31–40 of 131 posts
But that team is not enough for being successful and you are overestimating it if you think it's enough. Marketing and Selling capabilities are the other side of the coin.
I don't know. If you have a team that is able to consistently ship products that work and are well received by your existing client base, you probably do have some badass tech guys. You don't necessarily have to claim that you are better than all other startups, you just have to claim to have a tech team that is magnitudes better than average teams at other companies. It is crazy to me how many failed projects are fl…
"I don't know. If you have a team that is able to consistently ship products that work and are well received by your existing client base, you probably do have some badass tech guys." From my experience, a good manager can ship with bad enginners but good engineers cannot ship with a bad manager. This is from the perspective from an engineer. We engineers need to stop kidding ourselves. We are good at certain problem…
But about going beyond my own limitations, rather than trying to be all things, we just brought on some new partners to handle the marketing/sales, and things are finally starting to look up.
Is text chat hard? No. Facebook? Nope. Video Chat? Yes that is a bit harder, but still relatively solved. Social _____? Probably not. Any casual video game? No. Salesforce.com? Nope. Zoho? No. Airbnb? Nope. Dropbox? Nope.
The more interesting things are the google self driving car, machine learning and the occulus rift to a point. But those things are few and far between.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Writing software is hard. To quote Douglas Crockford "Writing software is the hardest thing you can do." So if as a team you are able to, manage client expectations, deliver on schedule, build a project that works to specifications, has good UI/UX, has a low user learning curve, meets performance requirements (obamacare site), is well received by users, I'd say your team is pretty great.
I know a lot more people who write software well than can guard Lebron James well.
On the upside, most problems startups are working on aren't necessarily extremely technically difficult.
When I work on EE or mechanical projects the physical elements involved have the opposite effect and create a negative feedback loop and (perhaps) lead to more deliberate development and more realistic views of the relative difficulty of the development effort. Anyone who has studied controls knows that negative feedback is generally what is wanted to reach the point you're aiming for.
Another is that the CEO says nothing about the engineering team itself at all, and it's all product, product, product. On that path lies Apple, and I have heard many say (myself included) that we would not work somewhere where engineers are rarely seen and never heard. Although, obviously some smart people do.
And when CEOs give praise to the teams, they get flack like this.
So I mean, what do you want them to say? This is hacker culture; don't whine, submit a patch. If you think they are better ideas, go work at DilbertCorp, or for Apple. Or, if you think there is some other path, describe for us what it is. Or better yet, go start a company that behaves that way.
But the way I see it, CEOs like this are just following principles that we ourselves have asked for: we want to be taken seriously, we want to make decisions, we want to sit at the executive table, we want to be perceived as an integral role that uniquely contributes to the success of the venture. Saying "our tech team is really great" is a direct consequence of those principles.
I thought everyone knows that it isn't true, it's like a BS marketing talking point. The things most of us in startups work on isn't technically difficult or pushing the envelope, and that alone should point to not having the best people or teams. Because these places will never gain the interest of or the pay the price for the for the very best, which can easily reach $400k/yr starting. The only technically challeng…
On the upside, most problems startups are working on aren't necessarily extremely technically difficult.
Definitely true for software. Compared to other engineering disciplines software development isn't necessarily easier but there's a tendency of software developers to overestimate their achievement. I know from my own experience that the ease with which complex SW systems can be created out of nothing is very satisfying and can lead to a positive feedback loop with a runaway effect. When I work on EE or mechanical pr…
I thought everyone knows that it isn't true, it's like a BS marketing talking point. The things most of us in startups work on isn't technically difficult or pushing the envelope, and that alone should point to not having the best people or teams. Because these places will never gain the interest of or the pay the price for the for the very best, which can easily reach $400k/yr starting. The only technically challeng…
Dropbox wasn't a trivial engineering problem. While making facebook for a couple thousand users isn't too hard, scaling it to hundreds of millions was no trivial feat either.
I thought everyone knows that it isn't true, it's like a BS marketing talking point. The things most of us in startups work on isn't technically difficult or pushing the envelope, and that alone should point to not having the best people or teams. Because these places will never gain the interest of or the pay the price for the for the very best, which can easily reach $400k/yr starting. The only technically challeng…
It seems to me that successful business is not just about having the smartest solution, but having the right solution at the right time... and having a thousand other things fall in to place perfectly as well.