The assumption made in this article is that startups with the "get shit done" mantra only say to "get shit done" when you're not performing. I feel like the entire article is based on a bad assumption..
Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture
41–50 of 212 posts
Re: Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture
#42Is 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…
"you should value execution over planning".
People who hold to this philosophy should practice it while driving. This would reduce the number of people who hold this philosophy.
Re: Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture
#43I think you interpret "get shit done" different than I do. Not trying to put words in your mouth, but I think you interpret as get this product out ASAP. I think of it as take responsibility for yourself, if you need a break, take a break. Whatever you need to do to "get shit done", do it.
Re: Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of entrepreneurs, are the engineering equivalent of cowboys. Entrepreneurs who are professional software developers, are quite rare.
Throwing something together and putting it in front of people aims to answer the question of "what does the customer actually want?" Until you've answered that question you can't build a professional product - otherwise you're building without a defined set of requirements. Many entrepreneurs I've met hate the fact they're writing utter crap code, but without the budget to make mistakes (e.g. building the wrong thing…
I think the best way to pivot and change, is having codebase that you can actually change, without breaking everything.
Re: Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture
#45I said this a while back in another thread, but it's actually more on-topic here: One of the worst things about tech culture is that it's full of socially awkward people who have learned a neat low-effort hack for getting around their poor social skills: be an asshole. Being an asshole is easy. It requires no actual effort spent in learning the intricacies of human social interaction or human nature. It requires no e…
I would argue quite the opposite is true, that being an asshole requires the same amount of work as being nice. Poor social skills are just that, poor social skills. Being an asshole is simply learned behaviour, it doesn't have anything to do with how easy it is..
I disagree. An asshole doesn't have to grasp social nuance. Instead they can just run it over with a truck, problem solved.
Re: Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture
#46I 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.
This can't be overstated enough. Just getting started on the problem is half the battle. Choosing a naive solution is fine since a) you can improve it later, but with better more actionable knowledge b) it is very difficult starting a complex project from scratch, so you might as well just start somewhere.
Re: Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture
#47The 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.
I experienced "fire fast" on the receiving end once. It's the one and only time I've been let go for any cause from a job. It occurred at a shall remain unnamed big startup on the East Coast. I was hired on the merit of my portfolio and past positions (I do not have a high-snob-factor college degree), and dove in and got up to speed pretty quick. Job was to implement a lot of Java code and some .NET for a major web-b…
Are they still in business with prospects for success?
Re: Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
"you should value execution over planning". People who hold to this philosophy should practice it while driving. This would reduce the number of people who hold this philosophy.
Or at least reduce the number that arrive at their intended destination...
Re: Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
I experienced "fire fast" on the receiving end once. It's the one and only time I've been let go for any cause from a job. It occurred at a shall remain unnamed big startup on the East Coast. I was hired on the merit of my portfolio and past positions (I do not have a high-snob-factor college degree), and dove in and got up to speed pretty quick. Job was to implement a lot of Java code and some .NET for a major web-b…
Sounds like a Daily WTF, but it's also very common. Its seems most companies don't realise the easiest way to move fast, is a extensible, easy to change/understand code base. And not going through spaghetti code with a fine tooth comb. Odd they recommended research, they only care about one off prototypes. The problem is future employers assume your the problem. Btw, Proper scrum/agile encourages people to refactor a…
Luckily this engagement was so short, and followed after a period of independent consulting, that I was able to be only slightly dishonest and call it a short-term consulting gig.
Thing that pissed me off the most was that I was proud of this code. It was elegant asynchronous java.nio-based stuff that used something like 1/100th the RAM and brought the product's response time down from a several hours "we'll get back to you" to less than a minute for small customer sites. It could also run the entire product on one EC2 compute node instead of like a dozen. I also commented it thoroughly and wrote a design document to hand to other developers describing exactly how its central queue based async architecture worked. Every method had a complete JavaDoc comment including the method's "contract," etc.
It's actually some of the cleaner code I've written. Not the thing I'm most proud of, but probably on the top ten.
Didn't have full unit tests yet, but could have done that in a day or so easily.
The second thing that pissed me off was this: I have a strong suspicion based on circumstantial evidence that the fact that my college degree is from a po-dunk Midwestern school had something to do with it. I have a strong suspicion that what I did would have been brilliant if I'd gone to a top-ten university. The founder apparently had such a hard-on for top-ten talent that he wrote about making sure candidates were from "the right schools" repeatedly on his blog, and I got the sense from the get-go that he was skeptical of my hire.
Whatever. My career is looking good and I can probably code the guy under the table so :P
Re: Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I experienced "fire fast" on the receiving end once. It's the one and only time I've been let go for any cause from a job. It occurred at a shall remain unnamed big startup on the East Coast. I was hired on the merit of my portfolio and past positions (I do not have a high-snob-factor college degree), and dove in and got up to speed pretty quick. Job was to implement a lot of Java code and some .NET for a major web-b…
Are they still in business with prospects for success?
Yes. They are actually a fairly hot company on the East Coast.
In retrospect I do realize this: they are not a tech company. They are a marketing company. They have a couple cash cow products and their audience doesn't care much if they're slightly rough around the edges. So in a sense I was polishing their product in a way they did not think was important. I disagreed -- personally instantaneous response times are a big selling point for me and I did point out the hosting cost savings which were non-trivial -- but I was not the boss so that's how it goes.