Sick of these startup executives, painting a rosy picture for employees

There are other reasons people enjoy working at startups.

I currently work at a large org, decent team, the pay and hours are good, they look after their people pretty well. I'm pretty happy, but...

But getting anything done is a pain, because every project ultimately touches at least 5-10 different teams - legal, compliance, couple of systems teams, operations, security, risk/grc (different department from technical security!), supplier assurance (sub department of risk), privacy (different department from legal & security!), architecture, marketing, brand (different from marketing for some reason), etc. These are just the ones I remember talking to in the past year, sometimes other "interested" teams come out of the woodwork. For example, if your project touches "retail" there's a whole separate world there.

There are good reasons all these different department exist (enforce best practices / scar tissue / to protect the org), but most of those people have no interest in the success of your project and have no "skin in the game". They are free to govern you to death because they have no other real work to do. They don't have to ship anything and do not bear the costs of the requirements they impose. The tendency is therefore for compliance requirements to escalate.

New people come in, excited about doing things, and you watch them slowly get crushed as the sum of all the external requirements and legacy tech forces endless delay and compromise.

Startups let you ship more, with less "oversight" and assume different (often broader) responsibilities. If you're lucky, and in a high-trust competent team, it feels low friction. A lot of people (including me) enjoy that.

I'm CTO at a startup and I've made a 180 on this in the last year. I used to paint a rosey picture. Now I feel it's my duty to give employees full disclosure on what they can expect: cash burn, runway, technical debt, what we likely can and can not spend time on, that potential stock options should not influence the decision making, because the future is impossible to predict and it's very likely to be worth nothing.

I do also tell candidates that it's an investment in themselves and a great learning experience. You'll get more responsibilities than in typical companies and you'll be very out of your comfort zone. If you're the kind of person that thrives in such an environment, and learns best by experience rather than by theory, then this might be for you.

Misrepresentation and lack of appreciation is common to plenty of companies; nothing to do with startups particularly, so I'm confused as to the reason for that specific targeting.

I think as much as anything its just (unfortunately) part of the system; some people lack ethics, some are just under pressure to recruit without anything to distinguish them to the employee beyond what they can conjure up as a goal and hope it sticks.

Needless to say, there are plenty of recruiters who could point their fingers at employees not fulfilling their part of the deal as well.

Plus they’ll be making something like ‘plumbing tools, but for dogs’.

Like, I’m happy you are paying me a lot of money to work for you, but don’t expect me to be excited about that.

Oh man, this is a fantastic summary.