Even if I liked the job I would take it. Six months paid holiday would be too good to pass up.

Yeah, let’s say your salary was $200k. They give you $100k immediately, you turn around and find another job after a month off at $190k—that means you’re making about $273k this year.

$273k means you would be hitting the top marginal federal income tax rate and also the net investment income tax. If you are in a state with high state income tax rates, your additional $100k nets you $50k. Of which maybe $10k goes to replace the post-tax income you lost for the month you spent looking for a job.

$40k in the bank is a nice bonus, but I wouldn't quit a job I liked for it.

Also getting a new job is a pain. I don't like doing it.

It reminds me of people flippantly declaring "just sue!" as if it's an easy or pleasant thing to do.

>> Also getting a new job is a pain. I don't like doing it

Agreed. A pain, and also a risk. A huge part of job satisfaction is working for a manager that you respect, and you can't really know that until you've been through some shit.

It depends on the terms, is it a lump sum? Or would the paychecks end when you get the new job?

Severance (or "buy-out"), is typically (in my experience) a one time lump sum event.

Why would they end? What business is it of theirs?

I think this is continuing your pay until you find new job... not as sexy as you think.

depends. it (used to be) a tough job to get. i've heard vague indications that their profit sharing would have been extremely lucrative. but i dont know exact numbers.

but just on a numbers basis if you made 1m a year profit sharing but a normal job outside you'd make 200k, you'd have to really hate working there to quit purely for the 6month payout.

Eh. This thread is about employees of 3+ years, in which case, even if the profit share is very lucrative, they've received that profit share 3+ times. On top of that, I doubt Basecamp pays poorly. If you're even vaguely burnt out or bored, 6 months off sounds like a dream.

I believe the profit-sharing plan is new, announced as part of these "changes".

> In addition, we recently introduced a 10% profit sharing plan

If so, it's hard to say for sure how lucrative it would be either, especially if you aren't privy to the details of what they say they are offering.

But if so, nobody's gotten it already, you'd have to stay to get it.

https://world.hey.com/jason/changes-at-basecamp-7f32afc5

Profit sharing was paid out for the first time in 2021-01.

Good to know. Thank you!

I expect that was the intent. They wanted a smaller, more focused company and longed after a time when things were simpler. So they have decided to take the financial hit for convenience by providing an offer that they hoped people would take.

Yeah, I've got to say, that kind of offer, even if I liked working for a company, would be hard to turn down. Especially right now. Take the summer off, enjoy things after this hellacious year, get back into a position somewhere in the fall. I don't imagine that it's going to be a black-balling mark for these people.

Depends on the situation of course. The grab a new job in a week heuristic doesn't actually apply with a lot of people. But a good exit package, as used to be more routine, is certainly something to take into account.

For the people who stay when one third of the team has left what’s your outlook?

Pro: high possibility of promotion and a new position

Con: way more responsibility and stress for managing a platform and rebuilding teams on the fly.

I think they’ll need to offer some form of compensation to reward the people who stayed on, because their lives will likely get a lot harder in the short term.

I see this as a third of the employees were more interested in taking 6 months salary than in keeping work conversations professional. Those aren't really people you want on your team.

I mean that's a false choice, plenty will be keeping work conversations professional elsewhere while also having 6 months salary.

I don't know if a full third of a company leaving at once can really be explained away as people they didn't really want on the team.

When it’s enough people to make a decent sized company, senior management owns it either way: if they didn’t screw up now, they spent years hiring the wrong people and not doing anything about it.

head of marketing, head of design, entire ios team. Probably people they wanted on the team.

If you read this news as "employees (who yosito disagrees with) should shut the fuck up", perhaps you think this is good. If you read this as, "I joined this company as a place where my voice mattered and now I'm being told to STFU by a founder on a rage bender", it makes more sense why people are leaving.

I followed the entire conversation and “a founder on a rage bender” is an extreme exaggeration.

They asked the political conversions be kept out of work channels, but continued to encourage people to be active politically, active on social media and even active at work using other platforms.

Framing the entire thing as some extremist plot to silence dissent is absurd.

If someone wanted to come into work channels and constantly tell people about their religion, why they should convert and why other religions were wrong would you think it’s okay to for the business to ask to keep those conversations outside of the main work channels?

That's not the conversations they are banning though. Many of the conversations are actually about the company itself and its culture. This is not people "wasting time" and sowing discord via typical political topics.

This sounds like you've only read DHH's description of events. Read the Platformer article for more context.

If you’re talking about this one, I just read it.

https://www.platformer.news/p/-what-really-happened-at-basec...

When I read that, I see business leaders who engaged for months then asked people to move on when they realized it was never going to go away.

Searching the chat logs and posting in front of everybody was a jerk move for an executive, absolutely.

Everything else seems entirely reasonable.

Same here, read it when it was posted elsewhere in this thread with an implication of “this’ll show you how basecamp management’s in the wrong” and that was the only part that stood out to me as wrong in their handling of this. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, as I read on, but it never did.

I read that as well, and even read the open letter that was included in that post. Seems like maybe Basecamp is better off without those employees who've decided to quit.

Just from the open letter (https://janeyang.org/2021/04/27/an-open-letter-to-jason-and-...) take a look at the kind of attitudes they have; these are some serious snowflakes:

    "As you know, I am writing this while on medical leave from Basecamp, a condition that was necessary in large part because of the extreme emotional duress I have experienced as an employee at the company."

> I followed the entire conversation and “a founder on a rage bender” is an extreme exaggeration.

I don't know, maybe you missed the part where he posted on Twitter about cancel culture and then started blocking everyone who disagreed with him. Rage benders don't need to be limited to the office. =)

The one where he linked to a NYT article/podcast interview and everybody start tweeting at him that he was raging about cancel culture?

This one?

https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1387731297980854272?s=21

Yeah! They tweeted at him such because that's what he was doing. Other people just said, "Maybe you should take a break" and got blocked. =)

I guess if we're just going to go in a circle confirming that we've both observed the same thing vs. discussing, I'm happy to bounce! =) Have an awesome one!

Posting an article link is hardly raging about cancel culture, especially when it’s a very reasoned interview about it.

If you saw a link posted and see that as rage, it kinda proves the point.

Did you read the NYT article or listen to the podcast? It was very reasonable.

They said--

We don't care what you think about the impact of our poor decisions.

We don't care what you think about diversity and inclusion.

We don't want to be a workplace that cares about your health or wellbeing.

And we are going to escalate any disagreement until you shut the fuck up.

A third of the company (and counting) has decided that this sucks and is leaving.

I'm not calling this an extremist plot. In fact, I think it's the exact opposite of a plot, hence "on a bender". I think this is someone who got angry at work, had the power to win a debate by fiat, and exercised that power, and is now learning the cost of that Pyrrhic victory.

> If someone wanted to come into work channels and constantly tell people about their religion

The conversations inside Basecamp weren't about that at all, so I'm not sure why you raise this example. They were about the way the workplace had been run and citing the shortcomings of those decisions.

> We don't care [...]

Well, this might be contrarian but if I worked for DHH I might very well prefer this situation.

In fact I feel like I've been in and out of situations and I tend to prefer clear command chains: I do what I am told and those under me do what they are told.

The military is a perfect good example as is certain companies.

Maybe twice (including a decade ago and now) have I experienced self organizing teams that worked.

And a lot of people don’t need or want a workplace to “care about their wellbeing”. A job is not your mommy and daddy, they are not there to take care of you. They pay you money to provide a service. You should be able to take care of your own wellbeing like a normal adult.

They said absolutely none of that, unless you have quotes I haven’t seen.

This is a very twisted and biased account of what happened. Nowhere did DHH or Jason state or directly imply these things.

I find it refreshing that you'd defend my right to make grand sweeping blog posts about the mighty weight on my shoulders, telling my employees what they can't talk about, and then in the next post I'm reposting long screeds from an internal message board of me picking on an employee and plaintively playing for the readers approval

If they really cared about keeping those people, they wouldn't have offered an incentive for them to leave.

For example, they could have structured the incentive such that it only applied to employees below a certain level. They didn't do that though because they wanted to make sure every employee who disagreed with the policy left.

They've lost their iOS development team, but kept the employees who think that spending their work hours pulling customer names from their production environment to make fun of them is a good use of their day. So much winning!

> They've lost their iOS development team, but kept the employees who think that spending their work hours pulling customer names from their production environment to make fun of them is a good use of their day. So much winning!

Perhaps they’ve kept the employees who accepted management’s statement about the event and wanted to move past the issue.

Perhaps!

> "employees (who yosito disagrees with) should shut the fuck up"

Please don't put words in my mouth. I said nothing of the sort.

The deal's almost too good to pass up.

I'll program and be professional at company A just as happily as I would at company B.

I'm already professional and apolitical at work, I don't feel I stand to gain much being otherwise.

So I think you'd be inadvertently discriminating against people who are simply interested in getting 2 salaries for 6 months.

On the contrary, anyone who would choose to stay doing exactly what they've been doing despite being offered 6 month's pay to leave is not a person who will try to positively change things around them, barring some other external factor preventing them from leaving. You probably don't want them on your team.

People are also going to be tempted to not deal with the backlash of staying onboard despite a fairly generous buyout offer.

I wonder if they're regretting the "no employee equity" policy now.

What? After two years, every Basecamp employee starts getting shares that pay dividends.[1] Their handbook also claims that employees will get 10% of the value of the company if it is ever sold or goes public (though they plan to never do so).

https://basecamp.com/handbook/08-benefits-and-perks#employee...

Exactly, it's a profit sharing program that encourages good year over year results, not something that rewards you with assets that may be worth a whole lot of money, but only in 10 years.

I guess it comes down to numbers though. How much money was this profit sharing incentive giving to most employees? And how many users did they lose this week?

"We ask that you think of any compensation from this program as not something to be counted upon, not something to be budgeted with, but as a true bonus. Year to year, profits and therefore the amount we’re able to share with employees may swing wildly or not be paid out at all."

Does anyone add in randomness (dice?) to actually enforce the feeling that profits/bonuses can swing wildly?

"This Program does not have any set expiration date, but the company reserves the right to amend it or cancel it at any time. You forfeit your shares in the profit sharing program if you resign or are terminated from Basecamp."

So not equity. Profit sharing.

I suspect many people would leave many jobs if offered a comparable payout, particularly if their skills are valuable

Four words come to my mind: “United States Healthcare System”

Even with an amazing buyout like this, I feel like you have to be in that relatively narrow space of “no spouse, no kids, good health, pretty young” to be able to walk away from health insurance.

While I agree that the US healthcare system is terrible, this shouldn't be much of a concern for people making software engineering salaries. One good thing the ACA did was make it reasonably convenient to exchange dollars for health insurance without the idiocy of your employer being a middleman, and you can't be denied or have rates jacked up for preexisting conditions.

It looks like California ACA Silver plans run about $1000/month for a 30 year old couple.

They can make use of COBRA and use some of that money to pay for that.

Well, when I ended up using cobra the cost was roughly 5x what I was paying while employed. This got worse as one aged, and put a noticeable dent in the household budget. If some of those that walked were <= 26, can't they use their parent's insurance due to ACA? For those with a working spouse, free money. For those working in, say, Canada, catastrophic insurance isn't something that involves the employer.

cobra is free for them -- per the covid bill. through 30 sept

COBRA is only free under the relief bill for people who were involuntarily terminated.

https://www.natlawreview.com/article/new-covid-19-relief-pac...

constructive termination counts as involuntary

Is it a competitive job market? I've been interviewing SWE candidates at my current workplace for some time and it feels like the org is competing for developers more than developers are competing for jobs.

Here in Seattle, if you can't quickly solve Fizz buzz and Hacker Rank questions in an interview, most companies interview processes will reject you in short order.

It doesn't seem to matter if your getting quality PRs approved into popular FOSS software, nor do most interview processes actually vet for technical capability or quality.

My friends who work in tech right now (whether at Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Mercedes, etc) essentially set aside 6 to 18 months prior to job hunting to screw around practicing these questions.

I think that's what he meant - employers are competing for employees. I had one recruiter (who cold contacted me) admit that the SF Bay area job market is red hot and everyone is hiring like crazy.