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If you want to get rich, stop being a fucking joker

sebastianmarshall.com

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Re: If you want to get rich, stop being a fucking joker

#131

Post by vog »

megablast wrote: post #110
rkon wrote: post #29

At first I thought this was posted by one of the email's recipients as a form of revenge on its douchebag author. Then, I realized it was posted by the author on his own blog... how embarrassing. The whole letter/blog simultaneously reeks of desperation, egotism, conceit and condescension. He clearly craves validation and doesn't hesitate to dole it out to himself. "I picked you guys because you're the best! Now quit…

Surely this guy is joking. "A joker is someone who does not complete something, and has excuses. Don't be a fucking joker." and later ...Hannibal is his greatest hero, the guy who ALMOST conquered rome, but had a great excuse for not doing so. and "Now, here’s the score. I had a very fast, but totally possible timetable. At first, we were on it, and killing it. Then, one of us slipped. I don’t know who slipped first,…

He's joking for sure. Just have a look at the very first paragraph! (see also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3246869)

Re: If you want to get rich, stop being a fucking joker

#134

Post by illumen »

bermanoid wrote: post #125

"Dear Sebastian, we quit, piss off. Best, Sam, Lee, and Jon." Seriously, this is just ridiculous. Is there anyone here that would actually put up with this ridiculous public shaming at all, let alone from a CEO that's off in Asia staying up "20 hours" to print flyers for one of his other companies, while he bitches that you're not reneging on your teaching commitments (which I would presume he knew about when he took…

It reads like the person has a drug habbit. I feel sorry for the employees.

Re: If you want to get rich, stop being a fucking joker

#140

Post by bermanoid »

nirvana wrote: post #24

I can identify with what sebastian is experiencing here. Its easy to work with friends, or be friendly with your employees. Its easy for things to get casual. Its easy for people to start running everything by you. Its VERY easy for the sense of urgency to just go away. Its very hard to get people highly motivated about time. It's easy to kill an entire day with BS, and let things just stretch out. Especially when yo…

Its a shame most of the comments on this seem to be reddit quality. Almost as if the people making them have never been in this situation.

I think the problem is, anyone that's worked in the startup world for a while has been in this situation. But most of them have seen it from the other side.

Where you've got maybe 2% equity in a company if you're lucky, and a salary that's about half what you'd be making flipping Java-burgers at a bank. Where you, the sysadmin-at-large (amongst other hats that you wear) see first-hand that traffic levels are a couple orders of magnitude less than you were supposed to set up the system to scale to. Where you're asked to put in 55 hours this week instead of the usual "lazy" 50 because the killer hail-mary-feature that's going to save the company (and is suspiciously similar re: customer visibility to the killer hail-mary-feature of last week) has to be pushed out by Monday or else, ...what, all 20 of the people that bothered to sign up to the mailing list will be disappointed at the missed deadline...? Blech.

Sure, sometimes the situation is different, sometimes it really is a matter of a few people with equal stakes in the outcome not equally pulling weight, and that can be a real problem worth worrying about. But I'm always skeptical when I see CEOs complaining about lazy drones, quite often these complaints are more indicative of top-down scope-creep, bad time estimates, or a failing business model than any actual problem with the workers.

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