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I honestly think that these kind of situations are the best ones of our careers. I barely can’t rembeber the perfectly written API, but I still laugh over some

I honestly think that these kind of situations are the best ones of our careers. I barely can’t rembeber the perfectly written API, but I still laugh over some of the wild shit I saw over the years on companies that started with a single php file and a mysql db, and when you go to have beers with your teammates its a 100% safe topic to just have laughs all the way long.

carapace 4y ago
I'm sorry but I cannot agree. While there was excitement and fun, we objectively were doing a terrible job, and that felt terrible. Rob and Chris were simply incompetent, and succeeded only despite themselves. Haim at least knew his stuff, he was just unprofessional (screaming at Rob, etc.) (Edit to add: Rob was a great UX designer, all those beautiful layouts and pages were his work. He was incompetent as a CEO.) Working there became so frustrating I was going to quit. (It's the only time I didn't quit a job that was obviously bullshit. I don't blame my girlfriend for convincing me to stay on, it was my choice, but i recognize that it was the wrong choice.) We wasted so much investor money. The thing that bothered me the most was that we used our users as the QA dept. Chris would push to prod, things would break, and he would scramble to fix them. The users thought he was their hero fixing problems and didn't realize he was the one causing the problems in the first place! And then, in the end, the whole thing was gobbled up by (I think) the Waltons? And now it's a caricature of what it aspired to be. Despite the "success" of the company I see it as a cautionary tale.
- ratww 4y ago
  I agree that these things suck. I had a very similar experience in a few startups/scaleups. They were incredibly successful despite the horrible tech and horrible environment for development. IME the reasons for that are often due a culture problem stemming from the top, so there's no way to really fix the problems as an employee. One of those companies still has one of the founders in a "tech director" or something like that. Really great guy, great person, but he must be writing his 3th or 4th ORM now, and I'm not even joking. The first few iterations were in PHP but the new one was going to be in Java. Each time the backend needed a new feature that was difficult to implement on top of the previous ORM, he would retreat to design a new version of the backend (including a homegrown ORM) and gets green light from the CTO. He and the team are clearly not really good at producing a good design, and also not good at finishing, considering the messes left behind on every rewrite-everything implementation. When I worked there there were three "official" ways of talking to the DB. The frontend framework was replaced a couple times (jQuery, Vue, another one which I won't mention since nobody uses it), even though the home page didn't really change for a few years. It was an e-commerce-like site but not even the items in the homepage would change (it started changing while I was there, though!). The dev headcount was >400 IIRC, so it's not surprising that they had so many rewrites. I got burnout pretty fast from all that. Adding a single button to a page was a two-to-four-weeks ordeal. My manager was a bit of an asshole, who said the problem was me and I should go back doing therapy and taking antidepressants (like I disclosed I had done a few years ago) instead of looking for a less stressful job. Kinda saddens me because it's a company I liked, although I couldn't stand the tech culture.
  - carapace 4y ago
    Oh man, I'm sorry to hear that. That's pretty crazy too, eh? I hope you've found better place(s) to work since then. :)
    - ratww 4y ago
      Definitely did :) I still have the weird stories to tell, but glad I'm out of there. I hope you're also in a great place!
danjac 4y ago
You know whenever there's some TV history show about the early days of air flight, they show some old footage of a bicycle-powered helicopter or a ten-winged contraption crashing into the ground? That was pretty much early 2000s web development.

carapace 4y ago

I'm sorry but I cannot agree. While there was excitement and fun, we objectively were doing a terrible job, and that felt terrible. Rob and Chris were simply incompetent, and succeeded only despite themselves. Haim at least knew his stuff, he was just unprofessional (screaming at Rob, etc.) (Edit to add: Rob was a great UX designer, all those beautiful layouts and pages were his work. He was incompetent as a CEO.) Working there became so frustrating I was going to quit. (It's the only time I didn't quit a job that was obviously bullshit. I don't blame my girlfriend for convincing me to stay on, it was my choice, but i recognize that it was the wrong choice.) We wasted so much investor money. The thing that bothered me the most was that we used our users as the QA dept. Chris would push to prod, things would break, and he would scramble to fix them. The users thought he was their hero fixing problems and didn't realize he was the one causing the problems in the first place! And then, in the end, the whole thing was gobbled up by (I think) the Waltons? And now it's a caricature of what it aspired to be. Despite the "success" of the company I see it as a cautionary tale.

ratww 4y ago
I agree that these things suck. I had a very similar experience in a few startups/scaleups. They were incredibly successful despite the horrible tech and horrible environment for development. IME the reasons for that are often due a culture problem stemming from the top, so there's no way to really fix the problems as an employee. One of those companies still has one of the founders in a "tech director" or something like that. Really great guy, great person, but he must be writing his 3th or 4th ORM now, and I'm not even joking. The first few iterations were in PHP but the new one was going to be in Java. Each time the backend needed a new feature that was difficult to implement on top of the previous ORM, he would retreat to design a new version of the backend (including a homegrown ORM) and gets green light from the CTO. He and the team are clearly not really good at producing a good design, and also not good at finishing, considering the messes left behind on every rewrite-everything implementation. When I worked there there were three "official" ways of talking to the DB. The frontend framework was replaced a couple times (jQuery, Vue, another one which I won't mention since nobody uses it), even though the home page didn't really change for a few years. It was an e-commerce-like site but not even the items in the homepage would change (it started changing while I was there, though!). The dev headcount was >400 IIRC, so it's not surprising that they had so many rewrites. I got burnout pretty fast from all that. Adding a single button to a page was a two-to-four-weeks ordeal. My manager was a bit of an asshole, who said the problem was me and I should go back doing therapy and taking antidepressants (like I disclosed I had done a few years ago) instead of looking for a less stressful job. Kinda saddens me because it's a company I liked, although I couldn't stand the tech culture.
- carapace 4y ago
  Oh man, I'm sorry to hear that. That's pretty crazy too, eh? I hope you've found better place(s) to work since then. :)
  - ratww 4y ago
    Definitely did :) I still have the weird stories to tell, but glad I'm out of there. I hope you're also in a great place!

danjac 4y ago

You know whenever there's some TV history show about the early days of air flight, they show some old footage of a bicycle-powered helicopter or a ten-winged contraption crashing into the ground? That was pretty much early 2000s web development.