IANAL: Depends on whether it causes marketplace confusion.

I have this mental list of "things I would love to see and am too lazy to actually implement right now and maybe someone else will come up with the same idea and spare me the work".

And now I can cross another item off of that list.

thesixtynine.com is a great example of how experimentation and exploring new positions can really get you 'head of the market.

I used to 61 a lot, but now I'm 69'ing all the time and experiencing a new brand of satisfaction that I never thought was possible. These fellas sho' are cunning linguists - they're coming into areas that few have before. It's a consummate example of remaining firm at a time when others might experience performance anxiety.

I applaud your virility, gentlemen.

I'm one of those people who has a really hard time with the idea of having left money on the table. When I'm in foreign countries, I love to haggle in the markets, but no matter how big a reduction in price I get, I always walk away wondering if they're laughing at me behind my back because I still paid 10x the going rate.

Anyway, working for a large corporation with an opaque salary system was an exercise in frustration. I moved to SF and took a job at a midsize company making what I thought was a very decent salary. I was just out of college and making more than my parents, so I thought I was doing really well. However, after a bit of digging and research, I discovered that the "going rate" for my position was actually 20 - 30% higher. Ugh.

I can totally see the appeal of a transparent salary system, especially when you throw profit-sharing into the mix.

Nice. Now that there is a list, we don't need to vote these all up to the front page. In fact, let's not vote any of them up to the front page. 'k?

There was a funny April Fools Day joke once. It was when Google announced a truly preposterous new service: free email with a whole gigabyte of storage for everybody. It was ridiculous; nobody would offer that for free, and it was completely unrelated to Google's search business.

The punch line is that it wasn't a joke. Gmail is real, and it really did come with that much storage space. Ha ha ha!

Fake news stories on discussion forums just can't compete with that.

How is this a Sam Altman story?

I think that Mathematics is a much larger field than most people realize.

How can programmers not be mathematically inclined? Thinking logically about how to model and solve a system using abstract concepts. Computer science is a subset of applied mathematics.

What about employees who think they deserve to be rated higher on the (somewhat subjective) scope and skills metrics?

As a Fog Creek employee, I can attest that the profit sharing at the end of the year is a pretty big incentive to work harder.

Also see http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000070.html for a discussion of why Joel doesn't want to have incentive pay.

How could these folks think making their customers look and feel like idiots would benefit their business?

I think i'll buy into the fact that they're dedicated and willing to fix this when they will have links to the official support page, and changed again this banner to something like :

"37signals decided to handle their web-support by themselves. You can reach them at <url>".

Their site is build upon a conception about "big evil companies", thor said that himself in the so called open letter. So it makes every company on their site that hasn't suscribed to their thing an evil one by definition.

Now don't get me wrong, this can be very good, when it is true. And very bad and harmfull when it isn't

This is not a technical issue. This is a structural flaw into the conceptual design of their website, so maybe they meant no harm, but that's not the point at all.

If they can't fix it, it would probably be better for everyone if they went down. On a brighter note, it's probably not that hard to fix. But it needs to be taken very seriously.

Also i don't buy the garrett dimon line, even if i understand his motivations. Those companies also leave in a world where they have very real possibilities of harming each others.

So in the end, the fact that they're "really good people" is totally emotional and strictly not related to the issue in place here.

And the fact that they're willing to fix, while a good thing, is also tied in my opinion with the fact they did a mistake that could have hurt anybody in the community.

So this is not 'nice' of them, it's just well, the regular attitude to have !

What does malice have to do with it?

Here's part of Jason Fried's description of the problem:

Can you believe that language? “37signals has not yet committed to open conversations about its products or services.” WHAT?! We haven’t committed to open conversations about our products or services because we haven’t signed Get Satisfaction’s pact on Get Satisfaction’s site which generates Get Satisfaction’s income? That’s awfully close to blackmail (or a shakedown or a mafioso protection scheme).

It doesn't matter whether Get Satisfaction wrote the false and insulting phrase about "open conversations" by accident or on purpose. It was insulting, and false, and if Jason's response came off as a bit angry nobody should be the least bit surprised. They asked for it; they got it.

It also doesn't matter whether Get Satisfaction was committing a shakedown through "ignorance" or out of "malice". A shakedown is a shakedown. Get Satisfaction created a problem [1], and then asked for something of value to make the problem go away [2]. That's a shakedown.

I'm perfectly willing to believe that Get Satisfaction didn't mean to wake up one day and discover themselves in a dubiously ethical line of work. [3] But they did. To their credit, they seem to be reacting with appropriate public displays of horror and remorse.

---

[1] The problem: A site that fooled me, and apparently more than a handful of other people, into thinking it was an official 37signals support site. One that was full of questions, but no answers.

[2] The value: A public endorsement from 37signals, in the form of a publicly visible signature on a "Company-Customer pact". Endorsements are valuable. (The pact itself seems to be a bunch of legally meaningless pledges, but then again I'm not a lawyer; if it contains any legally actionable language, then the mere act of signing it is a cost.)

Also: A public notice, on the Get Satisfaction page, that 37signals employees visit that page -- a notice which, once it is up, will tend to obligate 37signals to devote valuable employee time to answering questions on a third-party support system that's incompatible with their standard support system. The cost of having to do tech support on two -- or three, or four, or seventeen -- different public sites is nontrivial. (Copying and pasting support tickets from site to site is inefficient. Hacking up RSS feeds to integrate trouble reports from n different sites is inefficient. Answering the FAQs 2n times per week, rather than just n times per week, is inefficient.) More importantly, splitting your support effort across multiple venues dilutes your brand, dilutes your customer base, and confuses your customers ("where should I report this problem, again"?), and that's even more costly.

[3] I've had the experience of suddenly realizing that I'm working on an unethical project. It's not uncommon -- just ask the people who've been working on Wall Street. It's amazing how such things can sneak up on you.

Please avoid editorializing in the title.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Paul Buchheit at Startup School 08 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZxP0i9ah8E

Sam Altman at Startup School 08 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m43t44WL8-w

Answer: "Because we don't call it 'negotiating a raise', we call it 'applying this formula'."

Two immediate problems with the formula and one problem with the concept.

First, "scope", factor 2 in the formula, can be external to the employee. It's in Spolsky's interests to hire people who "could" manage multiple projects if given that responsibility, but the demand for those people inside Fog Creek will tend to be lower than the demand for lower-scoped responsibilities. His formula thus does one of two things: it incentivizes him to hire less talented people --- even when he may want a buffer of talent inside the company --- or it creates a totally subjective ranking system where 10 people are qualified to lead a project, but only the "favorite" does.

Second, "skills", factor 3 in the formula, is also subjective. That he's coded it in a chart doesn't change the fact that the "skills" spectrum is basically the line over which every salary negotiation is fought anyways.

Which leads to the general critique of this, that coding and regimenting salary negotiation does nothing except code and regiment salary negotiation. OK, so Fog Creek is transparent about the behavior they want to incentivize. But so what? The real world still creeps in and subverts this system:

* "I'm capable of leading this project, but I'm never getting a lead role because 5 people with seniority are always going to take the next available slots."

* "I was given this task to complete, but it was poorly specified, and so my output didn't contribute to company success."

* "You'd be ranking me at a higher skills level if you put me on a project that would give me exposure to new technology."

* "You'd be ranking me at a higher scope of responsibility if you'd just recognize that my team lead is a moron."

All the same pathologies seem to remain intact in this system.

Curious as to what I'm missing.

"Knowing even a little of the right kinds of math can enable you do write some pretty interesting programs that would otherwise be too hard."

(one of the Yegge quotes in the article)

I think this nails it.

It's a Blub thing. Jeff sees little use for Math because he does not know of any mathematical solutions for the problems he encounters. But...how can he think of a mathematical solution for a problem if he doesn't know very much Math?

Google, of course, relentlessly applies Math to everything they possibly can. I think that has worked out rather well for them. The flip side is that they might lose a good designer occasionally with good subjective judgment about hard to quantify things.

It's quite ironic given their business name how unsatisfied many people are with them. I certainly felt this way, but thought there was nothing I could do about it.

Thanks Jason I say.

I'm sick of April Fool's jokes on the web. I understand the allure, but it's energy mis-allocated. Gmail, autopilot is dumb. And thanks for the spam this morning SlideShare. Jerks.

I don't ever, and haven't ever, utilized April Fools to contact my users to make a joke (at their expense).

You're just using word play to try to validate your point. Any salary discussion is going to go straight to the employee's performance.

The problem with this system is it takes the focus off that individual employees performance and puts it on the rest of the office's performance. Suddenly you aren't talking about how good that employee is you're talking about why Joe in the next cubicle over rates higher than him.

That's exactly where you don't want salary negotiations to go.