The REWORK podcast

Rework Mailbag 4

Basecamp co-founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson are back in the studio to answer your questions. This edition of Mailbag includes topics like why big companies don’t use Basecamp; how they managed the transition from a web design agency to a product company; and what their business partnership means to them. Kristin Aardsma from Basecamp Support also pops in to answer a question about how her team maintains fast response times while making time for breaks.
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DHH on The Heartbeat Podcast

In our last episode, we talked to Claire Lew, the CEO of Know Your Team. She has her own show called The Heartbeat Podcast, where she talks to founders and leaders about management. This is her interview with Basecamp co-founder and CTO David Heinemeier Hansson. To listen to more of The Heartbeat Podcast, visit https://knowyourteam.com/blog/podcast/ or look for the show wherever you listen to podcasts.
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KNOW YOUR TEAM

Claire Lew is the CEO of Know Your Team, a company dedicated to solving the problem of bad bosses. The company has its origins as a product developed within Basecamp and today is not just a software tool, but a deep vein of resources for managers of all experience levels. In this episode, Claire shares her unconventional path to becoming a CEO, how she completely revamped her company’s focus and business model, and why so much “thought leadership” around management gets it wrong.
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OFFICE SPACE

We’re introducing a new segment called Last Week with Jason Fried, where Basecamp’s CEO talks about a task or concern that recently fell on his plate. In this inaugural episode, Jason talks about how the end of the company’s lease on its Chicago office leaves him with a big decision on how to design a space for a mostly remote workforce and whether Basecamp needs an office at all. Meanwhile, all work and no play makes Shaun a dull boy.
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Unplugged from the Matrix

In 2007, Kenneth Coats started a business helping Chicagoans expunge their arrest records so they could improve their job prospects. After a challenge from the Illinois Attorney General shut down that venture, Kenneth reinvented his business with an assist from a local clinic that provides free legal services to entrepreneurs. In this episode, hear how Kenneth pivoted—and what he did to ensure he couldn’t return to his previous career.
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Job Scam

We’re introducing a new segment called Check-Ins, where we talk to folks at Basecamp about their answers to recurring questions that get asked of everyone here. Recently, Jeremy Daer on our Security, Infrastructure, and Performance team dealt with an incident where an Internet scammer was fraudulently posing as a Basecamp recruiter to collect personal information from job seekers. We hear from Jeremy about how this scam works and from Shanae Dykes on Basecamp’s Support team about how to keep yourself safe while looking for remote job opportunities.
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Subscription Hostages

Raise your hand if this sounds familiar: You sign up for a service or a product online. When you go to cancel, you discover the only way to stop the subscription is to write an email or—even worse, make an actual phone call. In this episode, we try to get to the bottom of why this consumer trap persists, especially in the newspaper industry, and what it says about a company’s confidence (or lack thereof) in what it’s selling.
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Did You Order the Code Red?

“Passwords just aren’t cutting it online. It’s getting worse. We all feel it.” This is what Jeremy from Basecamp’s Security, Infrastructure, and Performance team wrote in a February blog post after dealing with a mass-login attack. Intruders with huge lists of login credentials—obtained in previous data breaches—tried using those passwords to access Basecamp accounts. Hear how Basecamp addressed the immediate incident and was also forced to reflect on longer-term plans for customer security in an increasingly insecure age.
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Ruby on Rails

In 2004, Basecamp CTO David Heinemeier Hansson released a framework called Ruby on Rails that has since been used by over 1.2 million web applications including Twitter, Airbnb, Hulu, and, of course, Basecamp. In this bonus episode of Rework, David talks about creativity, finding a passion, and how writing Ruby changed the way he thinks about programming.
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Hiring Is Not Hazing

Why are manhole covers round? How many golf balls can fit in a 747? Why are job interviews so terrible? In this episode, Aja Hammerly, a developer advocate at Google, talks about the drawbacks of common tech interview techniques like whiteboard coding and trivia questions, and shares her tips for improving the process by making it about discovering the candidate’s best qualities.
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