101–110 of 166 posts
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The nature of a startup is long hours and a lot of work, chaos, unpredictability and some reward (a lot more of all these than in other places). A successful startup is not immune to these. So one dark side is looking back years later and realizing that all those long hours and reward (money) were probably not worth as much as lost relationships and time outside of work. I don’t like the term “work life balance”, but…
But nevertheless it helped me to improve lot as professional. You must be aware about work you are doing, it just should not be labour work for long time. If you thinking to have 9-6pm job then that's the only Dark-side I would say; else everything is fine.
Values.
There is nothing more de-motivating than being forced to hire applicants because they're from a "disadvantaged background" or due to unique sexual fetish characteristics.
I've joined many early stage startups over the years. The first few years of any business is paradise and there is certainly no better feeling than when all employees onboarded are truly aligned, dedicated, and oriented towards making the business a success. Kiss the culture goodbye once HR starts setting doctrines for ethnic quotas and begins to impose their own corrupt views of how company cultures should be. And where does it begin, in the creation of "values". Their values.
People. Success breeds some weird shit, especially if you were close to people, which happens a lot in startups with a high work ethic. Friends turn into strangers, friends turn into enemies. Some make more money than you — a lot more — and some make less than you — a lot less. Brews some weird undercurrent sometimes. Money changes things. Even if you don't make real money... the perception of success changes things,…
Successful companies also attract gold diggers. When the company is small, unless everybody is going above and beyond the call of duty, it's likely going to fail. As the company gets bigger, there is more and more latitude for failure. At some point it is successful enough that it can survive having people whose only goal is to direct a large amount of money into their pockets. This can lead to really weird decisions…
This is true about any large people structure operation. In fact I would say this is true in any case where your boss has a boss.
>>If you happen to be the hapless person who is innocently trying to make the company successful
You are either going to be a Jeff Dean. Very likely you won't be.
In the other case this is the equivalent of painting a huge X and walking into an arena full of political snipers. The first thing they will do is eliminate you at all costs, to prevent competition from emerging.
I've been purposefully losing 'Hackday' and 'Innovation Challenges' at work. Those have little to do with innovation and mostly exercises to prepare purge lists.
For me there was a lot... Being pushed around by members of the founder's entourage who are untouchable, especially incompetent people who would never be hired at the same level elsewhere. As a new grad coming in fresh out of school, realizing your equity is probably worth 1/10 what you thought when all is said and done. Dealing with the middle management takeover and dodging accompanying political bullets as the new…
You must take it as a lesson and don't do same mistakes twice.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Successful companies also attract gold diggers. When the company is small, unless everybody is going above and beyond the call of duty, it's likely going to fail. As the company gets bigger, there is more and more latitude for failure. At some point it is successful enough that it can survive having people whose only goal is to direct a large amount of money into their pockets. This can lead to really weird decisions…
Slightly different take: I remember back in the dotcom boom, a company of which I was a part started to go downhill (in a bumpy fashion, with VC money). In retrospect, one of the early employees observed that this happened when the company "was big enough that people could hide". That seemed to happen around 60ish people.
The moment your boss has a boss, its just plain easy to hide.
The most important thing to understand about big people structures is every thing is a 'cost center'. The expenses aggregate at your boss, its irrelevant who is consuming how much in a team. For example Boaty McBoatyFace could have negotiated a big bonus from his boss Scrooge McDuck. Scrooge could have 10 people reporting to him, but Boaty's bonus is largely an expense divided by 10 across Scrooge's team, and largely appears as expense per person to the Scrooge's boss.
More precisely its like
SELECT SUM(person_expense)
FROM expense_table
GROUP BY manager_name;
I learned this first hand from my ex-manager. Also most organizations are likely to fire queries along the lines.
SELECT SUM(expense)
FROM expense_table
GROUP BY expense_category;
Say an expense category was 'bonus', or 'stock grant'. Its very common in most orgs, that in a team, for 2 - 3 people to eat the whole team's budget, and yet be totally invisible. And better, make it look like the whole team finished the budget.
I have had two startups promise me the moon and the stars only to fire me shortly after the product was developed and viable. One found a way to screw me out of all the equity as well, which would have made me a ten something millionaire. Once people start smelling money things shift quickly.
What would you do differently now? How would you protect yourself from getting screwed over?