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Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture

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Re: Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture

#21

Post by lotyrin »

talmand wrote: post #16
300bps wrote: post #4

Another site reporting "Error establishing a database connection". For anyone posting blog entries telling people that they are doing things wrong, it really destroys your credibility when you can't set up a server that continues to function with a moderate amount of traffic. Mirror: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?output=search&s...

You are assuming that the person who wrote the article is in charge of the server.

Possibly not directly, but at least indirectly (by choosing where they're hosted).

Re: Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture

#22

Post by smacktoward »

api wrote: post #15
smacktoward wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Ready, fire, aim!"

Also known as "iteration" and "failing fast" and "being quick to pivot." These are not bad concepts when properly understood. Unfortunately they are rarely properly understood. Hint: they do not mean "it doesn't matter whether what you do has any merit out of the starting gate," nor do they mean "quality doesn't matter, just fling shit and see if it sticks to the wall."

I wonder if this piece I wrote on one way for organizations to succeed without bureaucracy or heavy top-down management might not be of interest to those suffering from the "fail fast" syndrome: http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/03/how-winners-win-john-boyd-...

Not to say it's the only way to do things, of course, but it's a hell of a lot better than "Get Shit Done" ...

EDIT: Submitted the post to HN for discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6669129

Re: Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture

#24

Post by bane »

jaegerpicker wrote: post #6

Dear 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…

To play devil's advocate, I've been in startups where it seems like very little ever gets done and dithering and playing around with cool code becomes the norm. Eventually, a "bull dog" personality has to be brought in to light some dynamite under the ass of engineering and get them focused on delivery.

GSD works so long as it's focused on shipping.

Re: Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture

#25

Post by UK-AL »

RogerL wrote: post #20
smacktoward wrote: post #8

Is 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.

Sure. Friday on LinkedIn I got one of those "recommended jobs" thingies in my story line. It was full of "you should value execution over planning". It pretty much sounded like a 20hr/day sweatshop of fighting endless bugs and chasing the whims of the founders. Are the VCs listening to this? You are funding people who don't take spending your money very seriously. There is a huge continuum (shall I say gulf) between…

A lot of entrepreneurs, are the engineering equivalent of cowboys. Entrepreneurs who are professional software developers, are quite rare.

Re: Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture

#27

Post by _delirium »

UK-AL wrote: post #12

The whole start-up culture encourages this behaviour. The current fire fast trend, rather than trying find the root cause for example. Firing someone can completely mess up someones career, but people are being told to fire someone on a whim, if they're not right fit(I mean that could be anything). Turn it around, and put yourself in their shoes.

It's an odd trend in part because it doesn't seem like companies can afford it. At least, they complain about the results: can't find and keep enough good programmers. If there were a huge pool of easy to find qualified people, just firing people at the first whiff of difficulty, rather than debugging management, could be a viable strategy. But if good people are hard to find, firing a good engineer for "bad fit", rather than first trying to figure out whether the fit is a management issue, seems shortsighted.

Or at least, if you take that strategy, I'm not going to have a lot of sympathy for complaints that good developers are hard to find! If this strategy works at all, and companies really can take a haphazard approach to management and succeed with it, it would suggest that good developers aren't really in that short supply after all.

Re: Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture

#28

Post by vampirechicken »

smacktoward wrote: post #19
vampirechicken wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wordpress has good caching available. This is the owner's failure, not WP's.

WordPress' inability to stand up to even moderate levels of traffic is well known enough at this point that the product really should come with some kind of caching solution built in, IMO. Yes, there are caching plugins, but the users who need them the most are also the ones least likely to know they need them.

Software users not having a comprehensive understanding of the technical complexities of their software is nothing new. It is, in fact, the status quo , as anybody who does IT work for a living can attest.

That WP should have built-in caching, I cannot argue, but once the choice is made to use it, it becomes the chooser's problem.

Re: Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture

#29

Post by bluedino »

I think the author is missing one of the points of 'get shit done', which is instead of debating whether you should use Go/PHP/node, just fucking do it. Instead of agonizing over a design choice, just make the damn thing and tweak it later. Don't over-engineer things.
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