Our startup is failing internally. The product idea keeps changing, projects get switched rapidly, the engineering team got an ass beating by the CEO in an all team meeting for being ‘too slow’ (which was out of line by him) despite trying their best to keep up. We had an amazing chance to be one of the first companies doing what we do, and we’ve just whiffed it. On top of this no one has had pay reviews, some for multiple years. And we’re trying to hire a new position and all the candidates drop out when they see what a shit show everything is. I’ve spoken off the record to half of the team (it’s a small company) and all of them are absolutely over it, looking for other work, doing the bare minimum. I was hired a few years ago as a customer person, but we barely have customers and they’re pressuring me to instead do aggressive consulting and sales stuff. I hate it, but the paychecks keep cashing and I hate job hunting.
I was part of a startup that started rebranding for no fucking reason once. It sucked.
In another case I was hired to consult for a small startup with horrible unclean code and tech debt. We were asked to make our recommendations about architecture to reduce that tech debt. One of our recommendations was “The CEO is no longer allowed to sell features that don’t yet exist”.
Like 90% of dev work was happening in response to the CEO hanging up the phone and saying “We just landed X company … as long as we can build them X”
I stg this is what is happening!! The CEO will ‘land’ a huge deal and suddenly the team is now building some random freight TMS integration and we’re being told there is a lot of demand for it. Then the deal never actually closes, the dev work slows and switches back to other things, and he moves on to the next shiny object. Meanwhile I’m having to custom code an API to script solution for fucking Google Sheets because that is somehow not important enough to finish. He just closed a deal and handed it to me for implementation, and there are no guidelines anywhere on what was actually sold. He promises vague outcomes, names a price, and if they’re actually ballsy enough to go for it, I get to figure out what specifically they are asking for, and a way to shoehorn it into our half built architecture.
Our startup is failing internally. The product idea keeps changing, projects get switched rapidly, the engineering team got an ass beating by the CEO in an all team meeting for being ‘too slow’ (which was out of line by him) despite trying their best to keep up. We had an amazing chance to be one of the first companies doing what we do, and we’ve just whiffed it. On top of this no one has had pay reviews, some for multiple years. And we’re trying to hire a new position and all the candidates drop out when they see what a shit show everything is. I’ve spoken off the record to half of the team (it’s a small company) and all of them are absolutely over it, looking for other work, doing the bare minimum. I was hired a few years ago as a customer person, but we barely have customers and they’re pressuring me to instead do aggressive consulting and sales stuff. I hate it, but the paychecks keep cashing and I hate job hunting.
I was part of a startup that started rebranding for no fucking reason once. It sucked.
In another case I was hired to consult for a small startup with horrible unclean code and tech debt. We were asked to make our recommendations about architecture to reduce that tech debt. One of our recommendations was “The CEO is no longer allowed to sell features that don’t yet exist”.
Like 90% of dev work was happening in response to the CEO hanging up the phone and saying “We just landed X company … as long as we can build them X”
I stg this is what is happening!! The CEO will ‘land’ a huge deal and suddenly the team is now building some random freight TMS integration and we’re being told there is a lot of demand for it. Then the deal never actually closes, the dev work slows and switches back to other things, and he moves on to the next shiny object. Meanwhile I’m having to custom code an API to script solution for fucking Google Sheets because that is somehow not important enough to finish. He just closed a deal and handed it to me for implementation, and there are no guidelines anywhere on what was actually sold. He promises vague outcomes, names a price, and if they’re actually ballsy enough to go for it, I get to figure out what specifically they are asking for, and a way to shoehorn it into our half built architecture.