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Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture
101–110 of 212 posts
Re: Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture
#102" Everyone has the potential to be productive or unproductive. 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. " But some people will go from 0 to A faster and with less assistance than others within the scope of a specific set of tasks for which they have innate talent or relateable experience. Further, if the skill set demanded is fungible it is ch…
Unfortunately, it's difficult to evaluate the quality of the work that you will undertake as a developer from the outside. This leads to tons of employers with C-quality work clamoring for A-quality individuals when they could find a B-quality candidate much easier. How much of 'business' is predicated on this zero-sum mentality? It's all very tiring. You don't need the best; you just need good enough.
"How much of 'business' is predicated on this zero-sum mentality?"
This is a problem of asymmetric information, i.e. employees generally knowing themselves better than prospective employers, and wide uncertainty bands around the evaluation of prospective employees. A rational employer retains a C over replacing them with an expected B who might be an A or an F.
Re: Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture
#103"what a good manager does is help this person identify the things that are causing them to be unproductive.
They’ll help them develop new habits and encourage them in their efforts to adopt them.
They’ll force them to take a step back and see the bigger picture.
They’ll work together to build new systems that will help them be successful.
Shit, at the very least they’ll recommend a good self help book."
Are you serious??? With all due respect, if you are not capable of developing new habits, stepping back and looking at bigger picture or (sigh) reading a good self help book on your own without someone holding your hand, then you have a problem. Wake up my friend and GET SHIT DONE!
Re: Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People bitch about how hard it is to find good developers and yet hire talented developers but put them in shitty positions. Notwithstanding the fact that the GSD mentality is often nonsense that comes from folks who don't know what they're doing, I would make the point that a lot of software jobs are "shitty" in the context of what many expect to find when they decide to become a developer. And that's life. Even a…
"That's life" what a load... no, that's a corporate job which doesn't give a shit about you. It's not really life. The only reason people put up with it is because they're told "that's life" or "that's just how it is." when that's meaningless bullshit.
Why would you expect a corporate job to give a shit about you? It's not a person (regardless of what the Supreme Court says...), it doesn't have feelings.
Your parents love you unconditionally. If you want anyone else to care about you, you have to make it happen through your actions.
Re: Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture
#105Dear 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…
Half of the work at a startup, or in programming (and many other things) is figuring out what to get done next. GSD isn't a problem in itself, the people who have both vision and GSD are usually killing it and I love working with those people. What you describe is more like a PITA-client who picked up GSD as a buzzword.
Re: Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture
#106Is this an actual thing? Are there really people out there who think running around yelling "Get Shit Done!" constitutes actual project management? We are doomed.
Yes, I worked at a large media company where the GM would run around saying this exactly in this way. However, ON TOP, there was a massive PM department that was poorly setup and just slowed everything down. Worst of both worlds.
Bumper-sticker management.
Re: Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture
#107Sorry about the server issues. Cached version: http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?&d=760352947104&mkt=en-US&set...
"Could not find the requested document in the cache."
This worked for me:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
Re: Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture
#108I think I have a different definition of get shit done than this blog post describes.
To me getting shit done means actually getting your work done. It means you don't read Hacker News all day long (oops) and send cute cat pictures to the entire office every hour. It doesn't mean you take every possible shortcut and hacky workaround to save a few hours of implementation time.
However, sometimes (and ONLY sometimes) that's what you are going to have to do. Just make sure you fix it later. If you do that all the time, it's going to blow up on your hands sooner or later (or on the hands of the poor schmuck they hire to work on it long after you're gone).
I work for a startup getting pressured by several BIG competitors that have all the advantages (client base, billions in the bank, established brand names, etc.), so we're under a tremendous pressure to "get shit done". There have been times (actually, I think only one time) when the right call was to get shit done in the wrong way of the phrase. We fixed it later. The core of the solution was solid, though.
We've also been unlucky to hire people who do NOT get shit done. It's like they have some sort of perpetual procrastination engine built in their brains. No amount of planning or iterating worked. Shit just wasn't getting done in any way, poorly or excellently. If you can't decide what approach to take, just pick ONE and move forward. Chances are you'll learn something along the way to validate or invalidate your approach, and you can then adjust.
Re: Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture
#109Tripadvisor's slogan is "Speed Wins," which seems like it would translate into "rarely pay down technical debt." It's always put me off of working there.
Re: Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture
#110What's your experience with larger multi-layer structures, as if someone up the chain is pushing GSD, there is less opportunity to fix this downstream, leaving people to constant stress.