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Posted by weli 16 hours ago

Half-Baked Product(weli.dev)
1183 points | 364 commentspage 5
murphomatic 11 hours ago|
> “But this is a startup. And startups are built with blood and sweat. Everyone here has to sacrifice. You have two weeks.”

If only this simply applied to startups. Many enterprises today still remember their startup roots a little TOO clearly.

abraxas_ 12 hours ago||
This was an absolute delight to read. I have tried to build so many ovens in my life…
sscaryterry 16 hours ago||
Wow, this is so damn close to truth :)
k7peak 15 hours ago|
I gave up, how did this make it to page 1 jeez.
weli 15 hours ago|||
I've been experimenting with writing longer-form content. I do agree the main point could be condensed a lot and I'm not the a great writer by far. This is kind of a rant and really cathartic for me to write after working more than 5 years on startups. Just wanted to share it.
edu 15 hours ago|||
I read it full and I loved it and bookmarked it.

It resonates with my personal experience, and your writing style is fresh and dynamic.

Thanks for sharing it, and it deserves to be on the front page and #1.

jason_s 9 hours ago||||
Really liked it, and somewhat envious that you were able to create such a well-written, cohesive piece of just about the right length. (I blog on different topics and it's so hard to keep things short and not wandering.)
bravetraveler 14 hours ago||||
Glad you did share, really enjoyed this... and I've never worked at a startup. Rings true to my hollowed corporate soul. The main difference: your peers might think they're founders; tend to forget they were acqui-hired.
ChrisMarshallNY 13 hours ago||||
I enjoyed it, but it is uncomfortably realistic.

Some folks want to gripe about everything. Life's too short to worry about them. They need to live in the world they make; not me.

IggleSniggle 12 hours ago||||
I loved it. It was cathartic to read, too. It's really a rather short story. There's no accounting for taste.
jaapz 14 hours ago||||
It's fine, don't worry about it. It's hard for me to read long form on a computer and I read your entire story.

You can't please everyone

otherme123 13 hours ago||||
On another post from today, titled "Mystery identity of 'Green Boots' climber is finally solved after DNA test", aparently the TLDR is the name of the dead man. The rest of the article explaining how, when, why, with whom the man was there, for some people, is cruft, a total waste of reading time.
drunkboxer 14 hours ago||||
I loved every paragraph
telchior 13 hours ago||||
You're at the least a good writer. It's a lot like music (or any other artform). No matter how good the result, even if it's utterly sublime, there will be a group who doesn't enjoy it.
achenet 13 hours ago|||
Personally, I really liked both your writing and the fact that you took the time to flesh out the main point.

Thanks for taking the time to write this up and share it ^_^

vultour 13 hours ago||||
Do you need a 7-second TikTok summary?
worik 15 hours ago||||
I loved it.

Different tastes

ares623 15 hours ago||||
Not enough "key insight", "smoking gun", "this closes the gap", "kicker" huh.
realo 12 hours ago||||
I would guess you are in Sales ...
bayindirh 15 hours ago|||
I mean, it's read time is 20 minutes at most. I don't think it's long or tasteless or anything.
tiohijazi 12 hours ago||
I made an account just to reply to this post. Happened to me. Word per word. From the start until the end. Exactly like it is.
SilverSlash 12 hours ago||
This was such a great read! Thank you! Too bad Oven Inc never got more headcount. Otherwise the engineers could've had a day hackathon week while the managers and founder went to a retreat for a strategy offsite.
mishellaneous 14 hours ago||
for me, the moral of the story is that it's easier to promise things than to deliver them. or, engineering was the bottleneck. in my experience, this is not particular to start-ups, or even software engineering.

why does this happen though? i think it could be due to short-term thinking. like buying things with a credit card: you get the shiny new thing immediately, but the payment is diluted over time. likewise, once the sale is made, you may feel the reward immediately (though i guess it depends on the exact nature of the deal), but the work that will have to be done, will be done over time.

also, it's no wonder that the founder, or, outside start-ups, the marketing department, which specializes in promising impossible things, manages to evade the blame...

ares623 14 hours ago||
> engineering was the bottleneck

to the Amazon river everything and anything will be a bottleneck

skydhash 13 hours ago|||
Because engineering is where ideas get materialized in reality. And reality has a surprising amount of constraints, unlike imagination. It’s “draw the rest of the horse” turned to eleven.
mdavid626 7 hours ago||
It’s very simple. Everbody just wants to make money.

Startups have nothing to do with innovation or making the world a better place.

It feels like it’s about creating the bubble, inflating it and cashing out before it bursts.

notatoad 6 hours ago|
I don’t think that’s true. Some people really do have product ideas that they want to share with the world.

The problem is that those people are really bad at making money, and have a hard time competing with the people whose motivation is money.

podgorniy 9 hours ago||
This writing is too realistic to feel joy about it. Thanks for putting it together (and then to the HN)
ivansmf 9 hours ago||
The technology is amazing. The marketing around it is a decade ahead of its capability, and the pushiness to make LLMs do what they still can't is just irritating. The question to me is "who is seeing the goal posts?" And the answer is "the marketing department of whoever sells it".
annjose 9 hours ago|
Such a great read! I kept on nodding and chuckling the whole time reading it. I can see myself as the founder, especially 'spending time in the oven forums' lol.

I went to the /blog route to see other posts by the author, but alas, there is only this one! And that's a gem.

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