Both my experiences with startups were the same. Big egos, no management skills, mediocre technical skills. Immature brats who think they're hot because somebod

Both my experiences with startups were the same. Big egos, no management skills, mediocre technical skills. Immature brats who think they're hot because somebody gave them money and a foosball table. Pretty sure I'll never work for a startup again unless it's my own. I worked for a startup in River North for a year or so. My manager (later VP) insisted we use his custom ORM. Fine. I needed to join two tables. I ran out of memory trying to process the result sets in memory. I needed a database join. Every morning's stand-up, same story "I'm blocked until the ORM implements joins. Want me to implement them?" "No, I don't want you touching that code." So him & his minion would pace around and scribble on a white board all day, then go out for drinks. Next morning, same thing. So after two weeks of surfing the web because I'm blocked on everything I'm supposed to be working on, I just write a SQL query with a join and finish my damn component. He sees my commit, makes everybody stop working while he chews me out in front of everyone for not using the ORM. "Does it do joins yet?" "No, BUT IT'S GOING TO!". It's so much easier to berate your employees than have a solid architecture, use existing libraries, write unit tests, or have any sort of plan. Say you "move fast and break things" to the press, then scream at someone that "this isn't a game" when things break. I'm a manager myself now, and I make it a point to have the kind of environment where failures become learning experiences and the first place I put blame is on our process. I've seen average developers become stars by being honest about how they screwed up, then sending them down the right path. But I'm in my late thirties now. My management style comes from studying leadership and almost two decades of development experience under good & bad managers. These startup managers were all in their mid-twenties. I wonder what training, what mentoring they had. I sometimes think they were just copying every stereotypical boss they saw on TV.