31–40 of 43 posts
These posts are primarily to create engagement and promote themselves / their business. In general it's mostly hackneyed talking points because they are the most likely to get liked / retweeted.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Continuous integration and testing practices" are useless when you are going to rewrite the software from ground up every year or two years. You just patch the software until it's time to throw it away. Many startups write something that they can sell, get experience, realize what they should have been doing instead, then do that.
“Continuous integration and testing practices" are not exactly a great burden, and you don't know when the thing you are working on is going to snowball and become the thing you need to nurture and grow. Even if you pivot, you will likely want to re-use code written for earlier attempts. I suspect the reason startups don't do the bare minimum here is because their developers tend to be cheaper and less experienced (a…
Product and product research are the same.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Continuous integration and testing practices" are useless when you are going to rewrite the software from ground up every year or two years. You just patch the software until it's time to throw it away. Many startups write something that they can sell, get experience, realize what they should have been doing instead, then do that.
“Continuous integration and testing practices" are not exactly a great burden, and you don't know when the thing you are working on is going to snowball and become the thing you need to nurture and grow. Even if you pivot, you will likely want to re-use code written for earlier attempts. I suspect the reason startups don't do the bare minimum here is because their developers tend to be cheaper and less experienced (a…
I recommend watching Kent Back’s 3X talk for that, I also wrote a blogpost about it: https://rchavesferna.medium.com/designed-v-evolutionary-code...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Continuous integration and testing practices" are not exactly a great burden, and you don't know when the thing you are working on is going to snowball and become the thing you need to nurture and grow. Even if you pivot, you will likely want to re-use code written for earlier attempts. I suspect the reason startups don't do the bare minimum here is because their developers tend to be cheaper and less experienced (a…
Actually you are more likely to rewrite and migrate away from that legacy codebase once you succeed/pivot I recommend watching Kent Back’s 3X talk for that, I also wrote a blogpost about it: https://rchavesferna.medium.com/designed-v-evolutionary-code...
In practice I've never, ever, ever seen that happen: it's too much upfront cost to start over, especially when you have real customers and real data on top of it and you need to keep pumping out new features.
In other news: water is wet. Company isn’t a family, HR isn’t your friend, CEOs care about shareholder value. But no point being upset about it, you can learn to filter the copro speak out.
Do you mean "copro" as in shit? Or "corpo" as in corporate?
Big tears. Start ups are extremely high risk. If that’s not your cup of tea then go work for a mega Corp with better medical and retirement benefits.
The main complaint is about lies and misrepresentation as well as lack of empathy and appreciation; certainly that isn't particular to startups (and not all startups are like that) but your dismissal implies startup founders get some sort of pass for lying and generally behaving like shits.
Yet, that is the risk of being an early stage employee.
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.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Continuous integration and testing practices? We think those things are great, but we’ve been too busy to get to that, because we’re a startup ...”
It's kind of like trying to save time on a marathon by not stopping to tie your shoelaces. I mean it takes maybe a day or two at most to set up a CI/CD pipeline with Github actions or something similar. It takes maybe a day to set up test runners, and you can just sprinkle in small tests as you go. There are plenty of templates you can find depending on your language/platform that do most of this out of the box. You…
I’ve expressed it as sprinting forward as fast as you can while looking straight down at your feet - which is basically the exact same sentiment.
Of course there’s always “stopping to sharpen one’s saw”
A new I came up with myself “removing the stoplights hoping it will end rush hour sooner ...”
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Continuous integration and testing practices? We think those things are great, but we’ve been too busy to get to that, because we’re a startup ...”
“Continuous integration and testing practices" are useless when you are going to rewrite the software from ground up every year or two years. You just patch the software until it's time to throw it away. Many startups write something that they can sell, get experience, realize what they should have been doing instead, then do that.
UNLESS your team lacks the experience to build and maintain a test suite with a high benefit-to-cost ratio, which is unfortunately the case for most teams.
In this case I don’t have any good solutions, other than choosing one’s team and teammates carefully, before starting the project.
Her first point is even "Play the long game". It's not an overnight success. "Wealth creation doesn't happen in one go, make it a long game, with regular payouts, that then get invested in some form again & grow more & more".
The Twitter thread and the blog post aren't contrasting experiences. Yes you had to do lots of something you didn't want to do but that something was you, an engineer, had to do market studies for a feature you would later build. Yes most startups won't offer a clear career trajectory because, quoting the thread, "Will you be a brilliant full stack engineer or do you have potential to start as a good one but can pickup quickly & grow into a data engineering role".
Yeah start-ups could overhype the experience the way they oversell their product. But I don't see the that in the thread.