8 ms·

I joined Fast towards the end of last year. I didn't get as much exposure to the rest of the company as parent comment, but I'll say I saw a weird air of compl

I joined Fast towards the end of last year. I didn't get as much exposure to the rest of the company as parent comment, but I'll say I saw a weird air of complacency and assumed success. I first ignored my instincts that something was wrong, but as I saw more of how the company operated, I became convinced that the single largest problem the company had was the culture. On the surface, I agree with the parent comment, things were definitely positive, but rather than toxic, I think it was more of a naive one, like most of these people had never worked at a startup before, and didn't understand that it's always easy to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and that if they didn't understand what they were doing and how it affected the company then probably nobody else did either. It felt like everyone was very smart, but somewhat foolish (myself included). That being said, I enjoyed my time there, and definitely learned a lot, especially organizationally. The people are solid and I think Affirm is going to get a pretty sweet deal.

pyb 4y ago
Good point, I am always surprise when well funded startups hire former big-tech engineers, rather than experienced startup engineers.
- matwood 4y ago
  Yeah...it's often a different type of person who goes from 0->1 than from 1->100. Neither type is better than the other, just different.
- DevKoala 4y ago
  Hear hear.
- danielmarkbruce 4y ago
  There is a pretty good reason. If the experienced engineer worked at a startup that went anywhere, they have a lot of money and aren't coming to work for you. So the choice in many cases is big tech engineer or failed startup engineer. It's not clear which is better, it is clear (ish) which seems better.
  - DevKoala 4y ago
    This is not true at all. A lot of people In BigTech companies boast of passing a tough interview as their biggest accomplishment and beyond that haven’t really done much. Meanwhile, good startup engineers are used to learning new technologies quick, can work across the full stack, can own all aspects of their app/feature, work without much direction, never mind a formal spec, and generally are used to solve problems over shipping code. Often, the key drawback with startup engineers who are available after working at one or two startups, is that they pick bad companies and do not really understand the business end of the equation. However they are still excellent problem solvers.
    - danielmarkbruce 4y ago
      You've compared the worst big tech engineers with the best startup engineers. Those are rarely the choices faced.
      - DevKoala 4y ago
        Your comparison was similarly unfair at the other end while presenting it as a common scenario, which is why I presented a different one. This is from my experience as a hiring manager who has worked at multiple startups and now works for a large public tech company.
        danielmarkbruce 4y ago
        But I was implying the choice isn't clear. There aren't many good startup engineers with experience at successful startups who are floating around, especially from when the company in question was actually a startup. edit: i re-read, my comment "failed startup engineer" may have read differently to what i intended. I meant they worked at a failed startup, not that they were a failure. It's largely unfair, but people do seem to think people who worked at a successful company are better than those who worked at a failed company.
        4y ago
- throwawaythekey 4y ago
  I interviewed at Fast last year as an experienced startup engineer. I was given the "describe a production incident you were involved in" question. I detailed a case where a recent deploy I had done had resulted in elevated error rates for some of our clients and how I had solved it with a quick follow up push to prod. The interviewer asked why it wasn't caught in staging and I mentioned that it could have been but as a small company we have to make velocity vs bug tradeoffs and in general it feels like we are currently at a sweet spot. The interviewer was unwilling to explore that space at all, or the concept that different companies might want to land in different places. Later I was given feedback that I did exceptionally well in the technical interviews but the company didn't want any cowboys on their team. All of that is probably just a long way of confirming the other anecdotes in this thread that from the outside fast seemed somewhere between delivery hostile and overly cautious.
  - omarfarooq 4y ago
    What exactly is meant by "cowboy" here?
    - nicd 4y ago
      Someone who plays it "fast and loose" in terms of engineering (for example, deploying straight to prod). As parent mentions- this isn't necessarily a bad thing depending on the context (but "cowboy" here has a negative connotation).
      - strikelaserclaw 4y ago
        oof, i described myself as a cowboy at a interview i did last year to a higher up, no wonder i didn't get the job even though i did well on their technical exams. I always took cowboy coder to mean someone who had independence and resilience to get things done even if the environment isn't conducive towards that.
    - orzig 4y ago
      Not OP but in tech cowboy often means "taking unacceptable risks to increase velocity". In this case, shipping code without integration tests in Staging. whether that risk was 'unacceptable' is the difference of opinion at issue. Fun fact: The 2011 article Cowboys and Pit Crews (https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/cowboys-and-pit-crews https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/cowboys-and-pit-cre...) points out that modern cowboys actually spend a lot of time on communication and checklists.
- nseggs 4y ago
  Or inexperienced startup engineers, given the nature of the name
- gumby 4y ago
  It’s a kind of cargo cult, cf the post “you aren’t google”. The kinds of people who succeed at FAANG (MANGA?) are used to a lot of infrastructure and are (at google in particular) mostly incented to ship rev 0, not build a sustainable system. That’s a gross generalization, but gives you the flavor. I couldn’t do what they do (huge budget, low incrementalism) and would hate the environment. But they can’t do what I do, and when hired to do so, typically fail. Not because they are dumb, or lazy, or foolish, or anything negative — typically they are none of those things. Just haven’t experienced the startup environment.
  - esprehn 4y ago
    My experience of Google is very much incrementalism and long term sustainability. Very few things at Google are built "new", it's tons of cobbling together systems that already existed and making small adjustments and optimizations to them. There's a big difference between the product strategy side (v0 of N different chat products) and the tech side which is that all those products are made of many of the same components arranged differently.
- namdnay 4y ago
  > I am always surprise when well funded startups hire former big-tech engineers, rather than experienced startup engineers i'd say that if you plan on scaling, you need a bit of both. a lot of tricky scale/process/architecture questions have effectively been "solved" in big orgs, it's useful to have people who can bring this experience to take a completely random examples: setting up a performance improvement plan, performing incident post-mortems, organising oncall rotas, branching strategies when you have a mix of small customers on standard product and big accounts with customisations etc
  - hef19898 4y ago
    The risk, and I see that currently in non-software functions, is hiring people from big corps that know how to manage the people that solved those scale/... problems instead of the problems themselves. With the result that those senior people default back to building an organization that looks like the one they are used to. Which doesn't solve a single one of those solved problems. Quite likely to happen of the founders / existing hiring managers have no idea themselves how big corp solved these problems.
  - nowherebeen 4y ago
    That’s the problem. They had 0 need of scaling. It’s premature optimization 101.
    - aidaman 4y ago
      nail it, then scale it
      - nowherebeen 4y ago
        Exactly, scaling doesn't help you solve product-market fit. It adds operational complexity/overhead with, in this specific case, no benefits, and solidifies the product that doesn't have market fit. Watch this for a laugh: https://youtu.be/y8OnoxKotPQ https://youtu.be/y8OnoxKotPQ
- searchableguy 4y ago
  They pay them better salaries and comp too. Startups boast about poaching talent from big tech by matching compensation and putting those new big tech employees at forefront. It's a fund raising and public marketing trick.
belval 4y ago
This echos my experience at a $100M startup that I worked for and that ultimately failed. HR would tell us we were extraordinary, we would have world-class catering for lunch every day, and yet we had no customers, no contracts, and no money except the investors'. It was a sobering realisation on the damage that can happen when you are submerged in toxic positivity. You forget that companies still need to earn actual money, that it's not a party every day.
- im_down_w_otp 4y ago
  How on Earth did the company raise so much money with so few milestones of any kind being achieved?
  - belval 4y ago
    A well known name was attached and it was at the peak of the AI craze.
    - im_down_w_otp 4y ago
      Ah, celebrity investing. Of course, of course.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > How on Earth did the company raise so much money with so few milestones of any kind being achieved? Fast pitched itself as taking the prudent path compared with e.g. Bolt. The latter went for big clients first. Fast started with small businesses. There were clearly other issues. But the closing era of cheap capital favoured the bold, and Bolt’s seizure of the fertile low grounds cut off Fast from its growth. Despite Fast taking the orthodox path.
    - b20000 4y ago
      this doesn't answer the question at all, it's just a bunch of bullshit words strung together. we never raised any money, and we had more to show than Fast although we were in a completely different industry. this goes to show that all that matters is knowing people, it doesn't actually matter whether you have a real business and have achieved anything at all.
cormacrelf 4y ago
This whole thing is strange to me. It's targeted at software engineers, and the dominant theme is that you should be wary of toxic positivity and a number of specific indicators that you should be able to see from your desk as an engineer. The discussion in here is also focused on that. But if you are an early employee with equity, you are not just an engineer. You are, figuratively, a shareholder. One of the reasons they give you stock options as opposed to actual shares is that shareholders have a ton of rights against companies, and can e.g. sue for investor fraud, vote the board out, get quarterly reports with financial & performance statements therein backed by federal law and the threat of investor fraud lawsuits. You, on the other hand, are given the financial exposure to the company's performance without any of the attached rights. And they will happily lie to you in order to keep you happy & get you to project enough positivity to hide flaws & keep outside investment flowing until it all collapses. So as an employee, you should be trying to claw back some of what being a shareholder would get you, given you are so heavily exposed. I've worked at companies where there is a monthly meeting, nearly everyone present, where the entire company's business position, prospects and challenges are discussed openly. The employees (largely) didn't even have equity. Any cracks (like an imminent complete collapse in the next three days) would show very early on, but there were none, because the employees were empowered to do something about any challenges. So, yes, there are warning signs, and your response isn't a binary choice between staying and leaving. I would like people to come away with a better model of this than "if they are hiring exclusively from big tech, that's a red flag, get out of there". You can demand more transparency if you know what transparency looks like. If you are content to sit at your desk and happily churn out React components, satisfied with management sending enough emojis at you via slack, then you can't protect yourself at all.
- lupire 4y ago
  The reason they give options is that giving out stock basically forces an early IPO due to the 500 employee rule.
  - plasticchris 4y ago
    I think options will trigger this as well, this is where the “double trigger” rsu came from.

pyb 4y ago

Good point, I am always surprise when well funded startups hire former big-tech engineers, rather than experienced startup engineers.

matwood 4y ago
Yeah...it's often a different type of person who goes from 0->1 than from 1->100. Neither type is better than the other, just different.
DevKoala 4y ago
Hear hear.
danielmarkbruce 4y ago
There is a pretty good reason. If the experienced engineer worked at a startup that went anywhere, they have a lot of money and aren't coming to work for you. So the choice in many cases is big tech engineer or failed startup engineer. It's not clear which is better, it is clear (ish) which seems better.
- DevKoala 4y ago
  This is not true at all. A lot of people In BigTech companies boast of passing a tough interview as their biggest accomplishment and beyond that haven’t really done much. Meanwhile, good startup engineers are used to learning new technologies quick, can work across the full stack, can own all aspects of their app/feature, work without much direction, never mind a formal spec, and generally are used to solve problems over shipping code. Often, the key drawback with startup engineers who are available after working at one or two startups, is that they pick bad companies and do not really understand the business end of the equation. However they are still excellent problem solvers.
  - danielmarkbruce 4y ago
    You've compared the worst big tech engineers with the best startup engineers. Those are rarely the choices faced.
    - DevKoala 4y ago
      Your comparison was similarly unfair at the other end while presenting it as a common scenario, which is why I presented a different one. This is from my experience as a hiring manager who has worked at multiple startups and now works for a large public tech company.
      - danielmarkbruce 4y ago
        But I was implying the choice isn't clear. There aren't many good startup engineers with experience at successful startups who are floating around, especially from when the company in question was actually a startup. edit: i re-read, my comment "failed startup engineer" may have read differently to what i intended. I meant they worked at a failed startup, not that they were a failure. It's largely unfair, but people do seem to think people who worked at a successful company are better than those who worked at a failed company.
        4y ago
throwawaythekey 4y ago
I interviewed at Fast last year as an experienced startup engineer. I was given the "describe a production incident you were involved in" question. I detailed a case where a recent deploy I had done had resulted in elevated error rates for some of our clients and how I had solved it with a quick follow up push to prod. The interviewer asked why it wasn't caught in staging and I mentioned that it could have been but as a small company we have to make velocity vs bug tradeoffs and in general it feels like we are currently at a sweet spot. The interviewer was unwilling to explore that space at all, or the concept that different companies might want to land in different places. Later I was given feedback that I did exceptionally well in the technical interviews but the company didn't want any cowboys on their team. All of that is probably just a long way of confirming the other anecdotes in this thread that from the outside fast seemed somewhere between delivery hostile and overly cautious.
- omarfarooq 4y ago
  What exactly is meant by "cowboy" here?
  - nicd 4y ago
    Someone who plays it "fast and loose" in terms of engineering (for example, deploying straight to prod). As parent mentions- this isn't necessarily a bad thing depending on the context (but "cowboy" here has a negative connotation).
    - strikelaserclaw 4y ago
      oof, i described myself as a cowboy at a interview i did last year to a higher up, no wonder i didn't get the job even though i did well on their technical exams. I always took cowboy coder to mean someone who had independence and resilience to get things done even if the environment isn't conducive towards that.
  - orzig 4y ago
    Not OP but in tech cowboy often means "taking unacceptable risks to increase velocity". In this case, shipping code without integration tests in Staging. whether that risk was 'unacceptable' is the difference of opinion at issue. Fun fact: The 2011 article Cowboys and Pit Crews (https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/cowboys-and-pit-crews https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/cowboys-and-pit-cre...) points out that modern cowboys actually spend a lot of time on communication and checklists.
nseggs 4y ago
Or inexperienced startup engineers, given the nature of the name
gumby 4y ago
It’s a kind of cargo cult, cf the post “you aren’t google”. The kinds of people who succeed at FAANG (MANGA?) are used to a lot of infrastructure and are (at google in particular) mostly incented to ship rev 0, not build a sustainable system. That’s a gross generalization, but gives you the flavor. I couldn’t do what they do (huge budget, low incrementalism) and would hate the environment. But they can’t do what I do, and when hired to do so, typically fail. Not because they are dumb, or lazy, or foolish, or anything negative — typically they are none of those things. Just haven’t experienced the startup environment.
- esprehn 4y ago
  My experience of Google is very much incrementalism and long term sustainability. Very few things at Google are built "new", it's tons of cobbling together systems that already existed and making small adjustments and optimizations to them. There's a big difference between the product strategy side (v0 of N different chat products) and the tech side which is that all those products are made of many of the same components arranged differently.
namdnay 4y ago
> I am always surprise when well funded startups hire former big-tech engineers, rather than experienced startup engineers i'd say that if you plan on scaling, you need a bit of both. a lot of tricky scale/process/architecture questions have effectively been "solved" in big orgs, it's useful to have people who can bring this experience to take a completely random examples: setting up a performance improvement plan, performing incident post-mortems, organising oncall rotas, branching strategies when you have a mix of small customers on standard product and big accounts with customisations etc
- hef19898 4y ago
  The risk, and I see that currently in non-software functions, is hiring people from big corps that know how to manage the people that solved those scale/... problems instead of the problems themselves. With the result that those senior people default back to building an organization that looks like the one they are used to. Which doesn't solve a single one of those solved problems. Quite likely to happen of the founders / existing hiring managers have no idea themselves how big corp solved these problems.
- nowherebeen 4y ago
  That’s the problem. They had 0 need of scaling. It’s premature optimization 101.
  - aidaman 4y ago
    nail it, then scale it
    - nowherebeen 4y ago
      Exactly, scaling doesn't help you solve product-market fit. It adds operational complexity/overhead with, in this specific case, no benefits, and solidifies the product that doesn't have market fit. Watch this for a laugh: https://youtu.be/y8OnoxKotPQ https://youtu.be/y8OnoxKotPQ
searchableguy 4y ago
They pay them better salaries and comp too. Startups boast about poaching talent from big tech by matching compensation and putting those new big tech employees at forefront. It's a fund raising and public marketing trick.

belval 4y ago

This echos my experience at a $100M startup that I worked for and that ultimately failed. HR would tell us we were extraordinary, we would have world-class catering for lunch every day, and yet we had no customers, no contracts, and no money except the investors'. It was a sobering realisation on the damage that can happen when you are submerged in toxic positivity. You forget that companies still need to earn actual money, that it's not a party every day.

im_down_w_otp 4y ago
How on Earth did the company raise so much money with so few milestones of any kind being achieved?
- belval 4y ago
  A well known name was attached and it was at the peak of the AI craze.
  - im_down_w_otp 4y ago
    Ah, celebrity investing. Of course, of course.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > How on Earth did the company raise so much money with so few milestones of any kind being achieved? Fast pitched itself as taking the prudent path compared with e.g. Bolt. The latter went for big clients first. Fast started with small businesses. There were clearly other issues. But the closing era of cheap capital favoured the bold, and Bolt’s seizure of the fertile low grounds cut off Fast from its growth. Despite Fast taking the orthodox path.
  - b20000 4y ago
    this doesn't answer the question at all, it's just a bunch of bullshit words strung together. we never raised any money, and we had more to show than Fast although we were in a completely different industry. this goes to show that all that matters is knowing people, it doesn't actually matter whether you have a real business and have achieved anything at all.

cormacrelf 4y ago

This whole thing is strange to me. It's targeted at software engineers, and the dominant theme is that you should be wary of toxic positivity and a number of specific indicators that you should be able to see from your desk as an engineer. The discussion in here is also focused on that. But if you are an early employee with equity, you are not just an engineer. You are, figuratively, a shareholder. One of the reasons they give you stock options as opposed to actual shares is that shareholders have a ton of rights against companies, and can e.g. sue for investor fraud, vote the board out, get quarterly reports with financial & performance statements therein backed by federal law and the threat of investor fraud lawsuits. You, on the other hand, are given the financial exposure to the company's performance without any of the attached rights. And they will happily lie to you in order to keep you happy & get you to project enough positivity to hide flaws & keep outside investment flowing until it all collapses. So as an employee, you should be trying to claw back some of what being a shareholder would get you, given you are so heavily exposed. I've worked at companies where there is a monthly meeting, nearly everyone present, where the entire company's business position, prospects and challenges are discussed openly. The employees (largely) didn't even have equity. Any cracks (like an imminent complete collapse in the next three days) would show very early on, but there were none, because the employees were empowered to do something about any challenges. So, yes, there are warning signs, and your response isn't a binary choice between staying and leaving. I would like people to come away with a better model of this than "if they are hiring exclusively from big tech, that's a red flag, get out of there". You can demand more transparency if you know what transparency looks like. If you are content to sit at your desk and happily churn out React components, satisfied with management sending enough emojis at you via slack, then you can't protect yourself at all.

lupire 4y ago
The reason they give options is that giving out stock basically forces an early IPO due to the 500 employee rule.
- plasticchris 4y ago
  I think options will trigger this as well, this is where the “double trigger” rsu came from.