121–130 of 167 posts
FWIW my company had a terrible, terrible experience with Zenefits and ditched them after less than a year. Incompetent customer service, crappy software (one problem we had was a result of a corrupted database record, according to one of their reps, that had to be manually corrected by a developer), no one seemed to know what they were doing. As a founder I told their reps multiple times that we were a startup too --…
The culture I'm referring to is the "give me complex software, and host and maintain it for me, but have someone else pay for it" culture.
Whether it's through intrusive ads, creepy data practices, and/or Zenefits-like shadiness, insisting that software should be paid for by anyone but the people using it is a disaster waiting to happen.
I'm founder of a startup building an application that is free (as in freedom) for small businesses. If future customers want us to support and maintain the software for them, they will need to pay for it the old-fashioned way. Any other arrangement would compromise both our customers' interests, and our company's integrity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> uncovering some frightening immaturity pervasive in Valley companies. This is one of the dark sides to having an entire engineering team in the 25-30 age range. They can sling http just fine, but sometimes don't fully grasp the consequences of their work.
The guy on my team who's a 'hacker' is in his mid 30s. Some people just never grow up. I'm 27, and I'm the guy always arguing with my near-40 boss about trying to do things the right way, not the way that's easiest today. Age is probably the generalization to make, but cargo-cult mentality isn't in any way limited to then young.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
CRM for government reminds me of the Ted Talk where a guy said the government should use source control. We're not there yet but it's a step in the right direction. You guys should seriously consider using resellers and distributors btw. Gov't purchasing agents always request three competitive bids.
That's true if you try to sell into the municipalities via the RFP process. However, we sell directly to the departments who will be using our software. We've met with great success doing it this way. In fact, we managed to close a department in Miami in only six days--that's basically unheard of in local government software sales.
I used to work at Gusto (ZenPayroll back in my day) and dealing with Zenefits was always a pain for this reason. They were the consummate hackers, using screen scraping and automation to do whatever the hell they wanted. One nightmare example was when a bug in their "automated" system rewrote bank account information for tons of employees to just be the last 4 digits of their account number. Such a mess. Even if this…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> uncovering some frightening immaturity pervasive in Valley companies. This is one of the dark sides to having an entire engineering team in the 25-30 age range. They can sling http just fine, but sometimes don't fully grasp the consequences of their work.
I bailed mentally at an interview with a YC startup in SF because, as part of the technical portion, they had me write a scraper to pull information from searches on other sites. This was against each site's legal/usage terms (and so was defeating the basic obstacles the companies put in the way of being scraped in bulk). When I asked about their business model they revealed that they were making money by doing exact…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Glad you liked it! I'm now building software for local government and we've naturally taken that ethos to our new company. If you are ever looking for another opportunity, check us out http://seneca.systems
Your values page is interesting, though the quotes may be a bit excessive. If you don't mind my drive-by critique, I would suggest listing those quotes at the end of each one as a kind of an "alternate telling." For the "empathy" value: > Oftentimes, this means acknowledging weaknesses and having difficult conversations. Feedback should come from a place of love and respect, under the assumption that everyone has act…
I like your idea framing the quotes as an alternate telling. They were listed first out of habit (ex-philosophy major), but you're right that this is primarily our story to tell.
Empathy
The difference between front-stabbing and giving good feedback is one of maturity. If you've had many conversations with young kids, they are incredible at giving blunt feedback, but it's only funny because they are tiny humans. Some of what they say would be unconstructive coming from an adult.
Front-stabbing, to me, is someone trying to justify being an asshole. Your comment is a great example of the difference, of being honest and direct but mature. The opposite of the kumbaya culture isn't telling someone they suck, even if you do it because you want them to be better.
Don't always be right
This is my fault, I mixed too many concepts. This value is about not getting complacent with success or being afraid of failure. I don't want us to get it right every time, because experimentation (where the magic happens) involves making mistakes. As you point out, that failure isn't the same as taking the right risks. This value is counteracting our need to be perfect, about pushing back if we seem to always be getting what we expected.
Happy to dive deeper if I didn't answer your questions. Thank you for the thoughtful consideration!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I realize it's the law, but that is an interesting question. I'm a page-at-a-glance reader (not to brag) and sitting in front of something for 52 hours would make me feel like a character from "Harrison Bergeron".
The 52 hours is meant to be spent exploring inside of an LMS (Learning Management System). You aren't simply reading a manual, but rather going through lessons, taking quizzes on them, working through different scenarios, etc. It's supposed to be an interactive process where you're familiarizing yourself with the information, learning to identify how to handle different situations, learning what "gotchas" to watch ou…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I realize it's the law, but that is an interesting question. I'm a page-at-a-glance reader (not to brag) and sitting in front of something for 52 hours would make me feel like a character from "Harrison Bergeron".
The 52 hours is meant to be spent exploring inside of an LMS (Learning Management System). You aren't simply reading a manual, but rather going through lessons, taking quizzes on them, working through different scenarios, etc. It's supposed to be an interactive process where you're familiarizing yourself with the information, learning to identify how to handle different situations, learning what "gotchas" to watch ou…
I used to work at Gusto (ZenPayroll back in my day) and dealing with Zenefits was always a pain for this reason. They were the consummate hackers, using screen scraping and automation to do whatever the hell they wanted. One nightmare example was when a bug in their "automated" system rewrote bank account information for tons of employees to just be the last 4 digits of their account number. Such a mess. Even if this…
Issue you are talking here seems to be about pushing software with a critical bug (a logical mistake by the developer). This issue looks to me as a test scenario that wasn't covered before. I guess these kind of issue could happen at anywhere else too, irrespective of their working (hacking) culture.
If you care about security and stability, that should have set off major alarms.
Scraping data and pushing to internal APIs in another product have no spec, so any tests you write are either wrong or not wrong yet.