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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

#151

Post by com2kid »

mcguire wrote: post #121
com2kid wrote: post #3

I am incredibly sick and tired of this stereotype: > The most common is the engineer who, slaving for hours in the proverbial garage, programs his (or, infrequently, her) way to glory and gets showered with millions by venture capitalists. He is the tech cliché—nerdy and socially awkward. At least 90% of the technical co-founders I know are well spoken, well dressed, and perfectly capable of attending social events.…

" I've ran teams that had Whisky Friday, at 5pm we opened a bottle and invited members from all teams to come, sit down, talk, and have a drink. " How late did whisky Friday run? On the clock or off?

An hour or two, some people would split off to play board games, others would have a drink then hop on a bus or grab their carpool to go home.

Plenty of families on the team, sometimes kids + spouses would stop by and chat as well.

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

#152

Post by avgDev »

gaius wrote: post #74
raducu wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I may be a shitty person because of this.....but I exploit people like this sometimes, especially 'bros'. This works well when surrounded by a group of people. All you gotta say is...man there is no way anyone would do this, you would have to be a bad ass....smarter people usually ignore it but there is often one dude seeking attention that will do something stupid because he wants to be that bad ass.

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

#153

Post by avgDev »

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…

All I do is 9-5. I get recruiters reaching out all the time about some bs start up in the city. One company tried to excite by saying they have happy hour DAILY where they drink vodka/beer because their customer sells alcohol. IMO that is fking crazy, my uncle died to alcoholism at 48 and I know others that struggle with addiction. I don't want to be around alcohol and I can only imagine the culture at that company.

Another time I interviewed at a company that I found cool and I was interested in their product. I asked, "How is work life balance here" and they answered "we have many projects in the pipeline". I told them their salary was too low. I left and my recruiter called me upset that I changed my salary expectations during the interview.

Some companies are shitty.

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

#154

Post by finnthehuman »

crunchyfrog wrote: post #60

Anyone else find it strange that this person worked in sales for one company which called itself a startup despite being nearly two decades old but keeps making these sweeping generalizations about startups and tech? > Here was the biggest surprise about working in tech: even though everyone wears their team T-shirts and hoodies, rah-rah chants at the monthly all-staff meetings and competes for the sombrero of shame…

This is a key theme of all "tech" culture commentary. They play fast and loose with the distinction between "tech" as a business vertical, and the "tech" focused roles found inside any companies.

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

#155

Post by sonnyblarney »

hvidgaard wrote: post #83
sonnyblarney wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing wrong with family funded business but if after 18 years the 'dad' is the major shareholder it's a bad sign they were not able to raise much outside capital. It's not so bad, most companies are not 'high flying' but if they have 'startup culture' ... maybe not such a great thing. Also - family companies can be odd. It very much depends on the situation. An 18 year old company should simply not be referring to…

> Nothing wrong with family funded business but if after 18 years the 'dad' is the major shareholder it's a bad sign they were not able to raise much outside capital. Or they didn't have a need to. Why depend on other peoples money if you're fine without?

Because family rounds would have been earlier, and typically want less risk. Also, there are almost 0 companies that can do just as well with $10M as they can with 100.

More money is a powerful sign of momentum, and it generally increases valuation.

So sure, maybe $50M is enough and 'more' just comes on worse terms ... but a small company avoiding going past Round A ... it's far more likely they just couldn't raise.

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

#156

Post by Balgair »

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…

Like most things in history: it's complicated. Generally, in a feudal system: yes, you had a job for life and that was that. How stable was that? Not very, as food is still 'variable' until the industrial revolution and the green revolution of the 1930s-1960s[0]. But starvation and epidemics are a bit orthogonal to the question of employment. Still, the skills and, importantly, the tools used were expensive to learn and teach.

The feudal system, as done in Europe in the middle ages, is actually a result of just one man: Emperor Diocletian. His policies essentially ushered in feudalism as Europe knew it. He forbade the travel of skilled craftsmen, inadvertently encouraged the self sufficiency of large estates, and tried to fully regulate all prices in the empire. His early attempts gave Rome the Tetrarchy and yet more civil wars; essentially his efforts were total failures. He actually retired, a first, and went off to grow really big cabbages in modern day Turkey. Though many of his reforms flopped, the feudal system of 'jobs for life passed onto kin' did stick for about 1500 years.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution

[1] https://cafehayek.com/2006/09/an_empire_of_re.html

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

#157

Post by seem_2211 »

griffinkelly wrote: post #109
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…

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.

I agree. Interestingly as a sales recruiter, I've noticed that while the sales bro culture is well and alive in NYC / SF etc, a lot of the major aspects of it are especially magnified when you talk to candidates outside of the major tech markets.

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

#158

Post by skybrian »

lmm wrote: post #101

> 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 tha…

You both use possibly/possible and that's enough of a hedge that I don't think there's an actual disagreement here on facts, just on mood.

It's possible that there is a way to improve on textbooks, but this company won't find it. Or maybe they will?

It seems to me that writing just a single textbook (or equivalent content) well takes a lot of work, and improving on it would be harder than that.

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

#159

Post by wpietri »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #123
wpietri wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the other hand these startups are voluntary organizations. You choose to work there or not. I think this sounds good in theory and is very shaky in practice. For example, look at indentured servitude [1], where people can sell themselves into time-limited slavery. Once common, it has been banned. You will find people suggesting we bring it back while waving the banner of "freedom". It's especially erroneous here…

He talks about it as "cult-like" because they had standup meetings and used industry-standard acronyms. It certainly does feel weird to transfer into a new industry where there's a huge set of conventional wisdom you don't know, but that's not exactly manipulative.

Whether or not those are industry standard, they can be used in cult-like ways. E.g., I love stand-ups myself and have promoted them vigorously. But as with many Agile terms, a lot of the use I see and hear about is definitely cargo-culted: ritualistic, dogmatic, and not very effective compared with people who use them as tools to improve their work.

Here in particular he makes clear it's a veneer: "Six months in, I started to see through the acronyms and the carefully maintained optimism of my teammates. For all the talk of agility and disruption and 10X, there was a deep fear of fucking up."

Real cults regularly use reasonable-sounding religious jargon and performative optimism to paper over deep flaws. So I think he correctly describes this as cultish. And that's before we even get into the other cult-ish signs. You can do your own scoring here: http://www.neopagan.net/ABCDEF.html

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

#160

Post by skybrian »

asianthrowaway wrote: post #124

Why all the animosity towards "frat bros"? I worked in a "nerd only" environment before and I felt incredibly lonely. Nobody ever wanted to go out for drinks, nobody even talked during lunch.

We're talking in stereotypes, but I think it has more to do with your feelings about competition than about lunchtime conversation. When I was working I really enjoyed lunch (with the right people) and I'm definitely more into nerdy things.
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