Posted by advisedwang 22 hours ago
> Did my old job only exist because the Product Owners didn't realize we didn't have product-market fit?
Which is maybe as it should be, but it does pit agonized debates over detailed technical work in perspective.
So let them do damage. I do what I am told, I have the strategic thinking but not many have made use of it. OK. It's their right. I still pocket a wage. They could have gotten more for their money but consciously chose not to. Who am I to stop them? (And not like I actually can.)
At the end of the day, if they choose spend their magic beans on shitty features, I’m still getting paid. Then again, I’m at a larger company, not a startup.
Reminds me of when I, as a UI dev at a very small startup, became subordinate to the new designer (who was a big fan of large fonts and huge whitespace margins in our professional tool) regardless of any UX concerns. My opinion on UI/UX was highly valued as long as it completely agreed with the designer's :-) She is, after all, the professional.
The owner was the son of an old school magnate out of PA.
Among other things his line has always stuck with me: "A whale that surfaces is soon harpooned."
The company never made money. I think the whole thing was run as a loss on purpose for tax purposes. I became tired of the head manager/engineer combo (big fish in this tiny, tiny world) and left.
Even they knew this company was never really trying to do anything serious. Strange indeed
If you have a lot of money it’s fun to LARP the startup life. The experience working for such a company is highly varied and completely depends on the personality of the founder. But even if it’s a healthy place, it’s usually a black hole from a career development POV.
Don't confuse a hobby business with a failing business.
Plenty of people with independent means run loss making businesses for fun and/or support wives/children doing just that.
Have you ever wondered why kids climb trees?
It doesn't matter if it costs a lot of money to maintain. Yachts and sports cars do the same. That's actually like the whole point of it, after all.
I have been on the other side of this, building a frontend that connected to an external service robot that we, with a 5 minute script, managed to successfully prove internally was just a if/then/else state machine.
We got paid to make it, so we didn't care, but we knew someone was losing money.
It could’ve been worse, it could’ve been a fraud! But it’s merely a business designed to lose money. It won’t land you in jail but it’s not a place anyone would advance a career.
The years I spend on nonsense will never come back.
You weren’t committing fraud. You did real work. Now you’re in the US with a family and a career.
Happy Father’s Day.
It's a pretty frustrating experience -- was it all for naught? Maybe it's useful to vent about it a bit.
"We're not shipping? Well, that's a bummer, but also, what a relief! If building it that was this hard, I can only imagine how bad shipping it would've been; now we can delete that code and with it all of the maintenance we would've had to commit to for years."
The personal attachment just had to go eventually. It proved not to be terribly helpful or healthy anyways.
I accepted a long time ago that it is all for naught :)
Enjoy our time on this earth, do what we can, focus on people and it'll be alright
It also feels like willfully abandoning the bit of agency you still have if you don't even try to understand why the world around you works like it does.
For almost everyone, working is not the best way to spend their time, it's just how they can afford the stuff they do the rest of the time. Obviously it's preferable if it's useful and/or enjoyable, but they're not necessary qualities.
>It also feels like willfully abandoning the bit of agency you still have if you don't even try to understand why the world around you works like it does.
Odd. "Agency" usually refers to the ability to exert will. Understanding would not seem to contribute towards that.
'Useful' is not even a thought that's ever entered their brain.
When the world starts paying people for the best use of their time, people will start prioritizing that.
I knew this, but took the job because I was burned out and knew I could spend a year or two coasting and padding my resume with some interesting things.
I came to the conclusion that the company was a grift, but at least they took care of their employees and included them in the profit part of it.
We had startup perks that were basically paid out in cash when the pandemic hit. The “gym” perk became $500 in cash which could be spent on anything vaguely fitness related, like an Apple Watch. The commuter benefits rolled into our accounts which gave me free tolls for years afterward. Instead of taking all the money, they cut us in.
So yeah, maybe frustrating if you expected your startup to be successful, but that’s so often outside of the control of any engineer. It’s always a crap shoot. Get your best offer and make the most of it. You can do resume driven development even in the shadiest of firms.
All good grifts let some "little people" in on it so they go to bat for it.
However, I was quite surprised a few weeks ago, on a client project, to find in one of their repos a chunk of example code that I’d worked on 22 years ago.
[0] Being real, a lot of the ephemerality actually stems from questionable commercial decisions, working on the wrong thing, etc. But some at least is a legitimate result of evolving markets and needs.
I suspect some of my open source contributions will live a long time. Not my personal projects that I make open source just in case, but the (very small) contributions to fix things in the dark shadows of established projects with longevity. Some of that will become obsolete and hopefully be removed, and some might get refactored eventually, but if the project is older than my career it's may well last beyond me.
I would have thought most people would grow out of having this kind of feeling after their 1st job. But I also definitely work to live, not live to work, so YMMV.
With that mindset (or work-to-live or whatever you can call it), these things are just an afterthought. That after-work climbing session and that weekend meeting with friends or hiking trip in the mountains with kids mean world to me, and I fully indent to keep that mindset till retirement and continue with it further. If it means I won't get into top 1% or whatever I am fine with that, QoL is firmly above that and career rat races are meaningless (and fruitless) ego polishing / insecurities managing exercises.
> "in a business that is clearly managed by too ambitious people and will never succeed"
> "given that you are legally not a part of the potential fraud ring that you can't prove"
Consider:
1/ If it's a biz that's purposely mucking about without success...or a loss making entity for tax breaks: I have no problem in working here (Consider that I am in my 40s, used/abused in various "start-ups" and burnt-out. I need the money, and I'll take it.)
2/ If it's a company involved in criminal fraud: I'd run away as fast as my feet could take me. The problem with fraud is that eventually the authorities will catch up. If the owner is a criminal, he'll do anything to save his backside...even throwing innocent employees under the bus. You might be exonerated eventually. But that eventually might take years...decades.
If you suspect that it's fraud, you should seriously consider whether you want to be a part of it, even if you can't prove the fraud. Examples are companies centered around cryptocurrencies: not all of them end up being rugpulls, but enough of them do, making every new company potentially morally risky for each engineer.
If you only suspect that it's an overly ambitious project, but not fraud, the moral risk is obviously lower. Sure, it may be economically risky - as all unproven business models are - or you may discover the fraud later (like the author apparently did). Examples are startups like SpaceX in its initial stages: there was nothing ostensibly fraudulent in trying to make and sell better rockets, just very economically risky.
Obviously, the devil is in the details, but if you're honest with yourself, you should do your due diligence (i.e., does it seem like fraud or not) and determine your moral risk appetite. It's up to the wider society to reduce and punish the unacceptable levels of moral risk, regardless of the appetites of individual engineers.
Then again, if it is doomed to fail from the start, it is unlikely that I would really enjoy working on it.
I was with a startup for almost a decade. During that time it had four different owners. At one point it was "clearly managed by too ambitious people and will never succeed", but the parent owner and remaining founder saw this and found a legit buyer.
When this happened, we were wholly owned by a major conservative company but operated independently; the fact that "adults" controlled the purse strings was what made the situation work out well in the end. (For me, that is. Other people who drank the kool-aide were given nice severance packages.)
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Thus, you really have to know the whole story: Who's the investor? Who has power? Who's controlling the purse strings? If the business has potential, the investors will fire "poker player" leadership in situations like this.
Sure, 99.9% of startups may not get there but we saw in the past some wild unexpected successes. Plus things may change along the path as markets evolve and if they pivot successfully into new areas they may win the first mover situation, even if original mission won't ever be accomplished.
In this regard, we aren’t standing on shoulders of giants, we are like an immense asshole of a dad climbing ontop of his young child’s shoulders to win a chicken fight in the pool while his kid drowns below.
Sure enough, he is a founder of an "AI That Knows Why" company.
It reminded me a lot of the Bill Cosby skit about the game Keno, he used an example of a Keno Card that had two numbers on it, you picked one and took it up to the cashier with your $1 bet, the cashier drew a number and said, "Sorry not your number, try again."
The sad truth was that a lot of people who had become wealthy because they happened to be working at a company that went public and had stock, were not particularly sophisticated when it came to the reality that even people "like you" were not your friends. I spent my Jr High/High School years in Las Vegas and got to see so many 'confidence men' fleece tourists with so many schemes. There is a great book called 'The Confidence Game' by Maria Konnikova. It is excellent and reading it you'll come to understand that not only is it possible for even 'smart' people to be taken, there are lots of people who work on being good at it.
But taking all of that into consideration, if you worked at a company, did your job to the best of your ability, and it turned out that it was a "fake" job because some third party was using it as part of a scam, you aren't part of the scam. Any more than happening to be in a bus when the driver whose been drinking kills a pedestrian. You aren't responsible for that pedestrians death and you're not being on the bus wouldn't have changed anything. So you can let that go.
The passengers on the bus are not blameless if they know or have reason to know that the bus driver was drinking before or while they went down a road with pedestrian crossings. They are not blameless if they take no action, but to sit in the seats and wait to see if anyone gets hit or they all get away with it and arrive at the destination.
Or if they remain in the seats after the first pedestrian and 'hope' it wont happen more.
And how 'blameless' are the 'non-passengers' along for the ride to perform ongoing maintenance and provide fuel and snacks to the driver while on this imaginary trip to hell.
So, I'm all out of 'you're not really the asshole' cards as we watch the whole kleptocratic SV system run Theranos' style over the total sum of human creative production.
Anyone who participates in building the toolchains of tyranny is complicit in the abuse of people with those tools, even if it just a tiny bit.
Sorry, not sorry, if that pricks the consciences of a few pricks; those that can feel shame are the better for it, and those who feel it not we must all be wary of.
So yeah, it is going to test you and you might come up short. I don't judge people who stay when they know, but I do grieve for the damage they do to their souls when they see themselves as someone they no longer recognize.