Comments on: Fuck 37Signals and Their Bourgeois Bullshit

By: Serendipity Seraph

Serendipity Seraph — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 00:06:59 +0000

Whatever happened to the idea of specialist freelancers joining and leaving teams on an as needed basis? There is way too much out there to be even moderately on top of all of it. So your product is going to suck in various ways in each and every way where your skills are not at al up to date. You think it will not make a difference just because you get to market faster? That isn't true for very long unless you have some kind of lock in. I believe that each one of the 37signal products could be knocked out of the market with a 50% better product at the same price. They are vulnerable if they don't innovate from here.

By: Serendipity Seraph

Serendipity Seraph — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 00:00:33 +0000

The are not that cool. Basecamp is a joke for real project management. Not even so much as subtasks much less niceties like task dependencies. Backpack can only produce a few types of simplistic document. Not that great for the $$ per month. It does give me a lot of hope that 37signals can be very successful with apps this simple though.

By: Serendipity Seraph

Serendipity Seraph — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 23:57:48 +0000

I agree in part. All of their paid apps are pricey for what you get. I believe it is very possible to offer much more for that price without making the product much more complicated or appreciably more difficult to use. I think they are way overhyped and are overhyping a story that a lot of managers and customers want to hear.

By: marcus@marcusk.co.uk

marcus@marcusk.co.uk — Thu, 27 May 2010 08:09:13 +0000

This is an old post, but I'm wading in anyway:
Surely the concept that form follows function is relevant here. Modernism and Bauhaus, the taproot of much contemporary design, started working with the medium itself as the expression itself. Painters abandoned perspective and illusion in favour of texture and material.
Ignorance of the medium you're working in is counter-intuitive to everything we've been taught about art and craftsmanship.

By: Stew

Stew — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 20:42:13 +0000

Essentially, I agree with you. I've always been a jack of all trades, with an eye for design. As such, doing everything from concepts to photoshop to html/css to JS — the overall product is “good” across the board, but by no means spectacular. Honestly, I don't have enough time or brain power to be innovative within any of the individual segments.

With that being said, I'm scratching my head at your usage of the word “bourgeois” in the title of your post. This is the word Russian communist revolutionaries used to refer to capitalists.

By: Erik R

Erik R — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 04:56:17 +0000

Yeah, I like 37 Signals but they're talking out of their butts on that one. If anything, front end devs need to take a more active role in design without interfering with the visual portion of it. At the end of the day it's our skills that set the bar on what's possible and if you have a decent front end dev, that bar is higher than you probably realize because he tends to get left out of the proper meetings. Everything passes through our work at one point or another and we're the ones constantly tweaking and reloading the apps until they check out in everything. You start to make observations and develop opinions after a while. Much better ones than IAs or “UX Engineers” who don't know a lick of HTML ever will.

In any case, brains that can come up with deceptively simple but brilliant logos and brains that can make it all look the same in IE 6, IE 7, Safari, and Firefox when it has rows that stretch in different places at different levels rarely occupy the same space.

By: Joe

Joe — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 17:36:48 +0000

they build cool apps — you write angry rants … I wonder which one has more credibility.

By: hiester

hiester — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 14:16:54 +0000

I recently did some work with a really terrific designer who tried writing his own HTML and CSS. He ended up with loads of tags, absolutely positioned divs all over the place and nested divs as bad as your worst nested tables nightmare. Believing that designers can learn HTML and CSS by learning which tags to type and simple instructions like “no tables” is like believing you can write a Nobel prize-winning novel simply by pressing the right keys in the right sequence. OK, that's stretching it a bit, but the idea is that HTML and CSS have a history and context and if you don't know where ideas like semantic markup and progressive enhancement come from, then you're not going to be successful at coding usable HTML and CSS. As you noted, it is a skill set on its own.

By: Steph

Steph — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 14:30:03 +0000

I love this post. I stopped reading the 37 signals blog 2 years ago. If 37 signals was actually good at what they do then Backpackit & Basecamp wouldn't be so completely useless. The real reason why they want their designers to code is because they are lazy, arrogant, and cheap.

I *am* a designer who can code HTML & CSS very well (thank you) and it sucks! I don't enjoy it. I'm slow at it. And all it does is keep me from doing my best work. What I've learned over the years is this. Very few people actually want to do this job, so why not dump it on the designer? It's hard to find good front end developers, so why not dump the work on the designer? I've seen companies give in to this false perception of efficiency simply to save some money, and bully designers into doing work they are not suited for. Attitudes like that of 37 signals just cultivates a hostile work environment for designers.

To anybody who expects designers to code, let me ask you a few questions... How does your design ever get better if your designers are not actually doing design work? How do you have a career as a designer if you don't actually do design work? Is your product or end-user actually benefiting from all that coding you are making your designer do? Or are you just too cheap (or ignorant) to hire the right kind of people? Are you too lazy to plan the right kind of process? Do you even understand what design is?

You have to ask what is wrong with e.j. ... Why does a designer's work have to be "seriously beautiful" before you value them as a professional? How retarded! What about "seriously useful" or "seriously meaningful".

By: DMC

DMC — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:40:18 +0000

Thank fuck for you. Seriously, I was beginning to think the world was going mad. I'm a creative designer, and I used to work in Flash until actionscript became a proper programming language. I write my own html and css, but only because I find them relatively easy. I'd prefer not to.

You're absolutely right. People should be single skillers.
It cuts the wheat from the chaff so to speak.
Sure, there are truckloads of people out there who can "do a bit of everything", but they usually suck a bit at everything too.
The turning point for me was when I started a new position as a senior designer, and was told they expected me to "pick up actionscript 3 and the flex framework in 4 weeks". I'd told them explicitly that I don't do development, and as I'm sure you know, a lot of companies out there like to act as though actionscript or anything front-end, is somehow NOT development. Well, they can go fuck themselves. Hear hear!