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A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools

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Re: A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools

#241

Post by wpietri »

fivre wrote: post #74
Hnrobert42 wrote: post #33

I am the CIO of a mostly remote, cybersecurity startup (50 FTEs). I balance between not single-threading all choices through me and not letting things get too out of hand. That means no one is every really happy. E.g., we use Uberconference for videoconferencing. We thoroughly looked at a bunch of others and chose UC for its functionality, price, and simplicity (every conference gets a simple phone number, no stupid…

The individuals in aggregate may be toddlers, but unfortunately the C-suite as individuals are often also toddlers, at least vis a vis their responsibilities. Tasked with providing IT infrastructure that works for the company, they seem to largely shirk their responsibility and choose IT infrastructure that best serves them, the needs of others be damned. CIOs will seemingly gladly choose something that provides a go…

> this corporate disdain for quality of work environment

You may find the term "managerialism" handy. It's the belief that managers and execs are the central story of a company, that everything must flow through them, especially key decisions. And of course, that as the special people, they deserve outsized rewards. It's the dominant philosophy of US business, and although it seems eternal to us, it was invented in the 1950s and 1960s, along with the MBA that became a vital qualifier to join the managerial class. And it is definitely a class system; note who flies in "business class", for example.

It took me a long time to be able to see it, but once I did I see it all over the place. It was sort of the same struggle when I learned functional programming: I had never really thought about the rest of programming, its philosophy and value system. I was soaking in it, so I didn't need to.

The book that got me going was "Confronting Managerialism", but I'm sure there's a fair bit more out there these days: https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Ec...

Re: A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools

#242

Post by TACIXAT »

Hnrobert42 wrote: post #33

I am the CIO of a mostly remote, cybersecurity startup (50 FTEs). I balance between not single-threading all choices through me and not letting things get too out of hand. That means no one is every really happy. E.g., we use Uberconference for videoconferencing. We thoroughly looked at a bunch of others and chose UC for its functionality, price, and simplicity (every conference gets a simple phone number, no stupid…

Damn I hope I never work under someone who considers their employees to be toddlers.

Re: A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools

#243

Post by taylorwc »

It's fun seeing the comments here and the two sides of this. For me, being a team of 1, I pay for gsuite, Streak, Calendly, Docsend, Hellosign, and github. When I add a few staff members, I'll happily pay for Slack and Notion.

Yes, it's a lot of subscriptions for a tiny team, but if the combination of all of those (or heck even one of them) saves me 2-3 hours per month, it's worth it. If I close one deal, it's worth it. But really I love that I can set up a few zaps on Zapier and write a few API calls and it frees me up to spend my time thinking about higher-value things.

I get vendor fatigue and I understand that many of these tools get really expensive as you scale, but I'm pretty thrilled to live in a time when I can find tools that I can make talk to each other for a relatively low monthly cost.

Re: A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools

#244

Post by propogandist »

sheeshkebab wrote: post #163
apk-d wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this only true for US-based companies? Where I'm from, I rarely see use of subscription services (especially ones that incur per-seat costs). Developers here tend to earn roughly the same number , but in a different currency , which makes all software and services several times more expensive. This results in preference of OSS alternatives and free tiers whenever possible. We use Discord for communication, Gitlab…

In US, I’m seeing the culture of hacking your own hardware dying. Everyone wants to use stuff that takes 5 mins setup (long term rent costs don’t matter), doesn’t need any wires or screws, or maintenance - only what is in my wallet. That applies to most startups, and now started also propagating up to larger companies (although those have more stringent controls). In terms of developing software - it’s the same there…

it's as if everyone is working towards a quick exit rather than long term sustainability. Few startups seem to care about profitability and bootatrapping, it's all about hypergrowth, mostly using investor money.

Re: A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools

#245

Post by wpietri »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #213
notyourday wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not entirely accurate, if not to say that's completely inaccurate. Contrary to what people might think, companies are not ran as military with the CEO being a commander-in-chief. In most of the companies, members of the C-suite have a certain or total autonomy to make any decisions that they want as long as it is somewhat within their domain. The conflicts between them are resolved via negotiation and horse tr…

I cannot tell how is each company organized, but I am working in a $250 billion company and I had the occasion a few years ago to find out in detail how this works when our CIO had to approve some IT purchase and there were some technical problems with the authorization system: our CFO does not have the authority to sign or approve any IT contract and nobody in the company will ever execute the payment. We are not or…

Perhaps you should consider that your old, $250 billion company is going to be a bit more formal than a young, $50 million company.

If your company really does have a purchasing proces so rigorous that it will reject an "IT" contract signed by the CFO despite it being within their purchasing limit, then there's a reason for that. The reason typically being that in the past there was enough naughtiness by some CxO that they went to all the trouble of putting some heavy bondage into their purchasing rules.

Also, I would be willing to make a cash-money bet that CxOs shopping outside their domain authority don't get immediately fired for that. Even at your company.

Re: A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools

#246

Post by ibeckermayer »

wpietri wrote: post #241
fivre wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The individuals in aggregate may be toddlers, but unfortunately the C-suite as individuals are often also toddlers, at least vis a vis their responsibilities. Tasked with providing IT infrastructure that works for the company, they seem to largely shirk their responsibility and choose IT infrastructure that best serves them, the needs of others be damned. CIOs will seemingly gladly choose something that provides a go…

> this corporate disdain for quality of work environment You may find the term "managerialism" handy. It's the belief that managers and execs are the central story of a company, that everything must flow through them, especially key decisions. And of course, that as the special people, they deserve outsized rewards. It's the dominant philosophy of US business, and although it seems eternal to us, it was invented in t…

I’ve seen another user on HN who grew up in the USSR call it “soviet capitalism”.

A friend of mine also recognized it in this 2015 article (see footnote 1): https://reasonandliberty.com/articles/obamacare

Re: A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools

#247

Post by wpietri »

goatherders wrote: post #149
Ididntdothis wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Conversely, if you are a developer and you have time to be shopping for video conferencing solutions, what’s the point in having you?” I am often forced to spend a ton of time dealing with tools that don’t work. At my company a lot of meetings start with 10 minutes trying to make the phone conference work. So it’s good use of time to look for tools that work. Same with Jira. IT bought it and promised to customize it…

Every conferencing solution shares one trait: at least one person on a call of N+1 people will have trouble joining and getting everything to work. I have been making the same "joke" for years on calls that everyone on the call should join me in quitting our jobs to create a teleconference solution that works. Hardyharhar. (The practical solution for teleconferencing issues is to get people to join a couple minutes e…

> (The practical solution for teleconferencing issues is to get people to join a couple minutes early)

If everybody has to join early, then "early" is the new "on time". It's just sacrificing a different n minutes for setup issues.

Re: A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools

#248

Post by rossdavidh »

matsemann wrote: post #24

Not exactly the same, but I have sometimes wondered how many startups are just burning other startups' money, and would collapse if VCs tightened the belt. For instance, startup X seems profitable but all revenue is from other startups not making money yet. Like a big ponzi scheme of sorts. Most products mentioned in the article are now mainstream, but for lots of them a few years back they were small and only used b…

This has all happened before. This will all happen again. http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html

Re: A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools

#249

Post by rossdavidh »

rossdavidh wrote: post #248
matsemann wrote: post #24

Not exactly the same, but I have sometimes wondered how many startups are just burning other startups' money, and would collapse if VCs tightened the belt. For instance, startup X seems profitable but all revenue is from other startups not making money yet. Like a big ponzi scheme of sorts. Most products mentioned in the article are now mainstream, but for lots of them a few years back they were small and only used b…

This has all happened before. This will all happen again. http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html

Also, you could add Amazon AWS to the list of businesses that look profitable now but are making their money off a lot of companies that are not profitable and never will be.

Re: A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools

#250

Post by wpietri »

ibeckermayer wrote: post #246
wpietri wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this corporate disdain for quality of work environment You may find the term "managerialism" handy. It's the belief that managers and execs are the central story of a company, that everything must flow through them, especially key decisions. And of course, that as the special people, they deserve outsized rewards. It's the dominant philosophy of US business, and although it seems eternal to us, it was invented in t…

I’ve seen another user on HN who grew up in the USSR call it “soviet capitalism”. A friend of mine also recognized it in this 2015 article (see footnote 1): https://reasonandliberty.com/articles/obamacare

That's a good description. I'll also talk about "corporate feudalism", where you have the Duke of Engineering fighting with the Duke of Product, and the King/CEO must mediate the conflicts. The peasants, of course, are basically property of their various nobles.

But I really like "soviet capitalism", as it points at a key contradiction. Somehow, fans of capitalism, which maximizes surplus value by freeing individuals to make economically rational choices, rarely seem to notice that large corporations never make use of the mechanisms of capitalism, instead relying on central planning. And like the soviet era, corporate central planners often do things that are economically irrational, but useful to their careers and their quality of life.

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