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How a startup loses its spark

blog.johnqian.com

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Re: How a startup loses its spark

#171

Post by dilyevsky »

g9yuayon wrote: post #143
version_five wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Importantly, this requires mature engineers and managers. Nothing worse (from personal experience) than working at a place that hires experienced engineering talent and then has a bunch of junior "leadership" telling them what to do. That's how you end up inundated with meetings and frameworks and blablabla. Obviously you need experienced developers to get stuff done without handholding, but you need managers that ca…

Absolutely. To start with, leaders must not be afraid of their teams making mistakes. Copying from another comment: "Netflix's culture demands very strong leadership and probably works only when the company is small enough. From CEO and down, leaders in every level need to know how to set context for their teams, give enough freedom to their teams, while making sure failures are manageable and success rate are maximi…

Hah I think Yury leads the Clickhouse development now. I interviewed with him and he seemed like a very interesting guy

Re: How a startup loses its spark

#172

Post by ravenstine »

throw3823423 wrote: post #168
version_five wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Importantly, this requires mature engineers and managers. Nothing worse (from personal experience) than working at a place that hires experienced engineering talent and then has a bunch of junior "leadership" telling them what to do. That's how you end up inundated with meetings and frameworks and blablabla. Obviously you need experienced developers to get stuff done without handholding, but you need managers that ca…

One of the strangest experiences in my career involves working for a very well known startup, which had lucked out into an extremely high talent pool, thanks to some key early hires. The problem is that while they had top engineers, their engineering management was no good, all taken from companies way bigger than them. The end result is that, as the layers of self-entrenching management grew, basically every enginee…

In addition to your last point, an employer may have good engineers and not even know it if their system discourages excellence. A lot of what the author mentions can cause good engineers to coast because merely changing a string can be an absolute slog of PRs, spurious feedback cycles, and code deciphering. Cash is king, so as long as an engineer gets paid and isn't totally driven insane, they'll stay just for the paycheck. Yet the whole time the employer has extra talent sitting there just being wasted.

Re: How a startup loses its spark

#173

Post by progman32 »

esafak wrote: post #167
g9yuayon wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. To start with, leaders must not be afraid of their teams making mistakes. Copying from another comment: "Netflix's culture demands very strong leadership and probably works only when the company is small enough. From CEO and down, leaders in every level need to know how to set context for their teams, give enough freedom to their teams, while making sure failures are manageable and success rate are maximi…

> does an attorney help you write code? That does not sound like the right question. How about: have we vetted our dependencies' licenses?

I suppose that's a tangible benefit to hiring well- you don't have to ask your team basic questions like these. Presumably the engineer well knows to check licenses.

Re: How a startup loses its spark

#174

Post by zenlf »

victor9000 wrote: post #166
zenlf wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you bully people into joining a company?

By employing high-pressure sales tactics to trigger fomo in candidates, except it never worked. He climbed the ladder at a well known tech company, almost to the very top, and tried to use those same "skills" in a startup context.

I see, thank you. You would assume that one would use tactics accordingly.

Re: How a startup loses its spark

#175

Post by bcantrill »

halkony wrote: post #140
bcantrill wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Terrible advice (from a broadly terrible book, I hasten to add). The reason that this is terrible advice: if you "fire quickly", it is because something is either grievously wrong (a mishire) or you are firing based on limited evidence. If the former, you have a hiring problem, not a firing problem; if the latter, you will generate a fear-based culture. Now, if you're running a prison, a fear-based culture may be exa…

Could you expand on your other criticisms of the book? How does it conflict with your experience? I'm still learning.

I honestly think the book is so bad that it's not worth a lengthy critique, but in short:

1. Dalio doesn't understand what a "principle" is -- but I can understand that "Aphorisms, Cliches and Hunches" is a less arresting title, if much more accurate. (See [0] for a fuller review on this.)

2. Dalio's version of Bridgewater doesn't line up with the experience of others -- which I have heard from so many people as to completely undermine whatever he might say.

Now, in the book's defense: I didn't get through it and perhaps it got suddenly palatable or interesting. However: I also couldn't get through it -- it was just that bad.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2233988523

Re: How a startup loses its spark

#176

Post by ravenstine »

bcantrill wrote: post #115
halkony wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ray Dalio talks about this in his book "Principles." The specific advice he offers is "hire slowly, fire quickly."

Terrible advice (from a broadly terrible book, I hasten to add). The reason that this is terrible advice: if you "fire quickly", it is because something is either grievously wrong (a mishire) or you are firing based on limited evidence. If the former, you have a hiring problem, not a firing problem; if the latter, you will generate a fear-based culture. Now, if you're running a prison, a fear-based culture may be exa…

It's very old school and discounts how many problems can actually be corrected faster and less expensively than by firing ASAP.

The reason "fire quickly" may be appealing advice to some is that solving problems takes effort without a clear guarantee of return, and leaders usually end up trying easy solutions that diffuse blame or create the illusion that something has changed. Then they wonder why productivity is not up or why employee sentiment is middleing.

Re: How a startup loses its spark

#177

Post by esafak »

Aurornis wrote: post #79
geophile wrote: post #63

I went through this cycle a few times. My favorite, and last successful startup was acquired by a gigantic international corporation four years in (2007), and I stuck around for another two years. After the product shipped, the need to support customers and sales definitely slowed things down. Our fantastic VP of Engineering became CTO, and hired a middle management moron as VP, and that was the end of the good times…

> Our fantastic VP of Engineering became CTO, and hired a middle management moron as VP Hardest lesson I learned when I got promoted to upper leadership positions: Hiring middle management is incredibly hard. The number of absolute sharks in the candidate pool is wild. People will show up, sense that you’re new, and tell you everything you want to hear about how they’ll solve all of your problems. They’ll claim they’…

Do you have any advice on avoiding or fixing this problem?

Re: How a startup loses its spark

#178

Post by Zetice »

ajkjk wrote: post #97
Zetice wrote: post #95

> If you find an idea that you think is both valuable to the company and interesting to you, you can just drop everything to work on it. What. How is an engineer deciding what to work on like this, even at a small startup?!

What do you mean? They just.. Do it? Nothing about an engineer precludes having good sense at other things.

Nothing about an engineer includes having good sense at other things, either.

In fact, many of the best engineers are profoundly bad at figuring out what to work on.

Re: How a startup loses its spark

#179

Post by esafak »

simon_000666 wrote: post #146

Love the summary, don’t agree org entropy is inevitable and also don’t agree that equity is a silver bullet. Many times the cure is worse than the disease, it creates a whole bunch of behavioral anti-patterns e.g. people sticking around too long, politics and grandstanding in order to win more equity. In my experience profit-share provides same positive incentives without the downsides.

How? Profits are short term indicators while equity is longer term.

Re: How a startup loses its spark

#180

Post by andrewstuart »

esafak wrote: post #167
g9yuayon wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. To start with, leaders must not be afraid of their teams making mistakes. Copying from another comment: "Netflix's culture demands very strong leadership and probably works only when the company is small enough. From CEO and down, leaders in every level need to know how to set context for their teams, give enough freedom to their teams, while making sure failures are manageable and success rate are maximi…

> does an attorney help you write code? That does not sound like the right question. How about: have we vetted our dependencies' licenses?

Man you just harshed the vibe of this free spirited Netflix love-in thread.
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