Failing the startup game at Unbabel

It seems that given Andreas' move to join the startup - if his explanation is accurate and complete - the level of responsibility of the founders does increase. I've been a founder asking people to move before and I've always felt that it adds a significant extra responsibility. You need to be quite a lot more certain it'll be a good fit before asking someone to move to join your company.

In my mind "culture fit" is the responsibility of the founder. If you're recruiting someone, you need to make the call if they fit into your culture. You can't really blame the person you're recruiting for not fitting in. You can (and should) fire them if they're not a fit, but it's still your hiring mistake, and you need to take the responsibility for it.

If a mudslinging contest can somehow be avoided, it'll be great to have a response from the Unbabel founders. There are probably some good lessons for both coders and founders here.

> I've been a founder asking people to move before and I've always felt that it adds a significant extra responsibility.

Exactly. If you ask people to do things outside the normal employment environment then you are partly responsible to make them whole if thing do not work out.

And if you can't do that then don't get people to move halfway across the continent for you, especially not without doing more work to see if there is a good fit or not.

I feel for you too. It wasn't a startup and the job was local, but I took a salary drop and swapped a cosy-but-unrewarding role with a global corporate to join a 40-strong SaaS development company that wanted someone to come in and sort out their internal and customer support infrastructure - they had no strategy, procedures or hierarchy and were constantly firefighting - shuffling resources between projects according to which customer complained the loudest.

It became clear very quickly that the two founders who brought me in wouldn't embrace any change that didn't come from them, and they had a total fear of empowering anyone else to make executive decisions - even about their own team members; I constantly found my guys being assigned to firefighting for other teams without my knowledge, so workload planning and scheduling knowledge sharing periods was impossible - we had information silos all over the place and if someone went on vacation they would often be called or emailed frequently because they were the only ones who knew about a specific part of a project or system. I wasn't allowed to attend support review meetings with the customers - the Directors went alone and told me what had been agreed, and they constantly dealt directly with one of my guys (the company 'guru'), assigning him work and making it impossible for me to grab his time so he could share his skills with the rest of the team - I highlighted it as a serious business risk that this guy was the only person who knew some of the tricks with some of our internal and customer infrastructures, and that he wasn't encouraged to document or share his knowledge, but they dismissed my concerns.

When we had that Friday afternoon talk after 9 months of trying to bring in some best practices and semblance of organisation, I left the office for the last time with a sense of great relief that I was out of the clusterfuck.

It only took me a few weeks to find a much better role and I hope things work out for you too.

Edit: Looking back at what I wrote, it might be that the OPs circumstances just offered the opportunity for a bit of a personal rant, which was not the intention. My main point was based on the fact (not explained at all by me in my post) that when I met the two Directors (twice), prior to joining, the setup and opportunity for me looked very positive, and I was convinced I was going to be empowered to fulfil the role. Things turned out very differently, and I clearly did not fit in with the company culture the founders wanted to both leave and stick with simultaneously (it was their comfort zone, and although they knew is was not the best was to run a business, they ultimately couldn't leave it). Moral: Shit happens, despite due dilligence, but that doesn't make it right.

When I was a few years out of school I went to my second job and inherited a huge code base with 4000 line java files, no tests, no one who worked on the code still around, etc, at a big non-tech company. I was young and stupid to think I was a bad programmer that I couldn't fix it all in a few weeks by myself.

I know it's in the past now, but try to avoid situations like this. If you can't, talk to your boss about what can reasonably be done in what time frame. Now I would try to figure out which parts can realistically be refactored and which can be isolated and rewritten iteratively make things better. I wouldn't take on new features unless I was confident I could deliver with spaghetti around.

Actually, this is only a problem for un-founded startups - but if you don't have the money, you should at least have the technical expertise necessary to create the software for your start-up for the next 6 months or so (before you get to a Proof-Of-Concept stage, and can get investors). When you get the money, it's almost always a problem of just offering enough money to offset the risk of a startup failing/the team not working out.