and of course that year of paid maternity leave you skimmed over ;-) yeah it's much "different" here.
p.s. There was also a great discussion on HN about CA standard of housing and costs (rents, houses etc) two months ago. Conclusion: insane, unless you're DINK.
Yeah, benefits are generally poor in the US compared to Europe. Salaries tend to be higher and taxes tend to be lower in the US. It's American culture to value those more.
I don't think that your insurance covers things like MRI. Does it? The one I wrote about does. Dental too, but missing dental, like missing optic is the thing I dont understand. I want to be healthy, except my eyes and teeth ;)
Vision 'insurance' doesn't offer much other than an eye exam and some glasses, so it has little value. You'd be using your medical insurance otherwise. They have dental coverage.
> Basecamp will pay up to $100/month for your gym membership, yoga studio membership, or whatever activity you do to stay in shape.
Is this sort of thing common? I wish my current employer did something like this. While I'm still skimming some of the documents - Basecamp sounds like a cool place to work.
I think it is often subsidized by your health insurance. But even if it isn't, it just makes sense - healthy employees need fewer sick days, and have better mental health and energy levels.
Thanks for the reply - I was just curious because currently (first job post graduation) nothing like that is offered where I work and I would take advantage of it if I got the chance.
In Poland, almost all companies offer "sport card", which can be used at gyms, pools and other facilities with no limits (or very little). I could basically spend all my free time at gym or whatever. Employee has to participate in small fraction of subscription fee (say, 10$).
At least on the West Coast it seems pretty common - considering that companies here also pay for your health insurance, it seems like an overall decent idea.
I think the "5x12s" actually sound pretty neat. Sure, it's not work related, but it's nice to have some kind of socialization with your co-workers that isn't just focused on work.
The fact that the founders are involved as well is awesome. I'd say it really humanizes them in an environment where upper-level management could seem unreachable or distant.
How useful is it to clean all my work data every time before crossing the border? And if I'm asked why there's no data on my system, should I say I wiped it clean? or that it's a new system? or that it's a personal system?
If you find yourself in the position of answering why there's no data on the system, I think you'd already know the answer.
It takes a pretty invasive search to come to that conclusion. (Unless your definition of wipe is like, cat /dev/zero >/dev/sda, in which case they'd probably ask why it doesn't work pretty shortly after asking you to turn it on, and then you'd get to the conclusion fairly quickly.)
I've never had to deal with an invasive search like this but I've also never gone through customs with a laptop, at all. I think this kind of policy instruction is more useful as a way of simplifying the kinds of questions that General Counsel has to answer, especially in a corporate environment where you have a lot of (nerds) extremely privacy-conscious developers.
That eliminates a whole class of questions. "What should I do if I am asked to unlock my computer by a customs agent?" Let them search anything they want to, if they have legal authority to do it. "What if I have sensitive company data on my work laptop and we've signed XYZ NDA with LMNO Company?" This question and a whole host of related questions will never come up at all if there is a policy against carrying any type of sensitive data through customs.
If you are an employee of such company and you have issues with this policy, there is a pretty good chance it's because you aren't in the habit of keeping great backups. So that's one more great reason for the company to have this policy, as that's information that you'll want to become known and have addressed some time well before it matters.
Is it just me or are their "real" benefits pretty poor?
Health Care: no vision, I assume no dental. 25% copay on the PPO is on the higher end too, no?
401K: Not matching up to max. Certainly not all companies do, but still. I guess it's rare for startups.
Equity pool: (1) What happens on year 6? You don't vest any more equity? (2) This feels to me like it would not reward tenured employees as much. If you joined the company at 10 people and it IPOs at 300, you would be diluted significantly more than if you started with 1-2% of the company and diluted at investment rounds (I know they don't like to take on investor money, but just for comparison)
Seems like if you decide to work at Basecamp, you are trading some "real" benefits for the unique company culture.
Matching 401K up to 6% with no vesting period is exceptional.
Yes, paying 25% of the cost of an individual health plan is on the high end for a tech company. However, Basecamp continues to pay 75% of the premium for family plans. Often companies pay for a much lower portion of these expensive plans. It's also a very good health plan with nationwide coverage.
What is the difference between matching and just giving you more salary, which you could put into your 401k? Does it enable you to put even more into your 401k tax free?
There's a few comments here pointing out their rules for wiping company data from devices when traveling through customs.
As a frequent international traveler, I feel naive here... can anyone point out any resources as to why this is best practice? What's on the line here, and what's going on that we need to be aware of?
Well it's probably a lot simpler than you think. If you carry it through Customs then it is subject to search. If you don't carry it through Customs then you can be searched, and you're not disclosing any proprietary company data. Easy peasy.
For any company that has external NDA obligations, this seems like a no-brainer to make legal compliance very easy. You don't want to disclose your proprietary company data, well then make a policy that says don't put proprietary company data in a position where it is likely to be subject to legal searches without any strong requirement for a warrant (probably a very short list of situations, maybe just when passing through Customs.) Now you can sign NDAs and pass through customs too, and don't worry about any potential that a conflict between the two could put you in a precarious legal position.
Customs has very broad legal latitude to perform invasive searches on a whim. (Here in the US, I don't think I even need to pass through customs to be subjected to invasive searches like this when passing through an airport.)
Anybody else surprised that their billing and identity system[1] is publically accessible (login required of course). Shouldn't this only be accessible within a trusted zone (office/VPN)?
To me the big thing is 37 Signals spent years railing against companies with their handbooks and written down procedures. Calling them rituals doesn't change the fact that they have processes
Shipshape is just a security and config audit tool that ensures that you have proper MacOS security settings (FileVault, proper password requirements, Gatekeeper, SIP, etc.) and a few other things installed (1Password, etc.).
There has been little mention of the most amazing perk at Basecamp which are the four day work weeks for four months of the year. This doesn't mean working four days of ten hours each day. You work four normal, eight hour days and get one day off.
Looking at the job req, it mentions the expectation is for 5 minute response times when you're on call (from alert to being online) and that you're on call one week a month.
Is the compensation provided in line with essentially working 24 hours a day for a week once per month?
"We have a shared on call responsibility which is about 1 week (5 week days, and 2 weekend days) a month. (The responsibility means you'll be online within 5 minutes of receiving an alert.) We constantly work on making the on call responsibility as calm as we can. We try to finish what we start vs leaving it for someone else to clean up. When there is a code red event (like a site outage), we all pitch in to help until we are sailing on calmer seas again."
(I run our Ops team.) The time burden goes down with the more people we have. It's still a burden though -- and our compensation (in theory) reflects that.
FWIW We're doing everything we can to make this "work hours only" M-F, which we could solve by hiring tons of people immediately, but we also have other ideals like keeping the company as small as possible that we want to realize too.
There's an open and ongoing discussion about making improvements in this area and I'm thankful that David and Jason have been receptive to many of the suggestions I, or anyone else on our team has had.
My personal stance is that we should do everything we can to give Ops a 40 hour work week that's during regular working hours and no more, even if that means people get cut a lot of extra slack to recover after a late night page, etc. (Hopefully our team would back me up in saying I encourage people to take reasonable time to make up "lost" hours.)
(Also fwiw, I participate equally in the on call rotations.)
There's a big problem with being on call for one week out of 6 or 8: you lose touch with the procedures. Sure, your four year veterans know everything by heart - but the first few shifts of a newbie are going to be perilous. I recommend making the shifts shorter and more frequent.
Presumably one person is on-call and everyone else can be called in / woken up as necessary. So - split each day into two halves, and ask people to be on-call for a 12 hour period.
Rotate the roster around so that Jane doesn't always have the same Friday-afternoon shift, nobody has 2 shifts in a row, and put it in a shared calendar so you can always see who has the watch.
With 6 people, you'll take 2 and a seventh shifts per week. At 7, it's an even 2 shifts per week.
Benefits:
- much less of a burden that a whole week of readiness
- brains work better when they haven't been pummeled for a week at a time (at least, mine does)
- easily scales fairly when you have more people, or when someone leaves, but keeps everyone in the loop. When you have 14 people in Ops, you only have one shift a week, but you get one every week.
- much more family-friendly
OK, why 2 12 hour periods instead of splitting the day into 8, 6 or 4? Because people lose track too easily. Trying to schedule around your kid's concert or music lessons with smaller chunks is hard to keep in your head - and trying to work that in with a one week shift is nigh-impossible.
Why not a 24 hour shift? Because it's really hard to recover from that. Humans are generally awake for about 15-17 hours a day. Shifting a few hours is generally doable.
I would recommend that for anyone who took an alert call during non-core hours, you automatically expect them to take the next normal day to recover. I know that when I get woken up at 4AM, I'll run out of steam by 2 or 3PM.
How do you even, like, commute to work on a 5 minute online time? Even stuff like essential food shopping, I can sometimes be more than a 5 minute walk away from the car and laptop. Or going to the bathroom.
> FWIW We're doing everything we can to make this "work hours only" M-F, which we could solve by hiring tons of people immediately, but we also have other ideals like keeping the company as small as possible that we want to realize too.
And this is what I can't stand about small businesses. Nothing makes me run from a company faster than a company saying they're committed to their ideals over what's best for everyone. Small businesses, for whatever reason, are the ones who are most likely to shout "Honor before reason!" and shoot themselves, their employees, and their customers in the foot. You don't see megacorps doing this.
What's best for everyone is to hire "tons of people immediately". If your ideals conflict with that, then you need to jettison your ideals.
Wow, that sounds horribly oppressive. What that basically means is "For 1 week a month, you can forget about going to the movies, going out to eat, going shopping, or going anywhere where you're not within 5 minutes of a desktop computer. You can probably forget about cooking, too, unless you're willing to start a kitchen fire when you get an alert. Hope you like DoorDash!"
I would literally rather work the counter at Taco Bell than work in an environment like that.
Edit: And forget about going to the doctor, too. I can't wait for an employee to go to the doctor for a medical emergency, miss an alert, get fired, and then launch a spectacular lawsuit.
Y'know, the doctor's office around the corner from me actively bans cell phones past the waiting room. They have huge signs saying "NO CELL PHONES" at the back of the waiting room and in every exam room.
I don't work at basecamp, but in practice it's pressing the ack button on pager duty on my phone, looking at the alert metrics to see if it's something I should worry about immediately and if it is and I'm not available, I would go ask someone else to try to deal with it. Oncall is triage, you usually ping the person actually responsible for it.
And if I am surprisingly indisposed it would fall back to everyone else. If I need to go to the doctor, then I would swap times with someone else. No one has gotten fired for letting an alert through, just minorly teased the next day.
Edit: And forget about going to the doctor, too. I can't wait for an employee to go to the doctor for a medical emergency, miss an alert, get fired, and then launch a spectacular lawsuit.
Technically there is some merit in what you say. Taking the overall manual in context, I guess that notifying your team that you have to go for a medical emergency, or doing so after the fact, will make it a non-issue.
You literally couldn't pay me enough to work a job where I had to be on call an entire week every month. I mean it. You could offer me nine figures, and I'd still turn it down.
I think 5 mins is unrealistic 20-30 mins from the call to being logged on and working is more realistic and you are of course paid plus TOIL for this on call?
If anyone had an old school pager go of when you are deep asleep you will know that it can take 20 mins and a coffee just to be in the right state to work :-)
> You may also choose to take an additional 8 weeks leave unpaid. Note that this does not guarantee your employment. We're simply keeping your job open for an additional 8 weeks, unless your position becomes redundant.
Is it just me, or does that sound a little harsh? (Maybe I'm used to UK workers rights) Isn't this exactly the reason why many parents don't take the parental leave they probably should? ie that they fear they will become obsolete simply from not being in the office...