You know how when things are working, you don’t really think about them? For example, when I run my dishwasher every night, I push the start button and forget about it. It’s doing its job—why should I waste brainpower on it? The 12 Spokes remote team is like my dishwasher. It works so well, I [...]
I’ve put out lots of job postings for Ruby on Rails developers in my day, and yet I’ve never used the 37 Signals Job Board because, well, how do I put this delicately? The 37 Signals team is renowned in our little corner of the world, and deservedly so. Their philosophies and products have changed [...]
We just went through another round of hiring here at 12 Spokes. We always get a flood of applicants for open positions, and of course, all the stereotypical job-seeking advice applies here—write a cover letter that addresses the individual job posting, keep your resume to one page, yada, yada, yada. There’s one stereotypical piece of [...]
Believe it or not, 12 Spokes has not always been the large team that it is today. (I know, shock). When we started, we were just a couple of really talented developers working at home, building hot software for a small cadre of clients. It was 2006, and we’d been drinking the 37 Signals “Less [...]
Backstory: One of our developers had his computer crash, and he needed a new one ASAP. We decided to send him my brawny Macbook Pro, because its power was sadly underused. I don’t do any heavy lifting—like coding or Photoshop—anymore; my job these days mainly consists of composing emails and managing HR. I didn’t need [...]
I get this question all the time, especially when I go home for the holidays. It’s a valid question, I suppose. When you work in an office, that’s your default way to know the other people on your team are working. [Ed. Note: it's sad that people think their physical presence in an office proves [...]
Don’t get me wrong. I love our remote team. I feel like we’ve put together an awesome group of the best talent we can find across the country. Everyone’s an awesome communicator, so getting the point across is just as easy when we’re 1,000 miles away as when we’re across the table from each other. [...]
True story: Last year, Trey was conducting a phone interview with a developer. It was going badly. Five minutes in, Trey was thinking, “There’s no way I’m going to hire this guy.” The interviewee’s voice was flat, his answers were uninspired, and he just wasn’t fun to talk to. When you’re bombing an interview in [...]
It is an unfortunate reality that if you run a business, sometimes you’re going to have to print stuff out onto paper. We really hate doing that because: Printed items need to be stored in real-life files. Filing cabinets are friends of entropy—it takes a lot of work to maintain them. It’s so much easier [...]
Over the years, we’ve had clients ask if we’ll offer a price break or even waive our costs altogether in return for equity in their product. As an idealist, I totally understand and love the idea of equity. Hey, we’re all part-owners of this product now! We all have equal incentive to make it succeed! [...]