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Most of the people I know who pursue creative/crafting hobbies alongside a software development job have chosen to work for well-known big companies, for presti

• RobRivera 2y ago
  Vigorous exercise and a love of food gos miles for managi g the creative soul. Side projects and meditation supplements. Each year passes and O learn more about myself so hurray growth?
• lucianbr 2y ago
  Aren't you afraid that the "fast-growing" small company will soon become a large company, with all the problems you mentioned you want to avoid?
  • t43562 2y ago
    It happens but then it's time to find the next one.
  • xenocratus 2y ago
    Isn't it possible to just go looking for another fast-growing small company when your current employer reaches that stage?
    • lucianbr 2y ago
      I just think that they wrote "fast-growing" as a positive attribute, when the logic of the comment would make it a negative attribute. Of course you can go looking again. But why not look for a slow-growing or not-growing small company, so you don't need to go looking so often?
      • sukruh 2y ago
        Yes, fast-growing companies can grow out of my preference zone and as other commenters said, jumping ship when that happens may be the correct way to go. There are other issues with slow-growing or not-growing companies. When the company is not growing, people are incentivized to take a zero-sum approach to their work relationships. If the pie is not growing, you need to guard your own slice and take from others. This creates a toxic environment. If the company is growing, then collaborating on growing the pie can become the shared attitude.
        • lucianbr 2y ago
          Oh, I think people take a zero-sum approach in growing companies as well. Maybe even more so. https://spakhm.substack.com/p/how-to-get-promoted https://spakhm.substack.com/p/how-to-get-promoted
      • sokoloff 2y ago
        Slow growth and no growth companies tend to be under a lot of pressure for cost-optimization (which makes sense in a lot of ways, but is grueling to live through…)
• ravenstine 2y ago
  At a level or two down from the abstraction of company size, crafting hobbies are also a reprieve from the tyranny of linters. So many programmers today believe that code is always better when it all looks identical. Consistency is a good thing, but not when it's expected to be absolute. Programming should actually allow for creativity, and where you decide to add spaces and newlines can actually add subtle but important communication as to the significance of a particular part of one's code. Most places I've worked in the last 6 or so years are obsessed with tooling and add so many lint rules that it's often impossible to merge your pull request if you decide to format your code in a way that violates the rules in some trivial way. With woodworking, you can just do the thing. OK, I don't do woodworking myself, but both of my parents do, and I know that they don't spend their time bikeshedding or homogenizing their work. The tools they use are intended to help them accomplish something and aren't there to prevent you from doing anything. It's possible to do personal software projects however one wants, but one will no doubt be faced with the modern compulsion to want to "do the right thing" and add a bunch of time wasting tooling. If you don't, and you share your code, inevitably someone is going to want to add a bunch of rules and bureaucracy to your software that was already working and free of serious problems in the first place.
  • Arainach 2y ago
    Consistency is critical for reducing mental load when working as a team. Format your personal projects however you want, but when collaborating your editor should apply the standard format every time you save.
    • ravenstine 2y ago
      Maybe I'm not articulating my point very well. I absolutely agree that consistency, in principle, is usually a very good thing. My objection is to the idea that it's always a good thing, which it's not. Treating code formatting as rules rather than suggestions, in my experience, is a waste of time and unnecessarily tyrannical. In terms of mere code formatting, I don't buy that there's a meaningful difference between 100% consistency and say 95%. It's far more important that APIs and other conventions are consistent. When constructs in the code aren't consistent, it can be an absolute nightmare. When code isn't formatted well, it's usually just annoying and can be trivially fixed with automation.
• usrnm 2y ago
  What's wrong with doing a boring job for a lot of money and then getting all the fun elsewhere? This actually seems to be the best way to do it to me
  • Aeolun 2y ago
    Doing the boring job at all is a waste of 50+% of your waking hours? By all means, do it if it makes the remaining 50% more enjoyable, but I think it’s possible to have both. I want to have my cake and eat it too.
    • vincnetas 2y ago
      But you know, at the end there should be someone who is cleaning the toilets and taking out garbage. You eating the cake and having it is a bit selfish.
      • sokoloff 2y ago
        Me living in a 4 BR house with only our 4 family members instead of us taking in a stranger is also a bit selfish. Everyone does some level of selfish things; trying to shape work so that you find it enjoyable (and therefore likely something that others would also find enjoyable) is an acceptable form of selfishness to most.
      • vbezhenar 2y ago
        Just because someone's cleaning the toilet doesn't mean that everyone must struggle. Yes, life's not fair to everyone, some people starve right now, while other throw away kilograms of food. Some people clean toilets while other people were born with gold spoon in their mouth and will enjoy whatever they want for the rest of their lives. Daring to work at place that does not suck is not the worst offender to the world fairness, I think.
        • bumby 2y ago
          >Daring to work at place that does not suck is not the worst offender But there is something to be said that some people are born into situations that force them to adopt a very risk adverse posture. If you don’t have any safety net, “daring to work at a place that does not suck” takes on a different risk profile and doesn’t necessarily generalize well as a strategy.
• surfingdino 2y ago
  I learned to play the game. I too really enjoy being able to talk directly to the client while building, but I also learned to play the game of cogs, where I am separated from the client by layers of increasingly clueless management. I balance the insanity with pursuing photography.
  • NikolaNovak 2y ago
    All of this is hitting too close to home! I work for a large company , and I love people I'm with and had some great challenges and accomplishments, but yeah... There's still a creative urge that's left not completely filled. So I ran a photography business for a decade!I loved interacting with happy and involved clients, and creating something that brings them immediate joy :). I don't have time anymore to do it professionally but I still do it for friends and family ( while I work with my therapist to survive my day job :)
• darkwater 2y ago
  I was in a fast-growing company (although adjacent to Tech), that grew "big" and went though tons of extra bureaucracy where you will spend months fighting for some stupid change that makes all the technical sense. Now the company is sinking, I hope I will be fired and with the severance package I can enjoy life for 6-8 months and then go find again a company where I can fix things and impact someone's life in a mostly positive way. Wish me luck.
• demondemidi 2y ago
  I worked for big companies, startups, and freelance. If you don’t take control of your career you will be unfulfilled. Software has the pick of the litter. The winning combination is a big company and a role you chose. Security, compensation, and creativity all in one. Startups are 90% likely to fail, contracting will set you back late in life if you don’t hustle all the time. YMMV but nothing beats a blue chip.
  • Difwif 2y ago
    One man's garden of eden is another's hell on earth. I've gone back and forth between big and small. I'm genuinely happy at small companies with tight knit teams (getting abused by csuite for shit pay ofc). At big companies I get extremely depressed in a corporate hell scape mostly surrounded by people that have maintained sanity by dissociating from the job and collecting a paycheck. I'm trying to start my own business now without going down the consulting route. At the very least I tell myself that the spoils of the hustle go to me. Let's see how this phase goes.
    • demondemidi 2y ago
      This entire thread is full of “well for me…”. So I added mine. It’s obvious this is purely anecdotal for everyone.
• soco 2y ago
  Another idea: work for an IT services big company. Then you'll have a lot of change, will be much less of a cost center (only at times) and talk directly to the customer to solve their problems. Not the same as a startup of course, but at least on paper it looks like checking your points with slightly less stress or risk.
• heresie-dabord 2y ago
  > This is why I am very happy [...] where one can have honest conversations Cheers! Nonsense is tiring, nonsense breeds detachment, and I daresay most humans will detach from sources of constant nonsense. (As well as from economies of constant nonsense. See: advertising, social media) > endless PowerPoints We can agree that PowerPoint is a lossy encoder for instances of Conway's Law. But to your point about Small versus Large entities... > ended up unfulfilled in their jobs. There are many well-travelled roads to Unfulfillment in the software business. Both Small and Large entities have the problem known as people. Although it's true that corporations tend towards uncalled functions and structured madness, small shops can amplify the oddities, mistakes, and loyalty-antipatterns of principal's exclusive control. And people at a small shop will often work longer hours just to sort these problems. > people [...] who pursue creative/crafting hobbies These people are lucky and are doing what is healthy. They are the tool-maker sort of person and are fortunate to have the time to extend their skills and knowledge.
• FpUser 2y ago
  >"This is why I am very happy at a fast-growing small tech company where one can have honest conversations about the customer and the product. How do other people deal with this?" I am very good at designing and creating software products from scratch. Was doing it for few years a an employee of smallish company that served numerous clients. I then went on my own and kept doing the same. I have my own product that brings in some money. Also I design and develop software product to various clients. I've had ups and downs but in average am very happy, not overworked, have more than enough time for myself and like my job which is basically a hobby paid for by the clients. My client are usually small to medium size that are not really in software but for one or another reason software runs their business.
• jwr 2y ago
  I run my own self-funded solo business. I talk to my customers and make a meaningful difference in their daily work. If I do my job right, they gladly pay me subscription money. I'm pretty happy with this, especially given that I choose my tools and technologies, and that my customers are smart engineers.
• filleokus 2y ago
  I think there is something special about physical creativity that scratches a certain part of your even if you have a very fulfilling day-job. "Even" Chris Lattner (of LLVM and Swift fame) which I as an outsider at least would say have a fulfilling job dabbles in the occasional woodworking: https://nondot.org/sabre/Woodworking.html https://nondot.org/sabre/Woodworking.html
• conductr 2y ago
  I think those people also are more likely to have the work life balance to pursue hobbies where most people doing fast growing/early stage startups are off balance. I personally don’t care what I spend my time on at work, I’ve found even when I enjoy the work, it doesn’t increase my fulfillment in life over the long term. So I try to optimize the life part of the ratio as much as I can, at times at expense of the work side of the ratio.
• AdrianB1 2y ago
  When you are young and especially when you don't have a family to support, you move to some place where you like to work. When you are older and opportunities are rare (and agism is huge in the industry), you just take what you can and escape any way you can, like video games or side passions of any sorts. I bought a motorcycle when I was over 30 years old for commuting (heavy traffic, the bike was saving hours), but after a few years I started to take motorcycle trips in the weekends and, once in a while, across Europe. But it can be anything that you find enjoyable, the point is that you have to try different things and see what you like, when I was 20-25 years old I had no desire to ever buy a motorcycle. Now, if it's a light rain, I am happy to take it for a ride.
• wouldbecouldbe 2y ago
  I get what you're saying, but for the author of the article it seems the opposite issue. He seems to (mostly) live from his own software products, and his two main points of stress are unreasonable customers & his own inability to let things go when fixing/working on stuff.
• vlozko 2y ago
  > Most of the people I know who pursue creative/crafting hobbies alongside a software development job have chosen to work for well-known big companies, for prestige and safety, and ended up unfulfilled in their jobs. Depends on the industry. I've been doing iOS for over a decade. You're right in that there are different dynamics with enterprise that can wear you down. I find that to be less so the case with jobs in the retail sector. Things are always fluid and changing there. Still, this is a very subjective statement. As someone in my middle ages, I've come to appreciate and understand how views change over time. The 20-something me would have jumped over to new jobs every 2-3 years. The 40 something me recognizes value in work/life balance, stability, and a more defined and often opportunistic growth path in larger companies. And it's at this stage that while I may not fully comprehend the occasional stubbornness of 60-something devs, I can at least approach their way of thinking as not wrong. When you have a spouse, family, and mortgage to support, the potential upsides of a smaller, more nimble company just don't overcome the peace of mind of being in the corporate world.
• gspencley 2y ago
  I'm one of those creative types. I have woodworking shop, I'm a musician, my wife and I are part-time performing magicians. I've only ever worked for small start-ups. Including my own which paid the bills for 15 years. Working for start-ups does not solve the problem for me. The problem for me is that I need to give a shit about WHAT I'm creating. And I find that after 25 years of working in the tech industry professionally, as an end user the older I get the less interest in modern technology I have. It's hard for me to not see the negatives. I want a car that I can maintain myself and that does not talk to a network for critical functions. I want a fridge that just cools my food and doesn't come with an app or "smart" features. I have zero interest in AI. I love writing code, and I'm already over-burdened by poor code quality that I've inherited and that was written by inexperienced devs. I don't need AI generating code for me that I then need to review and refactor. It's faster and more fulfilling for me to write it myself. I never got on the smart phone bandwagon. Yes, I own one, but I often forget where I left it and when I find it the battery is usually dead because I haven't touched it in days. I don't want a "smart home." I'm not a gamer. So in my off hours, I find that I spend my time doing things that don't touch modern tech at all. So yeah, I find myself constantly planning my exit strategy from the industry. I enjoy coding, making things and solving problems but I don't enjoy modern technology the way that I used to. And making products that I wouldn't use myself is what I find soul crushing.
  • sandspar 2y ago
    As an aside, high skill and low excitement is a great recipe for composure. It makes me think of a veteran I once knew. He once talked us out of a sticky situation because seeing his calm demeanor, the authority figures had no reason to suspect we were up to something.
  • purple-leafy 2y ago
    Amen. On the same bandwidth here. No social media. I don’t read the news. We don’t have a TV. I yearn for old tech. New tech has no character or charm. AI is the worst thing to happen to the industry. Literally just makes our working conditions worse
• twojobsoneboss 2y ago
  There are plenty of big tech or big tech adjacent public traded company jobs paying far better that are still majority coding and with a lot less speed pressure than an early stage startup, among other things allowi Ng for an earlier retirement. Will take one of those instead, any day.
• fatbird 2y ago
  I work for a digital services consultancy handling large gov't contracts. It has all the problems of every large organization, public or private, but it's not overly demanding. The work is more challenging from a people perspective than a technical one. But, as in my last big project, I'm building something well that makes a concrete difference in people's lives, internally and externally. In my previous project, the software we delivered saved hours a day for clerks who were typically very overworked, and we received grateful emails telling us that they'd been able to sit down for lunch for the first time in years. In the current project we're bringing GIS capabilities and full accessibility to a gov't online service--we have a mandate to ensure it works properly with screen readers, and we're actually doing new work on making map features accessible to the visually impaired. So much of the motivation for geeks is technical satisfaction that we can miss many other forms of fulfillment in our technical jobs. Having worked on the web since the late 1900s, through multiple hype waves and "oh, we're doing this again" moments, I find the non-tech, more people-oriented rewards much more satisfying. Also, I'm building out the wood shop I want. :)
• JKCalhoun 2y ago
  > Most of the people I know who pursue creative/crafting hobbies alongside a software development job have chosen to work for well-known big companies Guilty (although retired now). When I could apply creativity to my job, I did so, but I think I prefer to have had the outside-work activities to have been my creative outlets. The application to express creativity in software is fairly narrow in comparison to other activities and, as was pointed out in this thread, physically creating with your hands (rather than virtual creating with your keyboard) is ... real.
• zerkten 2y ago
  >> The effort of managing up eats a creative person's soul. This really struck me because I'm realizing it is soul destroying but have gotten competent, and even good at it. I was involved in my family's small business and some of my own startup attempts and consulting, so I remember those feelings.
• hinkley 2y ago
  At small companies, across a long career, I’ve solved the same problems many times. But that’s not the part that stings the most. What grinds my gears is failing to solve problems I’ve already solved. At some point you have to convince others that a plan is good. Your arguments might not work on a new team. You might not know what the secret sauce was that got you consensus last time. Or after years of getting your way you may forget some of the arguments for an idea. Because mastery is, at the end of the day, converting an intellectual process into intuition, so you can go faster. Once a decision process is successfully ingrained, the intellectualized path is dead weight. There’s a lot of vaguely intellectually lazy, cheap instead of frugal thinking, and ethically challenged people in or around our industry, and the collective weight of it causes pushback on progress.
  • skydhash 2y ago
    > Because mastery is, at the end of the day, converting an intellectual process into intuition, so you can go faster. Once a decision process is successfully ingrained, the intellectualized path is dead weight. That's where you write a blog post, a company note, or a book if you got the time. The best proof of mastery is teaching because that's when you got confronted to the problems from another perspective (the other may not learn it as well as you do). And you won't have to repeat yourself that much if your arguments and process are written somewhere.
  • aprdm 2y ago
    Companies can be wildly different in how they operate, how decisions are made, and what trade offs they prefer, what culture they have. Simply adoption something that worked in a previous place isn’t a way of usually making decisions, imagine a company with 100 engineers where they all came from different companies and have different ways they solved the cicd problem - how do you move forward from that ? Decision making can be complex - can also be very simple, depending on the company ..
• deleted 2y ago
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• whb101 2y ago
  This comment hits the crux of what OP was really getting at. It's not that software itself is an inherently bad trade; it's what's been happening to it and why. > very happy at a fast-growing small tech company where one can have honest conversations about the customer and the product Right. Why is this getting harder to find? Engineers are feeling like their labor is increasingly becoming unimpactful vaporware; their work life is increasingly subject to the whims of nontechnical people; product complexity is going beyond the amount that's just natural in software and getting disproportionately bad. It's because the market is driving people to the software world like tourists to a national park that's gone viral on social media. The mass of people trying to make a buck off software are unknowingly degrading it. The park's land is still good - just a little too good for its own good. As long as software makes it easier to reach many eyeballs and wallets at once (which is "always") people will flock to it. What's less inevitable is what makes fluff and snake oil rampant in other industries, like health: a deadly combo of unbridled capitalism and masses of uneducated people. This makes people, including many software engineers themselves, view software engineers as natural resources you can just endlessly extract from, instead of people with biological limits and dreams of making cool things with their hands. The remedy to this - people democratically owning the means of production, and providing each other with reliably good schooling - might seem like a pie-in-the-sky idea but will be common sense in 100 years if we're still around.
  • hn_version_0023 2y ago
    I’m going to seize on one phrase: people, including many software engineers themselves, view software engineers as natural resources I’ve said this a million times on this forum.. the little trick whereby people who were once employees became merely _human resources_ has done more to damage work-life in this world than anything else I can think of. Its natural to exploit resources to their fullest. Labeling humans as resources is inherently dehumanizing and desperately needs to end.
    • jq-r 2y ago
      I've lost my cool one time when a very young "manager" asked: "Do we have a backend resource on this call?" It really got my blood boiling and I've said something very similar to: "No we don't have a resource on the call, we have engineers, colleagues, employees, humans and friends on this call. Resources are air, water, memory, cpu and time, please don't call people like that". This followed by silence, and a lot of red faces. Couple of weeks later, had a talk with my manager who is a true and true programmer I really respect. And then he says something with that "resource" referring to our team members... I have experience across various industries, and many professions think very highly of themselves. But over here I have seen the working population be so easily manipulated, self-effacing, and self-abnegating. Most of the time bad managers just say "jump!" and engineers just ask "how high?".
• irrational 2y ago
  I like the big companies because I can be paid a hefty six figure salary while working 4 hour days and spending the rest of the hours doing woodworking, gardening, home remodeling, baking, exercising, reading, etc.
  • hyggetrold 2y ago
    It's an odd thing - at all the big companies I've worked for, you can usually get all your work for the day done in 4 hours. Between meetings and status waste, that's all anybody expects from you.
    • ghaff 2y ago
      What you personally do is only part of your job. Communicating with others is probably at least the other 50%. Even if your an individual consultant your clients will expect you to communicate with them.
      • deleted 2y ago
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      • rendaw 2y ago
        Do meetings typically involve communication? I'm not familiar with practices in various companies.
  • lawlessone 2y ago
    psst, stop saying it. Companies would rather overwork 1 person than pay 2 and have both slightly under utilized
  • htrp 2y ago
    Do you count the meetings as work?
    • randomdata 2y ago
      Surely. It'd be hard to get to 4 hours otherwise.
• adamtaylor_13 2y ago
  You hit on a really key point here: > I want the clarity of being able to talk to "the boss/the customer" and solve their problems I finally identified that at my last job, and have begun actively working to make that happen. For example, I transitioned internally to a "platform" team so that I know my customer—my fellow product developers at the company. This has resulted in me being MUCH happier with my day-to-day work.
• freedomben 2y ago
  Same. The enterprise can be enjoyable from some aspects, but in the end the soul-suck isn't worth it to me. I think a great skunk works team with a big budget is probably the dream, but short of those rare and difficult-to-get opportunities, the startup/small-tech co is the place to go for people like us. Some are better than others at faciliting honesty, but it's far more common IME than big corp.
• jajko 2y ago
  > if you want to solve problems and build stuff Not everybody is like that, even in software. I mean sure, creative aspect is very cool, but its fraction of any senior job, including most bigger startups from what I've heard. Even my current corporate job which started 12 years ago was pure dev in the beginning, now its maybe 20-30%. Responsibilities, personal growth, but also business grew in complexity and IT landscape and various regulations governing it exploded and keep exploding. I know stuff very few other do, so I get involved continuously into tons of efforts. As they say, if you work manually hard work rest with mental challenges, and vice versa. Wood working must be cool since you create visible results with your hands and there is certainly some physical effort. I don't seek further creativity TBH, I look for extreme/adrenaline sports, be it climbing, ski alpinism, paragliding and few other similar (but also super chill diving to cover all elements and balance intensity). And ie in climbing, finding out how to climb some new route that is hard and scary for you is extremely rewarding, a literal creative ballet on vertical rock face. Till kids came, this was making me properly happy and fulfilled to 120% since I was doing something every evening, every weekend, every vacation combined with 3rd world backpacking. Plus it made me super healthy and more focused on healthy eating too, became quite attractive to women since all this changes visuals but also confidence and overall persona for the better in aspects many women notice. With small kids, and few non-horrible injuries I am now somewhere in the middle now, but kids are top priority, rest are not that important now (folks who keep going the same way/pace after having kid(s) I don't respect, it shows later on those kids in all kinds of bad ways). I know I have skillset to show them later some pretty awesome places and activities, but will let them go their own way. Just managing maximum possible off screen time since thats cancer for young soul and sugary stuff since thats cancer for body, now its easy and they follow our examples so they happily much some bio carrots and ignore cakes.
• jjav 2y ago
  > Most big companies are not good if you want to solve problems and build stuff. There are many levels to "build stuff", so it's important to introspect what kind is important to you. I love to build quality code. Production code that is quite efficient, fast, secure and maintainable while being full-featured. Having done five startups now, this is very difficult to do in startups. (There was one startup where we had a great team of like-minded quality-driven people and it was awesome, but it was the exception.) "Building stuff" in startups usually means throwing together a mess of half-baked code and holding it together with chewing gum and duct tape and immediately moving on to the next thing that sales promised a customer yesterday but hasn't been started. From a business perspective, that's not wrong. It's a startup, you need to grow fast and add features at lightning speed to capture some market. But if you crave to build quality, this isn't it. It's only in larger companies with some stability and steady revenue that there is some possibility of finding the environment to build things I can be proud of. Of course, most large companies also just build junk. Finding a good one is hard, and is an exercise left to the reader. (If you know any please share!)
• rightbyte 2y ago
  > Especially "the enterprise", where software is seen as a cost center so the less of it the better. Less is more? Oh you are painting such a rosy picture of enterprise IT.
• JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
  > Most big companies are not good if you want to solve problems and build stuff My experience is the opposite: you can usually chill at big companies, while startups need money fast and attracts the worst managers. I know it's not the same experience for everyone, but I'll never work for a startup ever again.
• xvilka 2y ago
  A lot of software jobs are "bullshit jobs" - creating unnecessary or unused software (or particular features).
• netbioserror 2y ago
  I’m very lucky. I work on a very small software team, with a very flat structure, where my boss, with a very high level of trust, tasked me with replacing several very old parts of the product stack using my best judgment and choice of languages/tools. He also appreciated that during the interview, I mentioned that my work must be oriented towards customer value; that is the ultimate goal of any of our work. I am often privy to client feedback. However, I am also protected by a hard communications firewall from direct contact with those customers, as well as the much larger field tech and sales side of the company. My job thoroughly satisfies my creative and technical needs, such that I do not pursue much programming or high-skill crafting outside of work. Nobody believes me when I tell them this. Software is so thoroughly corrupted by the low-trust managerial paradigm, where massive hierarchies are built to justify high-paying managerial positions that end up reducing the efficiency and productivity of great programmers, that it’s simply taken for granted: We should never trust engineers to make independent decisions, to schedule their own pursuit of tasks, to pick the right tool for the job, to do this all with customer value in mind. Who knows? Maybe I’m the exception and engineers don’t deserve to be trusted. In which case we have a very, very big societal problem. All I know is that our software team performs very esoteric group interviews, and our style seems very good at sniffing out pretenders and exploiters.
  • MrBuddyCasino 2y ago
    > Software is so thoroughly corrupted by the low-trust managerial paradigm They were certainly very good at coopting the agile „movement“ in this manner.
    • psunavy03 2y ago
      It didn't help having Jeff Sutherland blathering on about "twice the work in half the time."
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  • psunavy03 2y ago
    > However, I am also protected by a hard communications firewall from direct contact with those customers, as well as the much larger field tech and sales side of the company. One of the worst faceplants I've seen in my current role was when my team was developing a solution to integrate some third-party data. Our PO reported to a Product Manager who was tapped as the "I talk to the end users" person and he completely fucked it up. The team was siloed off to do this for multiple quarters, and at the rollout we literally got laughed at and told "we can't use this." But God forbid my team actually, you know, TALK and DEMO to the end users once an iteration like you're supposed to in Scrum, as opposed to plugging in some drone from corporate who it turns out doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.
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• apwell23 2y ago
  > This is why I am very happy at a fast-growing small tech company where one can have honest conversations about the customer and the product. How do other people deal with this? My experience is the opposite. Startups i've worked at were mostly 'boys clubs' where if you weren't part of a 'core group' then you were merely a mercenary. So you are in the same situation as in 'big tech' without the safety or prestige. You still have schmooze and 'manage up' to get into that core group of decision makers. Startups aren't immune from human nature. startups as meritocratic wonderlands of creativity is not an idea based in reality.
• throwaway984393 2y ago
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• owlstuffing 2y ago
  What will you do if your company becomes “successful”: is either acquired by a “big company” or becomes a “big company”? Particularly if you play a significant role in your company’s success? Maybe get a head start and learn about wood.
• consf 2y ago
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