Our industry is insane and terrible, at the same time chipper and blithely inhospitable to normal human beings.
The problem is, it’s the future.
After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake
21–30 of 192 posts
Re: After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake
#22I'm surprised by the amount of salt (for lack of a better word in my vocabulary) in the comments. I've worked at a Canadian start up. It was not a unicorn, but you were expected to work long hours, be a "10xer", always be responsive, and put in hours on the weekend. Those expectations were never made explicit, but the company had a lot of churn for those who didn't "fit the culture" or acquiesce to the cult of personality.
I enjoyed the article - is this too strong a look in the mirror for most folks? My ideal job now is one where I can live in the bush, have boring but steady work, and otherwise not care about programming after 5pm and feel OK with myself for it.
Re: After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake
#23Fratbros gonna fratbro.
Re: After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake
#24I'm surprised by the amount of salt (for lack of a better word in my vocabulary) in the comments. I've worked at a Canadian start up. It was not a unicorn, but you were expected to work long hours, be a "10xer", always be responsive, and put in hours on the weekend. Those expectations were never made explicit, but the company had a lot of churn for those who didn't "fit the culture" or acquiesce to the cult of person…
There is a thread of a story in the article that is interesting but leaves a lot of 'what if?' questions - could this author have found something that fit between the bro-culture-10x sales targets and a magazine editor-change-isnt-always-good?
How come when he interviewed at a dozen more start ups at the end of the story, he didn't find himself in an interview where he could discuss the 10x-start-up culture downfalls?
Or maybe that middle road is extremely rare.
Re: After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake
#25Seems like there's not a lot of circumspection happening in these responses. I truly don't know how true the "brogrammer" stereotype in SV or Toronto is, but my opinion changes dramatically between HN (in general) and say Blind, where engineers with the vocabulary and attitude of young children are regularly found waxing insecure about their 300k+ inflated salaries (as just one example). I imagine the culture can vary dramatically, but if it doesn't, then I'd wager that cultures fall into one of the extremes. Either the older antisocial stereotype, or the one described here. Not really going on a lot though.
Re: After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake
#26The setup for this article sounds like a rip-off of Dan Lyons' book "Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Startup Bubble." That was a fun book also about a journalist joining the marketing startup ... this one called Hubspot.
Dan Lyons' blurb from Kindle edition: "Dan Lyons is a novelist, journalist, and screenwriter. He is currently a co-producer and writer for the HBO series Silicon Valley. Previously, Lyons was technology editor at Newsweek and the creator of the groundbreaking viral blog "The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs." Lyons has written for the New York Times Magazine, GQ, Vanity Fair, and Wired. He lives in Winchester, MA."
Re: After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake
#27An incredible amount of butt-hurt and cynicism rolled up with well-worded storytelling and topped off with a bevy of stereotypes and buzzwords, quoted for effect.
As I approach "the hill" and prepare to age over it, I have accumulated a metric ton of cynicism. But after spending nearly 20 years in the business and having worked for multiple startups there's just one thing that I can't get past with this article - the author just comes across as _incredibly outmoded and get-off-my-lawn-y_.
Re: After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake
#28I'm surprised by the amount of salt (for lack of a better word in my vocabulary) in the comments. I've worked at a Canadian start up. It was not a unicorn, but you were expected to work long hours, be a "10xer", always be responsive, and put in hours on the weekend. Those expectations were never made explicit, but the company had a lot of churn for those who didn't "fit the culture" or acquiesce to the cult of person…
There is a thread of a story in the article that is interesting but leaves a lot of 'what if?' questions - could this author have found something that fit between the bro-culture-10x sales targets and a magazine editor-change-isnt-always-good? How come when he interviewed at a dozen more start ups at the end of the story, he didn't find himself in an interview where he could discuss the 10x-start-up culture downfalls…
> could this author have found something that fit between the bro-culture-10x sales targets and a magazine editor-change-isnt-always-good?
Maybe they didn’t want to? They tried a few tech startups and didn’t like the experience; it seems natural to then say “I think I’ll do something else instead”.
Re: After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake
#29I'm surprised by the amount of salt (for lack of a better word in my vocabulary) in the comments. I've worked at a Canadian start up. It was not a unicorn, but you were expected to work long hours, be a "10xer", always be responsive, and put in hours on the weekend. Those expectations were never made explicit, but the company had a lot of churn for those who didn't "fit the culture" or acquiesce to the cult of person…
I enjoyed the article; I find the description entirely plausible and totally depressing. It definitely reminds me of Dan Lyons' book "Disrupted", which was also perfectly believable.
I've been around since Bubble 1.0; I started working in San Francisco in 1997. The thing I find horrifying about this article is the way Vision Critical apparently takes the worst aspects of startups and amplifies them, while taking the best aspects and perverting them.
As example, I was an early Agile person; I went to the main US Agile conferences 2001 to 2008 or so. The whole point of things like sprints and standups was to control schedule pressure and keep our work lives sane. The point of agility was not to increase risk and fear, but to make it safe to take risks so that we could be both bold and serene. If you had focused on "maximizing productivity", you would have received stern talkings-to about "outcome, not output." The point was not to put on a show of working hard; it was to radically increase effectiveness.
The sales-bro culture of competition and aggression is also nightmarish to me. It's inevitably short-sighted. I'm sure it works to generate rapid growth, but at what cost to the people and the long-term prospects of the company? It's a sign to me that they definitely aren't changing the world, but instead are likely pushing a mediocre-or-worse product on the world. As if that's new.
For what it's worth, I have the impression that this sort of awfulness is is more common in tech startups that aren't in SF/SV. I take it as classic cargo culting: instead of adopting the important parts, they adopt the visible parts. So maybe some of the saltiness here is just where people are working.
Re: After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm confused, you're saying TopHat, the one "changing for change's sake," is doing a bad job, but you're also saying GP is wrong for calling them out?
Sorry, I might've messed up the subject of the sentence? "I used TopHat's predecessor products in University and they were Terrible" TopHat's predecessor was terrible and TopHat's innovations are very much welcome (which also made them quite profitable).
Nah, I think I just misread it, sorry.