Remote: Office Not Required

At the time of publication of this book, a notch over 50 percent of our employees have been here for five years or more. That’s rarefied air in an industry where the average tenure at the top tech companies is less than two years.

What the rise of the large office really needed—a productivity silver bullet of sorts—was some way to combine the speed of synchronous communication with the low overhead of asynchronous communication.

Office hours We have all sorts of experts at Basecamp. People who can answer questions about statistics, JavaScript event handling, database tipping points, network diagnostics, and tricky copyediting. If you work here and you need an answer, all you have to do is ping the expert. That’s wonderful. And terrible. It’s wonderful when the right answer