{"id":563,"date":"2021-06-16T17:31:52","date_gmt":"2021-06-16T12:01:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.remotebharat.com\/resources\/?p=563"},"modified":"2021-06-16T17:31:54","modified_gmt":"2021-06-16T12:01:54","slug":"they-led-the-cult-of-remote-work-now-were-all-members","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.remotebharat.com\/resources\/they-led-the-cult-of-remote-work-now-were-all-members\/","title":{"rendered":"They Led the Cult of Remote Work. Now We\u2019re All Members"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It only took a pandemic for us to live in Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson\u2019s remote work fantasy<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cObviously, the news is a big deal,\u201d said Jason Fried on a call last week. The markets were spiraling<\/a>, his hometown of Chicago had just issued a stay-at-home order, and the coronavirus pandemic seemed to permeate every aspect of life<\/a>. \u201cBut otherwise, it\u2019s absolutely no different than any other workweek in the past 20 years.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fried wasn\u2019t being sarcastic. The author, blogger, podcaster, and co-founder\/CEO of Basecamp \u2014 a remote project management platform that was sort of Slack before there was Slack \u2014 was at his home office 15 minutes outside of downtown Chicago. Meanwhile, his CTO co-founder, co-author, co-blogger, and co-podcaster, David Heinemeier Hansson, was thousands of miles away at his home office in Malibu, California. And if they stayed off Twitter and ignored the howls of frustrated children (their own) who should be at school or daycare, they could almost pretend that the world wasn\u2019t falling apart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Basecamp has been a virtual company for all of its 21 years. And apart from a dozen or so temporarily displaced workers at the company\u2019s headquarters in Chicago, all 50-something of its employees were in their usual personal headquarters \u2014 behind laptops and monitors in remote offices across the country and around the world, including one guy in the middle of a forest on a lake in Canada. \u201cThat part of the equation is really unchanged,\u201d Heinemeier Hansson says. \u201cSelf-isolation and a normal workday for us \u2014 they kind of look like each other.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tireless promoters of contrarian views about the workplace, the tech industry, and Silicon Valley, the duo have long hoisted themselves onto every platform and medium available.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

But as Covid-19 clamped down hard on Americans\u2019 lives and companies trepidatiously scrambled en masse to shift their workforces online, Fried and Heinemeier Hansson couldn\u2019t ignore this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to evangelize a philosophy of work \u2014 and their personal brand \u2014 that they had been talking about, and living, for years. Tireless promoters of contrarian views about the workplace, the tech industry, and Silicon Valley, the duo have long hoisted themselves onto every platform and medium available \u2014 TED Talks<\/a>, their Signal v. Noise<\/em> blog<\/a>, their weekly Rework<\/em> podcasts<\/a>, YouTube<\/a>, three books, including a New York Times bestseller<\/a> \u2014 to tout the benefits of bootstrapping, staying small, growing slow, and to rail against venture capital, IPOs, tech industry monopolies, 100-hour workweeks, physical offices, and, perhaps their favorite target, the meeting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe can\u2019t seem to figure out how to shut up,\u201d Heinemeier Hansson says. \u201cI suppose that does help the business, sometimes, by raising awareness. Other times, it hurts the business, when people think we\u2019re idiots.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Heinemeier Hansson confesses that in the early days of the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. he spent a good amount of energy \u201cchanneling furious outrage with the tons of companies that were way too slow with following medical guidelines, doing the reasonable, kind, and safest thing of letting people work from home<\/a>.\u201d Putting the call out to\u00a0his 395,000-plus Twitter followers<\/a>, Heinemeier Hansson received hundreds of messages, then named and shamed dozens of companies \u2014 including Accenture, ATT, Cognizant, Epic Systems, Tesla, SpaceX, and Wells Fargo \u2014 in\u00a0an archived thread<\/a>\u00a0that\u2019s gotten millions of views. \u201cI outed dozens and dozens of companies for having shitty policies and, in some cases, even keeping the office open after they had active Covid-19 cases,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Heinemeier Hansson, a serious amateur race car driver with chiseled cheekbones, comes across as a bomb-throwing Nordic James Bond. (He plays to type: In January, he also testified<\/a> in front of the House Antitrust Committee on Big Tech\u2019s tightening monopolistic grip on the internet.) Fried, a vintage watch collector, projects more of a cool professor vibe, surprisingly modest and self-effacing given his brand of fame and influence in entrepreneurial circles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fried started writing software as a somewhat dorky teenager growing up in an affluent Chicago suburb. He opened a web design shop called 37 Signals with a couple of friends in 1999. Heinemeier Hansson, from Denmark, got his first computer at age six. In 2001, he sent Fried a programming question \u2014 he\u2019d been reading an early iteration of Fried\u2019s blog \u2014 and ended up getting hired to build (remotely) some project management software to help coordinate 37 Signals\u2019 growing workload.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That product eventually became Basecamp \u2014 and in 2004, Heinemeier Hansson also spun out Ruby on Rails, the now-iconic open source software framework that grew out of his work on Basecamp and has since been used to launch roughly a gazillion web applications. After graduating from the Copenhagen Business School with a bachelor\u2019s degree in business and computer science, Heinemeier Hansson moved to the United States in 2005 to join Fried\u2019s company. The two have been inseparable \u2014 spiritually, if not physically \u2014 ever since, as they shifted their business model away from software consulting to software-as-a-service, changed the company name to Basecamp in 2014, and grew to serve more than 6 million monthly users today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since the virus hit, sign-ups for Basecamp \u2014 which is profitable, with annual revenue in the tens of millions, according to the company \u2014 were up 25%. But rival virtual work platforms \u2014 from wildly popular but less comprehensive services like Slack and Zoom to more directly comparable project management tools such as Asana and Trello \u2014 were also seeing a surge. So Heinemeier Hansson and Fried made a point of getting out in front of those users, old and new, to offer reassurance and advice. They\u2019ve also been virtually \u201cstopping in\u201d at companies that have asked them to speak with employees about going remote, and have given away some 600 copies of their 2013 distributed working bible, Remote: Office Not Required<\/em>. \u201cI never charge for my speaking engagements,\u201d Fried says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Zoom quickly became the pandemic\u2019s go-to lifeline for businesses, it irked them to see how companies of all sizes \u2014 in a blind rush to go remote \u2014 were merely replicating the worst aspects of the workplaces they\u2019d left behind.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

On Tuesday, they hosted their second Twitch livestream, a Q&A on remote working \u2014 Fried in a baseball cap and sweatshirt, and Heinemeier Hansson with gelled-back hair and a T-shirt, both sporting scruffy near-beards \u2014 guiding an online audience, which peaked at about 250, through the nitty-gritty of remote project management for nearly two hours. Imagine Bill Gates \u2014 or a lower-budget, indie version of Bill Gates \u2014 showing off some of his favorite tricks for optimizing Windows. \u201cWe don\u2019t normally spend hours doing product walk-throughs, and in normal times it\u2019s not necessary to do that,\u201d Heinemeier Hansson says. \u201cBut these are not normal times.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The duo manage to toe a fine line between self-promotion and selflessness. The webinar was understandably Basecamp-centric \u2014 the company still uses its own software for internal project management \u2014 but much of their advice could be generalized to other tools and other workplaces. \u201cFind whatever works for you,\u201d Fried says. \u201cWhat I would just encourage people not to try to spin up four or five or six separate products right now. You\u2019re just making things difficult for yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More than pitching a product, though, what they most want \u2014 sincerely, it seems \u2014 is to make sure that people who find themselves suddenly thrust into working remotely actually have a chance to \u201cget\u201d what\u2019s good about it. Fried and Heinemeier Hansson tell me this over the course of two interviews, conducted separately and \u2014 if you can believe it \u2014 over the phone. Fried had pushed back, firmly, at my suggestion to connect via video chat. \u201cPhone seems perfectly fine with me,\u201d he emailed. Faced with the prospect of even one more virtual meeting than was absolutely necessary, the guys who wrote the book on virtual work just couldn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Zoom quickly became<\/a> the pandemic\u2019s go-to lifeline for businesses, it irked them to see how companies of all sizes \u2014 in a blind rush to go remote \u2014 were merely replicating the worst aspects of the workplaces they\u2019d left behind. \u201cHaving video conferences all day long is totally the wrong direction,\u201d Fried says. \u201cThe beauty of remote working is the opportunity to improve the way you work, to cut way back on meetings, to cut back on the number of people that need to be involved in any decision, to cut back on the need to FaceTime constantly.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the pandemic eventually subsides, quarantines lift, and companies start returning to their offices \u2014 behavior across corporate America will be forever changed.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Heinemeier Hansson and Fried\u2019s feelings about meetings are well known among their followers: They are terrible, too long, almost always unnecessary, \u201cthe ultimate time suck.\u201d Most meetings can simply be replaced with writing, Heinemeier Hansson says. \u201cInstead of sitting around at a table with your team and, one by one, describing what you\u2019re working on, we have each person jot down what they\u2019re going to work on that week,\u201d he says. That can be a couple lines or a few paragraphs, but the point is that others get to read at their leisure, not at a mandatory Monday meeting where everything else stops. \u201cThe great thing about working asynchronously is you get to string together long stretches of uninterrupted time, and you get to do the great creative work that only happens when you have long stretches of uninterrupted time,\u201d Heinemeier Hansson says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fried and Heinemeier Hansson, whose most recent book is titled It Doesn\u2019t Have to Be Crazy at Work<\/em>, have long advocated for a more humane version of work life than the one promoted by startup culture at large. They\u2019re big fans of the 40-hour workweek, families, and a good night\u2019s sleep. But that whole work-life balance thing, Fried warns, can get even trickier once you\u2019re working remotely. \u201cMost people initially think that people are going to slack off at home,\u201d he says. \u201cActually, because there\u2019s not as much separation, the bigger risk is overwork.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Right now, especially, they want managers to scale back their ambitions and expectations, because the risk of burnout is so high. Even for the guys who wrote the book on remote working, it\u2019s no picnic. \u201cWe can\u2019t pretend that just because we\u2019re a remote company already doing this for 20 years that we\u2019re going to be firing on all cylinders,\u201d Heinemeier Hansson says. \u201cYou can\u2019t expect people to have 100% of their faculty and attention available for work when the world is in the biggest upheaval that most people at Basecamp have ever been through.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About half of Basecamp\u2019s employees are parents, says Fried, who is married and has two kids, ages one and five. \u201cIt\u2019s important for companies to recognize that there\u2019s no such thing as a full-time job right now for most people who have kids at home,\u201d he says. \u201cThey\u2019re doing their best, but they\u2019re not really putting in a full day\u2019s work.\u201d Heinemeier Hansson, who has been sheltering in place with his wife and their three kids, ages six months, four, and seven, says there\u2019s been \u201ca lot of screaming,\u201d especially between the seven- and four-year-old. \u201cWe\u2019re all on edge. Adults just internalize it. Kids verbalize it into screams.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even if your company already has some familiarity with remote work and the tools for doing it \u2014 as many tech companies and smaller businesses already do \u2014 don\u2019t underestimate the time it takes to get everybody on board, even at the basic proficiency level. \u201cIf you threw a guitar at me, and I\u2019ve never played a guitar before, everyone would understand that I\u2019m going to suck,\u201d Fried says. \u201cIt\u2019s the same thing for remote work. If people haven\u2019t practiced before, they\u2019re going to suck for a little bit.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Companies need to prioritize, says Heinemeier Hansson, whose main focus now, as CTO, is making sure the Basecamp platform doesn\u2019t melt down in this real-life stress test. \u201cIf [we have] any outage \u2014 even a short one \u2014 now, it would be even more catastrophic than usual,\u201d he says. \u201cI feel a great responsibility to make sure that our systems are resilient, fast, safe, and secure.\u201d To that end, he and Fried made the call to delay launching any new features and products for now, including Hey, a new email service that had been scheduled for an April release. \u201cWho the fuck wants to hear about a new email product right now?\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although their message and product seem ideally suited for the current moment, there\u2019s also built-in uncertainty for them. \u201cWhile we might be picking up a bunch of new customers, we might be losing a bunch too,\u201d Fried says. \u201cA lot of our customers are small business owners, and small businesses are getting hit really hard right now. I\u2019m less worried about losing business to competitors than losing business because companies are closing <\/a>or cutting a cost.\u201d Heinemeier Hansson believes the worst is yet to come: \u201cWe\u2019re in the eye of the storm, and in about two seconds, it\u2019s going to move and shit is going to start flying and then all our plans are going to be out the window.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is certain, however, is that when the pandemic eventually subsides, quarantines lift, and companies start returning to their offices \u2014 hordes of commuters once again grumbling about delayed trains and bumper-to-bumper traffic and spilled coffee\u2014 behavior across corporate America will be forever changed. \u201cMy hope is that people look back at this time and see that they ended up getting a lot done and people enjoyed it,\u201d Fried says. \u201cAnd that it will spur companies to revisit the way they work.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Originally published at Medium and written by Adam Bluestein<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>

https:\/\/index.medium.com\/they-led-the-cult-of-remote-work-now-were-all-members-200897f9afe0<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It only took a pandemic for us to live in Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson\u2019s remote work fantasy \u201cObviously, the news is a big deal,\u201d said Jason Fried on a call last week. The markets were spiraling, his hometown of Chicago had just issued a stay-at-home order, and the coronavirus pandemic seemed to permeate every aspect […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":564,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,2,9,6,3,25,7,27,5,8,4],"tags":[18,21,22,20,23,16,19,11,14,13,17,12,10],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.remotebharat.com\/resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.remotebharat.com\/resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.remotebharat.com\/resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.remotebharat.com\/resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.remotebharat.com\/resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=563"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.remotebharat.com\/resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":565,"href":"https:\/\/www.remotebharat.com\/resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563\/revisions\/565"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.remotebharat.com\/resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.remotebharat.com\/resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.remotebharat.com\/resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.remotebharat.com\/resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}