Join Basecamp as our new Rails programmer

Basecamp is hiring! We have a rare opening for a Rails programmer to work on new product development within our General Practice team. We haven’t had an opening for this kind of work for a few years, so we’re excited to welcome someone new to the team!

This is a position for an experienced Rails programmer, but you don’t have to be a rock star, a ninja, or a superhero to apply. In fact, if you self-identify in any of those categories, we’d rather you don’t!

We’re looking for someone with a strong track record of putting Rails to work and bringing products to life. This is not a junior position, but, imposters everywhere, this is in reach to YOU. If you ship solid work, you have the experience we’re looking for.

We want strong, diverse teams built from different backgrounds, experiences and identities. We’re ready for the ongoing work that goes into building an inclusive, supportive place for you to do the best work of your career. That starts with regularly working no more than 40 hours a week and getting 8+ hours of sleep a night. Our workplace and our benefits are designed to support a sustainable, healthy relationship with your work.

Today, our team works from 32 different cities spread across 6 countries. You can work from anywhere in the world, so long as your normal working day has 4 hours or more overlap with Chicago time (CST/UTC-6). Nomads welcome.

About the Job

The General Practice group at Basecamp works on a regular cadence of 6-week cycles in either Big Batch or Small Batch mode. Our feature teams are small. You’ll usually work with one designer, sometimes another programmer, and usually a tester as well.

That’s just a handful of people expected to regularly ship a big feature in 6 weeks or a small feature in a week or two. This is a fast pace, but it’s never frantic. We don’t have time for harried, hurried work. We value a calm company and deliberate, concerted effort. We work 40-hour weeks here (and less in the summer!). This is not a job for workaholic heroes who thrive on 80-hour+ marathons. NOPE!

Our formula: Capable people left to get great work done in a reasonable amount of time with minimal distractions.

And, of course, you’ll have the full support of some of the best Rails programmers in the business. We literally wrote the framework. Everyone here is keen to help and support newcomers to become part of the team and, ultimately, to do the best work of their career.

While creating new features for Basecamp 3 is mostly greenfield work, there are also a fair share of legacy obligations on our plate. We have the first Rails application ever created still running and serving happy customers. You may well work on the first version of Basecamp or any of the other products we no longer sell but still lovingly support. We cherish our legacy. Take heart when `git blame` reveal lines 12 years or older 😀.

You’ll help us support customers directly. Everyone at Basecamp participates in Everyone On Support every few months, and you’ll regularly help with escalated technical issues.

We’re also staunch supporters of the open source community. Not just through Rails, but plenty of smaller projects as well, including quite a few in JavaScript. Every programmer at Basecamp is encouraged to give back and share our tools.

About You

In broad strokes, Managers of One thrive at Basecamp. We’re committed generalists, eager learners, conscientious workers, and curators of what’s essential. We’re quick to trust. We see things through. We’re kind to each other, look up to each other, and support each other. We achieve together. We are colleagues, here to do our best work.

We’re all quite different people (and we stumble, fall, reach, and achieve just like anyone!) but these are fundamental attitudes we share. What floats your boat? What lights a fire in you? What keeps it burning?

We aren’t looking for ideological clones, but we are looking for people who share our basic values and beliefs about how to write good software. It helps if you can identify as a software writer. If you care about writing clean, concise code. If the thought of a majestic monolith appeals to you. If you seek the epicenter. If you say no.

As an experienced Rails developer, you should be intimately familiar with the framework, with Ruby, and with the stables of full-stack web development: HTTP, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, SQL. It’s a bonus if you’re broadly familiar with other languages as well — we write our iOS app in Swift, our Android app in Kotlin, and have tooling written in Go — but your main work will be Ruby through and through. We ❤️ Ruby, if wasn’t clear by now 😄.

Benefits & Compensation

Our pay is in the top 5% — or better! — of the industry for the matched role and experience, based in Chicago. No matter where you live. Plus, with two years under your belt, you’ll participate in our profit-growth sharing program.

Our benefits at Basecamp are all about helping you lead a healthy life away from work. While we have a lovely office in Chicago, it’s not where you’ll find foosball tables constantly spinning, paid lunches, or any of the other trappings that companies use to lure employees into staying ever longer at work.

Work can wait. Our benefits include 4-day Summer Weeks, a yearly paid vacation, a one-month sabbatical every three years, and allowances for CSA, fitness, massage, and continuing education. We have top-shelf health insurance and a retirement plan with a generous match. See the full list.

How to Apply

Please send an application tailored to this position that speaks to us. Introduce yourself as a colleague. Show us that future.

We value great writers, so please do take your time with the application. Forget that generic resume. There’s no prize for being the first to submit!

We’d like to see examples of software you’ve written. The actual code. We appreciate that it can be hard to share representative samples when you’ve been working on commercial software, so anything you can scrape together will be good. If you have open source contributions, those are great candidates, but you don’t have to be an open source contributor to apply.

You can share private repos on GitHub with @dhh, @packagethief, @sstephenson, and @jeremy. They will be your gentle and kind evaluators on the programming side of things.

Go for it!

We are accepting applications for this position until February 27, 2017. We’ll let you know that we’ve received your application. After that, you probably shouldn’t expect to hear back from us until after the application deadline has passed. We want to give everyone a fair chance to apply and be evaluated.

As mentioned in the introduction, we’re eager to assemble a more diverse team. In fact, we’re not afraid of putting extra weight on candidates from underrepresented groups at Basecamp.

We can’t wait to hear from you!

(And again, imposters: We are too. Take heart. Step up.)