Ask HN: Is it me or ...?

This seems the most likely reason behind your discontent. People who start companies rarely fit well into other peoples organizations.

I'd say his description fits where I work quite well. Essentially the only lack of communication I've ever experienced that hindered my work was from the end customer, or occasionally we have a communication breakdown between teams.

To turn this the other direction, here's some perspective from a startup exec. This job requires constant compromise between doing what's right for the business, the investors, and the employees of the company. In my management experience I've found that I've always worked FOR my people, not the other way around. My days are full of battling it out with the CEO over a pay raise I know a good engineer deserves, or figuring out a way to provide additional stock option bonuses when more cash just isn't feasible. The majority of my time, however, is spent as keeper of the peace. People are tricky and all very different. Some have thick skins, others don't. I spend countless hours being a therapist and making sure everyone is able to work as close to peak performance as possible without killing each other. This involves a ton of moving parts.

In my last gig I managed five directors who all had their own teams under them. The juggling to make sure these folks were well taken care of and their teams were happy overall is tough. Things do fall through the cracks. A developer might have a big problem with a product manager. I might not hear about it until the developer has put in notice because my engineering director thought he/she could take care of it without me. That engineer more often than not probably thinks "hey, the CTO is ignorant and has no idea what's going on." I accept that as part of the job and understand I'll never have 100% view into everything that’s happening. I accepted a long time ago that in some cases a member of my team might believe me to be incompetent. Comes with the territory.

On top of those duties, the overall company strategy and operational plan needs oversight and contributions from the executive management team. The amount of time spent talking about ideas and direction is enormous. By the time a pivot or major change has been decided on it’s generally been under discussion for several weeks, sometimes even months. The inputs and process for arriving at these decisions are a complex mix of research, customer conversations, cogs analysis, competitive analysis, M&A discussions, go to market strategy, pricing, technical feasibility, margin, etc. When the decision is finally ready to be communicated to the troops it can often cause confusion and the belief that “these guys don’t know what they are doing.” While that may be true in some cases, I’ve never been involved in one of these types of decisions that didn't have a lot of well thought-out reasons behind it.

This is only the first step. The way the best leaders separate themselves in this situation is their ability to communicate decisions and make everyone BELIEVE it is the right thing to do. In startups there’s never a 100% clearly correct answer. Faith comes in more often than I’d like to admit, and getting everyone to drink the Kool-aid is pretty damned important in terms of morale. The rightness or wrongness in the decision won’t often be known until a year or more passes. If the decision causes the company to be successful the execs are looked at geniuses. If it fails they are incompetent idiots. Many of the factors that determine the outcome are out of the control of the executives. I guess that’s life. My advice is always this: be self-aware about what you want. If you have a passion for a product or space and enjoy your work, try not to let the factors out of your control dictate your job satisfaction. If you are unhappy with decisions being made or company direction, put yourself in a position to have influence. It’s easier than you might think.

You're truly cursed. The only thing that you can ever do to achieve career happiness now is to do your own startup.

One of two things will happen, you will either succeed or your patience for the struggles of management will grow and you will be happier at the company you work for next.

As someone who's spent some 17 years doing almost nothing but startups, allow me to add my $0.0296 ($0.02, adjusted for inflation1)

Some combination of #1, #4, and #6.

#6 is the one where you don't truly respect the process of management works (in much the same way we all get frustrated at managers who don't understand how the process of software engineering works), and are oblivious to the challenges and concerns involved.

This is an easy trap to fall into and most engineers I know have fallen into it at some point in their careers. Good management is often virtually invisible, but bad management sticks out like a sore thumb -- or so the conventional wisdom goes. Remember:

1. Management is a skill, just like coding. It's deep and complex and multi-faceted and you're only seeing the surface of it. 2. In startups, many entrepreneurs are getting their first taste of a completely different world. It's a learning process even for an experienced manager/executive. Imagine being a career web developer and say, cutting over and doing 3D game development on a console system in C++ for the first time. Only it's not a hobbyist thing, it's your job and people are counting on you. 2. Startups are not like normal environments. Inaction is usually worse than a bad action, because at least with a bad action you've learned something and narrowed the search space a bit.

You should EXPECT that in a startup, seeing management trip up and make "mistakes" will be a common, everyday occurrence. Oftentimes the right decision will look, externally, like the wrong decision. If you want a well-oiled machine in a well-understood problem domain, go work at Cisco.

Startups are about discovery. Product-market fit, paths of least resistance, etc.

I'm personally inclined to this form of myopia myself, so as a rule, I only work within my personal network at this point because I have a group of entrepreneurs, executive-level programmers, and so forth who I trust implicitly. I may not understand a given decision, and any given decision may be a mistake but I'm entirely comfortable leaving their domain in their hands while focusing on doing my best in my domain. I find it's less stressful, and more rewarding whether the venture succeeds or fails.

(1 - Yeah, I looked it up on WolframAlpha. I'm bored, what I can I say.)