Ask HN: Our founders are just assholes. What are the chances we won't fail?
The team I work with writing code is great. We're strong programmers. People have good ideas and understand the tech. We're able to iterate and ship quickly. But interacting with the founders (one technical, one not) is a constant blame game of poor communication. They will get angry with people for not doing something that wasn't communicated. Any difference in understanding is blamed on the person writing code. This happens almost daily.
My job feels like getting paid to put up with abuse. People literally get yelled at. Get called out in front of the team for "not delivering", when most of the time the work was done. People get fired for dumb reasons. We've had 20+ people get fired or quit in frustration in the past two years (the whole team turning over several times). Is that normal?
I would never refer anyone. I'm stressed all of the time. I don't see my family. I put in so much overtime. I get sometimes you need to work hard, but it feels no amount of work would fix the root problem: our founders treat people like crap. They have fired people and made it very clear they intend to buy their way through any problems by just hiring new people.
I do have some stock and I'm trying to decide if I should keep putting up with the abuse for the chance of a payoff. Our customers like us and have lots of money. It seems like we have a good product that might be an underdiscovered niche. The founders keep talking about how a buyout would be amazing and we would all get rich. But, that's kind of their job to say that.
How do I determine our chance of success to know whether I should stay? Does having asshole founders make us much more likely to succeed or to fail?
Also don't worry about the stock you own, it's a scam to get you to work harder for relatively small rewards (or more likely, none at all) at some future time, and it shouldn't be an incentive to put up with abuse.
Time with your family and your own mental health are the most important things here, not appeasing these petty tyrants.
If they do other things great, I don't see any reason why asdholes can't succeed.
See also: Robert Sutton's book, The No Asshole Rule (Stanford prof)
PS: I really do think corp culture falls in one of two main camps: those that defend civility/fairness like a family and those where employees have already mentally/emotionally disembarked, pining for warmer shores elsewhere.
Successful leaders always put performance above nice. Sugarcoating ruthlessness with lithurgy of respect and caring is the current trend and I think younger generations reguire it.
I presume from details that the company is profitable and will continue to be so.
BTW are the founders assholes to the customers as well? If so, then there could be cancellations coming along. If customers are by subscription or some annual renewable basis then you will need to monitor the new customers vs the lost customers ratio. It is not unusual for companies to do well initially and then start bleeding customers when poor support and aggressive tactics come into play.
Which VC? (If any.) Mention it to them. Worst case, the VC is an asshole too, and you burn that bridge. Darn.
Slightly better case, the VC isn’t an asshole and remembers you.
Probably unrealistically good case: the situation improves.
If you stick around, but are still uncomfortable with how things are trending, job stability, etc, devise a reason to cash out some of your vested equity, and see if they will set up a program for this.
The normal scenario is that they need to raise $X dollars in some round, but find investors with 1.1 * $X to invest. The employees end up selling 0.1 * $X of stock at whatever valuation the fund raising round comes up with. This can be a good way for employees to get liquidity at the expense of potential future gains, and it avoids dilution for everyone else (unlike raising money, and then using it to give out bonuses).
http://www.paulgraham.com/safe.html