How a startup loses its spark

Re:How a startup loses its spark by throw3823423 on Saturday August 12, 2023 @02:52PM (#37103098)

One of the strangest experiences in my career involves working for a very well known startup, which had lucked out into an extremely high talent pool, thanks to some key early hires. The problem is that while they had top engineers, their engineering management was no good, all taken from companies way bigger than them. The end result is that, as the layers of self-entrenching management grew, basically every engineer left within 3 years. They went from a results-oriented company, to a Jira-centric organization. Fortunately they had a working system and good product market fit, so the company could keep doing well via coasting. But the extremely high performance organization basically disappeared due to 4 bad hires, which then made many bad hires from their network.

Hiring extremely good engineers is hard, but hiring good managers is far harder. They also are much better at driving out the good talent tan a bad engineering hire is.

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Re:How a startup loses its spark by ravenstine on Saturday August 12, 2023 @03:12PM (#37103268)

In addition to your last point, an employer may have good engineers and not even know it if their system discourages excellence. A lot of what the author mentions can cause good engineers to coast because merely changing a string can be an absolute slog of PRs, spurious feedback cycles, and code deciphering. Cash is king, so as long as an engineer gets paid and isn't totally driven insane, they'll stay just for the paycheck. Yet the whole time the employer has extra talent sitting there just being wasted.

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Re:How a startup loses its spark by reaperducer on Saturday August 12, 2023 @04:39PM (#37104048)

Hiring extremely good engineers is hard, but hiring good managers is far harder. They also are much better at driving out the good talent tan a bad engineering hire is.

"People join companies. They quit managers."

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Re:How a startup loses its spark by bonestamp2 on Saturday August 12, 2023 @04:40PM (#37104058)

* * *

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Re:How a startup loses its spark by majormajor on Saturday August 12, 2023 @09:34PM (#37105795)

Hiring managers from a bigger org into a startup is the easiest trap I've seen companies fall into. And the more experienced the manager and the more successful the big-co, the worse it gets - but also, the more seductive it gets especially if the founder feels like they personally are a bit out of their own engineering management depth.

Everything needed to keep a giant super-successful post-product-market-fit company running smoothly and reliably as, say, a VP at Google, is completely the opposite of what you need to move fast when you're trying to figure out how to thrive (or even just survive).

I haven't worked in one of those "this is like a startup inside a big-co" places that you often hear about, but I imagine it's why those struggle to compete with actual startups. It's hard to act like you are facing existential risk when you just plain aren't.

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