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Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture

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Re: Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture

#51

Post by dmajoraddnine »

api wrote: post #31
UK-AL wrote: post #12

The whole start-up culture encourages this behaviour. The current fire fast trend, rather than trying find the root cause for example. Firing someone can completely mess up someones career, but people are being told to fire someone on a whim, if they're not right fit(I mean that could be anything). Turn it around, and put yourself in their shoes.

I experienced "fire fast" on the receiving end once. It's the one and only time I've been let go for any cause from a job. It occurred at a shall remain unnamed big startup on the East Coast. I was hired on the merit of my portfolio and past positions (I do not have a high-snob-factor college degree), and dove in and got up to speed pretty quick. Job was to implement a lot of Java code and some .NET for a major web-b…

Very interesting story.

Looking back, did you feel like you were fully communicating your situation to your team? What did your manager say about your concerns?

Re: Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture

#52

Post by RogerL »

onion2k wrote: post #34
UK-AL wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of entrepreneurs, are the engineering equivalent of cowboys. Entrepreneurs who are professional software developers, are quite rare.

Throwing something together and putting it in front of people aims to answer the question of "what does the customer actually want?" Until you've answered that question you can't build a professional product - otherwise you're building without a defined set of requirements. Many entrepreneurs I've met hate the fact they're writing utter crap code, but without the budget to make mistakes (e.g. building the wrong thing…

I am not sure if you are disagreeing with my comment, or expanding on it, so let me clarify.

That was the point of my 'continuum' comment. If you don't know what the customer want, sure, one way to answer that is to prototype things and put it out there. In which case you are certainly not going to worry about whether the current system is scalable and so on.

But.

If your product is the front end to my bank, yes, do DO have to worry about whether it is a professional product or not. Even if it is a silly game, you need to stop and think about what you are going to put out - just hacking some shit together is unlikely to result in a product that people want. That is what we are talking about - think about what you are doing, adapt your strategies to your goal, and so on. Naturally that sometimes leads to substandard architecture - most understand and accept that. But to just run around randomly doing shit? That way lies madness.

Sorry, this is about impossible to capture in a single post, or series of posts. But so many companies have taken the difficulty of requirements definition and somehow conflated that into a 'ready. fire. aim' mentality about all aspects of the business.

edit: for a long time I worked in avionics. This was a vertical silo. Let's ignore the human safety aspect, which of course sways engineering quality immensely, and focus on the silo part. It was mostly really clear when something was a throwaway, and when something had value beyond a single product. For example, code to display an HSI. You could hack that out quickly for a trainer, but hey, look, we work in avionics. Think that just might be useful even if this trainer ends up thrown away? Of course. So, you might put a bit more effort into that part of the project. I wrote code in 94, for a prototype, that is still running today in many different products. Small parts of that code, but the important bits. 'Get Shit Done' doesn't even admit that conversation, whatever the right decision might be (there are certainly budget/time cases where you might just hack it together).

Re: Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture

#53

Post by brown9-2 »

api wrote: post #31
UK-AL wrote: post #12

The whole start-up culture encourages this behaviour. The current fire fast trend, rather than trying find the root cause for example. Firing someone can completely mess up someones career, but people are being told to fire someone on a whim, if they're not right fit(I mean that could be anything). Turn it around, and put yourself in their shoes.

I experienced "fire fast" on the receiving end once. It's the one and only time I've been let go for any cause from a job. It occurred at a shall remain unnamed big startup on the East Coast. I was hired on the merit of my portfolio and past positions (I do not have a high-snob-factor college degree), and dove in and got up to speed pretty quick. Job was to implement a lot of Java code and some .NET for a major web-b…

It's a really bad sign when people look at the end of the sprint as an absolute deadline for things needing to get done.

Re: Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture

#54

Post by PMan74 »

> There aren’t people who are A players and C players. Just people who are performing at an A level and at a C level.

That sounds very nice, like something Barney the Dinosaur would say. People who consistently perform at C level are C players. Maybe they would be A players doing something different but that's not much use to you.

Re: Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture

#55

Post by dmajoraddnine »

RogerL wrote: post #37
api wrote: post #14

I said this a while back in another thread, but it's actually more on-topic here: One of the worst things about tech culture is that it's full of socially awkward people who have learned a neat low-effort hack for getting around their poor social skills: be an asshole. Being an asshole is easy. It requires no actual effort spent in learning the intricacies of human social interaction or human nature. It requires no e…

This has nothing to do with tech, IMO. Wander over to Wall Street, go into some white collar office with a bunch of people doing data entry, go to some fulfillment center warehouse, and then go to a construction site and you'll see the same behavior. Managing people is not trivial. So, to bring tech into it, it really boggles my mind when I see these awful styles. I mean, we spend years developing our skills, and bre…

What I find particularly interesting about this is that, as technology creeps further and further into the mainstream, we're going to need more people writing/maintaining software. And they're likely going to be from the fatter part of the bell curve w/r/t skill (or else wouldn't they have become interested in software anyway?). So will it get easier or harder to manage coders when the average ability level moves toward the mean?

Re: Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture

#56

Post by jaegerpicker »

bane wrote: post #24
jaegerpicker wrote: post #6

Dear God this was my life at a past employer. The biggest issue is that Get Shit Done usually turns to Get Shit Done exactly how I want even though I won't tell you what it is because I'm "Getting Shit Done!". I know better now. If I see that at an interview now, I'll run, not walk, run away. People bitch about how hard it is to find good developers and yet hire talented developers but put them in shitty positions. T…

To play devil's advocate, I've been in startups where it seems like very little ever gets done and dithering and playing around with cool code becomes the norm. Eventually, a "bull dog" personality has to be brought in to light some dynamite under the ass of engineering and get them focused on delivery. GSD works so long as it's focused on shipping.

I'd argue that is rarely if ever works well. I think there is a world of difference between playing around with cool code and the GSD path. Controlled, focused, and communicative processes, driving towards building the best, most light weight piece of software/system you can works better than either extreme. Work hard, damn right but work smart also. It takes both IMO. Software developers are smart people by definition, enable them to use that for the benefit of the company. If someone is just scrambling to meet an arbitrary quota because they need to "GET SHIT DONE!" they aren't making smart decisions, and as a startup that will kill you.

Re: Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture

#57

Post by pnathan »

RogerL wrote: post #37
api wrote: post #14

I said this a while back in another thread, but it's actually more on-topic here: One of the worst things about tech culture is that it's full of socially awkward people who have learned a neat low-effort hack for getting around their poor social skills: be an asshole. Being an asshole is easy. It requires no actual effort spent in learning the intricacies of human social interaction or human nature. It requires no e…

This has nothing to do with tech, IMO. Wander over to Wall Street, go into some white collar office with a bunch of people doing data entry, go to some fulfillment center warehouse, and then go to a construction site and you'll see the same behavior. Managing people is not trivial. So, to bring tech into it, it really boggles my mind when I see these awful styles. I mean, we spend years developing our skills, and bre…

This is a good statement. Management is actually hard, and questions of leadership and management have been seriously thought about for centuries, because it is a hard problem that manifests itself in places where good results are expected.

Re: Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture

#58

Post by LaGrange »

bane wrote: post #24
jaegerpicker wrote: post #6

Dear God this was my life at a past employer. The biggest issue is that Get Shit Done usually turns to Get Shit Done exactly how I want even though I won't tell you what it is because I'm "Getting Shit Done!". I know better now. If I see that at an interview now, I'll run, not walk, run away. People bitch about how hard it is to find good developers and yet hire talented developers but put them in shitty positions. T…

To play devil's advocate, I've been in startups where it seems like very little ever gets done and dithering and playing around with cool code becomes the norm. Eventually, a "bull dog" personality has to be brought in to light some dynamite under the ass of engineering and get them focused on delivery. GSD works so long as it's focused on shipping.

That’s not about what this article is about, at all. It’s about thinking that „get shit done” is somehow enough, not that being goal-oriented is bad. It’s about thinking that screaming that term around is somehow a valid management technique.

In fact, you don’t need a bulldog, more like an elephant. Patient, but smart, and they’re gonna get there.

Re: Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture

#60

Post by api »

dmajoraddnine wrote: post #51
api wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I experienced "fire fast" on the receiving end once. It's the one and only time I've been let go for any cause from a job. It occurred at a shall remain unnamed big startup on the East Coast. I was hired on the merit of my portfolio and past positions (I do not have a high-snob-factor college degree), and dove in and got up to speed pretty quick. Job was to implement a lot of Java code and some .NET for a major web-b…

Very interesting story. Looking back, did you feel like you were fully communicating your situation to your team? What did your manager say about your concerns?

Yes and no.

I attempted to communicate the fact that something would have to be done about this code base if it were to scale beyond "beta," and talked a bit about making this an official part of the next sprint. The decision to do a barn storming run was a result of pressure and mixed messages. I was getting e-mails from the VP (not my direct boss) sort of implying that I was being slow and that my performance was not satisfactory.

In retrospect I may have walked into a political trap, but it's cool because I don't want to work for a company with politics like that. I also think in retrospect that there was poor communication on both sides. I didn't communicate the issue quite clearly enough, and they didn't communicate their priorities clearly enough. I also think getting mixed messages from different people above me in the company hierarchy really confused my sense of priority. If I hadn't gotten that I probably would have just done what I could on the issues at hand with the strong recommendation that the core be rewritten and moved on to the next sprint.

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