4 ms·

Free drinks and fast CI don't solve a broken company, product, & team. The former you can always fix on your own, but not the latter Two+ years of your life ha

Free drinks and fast CI don't solve a broken company, product, & team. The former you can always fix on your own, but not the latter Two+ years of your life have much more important questions than staging servers, such as: * "Is the company profitably growing at > 50% YoY" <- is it winning? * "What will it take for the next 100X in growth?" <- will it keep winning? * "What happens if the next fundraising round doesn't land?" <- is it a wobbling VC trick? * "For this job, what will I own, and what skills do I need to be successful at that?" <- will you succeed? * "What percent of the team has been there more than 1yr, and more than 2yrs? Why do people stay vs leave?" <- is it a healthy environment?

rroot 4y ago
You can't fix a broken CI in a broken company, product, & team. But I get what you're saying.
- lmeyerov 4y ago
  The good news is you can totally fix a broken CI in a working company, product, & team, so those are the more important things to ask about
oriolid 4y ago
> "Is the company profitably growing at > 50% YoY" <- is it winning? > "What will it take for the next 100X in growth?" <- will it keep winning? How do these exactly affect a software developer? Even if the company is going to grow 100x, you can still be laid off and it's highly unlikely you're ever going to have any part of the money.
- lmeyerov 4y ago
  if the company keeps growing revenue ahead of hiring, they'll care more about retaining good people than losing them so they can keep growing. in this scenario, hiring a build engineer to fix CI becomes a reasonable thing to do: there's money, it's not a hard problem, and makes everyone else happier & more productive. if the company is setting more and more money on fire, it's a dead company walking. you're hoping for an acquisition or exit before the house of cards collapses. in this scenario, instead of repurposing current hires to getting to profitability, a company that keeps hiring is compounding its risk. each new hire eats the runway that much faster and makes everyone's job that much more precarious. folks are totally free to ignore whether their company is economically viable, and prioritize something like free drinks & CI b/c that makes their week better. but then they shouldn't be surprised when multiple rounds of layoffs happen every few months. Note: it's totally fine if a company is losing money. but then the question is "how many more years of runway are there with the hiring plan?", and if the answer is 6-12mo... well. A scramble will start where stuff like build times won't matter.
  - oriolid 4y ago
    > in this scenario, hiring a build engineer to fix CI becomes a reasonable thing to do: there's money, it's not a hard problem, and makes everyone else happier & more productive. In my experience, not necessarily. After all, the company is already making money without CI engineer so the management doesn't have any incentive to recruit one. It's a stable situation but not really enjoyable one.

rroot 4y ago

You can't fix a broken CI in a broken company, product, & team. But I get what you're saying.

lmeyerov 4y ago
The good news is you can totally fix a broken CI in a working company, product, & team, so those are the more important things to ask about

oriolid 4y ago

> "Is the company profitably growing at > 50% YoY" <- is it winning? > "What will it take for the next 100X in growth?" <- will it keep winning? How do these exactly affect a software developer? Even if the company is going to grow 100x, you can still be laid off and it's highly unlikely you're ever going to have any part of the money.

lmeyerov 4y ago
if the company keeps growing revenue ahead of hiring, they'll care more about retaining good people than losing them so they can keep growing. in this scenario, hiring a build engineer to fix CI becomes a reasonable thing to do: there's money, it's not a hard problem, and makes everyone else happier & more productive. if the company is setting more and more money on fire, it's a dead company walking. you're hoping for an acquisition or exit before the house of cards collapses. in this scenario, instead of repurposing current hires to getting to profitability, a company that keeps hiring is compounding its risk. each new hire eats the runway that much faster and makes everyone's job that much more precarious. folks are totally free to ignore whether their company is economically viable, and prioritize something like free drinks & CI b/c that makes their week better. but then they shouldn't be surprised when multiple rounds of layoffs happen every few months. Note: it's totally fine if a company is losing money. but then the question is "how many more years of runway are there with the hiring plan?", and if the answer is 6-12mo... well. A scramble will start where stuff like build times won't matter.
- oriolid 4y ago
  > in this scenario, hiring a build engineer to fix CI becomes a reasonable thing to do: there's money, it's not a hard problem, and makes everyone else happier & more productive. In my experience, not necessarily. After all, the company is already making money without CI engineer so the management doesn't have any incentive to recruit one. It's a stable situation but not really enjoyable one.