Managing vs. Mentoring

Welcome to Rework, a podcast by thirty seven signals about the better way to work and run your business. I'm your host, Kimberly Rhodes, from the thirty seven signals team. Today, I am joined by longtime employee, Jeffrey Hardy. We've said many times on the podcast, you've heard Jason and David say that we don't have full time managers at thirty seven signals. But I started thinking we must have something when it comes to the programming side, and that led me to this idea of mentorship. So Jeff is here to join me today to talk about the differences as we perceive them about managing versus mentoring. Jeff, thanks for being here. Welcome back to the podcast, I should say. Thank you. Yeah. Well, before we jump right in, tell me a little bit I know you've been at the company for a really long time. Tell us a little bit about your tenure here at thirty seven signals, and then we're gonna dive right into the topic. Okay. Yeah. I've been at thirty seven signals for seventeen years, and I've been a programmer. I know. Right? I've been a programmer on the product team the entire time. So working on all our products, features, things like that. And, yeah, so I have a good sense of how we've managed or how we've treated, like, management and what management is and the arc that it's taken and and it you know, where we landed after trying lots of experiments. Okay. I have a question. Seventeen years, do you know what employee number you are? I I should know this. I feel like it was seven or eight. Yeah. It was that's the thing. When we first started, when I showed up, it was just you show up, and I showed up in our campfire room and was like, get to work. And I started working with Jason Fried immediately on a project. And at that time, we didn't have any sense of managers. I doubt I know that nobody that I worked with at the time, nobody at thirty seven signals had even had a manager, really. David may have had a manager in, like, a software role that he had. But, like, managers, it wasn't really a thing, and we were very much of the mind that, no. You're a manager of one. You're there because you you already know how to manage yourself, and it was it was not necessary. And it was also freeing because it was just like, oh, it's just us. But you've seen the company grow over time from, what, seven employees to now we're at about 60, and the company has gone through kind of different iterations of management. Kind of talk me through that, what you've seen over the years and where we've landed now, and then we'll kind of dive into mentorship versus management. Yeah. No such thing as managers, which you kind of don't need when you're really stuck …