"Fun" is being a relatively new hire at a startup and, about two months into realizing that the little place is a dysfunctional train-wreck whose core technolog

"Fun" is being a relatively new hire at a startup and, about two months into realizing that the little place is a dysfunctional train-wreck whose core technology is little more than some crappy UI wrapped around an even crappier XML processor (which the company didn't even write!), being called into the offices of a couple of the corporate VCs and being grilled on how things "actually were". So I told 'em: Disfunctional this, hollow shell of technology that, engineering practices that involved trading floppy disks of source code and doing builds by hand. I think they knew. There was little shock. Memo: If you're a hardware company with little experience in software, don't invest in software you know nothing about. I don't know why the funding wasn't yanked. Perhaps it's because it was 1999, the start-up was buzzword compliant, and although there were ominous creaking sounds, the first bubble hadn't popped.