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After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake

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Re: After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake

#71

Post by fsloth »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #67
fsloth wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Payment is based on what it would cost to replace you, not on what you do." I would perhaps rephraze this as 'payment is based on the market rate'. It has more into it than just cost of replacement. The replacement cost becomes a key metric when presenting a counter offer to an employee who got a better offer elsewhere.

The market rate is the cost to replace you. An employer paying more is making a mistake. An employee taking less is making a mistake. It's the only steady state.

Sure, avoiding the word 'replacement' is mostly about semantics as it guides the mind to think in closed and not in open mode.

Re: After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake

#72

Post by mettamage »

In The Netherlands I see some similarities, but also a couple of differences. The startups that I have worked for (3) did:

1. Put in long hours (mostly as a result of deadline stress).

2. Have a mission/vision.

3. Acronyms and own company words that they invented themselves. Not necessarily a bad thing, a new word can mean a very specific concept.

But they didn't have:

1. Stock options

2. An explicit company culture

What they did have:

1. More direct than the companies described here. It wasn't brutally honest, but definitely more honest than whatever I read in this blog post.

2. Being more down to earth.

These final two things are also much more ingrained in Dutch culture than in the US culture (and probably Canadian culture).

Re: After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake

#73

Post by scarejunba »

pcunite wrote: post #6

Culture is an obsession at start-ups. They talk about it nearly as much as they talk about sales targets. Its a signal for: don't apply here if you're over 40.

Believe whatever you want. But I'm never hiring a guy whose belief is that as a developer his job is only building whatever some person thinking about the product wants. I want to work with engineers who want influence over the product.

That's a culture difference.

I'm never hiring a guy who thinks it's his job to only write code in the stack I tell him to under the rules I place him under. I want to work with people who care about that and have an informed opinion about it.

That's a culture difference.

I'm not hiring a guy who wants to write code but not be affected by the operation of it, who believes that he should operate in isolation and everyone should merge his 30k line PRs, who believes that he should only have his code reviewed by those senior to him.

That's culture. And a hundred other things are, too.

Life's too short to have a net negative weighing the team down.

Re: After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake

#74

Post by gaius »

raducu wrote: post #62
lucidone wrote: post #22

I'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…

Did the company also pay 10x the market rates? Of course not, because they aren't really hiring 10x programmers (whatever that is), they are just hiring low self-esteem people, slap the 10xer label on them, strap them on the hamster wheel and work them to death. It's a bit like the series "The Good Place" -- "heeeyyyy we only hire 10xers, you're a 10xer, aren't you proud? Right, now go prove you're a 10xer by working…

“My boss bet me I couldn’t work 100 hours this week and I proved him wrong!” is how I look at things like this. People actually brag about how exploited they are, it’s bizarre.

Re: After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake

#75

Post by gaius »

dmix wrote: post #35
lucidone wrote: post #22

I'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…

Working for a big company/megacorp without valuable good stock options/bonuses on weekends and off-hours is dumb and abusive. On the other hand these startups are voluntary organizations. You choose to work there or not. I don't see anything wrong with a company deciding on a culture/work enviornment which attracts people who are very dedicated to the company (and hope to be rewarded in the long term as such) and are…

I don't see anything wrong with a company deciding on a culture/work enviornment which attracts people who are very dedicated to the company (and hope to be rewarded in the long term as such)

That’s OK in theory but in practice it’s almost always a bait-and-switch relying on the marks not knowing the difference between preferred and common stock, or what dilution is.

Easy test: do they say “10,000” shares but don’t tell you how many shares there are?

Re: After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake

#76

Post by gaius »

pj_mukh wrote: post #8
rsynnott wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bro culture is a deep-seated problem in tech that I'd love o see excised When did this start, actually? Where did it come from? I don't remember it really being a thing in the early noughties, but by the end of the decade it was deeply entrenched.

The author alludes to the problem, I'd venture a guess it is a cultural import from Wall St. after the success of B2B companies in late 2000's.

No, it coincides precisely with the rise of RoR and is largely confined to webdev, even if the trendy language had changed to Node. You just don’t get C++ or R or Python brogrammers.

Re: After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake

#77

Post by scandox »

> A job for life also meant that your job was your life. You went into teaching or sports reporting or proctology because it was a calling—it was who you were meant to be. But it’s been a long time since anyone has been able to count on a job for life. The tech industry led the way: our shift to precarious employment was hastened by more efficient algorithms, apps and Amazon.

What is the real history of employment stability? I mean I can imagine that a Blacksmith was probably safely a Blacksmith for life back in the day, but is even that really true? And that's for identifiable trades, which it seems were not even easy to get trained into. So maybe the reality is that employment for most people has always been precarious?

Hasn't tech merely brought this instability to a social class that was exempted from it for the latter half of the 20th Century?

Would love to know more from someone who has some grounding in this.

Re: After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake

#79

Post by starkingclojure »

brailsafe wrote: post #25

Seems 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 var…

What's Blind? Is it a community? Tried googling but could only find a consultancy of some sort.

Re: After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake

#80

Post by titzer »

sn41 wrote: post #53
wpietri wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> classic cargo culting: instead of adopting the important parts, they adopt the visible parts. This is the most succinct description of cargo cutting I have come across. Thanks, will use it :)

I will think of this every time I see a getter/setter pair on a class. The illusion of modularity and encapsulation with net negative in code quality.
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