My own experience is that startup employers really do have unrealistic/over-optimistic expectations of what's actually required to achieve a certain result. Any

My own experience is that startup employers really do have unrealistic/over-optimistic expectations of what's actually required to achieve a certain result. Anything worth doing in the startup world hasn't been done before, so it's usually not possible to invent it on a schedule. People who will throw something together are heroes, but very often the result is complete crap that has enormous costs if it gets adopted as a standard. I'm being only slightly facetious asking, how much has humanity been set back due to the fact that less than two weeks was spent inventing Javascript? Maybe they should have spent an extra week or two on it and saved millions of person-years down the road [ h/t the recent repost of https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death... ] At the same time, my own psychological makeup made me vulnerable to trying to meet those unrealistic expectations, and that's on me. It took decades to really figure out what's going on, and ultimately it's a matter of acceptance rather than actionable change, although change is possible. With so much of our capabilities and challenges being unconscious, I continue to marvel at the miracle that anything gets done at all.