Fully remote lifestyle business where everyone's workload is around 12-24 hours a week with $100k+ salaries. Everyone in the company makes around the same amount (CEO to junior). Full transparency for the accounting books. Excess profits get evenly distributed to everyone. No investors to answer to. A job that gives enough time and money to do what you want in life.
This is really only for people who are already good at something though.
> > I would love to work in an environment where
> > I felt valued as a person but I have yet to find that
> CAN that even exist?
I would be very loyal to a place that helped me grow as a person with continuing education opportunities.
I would also be very loyal to a place that had a solid balance of feature delivery versus vs. technical debt management. (I feel this benefits the company in the medium to long run as well, even moreso than the engineers)
Those things would not necessarily be hard to achieve and would pay for themselves.
Yet nobody actually seems to run their company that way.
I guess the fundamental roadblock is that so many things in capitalism force you to think only about the short game. Thinking even 12 months ahead is often viewed as sheer insanity.
As an engineer, I understand the pressures faced by higher-ups. Keeping the lights on is expensive. Investors want results sooner or later. And higher-ups often don't have the engineering chops to understand why good engineering processes can be such force multipliers enabling faster delivery in 18, 24, 72, whatever months.
Modern software development is highly dysfunctional
but we somehow refuse to tackle it.
Sure, it's pretty rare to hear from anybody that their particular field runs smoothly.
But our field. Man oh man. We know what tech debt is, and we know how it affects the time+effort required to achieve a certain velocity. And yet we spend more time shooting ourselves in the foot than doing anything else.
Quite honestly I feel that the problem has become massively worse in the last decade, with everybody cargo-culting the highly complex architectures of FAANG companies when in reality much simpler alternatives would be an order of magnitude better.
Every dollar paid to me is a dollar less for the founder/VCs.
CAN that even exist? The mercenary approach seems to me the only one that doesn't fall prey to living in a fantasy about how things "Should" be -- there is only the way they are: it's a business relationship.
Younger me thought otherwise. I was big into startup culture, enjoyed the comradery of working long hours, taking pride in this thing we were building together. Management was great. Hierarchy was minimal. I felt "valued"... And then we were all let go with a phone call. I remember just being like "...Ohhhhh. Right." It's a business relationship. That's as far as it goes. Anything else is an illusion.