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How a startup loses its spark

blog.johnqian.com

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Re: How a startup loses its spark

#191

Post by flimsypremise »

Whenever I read something like this I roll my eyes and assume the person writing it is either pretty junior or the specific founder type who has weirdly dysfunctional expectations about why their employees work for them. I think a lot of this stems from the bizarre culture of the SF tech world, but outside that bubble people do not really think about their jobs in this way. I emphasize _job_ here. The best devs I've worked with were not "intoxicated" with the job. They were professionals who knew what they were doing, were well paid for that knowledge, and outside of the job they had full lives with friends and personal interests.

This sort of narrative is type of propaganda designed to get young, impressionable engineers to commit more of their lives to their job than the salary they are paid would justify. Do not do this if you are a young engineer. There are a lot of bosses out there who will take advantage of your excitement and naivete to utterly destroy you personal life at the expense of the business, but for every one of those there are others who will have the normal expectation of the employer/employee relationship.

Re: How a startup loses its spark

#192

Post by aardvark179 »

samhuk wrote: post #155
lr4444lr wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's an idea I've seen work: stop assuming people over 35 aren't a good fit for a start up. People who've been in leadership for a while but have the chops and in their day did on the ground work, and who can - given enough time and guidance - understand the minutest detail of a new tech stack or financial maneuver, command the respect of the super stars doing the day to day for their contribution of far seeing lea…

Preface: I'm not saying that this norm is necessarily right, rather just explaining the mechanism that I believe is at play here. Isn't part of the issue that early on in a start-up, everyone is indispensable, and often that comes with putting in extra hours and going the "extra mile" for the viability of the company? When you are over 35, 30 even, you are much more likely to have a spouse, children, etc., and all th…

> Isn't part of the issue that early on in a start-up, everyone is indispensable, and often that comes with putting in extra hours and going the "extra mile" for the viability of the company?

There seems to be a strong culture in American companies, and especially in startups, of rewarding heroic efforts. But if I see people putting in heroic efforts to get things done I tend to look for ways to not need those efforts in the future.

Good experienced engineers can help ensure that you don’t keep having to go that extra mile to get the job done in the first place.

Re: How a startup loses its spark

#193

Post by dilyevsky »

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…

A mishire situation is what usually this advice is about. Maybe if you hire only people you previously worked with you can bring the mishire rate way down but for majority that rate will probably be very high is what I commonly hear.

Re: How a startup loses its spark

#194

Post by [deleted] »

flimsypremise wrote: post #191

Whenever I read something like this I roll my eyes and assume the person writing it is either pretty junior or the specific founder type who has weirdly dysfunctional expectations about why their employees work for them. I think a lot of this stems from the bizarre culture of the SF tech world, but outside that bubble people do not really think about their jobs in this way. I emphasize _job_ here. The best devs I've…

[deleted]

Re: How a startup loses its spark

#195

Post by reaperducer »

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…

Hiring extremely good engineers is hard, but hiring good managers is far harder. They also are much better at driving out the good talent tan a bad engineering hire is.

"People join companies. They quit managers."

Re: How a startup loses its spark

#196

Post by bonestamp2 »

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…

> The end result is that, as the layers of self-entrenching management grew, basically every engineer left within 3 years

I'm currently in this situation. Our small company was bought out a couple years ago. Before, we had one meeting every quarter and now we have at least one meeting every day (if not more). The managers aren't listening when I tell them that engineers are leaving because there are too many meetings. The crazy thing is that most of the meetings aren't even related to what we actually work on, it's absolutely insane.

Re: How a startup loses its spark

#197

Post by spoonfeeder006 »

flimsypremise wrote: post #191

Whenever I read something like this I roll my eyes and assume the person writing it is either pretty junior or the specific founder type who has weirdly dysfunctional expectations about why their employees work for them. I think a lot of this stems from the bizarre culture of the SF tech world, but outside that bubble people do not really think about their jobs in this way. I emphasize _job_ here. The best devs I've…

I am bookmarking this comment. My first job out of college was a great project for the world, but also at nearly grocery store wages. It was a small company with literally 2-3 people. The CEO was an old man "with no retirement" and also "2 million dollars in debt"

Later when I offered to defer my wages until the product was released (it seemed he was "running out of money"), eventually all the trust building tactics he had used on me over the years were cashed out on as I gradually became disillusioned to realize him paying me dirt was deliberate. He could have easily paid me a decent wage for that work, but ultimately I met nothing but resistance and breadcrumbing and stonewalling when trying to get a decent pay

"I don't have the money to pay you" he said at one point after the fact when I asked to be paid what he owes me. But afterwards and after I had rage quit, he simply hired someone else to start from scratch on my 2nd project after I had told the other developer that one thing I saw first hand working for him was how corporations don't care about people

Granted I wasn't the fastest developer in terms of the number of hours I worked, and the new person he hired seems to have been pretty good, definitely above my level, assuming they implemented all the features I did. But I was getting my work done just fine as far as I and the other dev could tell

Re: How a startup loses its spark

#198

Post by aaronblohowiak »

silentsea90 wrote: post #129
g9yuayon wrote: post #128

I really like the approach of Netflix of 10 years ago when it was still small. They hired mature people so they could get rid of processes. Indeed, they actually tried to de-process everything. As a result, things just happened. Non-event was often mentioned and expected in Netflix at that time. Case in point, active-active regions just happened in a few months. A really easy to use deployment tool, Asgard, just happ…

Wow that's so cool but makes sense! Is it not like that there anymore? They still hire experienced engineers, so I wonder what changed? As an aside, is there any low hanging fruit / interesting work left to do at Netflix?

It was a very very special place to work for a time. Everything changes, though, and I will leave it to say the Netflix I left early this year was a completely different place from the one I joined almost 8 years ago.

Re: How a startup loses its spark

#199

Post by denvrede »

F-W-M wrote: post #154
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…

In Germany it is very hard to fire people but there is a six month period in the beginning, where one can be fired without reason. Is it possible to gauge a new employee during that timeframe?

I would say you can generally (from my experience >95% of the time) identify a bad hire in roughly a month, mostly in two weeks and then give yourself / them additional two to be very sure.

We just hired for a management position a couple of month ago and I could tell from the very first meeting that it was a bad hire. I made sure with my team that I’m not totally wrong and then communicated my doubts to the C-Level. It took some time because they wanted to give them a real chance but just before the probation ended there was an evaluation meeting and the feedback was, without exception, negative. Took two days and they were gone.

Of course there will be hires that can uphold their charade for six month but I would say that’s an exception.

Re: How a startup loses its spark

#200

Post by jotato »

Aurornis wrote: post #126
jotato wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I'll add - or maybe it expands on too technical of a leader - is when a brilliant outside hire is brought in to fill the arch/principal/whatever role. Then they start looking at the app and questioning every decision calling everything they don't have context on "technical debt" I've seen it a few times. I told a new VP of Eng he was being asinine because he wasn't there for the original problem, decision,…

It sounds like the VP Eng was actually a great leader if he could take feedback like that in stride and admit when he was wrong. Bad leaders would have dug in their heels and sidelined the person with abrasive feedback (you).

Absolutely. My point is that it doesn't always go that way. He had his faults, but he could take string feedback. If I recall, he said something to the effect of "not many people speak to me like that. I forget how helpful it is to be challenged"
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