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Reading List More from David Heinemeier Hansson
We didn’t used to need an explanation for having kids. That was just life. That’s just what you did. But now we do, because now we don’t. So allow me: Having kids means making the most interesting people in the world. Not because toddlers or even teenagers are intellectual oracles — although life through their eyes is often surprising and occasionally even profound — but because your children will become the most interesting people to you. That’s the important part. To you. There are no humans on earth I’m as interested in as my children. Their maturation and growth are the greatest show on the planet. And having a front-seat ticket to this performance is literally the privilege of a lifetime. But giving a review of this incredible show just doesn’t work. I could never convince a stranger that my children are the most interesting people in the world, because they wouldn’t be, to them. So words don’t work. It’s a leap of faith. All I can really say is this: Trust me, bro.
Denmark is technically and officially still a Christian nation. Lutheranism is written into the constitution. The government has a ministry for the church. Most Danes pay 1% of their earnings directly to fund the State religion. But God is as dead here as anywhere in the Western world. Less than 2% attend church service on a weekly basis. So one way to fill the void is through climate panic and piety. I mean, these days, you can scarcely stroll past stores in the swankier parts of Copenhagen without being met by an endless parade ads carrying incantations towards sustainability, conservation, and recycling. It's everywhere. Hilariously, sometimes this even includes recommending that customers don’t buy the product. I went to a pita place for lunch the other day. The menu had a meat shawarma option, and alongside it was a plea not to order it too often because it’d be better for the planet if you picked the falafel instead. But the hysteria peaks with the trash situation. It’s now common for garbage rooms across Copenhagen to feature seven or more bins for sorting disposals. Despite trash-sorting robots being able to do this job far better than humans in most cases, you see Danes dutifully sorting and subdividing their waste with a pious obligation worthy of the new climate deity. Yet it’s not even the sorting that gets me — it’s the washing. You can’t put plastic containers with food residue into the recycling bucket, so you have to rinse them first. This leads to the grotesque daily ritual of washing trash (and wasting water galore in the process!). Plus, most people in Copenhagen live in small apartments, and all that separated trash has to be stored separately until the daily pilgrimage to the trash room. So it piles up all over the place. This is exactly what Nietzsche meant by “God is dead” — his warning that we’d need to fill the void with another centering orientation toward the world. And clearly, climatism is stepping up as a suitable alternative for the Danes. It’s got guilt, repentance, and plenty of rituals to spare. Oh, and its heretics too. Look, I'd like a clean planet as much as the next sentient being. I'm not crying any tears over the fact that gas-powered cars are quickly disappearing from the inner-city of Copenhagen. I love biking! I wish we'd get a move on with nuclear for consistent, green energy. But washing or sorting my trash when a robot could do a better job just to feel like "I'm doing my part"? No. It’s like those damn paper straws that crumble halfway through your smoothie. The point of it all seems to be self-inflicted, symbolic suffering — solely to remind you of your good standing with the sacred lord of recycling, refuting the plastic devil. And worse, these small, meaningless acts of pious climate service end up working as catholic indulgences. We buy a good conscience washing trash so we don't have to feel guilty setting new records flying for fun. I’m not religious, but I’m starting to think it’d be nicer to spend a Sunday morning in the presence of the Almighty than to keep washing trash as pagan replacement therapy.
In a fit of frustration, I wrote the first version of Kamal in six weeks at the start of 2023. Our plan to get out of the cloud was getting bogged down in enterprisey pricing and Kubernetes complexity. And I refused to accept that running our own hardware had to be that expensive or that convoluted. So I got busy building a cheap and simple alternative. Now, just two years later, Kamal is deploying every single application in our entire heritage fleet, and everything in active development. Finalizing a perfectly uniform mode of deployment for every web app we've built over the past two decades and still maintain. See, we have this obsession at 37signals: That the modern build-boost-discard cycle of internet applications is a scourge. That users ought to be able to trust that when they adopt a system like Basecamp or HEY, they don't have to fear eviction from the next executive re-org. We call this obsession Until The End Of The Internet. That obsession isn't free, but it's worth it. It means we're still operating the very first version of Basecamp for thousands of paying customers. That's the OG code base from 2003! Which hasn't seen any updates since 2010, beyond security patches, bug fixes, and performance improvements. But we're still operating it, and, along with every other app in our heritage collection, deploying it with Kamal. That just makes me smile, knowing that we have customers who adopted Basecamp in 2004, and are still able to use the same system some twenty years later. In the meantime, we've relaunched and dramatically improved Basecamp many times since. But for customers happy with what they have, there's no forced migration to the latest version. I very much had all of this in mind when designing Kamal. That's one of the reasons I really love Docker. It allows you to encapsulate an entire system, with all of its dependencies, and run it until the end of time. Kind of how modern gaming emulators can run the original ROM of Pac-Man or Pong to perfection and eternity. Kamal seeks to be but a simple wrapper and workflow around this wondrous simplicity. Complexity is but a bridge — and a fragile one at that. To build something durable, you have to make it simple.
Denmark has been reaping lots of delayed accolades from its relatively strict immigration policy lately. The Swedes and the Germans in particular are now eager to take inspiration from The Danish Model, given their predicaments. The very same countries that until recently condemned the lack of open-arms/open-border policies they would champion as Moral Superpowers. But even in Denmark, thirty years after the public opposition to mass immigration started getting real political representation, the consequences of culturally-incompatible descendants from MENAPT continue to stress the high-trust societal model. Here are just three major cases that's been covered in the Danish media in 2025 alone: Danish public schools are increasingly struggling with violence and threats against students and teachers, primarily from descendants of MENAPT immigrants. In schools with 30% or more immigrants, violence is twice as prevalent. This is causing a flight to private schools from parents who can afford it (including some Syrians!). Some teachers are quitting the profession as a result, saying "the Quran run the class room". Danish women are increasingly feeling unsafe in the nightlife. The mayor of the country's third largest city, Odense, says he knows why: "It's groups of young men with an immigrant background that's causing it. We might as well be honest about that." But unfortunately, the only suggestion he had to deal with the problem was that "when [the women] meet these groups... they should take a big detour around them". A soccer club from the infamous ghetto area of Vollsmose got national attention because every other team in their league refused to play them. Due to the team's long history of violent assaults and death threats against opposing teams and referees. Bizarrely leading to the situation were the team got to the top of its division because they'd "win" every forfeited match. Problems of this sort have existed in Denmark for well over thirty years. So in a way, none of this should be surprising. But it actually is. Because it shows that long-term assimilation just isn't happening at a scale to tackle these problems. In fact, data shows the opposite: Descendants of MENAPT immigrants are more likely to be violent and troublesome than their parents. That's an explosive point because it blows up the thesis that time will solve these problems. Showing instead that it actually just makes it worse. And then what? This is particularly pertinent in the analysis of Sweden. After the "far right" party of the Swedish Democrats got into government, the new immigrant arrivals have plummeted. But unfortunately, the net share of immigrants is still increasing, in part because of family reunifications, and thus the problems continue. Meaning even if European countries "close the borders", they're still condemned to deal with the damning effects of maladjusted MENAPT immigrant descendants for decades to come. If the intervention stops there. There are no easy answers here. Obviously, if you're in a hole, you should stop digging. And Sweden has done just that. But just because you aren't compounding the problem doesn't mean you've found a way out. Denmark proves to be both a positive example of minimizing the digging while also a cautionary tale that the hole is still there.
When the iPhone first appeared in 2007, Microsoft was sitting pretty with their mobile strategy. They'd been early to the market with Windows CE, they were fast-following the iPod with their Zune. They also had the dominant operating system, the dominant office package, and control of the enterprise. The future on mobile must have looked so bright! But of course now, we know it wasn't. Steve Ballmer infamously dismissed the iPhone with a chuckle, as he believed all of Microsoft's past glory would guarantee them mobile victory. He wasn't worried at all. He clearly should have been! After reliving that Ballmer moment, it's uncanny to watch this CNBC interview from one year ago with Johny Srouji and John Ternus from Apple on their AI strategy. Ternus even repeats the chuckle!! Exuding the same delusional confidence that lost Ballmer's Microsoft any serious part in the mobile game. But somehow, Apple's problems with AI seem even more dire. Because there's apparently no one steering the ship. Apple has been promising customers a bag of vaporware since last fall, and they're nowhere close to being able to deliver on the shiny concept demos. The ones that were going to make Apple Intelligence worthy of its name, and not just terrible image generation that is years behind the state of the art. Nobody at Apple seems able or courageous enough to face the music: Apple Intelligence sucks. Siri sucks. None of the vaporware is anywhere close to happening. Yet as late as last week, you have Cook promoting the new MacBook Air with "Apple Intelligence". Yikes. This is partly down to the org chart. John Giannandrea is Apple's VP of ML/AI, and he reports directly to Tim Cook. He's been in the seat since 2018. But Cook evidently does not have the product savvy to be able to tell bullshit from benefit, so he keeps giving Giannandrea more rope. Now the fella has hung Apple's reputation on vaporware, promised all iPhone 16 customers something magical that just won't happen, and even spec-bumped all their devices with more RAM for nothing but diminished margins. Ouch. This is what regression to the mean looks like. This is what fiefdom management looks like. This is what having a company run by a logistics guy looks like. Apple needs a leadership reboot, stat. That asterisk is a stain.
More in programming
If you manage a team, who are your teammates? If you're a staff software engineer embedded in a product team, who are your teammates? The answer to the question comes down to who your main responsibility lies with. That's not the folks you're managing and leading. Your responsibility lies with your fellow leaders, and they're your teammates. The first team mentality There's a concept in leadership called the first team mentality. If you're a leader, then you're a member of a couple of different teams at the same time. Using myself as an example, I'm a member of the company's leadership team (along with the heads of marketing, sales, product, etc.), and I'm also a member of the engineering department's leadership team (along with the engineering directors and managers and the CTO). I'm also sometimes embedded into a team for a project, and at one point I was running a 3-person platform team day-to-day. So I'm on at least two teams, but often three or more. Which of these is my "first" team, the one which I will prioritize over all the others? For my role, that's ultimately the company leadership. Each department is supposed to work toward the company goals, and so if there's an inter-department conflict you need to do what's best for the company—helping your fellow department heads—rather than what's best for your department. (Ultimately, your job is to get both of these into alignment; more on that later.) This applies across roles. If you're an engineering manager, your teammates are not the people who report to you. Your teammates are the other engineering managers and staff engineers at your level. You all are working together toward department goals, and sometimes the team has to sacrifice to make that happen. Focus on the bigger goals One of the best things about a first team mentality is that it comes with a shift in where your focus is. You have to focus on the broader goals your group is working in service of, instead of focusing on your group's individual work. I don't think you can achieve either without the other. When you zoom out from the team you lead or manage and collaborate with your fellow leaders, you gain context from them. You see what their teams are working on, and you can contextualize your work with theirs. And you also see how your work impacts theirs, both positively and negatively. That broader context gives you a reminder of the bigger, broader goals. It can also show you that those goals are unclear. And if that's the case, then the work you're doing in your individual teams doesn't matter, because no one is going in the same direction! What's more important there is to focus on figuring out what the bigger goals should be. And once those are done, then you can realign each of your groups around them. Conflicts are a lens Sometimes the first team mentality will result in a conflict. There's something your group wants or needs, which will result in a problem for another group. Ultimately, this is your work to resolve, and the conflict is a lens you can use to see misalignment and to improve the greater organization. You have to find a way to make sure that your group is healthy and able to thrive. And you also have to make sure that your group works toward collective success, which means helping all the groups achieve success. Any time you run into a conflict like this, it means that something went wrong in alignment. Either your group was doing something which worked against its own goal, or it was doing something which worked against another group's goal. If the latter, then that means that the goals themselves fundamentally conflicted! So you go and you take that conflict, and you work through it. You work with your first team—and you figure out what the mismatch is, where it came from, and most importantly, what we do to resolve it. Then you take those new goals back to your group. And you do it with humility, since you're going to have to tell them that you made a mistake. Because that alignment is ultimately your job, and you have to own your failures if you expect your team to be able to trust you and trust each other.
We didn’t used to need an explanation for having kids. That was just life. That’s just what you did. But now we do, because now we don’t. So allow me: Having kids means making the most interesting people in the world. Not because toddlers or even teenagers are intellectual oracles — although life through their eyes is often surprising and occasionally even profound — but because your children will become the most interesting people to you. That’s the important part. To you. There are no humans on earth I’m as interested in as my children. Their maturation and growth are the greatest show on the planet. And having a front-seat ticket to this performance is literally the privilege of a lifetime. But giving a review of this incredible show just doesn’t work. I could never convince a stranger that my children are the most interesting people in the world, because they wouldn’t be, to them. So words don’t work. It’s a leap of faith. All I can really say is this: Trust me, bro.
If you give some monkeys a slice of cucumber each, they are all pretty happy. Then you give one monkey a grape, and nobody is happy with their cucumber any more. They might even throw the slices back at the experimenter. He got a god damned grape this is bullshit I don’t want a cucumber anymore! Nobody was in absolute terms worse off, but that doesn’t prevent the monkeys from being upset. And this isn’t unique to monkeys, I see this same behavior on display when I hear about billionaires. It’s not about what I have, they got a grape. The tweet is here. What do you do about this? Of course, you can fire this women, but what percent of people in American society feel the same way? How much of this can you tolerate and still have a functioning society? What’s particularly absurd about the critique in the video is that it hasn’t been thought through very far. If that house and its friends stopped “ordering shit”, the company would stop making money and she wouldn’t have that job. There’s nothing preventing her from quitting today and getting the same outcome for herself. But of course, that isn’t what it’s about, because then somebody else would be delivering the packages. You see, that house got a grape. So how do we get through this? I’ll propose something, but it’s sort of horrible. Bring people to power based on this feeling. Let everyone indulge fully in their resentment. Kill the bourgeois. They got grapes, kill them all! Watch the situation not improve. Realize that this must be because there’s still counterrevolutionaries in the mix, still a few grapefuckers. Some billionaire is trying to hide his billions! Let the purge continue! And still, things are not improving. People are starving. The economy isn’t even tracked anymore. Things are bad. Millions are dead. The demoralization is complete. Starvation and real poverty are more powerful emotions than resentment. It was bad when people were getting grapes, but now there aren’t even cucumbers anymore. In the face of true poverty for all, the resentment fades. Society begins to heal. People are grateful to have food, they are grateful for what they have. Expectations are back in line with market value. You have another way to fix this? Cause this is what seems to happen in history, and it takes a generation. The demoralization is just beginning.
Yesterday, the tj-actions repository, a popular tool used with Github Actions was compromised (for more background read one of these two articles). Watching the infrastructure and security engineering teams at Carta respond, it highlighted to me just how much LLMs can’t meaningfully replace many essential roles of software professionals. However, I’m also reading Jennifer Palkha’s Recoding America, which makes an important point: decision-makers can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. (Or, in this context, remain employed.) I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, as I’ve ended up having more “2025 is not much fun”-themed career discussions with prior colleagues navigating the current job market. I’ve tried to pull together my points from those conversations here: Many people who first entered senior roles in 2010-2020 are finding current roles a lot less fun. There are a number of reasons for this. First, managers were generally evaluated in that period based on their ability to hire, retain and motivate teams. The current market doesn’t value those skills particularly highly, but instead prioritizes a different set of skills: working in the details, pushing pace, and navigating the technology transition to foundational models / LLMs. This means many members of the current crop of senior leaders are either worse at the skills they currently need to succeed, or are less motivated by those activities. Either way, they’re having less fun. Similarly, the would-be senior leaders from 2010-2020 era who excelled at working in the details, pushing pace and so on, are viewed as stagnate in their careers so are still finding it difficult to move into senior roles. This means that many folks feel like the current market has left them behind. This is, of course, not universal. It is a general experience that many people are having. Many people are not having this experience. The technology transition to Foundational models / LLMs as a core product and development tool is causing many senior leaders’ hard-earned playbooks to be invalidated. Many companies that were stable, durable market leaders are now in tenuous positions because foundational models threaten to erode their advantage. Whether or not their advantage is truly eroded is uncertain, but it is clear that usefully adopting foundational models into a product requires more than simply shoving an OpenAI/Anthropic API call in somewhere. Instead, you have to figure out how to design with progressive validation, with critical data validated via human-in-the-loop techniques before it is used in a critical workflow. It also requires designing for a rapidly improving toolkit: many workflows that were laughably bad in 2023 work surprisingly well with the latest reasoning models. Effective product design requires architecting for both massive improvement, and no improvement at all, of models in 2026-2027. This is equally true of writing software itself. There’s so much noise about how to write software, and much of it’s clearly propaganda–this blog’s opening anecdote regarding the tj-actions repository prove that expertise remains essential–but parts of it aren’t. I spent a few weeks in the evenings working on a new side project via Cursor in January, and I was surprised at how much my workflow changed even through Cursor itself was far from perfect. Even since then, Claude has advanced from 3.5 to 3.7 with extended thinking. Again, initial application development might easily be radically different in 2027, or it might be largely unchanged after the scaffolding step in complex codebases. (I’m also curious to see if context window limitations drive another flight from monolithic architectures.) Sitting out this transition, when we are relearning how to develop software, feels like a high risk proposition. Your well-honed skills in team development are already devalued today relative to three years ago, and now your other skills are at risk of being devalued as well. Valuations and funding are relatively less accessible to non-AI companies than they were three years ago. Certainly elite companies are doing alright, whether or not they have a clear AI angle, but the cutoff for remaining elite has risen. Simultaneously, the public markets are challenged, which means less willingness for both individuals and companies to purchase products, which slows revenue growth, further challenging valuations and funding. The consequence of this if you’re at a private, non-AI company, is that you’re likely to hire less, promote less, see less movement in pay bands, and experience a less predictable path to liquidity. It also means fewer open roles at other companies, so there’s more competition when attempting to trade up into a larger, higher compensated role at another company. The major exception to this is joining an AI company, but generally those companies are in extremely competitive markets and are priced more appropriately for investors managing a basket of investments than for employees trying to deliver a predictable return. If you join one of these companies today, you’re probably joining a bit late to experience a big pop, your equity might go to zero, and you’ll be working extremely hard for the next five to seven years. This is the classic startup contract, but not necessarily the contract that folks have expected over the past decade as maximum compensation has generally come from joining a later-stage company or member of the Magnificent Seven. As companies respond to the reduced valuations and funding, they are pushing their teams harder to find growth with their existing team. In the right environment, this can be motivating, but people may have opted into to a more relaxed experience that has become markedly less relaxed without their consent. If you pull all those things together, you’re essentially in a market where profit and pace are fixed, and you have to figure out how you personally want to optimize between people, prestige and learning. Whereas a few years ago, I think these variables were much more decoupled, that is not what I hear from folks today, even if their jobs were quite cozy a few years ago. Going a bit further, I know folks who are good at their jobs, and have been struggling to find something meaningful for six-plus months. I know folks who are exceptionally strong candidates, who can find reasonably good jobs, but even they are finding that the sorts of jobs they want simply don’t exist right now. I know folks who are strong candidates but with some oddities in their profile, maybe too many short stints, who are now being filtered out because hiring managers need some way to filter through the higher volume of candidates. I can’t give advice on what you should do, but if you’re finding this job market difficult, it’s certainly not personal. My sense is that’s basically the experience that everyone is having when searching for new roles right now. If you are in a role today that’s frustrating you, my advice is to try harder than usual to find a way to make it a rewarding experience, even if it’s not perfect. I also wouldn’t personally try to sit this cycle out unless you’re comfortable with a small risk that reentry is quite difficult: I think it’s more likely that the ecosystem is meaningfully different in five years than that it’s largely unchanged. Altogether, this hasn’t really been the advice that anyone wanted when they chatted with me, but it seems to generally have resonated with them as a realistic appraisal of the current markets. Hopefully there’s something useful for you in here as well.
