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We also need to shift our culture and empower our employees to build their own careers, networks, and ultimately, dreams. Companies should take the opportunity
by jlees 12y ago
We also need to shift our culture and empower our employees to build their own careers, networks, and ultimately, dreams. Companies should take the opportunity to encourage their engineers to give technical talks, release open-source code libraries, and receive external credit for the work that they are doing.
I get the sense from this article that every startup can be reduced to a lot of engineers chained to benches with a founder (or cofounders) standing gloriously in the limelight, cracking the whip between press interviews and investor meetings at the Battery.
One thought is that the founding team at a startup is likely to be entrepreneurial and initiative-taking enough to seek out these opportunities for themselves, should they want them; though I appreciate the nod to startups who remain in 'stealth' mode indefinitely, leaving a puzzling blur on someone's resume.
Another, that I definitely see folks out and about from startups who are not the founding team, but then I go to technical events and read technical publications, neither of which tend to fawn over the CEO to the exclusion of all else. Should we glorify the Rails developer who built a CRUD app over the CEO who found the money to pay the team, test the app in the market, and ultimately grow the business? No, we should reward ingenuity regardless of the title of the person behind it. But HN does a pretty good job of that, and at its core I think this article is just an argument against shallow tech journalists who prefer a tidy story about college roommates over a messy bunch of talented folks who did great work.
- brandnewlow 12y agoI get the sense from this article that every startup can be reduced to a lot of engineers chained to benches with a founder (or cofounders) standing gloriously in the limelight, cracking the whip between press interviews and investor meetings at the Battery. Yes, that's the image the author wants you to take away. It doesn't make much sense though. For starters, what on earth chains these engineers to their benches? Startup engineers get weekly emails from recruiters and hiring managers at competitors (and often partners, which really stinks). The pay, perks, and work environments available to them are tremendous and only getting better. If they don't like where they're at, they can be in another job in a fortnight. And if that's no good, they can jump onto the next opportunity until they find a good fit. For this reason as a founder that went through YC and took a startup from 0 to acquisition in 3 years, I never once felt like I had anything resembling leverage over the engineers in our company. Just the opposite, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to give them the best possible work experience because I knew if I didn't, someone else would.