Your life's work

There isn't a 37 signals "voting ring" but pretty much we see about a blog per week from them of extremely low/general quality. Often they are of a lifestyle/why we didn't go big and why we are actually better than all the big IPOs changing the world nature. I mean this post boils down to "I love my company (that I own, not that I work for)". I think even if PG posted a blog so vapid, "I love Ycombinator, I can picture working here for years", even he would get a bit of fire. I certainly hope we aren't going to be seeing these vapid posts for a decade or more from 37S. You could randomly select a book from the self-help or business section of a bookstore, select a random page, and have a good chance of getting something more insightful than a standard weekly 37s post.<p>I seriously have nothing against them, I wish them more success even: just not success getting to the front page here because frankly they don't talk about interesting algorithms, technologies or business strategies. They are incredibly boring. No mobile, no Google glasses, no new computer game, no crafty actionable patio11 strategy, no raspberry pi hack, no programming language hack, no excellent presentation, no struggling story of success, no rejection and comeback, no scaling of servers, no clever command lines, no new SSH shell, no browser plugin, no investment philosophy, just "I love my business".<p>75% of their posts are simply not HN-worthy and there isn't a voting ring but there is probably a bunch of social contacts who are up voting this. Please just subscribe to their twitter or RSS because their weekly show here is frankly tragic and they should cut down to 1/4th as much and spend more time with their family.<p>Edit. Just to note I own a DHH book, so I will pay for the writing of this guy when it's actually worth it. I'm just saying this blog stuff isn't even worth free.

<i>I’d be happy if 37signals is the last place I work.</i><p>I've had this exact same attitude at every company (many!) I've ever worked at. Until someone or something completely outside my control fucked it up. Then I took my positive attitude and moved on to my next "last place to work".<p>Kinda makes a difference if it's <i>your</i> company, huh?

This is a great insight, not just for work but for life in general.<p>When I moved to the Bay Area both my wife and I were scrimping and saving to come up with a down payment for a house. After living there six years we 'traded up' to a roomier house, and in the process of getting our existing house ready for sale, we did a lot of the stuff we had planned to do 'someday' but in this case to make the house more attractive. We redid the hall bathroom, fixed the lights in the den, simple stuff. It was a lot nicer house to live in just before we moved out. We decided our next house would be different, we would do the things that made the house more livable/nice when we thought of them, that way we could enjoy them ourselves.<p>The tricky bit is doing this even if you aren't "sure" you're going to be in the same place in 10 years. The fear is that if you suddenly are going to be doing something else, living somewhere else, well you could have used those resources better by not spending them on something you wouldn't use/enjoy.<p>My experience has been that it is always the right thing to invest for the long haul.

I thought this was going to be something different based on the title. A few years ago I had a realisation: we are each of us <i>every day</i> working on our life's work. Your life's work doesn't begin on some nebulous future date after you land that dream job or get to start a clean project in a fresh new codebase. The bug you fixed yesterday, the optional parameter you added to that method today: that's your life's work.<p>This was a transformative realisation for me. It empowered me to take the pride in my work that I knew I wanted to, and drove me to push myself a little harder. It was also useful in helping me see my long term career goals more clearly. Once you've thought "<i>this is what I'm going to spend my one and only lifetime doing</i>" all the bullshit falls away.

I think the main reason you don't see this sort of 40-year loyalty in the software industry is money.<p>The first software job I ever had was pretty much perfect in every respect. Great team, fun projects, respect &#38; support all the way up to the owner, plenty of leeway to experiment with fun tech on the off chance that it might come in handy one day.<p>But they hired me at the market rate for a junior dev. And I got better fast. Like so fast that the things I built attracted attention elsewhere. And before the first year was out it was abundantly clear that I could make twice what I was making simply by responding to an email or two.<p>So I talked to management, and they did everything in their power to get me up to the market rate for a regular dev. Which was still way less than I ended up taking when I did eventually respond to one of those emails. (and a ton less than I was making a year after <i>that</i>).<p>Your value just goes up too fast in this business for a single company to keep up with. Nobody gives 100% raises every other year, but the market as a whole seems to be quite happy to do exactly that.<p>Unless that changes, I think we'll find that most people end up on a track like my own. We might find our dream job several times along the way. But unless we're pretty near the end of the track, it'll be hard to justify staying there forever.

I suspect the 37signals employment contracts still say "at will" somewhere in them. In fact, Jason Fried talked about exactly that at one point: <a href="http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2239-employment-contracts-what-are-they-good-for" rel="nofollow">http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2239-employment-contracts-wha...</a><p>If you want me to treat a position like it's the last one I'll take, then show me the same: treat me like a member of the team that you'll fight to keep around. Offer equity, take that at-will clause out of the contract, treat me like a partner in your success.<p>Anything else is just blowing smoke, I'm afraid. At the end of the day, you can be let go without notice (and, to be fair, you can also walk away at any time); that's the agreement you sign during your first professional interaction with most US-based companies. And it sets the tone for the rest of the relationship: this is a transient arrangement, and can be discarded as situations change on either side.

I attended a talk at SXSW a few years ago, mostly about the Millennial generation and their desire to work <i>with</i> you, not <i>for</i> you.<p>I'm no longer young, but I've bounced around to quite a few jobs because I've always run into a wall in terms of growth, personal growth within the organization, or professional growth - not expanding my skill set fast enough while limited to one employer.<p>As the founder of a company, you have a lot more control in pushing the envelope in lots of different ways, but I think the challenge is being able to create that for yourself vs. creating it for those that work for/ with you.<p>dhh can create 37racing, work from wherever he wants, push the envelope on technology as much as he desires, but I believe the challenge is giving the same to your employees, not just through profit sharing, but sharing the ways your company can grow.

As I was reading I was thinking to myself, "Damn! This guy must really love his job. I can't imagine being that loyal to a company for years and years and years. Unless I was a co-founder and it was partly mine."<p>Then reached the end and it's DHH. Of course he wouldn't mind working there, he owns that place. That punchline made the entire article insipid.

I've found that thinking of the next 5, 10, and 50 years is a useful mental trick. It puts me in a frame of mind that helps me make better decisions: will working myself to death on feature X help me 10 years from now? (Very rarely, the answer is yes.) Does it make sense to spend more time socializing, studying, or working? I don't want to exercise <i>now</i>, but how will going to the gym affect me in 5 years?<p>The funny thing is that I make better decisions even with extremely short term projects. If I'm working on a 1-month software project, I'll get it done better <i>and faster</i> if I have the perspective that I'll be using it for 10 years than if I have the perspective that I'll be using it for 6 months.<p>So it may be worth putting yourself in a long-term state of mind, even when it's not necessarily true.

I see a lot of comments suggesting "it's his company, of course he wants it to be good for him!" (One commenter used the term "insipid").<p>There are worse things in the world than a founder looking to make a company a good place to work for the long term. Consider: <i>If shit is broken, we’ll fix it now, lest we be stuck with it for decades.</i> Now think about people flipping companies, people playing hot potato with toxic assets, or looking for the next vote, or surge in page-views, and this attitude starts to look pretty nice.

<i>I’d be happy if 37signals is the last place I work. In an industry so focused on the booms and busts, I find myself a kindred spirit with the firms of old. Places where people happily reported to work for 40 years, picking up a snazzy gold watch at the end as a token of life-long loyalty.</i><p>I'm sure picking up the odd Lamborghini ( <a href="http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/coyotes-pulitzer-and-dhhs-lamborghini.html" rel="nofollow">http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/coyotes-pulitzer-...</a> ) as a token of last month's worth of effort is also a good plus... :-)

I have yet to have this feeling for a company that I work at, but I do remember having this feeling for an online gaming "clan", back in the day. On battle.net, for Diablo, people would make clans and just game together, and eventually war other clans, etc. It was normal to "clan hop" around and join basically every clan until you're in the best clan. I remember the day when a friend and I jokingly joined what we thought was going to be a lame no-name clan, and we had intentions of sneakily doing something as members of that random clan. Turns out that we really enjoyed that clan and stayed with it. I remember the strange change of perspective that I had on clans when I realized that the clan I had joined was so enjoyable that it was without a doubt going to be better than any other clan out there, in my opinion. Because of that enthusiasm for the clan, we all ended up sticking together and ended up being like one of the longest lasting and well known clans of that time period. We moved off of battle.net and onto our own IRC server which we've all been on, every day, since like 2001. It's awesome what that kind of realization can lead to, if given the chance.

There's a difference between being a long-term middle manager at <i>someone else's company</i> and being a long-term founder at your own company. I wouldn't choose the former and I doubt DHH would either (of course, I don't know him so maybe I'm wrong).

"I’d be happy if 37signals is the last place I work. In an industry so focused on the booms and busts, I find myself a kindred spirit with the firms of old."<p>This guy is soooooo full of himself, it's pretty nauseating. He acts like creating basecamp has somehow solved world hunger... I'm amazed nobody calls him out on it more often.

I've never once held a job that I thought I could do for another 5 years. I couldn't even imagine doing what I'm doing now for the rest of my life. I find that I usually get bored/tired of the BS after 2-3 years. Companies aren't loyal to their employees. I'm not loyal to them.

I wrote about this once, FWIW... the technical skills one should focus on that have lasting value: <a href="http://softwareboy.blogspot.com/2009/10/learning-things-of-lasting-value.html" rel="nofollow">http://softwareboy.blogspot.com/2009/10/learning-things-of-l...</a>

Sounds a lot like Charlie Munger's philosophy that he likes to invest in few businesses that let him sit back and relax for a long time instead of constantly having to worry about getting out of a position at a profit.

That's it, I'm applying to Valve.

10 years is an interesting test. Moore's Law predicts density increase of 100-fold (<i>2^(10/1.5)= 101.6</i>). Cost and processing power usually follow. 100x faster phones overshoots most demand for desktops, so not only would desktops be replaced, we'd likely have an even-smaller form-factor than phones. That's <i>one</i> decade.<p>What to invest in, that will still be relevant in decades? People and problem-solving. Maybe unix and web...

"If you’re not committed to your life’s work in a company and with people you could endure for decades, are you making progress on it?"<p>It's a good question. This post reminds me of another question: Are your goals worthy of your life? If they're not, I think it's best to find a new company/project.

I think you find this attitude a lot more in Europe than the United States. I see it in ZenDesk a lot too, living here in SF and having visited their offices a fair number of times.

My life's work is my daughter. Actual work comes way, way behind.

Good rant if you have a sucessful product to sustain your experimentional and fun lifestyle. For the rest of the crowd: keep calm and do work.

That's just not for me.

The USA will still have nukes. People will still drive cars. This aint changing...