David Heinemeier Hansson

June 3, 2021

We're hiring!

In the past few weeks, we've filled a bunch of vacancies at Basecamp with wonderful new coworkers. People we mainly found through our personal networks and other informal channels. But now it's time for the first big open call.

We always do these with a bit of trepidation, because it's a lot of work. We usually get hundreds of applications to new openings, and in some cases thousands. Yet we employ no AI to sort through applications, there are no up-front tests to take, and no pre-screening from a recruiting company. Just a team of humans, consisting mainly of the candidates' future coworkers at Basecamp, manually evaluating applications and honing down on a set of finalists.

But here we go: Basecamp is hiring Rails programmers!

Unlike our usual openings that look for maybe one or two people at the time, we could well be hiring three, four, or more in this round. We're not just looking to fill vacancies opened by recent events, but looking to put together a bigger team for the next phase of the company. A phase that's going to take us to a considerably larger group than we've ever been before.

We've come to the conclusion that Basecamp needs to expand a fair bit to do these two amazing, growing products we have proper justice. We're just getting started with production on Basecamp 4 shortly, but we no longer intend to let HEY sit while we build that (like we did with Basecamp while we built HEY).

If HEY had just been a modest, slow-growing business, we probably could have juggled both with a team the size of what we were. But it isn't, so we can't. HEY has signed up far more customers, far faster, than any new product we've ever launched before.

So this opening is just the first in a hiring drive that'll be unlike anything we've done in the past twenty years at Basecamp. By Silicon Valley rocket ship TOOT TOOT standards it's probably still not a lot, but it's going to be a lot for us. Never to the point of getting ahead of the business fundamentals, but rather to catch up with the reality of the size we already have.

Jason also did a sneak preview on designer openings you might want to check out. But otherwise we'll continue to post openings to basecamp.com/jobs. You can subscribe to be alerted by email when new openings are made. It's just one list for every type of opening, so the list already has about 50,000 people on it, but don't let that scare you off. We'll have a lot of openings of all kinds soon enough.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

About David Heinemeier Hansson

Made Basecamp and HEY for the underdogs as co-owner and CTO of 37signals. Created Ruby on Rails. Wrote REWORK, It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work, and REMOTE. Won at Le Mans as a racing driver. Fought the big tech monopolies as an antitrust advocate. Invested in Danish startups.