I work at Basecamp. From our handbook [1]:
"Basecamp pays at the top 10% for our industry at San Francisco salary levels, regardless of where an employee lives. The comparison data is provided by a company called Radford that polls compensation data from all the major companies in our industry and plenty of our smaller peers as well. Because we don't pay bonuses, we match our base compensation to the base + bonus of our peer group."
[1]: https://github.com/basecamp/handbook/blob/master/making-a-ca...
In How to run a calm workplace: review of Basecamp's bookbasecamp
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37signals Employee Handbook
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37signals Employee Handbook
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There are more than a few stories of things like this happening (or my favorite, outsourcing the actual dev work to China or india) but why would you when it's a lawsuit…
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 11:34:28 AM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
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HN mentions by year36 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2017-05-02 14:46:05 UTC to 2024-01-19 18:32:11 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 15 | 4 | 11 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 1 | 5 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 1 | 3 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
From the project README
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37signals Employee Handbook
In this handbook, you’ll find everything you need to know about 37signals policies and benefits. Hopefully it also offers a small peek at our culture.
If you’re new to the company, welcome! It’s important that you review everything in this handbook, so you know what’s expected of you and what you can expect from us. Please note that this handbook may be updated at any time, and it’s up to you to keep abreast of those updates – though we’ll do our best to notify all staff of major changes. GitHub repo is a great way to follow along with changes.
Please reach out to the People Ops team or to your manager if you have any questions about the information contained in this handbook.
Sections
Getting Started
Benefits & Perks
How We Work
Making a Career
Our Rituals
Managing Work Devices
Our Internal Systems
A Note About Moonlighting
State Leave Provisions
Severance Packages
Titles for Designers
Titles for Ops
Titles for Programmers
Titles for QA
Titles for Support
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
6 sourcesHave a citation? Because if that's the case, everyone is suggesting evading US customs, out in the open: https://www.google.com/search?q=wiping+phone+prior+to+custom...
It's even in Basecamp's international travel manual: https://github.com/basecamp/handbook/blob/master/internation...
In New Zealand travellers refusing digital search now face $5k Customs fineThe Basecamp guys actually has an internal company guide to do the exact same thing for any travel: https://github.com/basecamp/handbook/blob/master/internation...
In Traveler sues US Customs and Border Protection over iPhone search and seizureBasecamp have a guide for travelling to the US:
https://github.com/basecamp/handbook/blob/master/internation...
This doesn't cover social media accounts though. I'd suggest letting them log in and change passwords and log out all sessions immediately afterwards. You could also temporarily revoke permissions for any 3rd party app and grant those again once you've cleared border security.
In Ask HN: Travelling to the US. What can I expect at border security?Basecamp appears to be successfully managing this. If you look at their "About Us"[1] page, you see a lot of people who've been there for quite a while. Their solution appears to be:
1. Pay a lot of money: "Our target is to pay everyone at the company in the 95th percentile, or top 5%, of the market, regardless of their role."[2] Previously that was benchmarked to Chicago prices; as of late 2017, that's benchmarked to San Francisco prices.[3]
2. Offer an excellent benefits package that actually benefits people (i.e. isn't just an unused ping-pong table/game console and the promise of "great culture!").[4] Something specifically noticeable is that they offer the kind of benefits that maybe aren't big selling points when you're younger, but that become increasingly enticing as you get older, and especially if you have kids - a fantastic par
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ental leave policy, good retirement policy, short summer weeks.
3. Respect your employees and treat them like adults. Harder to quantify, but if you click around their handbook[5], you see a lot of things that boil down to "We trust you to do the right thing, even in a very independent setting. We won't be looking over your shoulder constantly." I think that's a really scary idea for some people, and a really attractive proposition for others. If you find people who are in that latter group in your hiring process, I suspect it makes it easier to keep them around when most other jobs are not going to involve that level of trust.
The idea of "interesting work keeps good people" - I dunno about that. It's hard to say what's interesting work. It's easy to say "adding new endpoints to a CRUD app" is not interesting, but for some people it might be, or at least it might be "sufficiently interesting" to make a career of it. I have friends in FinTech for whom tracking the market actually brings them joy, and I'm happy for them, but when I try to watch their screen while they tell me about what they're doing, my eyes start to glaze over. I don't know if what Basecamp does counts as "interesting work" for most people, but it seems like it's interesting enough, and the other parts of the company are good enough, for a lot of people to want to stay there for quite some time.
[1]: https://basecamp.com/about/team
[2]: https://m.signalvnoise.com/how-we-pay-people-at-basecamp-f1d...
[3]: https://m.signalvnoise.com/basecamp-doesnt-employ-anyone-in-...
[4]: https://github.com/basecamp/handbook/blob/master/benefits-an...
[5]: https://github.com/basecamp/handbook