The Jobseeker’s Manifesto
What’s in a job application, really?
Resumes are full of bullshit, stuffed with elaborate, painful explanations that make a chef gig sound like the Vice Presidency of Demand Solutions. They are easily gamed – just think of all the LinkedIn recruiters who barely read CVs and go after jobseekers anyway.
Resumes aren’t even meant to be read, a fact that trips up jobseekers with humanistic backgrounds – maybe skimmed, but not read. Hell, even cover letters are frequently ignored, with anything more than two paragraphs getting the TL;DR glaze-over – welcome to reddit the evaluations committee.
To compose literary masterpieces for either of these requirements is to produce something that maybe 2 or 3 people will read, probably cursorily and maybe angrily. In other words, it’s like churning out academic writing (almost – there’s good writing in the academy, but there’s also a lot of gobbledygook).
The expectations around the jobseeking process and its actual characteristics couldn’t be more different. I know they were for me – I once naively thought that a simple resume submission would net at least a response, favorable or otherwise, and that writing mattered for getting a job. Maybe it does at select companies such as Basecamp (“When in doubt, always hire the better writer”) but by and large writing is undervalued.
It’s something that everyone can do, and as such everyone erroneously thinks he can do well (in contrast, not everyone writes computer code or flies an airplane). Sure, some writing does pass for good with certain audiences – pepper anything with enough instances of “operational,” “solutions,” and “efficiencies” (ugh, that word shouldn’t really be plural, ever) and it gives off the noxious air of sophistication, but it’s just more of the same me-too dreck.
Form letters alone are evidence that writing too often doesn’t matter when seeking jobs. Think of how the classic TBNT letter is both long, vague, AND meaningless – an impressive trifecta.
How did jobseekers, especially on the humanities side, get in the situation of fighting an uphill struggle against hiring committees? Part of it is of course “the economy,” a euphemistic term for humans and what they value – tomes could be, and have been, written on how the cult of shareholder value, for example, has destroyed interest in things such as public investment and progressive causes.
But another part is, I think, the ongoing degradation of respect for labor at large. Giving a job to someone is treated almost as a gift or conferring of privilege, rather than as reward for merit.
How else to explain “entry-level” jobs that demand multiple years of experience? This disconnect grinds my gears because it shows that organizations don’t value language. You can tell so much about the ethics and value of a company by how they use words, how they frame job searches, and how they treat candidates. Saying “entry-level” means “5 years of experience” is dishonest and likely a sign that someone is trying to be cheap – pigeonholing an experienced person as just another rung on the totem pole. It’s a lot like how we’re (I’m speaking primarily to a U.S. audience here – apologies to international readers) there’s a persistent “skills gap” in hiring, or an “achievement gap” in education, both of which, unsurprisingly, are as spuriously and manipulatively motivated as the “missile gap” from the Cold War.
Similar aversion is kindled by the use of the word “technical” to mean all sorts of random shit, from “jargony” (in relation to writing) to “math-like” (in regard to skills). Clear, expressive writing is a sign that you’re thinking and trying to solve a real problem or fulfill an urgent need, and most job postings fail miserably. They’re overloaded with cliches that deaden the language, they’re not about real things (yes, I said “things,” not “entities,” “stakeholders,” “solutions,” “interests,” or “competencies”) and are essentially giant walls meant to keep applicants out rather than invite them to take a shot.
There is of course the angle here that HR departments are overwhelmed with resumes and should be pitied, especially as they try to deal with the “skills gap” phantom. That would be a plausible argument if these same sorts of practice hadn’t contributed to the problem in the first place. Dishonest postings give applicants, especially inexperienced ones, false hope – not everyone is going to be able to parse through the bullshit and see that what lies before them is not a doorway but a giant wall. Many will try to scale it nonetheless because they have no choice, so excuse me if I pity the ones making that effort rather than their counterparts who laid the brickwork.
How can job postings and processes be improved? There’s no catch-all answer, especially since hiring is not a meritocratic process much of the time and is fundamentally political. Organizations can and should hire applicants that it likes; but if possible they shouldn’t give off the air of objectivity, which pollutes the entire process and comes off as the worst possible lip service to fairness (and yet the same people who came up with these unfair constructs would probably resort to the ‘life’s not fair’ cliche if pressed). Maybe they could start with some of these changes:
Write the job ad in a voice and style similar to what you expect back from the applicant
Don’t write a huge wall of text about how someone needs “excellent written and verbal communications skills” for a writing job. It’s a writing job; you should be asking for samples, and good writing is so hard to fake, especially if requested on-demand or short notice (it’s not a resume). No one says “excellent written and verbal communications skills” in real life – it’s robot-talk. It undermines the concept it’s trying to communicate.
And don’t do this.
Basically, know your audience. Many job ads are written in a style so obtuse that it’s like trying to describe agile infrastructure automation, when the topic at hand is, um, “entry level data entry specialist” or something similarly euphemistic. Get real.
Come prepared to the interview that you’re conducting
Applicants are always told to do their research and be ready for the interview, and many of them do – they have to. The problem is, sometimes even the best preparation gets foiled by the interviewer’s lackadaisical approach to proceedings.
Too many interviews begin with long, awkward pauses. Ok, you say, this is the cue for me to just start spewing about what I do, who I am, where I see myself in…
This is an awful way to start things off. Maybe it separates the good from the bad, but it also puts the applicant in a bad position, as if she’s playing a guessing game.
Sometimes this awkward start gets followed up by some throwaways about “would [x] be ok?” and “are you ok doing [y]“? No one is going to say ‘no’ to these questions and they’re a waste of everyone’s time. If the responsibilities aren’t clear by the interview stage, something is wrong.
Keep things short
I once interviewed with Uber. In the process, I learned an enormous amount about how the company really operated. No, I wasn’t made privy to any of its earnings. And I didn’t get wind of UberX before it rolled out. Rather, I saw how Uber was a company set up to cross all sorts of ethical boundaries and step on people’s toes, based on how they treated job applicants.
The entire process lasted something like 50 days. That’s insane. An initial generic application was supplemented by a scenario exercise that in retrospect seems like unpaid labor on behalf of the company’s idea-starved managers. The on-site interview was a carousel of “fit” questions about how comfortable I would be meeting their demand schedule, which afaik was just tweeting generic replies to customers. I was given credits to take a few rides and evaluate them. I attended a holiday party full of awkwardness. I had to write emails to them with my feedback on the party. There was interminable radio silence, followed by a form letter. The same job was posted again and again, and plenty of people had the same experience as me – just check out Glassdoor (sign-in may be required).
Yes, I was disappointed for some reason when I was rejected, but looking back it feels like I dodged a bullet. Any company willing to drag things out that long and play cat-and-mouse with applicants is prone to, oh I dunno, spam-call users in a fake grassroots effort, or interfere just a little bit with the “free market” principles it espouses.
Treat applicants with respect. They’re already respecting you by even sending an application.
Grow a thicker skin and have some guts
Maybe that’s a bit harsh, and I admit that it feels like something that applicants, rather than companies, should be told. But just think about how spineless something like a form letter is.
These insults to the English language exist so that bad news doesn’t have to expressed directly and humanely. The standard TBNT letter twists itself into such knots that its writers make fools of themselves – have you ever seen the phrase “while our response cannot be more positive?” What does that even mean? It seems like the writers are going for “we want to be more positive, but gosh darn it we can’t” (itself an oddly helpless, defeatist position to take), but they leave themselves open to an alternate reading that would interpret the sentiment as “we literally couldn’t be happier with what we saw.” Would you want to work for a company that greenlit that letter?
Of course, “want” is a luxury for many jobseekers, and the sad part is that they often have to put up with this as they struggle to find anything. Still, many of them have probably grown thicker skins as a result of all of their rejection, thicker than hiring committees that can be set off by the smallest possible thing or red flag. There’s so many listicles out there such as “Top 10 Things I See On An Application That Lets Me Know I Should Immediately Reject That Person” or “5 Things to Never Ever Do On A Job Application.” When did things become so hair-splittingly insane? What happened to taking a cover letter seriously and trying to have a real conversation with an applicant? If something such as the phraseology of a question, or the usage of a common term, is enough to set you off, then maybe you’re too sensitive. Of course, many applicants will never know what participle, mannerism, or gesture stopped them from getting a job, and some of them will probably stay up at night thinking about how disturbingly capricious and opaque the whole process is.
A job interview isn’t an ambush
On the opposite extreme from the unprepared interviewer is the the interviewer that comes armed to the teeth with gotcha questions. Blame Google. At least Google eventually revealed that asking someone how to get out of a blender after being shrunken down to the size of a nickel isn’t really a good indicator of how good a candidate is.
These tactics are sort of like “parlor tricks” that seem like good ideas in theory but are mostly a waste of everyone’s time. Like all the other affronts here, they’re a layer of abstraction on top of what should be a straightforward, humane process. The fact that many organizations can’t even have a civilized conversation with applicants is a pretty damning indictment of the culture at large. It’s the corporate equivalent of not making eye contact or ignoring someone’s text. Something needs to change.
On Silver Medals and Effort: What I Should Have Done Differently on my Basecamp Application
The Winter Olympics just ended, and the U.S. finished with 12 bronze medals – more than 40 percent of its 28-medal total in Sochi. It crossed the double-digit threshold in bronzes before any country did so in golds. But rather than rue an overall performance high on copper-tin alloys but light on noble metals, U.S. Olympians were probably pleased that they avoided a mother lode of silver. Why? Isn’t silver better than bronze?
Judging from the elated faces of many bronze medalists and the anguished looked of their silvered-up counterparts, I (and they) don’t think so. Bronze is an emblem of obscurity and disaster narrowly averted, while silver is the mark of (usually) having barely missing gold. Just one more break here or there, and things could have gone differently, goes the postmortem logic.
But I feel that this silver medal aversion gets at something far bigger than the Olympics – it shows how we think about effort and the rewards that come with it. Olympic silver medalists are amazing athletes whose efforts got them on to the podium but couldn’t outstrip those of the overall winners. The sad faces of coming up short show off the realization of something paradoxical – that seemingly maximum effort was expended, yet wasn’t what enough. It’s only later that, perhaps, areas for improvement in exertion are discovered.
As a non-athlete, I’ll never be in position to comment with greater nuance on medal podium politics. Still, the lessons in effort are worth noting, especially when it comes to competitions such as job applications. Basecamp’s Jason Fried has argued that effort is both underrepresented on job applications and essential for setting the best applicants apart from everyone else:
The most underrepresented thing on most job applications: Effort. The one thing that often sets the winner apart: Effort.
— Jason Fried (@jasonfried) February 24, 2014
A few entries back, I applied to a support position at Basecamp, foregoing a traditional resume. This freed up energy and time that I could instead put toward effort on a loose blog entry addressing points that I would normally raise in a cover letter, this time without the stuffy “Dear [x], As a…” intro that wins over no one.
But my effort wasn’t totally on the mark. I may have stuck much too closely to simply scratching off the points one by one – my entry was really linear and maybe didn’t take the opportunity for a slight diversion that would show off my specific background in support. I had strongly considered contextualizing my answers to the sample support questions – that is, writing them out as an actual user might do when emailing them in, and then tailor my answer to that text rather than to the exact question given in the job application instructions.
I probably got this question 500 times while working at Branchfire:
to which I usually responded:
I wasn’t bothered by the repetitiveness of this exercise – it was a real point of confusion, and I did everything I could to clear it up and explain an often convoluted issue as lucidly as possible. Another support staple went as follows:
This one is tough because it’s usually not a good idea to guarantee that a certain feature will make it into a future release – too much could go wrong during development, schedules could get pushed back, you name it. Sometimes it pays to steer customers toward existing features that they might not know about, or consider taking a different approach to using the ones they’re already using:
While I think my responses to the hypothetical Basecamp questions were sound, they could have been better if I had tailored them to realistic text. For example,
could probably have been a variant of:
This specific line of reasoning is familiar – it came up all the time about iAnnotate PDF localization, in fact. We started off with English, French, German, and Japanese versions. Not long after the 2.0 redesign, all non-English versions were removed and users had no options to hold onto them except for refusing to upgrade.
This move was a mistake, and it makes me appreciate the availability of something such as Basecamp Classic, a perpetually supported product that retains multiple-language support. We got plenty of feedback about the elimination of the German version in particular (“the latest update is a disaster for me – why did you remove German? the app is useless now”), and my response was usually
My original response to the Basecamp question is ok and accurate, if only because there’s a lot more to go on given that users have the fallback of Basecamp Classic plus a wide range of text input support in the new Basecamp, including emoji. I think it’s good to mention these existing features if relevant, and moreover I admire Basecamp’s commitment to realizing how removing all language options could affect the work of some customers that chose not to upgrade. I know how pulling the rug out on language support can cause issues, and it makes perfect sense that Basecamp would zero-in on that question among the thousands of possible queries that could tumble into the inbox on a given day.
Outside of the blog entry/application, my interview may have been short on the types of questions that could have gotten me the information I needed. I may have overthought things and focused too much on process and mechanics rather than asking something as simple as “Why do you work in support at Basecamp?” That feels like the real “silver medal moment” to me, realizing afterward that I needed to dig deeper on questions when I had been grasping for straws at the time. I should have asked that and not let my effort stall out.
Of course, the paradox of winning silver seems to be believing that a little more could have gotten the gold, despite sometimes not being in the position to know what gold would have required. It’s like Lee Westwood once stating that he knew what it took to win a golf major, despite having never won one but having suffered plenty of near-misses. I don’t know exactly what it would have taken to succeed in my Basecamp application, only that there was more concerted effort out there than mine. It’s a good lesson in trying harder even if one doesn’t know all the factors at work – it can be tempting to feel that effort is “being wasted” and as such skimp on even making an attempt. But if the goal is worth trying for, then something will be learned along the way, regardless of the outcome, so why not instead push the limits and see what happens?
Working with Basecamp: “With Love” by Zomby – a look back
Ungainly title, but here goes. In my post/job application for Basecamp, I mentioned that I had been using the company’s project management software to work on some album reviews. I took that approach in order to give a more structured feel to my reviews, one that incorporates research, and to see how planning impacted composition – would it result in more or less revision, and would the results have a different timbre than my past work? My first stab is this retrospective on Zomby’s “With Love.”
Zomby’s “With Love” and the importance of physical media
Zomby’s “With Love” is a double album by a dubstep artist known for recording 1- and 2-minute shuffles. How did this happen?
I ask this while holding a gatefold triple-vinyl edition of “With Love,” which is apropos. The history of physical media, especially the relationship between vinyl and CD, explains how even artists given to brevity have been pushed to make expansive epics.
With Love – vinyl cover
By 1984, the writing was seemingly on the wall for vinyl LPs. The Compact Disc, introduced a few years prior, promised higher fidelity sound in a portable size, although it would take a while before CDs became a truly on-the-go format. Large home stereo systems were still the name of the game – if you were rich enough to afford CD playback equipment, why not go all-out?
But did CDs really sound better than LPs? That’s up for debate, and listeners will hear what they want to hear. The CD did have at least one decisive advantage – its maximum playing time, which at 74 minutes easily outstripped the 40-50 minutes typical of an LP. The greater length opened new artistic doors even as the CD’s single-sided nature closed others (no more per-side themes), and throughout the 1980s artists pushed the boundaries of the album format, with the Red Book spec as their key enabler.
They added content that would have been nixed in the past to keep the album under 50 minutes. It was possible to make a single CD with an amount of music that only a few years before would have required 2 or 3 LPs. And releasing 2-3x LP (a double or triple album) wasn’t something that bands did lightly. Pushing 60+ minutes of content on the public was a statement.
The Mother of Invention had unleashed Freak Out! in 1966, a four-sided monster with an atonal collage on side four, and two years later The Beatles brought sprawl into the mainstream with the 30-track, 90-minute White Album. While the latter still requires 2 CDs, Freak Out now comfortably fit on one disc, which takes some of its grandeur (two LPs! side 4 is all noise!) away.
During the transition from LP to CD, artists previously known for their restraint began to dabble in longer-form projects. The punk label SST Records was a microcosm of what was happening with recording at large. Husker Du finished the 70-minute Zen Arcade in 1984, an expansive work that inspired (or perhaps kindled the envy of) labelmates The Minutemen. Only a few months later, The Minutemen recorded 45 songs – padded with stripped-down covers and instrumentals – that lasted “only” 81 minutes. Their Double Nickels on the Dime was a double LP that still hasn’t been pressed on double CD.
While the Huskers-Minutemen rivalry was the impetus for these epic works, the changing of the guard in physical media format enabled their largesse. The Minutemen may even have gone too far in swallowing up the possibilities of the CD era, much like video game developers went bananas for full-motion video after the CD-ROM displaced the floppy in the mid-1990s (the 6x CD The Beast Within is still the best example of this excess).
In 2014, we’re seemingly long past the point at which CDs became obsolete. Streaming music services and digital purchases are more convenient, if not more profitable. Still, the CD lingers, but it barely resembles its 1980s self. Today’s CDs come with bonus discs, bonus tracks, bonus everything – anything to push that 80-minute barrier. At the same time, the double CD album has become less of an oddity than a fact of life – whether it’s the studio album + a live disc, or two studio discs, recording more than 80 minutes of music is cliche.
I’ve already looked at one of last year’s double albums – Shaking the Habitual by The Knife – and in that entry I mentioned Terre Thaemlitz’s excellent work on the growing disconnect between album length and performance length. He skewered the divide with his 30-hour album Soulnessless, which shipped on a microSDHC. But I’m not surprised that an artist as ambitious as Thaemlitz would do that. I am surprised, however, that Zomby made a double album at around the same time, a time when MP3s have essentially made it possible to record a never ending album.
With Love: The gritty details
Zomby’s style would seem unsuited to long form media. There are few lyrics, so telling a long-winded story is pretty much out of the question. Similarly, there are no exceptional instrumental chops that would justify, even if tenuously, extended jamming and progressive rock pretentiousness. Sure, Zomby is not heir to these traditions of rock music, but his style forgoes even the most excessive aspects of the more stylistically germane electronica genres, such as the extended remix (trance), the sprawling soundscape (drum n’ bass), or the mashup (EDM).
What does Zomby sound like? There’s a lot of plinky keys and synths, as well as 1990s R&B samples, which is de rigeur for dubstep. In dubstep, the 1990s are ancient history, with a historical relationship to the present-day akin to that of the 1960s British Invasion to modern pop and rock – Zomby’s breakthrough album was, after all, called “Where Were U in ’92?” and closed with a dizzying sound barrage punctuated by samples (“Sonic Boom!“) from 1990s cultural hallmark Street Fighter II. It was one big long send-up to rave.
With Love isn’t a similar single genre exercise. Rather, it has inspiration, variety and length that seem rooted in the ideal of a compilation album. There’s a little bit of chiptune, some jungle, a dusting of ambient, and a lot of trap. Opener “As Darkness Falls” is so chiptune that it reminds me of another double album, Hella’s 2005 opus Church Gone Wild/Chirpin’ Hard, which was essentially two separate albums, with the superior half consistently echoing Nintendo Entertainment Sytem-era boss battle music (the other was an unlistenable menage of Boredoms-esque drum noise). With Love follows similar logic. One of its halves is trap-dominated, while the other is more stylistically varied.
There’s a consistent, melancholic veneer that tries to tie With Love together. Though it moves between genres, there’s always a certain distance, a particular darkness that emanates from the music. It’s this theme that makes With Love a real heir to the epic album because it insists that the proceedings are more than just a collection of songs, that there’s a singular logic holding it all together despite the apparently unfocused running time. Taking such a stance is a cliche, as it is literally the raison d’etre of the artist album, but it’s necessary all the same because advances in physical media capacity has enabled works that seem destined to be unfocused.
“Soliloquy” may be the best track on With Love, with lightly whirring rhythms, punchy bass and overlapping melodies that interlock nicely, drawing the listener in even as the iciness keeps them at arm’s (ear’s?) length. Vocal samples are rare, but the ones in “It’s Time” recall 1990s-era Goldie and maybe hint at trip-hop, a suggestion strengthened by the track’s beat.
With Love has the length and scope of a trance compilation, but the singularity of purpose of Zen Arcade. While it’s hard to call anything the “last” of its kind, With Love feels like the send-off for the double album. It exhausts the listener across six sides of vinyl/2 CDs, its every machination under pressure from both the growing expectations around how much material an artist should churn out in the MP3 era and the need to “tie it all together” and make it more than the dreaded Just a Collection of Songs.
It’s not the most extreme example of a product forged under these dual pressures. Pan Sonic’s 4-CD Kesto, not to mention Thaemlitz’s aforementioned SD card-album, push the envelope further, but by doing so they become something alien, something that’s barely recognizable as an album that can be packaged, enjoyed in one sitting and replayed. But With Love is still relatively traditional. IT paradoxically feels extremely long – 33 tracks will do that – while being short for a double album, much like Double Nickels on the Dime nearly 30 years ago. It does long form in the only way that the brevity-minded dubstep genre can do – as a glorified mixtape, roughly transitioning form one burst of notes to another. Only the thematic darkness keeps it together, as if midnight were approaching for the album’s Cinderella run.
Writing Apps on Writing
Critiques of the writing app Hemingway have been making the rounds. Hemingway (the app, not the writer – though I’m not sure I would trust his prescriptions on writing, either, while we’re at it) has discriminating taste – it doesn’t like adverbs, passive voice, or anything that it opaquely deems “very hard to read.” The self-described aim of Hemingway is making writing “bold and clear,” hence the name, and this motive and the mechanisms (color-coded highlighting system) with which the app sees it through, aren’t inherently bad – better bold and clear than timorous and muddy, right?
I’m neither a linguist nor a marketer, so my critique of Hemingway is going to be more on the cultural side. Here’s Hemingway’s feedback on my paragraph above:
The irony of the “very” in the app’s “very hard to read” category aside (I’ll get back to it later), Hemingway isn’t a fan. It isn’t even a fan of its namesake, as Mark Liberman noted in his entry for Language Log. There’s lots of good writing that won’t make it through the Hemingway gauntlet, but I think that’s neither here nor there. What’s notable about Hemingway is how it enforces more than 50 years of overbearing conventional wisdom about what “good writing” even is.
In 1959, Cornell professor William Strunk, Jr. and writer E.B. White’s The Elements of Style was published, and over the ensuing 50 years it became the grammar bible for millions of postsecondary students. That’s too bad, since The Elements of Style is full of terrible advice, terrible advice that lives on in those annoying jagged red lines in Word, the platitudes of SEO experts, and in apps such as Hemingway.
If you’ve not read it (lucky!) Strunk and White doled out expert maxims such as:
- “Be clear”
- “Do not explain too much”
- “Omit needless words”
These suggestions run the gamut from vapid to tautological to useless, as linguist Geoffrey Pullum noted in his evisceration of The Elements of Style on the tome’s 50th anniversary. They’re jargon, really, and the irony was lost on both Strunk and White, who similarly violated their own rules at every turn. Hemingway’s “very hard to read” prescription seems insignificant as a violation of its edicts, but it’s as good an illustration as any of how opinions about what constitutes “good” (or “bold and clear”) writing are projected from weak grounds.
Hemingway is an heir to a long line of nag-apps, from Word to more subtle offenders like the wave of “distraction-free” writing tools that through their spartaness softly scold writers for exploring alternative methodologies (Dr. Drang has a great piece on why those apps don’t work for him). A nag-app doesn’t have to concern itself primarily or exclusively with writing, but writing is the art that yields itself most easily to e-nagging, since everyone consider herself an expert on the matter.
The comments to Liberman’s piece contain a counterargument to the effect that Hemingway is for technical writers and marketers. Perhaps it is, but it seems to cast a wider, much more broadly prescriptivist net than that. The opacity of the terms “bold and clear” rival the seldom-questioned, but eminently fungible, word that Google has so redefined: “relevant” (what’s “relevant”? That depends on…everything). In this respect, one can entertain the idea that Hemingway has roots not only in the over-opinionated Elements of Style but in commercial writing, a field that really has little to do with much that it good or literary about writing.
Google apparently values how-to’s, varying lengths, and keywords (tho increasingly less so). Writers “clean up” their copy so that they don’t risk running afoul of Google’s algorithms – it’s a similar effect to being told by your clueless 1st-year English professor that “is” is passive voice, and being forced to change it to something “more active.” In both cases, the rightness of the prescription isn’t questioned, for some reason – its roots in some very specific cultural context (postwar, hypermasculine America for Strunk & White; marketing, ad sales, and machine learning for Google) are forgotten and it becomes something akin to dogma. And dogma helps no one.
I suppose it’s this presumptive universality that gets me about Hemingway. It also has the air, as Kevin Nguyen points out, of a coding text editor trying to force its prescriptions onto all writing. Such a phenomenon isn’t surprising, given the cultural ascendancy and increasing prestige of programming (the absolute extreme example of this rise is Kentucky’s decision to let Java and C++ count toward foreign language requirements in schools). It’ll pass, and there may be a whole new wave of writing tools that aren’t always looking over their shoulders at computer science. Until then, writers have better (but more contradictory) sources of advice.
Why I want to work at Basecamp
Basecamp
Since this blog is primarily about software and has its share of “Why __” and “How to __ entries, I think it’s not too much of a stretch for me to apply for a job here.
Why do I want to work in customer support at Basecamp?
Because support is about a lot more than its name lets on, and I know so from having worked in software support. Keeping customers happy by honestly and earnestly addressing their questions is the priority of anyone in support, but doing it exceptionally well returns much more than an inbox full of grateful responses. It sparks a conversation, a dialogue through which both customer and company learn more about the thing that is so important to both of them.
When I provided support for an iPad/Android app a few years ago, I noticed that almost every important new feature that we added and every existing one that we tweaked had some roots in a support conversation. Maybe we hadn’t implemented all of them as 1-to-1 reactions to feedback, but our customers were smart; they predicted or at least hinted at where the app needed to go to be better, and it was up to us to make sense of what they said and guide them (and us) forward.
Everyone in the organization should be keeping her fingers on the pulse of support – it’s where most important things get their starts. Its relationship to decision making and improvement is akin to Reddit’s relationship to a lot of blogs and viral sites (Gawker sites, Buzzfeed) – if someone brought it up there (in support/on Reddit – a slash notation I never expected to write), then it’s probably going to continue making waves elsewhere because it hits upon something important.
I’ve done support in high quantity and at high quality, and it never felt like a dead-end task or a stepping-stone to being a Product Manager or Director of {X}. I and the other support specialists were at the intersection of everything important happening to the app, even if we didn’t realize it at first. Answering 50+ emails on Monday morning was a big part of ensuring that the app had a future. I compiled some lessons from my time in support here.
Why do I want to work at Basecamp (and not somewhere else?)
Because I value focus, and I admire your commitment to it. I’ve already learned so much from you all – whether about why company should hire good writers, or being introduced to Betteridge’s Law of Headlines via Jason Fried’s Twitter – without working there that it makes me almost unreasonably excited thinking about how much more I could learn from supporting Basecamp.
I started my first Basecamp project recently – organizing a list of favorite albums that I want to review – and now I really look forward to using it every day. It was easy for me to get started, and yet at the same time I felt that I could still learn a lot more from it as I went. As a former teacher I’m also eager about the prospect of teaching others about Basecamp via online classes.
I read REWORK in 2013 and it influenced my decision to eventually change my job. Everything I thought I knew about how the workplace worked changed, and for the better.
Basically, I know that your books and Basecamp have made a lot of people a lot happier, and I want to contribute. I admire your transparency and boldness. Signing up for the Basecamp trial and trying it out were some of the easiest things I’ve ever done with software – I’ve played free-to-play Android games that were trickier to navigate. That tells me that you trust and respect your users. You’re not asking for a credit card right away or nudging them all the time to provide extra info, probably because you’re confident in Basecamp and in how users will respond to it. I want to support a product that receives that level of care from its creators.
My great experience switching from AT&T to T-Mobile
I switched from AT&T to T-Mobile recently. Our family plan was complicated on paper, since we needed to accommodate the text/voice/data needs of my aunt who travels between the US and the Philippines. Though we thought we knew what we were getting into with international text/data for her phone, we ended up with a lot of questions after leaving the store.
I called T-Mobile with a long list of questions, some of them a bit unusual, at least to me (“Do you bill for international calls if the call is simply placed, or does the recipient actually have to answer?”). The support specialist was transparent with me and told me when he needed to look something up, instead of giving me a runaround or transferring me to another department. He took the time to verify the answers to the trickier questions and explain them simply, even when the subject matter was ostensibly dense.
How I taught myself basic HTML and CSS for a project
I’ve never been great with coding (as this stock WordPress.com template demonstrates), but I needed to learn some HTML and CSS for a support project at a previous employer. I had authored a long list of FAQs for our site, but the old support pages hadn’t been updated to match the style of our new front page, and none of our programmers had time to work on the relevant HTML and CSS to make it pretty again.
I sat down with one of our programmers, who went over some basic HTML and CSS with me. After that, I used online resources such as Codeacademy to get in a little bit more practice so that I could go to work redoing the styling on a few pages. I ran into a few errors along the way and had to ask for help, but the process helped me get better at my job – I was responsible for making the site friendly to customers, so that they could have an easier time getting to the answers they needed. It got the job done, and some of my contributions, both textual and design-related, are still there, such as this how-to.
A serious step-by-step guide to making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich
- Evaluate your carb options. Bread is good, but waffles are also delicious. Note that the heartier the carb, the more peanut butter and jelly you’ll need to get good flavor. For thick bread/waffles, jam may give better results than jelly since it’s made from whole fruit.
- If you don’t like or can’t have peanut butter, consider vegemite or speculoos spread.
- When spreading your chosen materials, use a spoon and/or knife. Using a spoon may be better in getting the right amount of stuff out of the jars, and may be easier for large pieces of bread/waffles. There’s no rule against using both (spoon first, then knife to get more even distribution).
- Press the two pieces of bread/waffles together, with the jellied/peanut-buttered sides facing in. For thin bread, be careful about how much pressure you exert since it may cause tearing.
- Enjoy the sandwich!
Is the new Basecamp offered in any other language besides English?
Hello Kathryn,
Thanks for using Basecamp and for writing into us!
The new Basecamp is offered only in English and we haven’t drawn up any plans to support additional languages. However, Basecamp Classic is still available in French, Chinese, Spanish, and many other languages – you can start a free Basecamp Classic account here.
We’ve also designed the new Basecamp so that text entry fields can handle most characters, including emoji.
Let me know if you have any other questions – I am happy to answer them.
Kind regards,
Alex
Does the new Basecamp offer time tracking?
Hello Patrick,
Thanks for using Basecamp – we’re glad you’re enjoying it!
The new Basecamp doesn’t have its own time tracking feature, but it does support a wide range of great third-party time tracking tools. You can check them out here.
Also, time tracking is still available in Basecamp Classic. The Plus, Premium and Max upgrade plans for Basecamp Classic all feature time tracking. If you’re not familiar with Basecamp Classic, you can try out a free account here.
Thanks again for contacting us, and let me know if I can help with anything else.
Kind regards,
Alex
Is there a reporting function in the new Basecamp?
Hello Marvin,
Thanks for using the new Basecamp!
The new Basecamp has a Progress view that shows you everything that’s happening with your projects, such as edits and deletions – it’s updated in real-time. There’s also the new Daily Recap feature, which sends an email to you once each day, in the morning, with all of the previous day’s activity on your projects.
Basecamp has other features for keeping you up to date on progress. You can try all of them out with a free 60-day trial of the new Basecamp, which gives you full access to everything – you can get started here.
If there’s anything else I can answer for you, let me know and I would be glad to help.
Kind regards,
Alex
Me
