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Ask HN: What is the dark side of working at a successful startup?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the dark side of working at a successful startup?

#121

Post by ericd »

coffeemug wrote: post #86
sharmi wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that is so depressing on so many levels but thanks for calling it out and educating us clueless ones.

It's more helpful to look at it as a social scientist. This is what can be empirically observed about the behavior of a large group of humans under these very specific conditions. It's not good or bad in the same sense that chemistry isn't good or bad. It just is, and can actually be quite fascinating if you look at it from that light! It's also magical that given all this, everything still works! The products get sh…

I'd say that it's also a big part of the reason so much of what get shipped is incredibly mediocre, though, and why small teams of dedicated people that manage to ship generally seem to ship the highest quality products.

Re: Ask HN: What is the dark side of working at a successful startup?

#122

Post by _urga »

cdoxsey wrote: post #26

Getting acquired and watching everything you built get rendered obsolete overnight. It's a good reminder that almost everything you build is fleeting. Especially in a startup where you often pour your heart and soul into a product. Ecclesiastes: > For a person may labor with wisdom, knowledge and skill, and then they must leave all they own to another who has not toiled for it. This too is meaningless and a great mis…

Thanks for the Ecclesiastes quote, Ecclesiastes is one of my favorite wisdom books, and a classic for any startup founder.

Just to add to your comment, I think the key to understanding the "meaningless" motif, and how the book works, is that the "meaningless" motif is used by the author to shut off every dead-end path, things that perhaps might be good things but good things which can't bear the weight of worship, things which can't in themselves give meaning or purpose to your life.

It's like a rat maze, with the author helpfully shutting all the paths, except the one path that matters, "the conclusion of the matter", the path of the "firmly embedded nails" on which you can stake your life, the path which is the duty of man, the path which is truly good and which will ultimately be rewarded.

Re: Ask HN: What is the dark side of working at a successful startup?

#123

Post by ido »

coffeemug wrote: post #62
itronitron wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

please write a book on this, or post a link to the book that you have written :)

I'm unlikely to write a book, but here are a few more tidbits that come to mind. Re the above -- I don't mean to imply that any of this is malicious or even conscious on anyone's behalf. I suspect it is for a few people, but I bet most people could pass a lie detector test that they care about their OKRs and the OKRs of their reports. They really, really believe it. But they don't act it. Our brains are really good a…

    There's lots of stuff like this that you'd 
    never think of in a million years, but is 
    super-obvious once you've experienced it. 
    And amazingly, in spite of all of this (or 
    maybe because of it?) everything still works!
I think it's because like with many other issues, we are not really in such a resource-constrained environment as the free-market advocates will make you believe ("every company below peak efficiency will quickly and ruthlessly have their lunch eaten and go out of business").

According to the first link I could find (https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-american-economy-during-worl...) in 1945, 37% of American GDP (and almost 90% of government spending) was spent on the war. And yet basically everyone was still housed and fed with 1945 tech on only the remainder.

There's a lot of fat for these inefficiencies to feed on before (and if) they kill the organism. That's also why there are so many bullshit jobs around that the world would actually be a better place without.

Re: Ask HN: What is the dark side of working at a successful startup?

#124

Post by pjc50 »

coffeemug wrote: post #62
itronitron wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

please write a book on this, or post a link to the book that you have written :)

I'm unlikely to write a book, but here are a few more tidbits that come to mind. Re the above -- I don't mean to imply that any of this is malicious or even conscious on anyone's behalf. I suspect it is for a few people, but I bet most people could pass a lie detector test that they care about their OKRs and the OKRs of their reports. They really, really believe it. But they don't act it. Our brains are really good a…

> professional money extractor

It's strange how SV geeks as a class will generally skew libertarian and wheel out lots of free market arguments, but haven't read Coase nor thought about how this applies within an organisation. Of course they're money extractors, that's what you've selected and that's what your culture prizes - you were just hoping they'd turn the money-extraction skill only against people outside the organisation. It's not even necessarily a bad thing, every successful startup needs a bit of this to get money from investors and make their first sales of a not-really-existing product.

Re: Ask HN: What is the dark side of working at a successful startup?

#125

Post by ido »

ericd wrote: post #121
coffeemug wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more helpful to look at it as a social scientist. This is what can be empirically observed about the behavior of a large group of humans under these very specific conditions. It's not good or bad in the same sense that chemistry isn't good or bad. It just is, and can actually be quite fascinating if you look at it from that light! It's also magical that given all this, everything still works! The products get sh…

I'd say that it's also a big part of the reason so much of what get shipped is incredibly mediocre, though, and why small teams of dedicated people that manage to ship generally seem to ship the highest quality products.

I've first hand experienced teams of 4 people achieve higher output (both in quality and velocity) than teams of a dozen+.

Re: Ask HN: What is the dark side of working at a successful startup?

#127

Post by throwawaylol9 »

crunchlibrarian wrote: post #16

I have had two startups promise me the moon and the stars only to fire me shortly after the product was developed and viable. One found a way to screw me out of all the equity as well, which would have made me a ten something millionaire. Once people start smelling money things shift quickly.

I never wanted (and still never want) to work at a startup. Without my knowledge or consent, my business partners acquired a small percentage of one, thereby bringing some measure of that toxic atmosphere into my work environment where I thought I was safe. Now there's at least 3 levels of secrecy and collusion as everyone maneuvers in expectation of a truly enormous payday that I truly do not believe will come. The tragedy is that when the startup in question fizzles, I'm still never going to break bread with these "partners" again, ever. If we had just stuck together and kept our heads down, we could have made plenty of cash, but the scent of blood changed them directly into people I can barely share a respectful meeting with, and they're starting to figure that out.

Re: Ask HN: What is the dark side of working at a successful startup?

#128

Post by NsvAsd9i8uOQo »

throwaway515 wrote: post #25
tlb wrote: post #8

Success can hide a lot of problems. Companies with wildly successful products have a strong bias toward "we must be doing everything right," when in fact the truth is only "we did some things right at some point". That bias can make it hard to change things, even clearly broken things. It can make it hard to introduce new products, since anything new will be tiny compared to the old successful product. It can make it…

This exactly, and sometimes it can be more than just a broken process or two. It could be that the rumors you hear are true, that there's some dirty secret that will eventually surface and endanger the entire business, and that there’s no bond of trust with executive leadership to confront it before it’s too late. I worked at a unicorn that seemed unstoppable until allegations of fraud surfaced in a major publication…

Is this Outcome Health? http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/columnists/ct-biz-out... seems to line up with some of the details provided.

Re: Ask HN: What is the dark side of working at a successful startup?

#130

Post by candiodari »

gaius wrote: post #93
mikekchar wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Successful companies also attract gold diggers. When the company is small, unless everybody is going above and beyond the call of duty, it's likely going to fail. As the company gets bigger, there is more and more latitude for failure. At some point it is successful enough that it can survive having people whose only goal is to direct a large amount of money into their pockets. This can lead to really weird decisions…

At some point it is successful enough that it can survive having people whose only goal is to direct a large amount of money into their pockets. Seen this a few times, “executives” joining late in the day (weeks before IPO) with 10-100x the stock(options) of early engineers.

Seen this too. What I can't understand is what makes people hire these clowns ?

The first thing you learn about business is that you don't know how it works.

The second thing is that no matter how experienced the competition looks, they don't know either.

Hiring cannot solve a lack of business knowledge ... and yet everyone keeps thinking, again and again and again, that it does.

So what makes people hire these idiots ?

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