The REWORK podcast

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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Remote Work: Extreme Edition

We place a long-distance phone call to Antarctica to chat with Kathrin Mallot, an astrophysicist who works at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in the South Pole. In this episode, Kathrin talks about preparing for a work assignment in a super remote part of the world; practicing self-care during the punishing Antarctic winter; getting along with coworkers that you also live with in close quarters; frozen nose hairs, snacks, Internet access, and more!
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No Hard Feelings

Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy are the co-authors of No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions At Work. They come on Rework to talk about how the future of work is emotional; why it’s useful to listen to feelings like envy; and how we can all take small steps toward a healthier emotional life at work. (NB: It is totes okay to cry in the bathroom at the office!)
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Reblog

The folks at Basecamp have been blogging since 1999, when Jason Fried would write by the light of a fire fueled by David Heinemeier Hansson’s savage indictments of the tech industry. A lot has changed since then (with the exception of DHH’s feelings about Silicon Valley). Basecamp’s blog, Signal v. Noise, changed platforms a few times. And it just moved again, this time from Medium to WordPress. In this episode, Jason and designer Adam Stoddard talk about leaving Medium for WordPress, the blog’s new look, and keeping SvN fresh after all these years.
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Spark Joy with DHH

Basecamp co-founders David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried are fans of Marie Kondo’s 2014 bestseller “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” which is back in the cultural zeitgeist thanks to her new Netflix show. In this bonus episode, DHH talks about how he’s applied the KonMari framework to code, business decisions at Basecamp, and his own belongings.
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Big Integer

On Thursday, November 8, Basecamp 3 went down for almost five hours. It was the worst outage to hit the company in a decade and a stress test of Basecamp’s practices around internal communication, customer support, and calm work. Today’s episode goes inside the company on November 8 to see how the outage unfolded.
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100% Facebook-Free

After yet another round of revelations about Facebook’s use of customer data, Basecamp has decided to become 100% Facebook-free. We’ve actually been off Facebook proper for a while, but on Wednesday we decided to remove the company from Instagram and WhatsApp as well. This is a conversation with Basecamp’s CTO, David Heinemeier Hansson, about making that decision and why he thinks you should follow in Basecamp’s footsteps.
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Rename

On the last episode of Rework, we talked about the dangers of using violent language in a business context. We’ve had to grapple with other kinds of problematic language at Basecamp as well. In this mini bonus episode, Shaun talks to programmer Jeremy Daer about shedding harmful terms for database relationships that persist in the industry.
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Happy Pacifists

Business rhetoric is rife with the language of war—there’s constant talk of conquering markets and dominating the competition. These tropes indicate a dangerous way of thinking that can have real consequences, intended or not, on human behavior. In this episode, two professors share their research on the impact of violent rhetoric on business ethics, and a member of Basecamp’s Support team talks about communication techniques that get us out of the mentality that everything is a zero-sum game.
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Sometimes It's Crazy At Work

In October, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson released their new book, It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work. The book featured their writing, as well as cover art and interior illustrations from a couple designers at Basecamp. The launch initially seemed like a great success—but then things went awry. In this episode, we look at the work that went into the book and the problems with the release, and attempt to find some lessons in the aftermath.
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