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How a startup loses its spark

blog.johnqian.com

261–270 of 287 posts

Re: How a startup loses its spark

#261
post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If those other fired people did anything substantial it’s an illusion to think you can take that work on. Otherwise the firing was justified as one person can apparently do the work…

You can absolutely take that work on. Are you going to get it all done? Probably not, but like I said, pick and choose.

Yes, for example, if the team was building new features, being 1 not 4 could just means it takes longer. As an example (hmm doesn't strictly mean s/he is doing 4 people's work though)

Re: How a startup loses its spark

#262

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…

Someone just forwarded this to me. It's absolutely a true story and it changed the course of my career as well as starting Netflix OSS. I'm forever grateful to Yuri and Ruslan Meshenberg for their support.

Re: How a startup loses its spark

#263
> At a well-run seed stage startup, engineers will often describe the work experience as intoxicating. At a larger company, the best you get is "enjoyable". Why does this happen? Is it inevitable?

Oh cool, I can work super hard to make someone else a bunch of money! What an exciting prospect. At least let me put on some clown makeup first

Re: How a startup loses its spark

#264
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?!

Engineers at small startups are generally founder minded. They’re like founders, and are passionate about the product and the problem. That’s how they get to decide/involve in the decision about what to work on

As an engineer at a startup, not sure that matters much.

The whole point is the founders have the eye, not as much so the engineers.

Re: How a startup loses its spark

#265
post #207
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure fine but if the question is 'how does an engineer know what's good to do' the answer is, "get good". Ask questions, learn what's important, and think about more than code.

That’s what the non-engineers are doing though, and it’s not work everyone should do. Engineers should do engineering things at startups because nobody else can.

That's naive. A competent well rounded human is far more of an asset than an engineer who can't handle anything else. I would never want to work with an engineer who had no good sense about anything else unless I had to, like if there was some skill only they had.

Re: How a startup loses its spark

#266
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

If you can tell from the first meeting, why was this person even hired in the first place? The only time i experienced something like that was when the CEO hired someone without asking anyone else to vet them.

Some people are just good at interviews or talking themselves up.

Back in university, most of the students in my Chemistry course had A-Bs (grades were published publicly). The final for the course though was set up by some national body (in the US), and all but a few in the class got no higher than a D. Why? Because the national test was reflective of what students actually learned. The typical university multiple-choice test just self-selected good test takers. I myself got in the habit of only attending certain classes once a month because I knew how to game the tests and still walk away with an A-B average (e.g. have a good idea of what will be tested, know the material well enough that you can eliminate 50% of the false answers, and then make an educated guess on the rest.)

The same is true in hiring. It can be easily gamed if you don't have a great interview process (most companies don't). Even worse, part of that is by necessity. Each candidate has a different set of experiences, but the interview is made to be as routine and consistent as possible to weed out any potential biases (e.g. candidate given purposefully hard question or colored feedback because interviewer didn't like them). To truly vet a candidate, you would need situational questions and feedback, like they quickly glossed over some part of the question, so I'm going to go off-script and drill down into this area. Big companies especially run far away from that due to risk of discrimination lawsuits.

Re: How a startup loses its spark

#267

The failure modes I've encountered: 1. Toxic team members who can't be fired. These people will reduce morale down to zero and force your best people to leave. In one case it was the CEOs long-time friend, and in the other case it was one of the technical founders. If you find yourself as an employee in a similar situation, then go ahead and pack things up because it will never get better. 2. Selling to Fortune 500s…

For #1, see the book "The No Asshole Rule". Does a great job at expanding on this. It happens not just with nepotism, but sometimes because management legitimately believes the employee is valuable. But you have to look at net impact on the org and not just individual impact. You can have an exceptionally talented engineer that chases everyone away due to horrendously toxic teamwork.

Re: How a startup loses its spark

#268
post #78

> [At larger companies...] Talking to users is for PMs, silly! You stick to what you’re good at. At best you get a summary of user insights and a reasonable task priority list derived from it. At worst you get a confusing task list built off a mistaken understanding of users and the manager’s selfish vision, and no one can explain why each task matters. Not necessarily. At the large companies I've worked at (>200 peo…

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