5 ms·

6 months of working at a hypergrowth startup

105 points by tibbar 5y ago

deedubaya 5y ago
Damn, let the paint dry before sharing your experiences. I'm not saying they aren't valid or good observations, only that the short/no time reflection undermines credibility.
- renewiltord 5y ago
  Always fascinating to me that people will take raw information and just be like "Wait, don't make it visible. Make it invisible." Like, you can always assign whatever coefficient you want to this. It is like wholly to my advantage to encourage people to make information available. Like, why would you want the counterfactual universe where you can only see how people feel 5 years in. Ideally, for me, I could query at any given instant.
  - alecbz 5y ago
    I mean, making a channel less noise and more signal involves making some data invisible, yeah.
    - renewiltord 5y ago
      A fair point, but you'd rather have a source filter than a query filter? I'd rather have the latter.
      - daveed 5y ago
        I think if we're speaking honestly, we're only going to have so much patience for the author's blogposts. We're not going to upvote updates for 6, 12, 18, 24 months at a hypergrowth startup. So I do think it makes sense to prefer a source filter.
- stillblue 5y ago
  How does it undermine credibility?
- sfmike 5y ago
  maybe makes it credibly too early, but not uncredible
lukeqsee 5y ago
Helpful post! I think a lot of these lessons learned apply to any larger organization (> 10) that has well defined internal structure with an eye to scale or has already scaled. I recently transitioned to working more within a larger organization (with a lot of healthy cross-team collaboration), and had to learn and relearn many of the same lessons.
- tibbar 5y ago
  Legend! What are you doing now?
rightbyte 5y ago
Scale AI is a shovel seller for AI companies? Nice aforisms though.
jonas_kgomo 5y ago
They didnt wanna proceed with the interview since i wasn't in the US. I was otherwise looking forward to it.
Uehreka 5y ago
This article is has a lot of good stuff to chew over, but I couldn’t help but get distracted by the second sentence: The phrase “Scale is growing incredibly fast right now” has to be up there with “Valve releases Steam” in terms of “you named your whole company just so you could make this joke?!” moments. Excellent work, well done.
- j2bax 5y ago
  Reminds me of Elon’s long game of naming the Tesla models S3XY…
  - iib 5y ago
    I think it was going to be actually "SEXY", but Ford had trademarked "Model E" for their upcoming electric vehicles.
  - actually_a_dog 5y ago
    I own a sound bar manufactured by LG with the model number SL4Y: https://www.lg.com/us/sound-bars/lg-sl4y-sound-bar https://www.lg.com/us/sound-bars/lg-sl4y-sound-bar It seems like engineers generally like clever names.
ssalka 5y ago
>You are being paid, in part, for your capacity to be frustrated and stressed for hours at a time As an ex-employee, I can confirm that being frustrated and stressed for hours at a time accurately describes the engineering experience at Scale – a large part of it in fact
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- wly_cdgr 5y ago
  Hehe, spill!
  - actually_a_dog 5y ago
    I can offer you this: I did a couple rounds of interviews with them, and the hiring manager's pitch to me regarding the type of hard problems they had to solve included "MongoDB keeps crashing because of bad queries." Needless to say, I decided to bow out after that.
    - Decker87 5y ago
      Why is that needless to say? It sounds like they gave you a straight answer.
    - herval 5y ago
      What's wrong with that answer?
      - feoren 5y ago
        Because it means the challenges you'll face are not because they're solving hard problems, but because their code is awful and their development process is broken.
        ido 5y ago
        To be honest isn't that the case at almost every web-focused startup (i.e. almost all tech startups)? We like to tell ourselves we're like NASA rocket scientists but almost all tech challenges the typical software engineers faces (even at places like google/amazon/facebook/etc) are mundane and not require PhD level understanding of computer science.
MaxMoney 5y ago
throw819738 5y ago
Place a lot less trust in this or any other company than OP seems to. I've heard troubling things about both the founders and I wouldn't touch the company with a ten-foot pole, even though it's clearly doing well.
- ido 5y ago
  It would be easier to evaluate if you said something more specific about what these troubling things are?
  - nefitty 5y ago
    Yeah, seems weird to go through the trouble of making a throwaway, no less, and then not sharing specifics.
jeremy_k 5y ago
"It’s okay if you don’t have a lot of context on a pull request. Try to contribute one useful thing. One of the best ways is to check it out locally and take the feature for a test run!" Since I work in the space I'm biased, but having to pull someone else's code locally to test out their feature is such a non-starter for me. If your company is in hyper growth mode (or even if it isn't) and the engineers don't have their own dev environment or better yet an ephemeral dev environment to allow others to test run the code, the company is hampering their product velocity.
- Yerui 5y ago
  Why? I like to check things out so I can take a look at it through the eyes of an ide. Just running it doesn't tell me the whole story.
jonas_kgomo 5y ago
Obviously we cannot ignore the fast that Alex was just 19 when he started Scale, and he is able to talk with world leading experts on AI. That doesn't seem like an easy job. Although Scale earns its money from human workers who clean and annotate data
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
This appears to be a job ad. Looks like an interesting place to work. I wish them luck. That’s not a bad list, but it’s probably an environment that I’d find uncomfortable, personally. I work extremely quickly, but in a very different way. > It’s important to make people feel at ease right away in an interview. Relax and show interest in them and their story This never happened to me, even once, while I was looking (I stopped looking, some years ago). In fact, several companies started off, being quite disrespectful, right off the bat. It was almost universal, and convinced me that it’s de riguer HR policy, these days. I assumed that it’s because it’s a strategy to keep the applicant off-balance, and in a subservient position, right from the git-go. For myself, as a hiring manager, I made sure to be polite, respectful, and interested, all the time. I felt that it was important to make the applicant comfortable. It usually paid off, as they let their guard down, and often volunteered a great deal of information that they would have otherwise kept to themselves. Even if we didn’t offer, I wanted them to think of us in a positive manner.

105 points by tibbar 5y ago

Damn, let the paint dry before sharing your experiences. I'm not saying they aren't valid or good observations, only that the short/no time reflection undermines credibility.

renewiltord 5y ago
Always fascinating to me that people will take raw information and just be like "Wait, don't make it visible. Make it invisible." Like, you can always assign whatever coefficient you want to this. It is like wholly to my advantage to encourage people to make information available. Like, why would you want the counterfactual universe where you can only see how people feel 5 years in. Ideally, for me, I could query at any given instant.
- alecbz 5y ago
  I mean, making a channel less noise and more signal involves making some data invisible, yeah.
  - renewiltord 5y ago
    A fair point, but you'd rather have a source filter than a query filter? I'd rather have the latter.
    - daveed 5y ago
      I think if we're speaking honestly, we're only going to have so much patience for the author's blogposts. We're not going to upvote updates for 6, 12, 18, 24 months at a hypergrowth startup. So I do think it makes sense to prefer a source filter.
stillblue 5y ago
How does it undermine credibility?
sfmike 5y ago
maybe makes it credibly too early, but not uncredible

lukeqsee 5y ago

Helpful post! I think a lot of these lessons learned apply to any larger organization (> 10) that has well defined internal structure with an eye to scale or has already scaled. I recently transitioned to working more within a larger organization (with a lot of healthy cross-team collaboration), and had to learn and relearn many of the same lessons.

tibbar 5y ago
Legend! What are you doing now?

rightbyte 5y ago

Scale AI is a shovel seller for AI companies? Nice aforisms though.

jonas_kgomo 5y ago

They didnt wanna proceed with the interview since i wasn't in the US. I was otherwise looking forward to it.

Uehreka 5y ago

This article is has a lot of good stuff to chew over, but I couldn’t help but get distracted by the second sentence: The phrase “Scale is growing incredibly fast right now” has to be up there with “Valve releases Steam” in terms of “you named your whole company just so you could make this joke?!” moments. Excellent work, well done.

j2bax 5y ago
Reminds me of Elon’s long game of naming the Tesla models S3XY…
- iib 5y ago
  I think it was going to be actually "SEXY", but Ford had trademarked "Model E" for their upcoming electric vehicles.
- actually_a_dog 5y ago
  I own a sound bar manufactured by LG with the model number SL4Y: https://www.lg.com/us/sound-bars/lg-sl4y-sound-bar https://www.lg.com/us/sound-bars/lg-sl4y-sound-bar It seems like engineers generally like clever names.

ssalka 5y ago

>You are being paid, in part, for your capacity to be frustrated and stressed for hours at a time As an ex-employee, I can confirm that being frustrated and stressed for hours at a time accurately describes the engineering experience at Scale – a large part of it in fact

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
wly_cdgr 5y ago
Hehe, spill!
- actually_a_dog 5y ago
  I can offer you this: I did a couple rounds of interviews with them, and the hiring manager's pitch to me regarding the type of hard problems they had to solve included "MongoDB keeps crashing because of bad queries." Needless to say, I decided to bow out after that.
  - Decker87 5y ago
    Why is that needless to say? It sounds like they gave you a straight answer.
  - herval 5y ago
    What's wrong with that answer?
    - feoren 5y ago
      Because it means the challenges you'll face are not because they're solving hard problems, but because their code is awful and their development process is broken.
      - ido 5y ago
        To be honest isn't that the case at almost every web-focused startup (i.e. almost all tech startups)? We like to tell ourselves we're like NASA rocket scientists but almost all tech challenges the typical software engineers faces (even at places like google/amazon/facebook/etc) are mundane and not require PhD level understanding of computer science.

MaxMoney 5y ago

throw819738 5y ago

Place a lot less trust in this or any other company than OP seems to. I've heard troubling things about both the founders and I wouldn't touch the company with a ten-foot pole, even though it's clearly doing well.

ido 5y ago
It would be easier to evaluate if you said something more specific about what these troubling things are?
- nefitty 5y ago
  Yeah, seems weird to go through the trouble of making a throwaway, no less, and then not sharing specifics.

jeremy_k 5y ago

"It’s okay if you don’t have a lot of context on a pull request. Try to contribute one useful thing. One of the best ways is to check it out locally and take the feature for a test run!" Since I work in the space I'm biased, but having to pull someone else's code locally to test out their feature is such a non-starter for me. If your company is in hyper growth mode (or even if it isn't) and the engineers don't have their own dev environment or better yet an ephemeral dev environment to allow others to test run the code, the company is hampering their product velocity.

Yerui 5y ago
Why? I like to check things out so I can take a look at it through the eyes of an ide. Just running it doesn't tell me the whole story.

jonas_kgomo 5y ago

Obviously we cannot ignore the fast that Alex was just 19 when he started Scale, and he is able to talk with world leading experts on AI. That doesn't seem like an easy job. Although Scale earns its money from human workers who clean and annotate data

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

This appears to be a job ad. Looks like an interesting place to work. I wish them luck. That’s not a bad list, but it’s probably an environment that I’d find uncomfortable, personally. I work extremely quickly, but in a very different way. > It’s important to make people feel at ease right away in an interview. Relax and show interest in them and their story This never happened to me, even once, while I was looking (I stopped looking, some years ago). In fact, several companies started off, being quite disrespectful, right off the bat. It was almost universal, and convinced me that it’s de riguer HR policy, these days. I assumed that it’s because it’s a strategy to keep the applicant off-balance, and in a subservient position, right from the git-go. For myself, as a hiring manager, I made sure to be polite, respectful, and interested, all the time. I felt that it was important to make the applicant comfortable. It usually paid off, as they let their guard down, and often volunteered a great deal of information that they would have otherwise kept to themselves. Even if we didn’t offer, I wanted them to think of us in a positive manner.