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Man, sorry for that it seems that you got into a toxic startup culture. My startup was a bit like this 10 months ago, the other founders were all about making s

Man, sorry for that it seems that you got into a toxic startup culture. My startup was a bit like this 10 months ago, the other founders were all about making sacrifices and working 999h per week. However, nothing was working out properly. I've made some drastic change to our culture to be more empathic, transparent and based on trust. Since then its way more enjoyable for everyone and we are way more productive. Salary for our employee are still under market, but we increase them whenever we have the chance and the financing. We aim to get to 10% above market value so that everyone is confortable. Also we've cut the 80h per week bullshit. If someone is working that much he is most likely doing a crappy job and needs to prioritize his day properly. Here is a series of concept/book I've implemented that drove the change: - Objective and Key Result: the only work that matter is those explicitly tied to the objective. There is a good book on that. - The book Drive, it helped us understand how to create a motivating environment for our employee. - The book Traction, it gave us a set of tools to make the business run smoother. - Effective DevOps: It gave us a blueprint on how to structure our technology developement and team interaction. - Peopleware: This was one of the best book that we've implemented. We moved to a remote-first company based on trust, we don't track time anymore and we don't care when people work. All that matter is objective attainement and the wellbeing of our employee. Let me known if you want to chat about this.

solatic 6y ago
Be careful with the combination of a ruthless pursuit of objectives, no explicit time tracking, and Peopleware-flavored advice not to interrupt people who are in maker-mode (which can easily be misunderstood as advice not to communicate). You have the makings of a culture where people bust their balls for 18 hours a day in order to meet their objectives and don't tell you that they're spending 18 hours and not 8 hours, because they don't want to rock the boat. Yes, meeting objectives matter. But setting the right objectives is a conversation between the business's wish list and the constraints of the resources that the business actually has. Trust is a two-way street; too many managers talk about trusting their workers but they don't talk about what they do to earn their workers' trust.
abhinav22 6y ago
That sounds like a great set of initiatives. But there is part selection bias for those posting on HN, they are probably on the nicer and more logical end of the spectrum. I’m not in a place to make decisions, so unfortunately can’t change the culture from within. The founder isn’t a bad guy, I just know he’s going to screw me in the end, so overworking for him doesn’t make sense for me. For me it sucked that I was lied to in the interview (if I had known that two of the senior members left, I would never join), but once you are roped in, it’s not that easy to get out. That said, I don’t think my experience is particularly unique — honestly I think finding a good company is more rare than working for a bad one, but when we are in good roles (like I was in previous jobs), we do assume we can always be in good situations. Pandemic didn’t help - worst time to be an employee looking for a change!

solatic 6y ago

Be careful with the combination of a ruthless pursuit of objectives, no explicit time tracking, and Peopleware-flavored advice not to interrupt people who are in maker-mode (which can easily be misunderstood as advice not to communicate). You have the makings of a culture where people bust their balls for 18 hours a day in order to meet their objectives and don't tell you that they're spending 18 hours and not 8 hours, because they don't want to rock the boat. Yes, meeting objectives matter. But setting the right objectives is a conversation between the business's wish list and the constraints of the resources that the business actually has. Trust is a two-way street; too many managers talk about trusting their workers but they don't talk about what they do to earn their workers' trust.

abhinav22 6y ago

That sounds like a great set of initiatives. But there is part selection bias for those posting on HN, they are probably on the nicer and more logical end of the spectrum. I’m not in a place to make decisions, so unfortunately can’t change the culture from within. The founder isn’t a bad guy, I just know he’s going to screw me in the end, so overworking for him doesn’t make sense for me. For me it sucked that I was lied to in the interview (if I had known that two of the senior members left, I would never join), but once you are roped in, it’s not that easy to get out. That said, I don’t think my experience is particularly unique — honestly I think finding a good company is more rare than working for a bad one, but when we are in good roles (like I was in previous jobs), we do assume we can always be in good situations. Pandemic didn’t help - worst time to be an employee looking for a change!