61–70 of 127 posts
A lot of the enterprise requirements he talked about add no actual value to the product; they're just checkboxes on an RFP that are required. Theoretically applying all of those requirements to your product might make your product more secure, scalable, or reliable. It'll also make your product harder to maintain, harder to test, and harder to improve. Many of those requirements are there because vendors put them the…
As employee #36 I lived through some of these things first hand and definitely agree with them (I think we were over 200 people when I left). It was painful going through the enterprise focus transition along with a nonsensical reorg imposed by the aforementioned Big Tech VP. One day we had focused platform-specific teams working on satisfying customers, the next we were moved to cross-functional feature teams and fo…
As an outsider to the tech industry, it seems to me that the Product Manager/Product Owner role seems to be not only the most BS role, but also the most damaging role? Considering that I saw a post a few weeks back, I saw a similar post (I think on HN itself) where PMs were being fired en masse, I wonder if there is any real utility with the product team, or if it's just a holdover from Google doing its thing back in…
A common theme seems to be founders who want to keep all the cool stuff about being a small business while they scale to the ARR of a corporate. It can't happen. 1000 people don't all care about some new feature shipped by someone over in the payments team so don't subject them to it. Most of us have been there in the painfull all-hands meeting falling asleep because the more people you have, the less they will care…
As employee #36 I lived through some of these things first hand and definitely agree with them (I think we were over 200 people when I left). It was painful going through the enterprise focus transition along with a nonsensical reorg imposed by the aforementioned Big Tech VP. One day we had focused platform-specific teams working on satisfying customers, the next we were moved to cross-functional feature teams and fo…
It's been a while - we should catch up soon :)
As employee #36 I lived through some of these things first hand and definitely agree with them (I think we were over 200 people when I left). It was painful going through the enterprise focus transition along with a nonsensical reorg imposed by the aforementioned Big Tech VP. One day we had focused platform-specific teams working on satisfying customers, the next we were moved to cross-functional feature teams and fo…
As an outsider to the tech industry, it seems to me that the Product Manager/Product Owner role seems to be not only the most BS role, but also the most damaging role? Considering that I saw a post a few weeks back, I saw a similar post (I think on HN itself) where PMs were being fired en masse, I wonder if there is any real utility with the product team, or if it's just a holdover from Google doing its thing back in…
As employee #36 I lived through some of these things first hand and definitely agree with them (I think we were over 200 people when I left). It was painful going through the enterprise focus transition along with a nonsensical reorg imposed by the aforementioned Big Tech VP. One day we had focused platform-specific teams working on satisfying customers, the next we were moved to cross-functional feature teams and fo…
As an outsider to the tech industry, it seems to me that the Product Manager/Product Owner role seems to be not only the most BS role, but also the most damaging role? Considering that I saw a post a few weeks back, I saw a similar post (I think on HN itself) where PMs were being fired en masse, I wonder if there is any real utility with the product team, or if it's just a holdover from Google doing its thing back in…
I think of them as basically glue. They just help make shit get done. That could be helping co-ordinate between eng and design, doing customer research, managing expectations, etc. Whole range of things that different PMs do.
> Being at a startup is hard in a way that is almost indescribable to anyone who hasn’t experienced it.
Being at a startup as an employee isn't necessarily hard. You hear this type of "startup is so hard" because running companies well is hard and successful startups will often grow faster than their founders are able to grow their own ability to run companies, which makes their own job challenging. And a lot of startups are poorly run in ways that are entirely avoidable (often as a result of their CEOs not being able to grow as quickly as their company) which can make life hard for the employees as well. But this isn't a necessary part of the startup experience.
I hate this BS about A managers hire A people, B people hire C etc. This is total MBA thinking (I think it comes form GE, or at least they espoused it) on a forum where people routinely mock MBAs. I have been lucky to work in a field where teams frequently work in parallel and success or failure is pretty clear cut. And teams are often stratified based on the priority of project. Many times-- not always -- the "B" te…
Additionally, people who are not so good tend to be threatened by good people. So they will rather hire someone that won't threaten or "find them out". B hires C.
On the whole, this is a fairly good write-up but this is just not right: > Being at a startup is hard in a way that is almost indescribable to anyone who hasn’t experienced it. Being at a startup as an employee isn't necessarily hard. You hear this type of "startup is so hard" because running companies well is hard and successful startups will often grow faster than their founders are able to grow their own ability t…
Contrast this with startup companies, where it's often required to explore and build completely new things from the thin air of the ether. I'm not saying other jobs don't also have elements of this, as new projects and opportunities do emerge, but being at a startup is definitely an extreme situation and arguably a different game. In the meta lens, it can be viewed as the act of mining the veins of market realities for golden ideas.
It's for the risk takers and adventurers. I've witnessed many a great engineer learn it's too undefined which can be uncomfortable, and is not a good fit for them.
It's nothing personal, along the exact same lines as some folks who can't stand working for a large company.
Different strokes and all that. This form of diversity is one of the beautiful things about the spectrum of humanity. In aggregate, it works!