After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake
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Re: After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake
#2According to the Wikipedia page the company was founded in 2000...I don’t think you can be called a “start-up” when you’re almost 20 years old...
Re: After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake
#3I am incredibly sick and tired of this stereotype:
> The most common is the engineer who, slaving for hours in the proverbial garage, programs his (or, infrequently, her) way to glory and gets showered with millions by venture capitalists. He is the tech cliché—nerdy and socially awkward.
At least 90% of the technical co-founders I know are well spoken, well dressed, and perfectly capable of attending social events.
It seems like 100% of the problems with this company come from letting sales people (or in this case, men) fresh out of college dictate the culture.
None of the startup founders I work with let their companies go this far, because at the end of the day they have work to do.
I've ran teams that had Whisky Friday, at 5pm we opened a bottle and invited members from all teams to come, sit down, talk, and have a drink. Team culture doesn't require being horribly irresponsible. People who didn't drink at all came and enjoyed themselves just fine. (I can say that because for the majority of the time I ran the team, I didn't drink)
Same team did have nerf guns, but we also had nuanced discussions about world politics, literature, and science.
On a related note, what is up with places having beer available around the clock? Does anyone actually get up at 1pm and have a drink?
tl;dr Give me a few million and I promise to build a responsible, respectful, team culture.
Re: After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake
#4According to the Wikipedia page the company was founded in 2000...I don’t think you can be called a “start-up” when you’re almost 20 years old...
The article brings this up (but you can of course disagree with its conclusion):
> I was initially mystified by how a company that’s been around since 2000 could still call itself a start-up. It turns out it’s not unusual for software companies to hold on to the start-up classification long after the point when businesses in other industries would be considered established. Software companies are forever “pivoting”—changing their business plans, chasing emerging markets, pushing their platform in new directions. The day I joined, Vision Critical had some 700 staff and two main offices: most of the execs, the sales team and I were housed in Toronto, high above Yonge and Bloor, while Andrew Reid and the majority of the devs were in Vancouver, where they’d taken over part of a tower that used to house the Vancouver Sun newsroom. The company also had sales offices in the U.S., Europe, Asia and Australia. It was established, but it was also very much a start-up, and had only recently pivoted the business to cloud-based market research software.
Re: After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake
#5tl;dr: "The legacy textbook publishers the company wants to disrupt aren’t perfect, sure, but that doesn’t mean they need to be destroyed. Those publishers do many things very well, and they do them slowly, with great care, for a reason. We should resist change for change’s sake. I’m being naïve, aren’t I?"
No, you're being wrong? Source: I used TopHat's predecessor products in University and the predecessor was Terrible (with a capital -T) and made zero effort to fix things. I am guessing this is true for a large swath of largely profitable web-first companies like Top-hat.
Bro culture is a deep-seated problem in tech that I'd love to see excised and tbh, as the author points out, this happens when a company has more sales people than "devs. But "gongs", incentives and aggressive sales goals are a tale as old as Capitalism. The author seems to try to lump a myriad of mostly inconsequential idiosyncrasies into a nice little bow called "bad".
Or maybe, Canadian publishers like Toronto Life are just catching up to the tired old tech "expose's" American media has been writing for about 5 years now.
Re: After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake
#6Culture is an obsession at start-ups. They talk about it nearly as much as they talk about sales targets.
Its a signal for: don't apply here if you're over 40.
Re: After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake
#7tl;dr: "The legacy textbook publishers the company wants to disrupt aren’t perfect, sure, but that doesn’t mean they need to be destroyed. Those publishers do many things very well, and they do them slowly, with great care, for a reason. We should resist change for change’s sake. I’m being naïve, aren’t I?" No, you're being wrong? Source: I used TopHat's predecessor products in University and the predecessor was Terr…
> Bro culture is a deep-seated problem in tech that I'd love o see excised
When did this start, actually? Where did it come from? I don't remember it really being a thing in the early noughties, but by the end of the decade it was deeply entrenched.
Re: After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake
#8tl;dr: "The legacy textbook publishers the company wants to disrupt aren’t perfect, sure, but that doesn’t mean they need to be destroyed. Those publishers do many things very well, and they do them slowly, with great care, for a reason. We should resist change for change’s sake. I’m being naïve, aren’t I?" No, you're being wrong? Source: I used TopHat's predecessor products in University and the predecessor was Terr…
> Bro culture is a deep-seated problem in tech that I'd love o see excised When did this start, actually? Where did it come from? I don't remember it really being a thing in the early noughties, but by the end of the decade it was deeply entrenched.
The author alludes to the problem, I'd venture a guess it is a cultural import from Wall St. after the success of B2B companies in late 2000's.
Re: After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake
#9According to the Wikipedia page the company was founded in 2000...I don’t think you can be called a “start-up” when you’re almost 20 years old...
The article brings this up (but you can of course disagree with its conclusion): > I was initially mystified by how a company that’s been around since 2000 could still call itself a start-up. It turns out it’s not unusual for software companies to hold on to the start-up classification long after the point when businesses in other industries would be considered established. Software companies are forever “pivoting”—c…
That describes an established 18 year old company, they're not a startup just because they decide to take the business in a new direction. It's like describing IBM as a startup when they decided to move into computers.
Re: After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article brings this up (but you can of course disagree with its conclusion): > I was initially mystified by how a company that’s been around since 2000 could still call itself a start-up. It turns out it’s not unusual for software companies to hold on to the start-up classification long after the point when businesses in other industries would be considered established. Software companies are forever “pivoting”—c…
That describes an established 18 year old company, they're not a startup just because they decide to take the business in a new direction. It's like describing IBM as a startup when they decided to move into computers.
Yeah I don't disagree with you, I was just pointing out something in the article that I believe the parent comment missed, since it referenced Wikipedia while the article mentioned 2000 directly.