Book Cover - Book Review: It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work

Sadly, bad practices in the workspace often spread and stop being challenged. In this book, the co-authors explain their current practices at Basecamp, resulting from two decades of experimentation. And when you experiment, you learn a lot, and you gain interesting insights, which are related in this excellent book.

The scope is very broad — hiring, office, communication, company vision, stress, vacations, business model, meetings, customer relationship, quality, sleep, productivity, … — everything tightly packed in a short book, full of great ideas.

The authors focused exclusively on Basecamp, a 50-employee, remote-only software company. That is not the “standard” company and everything described will not apply in every context. You will have to experiment too.

I enjoyed reading the book, from the first to the very last page. My intuition was delighted to hear what I was reading. It was telling me non-stop: “You see, I wasn’t so crazy.” If your job requires to be a minimum creative, I urge you to read this book, and appreciate how others are not afraid to be the exception in a corporate world far from being exceptional.

About the author

Julien Sobczak works as a software developer for Scaleway, a French cloud provider. He is a passionate reader who likes to see the world differently to measure the extent of his ignorance. His main areas of interest are productivity (doing less and better), human potential, and everything that contributes in being a better person (including a better dad and a better developer).

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