This is a bit of a cliché but I wonder if there are some cultural differences at play there. Like the hectic and chaotic pace for a Swede, would be business as usual for a Portuguese. This is likely not the root cause, but it probably did not help the miscommunication, maybe even during the recruiting phase. I also assume that if OP is not a native Portuguese speaker, it was harder to fit in, and it was easier to miss a critical info you're colleague could be discussing. I expect UnBabel to answer that OP was not communicating enough, etc. which could only be due to cultural differences.
Failing the startup game at Unbabel
51–60 of 241 posts
Re: Failing the startup game at Unbabel
#52As terrible as this experience was, what's most alarming is that you're 37, have been working for nearly 20 years in this field, and don't have enough savings to tide you over even two months without work. You really need to learn to save your income and cut your lifestyle.
I hope that if it turns out your story is true, that these guys are in some way brought to justice, karmic or otherwise. Best of luck.
Re: Failing the startup game at Unbabel
#53I see a clear lack of management, communication and leadership skills here. For how meaningless those words might seem here on HN, it really shows when startup founders do not have them. And it's not even a culture fit issue, dealing with people that are not a 100% fit is part of the challenge of managing a business.
"part of the challenge of managing a business"
Part of the benefit, you mean. Although we're only hearing one side, sounds like the culture there is pretty screwed up, so bringing in a guy with higher standards is obviously an epic culture fit fail but possibly the only way to repair the companies culture.
Although "pretty screwed up" sounds subjective, there are objective observations, and if they're not fulfilling contracts that's a rather objective measure (did a bank deposit occur or not?)
If you have a screwed up situation, and hire a guy who fits right into it as a perfect cultural fit, you haven't solved "the" problem, you now have two problems.
Re: Failing the startup game at Unbabel
#54Before you started working together, did you discus what would happen if things did not work well? Was your salary closer to that of the norm in Sweden, or that of the Portuguese? The difference is substantial. Did they think you where amazing at first and had too high an expectation? If you salary was closer to the Swedish norm then they may have thought that 2 weeks pay was a very substantial amount.
In Portugal, I believe, that unless you let people go before the trial period is over, then a whole lot of protective measures kick in.
For anybody looking to hire anybody abroad it is having the conversation about what happens when things don't go well.
It would be good to hear the Unbabel side of the story.
[Disclosure] Two of the founders are what I would call acquaintances of mine.
Re: Failing the startup game at Unbabel
#55As terrible as this experience was, what's most alarming is that you're 37, have been working for nearly 20 years in this field, and don't have enough savings to tide you over even two months without work. You really need to learn to save your income and cut your lifestyle. I hope that if it turns out your story is true, that these guys are in some way brought to justice, karmic or otherwise. Best of luck.
You don't know what the OP has been through it done. I'd avoid giving financial advice without knowing more about their situation.
Re: Failing the startup game at Unbabel
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or maybe he wants his story to sound more dramatic >So here I am, back where I started with barely enough money to eat. Come on, you're 37 years old Java professional from Sweden (which is not Nigeria or something). Even unemployed people there get more money which I used to make being programmer. > When I informed my landlord that I wouldn't be able to stay as long as planned she kicked me out of the apartment What,…
Completely agree, where are all the money you earned in the last 16 years?
Maybe he has to support a family or relatives - who are you to judge how he spends his hard earned money?
Re: Failing the startup game at Unbabel
#57I feel for you. I made a similar leap from an OK-paying regional job at an established niche cashcow to a London start-up. The perks: a coffee machine, senior pay cheque. The reality: a shit coffee machine, low moral, no realistic prospect of a profit and no willingness to pivot. 80% of costs have been sunk on a Facebook clone 'with a spin' while the owners try to sell snake oil to investors. We operate like the bad…
... the last lead dev couldn't understand the immeasurable benefits of model binding
So if the benefits can't be measured, you're suggesting that the front-end should be rewritten as a matter of pure faith in model binding?
(Honestly, that's my impression of how most people decide to adopt a JavaScript framework. "Yeah, we don't really understand the whole, and there are all these edge cases where you have to work against the framework, but overall it's immeasurably better because of philosophy and purity.")
I can't wait to have just one designer unencumbered, available and talented.
Good luck with that at a large corporation, I guess... :)
Re: Failing the startup game at Unbabel
#58If you read between the lines, it seems like this job definitely wasn't the right fit. Hence, they were probably in the right for letting you go. But they're definitely in the wrong for how they handled it. In particular, knowing that you moved to Portugal for the job, they should have given you severance sufficient to cover relocation back to Sweden.
> they were probably in the right for letting you go.
They violated his three month contract. They are not just morally wrong, but legally so as well.
If anything it sounds like they're pushing him around because they don't think he'll make the legal effort to get 1.5 months of pay.
Re: Failing the startup game at Unbabel
#59The truth of it is that the startup life isn't for every engineer. Startup code is messy. You don't have architects who draw UMLs for you, you don't have the luxury of time to do things right. At a small startup everything is often falling apart at the seams. Morale can rise and crash, repeatedly, like a roller coaster. Small startups often have to visit the iron bank of technical debt and take out a huge loan to put in that feature a very important customer wants right that second. Tests are very important, but spending too much on them can waste precious time. You're always flying low to the ground. You're looking at the short term: days and weeks, not months and years. That said, technical debt sucks and should be avoided at all cost, but priorities aren't the same when you're a three or four person team with about a year's worth of runway.
Re: Failing the startup game at Unbabel
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
The lesson is that it's hard to find good developers. More generally, it's quite hard to find good . People assume that available talent fits some sort of bell curve, with lots of 'average' people out there, but really it's more like an inverse square curve - there's a lot more people at the bottom end than the top. When you find the good ones you're nice to them because it's in everyone's interest.
> When you find the good ones you're nice to them because it's in everyone's interest. Why do you have to differentiate being nice to people based on their abilities in any way at all? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your point?
You should be as nice as you can to everyone, but pragmatically speaking you can't. There isn't enough time, money, or energy available. There are a good reasons to prioritise certain people though - I was suggesting that people who will have an impact on the startup industry are such people.