Re:What nobody says about startup moms
by hinkley on Monday May 03, 2021 @07:02PM
(#27032029)
I see these conversations go off the rails often because what should be seen as a call to common cause comes across as whataboutism, so let me try to be transparent about that:
I think prospective mothers in tech should find common cause with other groups of people who suffer because the expectation is that everything in a startup is event driven and that each event is automatically the highest priority.
When a plane crashes, we expect the NTSB to be 'responsive'. The meaning we use here is a quality we generally expect large organizations to lose - the ability to notice problems, take them seriously, and aggressively work to do something about them. That's not the same definition that I see people apply to startups. Startups are instead chronically run like a Skinner box, only you're the box.
If my career has a thesis it's that we have tools, literal and figurative, that let us "move fast and not break things". For some developers these tools seem like nice to have or a distraction (the White Knuckle Crew), for others they only see the value during an incident or a crunch, but to others they're essential for sanity, be you remote, a night owl, easily distracted, disabled, long commute, a caregiver, or prospective parent/pet owner.
From my knothole it seems like a lot of the infrastructure people build up in order to become an 'adult' organization is presumed to be something that you develop in-house shortly after the Last Responsible Moment, instead of something we expect from our tools out of the box. But that's probably more a consequence of the fact that few people demand it, so it hasn't gotten done.
If everyone has to be a hero, then you get mostly unattached bachelors in moderate to perfect health. Do you want an Old Boy's Network? Because that's how you get an Old Boy's Network.
I think prospective mothers in tech should find common cause with other groups of people who suffer because the expectation is that everything in a startup is event driven and that each event is automatically the highest priority.
When a plane crashes, we expect the NTSB to be 'responsive'. The meaning we use here is a quality we generally expect large organizations to lose - the ability to notice problems, take them seriously, and aggressively work to do something about them. That's not the same definition that I see people apply to startups. Startups are instead chronically run like a Skinner box, only you're the box.
If my career has a thesis it's that we have tools, literal and figurative, that let us "move fast and not break things". For some developers these tools seem like nice to have or a distraction (the White Knuckle Crew), for others they only see the value during an incident or a crunch, but to others they're essential for sanity, be you remote, a night owl, easily distracted, disabled, long commute, a caregiver, or prospective parent/pet owner.
From my knothole it seems like a lot of the infrastructure people build up in order to become an 'adult' organization is presumed to be something that you develop in-house shortly after the Last Responsible Moment, instead of something we expect from our tools out of the box. But that's probably more a consequence of the fact that few people demand it, so it hasn't gotten done.
If everyone has to be a hero, then you get mostly unattached bachelors in moderate to perfect health. Do you want an Old Boy's Network? Because that's how you get an Old Boy's Network.