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

torontolife.com

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

#101

Post by lmm »

> Top Hat’s software could very well make higher education more efficient but possibly less rewarding and meaningful for the student.

This seems like a variant on the just world fallacy - any improvement has to be balanced by an equal and opposite cost.

It's not true. It's very possible to make things just better overall. And college textbook publishing would be close to the top of my list of candidates of things that are just bad for no real reason (other than lack of competition).

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

#102

Post by joshstrange »

Annoying bro-style salesmen? Say it isn’t so! Good thing they only exist in the tech startup world... /s

I’m not saying startups are a perfect, far from it, but this whole article focuses only on the non-tech side of tech startups. Again, even for those in tech, startups are far from perfect but still, it seems like the author happened to interface with only the most juvinelle/brainwashed groups at a company.

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

#103

Post by adetrest »

stwr wrote: post #87
CalRobert wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's sad to hear. A friend of mine has been trying to get me to work in NL for a while and she says a common hatred of overtime is a big plus. Maybe it's just the company and not the country.

This is true, Dutchies tend to hate overtime and often in the elevator at 16:59. but there are of course exceptions. The Netherlands is a great place to work though :)

How is that a bad thing though? Why would you voluntarily work for free (overtime is rarely paid in tech) and long for it? Giving away your most valuable hours 5 days a week isn't enough, you should aspire to more? Screw that, you're an employee not the owner.

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

#104

Post by adetrest »

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…

> 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.

Would love to find such a job, but sadly they don't seem to exist. It's either startups like described in the article, or major companies cheating the system and building startups within so they can hire contractors instead of employees and pay start-up rates. Every company in Toronto does it, even the large ones (hello banks, telcos)

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

#105

Post by foepys »

adetrest wrote: post #104
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…

> 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. Would love to find such a job, but sadly they don't seem to exist. It's either startups like described in the article, or major companies cheating the system and building s…

I can only speak for Germany but there are tons of such jobs here. Americans regularly mock German IT wages but I can go home around 4pm consistently without anybody looking at me weirdly. I might not have a snooker table or free soft drinks in the office but I don't need to live there because my free time is actually my free time.

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

#106

Post by [deleted] »

EliRivers wrote: post #66
sethammons wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand on that? I disagree completely, but my sample size is small. We have lots of people over 40 and we hire for culture too. We define it has folks who are happy, hungry, honest, and humble. If you fit those boxes, are enjoyable to work with, are customer focused, and interested in driving the product forward with colleagues, you will fit our culture. We guard that zealously. Edit: typo.

We define it has folks who are happy, hungry, honest, and humble. Good for you. In a number of companies, "culture fit" became code for "looks like us, dresses like us, educated like us, thinks like us, is like us".

[deleted]

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

#107

Post by rebuilder »

carlmr wrote: post #85
scandox wrote: post #77

> 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 st…

>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? I'm guessing in most countries a Blacksmith (a toolmaker if you will) was usually self-employed. Of course they were "in-for-life", nobody was there to fire them. But this doesn't mean that it was easy going, they could still have a bad economy or some other blacksmith underbidding on price…

In medieval Europe, AFAIK trades were regulated by guilds. You couldn't just become a blacksmith, the job was hereditary. And the prices of goods were set by the guilds. I'm far from an expert on the matter, and I'm sure I'm painting the era with a very broad brush here. The point is, I don't think you can compare being a craftsman in previous ages to being self-employed today.

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

#108

Post by fjp »

wpietri wrote: post #29
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…

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…

From outside San Francisco, it looks like SV is a giant circle jerk of these exact problems you're talking about. I'm actually much more likely to believe that a startup elsewhere in the US is focusing on the important things because they're less likely to be influenced by that culture.

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

#109

Post by griffinkelly »

wpietri wrote: post #29
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…

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…

I think the sales-bro culture is much more prevalent outside of SF. I can only speak for Chicago, but having interacted with a number of 'startup' companies here, there is an obvious lack of engineering talent and an abundance of sales people ready to hit the phones. The sales guys all come from massive companies and want to work at a startup, and are sold on a pseudo startup culture; for them, its a dream come true.

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

#110

Post by wolco »

AdamSC1 wrote: post #94

The Canadian startup scene is brutal. We have all of the downsides of valley startups with very few of the benefits. About five years ago, during my last job search, I interviewed at a well funded (Series B) AI company that was looking for a VP of Marketing. After a few months of interviews, including many early on where they had asked me for my salary expectations, they offered me a starting salary of $70,000 CAD sa…

The Toronto startup scene is exactly like this. All of the negatives and no upside.

My last company didn't allow me to work in my off hours. Paid below market, needy owner wanted to be part of the developer team so he checks in untested code at 3am.. mornings were fixing those commits.

It's a culture issue maybe weaker real technical visions with ownership which creates 'medium' driven culture where everyone must be a sterotype.

You are better off working for a small business. Entity in most cases should be ignored.

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